Mark Fell – UL8 CD and Manitutshu* 2×12″ (Editions Mego)

Mark Fell – UL8 (Editions Mego CD)

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.

Tracks 13 to 19 are entitled “Acids in The Style of Rian Treanor”, a reference to Hecker’s”Acid in the style of David Tudor” also released on Mego, which was itself a reference to Art & Language’s “Portrait of V.I. Lenin with Cap, in the Style of Jackson Pollock” (1980).

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 LP

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.

[photo from here]

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.

Soundclips and Order direct: http://www.furtherrecords.org/fur-041.html (or get from your usual supplier)

http://ekoplekznews.wordpress.com/

Pauline Black and “2-Tone London” at Housmans

This just in from Nik at Housmans – sounds good, but I’m not too sure about the claim that Pauline was “the only woman in a movement dominated by men”. What about The Bodysnatchers, an all-girl band on the Two Tone label? The group included Rhoda Dakar, whose harrowing solo-single “The Boiler” I’ve written about here.

‘2-Tone London’

with Pauline Black

Wednesday 3 August, 7pm

£3, redeemable against any purchase

Launching her autobiography, Pauline Black, lead singer of The Selector, shares her recollections of the 2-Tone music scene, as well as her personal experiences of growing up in multi-racial London.

The only woman in a movement dominated by men, Pauline Black has plenty to share about the 2-Tone music scene of. As lead singer of The Selector Pauline was very much the Queen of British Ska.

But even as she found success in through music, Black struggled with her ethnic and cultural identity. Born to Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian parents, she was later adopted by a white working-class family in Romford. In her talk, Black recounts her struggles to find her way in a community that made her feel different at every turn, and shares her personal view of early multicultural London.

Combining her life at the top of the 2-Tone phenomenon with her search for her birth parents, Black will speak about her experience of London, as told in her new autobiography, Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir.

Housmans Bookshop, 5 Caledonian Road, King’s Cross, London N1 9DX

Tel: 020 7837 4473

www.housmans.com

Entry: £3 redeemable against any purchase

Nearest tube: King’s Cross

Forthcoming events include:

‘The Glorious Times of the Situationist International’
with McKenzie Wark

‘Thirty Years on from the Brixton Uprising’
with Alex Wheatle

‘Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class’
with Owen Jones

“Support the shop that supports your campaigns!”

Invasion of the Mysteron Killer Sounds radio play and interviews

“I dub from inner to outer space. The sound I get out of Black Ark studio, I don’t really get it out of no other studio.
It was like a space craft. You could hear the space in the tracks.”

Lee Perry

Kevin Martin (The Bug, King Midas Sound) and Stuart Baker (Soul Jazz, 100% Dynamite, Sounds of the Universe) have compiled this ace double CD and quadruple vinyl set of electronic dancehall riddims. A bad-ass selection with some undoubted classics like Street Sweeper and Peanie Peanie alongside more outre examples of JA music at its eeriest. Also some more modern and UK produced fare like Kevin’s own Aktion Pak riddim.

I’ve had mixed feelings about the concept. On the one had I was championing the reggae/ragga afronaut connection a decade ago as part of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts and one of my first ever reggae DJ sets was at the Garage in Highbury during an AAA night as part of the 10 day Space 1999 festival. I even did an AAA presentation on dub as the basis for a new intergalactic architecture at a conference organised by Kodwo Eshun in Austria. More recently Wayne and Wax has produced an incredible critical survey of rasta imagery in science fiction in issue 4 of Woofah.

On the other hand, I’ve previously been forthright in my condemnation of people who only seem to like their dancehall with the sounds of black voices erased. I think, on reflection, this criticism is hugely unfair on the curators of the current comp (and indeed Basic Replay who I previously tore into) who have done more than most to promote reggae music in its ancient and modern forms over many many years. But I have always come across a few techno fans who seem to hate ragga vocals and that seems a bit… odd.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that a bass-driven sci-fi is a great alternate window to look at dancehall productions through, and this compilation seems like an excellent launchpad into that world, featuring a mad comic about aliens and bashment beats.

The comic was originally planned to be a radio play, but apparently time and budget didn’t allow this. But the street finds its uses for everything, as the old cyberpunk saying goes, so I was chuffed to hear that Dino Lalič and the Sensi Smile crew at Radio Student Ljubljana were going to remix the source material from the comp and its comic back into a radio play last weekend. I think they’ve done a terrific job – the accented narration adds to the spookiness and conjurs up cosmonauts of yesteryear to my ears. I love the blending of ragga with more Joe Meek-esque sixties futurism and dubwise material as well.

The Invasion of the Mysteron Killer Sounds Radio Play was part of a whole evening’s entertainment on the station, which also included interviews with Stuart Baker, Paolo Parisi (the comic’s creator) and my good self. Mine was a live telephone interview, and listening to it again I am amused to find myself being an old fart talking about that yearning for the sonic future…

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Much of the commentary is in Slovenian, so may not be decipherable to many of my readers, although the tunes are obviously universal – not to say outernational! Here are some time marks for you for the English language stuff:

1:23:00 Stuart Baker

1:51:30 Paolo Parisi

2:03:32 The Radio Play

3:08:22 John Eden

Hacker Farm, live at The Vortex tomorrow

Hacker Farm gig – tomorrow! I probably can’t make it – but you should!

Hacker Farm is Kek-W and Farmer Glitch.

I previously bigged them up on here when they came to town to do the Exotic Pylon radio session. That was before I heard their CD, “Poundland”

In my ADD twitter feed, I’ve described this release variously as:

“low-fi pulsing cheekiness… like Ekoplekz, but on a farm, on acid. In the 1730s… darkside agricultural nightmare soundscapes. Side effects of that bootleg fertiliser… Crawling down the lane.”

Hacker Farm’s willful lo-fi, low-tech, low-down-dirty not giving a fuck about anything except the important stuff attitude is compelling. Obsolete equipment, operated by rusty geezers on a mission.

I’ve been listening to the CD a lot and I am gutted about not being able to make the gig. Mr Mugwump’s nights are always worth checking and the set from Ekoplekz earlier this year was especially satisfying. Go along, and then taunt me with stories about how good it was.

More info on the gig here.

Poundland is available here.

Special bonus feature in The Wire with audio.

I’ve been sent some amazing DIY music over the last few months and I need to make time to do a podcast so people can get a taste of it…

Mix: Shake The Foundations vol 1

This is the first proper mix I ever did, back in those pre-blog times of 2002. I was interested in tracks that blurred the lines between reggae, dub, electronica and dance music. I still am, but it seems harder to find interesting angles on it these days.

Thanks to Kate Bakhaus for helping me out with a copy of the mix when I found out that my CDR master had gone glitchy.

Sleevenotes

“For some of us the experience of reggae was far more unsettling than a mere alphabetised clutch of Wailers LPs. People get warped by dub and reggae, and they never recover. And there are reasons for this.” Ian Penman

Received wisdom has it that “real” dub was made in Jamaica in the 1970s, by engineers mutating tracks by “proper” musicians. None of the tracks on this CD meet all of these criteria. Very few meet any of them.

Without wishing to dis the golden age of reggae (indeed – check for future mixes) there has been a wealth of music recorded more recently that tries to build on the studio sorcery of Tubby, Perry et al in a way that looks to the future rather than upholding some kind of bogus tradition.

Arguments abound as to whether dub is a genre, or a technique, with purists favouring the former and visionaries ploughing head-first into the latter. This ism-ing and schism-ing is all too easily upset by the continual flood of gimmicky product – insipid ambient digi dub that doesn’t even qualify as nice background music, or perhaps “dub techno” in which yet another workmanlike 12″ tries to rescue itself from obscurity by the addition of a bit of echo and reverb.

As ever, the selector’s role is simply to wade through the dirt looking for the jewels. The tracks here vary from experimental electronica to techno, to the much-maligned “UK dub” steppers played by soundsystems like Jah Shaka and Abashanti. If there is anything that holds them together other than “dub” it is a certain edge – a dread intensity far removed from the image of reggae as summery beach music. It’s cold inna babylon, as a wise man once said.

This mix was hammered out live, in two takes – and it shows. What you hear is what was played. If I was playing these tracks out, you’d get more version excursions and some selections representing the other flavours of dub and reggae.

John Eden – June 2002

Tracklist

1. spectre vs scotty hard – the joust (wordsound)
2. pole & manuela krause – mein freund der baum (monika)
3. luciano – final call (dub) (xterminator)
4. rhythm & sound with shalom – we been troddin (burial mix)
5. (gregory isaacs – easy take it easy) (joe gibbs)
6. dub syndicate – ezy take it ezy (ruts dc remix) (on-u sound)
7. rootsman – wadada (sema mix) (virgin)
8. disciples – return to addis ababa (boomshakalacka)
9. disciples – message (version) (boomshakalacka)
10. iration steppas – killamanjaro (version) (universal egg)
11. winston fergus – can’t take no more (dubwise)
12. vibronics – one drop (tandoori space)
13. unitone hi-fi – racehorse (wordsound)
14. mannaseh – skenga (version) (response)
15. iration steppas – high rise (version) (universal egg)
16. chris jay – rough version (dubwise)
17. centry – release the chains (universal egg)

The mix was played on ResonanceFM in London, a community radio station in Hamilton, New Zealand, and out of Iain Watson’s window, to an unsuspecting Edinburgh public.

A slightly tongue in cheek account of the frustrations of recording it is here.

two new Dancehall books

I’ve reviewed both these books in the new issue of The Wire (with Roy Harper on the front and an ace advert for the new Bug/Soul Jazz bashment riddims comp “Invasion of the Mysteron Killer Sounds on the back).

Both books are produced by independent publishers – and are available by clicking on the covers above.

A Brief History Of Grime Tapes with Michael Finch and Rollo Jackson

I wrote about the film Tapecrackers a while ago – a touching and affectionate look back at Jungle and Garage pirate radio tapes of yesteryear.

My review generated quite a lot of interest and a few people asked about how they could get to see the film.

I’m pleased to say that it’s now available on DVD via Will Bankhead’s The Trilogy Tapes.

The film’s chronology ends with the beginning of Grime, and I was left fair gasping for a sequel that did this era justice.

Now The Wire’s Derek Walmsley has stepped up to the plate with an excellent Resonance FM show featuring Michael and Rollo from the film – and their cassettes, vinyl and minidiscs from the dawn of Grime. It’s as good an intro as any to the early days the genre – done by proper hyped up enthusiasts interspersed with proper hyped up music.

If you have even a passing interest in this sort of thing, then you need to check this.

You can listen to the show here.

When you’ve done that there are some complete tapes uploaded here as well. Nuff vibes!

Dr Black and Yello B

More promotional material for this Saturday’s events. Kinda.

Dr Black: “I asked the Yello B for an image and he produced this. I said it was minimal and he said the music should do the talking not the picture. So yeah.”

Hard to argue with that!

Come down if you’re in the area, it will be fun.

Reggae in Hackney this Saturday

SATURDAY 11TH JUNE 2011

The Clapton Festival Presents…

A Reggae Sound Connection featuring…

The Mighty
GLADDYWAX SOUND SYSTEM

(formerly of the awesome and much missed Wax Unlimited record shop on Northwold Road)

Alongside the Heavy Weight
SOLUTION SOUND SYSTEM

(Stoke Newington fixtures and one of my favourite sounds)

With Special guest selectors
TREVOR SAX (Saxon, and formerly of Regal Records Clapton)
MANASSEH (UK Dub legend, see Woofah issue 3)

4PM TIL 10PM
@ THE ROUND CHAPEL, LOWER CLAPTON RD, HACKNEY, LONDON E5
ONLY £3 ON THE DOOR

This is a Clapton Community Event.

Spread the word!

http://www.solutionsoundsystem.com
http://www.facebook.com/solutionsoundsystem

[photos added later]

Followed by:

This just in from the desk of my man Crofton:

Dr Black meets the Yello B

Please drop by Luigi’s basement, aka the Stokey Records Bar, on Sat. 11 June for an unprecedented night of heavy tropical sounds.

It’s a north versus south thing with me taking on the Yello B in a musical showdown that is set to encompass roots, dancehall, soca, gwo ka, hip hop, highlife, soukous, zouk and whatever else we can dig up on the day.

Spread the word, tell your friends, come early, stay late, and so forth.

It’s free to get in and it’s conveniently (for me) located at 98 Stoke Newington Church Street, N16. Go through the restaurant and down the stairs at the back.

We’re running from 9 til 3.

Facebook people can signal their desire to attend here:
https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=128137053932621