John Maus-flavoured Introduction to Robocop, Explanatory Music Video, Maus Book Reprint

So here's something a bit different. Last week I did a couple lectures in Brussels and Amsterdam in which I talked about John Maus and similar underground pop figures and then we played the film Robocop. Apparently this film is a favourite of Maus's. I wrote a tongue-in-cheek-but-deadly-serious introduction to the movie highlighting the parallels between Maus and Robocop, click here to read it at Subbacultcha.be

In a further attempt to highlight the resonance between Maus and Robocop, I whipped up a little music video for Maus's song 'We Can Break Through', using footage from the movie. Find it on the Subbacultcha page, or uh right here:

Also: Precinct have reprinted my essay / pamphlet on Maus, entitled 'Heaven is Real': John Maus and the Truth of Pop, AND released a new ebook version compatible with Kindle. Browse it and get it by clicking here.

Keep pushing on!

Essay: Matthew Herbert's Musical Shell

Next essay for Dummy is up, a discussion of Matthew Herbert's music and processes in the context of his forthcoming album, with a bit of critique in there, feat. Russolo, Marinetti, Wilfred Owen, Arcimboldo (click here to read).

In June, UK composer Matthew Herbert will release an album called The End of Silence, which is constructed almost entirely out of a ten second sample of modern warfare recorded in Libya in 2011: distant gunfire, fighters whistling a heads-up, a pro-Gaddafi jet approaching, and a bomb landing close by. It might be what Russolo would have wanted, but what is the significance – and consequence – of doing such a thing today?

His last album, One Pig, is made from samples of the life and afterlife of a farmed pig, from its birth to its death and to a meal attended by Herbert and friends at which the pig was finally eaten... The project prompted controversy and reached the news, eliciting censure from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and a vicious Facebook campaign. Herbert responded articulately and persuasively – the work was not making gruesome, amoral “art” from the butchery of a living being, but rather was a disquieting and arguably necessary look behind the veil of a system in which living beings are industrially created and slaughtered for our consumption...

This time I'm not really so sure... Not because such brutally raw empirical evidence of warfare is automatically too serious a material for art or music – artist Jeremy Deller brought a bomb-mangled car from Baghdad to museum visitors very effectively. Not because it disrespects troops or even victims (it’s left unsaid as to whether Meyer’s impact had any), since the shocking truth is often what is needed to change minds and force action to help such people. It’s because The End of Silence is such a passive, distanced, and ultimately banal response to an intensely active situation...

Bit by bit since Around the House, Herbert’s concepts have been increasingly outweighing the music in gravity, the sonic causes have been outshining the musical effects. Were it not for the crushing, visceral intensity of its having sampled a real-life aerial bombardment, the music on The End of Silence would be interesting and sufficient, rather than what it feels like – as if it’s missing something, not living up to something...

It's not that there's anything wrong or artless about [Herbert's] technique, it's just that when faced with a subject such as modern warfare, it feels so hollow... If the comparison between Arcimboldo and Rembrandt shows us that art can be so much more intense than the reconfiguration of pre-given forms, that sculpture is not merely made out of stones, that poetry is not merely made out of ink, Herbert’s music shows us that no matter where they might come from, music is not just made out of sounds: music is made out of changes, patterns, gestures, sympathies, the warp and weft of difference and repetition...

Pattern Recognition: The New Online Weird

Hey - I've started a new monthly column for Electronic Beats magazine called 'Pattern Recognition'. The first entry is here (click to read), looking at some emerging online experimental beat music producers who work with imaginative contrast, subtly dark mood and inter-textural dissonance. The music linked in the article, by a i r s p o r t s, Karmelloz and RAP/RAP/RAP is certainly worth checking out. There's also a bit on Ferraro's latest phase, Sushi and Cold.

"Surely if music were to be creeping into unvisited territories, the very first thing that you’d notice about it would be its fresh weirdness and a vague sense that it doesn’t quite make sense. This would not be the time to start dismissing new artists, or their online means of distribution and communication, as merely ‘weirder’—it would be the time to start listening very carefully...

Something else marking these producers out is that their music is not particularly conceptual—that is, it’s not obviously ‘about’ anything in particular, and doesn’t overridingly express recognizable cultural concepts before we’ve dived into its abstract qualities, such as mood and sonic characteristics. In today’s underground pop music, this is relatively unusual...

Sushi, however, was much less forthcoming, mysteriously offering nothing but a black cover bearing the title, track names too general and simplistic to suggest anything as specific as before, and sounds that were either too basic or too complex to spark much recognition... This abstract space, where you have little but your senses and your emotions to guide you, is the one a i r s p o r t s, Karmelloz and RAP/RAP/RAP invite you to explore...

“dont need u”, in which the drop is a stuttering voice dangling precariously above a chasm of warm, razor synths. Or “coolDown©”, which is like approaching a giant yellow happy house smiley, only to find out that it’s really a backlit aquarium filled with algal slime and mutant shrimp... “Clarity” is a prancing hypnagogic disco until one of the characters from Street Fighter II shows up and starts pummelling the guests at hyperspeed (and yet the music goes on, he shows up here every night)...

RAP/RAP/RAP’s kick drum is relentless and usually much too loud, the claps and scrapes of the drum machine claw at your ear canals, the background pads and strings are nauseous, the samples are totally unexpected, and the ever-dissonant synths (an advanced case of the relatively rare FM variety) are like bars of sharpened glass. Her/his music is crude, basic and seems urgently purposive, but what the purpose might be is too unreadable for the club. Perhaps it’s in the spectacular contrast-yet-unity between the brutal percussion and the twinkling menace of the chimes...

To date, Karmelloz’s favorite strategies involve careful manipulation of the frequency spectrum, muffling rolling waves of organic ambience and surgically overlaying thin metallic structures and boldly incongruous voices that introduce dissonance. He’s a surrealist, one that has not forgotten that the most troubling dreams are just as much about their scarcely expressible emotional tinge as their bizarre juxtapositions...