CREATIVE THINKING

'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'  (Arthur C. Clarke)                     

I'm 57 years old. I'm white, male, heterosexual, English, middle class, liberal, woke a.f, and I try to be aware of my privilege. I work in local government and my life is steady and although I try to vaguely keep up with things, I haven't been fully tapped into the zeitgeist for over thirty years. Despite all of this, I really like Tyler the Creator, and I'm totally in awe of his eclectic, powerful and multi-faceted artistry although I actually understand only a little of who he is, what he does and what it means.

I can't pretend to know the life Tyler leads, or has had in the past, or to say that I parse the cultural references, artefacts, influences, microtrends, clap backs, look forwards and leaps into the unknown which comprise the kaleidoscopic shards of a voice and viewpoint which extend beyond music into dance, film, fashion, sport, performance art and social commentary. I don't like all he says, because he says some provocative things, some of which he apologises for, some of which he doesn't (his song 'Sorry, Not Sorry' covers this in revealing detail). But Tyler is a Creator, an artist, an individualist, an adult: he does what he likes. He doesn't need any sort of approval as far as I can see, least of all from me.

His art is not fully knowable to me and, as such, it has an even more potent allure. It's gleeful co-opting and mutation / usurpation of every facet of culture seems like the future right here and now, and is clearly the refined product of a fully formed and highly sophisticated permaculture that has developed all around me whilst my attention was elsewhere. This system is febrile and fertile and is strong with hybridity, diversity, variance. It is resilient, and seems better adapted to how we must live on this planet now. This is a good thing, a natural and necessary evolution and I welcome it, even if it is not really for me and it doesn't need any of my attention to exist. 

No, I don't fully understand Tyler the Creator or, for that matter, lots of things in contemporary music, film, art and literature, and if I were born a  hundred years earlier, I might have felt the same about Dada, or Stravinsky or  Eisenstein. But gaps in comprehension are not the same as disapproval or, at least, they shouldn't be. The fact is that, despite Francis Fukyama's 1992 announcement about the end of history*, new and exciting things still happen or, rather, like Tyler the Creator, simply and steadfastly refuse to stop happening - whether you as an individual are in the right space or place to get that is a completely different matter.

* There is more to this statement than meets the eye, of course, and Fukyama may have even been right at the time, but  he didn't reckon for a. the seething complexity of the world outside the West and b. the broiling insanity of the twenty first century. 

MAGNIFICENT RUIN

 

Tony Sinden / Alan Baker & The Insects: Magnificent Cactus Trees... (Piano Records, 1979)

One of the scuzziest sounding records I have, in one of the scruffiest and most badly designed sleeves. A scratchy, repetitive, minimal guitar motif is complemented by tinny bongos and the intermittent and intrusive hiss of machine noise. 

A price sticker affixed to the label shows that the record passed through the Record & Tape Exchange in Notting Hill, and was gradually reduced in price from 40 to 20 to 10. I'm assuming pence. 

I don't really know what this record is for, but I like it, and listen to it whenever I want music that sounds like a faulty clock in an empty factory with a hole in the roof.

SOME NOTHINGNESS

In recent years, I've found myself becoming more interested in experimental, abstract music - I've even made some of it myself. I'm particularly interested in the 'barely there' - sound recordings that could be ambient, minimal or field recordings, and unfold in their own time and space, sometimes their own universe.

There's lots of this music about, and I've decided to make a regular (or thereabouts) mix tape of things that particularly appeal to me. No overarching themes or gimmicks, just an hour of sound for listening, sleeping, knitting, looking mindlessly out of the window, whatever works.

Not always quiet, not particularly relaxing, but immersive and potentially transportative. Headphones or equivalent recommended, but do what you like, they're your ears. 

All tracks are relatively recent and are available to buy on Bandcamp.

   

Track Listing: John Macedo: Short Year / Sun Picture: Various Computer Music Spaces (Excerpt) / Cosmic Drag: Heavy Rain / Anne F Jacques: Collisions / Carnivorous Plants: Duet For Piano & Open Window / Li Song: Two Mobile Phones & A Snare Drum / Primitive Structures: Admiration Course 1 / E. Jason Gibbs: Three Steel Plates With Chimes & Flagpoles / P. Wits: No End & No Beginning / Kumao: Guitar Solo 3

WORLD PEACE, ONE TAPE AT A TIME

 

Yard Sale For World Peace is one of my go to contemporary music labels. Operating out of Olympia, Washington, they specialise in spontaneous music, mostly recorded live or at home on a range of inexpensive equipment. DIY is the guiding principle, and this extends to their design aesthetic, which is basic but always invigorating and attractive. 

One of my favourite releases on the label is by Connective Tissue. It has one track, repeated both sides: a 21 minute synth and drums jam that stretches and grows and soars before ending in what might be a shower of cosmic sparks. Like most YSFWP releases, it is organic and real: the track breathes, and you can feel the space it was recorded in. It's unadorned and imperfect, which makes it brilliant.

You can listen to it here, and there are still some cassettes (7 at the time of writing) available. Postage from the USA is hugely expensive these days, but, if you message the label about a bulk order, they'll see what they can do because they're not only visionaries, they're also really nice people.

BANGING

I have a proactive approach to music, I like to keep moving, like a chubby shark, so I have a new favourite group every few months, and that brings me joy. The latest addition to my personal pantheon is the Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra, a rolling collective of 10 to 14 year old kids who attend a school in Todmorden in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire (the birthplace of Geoff Love, fact fans, so clearly a place steeped in music). 

Under the direction of their teacher, Mr. Williamson, the group improvise with a range of percussion instruments (and the odd electronic device) in a variety of settings: some inside, some outside, some formal such as school assemblies and concerts. The results are amateurish in the best possible way: fresh, free, alive and brimming with energy and creativity.

Their Bandcamp page holds many downloadable delights, all reasonably priced. Their first CDR We Demand Everything Now, however, also comes with a badge, so there's that to consider.

FILE UNDER POST PUNK

Everybody has a record in them. It may not be a double album, it may not be any good, but it's there, waiting to be pulled out. The post punk era facilitated many such extractions, from eager and energetic boys and girls who spent a couple of hours and a few quid in a cheap local studio and committed the results to black plastic for future generations to blog about. 

File Under Pop (full irony to be revealed) released a solitary 45, a three track effort where two of the tracks were recorded live at London Heathrow Airport. These tracks are not musical in any conventional sense, consisting of nothing but snatches of ambience, tinny tannoy announcements, overheard conversations and a series of unnerving inorganic noises including at least one electronic arcade game and what sounds like a witch being electrocuted. They are  jarring, badly recorded and compressed to hell, and sound like a space age migraine. I went to Heathrow for the first time in 1978, and its escalators and beige and yellow modernity pretty much blew my ten year old mind, so I completely understand the appeal. 

There is a non-Heathrow track which is the only one where they sound like a 'band'. It consists of a spiky one minute guitar and bass riff over which someone reads quotes from newspapers about Mary Bell (a child who murdered another child) in a Lord Haw Haw voice. How was this not a hit?  

The sleeve features a single light bulb in an otherwise darkened room, a common trope of the era, not least because it looked impressive in monochrome, the colour scheme de l'epoque being predominantly black, white and grey. The lonely light has an undeniably sinister feel, and speaks of tunnels, disused factories, musty cellars, torture chambers, nightmares. It is a light that accentuates the darkness around it rather than illuminating it. 

THERE AIN'T NO PARTY LIKE A TRAUTONIUM PARTY

The Trautonium is an electric Synthesizer invented by Friedrich Trautwein in 1930. Trautwein's apprentice,  Oskar Sala, loved the instrument so much that he spent the next 72 years playing it and perfecting its design.

In 1963, Sala used an iteration of the Trautonium to provide the eerie chittering soundscapes that provide the only score for Hitchcock's last masterpiece, The Birds.

A fascinating mix of organ, synth and souped up electric cello, the instrument straddles the olde worlde and the science fiction-y simultaneously and, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to break into public consciousness. Sadly, since Sala's death in 2002, this labour of love has fallen further into obscurity, with only a handful of people left in the world who know how to play it.

See it, and Sala, in action HERE.

AGNETHA

As Agnetha Faltskog perhaps knew most of all, it wasn't easy being in ABBA. Perfection is an extremely tough standard to try and maintain.

DRONE DIDDLEY

As far as I am concerned, there are three types of people: those who love Bo Diddley, those who haven't heard him yet, and idiots. On their album Dawn of..., The Double play a classic Diddley Daddy-esque riff for forty minutes, and all sorts of strange stuff emerges as you listen. If you've ever wanted a soundtrack for driving into the sun, you need look no further. 

HEAVY AND LIGHT METAL

Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) was an Italian / American painter, sculptor, musician and furniture designer. I'm perhaps most interested in his sonic sculptures, fascinating sets of differently sized metal rods, bowls and sheets that chime and resonate and create overlapping waves of deep, shimmering sound when touched, bowed or banged with a mallet, but I'm most familiar with his wire backed chairs, one of which sat in the corner of my room at university for two years. It was really uncomfortable, but I wish I'd pinched it when I left.    

THE VOID OF A WORLD SURREAL

Teeny Deane, here's some rock an roll, Bubbu, hope you like em if you don't you're a cretin!! Ratfink*.

Chrome is not so much a band as an unexplained phenomenon. I don’t know how they wrote these songs, how they performed them, or how they recorded them. They seem to follow the classic film screenwriting edict of ‘come in late, leave early’, so many of their songs are like blurred Polaroids: bits and pieces in motion, indistinct edges, colours smeared and inchoate. The overall result is as exhilarating as it is disorienting. Their music chops and changes like a radio being tuned, ending abruptly, fading out or changing tack mid-song, layered to overload with scuzzy riffs, wild noodling and wayward analogue electronics. Sometimes they layer in screams, chuckles or maniacal laughter, ear-splitting buzzes and sudden bursts of static or dialogue taped off the telly. Their subject matter is from the pages of Philip K. Dick: mass surveillance, sinister media, doppelgangers, terrorism, paranoia, time out of joint. The drums always sound as if they are in a different room to the tape recorder.

My favourite Chrome album is their third, Half Machine Lip Moves, perhaps the most perfectly Chrome-like of their peak output between 1977 and 1982 (they’re still going now, albeit in a revised form, having lost a founder member along the way). It’s a record that sounds like a mix tape – it jumps around in time and space, in time zones and space spaces, a hundred sonic ideas hastily jotted down then crossed through, an album with both a laser sharp focus and attention deficit disorder. Arrows point to new directions, new sounds emerge. Everything sounds live and improvised, then laden with overdubs, echo and lots and lots of compression, slightly chaotic, but often hypnotic and adorned with sinuous guitar lines and squelches. It’s beautifully composed cacophony, sheets of sound, metallic clangs and clatters, heavily treated vocals that hiss about alienation, duplication, death and a ‘cold clammy bombing that will shit on your town’. If the Red Army Faction had made a record, it might sound like this, reeking of high explosive and petrol.

They’re probably my favourite band, and they are becoming more relevant as the world becomes more splintered and confusing. I strongly recommend them to you if you want to listen to something that will beat the hell out of your ears and head whilst making your heart and legs compulsively pump up and down.     

*Indented inscription on the cover of my secondhand copy of the album.

WORLD UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Some wonderful design on this long running and eclectic series.

YOU GOT ME STAR TREKKING

Astonishing outsider funk from Forrest Terry, originally released in 1980 but recently made available by the good people at Athens of the North. I love everything about this lo fi sci fi track: its murky sound, its muddled structure - the fact that Forrest had the foresight to make a video - and his superlative work on the Tri-speed Moog Keytar Synthesizer Guitar, an instrument that he invented. 

ENDLESS SUMMER

The internet is amazing, isn't it? You think of something, become a little obsessed with it, Google it and then find that it's a real thing, and that it's been on YouTube since February 1st, 2013. You don't get that in your poxy real life libraries. 

Here's Ms Summer again, properly adjusted to provide the perfect soundtrack for tumbling into a black hole, forever. Loop it; live it, let it become your life.

Thanks to Fearlono for providing the clues.

FALLING FREE

I have lots of records, and lots of favourite records. My favourite FAVOURITE record is 'I Feel Love' by Donna Summer. I could listen to it forever. It's my 'crossing the event horizon and passing beyond relativity into the shapeless, formless, timeless infinite unknown' record.

I've chosen this 'live' appearance because it's astonishing to consider that real people are playing this music, with human hands and minds. A work of evolutionary importance. 

WAITING FOR IMAM

Somewhere out in the Sahara desert, Tuareg super group Haso-Bambino-Koudede-Bibbi are jamming the fudge out of one of their songs. It would perhaps be very typically western to make a comparison, and say that their dedication to the groove and relentless guitar interplay remind me of The Velvet Underground, but I very much mean it as a compliment.  

SO MANY RECORDS

In addition to watching a lot of films, I buy as much music as I can. I don’t have any specific criteria, I just like the good stuff. Here’s a mix of good stuff I have bought in the last few months. It has no particular theme, and is mainly old music that has recently been reissued, with a few new tracks thrown in just to show I’ve still got it. It gets quite exotic in the middle, which is excellent. All of this music is commercially available elsewhere, so please buy it if you like it. Here’s the track listing:

001 Black Hippies: Doing it in The Street

002 Nico Gomez and his Afro Percussions Inc: Caballo Negro

003 Donnell Pitman: Love Explosion

004 Sumy: Where Were You Last Night (Sexy Lady)

005 Forest Terry: Satellite Love

006 Willie West: I’m Still A Man (Lord Have Mercy)

007 Abu Sultan: Your Love Made My Head Hurt

008 Maurica Louca: Al-Asr Adh-Dhabi

009 Michael Stasis Band: Brown Cow

010 Arthur Russell: Lucky Cloud

011 Trevor Dandy: Is There Any Love?

012 Ami Shavit: Alpha 1

013 Carol: Breakdown

014 Owiny Sigoma Band: I Made You / You Made Me

It’s all stuck together so, for the best results, put it on when you have just under 63 minutes to kill. Go HERE to listen or download.

THE SOUND OF FEELING

Michael Jackson was a preternaturally, supernaturally talented person. He did a lot of weird things, and was clearly a very troubled individual but, in his pomp (a period of about twenty five years) he did amazing stuff in music and dance that has left an indelible mark on popular culture. 

Case in point: Can You Feel It.

Yes, it’s a fantastic pop record, but its accompanying film (conceived by Michael, and realised in conjunction with computer graphics pioneer, Robert Abel) takes it to an entirely new dimension. In this universe, The Jacksons unexpectedly arrive in a troubled world in a blaze of golden light and glitter. The brothers appear as gigantic, glowing figures towering over the world, but despite being quite able to trash Tokyo, they are smiling, beneficent titans, here to heal the world rather than harm it. Their presence, which is accompanied by whooshing noises and bursts of synth and guitar, brings peace to the world, and a new understanding. By the end of the song, the people of Earth stand hand in hand, their petty differences forgotten, in a scene reminiscent of the idealised pictures found in Jehovah’s Witness leaflets*. All that's missing is a tame lion and some big bowls of fruit.

With any other band, this might seem like preposterous hubris: the brothers as Gods visiting Earth and making it better with their awesomeness. In this film, however, the brothers don’t seem to be imperious, or omniscient, or omni-anything. Rather, their powers seem to be a delight to them, as if they have been suddenly suffused with a divine light, as if they are vessels of a higher power rather than the power itself. There is a lot of pointing in the film – people pointing at the Jacksons and the incredible things they do, and the Jacksons pointing at each other, ecstatically surprised at how divine they have suddenly become.

It’s worth noting the nifty orchestral additions to the track, also written by Michael in a modern classical style reminiscent of the music to Logan's Run. They are mainly buried in the mix of the (otherwise wonderful) version released as a single, and that’s something of a shame. In an ideal world, the sort of world where five cool siblings regularly appear to magically make things better, there is a ten, no, a twenty minute Can You Feel It filled with sound effects and strings and horns and hope and groove which would become a world anthem that every single person and animal on earth could get behind. 

As a final note, it’s worth remembering that the Jacksons went into the studio to record this track (and the album Destiny) in the same month that Michael finished recording Off The Wall, the album that would cement his solo superstar status. Oh, and Michael was still only 20 years old. Incredible.

* The Jacksons were all Jehovah's Witnesses. Imagine opening your door to them.

EARTH GIRLS AREN'T EASY

I am clearly not the Rich White Ladies target audience, but, nevertheless, their music says something to me, mainly that I know nothing about contemporary mores or, indeed, about 21st century life in general. 

Actually, my reaction to them is complex. They make me feel foolish, because I live in their world and I know hardly anything about it, but they also make me feel optimistic about my short term chances: I mean, I definitely like this track, so I must sort of get it, even if I don't really get it. So perhaps there's hope for me. 

I may not be at the sharp end, but I'm not yet so blunt that I don't recognise that 'babies can't read / robots can't bleed' is a great pop line, and, when you think about it, virtually impossible to argue with.

SEARCHING

Spencer Clark makes strange, abstract music under a number of (pretty silly) pseudonyms*, perhaps the most prevalent one being Monopoly Child Star Searchers. His oeuvre consists of rambling percussion and electronics pieces that sit somewhat uncomfortably between ethnic field recordings, New Age glissando and the sort of music they used to have on VHS head cleaning tapes, and lo fi as hell, as if heard through or a wall or recorded on a phone with a waning battery. The titles of the tracks (where they are given) tend to be chance juxtapositions of pseudoscientific buzz words, and it is telling that he sometimes uses the alias of Charles Berlitz, the writer who produced an endless series of books in the seventies and eighties about strange and unexplained phenomena.

Clark’s ‘career’ seems fairly haphazard by 21^st century terms: he retains a mystery and unavailability rare in the over saturated internet era. Much of his back catalogue is out of print, or spread across a number of labels. He likes cassettes and CDR’s and limited editions, so even his most recent work is sometimes difficult to get hold of. But I’m on it. If you needed any further incentive, it’s worth pointing out that his first release as Monopoly Child Star Searchers was an alternate soundtrack to the 1978 Tony Curtis clunker, The Manitou, a pretty awful film that, nevertheless, achieves greatness in its climactic fourth dimensional cosmic mind laser battle between a psychic and a four hundred year old Native American medicine man.  

* Vodka Soap, Black Joker, Fourth World Magazine, Egyptian Sports Network, Monopoly Star Child Searchers, Typhonian Nightlife...