64 Quartets is already nine posts deep into the ninth quartet of his sixty-four, Wire, presenting an idiosyncratic, discursive lexicon of Wire’s initial run on Harvest. The ninth post only gets us as far as Bowie, David, with further lexicons promised covering Wire’s subsequent incarnations on Mute and under their own aegis, so settle in for the long haul. Hard to imagine any band more deserving of a full-length critical biography, and these posts might be as close as we’re getting. Start here.
Category: Music
Repetition in the Music, We’re Never Going to Lose It
A couple of decades ago, I found myself in the same boat as Internal Exile, struggling to cope with the dizzying abundance of music in the digital age, finding that the music meant less and less to me as I bought more and more, sprinting towards an endlessly receding horizon. I bought records and CDs so voraciously that I barely had time to listen to them once, just enough to check that they played all right, before I was back out the door to buy more. To this day, I remember very little about the music of that time. Song titles, album covers conjure nothing, no lingering frisson or echo in the memory.
Rather than surrender to the flow, I forced myself to slow down, to try to listen to records until they etched an outline in my memory. It’s been a long process, gradually weaning myself off that impulse to consume, embracing repetition in the hope of re-enchantment. That enchantment remains elusive—I’ll never regain that teenage obsession that led me spend entire mornings in bed, flipping a C90 cassette of Aqualung and Morrison Hotel over and over. My relationship to music now is more like an addict in recovery, a little burned-out and constantly self-monitoring for fear of relapse. I wiped the music library on my computer in 2015 and started over; in the decade since, there are only a half-dozen albums that I’ve listened to more than ten times.
But even that limited repetition is enough to enrich the music, to give me the time to dwell in the grain of the sound, to build some personal context around the music. Sound is voluptuous, but context is meaning. Everything I thought and felt while listening to an album, whatever I read or heard that led me to it in the first place, the conversations about it with friends, all that accretes meaning around the music like nacre around a nascent pearl.
Seeing the music performed live only becomes more important as the years go by, vivid nights in dank clubs, reeling from the volume, the intoxication of the crowd, the unflagging magic of hearing this music at the moment of (re)creation. The debriefing session in the pub afterwards, the lingering reverberation of the experience in the days after. Listening to the recordings again, reconfiguring their meaning in light of the performance.
So the notion of gluing a record to your turntable resonates strongly, even if it’s as bathetic a choice as Underwater Moonlight. Listen to it until you know it inside-out, like it’s the only record you own, the only record ever made. For all I said that I don’t remember much of the early 2000s, I recognised the jacket image at the top of Rob’s post immediately, remember where I bought that double-disc reissue on Matador, can hum a few bars of “I Wanna Destroy You” and “Old Pervert”. However little that is, it still means something to me.
The Body You Deserve
I came to HTRK through the back door, after reading a glowing review of Rhinestones in the Wire. Knowing no better, I missed completely the shock and surprise of hearing a band characterised by the blunt thump of a Roland drum machine and cavernous bass throb sidestep into fingers brushing nylon guitar strings and hushed 5am vocals. Only after seeing their low-key but dazzling set at the Workman’s Club did I start working through their back catalogue: the minimalist noise rock of their Rowland S. Howard–produced debut, Marry Me Tonight, the dubbed electronics of Psychic 9-5 Club.
There aren’t many revelations in this Quietus interview with Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang, but the tracks selected are a great introduction to their music. Luke Turner nails most of my favourites (“Gilbert and George”, “Fascinator”) but from Psychic 9-5 Club, I’d give the nod to the album closer:
(Something about that “Strange World of…” series title feels lumpen and hapless to me…could there be anything less strange than the doggedly unglamorous work ethic of Fugazi, for instance?)
Be Mine Tonight
Chasing Mailboxes announces the 14th annual Coffeeneuring Challenge. Last year I failed ignominiously after disappearing off to Le Guess Who with only five rides in the bag, and coming home too hungover to contemplate getting on the bike to finish it off. This year I will brook no failure.
Dean Roberts died a few months ago, far too young. He never seemed to receive the attention that his music deserved, despite releases on labels as storied as Mille Plateaux, Kranky, and Erstwhile. He probably tired of the comparisons with Mark Hollis and Talk Talk, but I can think of few artists who could bear the comparison so well, whose music matched that taut-nerved tension and haunted beauty.
And the Black Moths Play the Grand Cinema by Dean Roberts
Philip Sherburne’s comprehensive retrospective at Futurism Restated has disappeared behind the paywall, but Tone Glow and the Wire have reposted old interviews.
Afterbirth of the Cool
A highly entertaining interview with Kramer, stuffed with scurrilous detail on his time with Gong and the Butthole Surfers. Rick Moody (a name that hasn’t crossed my mind in two decades–plus) asks the questions. Hat tip to Rory for this one.
While we’re on the subject of the Butthole Surfers, Tone Glow offers up an equally exhaustive conversation with their guitarist, Paul Leary.
The Thin Line between Interesting and Boring
Over at Tone Glow, a typically in-depth interview with David Lance Callahan, formerly of the Wolfhounds and Moonshake. As Callahan comments, Moonshake were a schizophrenic band, the sneering edge of his songs rubbing up awkwardly against the breathy sensuality of Margaret Fiedler’s. For me, Moonshake were always outshone by the brilliance of her subsequent work with Laika, but listening to the songs laced through the interview reminded me that even if Moonshake weren’t the easiest band to listen to, they were consistently inventive, never dull. Stacks of interesting detail in the interview, the remastered Eva Luna went straight to the top of my shopping list.
Burning Ambulance runs the ruler over Sonic Youth’s first decade. It can hardly be controversial to suggest that their early work is far and away Sonic Youth’s best, a dislocating, psychedelic collision of noise, dissonance and rock. The further they travelled from their roots in no wave and Glenn Branca–esque drang, the more musicianly they became, the less individual they sounded, until the last reminders of their former abrasiveness and darkness were Kim Gordon’s vocals. The decision to hive off their experimental and improvisatory tendencies into the SYR series probably did much to keep Geffen on side, but surrendered the essential tension between pop and avant-garde that fired their eighties work. You could argue that the arrival of Steve Shelley was as much a curse as a blessing: without his power and fluidity, Sonic Youth could never have rocked like they did on Sister and Daydream Nation, but it’s hard to imagine they would have gone on to become so mature and assimilable with Bob Bert still on drums. In 1990, Sonic Youth were my favourite band by a country mile; does anyone say that about the Sonic Youth of ten or twenty years later?
Ten Albums for 2023
2023 already seems like a long time ago, but I suppose if the Quietus can publish their list a month before the end of the year, I can publish mine a month after. In any case, I’m so laughably out of touch these days that it would be the height of presumption to call these albums the best of 2023. Rather, these are the ten albums (not necessarily released in 2023) that represent best what I was listening to last year.
Deena Abdelwahed — Jbal Rrsas (Infiné)
Oren Ambarchi — Shebang (Drag City)
Big|Brave — Nature Morte (Thrill Jockey)
The Bonk — Greater Than or Equal to… (thirtythree-45)
Jaimie Branch — Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War)) (International Anthem)
Mabe Fratti — Se Ve Desde Aquí (Unheard Of Hope)
Goat (JP) — Joy in Fear (Nakid)
Bill Orcutt — Music for Four Guitars (Palilalia)
Radian — Distorted Rooms (Thrill Jockey)
Vanishing Twin — Afternoon X (Fire)
If I were to single one out, it would be the Mabe Fratti album, which has some truly breathtaking moments that give it the edge over Vidrio, the debut album from her new project, Titanic. But if I hadn’t come late to Se Ve Desde Aquí, Vidrio would be in the list instead.
Likewise, Afternoon X nudges the Holy Tongue album, Deliverance and Spiritual Warfare off the list, both sharing the rhythm section of Valentina Magaletti and Susumu Mukai. Having seen Magaletti drumming with Holy Tongue and Raime last year, I had concluded that she’s more about precision than swing, and it’s interesting to hear her laying down a muscular boom-bap on the title track of the Vanishing Twin album, even if the effect is more vintage DJ Shadow than James Brown.
The Radian album barely made a ripple as it slipped into the world — the only review I saw was on Brainwashed — but it’s a tense, vivid collection of dubbed, glitched post-rock. Maybe there were obvious points of comparison when they started out back in 2000 but at this point they’re in a league of their own.
Neil Kulkarni
Sad to hear of the unexpected death of Neil Kulkarni, one of the handful of Melody Maker journalists whose name and style were unforgettable. He was, it turns out, exactly the same age as I am, but I could only aspire to a fraction of the verve and confidence of his early work in the MM.
I lost sight of him when MM folded so his reappearance in the early days of the Quietus came as a bolt from the blue, the more so because it heralded his A New Nineties series, still the most memorable articles I’ve read on that site. At a time when I was groaning from the surfeit of post-punk reissues, A New Nineties came as a salutary reminder of the febrile genius of the music I grew up listening to: the shattered-glass post-rock of Disco Inferno, the austere reductions of Main, the bruised, sombre moods of Codeine and Come.
More recently, it was pleasure to see his byline appearing frequently in the Wire, even if he was usually touting something I wouldn’t have listened to in a blue fit. Farewell Neil, you will be missed.
Island Universe
A fascinating, in depth report on the DIY music scene in Cork, by Mariana Timoney. It’s hard to imagine that there’ll be many more like this on Bandcamp Daily, since Songtradr sacked nearly all the staff writers immediately after acquiring Bandcamp, but credit where credit is due—few other sites would have commissioned it in the first place.
The Quietus were unusually restrained this year, letting three whole days of December pass before publishing their Albums of the 2023 list. It’s as dementedly eclectic and esoteric as ever—I doubt I’ve even heard of two-thirds of the albums listed, much less listened to them.
Exploring the Parameter Space
Mammoth interview with Autechre in advance of their Vicar Street gig tomorrow night. I’m not usually gone on interviews that just present the unedited transcript of the conversation, but it seems appropriate here, given the multi-hour scale of some Autechre releases. There’s something of the same sense of wandering aimlessly in their world and unexpectedly happening on something really interesting.
If you’d asked me thirty years ago which bands of the day were likely to go down the Grateful Dead route of massive documentation of their live work, I might have guessed Sonic Youth, but Autechre wouldn’t have been anywhere on my radar. Nor Fugazi, for that matter.
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