Buried treasures

Dave Mothersole takes a look at the 80's goa party scene in "The Roots of Trance" over on Bleep43. Fascinating look at an oft-derided and misunderstood genre with a belter of a mix to accompany it. For long periods the music sounds like a good night at Optimo- really enjoyable stuff especially the fucked up Italo and synthpop of Laser Cowboys and Boytronic. Lots of the music there is available for buttons on Discogs too so i'll be getting in about it!

It's Record Shop Day the morn so I'll be tootling off around Underground Solushun, Avalanche and Coda desperately searching for a vinyl copy of Calling Out of Context!

In celebration of RSD have a wee look at Stefan Glerum's warning to Crate Diggers!

Forthcoming.

Robomanticism

Edinburgh Art/Music collective FOUND unveiled their emo-robot band creation, Cybraphon at the open of NewMedia Scotland's Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition at the InSpace gallery yesterday.

Cybraphon embodies the type of new-old-new aesthetic I was talking about previously. "Cybraphon consists of a number of instruments, antique machinery, and found objects from junk shops operated by over 60 robotic components, all housed in a modified wardrobe" (although the majority of Cybraphon's functions run off custom software). For the how, go here. The why, go here. It reminds me a little of Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller's "Opera for a Small Room" that was exhibited last year.

Cybraphon is resolutely modern too, being obsessed with social networking and the web, to such a degree that its prowess and popularity online impacts on its emotional state, which in turn has an effect on the music it composes. There are rumours that Richie Hawtin consulted with Cybraphon on Myspace and stole some of its ideas in surveying fans about what they'd like the return of Plastikman to look like.

Cybraphon, like many others, is naturally livid with Hawtin. Not because he stole his idea but because Cybraphon only sees the online component of its existence as informing rather than directing its practice as an artist.

There's a face off between FOUND and Cybraphon next week, unfortunately the website is saying it's sold out. Hopefully Cybraphon will notice I've written about it and grant me some sort of special robo-guestie.

Retro Stylings

Two seemingly disparate articles looking at similar tendencies in disparate musics floating around just now.

Philip Sherburne's column on Pitchfork looking at the return to analogue prevalent in the post-minimal climate. He's got some interesting points, most notably about Clone's increasing quest to refine and redefine the electronic canon, looking at the (small c) "continuum" of musics that have been growing out of the roots of disco/house/boogie/techno/acid/etc. Talk of innovation (although Sherburne uses the neat phrase "sonic novelty" in addressing the excesses of the minimal boom) has moved to talk of authenticity, a phrase that in all cultural forms is loaded with as much baggage as i've seen being lugged through the streets of Edinburgh this week.

Michael Tumelty's piece in the Herald looks at the Edinburgh International Festival's current programme and the furore over the sheer volume of Early/Historical/Authentic music in this years lineup. His point being that after a number of years where Historically Informed music was percieved as a niche, specialist pursuit it is now ready to go (for want of a better word) mainstream.

There's a lot of pleasure to be gained in seeing artists who've grown in relative obscurity getting plaudits for their mastery of their chosen form. I'm eagerly anticipating watching Legowelt break out his boxes at Substance this weekend just as Tumelty seems excited at the prospect of seeing Bach Collegium Japan.

So this is really just a wee screed, saluting all the interesting music programming this year in all its forms in Edinburgh's festival this year. It's a welcome relief from the depressing uniformity of a lot of the fare on offer at the major Fringe venues- acres of posters on boards plastered with easily recognisable visual references on posters.

We're jammin'

As the weekend approaches I wearily notice I haven't updated this in an age.

Work is the curse of the discursive classes. Or some old winsome guff like that.

Any road. This week is the last chance Edinburgh residents will get the chance to check out the unmissable Francesca Woodman retrospective. Anyone who doesn't bother to do so is on the shit list forever. Or at least goes into the book as a philistine who chose not to take a rare opportunity to gawp at a distinctive and unnerving body of work by a fascinating and obviously uniquely talented photographer.

There's some great background information and online galleries at the Ingleby site for those of you who can't make it along but it's well worth the trip. There's a limnal, haunted melancholy to Woodman's work, the circumstances of her death (by suicide, aged 22) amplifying the already creepy and disturbing erasions and distortions in the pictures- it's absolutely incredible to think that many of the earlier pictures featured in this exhibition were taken by Woodman when she was (by my calculation) only 13 or 14. This poignancy is heightened by the knowledge that few prints saw the light of day during Woodman's lifetime.

The exhibition coincides with a smaller collection of Woodman's work in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art as part of the Artists Rooms series.

The experience of being in the Ingleby pristine, quiet, sun-drenched gallery is slightly disconcerting as the building previously housed Edinburgh's legendary dark, sweat and booze encrusted "Venue".

Anyway. Event of the weekend is the Firecracker night at Jam the Box in GRV.

Local friendly vinyl pusher Fudge Fingas goes back to back with Linkwood Family member House of Traps in a three hour vinyl pile-up. Hopefully it'll whet appetites for the forthcoming Disco 3k weekender in Croatia.

Deviants may want to check the bizarro burlesque bacchanal Confusion is Sex tonight with FriendOfClom Kris Wasabi playing bangers in the main room after Gutter Klinik, a band "specialising in gayer-than-cum-on-a-moustache pop". Indeed.

I'm tempted but I'm a one-night a weekend man this weather.

More to come soon, I promise, including something about all these fuds who've retrospectively decided they never liked Sonic Youth because they were never really a band anyway more a late-capitalist curatorial project enslaving us all in some sort of po-mo whorl of tasteful countercultural signifiers until you just can't tell what's properly avant-garde anymore! Or you can obviously, and do, with a side order of obfuscatory dialectical mince.

Two baldheads fighting over a comb.

Delightful story in which bland, soulless venues operating as nighttime holding pens for Edinburgh's burgeoning no-brow Edinburgh market slug it out over customers who, in my experience, exhibit a manifest absence of discernment regarding where they choose to catch dysentery off the toilets on a Saturday night.

It's not clear whether the citation of acts like Kasabian, Kaiser Chiefs and the Sugababes formed the basis for Simon Frith's evidence.

Or whether any answer as to for the love of fuck WHY these shitholes are so successful.

Is it any wonder the weejies smirk knowingly whenever Edinburgh's nightlife is mentioned?

Anyway.

To dispel all thoughts of indie-gonk-moppets wiggling their uncoordinated arses and braying along to the Kaiser Chiefs I'm off to Riddim Tuffa tomorrow to see Jahtari Riddim Force at the GRV.

Waxy treats.

Things that are making my life worthwhile.

Nacho Patrol- Futuristic Abeba- Danny "Legowelt" Wolfers' new album is getting a lot of attention and i'm looking forward to checking it out but this, his second release as Nacho Patrol, is a surprising beautiful slice of african influenced, organ-soaked joy. Everything is so organic, summery, warm and delicious. Quite different to last years spiky imaginary soundtrack "The Maze of Violence" (a record my wife forbids me from playing when we have company round!).

Juju and Jordash- Dekmental 001 12"- Dutch producers first release on their own new label. Great, bit more driving than usual but retains the interdimensional galaxian feel that they always bring to the table. The end of "Super Blue Meanies" stopped me in my tracks when the lads in Underground Solushn played this when I asked for it. Made me go immediately to Levon Vincent's "Six Figures" from earlier in the year. Lerosa remix on the b-side is a loping dubbed out treat too. Online mixes provide a superb introduction to their sound, a rich, varied no-boundaries style that i can't get enough of.

Hieroglyphic Being- So much noise 2 be heard- Impeccable future machine jazz. Geniunely mindboggling emotion and feel from pretty much everything on these two 12"s. Hard to classify, there are just so many ideas. Everything feels so, so, so right. Sensational in every sense of the word. Checked out the Les Aeroplanes 12" on Mathematics that's getting a lot of attention just now. It's also very good but times is hard and I had to leave it.

Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics- Inspiration Information- Was really looking forward to this and not disappointed. Saw Heiliocentrics live a few years ago at Headspin and was really impressed with the way they manage to keep it weird as all hell and so tight at the same time. Reminds me a little of the underrated Up Bustle and Out when they went to Cuba and really opened up their sound but there is a lot more depth and experimentation here. I always get the sense that UB&O were never given the credit due to them, especially for the slightly demented feel of their later, live sessiony stuff. Mulatu Astatke is a complete legend, there's a nice piece on him (and further stuff about Soundway, Strut and Analog Africa) here.

Banda los hijos de la nina luz- Dejala Corre/El Sapo/Crees Que Soy Sexy- Demented Afro/Latin medely version of If you think I'm sexy on Soundway 7". Woot!

Dirty Deeds Done Dead Cheap

Amazing stuff here with an inventor/creator/mad genius making an instrument a day for a month. There are so many great ideas here, the best/most useful design is probably the mobius strip but i think the garden turntable (pictured) is the barkingest, most wonderful thing I've seen this year! Photos, videos, sound samples; follow the link.


This was a part of a wider "Thing-a-day" project where people made one item per day for the entire month of February, the kind of thing that makes me feel phenomenally lazy.

Seen on and stolen from AudioLemon.

A square peg in a round (k) hole

The seemingly endless theoretical wrangling over the existence and extent of the fabled "Hardcore Continuum" reaches something approaching a tabloid bunfight today as noted theory gonk, Simon Reynolds (someone for whom the existence of the HC represents a something of a meal ticket) kicked wonky to the HC curb for ideological heresy.
The crime? Not fitting neatly with Reynolds' thesis and key producers rejecting Reynolds' analysis (and possibly implying that he's, like totally old). What emerges from this little narrative can be summarised thus:

Reynolds

doesn't really like wonky. He can't dance to it. It's influenced by musics outside those universally decreed to be part of the HC "canon". Some people might take Ketamine at dances. It smells. Luke Vibert probably did it first. It involves producers from outside London engaging with a broader community, enabled by the internet. There are no 'zines. Or if there are the 'zine authors are insufficently conversant with Marxist theory and refuse to engage with an overwrought dialectical style birthed by hip young journalistic gunslingers in early 90's London.

Heaven forfend! The struggle for the discursive high-ground regarding wonky fails to see the energy, invention and excitement in that "scene" at the moment.It seems Reynolds would prefer if the major players conformed more to geographical or ideological boundaries, he seeks to

compare/contrast it with sounds that have a more philosophical basis. He doesn't seem to want them running around, hanging out, collaborating and learning from producers from all over the world. It's disappointing that a writer, who professes allegiance to the energy, anarchy and vitality of hardcore seems so intent on decrying ideological heresy among young producers.

I like Reynolds' writing, he's written some superb analyses of significant recent music history. But there are limitations to how far you can apply theory to reality. Throughout the history of dance musics there has been a "folk" element to certain scenes, locality and the sense of community that's formed through friendships and going to the same parties, listening to the same records, hanging out in the same pubs all contribute to productions.

Disco in 1970's New York was a diverse genre with certain clubs forging a distinct musical identity. From this chaos history is made, certain records were deemed "Garage" records, certain ones "Loft", certain ones "Studio". The Glaswegian Numbers crew are clearly influenced by Dopplereffekt and other US musics, undoubtedly through the Club 69/Rub a Dub crew. This is its own continuum, one that doesn't begin and end at the Watford Gap.

The Scottish Hardcore continuum (if such a thing even exists) is a significantly different beast (and has a different legacy) to that of, say Ireland. Through donning the straitjacket of Reynolds' theory we only see part of the picture, and one that is possibly seen through the rosy tinted specs of hindsight.

In a recent post, ISM's Pipecock really articulates the excitement of discovery, the simple joy of playing, listening to and losing your mind to records; looking to a musical continuum that isn't theoretical, one that's personal, that's formed through friends, great parties and just fucking doing it without fully understanding it.

One that "inspired damn near everyone I know to go buy record by cats like Drexciya and Basic Channel and start throwing them in the mix with any old funky electronic shit we could find."

Amen to that.

My/Your/Our

I'm unconvinced as to the extent to which My Girls and Your Love work together. It feels a little forced. Isn't the whole idea behind this mashup malarkey to juxtapose unlikely things over each other rather than just spotting similarities between synth lines?
Thoughts?


I don't think it quite syncs up either, although towards the end the addition of a kick indicates that lurking inside My Girls' baggy shuffle there's the makings of a great disco mix.

Anyway, if it's reworks of Your Love you're after you're better off with Edinburgh's xvectors who covered it a few years ago. Imagine a grumpy Chic fronted by Elvis Costello and you're half way there.

They play Optimo in Edinburgh on the 31st and will apparently be playing a heft of new tunes.

Christmas Gifts

Edinburgh's wonderful shazzblat shaman, Wounded Knee, is offering his peerless seasonal sleigh song "Cold Enough to Snow" for free download from here until January 5th.

The 'Knee has a couple of belters on his myspace just now including an extract from his new release "Orpheus" on Distance Recordings which is a spine tingling live recording of extended vocal improvisations in the tunnels under the Victory Column in Berlin. Oooh, get him. The featured extract "Canary" is my favourite Wounded Knee song and I have frequently given renditions late at night on on drunken nights home. Thankfully there are no surviving recordings of these as he is notoriously litigious.

There's also the wonderful skaters-referencing "My Wooden Cupboard" that featured on the Wire Tapper a few months ago.

Live 'Knee action tomorrow the 19th of December at Canongate Kirk along with other artists from the Edinburgh Composers Collective.

~Scape sound

Thanks to everyone who came down to the Voodoo Rooms last night.


Great turnout for a Monday night. TR I/O FON were absolutely fantastic, scrambling brains with scattergun clatter early doors. Inspired me to pull out Autechre's Envane EP to follow up.


Played Donnacha Costello's newie too before Araya followed on with a gorgeous set of bright shiny shimmer. Really looking forward to forthcoming releases. Then a few more tunes, Photek's 2 sword technique giving way to Peverelist's awesome remix of Shackleton on ~scape, those technoey kicks sounded brilliant over the Voodoo's sound system.

Then Pole came on and flattened everyone with a great set, starting with his rework of Shackleton's Shortwave and blasting through some Steingarten goodies and the forthcoming 12" "Alles Gut/Alles Klar". A great set from an absolute gent that neatly dispelled the notion that Betke's music is all about the sound design, really physical and great fun. Dancing amongst Edinburgh audiences is as rare as hens teeth and it was nice to see the floor moving!

Superb photos of the night by William Stark.

Pole, Dancing

Exciting weekend coming up, between going out to see Prins Thomas at Ultragroove for Kris Wasabi's birthday and then playing records between the acts at Pole in the Voodoo Rooms on Monday.

Support on the night from Benbecula's Araya as well as dub techno trio TR-I/O-FON. I've never heard of them but if there's a phrase that gives me a warm tingly feeling just saying the fucking words it's "dub techno trio" so get there on time.

Your ticket also entitles you to go along to Pole's production workshop at 2pm in Alison House at the University of Edinburgh.

On sale in Ripping, Underground Solushun and for our wild western buddies Rub a Dub and Monorail.

Thanks to Gav for asking me to do this, I'm a big fan of Betke and his superb ~scape label.

Frenetic Noise Splatter

Argh. Lack of updates recently due to constant onslaught of freneticism.

Caught Spencer Clark in his Vodka Soap guise at Sneaky Pete's last week with support from Heather Leigh Murray and the mighty Muscletusk.

Muscletusk were superb, a howling squealing morass of nasty and other such overburdened verb chunder. They rock. Anyway. If they play anywhere near you, you should crawl over dead bodies to go and see them. In fact, I think they'd probably love to see the street in front of the venue strewn with corpses so if they're playing in your town try to kill a few people and leave the bodies in front of the venue as an offering. Like a cat. In fact, if you are a cat you should probably go too. But if you're a cat, a fully grown human is probably going to be a bit too much for you to knock off so either get a load of your cat mates and gang up on a person (the elderly and infirm are usually an easy target, and remember, allergies can often do the work of 10 cats so try to keep it indoors), or alternatively bring a mouse, or just get your devoted owner to do the killing for you, they're great like that.

Right. Onwards.

I didn't really feel the Heather Leigh Murray piece all that much. There were some really interesting sounds, particularly when she was playing those really high notes on her pedal steel and using the harmonica but any time it seemed to be going somewhere interesting things seemed to get bogged down and not really progress all that much. This was a bit disappointing because I saw her with Tarpis Tula at ATP a few years ago and loved it but there you go. Saying this probably consigns me to some sort of gulag for a while but it kicks the fuck out of lying about it eh?

Spencer Clark is half of the Skaters and was completely and utterly fantastic and wonderful. I wasn't too familiar with the Vodka Soap stuff beforehand but it was a lovely piece with Clark playing behind a small shrine with a load of burning incense sticks sticking out of the top of it.
The piece was ritualistic, tribal, ecstatic and nicely bananas all the words that usually get trotted out by folk at these things and a lot more accessible than you might think.

Some people feel alienated by the indescribable, tiny noise/improv/out shindigs that are happening all over the shop but I generally find there's always something to enjoy, although I don't go as often as I'd like and by all accounts have missed some absolutely brilliant performances. Still, I've had some nice dinners and nights in by the fire and I wouldn't exchange them for the world.

We left just as DJ Bennetti was kicking off ItaloBlack, an Italo night that's been going every Thursday in Sneaky Petes for a few months now. The visuals, done by DJ Cassavetes were really, really good. I've been to it a few times now and really enjoy myself and indulge in bad/good dancing. More people should go.

Finally, check out the Shazzblog for a great little interview with hyperliterate zonk-monster and Pjorn-King, Fordell Research Unit.

My love is like a Red Nord Lead.

Today is Notional Poetry Day.

I was going to celebrate this by inflicting a poem on readers.
Then I got lazy, and couldn't manage to squeeze anything out.
So, as some sort of consolation here's some poetry-related malarkey.

Don Paterson wins award with poem about Georgian electronic musician.

Colour me seriously conflicted.
I love Paterson's work.
I also love obscure electronic music.
But this entire article makes me queasy.

There are excerpts from the poem at the end of the article.
Copy & paste them into a more forgiving viewer to read them if you must.

I'm not entirely sure this is the best introduction to his work.
Get Landing Light, Gods Gift to Women, or, if poetry isn't your thing dive into the Book of Shadows and giggle wickedly to yourself late at night over too much booze.

Droids, Slugs, Riddims.

The wearie-curated Blogariddims series is coming to an end, the second last installment is just up.

Droid and Slug joining the dots between todays fractured dubby electronic output and a previous pulse of fractured dubby electronic output.

Just get along and get listening.

"Krib" off Autechre's Cichlisuite EP retains to power to alter my reality.

Which begs the question...

Is it really worthwhile charging 12 quid into Optimo's bi-monthly do in Edinburgh if you know it's going to have an effect on the crowd? Especially given that it's usually half the price in Glasgow?

Is it time to introduce club etiquette lessons to the secondary curriculum? Lots of shoving. And couples mauling each other.

If someone you'd never met before accidentally gave you 20 quid instead of a fiver to add a pint to your order would you correct the mistake?

What kind of a bawbag thinks it's funny to deploy stink bombs in an underground club on one of the muggiest nights of the summer? Twice? Seriously dude, you're a gowl.

Aren't Joakim like a really neat amalgam of Sonic Youth, Franz Ferdinand and Scion?
Ok, that's not really a question. More an observation.

Matthew Bourne loves the sex doesn't he?

Why have all the good techno records gone so expensive?

Ladies Love Cool Cohen

Myself and herself went along to the Leonard Cohen love in this week on the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle. Got last minute tickets on a slightly tipsy whim when I was alerted to a last minute allocation going on sale the week before the gig. Pals and family had gone to the Dublin and Manchester shows. By the time I realised the only tickets available were expensive "hospitality" tickets I was completely committed to seeing him. So, a pile of money and seven days later we found ourselves guzzling free champagne (well, insfoar as it came free with a £75 ticket!) in a covered pod at the back of the open air auditorium.

My memories of Cohen permeate most phases in my life. My father loved his records and I remember him being played and his songs sung when my folks' parents stayed late drinking wine. I remember "Famous Blue Raincoat" as played by the busker opposite the O'Connell Mall soundtracking tearful ruminations after a drunken teenage drama on the night of my 18th birthday. The rain pouring down and my tearstained frustration at a thoughtless insensitive remark that ruined my own evenings entertainment.

My grandmother, in the later stages of her alzheimers, paranoid we were poisoning her, slipping crushed up anti-anxiety meds into her tea still remembered she hated Leonard's "Mrrrhm, mrrrhm, mrrrhm" droning down from my fathers teenage bedroom.

Cohen's music means things to people. It clearly meant a lot to the lady sat beside me. She stood up and shouted "YOU, JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP" to a gent three rows back who was chatting softly to his mate through the first song. Scary stuff! Clearly she understood Leonard better than everyone else.

The passion that Cohen inspires amongst women of all ages is staggering. The overwhelming impression of carnal quasi-religious fervour was epitomised as a woman dressed in white walked up the aisles in front of the stage like a bride to get a snap of our hero sauntering his way through "That's no way to say goodbye".

The strange sexual undertone was heightened for me by the two women behind me whispering every line of "I'm Your Man" into my ear creating a kind of sexy invisible Greek Chorus alongside Cohen's beautiful baritone. The intensity of the "hear a pin drop" reaction to his reading of "One Thousand Kisses Deep" was a real highlight with a palpable waft of lust in the air.

His band were fantastic if you're into the kind of glistening, virtuosic Adult Oriented Lobby Jazz de rigeur for late period 60's icons. Being a snooty pretendy-avant-gardian git I'd prefer to have had Leonard playing with acoustic backing and treating us to doomy readings of Blake and Burns. But that would require a time machine and an audience of about twenty. This was, despite the wrong-headed myth of Cohen as some sort of tortured hermit, entertainment in the broadest sense and the experience was all the better for it. The crowd were there to enjoy themselves and my apprehension that we'd be stuck with inattentive liggers proved completely wrong. A couple from Shetland offered some of their wine to the people around them and apart from the early intensity of the cultist beside me everyone was friendlier and more open than a lot of trendier gatherings.

Despite not playing any of my four favourites (The Partisan, Famous Blue Raincoat, Last Years Man and Chelsea Hotel #2) the two and a half hour show didn't disappoint with Tower of Song, Hallelujah, Suzanne, One Thousand Kisses Deep and the rambunctious closer Closing Time being the dazzling gems in a cave littered with treasure.

Cohen's chops as a poet seems to have inspired some great work. I stumbled across genius Julian Gough material in comments on a Guardian BookBlog about Cohen. This is number IX in a series of X written late at night and made my heart sing.

IX

You get up at five in the morning
And write poems about poetry for an hour and a half.
You are forty and you have no money and your trousers have split and nobody reads poetry.

But your wife is beautiful.
And your daughter is beautiful.
And you’re wearing a great shirt.
In a few hours you will all have coffee together.

You make a note at the top of a new page
“Write to Leonard Cohen and thank him before he dies.”

*Swoon*

I have fond memories of Gough's old band Toasted Heretic, particularly "Songs for Swinging Celibates" which my cousin and I used to sing along to. I'm glad I've managed to master my enthusiasm in recent years as I fear my "genius" idea of singing "Galway Bay" at my wedding to my father in law may have contributed to recriminations that probably would have necessitated another fiver in a buskers' guitar case and a request to "Just play "Raincoat" man".

Calling all kids

Wild Combination: A portrait of Arthur Russell is a documentary by Matt Wolf about the strange magic produced by Russell throughout his too-short life. Anyone who isn't aware of him should, in my opinion anyway, drop everything and get listening. Although you may have heard his music before, in ads, in clubs but the strange thing is, for such a supremely talented avant garde disco savant to remain so slept on is nothing short of incredible. The story is unremarkable at the outset, talented but mixed up cello-playing MidWestern kid runs away to San Fran in the late 70's and joins a commune. What transpires afterwards is like a skewed version of a folk tale in which, befriended by Allan Ginsberg, Russell decamps to New York where he lives in a building with the aforementioned Ginsberg, Richard Hell and no end of pale and interesting residents. Here Russell, who was sent to the closet by his fellow communards to practice his cello, set about creating a bewildering array of music starting as from a singer songwritery to becoming an amazing bandleader through making "Instrumentals 1-5" with former Modern Lover Ernie Brooks and Saxophonist Peter Zummo and a number of other players. Russell worked in collaborations on a type of Buddhist Pop music that even now sounds bizarrely contemporary- a few years ago while on holiday i put on "First Thought: Best Thought" which contains the aforementioned Instrumentals. Difficult to describe, these instrumentals have a strange, almost ritual quality, slightly off kilter, trancelike but still rock music, reminiscent of a very breezy Tortoise. That's Tortoise, although the similarity extends to our little shell-wearing buddy too as it has a persistent unhurried charm and seems entirely self-contained. Laboured metaphors abound when dealing with Russell because his music is so unique and unfathomable that coupled with his early death earns him the unhelpful "lost genius" tag. Wolf prefers to use "Icon" which i think fits well. Russell, at this stage developed a reputation as being frustrating, difficult to work and collaborate with and obsessively perfectionist (Tom Lee, Russells lover describes how he took nearly 6 years to complete the title track That's Us/Wild Combination!)

Russell was at this stage "out" and immersed in the New York underground disco scene. Here was a new, emergent subculture that allowed him to mess with a whole lot of equipment, techniques and instruments. Ideal. Russell produced some of my favourite disco records and when Go Bang! appears I practically fainted with pleasure. There's a good treatment in the film of this period although by Wolf's own admission at the Q&A afterwards he does get feedback that it doesn't deal with disco in enough detail. For me that is the tragedy of Russells life and more broadly the disco era, AIDS and drugs decimated this subculture and this is palpable in the film by the absence of so many people. In my opinion this is a strength of the film and the absence of so many key players communicates the sense of loss that many of the contributers felt (and obviously still feel).

The film uses interviews with Russells parents, lover, collaborators along with a few others. There are reconstructions of the Loft and Iowa which put russells music into a sort of context as well as a beautifully realised recreation of Arthur listening to his own tapes on the Staten Island ferry. This evocative image was the first thing that sparked Wolf's imagination to make this affectionate portrait of Russell. His parents are funny, worldly people who loved and encouraged their strange little boy. Russells partner Tom Lee is really moving and a real sense of the love between them is exquisitely portrayed. The music Russell left behind (hours of reels of tapes, DATS, regular cassettes- all unreleased) is the real legacy- songs that never saw the light of day are now being released by Audika. Many of these songs (particularly on Another Thought and Calling Out of Context) describe togetherness, the kind of mundane spiritual wonder that you feel on a boring Tuesday evening when sat on the couch together eating crisps. Other work is entirely individual, like being alone on a pier in the middle of the night. The magic of Russells music is the way the music creates this transportative power in ordinariness, the zen of living completely in the moment, whether losing your mind on a wild dancefloor, cuddling on the couch or listening to music on the deck of a ferry.

Hannah McGill paid tribute to Optimo's DJ Twitch for introducing her and countless others to Russells music. He deserves it, Optimo have been pushing the NY Disco sound long before the haircut brigade cottoned onto it. For my own part I have Greg n' Shane to thank for introducing me to the wonky rhodes organ wonder of Loose Joints.

She got one thing wrong though, the "best club night in the world" is obviously Subculture!

It lives...

No updates for over a month.

Naughty, lazy, feckless wastrel.

Work's been busy and I've been on holidays.

Recent Underground Solushun acquisitions:

Four Tet- Ringer EP (Domino)
SL Break- Laguna Seca 12" (Philpot)
Luke Hess- Real to Real 12" (FXHE)
James Pants- Welcome LP (Stones Throw)
Daedalus- Fair Weather Friends EP (Ninja Tune)
Terrence Dixon- Climb EP (Nightvision)
Sub Club- 20 years underground CD (Soma)

Absolutely loving the Luke Hess and Terrence Dixon 12"s.

The subculture CD on the Sub Club compilation has me happy as a clam.
The Martian, Steve Poindexter, Jimmy Bo Horne, Galaxy to Galaxy.
*Sigh*
Harri and Dominic are just dreamy.

Anyways, enough guff. It's the Leith Gala today so that means heading down the Links this afternoon for some food and cold beer in the sun listening to Stevie Messenger's good time selections. The weather's looking good so it should be a nice afternoon, at least until the local heid the baws start getting surly.

Then it's off to Techno Matt's 30th birthday party and the inevitable dawn of random.