David Keenan's Le Weekend festival this year features The Dead C and Borbetemagus. Interesting. Now, whether to go or not? Perhaps I should go here rather than ATP next year, which it sounds like is going to be curated by Throbbing Gristle. The idea of a whole festival curated by industrial types sounds dangerous to me. Whitehouse might end up playing the bar; Death In June will be behind the merchadise stall selling replica Third Reich Uniforms or something. Hmmmmmm.

Anyway, The Dead C. Simon Reynolds once wrote "MOST OVER-RATED OF THE NINETIES- THE DEAD C AND ALL WHO SAIL ON HER STAGNANT WATERS". Calm down, lad. I can see what he's getting at, though- a mate recorded my first Dead C tape when he was, as he put it, "smoking a doobie". Listening to the tape later, there wasn't the kind of immediate immersive warmth one associates with smokin music. Instead they evoke a total freedom- freedom to throw down their guitars and run to the other end of the room, as they described their early rehearsals in a Wire interview. It is both a strenth and weakness- long spaces where nothing and anything can happen can sound either compelling or indifferent. The music instantiates a most beautiful freedom- one might descibe it as a typically relaxed, contemplative New Zealand attitude. And yet by the more delineated standards of Eurocentric/American art rock, it misses rules and passion.

For me it's just a tremendously transparent music. When my mood and that of the music are the same, it feels like a perfect expression of empty-space. By filling the space with anything, it traces forms of freedom, without reference to any specific musical content. The presence of random sounding guitar squeals and squeaks underlines the more radical possibility of total absence of sound. Communicating this sort of psychological contemplation is difficult though, and they one thing The Dead C don't seem to do is communicate. It is simply a state that does not force itself on you, it can be entered or left at any time.

I have been busy today- thoughts on and a review of Blood And Fire's Tree Of Satta Volume 1, featuring The Abyssinians and friends.

New on The Wanderer- massive review of the alcohol-marinated leftfield extravaganza that was All Tomorrow's Parties 2004

Skykicking muses on mashed up break aesthetics in the wake of the recent Remarc compilations. Inspecting the state of the break circa 94 via a dodgy old Strictly Hardcore compilation , Skykicking finds his "favourites are invariably incredibly overstuffed with rhythmic detail". "I'd argue that multi-accented polyrhythmic arrangements are one technique by which you can achieve the "rhythmic danger" of jungle. It got me thinking on some of the formal elements of mashup beats aesthetics. I instinctively feel the mashup break can go to far- on an ultra-nasty track by Bass Master Warriors called Ten Grand Dubplate, the continual rattle of Amen breaks is too much like untamed aggression, a formless lashing-out. The maximalism of the way they use the break, just tonnes and tonnes of snares, is pretty mental but lacks much tension.

Tension between the physical and the abstract is paramount in jungle. One important factor in my favorite jungle breaks is how they are not just pure form, not just fractured geometries of drum samples. This is why drill and bass didn't work for me- it leaves the physical edge of the breakbeat behind, even makes a mockery of it. I like breaks which hint at the physical side of the drum break; they exploit the tension between sounding real in the early part of a track, and then exploding into impossible drum salvos after the bassdrop. Like in a cartoon where a character runs of the edge of a building, and hovers mysteriously in mid air before falling, the sensation of feeling a good drum break in jungle is often a momentary joyous, disbelief at the impossibility. The rules of funky physicallity of normal drums are adhered to, and then smashed into pieces.

An interesting aspect of this picture is that the snare drum is a constant sample; the snare drums all the sound the same, although often tinkered with with time stretch or whatever. The snare, abstracted from it's physical reality, is duplicated, pasted, doctored, but with such palpable crudity that it carries it's physical grain with it all the time. You can almost see the way the drums have been bolted together, and you are continually aware of the natural sound being being misplaced, mutated, even abused. The physical sound is always asserted (it's the sound of the amen break that is the wonderful thing about it), but at the same time the producer can play with the form of the percussion ad infinituum.

I think this is key to how jungle mixes extreme urban real-feel with radical break beat science. One never dominates the other, instead the tension between physicality and abstraction is the key. Any jungle track worth it's salt must have a sort of natural, intuitive, credible funkiness to it (that's why they start slow and sparing) to complement and contrast with the impossible madness of the middle sections of the tracks. There's a link here somewhere to the "scenius" nature of jungle. As an urban music with [partial] roots in hip hop, it can't leave the physicality of that music behind; it must in a sense pay homage to hip hop by respecting at least something of the natural, physical funkiness of that music, even if in certain sections of the track it goes absolutely mental. Perhaps this is how it attains what Skykicking describes as "flat-out amazing rhythmic construction, a groove that is as demolishing as it is anthemic as it is virtuoso"

A recent avant hip hop CD that had passed under my radar until now is Decomposition by Tavius Beck (aka AdLib, former member of Freestyle Fellowship). Broken beatscapes, depopulated of MCs, repopulated by oozing electro molecules. There's not much MCing, just an occasional presence in the more intense moments. The bulk of the album is jagged beats and abstract but suggestive synthetic textures. At first it's a little too much like DJ Shadow- a sort of progressive, pompous beat architecture; after a while, it becomes compellingly weird and intense, an overloaded of mad voice samples and limpid, glacial melodies inna Jean Michel Jarre stylee. An impressive headphone trip- it doesn't not fit any normal categories of hip hop achievement, but the continual electro pressure suggests a mutant strain of the hip hop virus...

Inspired madness from Simon Reynolds over on blissout. Trying to prove the affinity between the blogging music-journo underground and London underground music, he phones up a load of grime producers and asks them to big him up in their lyrics. Mental.

Let the bile flow! Musing over the new Air/Zero 7 albums recently, I summed forth a lengthy anti nu-chillout polemic for The Horse. The review is here.

Wonderful Pitchfork Media parody.

Checked out the some of the Gregory Markopolous mini-season at the NFT in London, as recommended by Jon Dale. Markopolous' started making films when he was 12, and became an important underground film maker in the 50s and 60s. His films have only begun to resurface after his death in the early 90s, as he himself tried to remove many of them from distribution. Some of the audience tonight had seen them when first released, and were having the strange experience of seeing them again after a 30-40 year gap.

Even by his early 20s his films were impressive. Swain was made in 1950s, and has the freshness and originality of a really original mind. A 20 minute dream-film with no dialogue, a young man awakes in a deserted home, and runs across fields to and finds himself exploroing an old, cavernous, foreboding mansion. Already the bleak spaces and existential sense of anomie suggest a riposte to the snug social warmth of Hollywood; the youthful protagonist wears an awkward, anonymous suit that evoke the anonymous, displaced heroes of Kafka.

This is a film of an outsider, and it's critique is levelled at hetrosexual society- a woman pursues Swain through the mansion and engages him in shallow, meaningless discourse. The film follows the man's awkward, agonised response to an uncomprenhending, irrelevant society. Markopolous' places faith here in personal revelations of an obscure, mystical sort. Like Cocteau (a great influence) myths (Greek etc.) are used as narrative tangents in Markoplous, suggesting spiritual escape-routes from his trapped characters. Markopolous is less playful than Cocteau however- the sense of spiritual crises is greater, and the sense of critique of society is more entrenched. Women are more menacing; men are more beautiful; beauty is primary, morality is secondary (cf. his rather shallow characterisations of women). The intuitive nature of the film gives it it's freshness- a la Godard, the vibrancy of the atmosphere, the power of the vision, implicitly raises the question- should society be different?

A later film, Twice A Man, didn't have quite this bold, poetic freshness- it is more schematic, experimental. Multiple perspectives of a relationship- a man, his lover, his mother- are explored and overlayed via edgy montage techniques. Frames of each character flick in and out of the narrative, using almost subliminal editing. Men and their bodies are eroticised, and the movements of actors' bodies dictate almost all the "action". These are films of [male] body language. For me, it was less impressive than Swain subliminal editing feels like manipulation, a cognitive-disruption, which is not as interesting to me as the pregnant, empty isolation of Swain.

Galaxie was an exhausting but ultimately rewarding experience. Thirty film-portraits of New Yorkers, each about three minutes long, are shown end to end. There is no dialogue, and darkness and film are alternated, breaking up normal apprehension and heightening attention to what is presented. Shots of each subject are superimposed on each other, creating a cubist geometry of eyes, of faces, of shadows. Whatever lack of variety there is in the portraits (we see faces, not bodies) is made up for in the meditative beauty of this minimal portrait technique.

Interesting films overall, although I have reservations about some of it. Difficult to say if a gay perspective would deepen my appreciation of the films; for me, a lot of the content of the films was of gender-sexuality polemic- they are films imbued with [homo]sexuality. Nevertheless, some of these experimental films were brilliantly bold.

One general fascinating issue raised itself- I love the way the American film underground wanted to push at the boundaries of art, to be eclectic and interdisciplinary- it's in contrast to the anti-art stance of the dadaists and situationalists. Markopolous' films are bold, passionate, opinionated- portratiture is explored as a mean to further the artform, not destroy it. Whereas the influence of Freudianism on European art was to create a sort of revolutionary rhetoric, where the unconcsious had to be let out (lest it explode), here the artists work-with the unconscious. The unconcious is there to be explored....

The small font on the "latest listening" on the_wanderer means that the "tap dancing/guitar improv" duet listed there looks like "lap dancing/guitar improv duet. Just imagine...

Pop! New singles reviews at The Wanderer.

Big up to WOEBOT for giving props to Arthur Russell's World Of Echo, calling it "the best record EVER by quite a clear margin". Wish I had a proper copy of this marvellous album, but I'm managing to make do with a dusty old D-90 knocking around the office with it on.

The title sounds like one of those underwhelmingh old sound demonstration LP ("the AMAZING WORLD OF STEREO"); Russell's World Of Echo makes good on it's promise though, by creating a beautiful microcosm that is totally under the control of his echo box. It's like many of his cello-work albums (Another Thought f'instance), but purer in form. It all flows from the sense of reverb-space- cello-carresses go into the echo, and emerge augmented by pitter-patter rhythms and arcing textures. Through some kind of alchemy, echoes becomes tones, becomes melodies. It's a world of flux, where every sound is malleable, mutatable, and it all flows from just an echo box, cello and voice. The sense of ebb and flow is untainted by any alien textures, and as sound-worlds go, this one is perfect.

Russell even deploys his echo box in service of a disco pulse, when the echos suddenly gel into a pulse and the cello becomes a rush of warms melodies. As for the debate as whether he's in the disco canon or not- on World Of Echo, he basically proves he was a sound experimenter whose pallette could taped into any number of genres. I definitely dig David Stubbs' point that he was all out on his own though. A recording more "naked" you'd be hard pushed to find.

Jon Dale slaps me down for slagging off the new To Roccoco Rot. Nice evocation by Jon of melody and beats "living together", adjusting to each other rhythms. Jon, as is his right, demands a deep listening to this album- in fact I listened again on a good stereo today, and there were flecks of melancholy melody, gently persisting, deep in the mix. Nice stuff, undoubtedly.

I was pretty much approaching Hotel Morgan through the techno-prism with which I viewed the rigid-loops of their early stuff. Thing is, although my techno reading admiteddly doesn't do their work full justice, I feel it's still kinda correct in a ballpark way. Despite the slightly-poppish inflections of some of the tracks, they don't have that organic sense of flowering, of swelling, that for me often seems to define- ahem- poptimism. A track starts with a sparky melodic twist, but doesn't prove infectious enough to infect, to interact with the rest of the sound-scape, it just repeats itself adinfinituum. The tracks are often short, and unlike Jon, this annoys rather than enraptures me- although it evokes "tracks that can only exist in your head", for me it does this by just evoking a grid of possibilities, like you've taken a peek inside their synth-programmes.

I think generally for me the elements of surprise on the album only comes through an engagement with the beat. Despite the hints of melody on the album, the beat is the main focus, and the mind is only galvinised here when the rhythm changes. I find myself sticking the CD on, and forgetting about it until an almost Daft Punk style bass brings da funk on about track nine.

Mind you, this is one of those abstract beauties that demands a bit of listener involvement to flesh out the album. If I listened to this on another day, perhaps I would have loved it, so I definitely dig Jon's perspective. Subsequent listens have been a little disappointing though.

Hey, Jon Dale- the only man to ever laugh at a To Roccoco Rot album! (insert winking smiley face here)

Woebot at the Royal Festival Hall, wondering whether Vincent Gallo deserves cheers or jeers (scroll down a bit). The burning question as Matt puts it is how Vincent Gallo's music inspires such fan-boy adulation. At Music and Video Exchange where I work, his albums have been album of the year for numerous staff members. Pretty surprising given the breadth of releases listened to in record shops like ours, and that our staff would usually give props to less bankable artists.

Music geek boys love to see someone make big it in the real world, but retain a respect for the underground. Just a single occurance of Vincent Gallo or Matt Groening bigging up Jim O'Rourke (or whatever) supports the partly-established principle that leftfield music is, like, proper art. Vincent Gallo making an (excellent) album for Warp is living out many a record shop clerk's fantasies of doing having money and doing their rock experiments properly.

Nevertheless the albums were quality. Stark, confessional melodic songs that make Nick Drake sound like Eazy-E. What was really admirable about Gallo is how his albums were, despite his stardom, music stripped down to naked emotions- he gambled on letting his fragile, personal songs be ridiculed when the safe option would have been to make a blank post-rock album. His recorded music is unusually sincere, and utterly compelling.

Seeing him live at All Tommorow's Parties was utterly shit though. Unlike The Royal Festival Hall, there were no vocals, and Gallo's role was reduced to marking out forceful, thudding bass parts on his Rickenbacker. Meanwhile a guitarist went through his daily workout of soporific space blues riffs, like David Gilmour demonstrating for sustain of his high notes. It was like an unending blues jam that clearly was being worked out on the spot. Music geek boys fetishise Vincent Gallo for his unusually sincere music, but here Gallo is fetishing rock authenticity itself- the vintage guitars, the steady tempo that gave space to each precious note, the ludicrous guitar soloing. It felt like it should have been done in a wood pannelled LA studio that had been hermetically-sealed since 1971.

A shame really. An artist who [seemingly] put his soul on the line on record was reduced, live, to a reverent evocation of of classic rock. It turns out he's as much as a music geek boy as our staff.

Moving away from To Roccoco Rot to other contemporary studio tinkerers, why haven't Chicago three piece The Eternals (featuring Tortoise's JOhn Herndon) not been bigged up more? Picked up their slept-on 2004 EP Out Of Proportion the other day, and it's phenomenal. Paranoia urban roots songs, backed with a feverish riddim section of bass and percussion, all infected with an unstoppable dub super-bug. It's like the militant sound aesthetic of On U Sound, but with the sould and guts of George Clinton. Nothing stays still in The Eternals sound- Funkadelic style basslines push the melodies around, samples are diverted into echo chambers, metronomic percussion finds itself being outperformed by a drum machine. The whole album is echo and phase inflected, making the whole experience even more enigmatic.

Simply cannot await the forthcoming LP.

Jon Dale bigging up (amongst other things) the new To Roccoco Rot album Hotel Morgan. It's an album I was gonna do a review of this album when it first came out- there's an engaging balance of tantric techno repetition and compelling hints of humanised melody. The first track puts a whistful Fender Rhodes over a dry drum beat to gorgeous effect. Certain other bits have the so-rigid-they're funky thing that Derrick May (I think) noted about Kraftwerk.

Thing is, I found there was not much more to the album than the odd hint of human movement amongst the loops and bleeps. It's as if their year-odd of sitting around and programming has yielded only the slightest hint of communication between man and machine. Much of the album is made up of unyielding, arguably rather humourless electro-therapy. There's some very good moments, a sense of diminishing returns; this genetic tinkering about with techno-derived DNA (which is essentially what To Roccoco Rot do- they put faith in loops, repetition, and sound fetishism) is prone to run out of formulas.

Nevertheless, a good album.

Back after atending one of the two weekends of All Tommorow's Parties, the south coast leftfield rock festival held these last two weekends. Awesome as usual, one of the best musical events I've ever attended anywhere. Here's reviews of some of the live acts I checked out-

Le Tigre, all girl trio of of fem-rock icons like Julie Kafritz and Kathleen Hanna, make politicking dance music that I've usually found too too polemic to enjoy. Live they're phenomenal- instantly seduced you with their crisp beats, cut and paste ad-busting visuals and robotic dance moves. Like Chicks On Speed or Kraftwerk live, it's as much a communication project as a gig really. Tune after tune, idea after idea. They must have a ball in the studio, dreaming up mad ideas for stage presentation.

Hardcore bass/drums duo Lightening Bolt are undoubedtly the visceral thrill of the weekend. Playing after saturday headliners Sonic Youth through their amps in the bar area, the drummer makes himself heard over a 400 odd crowd by smaking the shit out of his drums. Complex without intricacy, this is hard driving punk rock is full of swerves, skids and roaring power. One of the loudest and most brutal bands I've ever heard. Who is in control here, the men or the distortion pedals?

Dizzee Rascal only does a quick half an hour of rapping over his own records, but it's still pretty fresh. There are several awesome freestyles, lots of fist pumping in the crowd, and Fix Up Look Sharp gets a rewind. The only thing wrong here is the crowd (and me) want a greatest hits, and holding the sort of viral music like home-made garadge/grime/whatever to a set formula is against nature it's ever-evolving nature.

Love (who basically play Forever Changes and a couple more) I was really surprised by. The album is an fragile thing of flower like unfolding melodies, but hear they play them live and proud with a three guitar line up and it's still great. It's like intimate emotions broadcast with choral clarity. Arthur Lee's voice quavers slightly, but is still absolutely beautiful. The lyrics written down look like hippy dippy nonsense, but every word he sings drip with soul. "And you'll never know how much I lo-ve you, oh oh..."

Mission Of Burma are a proto-hardcore band in a Fugazi vein. They're robust and punky, but with mad squalls of feedback jammed in amongst the 90 mile an hour songs. Incredibly dynamic and sounding surprisingly vital 23 odd years after first forming.

OOIOO are a massive highlight, an all girl guitar group with Yoshimi of nomadic Japanese experimentalists The Boredoms on drums. On their album they are complex and bewildering emough to suggest cosmic conceptualism behind it all, but here it's obvious the intricacy just springs from a joyous playfulness (and a certain amount of musical telepathy). Fluid basslines, clattering percussion, primal trumpets, shouty girls. Life would them would be some sort of paradise for me I think.

I got up EARLIER THAN I USUALLY WOULD FOR WORK to make sure we got there to see Swedish drone rock legends Trad Gras Och Stenar, formed around the nucleus of a band called Parson Sound who jammed with Terry Riley in 1968. Parson Sound are one of the most extraordinary rock bands of the late 60s, who make The Velvet Undergrounds contemporary experiments with feedback and drones look incredibly tame. Here they are looser and less brutal than of old, yet the organic evolution of these jams is fantastically entrancing. Thirty years of empathy between musicians makes for some sincerely beautiful drone rock.

ESG are not quite as old a band, but have a similarly weighty history behind them. An all girl group of sisters from New York who made latino/funk jams back before they could have called them breakbeats. Each tune has minimal building blocks, bass/cowbells/drums, but with the girls chanting like they're at a breakdancing competition it's the most basically infectious dance sound imaginable. The crowd are chanting "E-S-G! E-S-G!" by the end. They could get a party started at the dentist's.

Vincent Gallo I was looking forward to because of his wonderfully soulful records. Unfortunally here he's a disgrace. None of his tremulous singing, just an hour long blues jam with Gallo on bass and some bloke wanking himself off on guitar. Gallo had obviously spent longer preparing his stage outfit of shiny purple shirt and stack-heel boots. This is music honed on vintage guitars, in a walnut-pannelled studios with hipster hangers on persuading him it's good. Later in the weekend they are selling signed Vincent Gallo T-shirts for 70 quid. MOney for old rope.

Black Dice merge hardcore rock with noise. Young kids who find conventional punkdynamics just aren't enough to express their angst are turning to white hot noise and dirty-hands bedsit-studio experimentalism. Wished I'd seen more.

Hanged Up are on the Constellation label, and the best thing I've heard on that label for a while. UNsurprisingly, they go quiet/loud/quiet like most GSYBE! label mates, but the duo of drums and violin gives it a beatnik free-jazz vibe. They build up from fiddle runs and drum taps into full scale percussion and electric violin onslaught. Ace.

LCD Soundsystem are wildly popular, but leave me a bit cold. Everything is in place for NY style punk-funk- a sweating drummer, squeely vocals, crisp sonics- but for me it's just exactly equal to a sum of it's parts, like their identi-kit name. It's quite funky, but unedifyingly formulaic.

Bardo Pond are a favoured band for me, but despite impeccable sonic credientials- sabbath style dirge chords leavened by lithe vocals- it all goes nowhere, or rather, it sinks deeper and slower. it's try to go soulful, but everything is being crushed under their sonic weight. Easy to like, difficult to love.

Sonic Youth are similarly fairly impressive without being amazing. Jim O'Rourke is on hand to flesh out their guitar sound, and they sound great and play with gusto- but the new material sound just like the old, and it's the sound of a distinct chapter of rock history. This is a band who are dating, and quickly.

Arab Strap go a bit epic and orchestral with soaring guitars etc. It's a pleasant surprise in a way, but can you imagine that big beardy bloke doing a romantic, Mercury Rev style vocals swoons? It'd be like being a grizzly bear sticking it's tongue in your ear. urrrr.

James Yorkston I wished I'd seen more of. Personal songs accompanied by acoustic bass and restrained, shimering exotica. Thoughtful and deep.

Jackie O Motherfucker I wished I'd seen less of. The New Kings Of Drone Rock spent 20 minutes slowly building up cymbal caresses and guitar burn, but there's a musical democracy operating which means they all share turns tinkering around. It's like a musical workshop in here.

Tindersticks perform some aching beautiful songs, yet are achingly boring. Their eternal miserablism is like a long-drawn out love affair- you feel such familiar contempt for them that you struggle to remember why they were so attractive in the first place.

Threnody Ensemble are finkity chamber-folk that makes you want to get on stage and snip their strings.

Erase Erata are bolshy fem-Fall, and are joined on stage by Kim Gordon. Sporadically very good, but these guys are struggling to merge their bedroom-honed skills into a diverse musical template. Nevertheless, I think they're gonna get better and better.

Malkmus is so dull it's unbelieveable. His music is so perversly awkward that you struggle to remember what good pop music sounds like. his set has the melody-draining effect of Spinal Tap, without any gags.

Nina Nastasia unfortunately can't recreate the ghostly gothic sweep of her folk albums live- she's as subtle and worthy as Suzzanne Vega here. Perhaps a crowded room full of pissed up weekenders is the wrong place for her.

Fiery Furnaces play all their songs in a medley style, breathlessly running white stripes-y style blues shangalang to white stripes-y style blues shangalang. There's a distinct lack of BODY to their version of rock music- the medley jerks about like a corpse being given electric shock resuccitation.

Deerhoof are a Euro-prog/Jap-pop crossover band who are as bad as that sounds.

....and that's your lot.