Project Future

Interesting post by Derek Walmsley at Slow Motion blog, based on his research for liner notes for a new Soul Jazz compilation: Electro Throwdown: Sci-Fi Inter-Planetary Electro Attack On Planet Earth 1982–89.  There's stuff about Record Mirror disco/club trax reviewer James Hamilton and his obsession with monitoring the b.p.m. of tracks.

Kind of a prequel to rave, electro - a full-on blast of futurism on every level: sonically, but also graphically, dance-moves wise, clothing, the wildstyle graffiti, you name it.  

Like acid / rave / ardkore / jungle, it was like there was a race on to get to the future first and as fast as possible. To do everything in the newest, freshest, breaks-with-the-past way possible. 

Many of the people whose heads were turned by electro - literally turned, what with spinning on their heads etc on bits of lino they'd brought down to the shopping arcade - went on to be major players in bleep and British first-wave techno. LFO, Autechre, et al. Jungle too: Danny Breaks (aka Dantronix), Acen.

Of course it began in Anglika - and Germanika.

But when it returned to the source as this Bronxed-up distorted-and-intensified reflection, it felt like a visitation from another planet. A new sound, a new dance. Kids signed up instantly.

Look at this ghostly clip of bodypoppin' on the London Underground for a real "lost future" shiver. 

Featuring Goldie and 3D (or is it even Bansky?) and - inadvertently - Hilary.

What's all this then? Via Sean Albiez, use of the word "electro" in 1945! 

Proof of my belief that whenever you think you've definitively located the first use of a music genre term, it'll aways recede further back into the past 

Me on 1980s "street beats culture" - the unused intro cut out from my V4Visions liner note. 

During the 1980s, before the U.K.’s house raveolution kicked off,  a more diffuse dance music culture existed in the country oriented around  “street beats” and largely based around imported tracks from America. Indeed there was a label called StreetSounds created by the canny young entrepreneur Morgan Khan to cater for this demand among British youth, in the form of  sharply designed compilation LPs that pulled together at an affordable price singles that cost far more to buy separately as import 12-inches.  

Starting with the iconic Electro series (ten volumes released between 1983-85) and soon diversifying to cover adjacent genres like jazz-funk, rare grooves, and slow jams, StreetSounds reflected the way that young British taste didn’t stick within the tighter boundaries that prevailed in the USA.  Perhaps because the music arrived precisely as an exotic import unrooted in a local community and its musical tradition, British dance fans were able to embrace a bit of everything.

Although StreetSounds’s scope didn’t extend as far as Jamaican music (other UK labels, like Greensleeves were already on the case), genres like lover’s rock and dancehall were also on the street beats menu. That led to homegrown and distinctively UK-flavored scenes like fast chat reggae. But the jumble of sounds coming across from Jamaica and America, and the porousness between genres and scenes in the U.K.,  also meant that Caribbean bass-pressure and patois-rich vocals merged with a series of American rhythmic advances. The result was a succession of only-in-Britain hybrids: sounds system soul, bleep-and-bass, ragga-techno, jungle, trip hop, 2step garage…  Virtually all the elements came from overseas, but the agglomeration of them was uniquely U.K.

This 1980s street beats culture was the wellspring for so many crucial clusters of innovation and vibe that emerged during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s: Soul II Soul’s funki dredd sound and look; the Bristol nexus of The Wild Bunch and Smith & Mighty that in turn begat Massive Attack, Nellee Hooper, Portishead and Tricky; “fast rap” collective turned breakbeat rave doyens Shut Up and Dance and their associates The Ragga Twins; Double Trouble pop star turned proto-junglist turned born-again Rasta Michael West a.k.a. Rebel MC a.k.a. Conquering Lion a.k.a. Congo Natty; the label Production House, best known for hardcore rave anthems by Acen, Baby D and The House Crew but rooted in ‘80s Britsoul via co-founder Phil Fearon’s hitmaking past in the group Galaxy.... 

The amazing, perfect artwork for the StreetSounds comps. 

Some real-time writing about Electro from Lynden Barber in the Virgin Rock Yearbook 1985 (published 1984) 

Quite Nik Cohn-ian in spirit.

And from David Toop in The Face

Avant Pop

Crack magazine has extracted three short essays from We Call It Avant Pop, including my own contribution. The 288-page volume was curated by Sergio Ricciardone around the Turin festival C2C and is intended as "a manifesto for C2C’s understanding of avant-pop – as a concept that has deeply influenced the festival’s identity, a community it brings together, and an outlook that has pushed pop music forward."

You can go to Crack to read the essays by Jazz Monroe and Carlo Antonelli, but here for your convenience is my piece...

‘The Ex Factor’

By Simon Reynolds

“Can’t things just be… pretty?”. As much a beseeching plea as an aesthetic enquiry, this is how the mother in 20th Century Women reacts to The Raincoats’s "Fairytale in the Supermarket" as played by her teenage son Jamie and her punky young tenant Abbie. “So… they’re not very good, and they know that, right?” she further puzzles. The kids talk about passion overriding skill and how prettiness is a lie masking over an unjust society. You can almost see the wheels turning inside mom’s head as she grapples with the discrepancy between the plausible arguments and the grating DIY racket.

I’ve often wondered the exact same thing, albeit from the perspective of a convert to this kind of noise and this way of thinking who suddenly doubts his own unexamined assumptions. “Why do we need our beauty to be progressive?”. Embedded in concepts like avant-pop is the belief that it’s not enough just to please the ear: some sort of advance must be made. Hence the long-running canon of art-pop radicalism stretching from The Beatles and Bowie, through Kate Bush and Björk, onto The Knife and SOPHIE: self-conscious innovators always seeking the next cutting edge in music. They grab new technology, push it or misuse it. They hijack ideas from street sounds and make them weirder. Sometimes the interloper started out in the world of experimental music and moved into pop: David Cunningham of Flying Lizards, Laurie Anderson.

I teach a class in Experimental Pop at a California art school. One thing we look at is the question of who gets to call themselves “experimental”. Quality newspapers, art periodicals, and left-field music magazines alike are susceptible to a certain sort of pitch (borders being crossed, etc). Often these musicians were educated at institutions similar to the one where I instruct. Part of what they learn there is how to frame their practice. They become fluent in a language that’s essential when applying for grants and positions, but works just as well when making a case for what you do in the culture media.

But pop has always harbored its own internal experimental tradition, a vernacular and functionalist approach that doesn’t use the jargon and rationales of the art world. Instead it favors adolescent or street slang: dark, sick, twisted, fucked-up, fresh. Mark Stewart, late singer of the ironically-named The Pop Group understood this. Celebrating the electrofunk of LA label SOLAR, Stewart recalled how “they would slice up tape with a razor blade and do these amazing remixes. It was incredible, the most experimental thing I’ve ever heard. But because it’s Black and it was entertainment, it wasn’t considered avant-garde. But some kiddie playing a hosepipe going on about Dada was…”.

Separate from the Bowie/Björk line, then, you can trace a different avant-pop from Bo Diddley through King Tubby to the warped Auto-Tune madness of Migos and Future. The motivations are less lofty, more impure: they want to make money and blow minds. Every innovation is also a gimmick designed to grab ears and make bodies move. But just as much as the art school trained Raincoats, these street vanguard sounds have the power to make parents wonder why pop can’t just be pretty.

Sherburnin' for new

Interesting 2020s-so-far electronic dance + non-dance overview here at Pitchfork from veteran observer Philip Sherburne. 

Cueing off of that wonderful meme-craze triggered by Drew Daniel's literally dreamed-up genre hit'em and ensuing attempts by musicians to turn dreams into reality, Phil divines greater significance from the fad: an expression of neophiliac longing. 

"....The outpouring of enthusiasm for a made-up genre speaks to a curious nexus of frustration and desire in the air right now, at the midpoint of the 2020s. There’s a nagging feeling that electronic music, for all its former promise, is spinning its wheels. And there’s a yearning for something more—an unspoken wish that things could be more interesting, more daring, more audacious.

"Before you counter with, “Well, what about [insert your envelope-pushing fave]?” I’m well aware that there’s no shortage of great, groundbreaking works of genius being made regularly. But electronic music used to be motivated less by genius than by what Brian Eno once called scenius, the hive-mind buzz of ideas evolving as they rippled across the community. That sense of collective creativity is currently in short supply. In the West, anyway, when’s the last time a fledgling subgenre made a significant impact on the scene? Planet Mu’s Bangs & Works, Vol. 1, the compilation that broke Chicago footwork to the outside world, came out 14 years ago. I suspect the enthusiasm for hit em—even if it is confined to a tiny circle of experimental connoisseurs, Ableton geeks, and online nerds—speaks to a subconscious wish for a radical new style to flip our collective wigs, a sound that might supply the same kind of rush that footwork did, or dubstep, or jungle, the first time you heard it. A sound that you struggle to process. A sound that feels like a dream made real."

 But then later in the piece - after discussing the impact on club culture of covid and lockdown, the ever-growing popularity of ambient versus rising bpm and trashy pop-edits -  Phil kinda contradicts the earlier argument with a spurt of enthused xenomania:

"That explosion of worldwide activity is also good news for hit em fans, and everyone else who is hankering for music that sounds strange, uninhibited, and unexpected. In Asia, a patchwork of scenes and subgenres is yielding new sounds and even allegiances that challenge hegemonic Western perspectives and colonial histories. Brazil’s funk scene is a hotbed of radical sonics, from the spartan, almost gothic minimalism of DJ Anderson do Paraiso to the trebly overload of DJ K and the blown-out industrial sonics of D.Silvestre. In Tanzania, an experimentally minded set of producers is pushing the country’s singeli sound to ever more bewildering limits. Venezuelan club pioneers like DJ Babatr are finally getting their due, buoyed by interest in the diverse array of styles and scenes that’s sometimes called—however erroneously—“Latin club.” Egyptian producers like 3Phaz and ZULI are turning out dazzlingly textured club tracks fusing experimental sound design with intricate rhythms.

"At this month’s Unsound festival, in Kraków, I found myself dancing to spry, swift-moving bass music in a tiny Ukrainian expat club—the dancefloor must have fit 20 people, tops—where the energy was so completely lit, the sound so refreshingly now, that it seemed impossible there was another club on the planet that night that could lay a more authoritative claim to being the center of the dance-music universe. The best thing about electronic music at the midpoint of the 2020s is that there is no center, no norm, no standard; everything is up for grabs."

Judge for yourself with this Spotify playlist 

TLS on SR

 

Very nice review of Futuromania in The Times Literary Supplement by Milo Nesbitt.

Here it is in easier to read form

One hates to be one of those "gift horse in the mouth" quibbly types..... especially with a review so thoughtful and generous...

But there were a couple of things that puzzled me.

"Never it's most lyrical stylist" - well, that's in the reading eye of the beholder obviously, but I dunno, in my day I was known as rather a rhapsodist. Indeed someone who possibly overdid it a bit! Presumably he's not seen Blissed Out or the Melody Maker stuff. But that kind of thing is not altogether absent from Futuromania.  For sure, as you get older as a writer, you get a little less gauche in your blurtings.

And then the thing about future shocks being harder to find after the '90s and the secret silent argument of Retromania lurking beneath the text. 

Well, maybe,  maybe not...  Fully half the book is taken up with the 21st Century, and futuristic thrills are found in grime, footwork, digital maximalism, Auto-Tune trap, and conceptronica (my reservations about that area are not to do with a dearth of futurism but a dearth of the Dionysian - and its replacement by the Didactic).

Of course, he's right that jungle will always be a benchmark, a pivot point in my life - the first time that those sort of lingering feelings of being "born too late" were blasted away by the full force of  future-now -  the awe and gratitude of being in the right place at the right time, at last. 

Similar to how punk transfixes perpetually those who lived through it in real-time (I didn't, not quite -  not in the sense of being forefront-of-consciousness aware, let alone actually involved in events as they unfolded. I biologically coincided with punk without witnessing it). 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Another very nice review here  from Bethan Cole, music writer turned beauty journalist and novelist. 

Electron Music

 

FUTURE ROCK

 

From Lilian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia, published 1969 -  as rock prognosis (progrockgnosis?) goes, this is pretty good, foreseeing the ability of listeners to remix tracks.

Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia is an odd book to read now.

 As an encyclopedia, it's fairly useless; the biographical entries are really short. I suppose at a time when there was no readily accessible repository of information about pop music, it must have been  useful just to have all the records by an artist listed. 

What makes it worth reading now is

a/ Roxon's turn of phrase, the stray perceptions and slivers of humour that peep through the fairly functional nature of the tome. 

b/ as a period document. Like the more historical books that came out in that sudden first surge of rock publishing (1968-1970 -  it went from there being no serious books about rock to over a dozen, almost overnight...  prior to that the only studies of pop and youth culture were sociological, usually with the Problem of Today's Generation framing), the Rock Encyclopedia is interesting for what's included and what's excluded.... entries on things that proved to be transient in the extreme.... entries where the contemporary commentator can be forgiven for having no idea that the group or sound would have far more legs as a historical phenomenon than could have been suspected at the time.... and then just absences (nothing at all on ska, bluebeat, Jamaican pop).

Here's another entry that is date-stamped but an intriguing read for those interested in electronic music and future-pop.

The fact that Lilian's surname was Roxon is freaky - like she was fated to write about rock.

She died tragically young, in 1973, of an asthma attack, aged just forty.