uncarved.org blog

Ekoplekz – Intrusive Incidentalz Vol 1 (Punch Drunk LP and digital)

More vinyl promo goodness from the Ekoplekz camp puts a big stupid grin on my face. The many moods of Ekoplekz are becoming slightly more apparent over time. This is much more aggy, more urgent than the Live at Dubloaded LP I reviewed last month. (And the standard disclaimer still applies – I am biased. Pro-Ekoplekz.) The tracks are shorter, generally denser, and less spacey. The lo-fi improvised electronic signatures remain.

Punch Drunk’s press blurb says that Nick’s “retro futurism” is tempered with a “post-dubstep sensibility” which makes me cringe a bit and I think is oversimplifying things (although I fully understand that is what a one-sheeter is supposed to do). Intrusive Incidentalz is less about influences and homages and more about intersecting paths in a maze. Bits that recall vintage Throbbing Gristle to an old fart like me will conjur up something completely different to a teenager just falling under the spell of dubstep or (and you can scoff all you like, but they are out there – I meet their parents!).

One of Richard H Kirk’s best contributions to the Synth Britannia documentary was saying that Cabaret Voltaire were trying to soundtrack the extreme political climate and paranoia of the era they were working in. For Kirk, the Brixton riots were inspirational – finally someone was kicking back. Only the most ardent anarchist would say that the recent riots were inspirational in the same way, but they are a good indicator of where things are headed – of the desperation (and desperate opportunism) the UK is soaked with right now.

Making tracks for the dancefloor is an entirely honourable pursuit in these circumstances and will provide that flash of release during hard times for lots of people. But for me, the wonky pummeling of “Clodsteps” or the woozy splinters of “Psionik Trance”  are a more apt soundtrack for September 2011. The sonic continuities with previous eras mesh with the political and social continuities – but so do the variations and innovations. Things are not exactly the same this time around, it’s different – we’re still working through what those differences are and what they mean.

Or perhaps I’m projecting? Nick seems much more down to earth and well balanced than me. Maybe he’s just so well rounded that he’s gone to the trouble of making an album that sounds like how I feel when I have to walk down those grey corridors with a nagging hangover, again. Sometimes I find this album hard to listen to, sometimes I find it hard to write about. Sometimes I sit at my desk, blinking along with the striplights and look forward to submerging myself in it all.

“Intrusive Incidentalz vol 1″ is out now on Punch Drunk. Order vinyl direct from the label and get a free digital copy.

Great cover again by my man 2nd Fade

Ekoplekz plays Cafe Oto in October in collaboration with Bass Clef as Eko-Clef

Ekoplekz interview at Sonic Router

Ekoplekz: Live At Dubloaded (Further Records LP and cassette)

Vinyl promos are as rare as hen’s teeth these days – definitely a mark of seriousness. Although, to be honest, surplus to requirements in this case. I’ve been sent Ekoplekz CDRs, I’ve been sent Ekoplekz cassettes, I’ve been sent yer white label promos. I’ve listened to them all, several times over, and tried to write about them all as well.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that the music is great. The second is that I like the man behind the Ekoplekz project a great deal, having read his music writing since the halcyon days of music blogging in the early to mid-noughties and had all my favourable prejudices confirmed when we finally met before the Ekoplekz / Hacker Farm session on Resonance FM. I like him, and I also like his approach to music production.

It’s easier than ever before to make music – and this should be great, right? A thousand urchins’ unbridled creativity unleashed and unbounded, producing sketchy or symphonic soundtracks that document 2011 or wilfuly fail to do that, chronicling some mentalist polski sklep-fueled dystopian sci-fi nightmare instead.

And yet, my inbox is filled with the same old bollocks – somebody with a very ordinary name (or an ordinarily wacky pseudonym) has made a dark/funky/disco/electro/bass/whatever “stormer” that is being played out or remixed or whatever by lots of other people with very ordinary names. Delete. I am too old for this shit.

I suspect Ekoplekz is too old for this shit too, which is why he has toiled away for years on various bits of non-computer hardware, hiding away from the world to develop his ninja skills and trying and do something else, something that catalyses his influences, but remains uniquely him. New broom might bring the hype and sweep the place clean, but old broom takes its time and finds all the corners.

The album is recorded off the mixing desk, so it lacks crowd noise but is excellent quality (mastered at D&M in Berlin, no less). I think Dubloaded was the first Ekoplekz performance and remember reading that Nick was pretty nervous about it all, but it comes across great. If the Vortex gig in Hackney earlier this year (thanks again to Johnny Mugwump) was anything to go by, Ekoplekz live is one human with a table full of gear, all of which might or might not function at various points throughout the set.

[photo from here]

The album has a hesitant start. You can almost see Nick turning on his various bits of archaic kit and giving them a thump to get them going. This intro bleeds into a swirly Radiophonic Workshop riff, which then gets joyfully tweaked and fucked about with. An off-kilter ambient interlude follows with occasional farty noises, fading into some beats and synths not entirely dissimilar to the best bits of Throbbing Gristle’s “Heathen Earth” album. Pulses. Themes. Thematic pulses.

The beginning of side two is quite minimal, but as with all great minimal music it’s configured to feel like there is still a hell of a lot going on. A more technoey jagged loop shatters the tranquility and Nick starts dubbing things up especially for me. We enter rugged urban nighttime soundtrack territory, where the streets are empty and not always well lit. The journey ends with some rhythmic headfuck material.

I’ve played this lots, often twice in a row. It just… works.

Soundclips and Order direct: http://www.furtherrecords.org/fur-041.html (or get from your usual supplier)

http://ekoplekznews.wordpress.com/

This is the first proper mix I ever did, back in those pre-blog times of 2002. I was interested in tracks that blurred the lines between reggae, dub, electronica and dance music. I still am, but it seems harder to find interesting angles on it these days.

Thanks to Jim Bakhaus for helping me out with a copy of the mix when I found out that my CDR master had gone glitchy.

Sleevenotes and tracklist are here.

A slightly tongue in cheek account of the frustrations of recording it is here.

Download link.

Fanzine of the week #3

With 64 pages, this is the biggest issue of Datacide yet!

It also includes a contribution from me. No time for an extensive review, but all of the material here is well up to the usual high standard.

FEATURES

Christoph Fringeli – “Hedonism and Revolution: The Barricade and the Dancefloor”

Stewart Home – “Dope smuggling, LSD manufacture, organized crime & the law in 1960s London”

John Eden – “Shaking the Foundations: Reggae soundsystem meets ‘Big Ben British values’ downtown”

Alexis Wolton – “Tortugan tower blocks? Pirate signals from the margins”

Neil Transpontine – “Dancing before the police come”

Christoph Fringeli – “From Subculture to Hegemony: Transversal Strategies of the New Right in Neofolk and Industrial”

Nemeton – “From Conspiracy Theories to Attempted Assassinations: The American Radical Right and the Rise of the Tea Party Movement”

R. C. – “How to start with the subject. Notes on Burroughs and the ‘combination of all forms of struggle’”

Matthew Fuller and Steve Goodman – “Beat Blasted Planet. An interview with Steve Goodman on ‘Sonic Warfare’”

Terra Audio – “Free Parties”

Gorki Plubakter – “This is the end… the official ending”

FICTION

“Sonic Fictions” by Riccardo Balli
“Digital Disease” by Dan Hekate
“Infra-Noir. 23 Untitled Poems” by Howard Slater
“Office Work” by Matthew Fuller

PLUS

Record Reviews
The Lives and TImes of Bloor Schleppy
Charts

ORDERING

Available now for EUR 4.00 incl. postage – order now by sending this amount via paypal to praxis(at)c8.com, or send EUR 10 for 3 issues (note that currently only issues 5, 7 and 10 are still available, but you can also pre-order future issues.

Also from the Praxis Webshop.

I don’t spend enough time with my records (who does?). Most of my music listening is done on the walk to and from work.

Sitting at home in my cupboard the other night, I discovered that the ace Dug Out label were re-releasing “Hole Up Your Hand” by legendary north London reggae MC Raymond Naphtali on ten inch. Awesome news!

Then I thought about the pile of records in the living room, sitting there. Not exactly unloved, but certainly not attended to very well. And yes, eight quid plus postage is a reasonable amount of cash to lay down for such an item, but it seemed like quite a lot for something I wouldn’t hear that much and would play out even less (if ever – this is the first year for a while that I’ve not taken to the decks. And actually that is OK).

As TIm P over at Dancecrasher pointed out, Honest Jons are doing Dug Out mp3s for 60 pence a pop. Which is frankly a bit of a no-brainer, even for an mp3 sceptic like me. You get them straight away, for cheap, and you are still supporting a great shop and a great label (and presumably the artist/producer as well).

I splashed out on a whole bunch of Dug Out releases, including the stone cold classic “He Was A Friend” by King Kong, which I had also baulked at buying on wax a little while back. It’s a digital lament to the late Tenor Saw which has been much in demand (I think it was even on the notorious Boomshakalacka “Best 100 tunes of the eighties” list?).

All the tunes are great and I have been listening to them repeatedly on the commute. There isn’t the same visceral thrill of holding the vinyl in your hand and lowering the needle, but this lot will do me fine as a compromise.

Then comrade T-woc pointed out on the Blood & Fire forum that Boomkat has bundled up a bunch of “psyche-dub” mp3s as part of their weekly “14 tracks” special. 14 tracks for 7 quid. Seems about right to me.

I’ve been listening to a fair bit of mad stuff recently, so this fitted the bill nicely: some droney, some noisy, some abstract. But all tied together in a bassy, echoey package. Mostly artists I had never heard of – or had heard of, but not got the chance to investigate properly.

Again, high quality stuff for the most part, that I am enjoying wading through. It reminds me of the seminal Macro Dub Infection and Isolationism compilations that Kevin Martin put together for Virgin in the nineties. Dub as process (rather than a genre) which links the outer fringes of all sorts of mindwarping musics. It’s a great bit of curation in fact – something much needed in the avalanche of new things to check out… I’ve now got some new things to investigate and some future purchases to make.

If people keep doing good stuff like this, then I’ll keep supporting it. Hopefully I’ll not be alone in doing that – which means we might have turned quite a significant corner in terms of our little zone of the music industry surviving.

At the Guardian of all places!

“Waiting For You” is out now on Hyperdub.

King Midas Sound

An interesting development – some exclusive bits of artwork, linkage and lyrics. Oh and the full text of “Scientist Meets The Ghost Captain”, Kevin Martin’s excellent sleevenotes from the seminal “Macro Dub Infection” compilation.

King Midas Sound perform their London debut at Corsica Studios this Saturday as part of the Hyperdub “5″ event:

After writing a bit about Wordsound here (and enjoying their skunked out dubby hip hop for years) I finally got around to watching the label’s feature film Crooked last night.

Crooked was shot, written and produced on an ultra low budget by Wordsound’s guru and Chief Executive Skiz and released in 2002 on DVD. The storyline is an (almost?) fictional account of an idealistic hip hop head starting a label in NYC with a deranged but massively talented rapper and producer by the name of Sensational. Who is played by deranged but massively talented rapper and producer Sensational.

A whole downpouring torrent of Wordsound ‘heads’ make guest appearances including Anti Pop Consortium and Ras Kush, who plays a wise rasta dishing out wisdom and vinyl at legendary NY store Jammyland (which eerily seems to be in a twilight zone “between locations” dilemma as I write this).

The film suffers from, and is buoyed up by, all the usual limitations of low budget films – the plot is shaky, some of the camerawork and sound is shakier, the dialogue made my better half cringe in places and she wasn’t even in the same room. But despite all this it’s good to see somebody having a go at something ambitious – trying to put their vision out there in different ways without pandering to expectations, coolness or whatever.

The portrayal of dedicated people getting by, and venal record label personnel and drug dealers is pretty effective and Sensational lives up to his name I think. Plus there is a slightly noirish atmosphere to all the NYC shots which I like.

The first mix I ever did kicked off with Spectre vs Scotty Hard’s The Joust from Wordsound’s second “Crooklyn Dub Consortium” compilation. So I was especially pleased to see him in the film, playing a cop. Scotty is aka Scott Harding, a founder member of New Kingdom – a point of regroupment in the early nineties for people who liked their hop to be hip, but also fucked up and experimental. He seems to be pretty at home in the studio – his discography is pretty impressive.

Check this out, for example:

During all this I was reminded that Scotty had fallen on hard times recently, a car crash in February leaving him paralysed. His friends are rallying round and maybe people reading this could as well if they like his stuff:

SCOTTY HARD INFO

As some of you may or may not know, Scott Harding (a/k/a Scotty Hard) was in a bad accident this past February. The road to recovery is long and hard and as has been noted before, “Legal resolution of insurance settlements will take a long time, and there is no way to know what the long term financial picture will look like. In the meantime there is rent due, mixing console payments to be made, a myriad of bills to pay to keep creditors at bay etc, not to mention medical and legal bills that will start to come in.”

If you wish to make a donation or just to keep abreast of the various benefits that are going on for Scott, please go to http://www.ScottyHardTrust.com

Thank you for your support.

If you ever downloaded his stuff or liked that mix I did, I think now would be a good time to do the right thing.

WOEBOT: Illbient

Matt’s halloween post on illbient was an interesting read for me because I’d just started getting back into that end of things myself during the change of the seasons.

I was never really into DJ Spooky and don’t own any Asphodel records, but did spend considerable time melting into Kevin Martin’s compilations for Virgin like Macro Dub Infection and Isolationism. These lead me down so many paths that it’s worth another post in itself, but one of them ended up at an alleyway in downtown Crooklyn where I’ve always imagined the Wordsound HQ to be.

WordSound is not a record label in the traditional sense. We are not concerned with hitting the charts, breaking groups, or making hits. WordSound is a guerilla think tank banded together for the purpose of continual creativity…

WordSound was started to harness the energy of the underground–those creators whose radical approach to the word, sound, and vision has been suppressed by the domination of the corporate overlord.
We are here to provide the people with a true alternative to the commercialized arena, and hijack institutions that choke free expression….

Our name comes from the Rastafarian expression: “Wordsound have power,” which acknowledges the spiritual energy emanating from the combination of words and sounds, lanquage and rhythm, text and ambience. WordSound is the word of sound–how the music speaks to us subliminally, and what it says…

Wordsound albums were never that easy to get hold of in the UK, but I did eventually managed to grab a complete set of their Crooklyn Dub Consortium compilations. Dark dubby downtempo hip hop for outernational heads, they were a bit of focal point for a certain post post post punk experimentation which took off from where sections of Macro Dub Infection began.

Wordsound managed to seamlessly absorb, predict and dub out whole swathes of musical mythology: rasta, Wu-tang, cut ups, dubplates, Hassan I Sabbah, soundsystem, Moorish Science Temple, occulture, a wilting daisy age, Sun Ra, afronauts, you name it.

The bewildering roster uncovered unknowns as much as it covered up the pseudononymous monikers of the famous. Like a soup kitchen for Control Agents worn out by contracts, paperwork, bills, overheads, spreadsheets, demographics, meetings, ass-lickers.

Ex-members of SWANS rubbed shoulders with De La Soul collaborators as if it was the most natural thing in the world…

After a while the Crooklyn vortex sucked me in like Burrough’s Interzone. I felt a bit suffocated by it all, but still vowed to return. Another wave in the global capitalist crisis paved the way for my re-entry. Two things, really. The pound’s strength against the yankee dollar, and the hardship of independent record labels.

Wordsound have a sale on right now, with most of their albums marked down to six bucks. That means if you buy one it will cost you a fiver UK money, including shipping to your house. Five quid – to your door! Yes they got sound samples, yes they take paypal, yes shipping is speedy. Grab them while you can – put some food on Skiz’s table so he can carry on with his thing.

http://www.wordsound.com

Reviews to follow.

The other thought I had about Burial in particular, and dubstep in general, is that it’s basically
Macro Dub Infection meets Isolationism, if you think about it.