uncarved.org blog

Simon Reynolds on dubstep’s disconnection from danger.

Plus - his Grime Primer for The Wire now online!

Hold tight for a big post from me later today, with audio.

History is made at night: House Music/Gender/Sexuality

Paul Meme has set up an incomprehensible new website to promote his forthcoming vinyl release.

Bo!

I am somewhat less than wild about the aesthetics - but the tunes are wicked.

At least he’s stopped calling himself a soundsystem now, tho eh?

Most of last week was spent putting Woofahs in envelopes, getting it into shops and telling people about how great it is. Which was and is, a good laff. Here’s a quick run down of some other stuff tho:

Paul Meme has an album coming out! And some other stuff I don’t know if I can tell you about yet! He’s been played by Mary Anne Hobbs on Radio one and Blackdown and Dusk on Rinse FM. It’s all sounding very good indeed.

Paul is interviewed about the project in Tom Lea’s new column in Fact Magazine, which includes a free downloadable grime mix from DJ Magic of Dirty Canvas fame.

Melissa Bradshaw now has a blog called Decks and the City, which you should all check, not least so you can see the context to the phrase “I was totally even more bewildered than Coki with the tits girl.”

Heatwave’s outstanding An England Story set has been getting some great reviews including a full pager in the Guardian guide at the weekend. They have a 12″ out on Soul Jazz also and more to follow. Their Roots Reality and Culture mix for Blogariddims has stopped me going postal in the post office on more than one occasion. This is just some of the news posted on their blog, which you need to check out on the regular.

Other stuff I’ve been checking includes:

Trim - Soulfood 3 mixtape
Riko - The Truth mixtape
David Rodigan presents Real Authentic Reggae Music comp (BBE)
Eek A Mouse - Most Wanted (Greensleeves)
Triston Palmer - Joker Smoker (Greensleeves)
Zareb - The Cake Must Slice (Greensleeves)
v/a - This is Lovers Rock (Greensleeves)

all of which comes highly recommended. Oh and some material for a blogariddims mix me and Paul are working on.

I’m sure I’ve missed a load of stuff out, it’s hectic times.

Owen kindly pointed out that Mark Stewart has reviewed the latest Portishead album for Spex magazine.

Whilst checking that out, I find he has a new album coming out in a few months, called EDIT, on Crippled Dick Hot Wax.

Also a documentary:

From April 2008, the documentary ON/OFF: Mark Stewart - from the Pop Group to the Maffia by Tøni Schifer will be gracing selected cinemas and film festivals. The film retraces the singer’s steps and paths from the early days of The Pop Group right up to the present. Schifer, who followed Mark around for a full two years, has crafted a detailed, often intimate portrait of the artist, supplemented by interviews with a. o. Mark Stewart himself, Adrian Sherwood, Daniel Miller (Mute), Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Doug Wimbish, Skip McDonald, Keith LeBlanc, Douglas Hart (The Jesus & Mary Chain), Fritz Catlin (23 Skidoo), Jon Spencer, Gareth Sager (The Pop Group, Rip Rig and Panic) and many others, plus live recordings and music clips. The DVD will be released by Monitorpop in May / June.

In similar news, this entry on KYPP has lead Al at Greengalloway to take an interest in Mark’s work and my piece about him.

So, thank you Owen.

Dubversion ups the “10 records” ante with some scans, recollections and mp3s!

2008, woah.

I’m really glad January is over - I kicked off the year by smashing up my Dad’s car and that set the tone, really.

But everything on the horizon suggests that BIG THINGS are going to happen this year:

• Woofah 2 is almost ready to go the printers.
• Woofah 3 is getting filled up pretty damn quick.
• Paul Meme’s Grievous Angel project got played by Blackdown on Rinse FM, and has an album coming out soon.
• Heatwave’s England Story mix is getting released on Soul Jazz as a double CD and two chunks of double vinyl. And so is their single with Warrior Queen
• Kevin Martin should be releasing not one, but two albums this year - one as The Bug, and one as King Midas Sound.
• Benga and Coki’s Night video features a mentalist squid, rekindling the colossal squid furore of yesteryear.
• That’s just the stuff I can tell you about right now.

Man like Gutta nominated me for this…

It’s a weird one because like Kek, I don’t really feel ashamed about music any more - I’ve almost always been into pop stuff and… other stuff. Anyone who checked the office party mix will know that, right?

So this is more of a “ten records I have trouble justifying to other people”.

10. Rachel Stevens - Come And Get It (2005)

When you’ve seen the rest of the list, it might surprise you that this humble album has been the item which has caused the most vehement disagreements in our house.

I have no fear of owning up to liking Rachel’s earlier stuff like “Sweet Dreams My L.A. Ex-”, and the singles off this album are wicked as well. “Some Girls”, “Negotiate With Love” and “So Good” are extraordinarily well-produced slices of sci-fi pop in which the vocalist is almost incidental.

We also have CDs in the flat by the Sugababes, Girls Aloud and Goldfrapp, which I have mentally filed in the same slot. For me, this is just an update to my Soft Cell and Human League records of yesteryear.

Regrettably the better half doesn’t agree and thinks it’s symptomatic of my mid-life crisis looming large in the form of lustful urges towards Ms Stevens. Which would be fine if I was constantly jerking off to her videos on youtube or had bedecked the bedroom with posters of her, but (as I never tire of saying) she isn’t my type and it isn’t about her.

Unfortunately my argument is slightly undermined by the fact that the non-single tunes on the album are rubbish, apart from the one which samples The Cure.

9. Anything by Vagina Dentata Organ

Probably the best example of industrial culture’s overloading of theory at the expense of tunes, Vagina Dentata Organ are more akin to conceptual art (with a nod to Dali) than music. Essentially the work of one man - Jordi Valls, the “group” focussed on releasing limited edition picture discs featuring unnerving field recordings.

Jordi managed to be one of the few people to exist in both of the notoriously antagonistic Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse camps, possibly because he doesn’t seem to give a fuck about politicking. I met him briefly at some TG art opening and he was completely pissed - staggering about and spilling wine everywhere. Admirable.

So anyway, I don’t have any of the picture discs, just one album of wolf noises, one album of motorbike noises and one album featuring the last 40 minutes of 900 members of the People’s Temple committing suicide in Guyana at the behest of Reverend Jim Jones.

It’s not uplifting party music that’s for sure… but I still respect VDO’s sheer bloody-mindedness.

8. Howard Jones - Pearl In The Shell (shaped picture disc, 1984)

So, talking of vinyl fetishism - this was the first vinyl I ever handed over my pocket money for (having previously bought cassettes for me walkman). I actually have a big post about luscious pouting synth-pop sensation Howard saved in ‘draft’ that I should pluck up the courage to unleash on the world.

Suffice to say that the disc is slightly yellowing these days and the music hasn’t aged that well either. Furthermore, my teenage dreams of owning really rare artifacts that future generations would look at with awe lie in tatters and prove that I am a rubbish capitalist.

7. Two Muppet Show albums (1977, 1978)

These are pop culture genius! It’s fair to say that Jim Henson has had more influence on me than punk. The aesthetic of the puppets (notably their garish fur and googly eyes) is still brilliant and the arrangements of the songs on this are perfect - not least because they are delivered with crazed muppet voices. Me and my sister must have played these a thousand times as kids as well as making my parents suffer them recorded onto cassette on interminable pre-M25 car journeys to see in-laws.

My love of huge horn sections (fnarr fnarr) in reggae might come from here too. It’s more playfully surreal than Vagina Dentata Organ could ever hope - songs about the sound of worms, chicken love, the Great Gonzo eating a rubber tyre to the sound of ‘the Flight of the Bumblebee’, it is all here.

So I probably shouldn’t own this, but make no excuses for it. And anyway I’m now able to enjoy it with my daughter…

6. Five ‘christian pop’ albums

Pop music was one of my main vehicles out of believing in all the Church of England stuff I grew up with, so I have a weird fascination with xtian pop and keep meaning to write something about it. (Seriously - I’d love to do a documentary or book.)

For example, there is something quite compelling about this christian response to Crass. What I like about the genre is that it’s obviously all ideologically driven, like anarchopunk and to a lesser extent industrial music, but always manages to get it a bit wrong.

What is also hugely entertaining is that for every xtian rocker there will be some fusty old vicar going on about how they are either great for “the youth” or actually crypto-satanists who are trying to lure kids into a vortex of evil with their primitive carnal rhythms.

Anyway, these records are all great in their own way, but not the sort of thing to play in front of relatives or children.

5. Sheena Easton - 9 To 5 (1980)

Yes yes, she was the first “reality” pop star and went on to get all pervy with Prince. That’s not the whole story for me, really.

I think I must have bought this at some point in the 90s when I was pissed. It cost 70p and was well worth it just for conjuring up all those images of yesteryear. It has that quasi-Nolans trebly singalonga vocal style but it’s the lyrics which drew me in, I think. There is a drudgery about commuting (which is what my Dad did every day) but also this weird hedonistic frisson running underneath it “he works all day, to earn his pay, so we can play all night”. This comes to the fore towards the end:

“I’m crazy, mad for him,
and he’s crazy, mad for me,
When he steps off the train
Amazingly full of fight”

Which I always misheard and thought was Sheena getting all orgasmic at the prospect of commuters engaging in hand to hand combat. I think it just reminds me of St Pancras and London in the old days, a bit grim but full of possibility…

Several years later I was living in a dive in Haringey and saw Sheena on some daytime TV programme with an L.A. accent talking about how she didn’t understand how people could take drugs because it was all about altering your reality and her reality was pretty amazing. As I looked around our living room I decided that going to get some drugs might not be such a bad idea.

4. Twenty Psychic TV live albums (and twelve other ones… er, and a load of singles)

There’s really no excuse for this at all, and I can only apologise profusely to everyone who has ever helped me to move house.

3. Matt Bianco - Get Out of Your Lazy Bed (1983)

Possibly another pissed charity shop purchase, I don’t actually know if I like this or not. It has a weird skank to it and the daaaaaaaa-dooooooooo-da female vocals probably relate in some distorted way to my love for fifties and sixties (and 00’s - see 10 above) girl groups.

It is unforgiveably jaunty, though, and I have to confess to having used it as a weapon of torture one hungover morning fairly early on in my relationship with my better half.

2. Trio - Da Da Da (1982)

This is just genius, proper minimal synthpop with a casiotone and boom-tish drummng. It even eclipses Laurie Anderson’s “Oh Superman” in the pop art states by having hardly any lyrics in it and then having those lyrics in German on the b-side.

I have this on loud right now and it reminds me of Kraftwerk and the Art of Noise and Suicide and a whole heap of totally credible stuff that isn’t nearly as fucking POP as this. It seems to annoy the shit out of everyone else in the world though - fellow bloggers aside, no doubt

1. A golden 7″ flexi disc by Jonathan King (1978)

Nobody, of any age or gender, should own this record.

Which is probably why I’ve kept the thing. Did you know Jonathan King once stood as an MP? Neither did I until I found this in yet another (probably sober this time) 90s charity shop trawl.

The record is titled “Vote For Yourself For A Change” and seems google-proof. It features the man himself, talking animatedly, accompanied by the music from the Hamlet cigar adverts (which is of course called something, which eludes me now).

He was basically a populist Tory (”what do you think? Let me represent your views in parliament”), but had “liberal moral views”. Exactly how liberal certainly became clearer later.
On a more positive note, I would like to keep this thing going by nominating:

Dubversion

Expletive Deleted

Panda Rescue

I’m fairly sure they are men…

Datacide - Noise & Politics

The great magazine now has its own blog! Early days yet, but some nice charts and a text from Break/Flow are a good opener.

Check, it bookmark it, add it to your rss reader.

You can now buy the full paper version from the uncarved.org shop as well.