From the “Homes & Property” section of the Evening Standard, found on a train:

[Hackney] might still have some of the highest unemployment in London, and occupy third place on the list of the most deprived districts in England, but the cavalry is arriving in the form of the sons and daughters of the middle-classes, young and single professional people and creative types […]

“Hey, do you remember this place before all the middle class artists moved in?”

“Oh yeah, it was terrible, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, I don’t think my humble working class vocabulary can actually express exactly how much gratitude there is in my heart for all of the middle class artists who moved into the area to save us.”

“I’m welling up, just thinking about it.”

“Yeah, I know. Somehow it doesn’t seem to matter so much now that there are no prospects and the whole infrastructure of the borough is crumbling, because when I walk home I can see middle class artists getting out of their shiny cars and walk into their loft developments or watch them eat in hugely expensive restaurants.”

“We never had that before, did we?”

v/a – Voice Crack Remixes (Ambush CD5)

courtesy Aphasic

Business as usual for the first 10 seconds – Hrvatski’s tearing amens, noise, adrenaline… but what’s this? It all fades out into a beatless noise montage with detuned guitars phasing away, and there’s just a tinge of squawking saxophone in there too. It’s Ambush’s very own ‘Jazz Odyssey’! “No, I said DJ Scud ABOVE the puppet show!!!”

Such are the difficulties of pushing boundaries until they cave in. Ambush have to take a lot of the credit (and perhaps some of the blame) for the proliferation of Records of Total Destruction (“the only solution!!!”). These days you can’t move for industrial-ragga-junglists mashing the place up, but it’s been a long haul. Plus, there was always more to it than that for the originators: check Aphasic’s more abstract tracks. Even Ambush’s dancfloor tear-outs had more depth and dynamics than the rest of the ever expanding crowd of genericists.

Hardly surprising, then, that they want to diversify a little. Scud has paved the way with his experimental releases as Amen Fire (with Craig from I-Sound) and Aphasic now combines hardcore mash ups with more downtempo spacey biz as JUNK.

So… Exhibit A is still something of a surprise – a CD featuring remixes of stalwart Swiss noise experimentalists Voice Crack. I have no recollection of hearing anything by them before, so it’s all in the mix, and that is a good thing.

Aphasic keeps it nice and minimal. ‘Hyperion’ sounds like someone has stripped out all traces of musical instruments from a dub track and left all the effects in.

Matmos’ contribution is sort’ve random bursts of sound which has the feeling of travelling through some sort of industrial plant. On Mars. Ripped to the gills on night nurse. Naked.

Moslang smothers amens under a pillow and then fights with them for several minutes before they finally expire. “Oh no! They killed Jungle!” “You Bastards!”

Haswell & Hecker make fucked up noises. Possibly the absolute panacea of anti-turntablism, but you’d have to ask them about that. It’s pretty disorientating and funny in a Nurse With Wound “go mental/ have a long pause/ go mental/ make random farty noises” sort of way.

Toby Reynolds (aka DJ Scud) finishes off with ‘Final (k)’ – brilliantly off-kilter, yet structured, slightly menacing, atmospheric piece. Drones and snatches of voice give it real depth. The quiet bits actually had my stomach turning over in anticipation – this is the real deal.

buggin

Radio 1’s Breezeblock featured The Bug in session last night – you can listen to the show again if you follow the link and have all that stuff which plays .rpm files. I started taping at midnight so presumably have about 3 minutes of the actual session, but it was nice to hear “We R I.E.” just before I went to bed.

ngozi ngozi ngozi… gone

courtesy Gladdy Wax

Ngozi – roots riddim of the year so far. A sort of watery, medieval soundscape with lots of plucked strings and that bassline, pulling you down.

Inevitably this has been caned by Rodigan in the weeks before payday so that I’ve only been able to get hold of two of the cuts – the rest gone gone gone, please don’t let it be forever… records fall out of the ether on Sunday night and Monday morning… are they this great or is it just fatigue and futile resistance to sleep, the coming working week… tape rolling and some pointless adjustments to the aerial before bed… 5 more minutes…

Luciano – “World Peace” and Bushman “Jah Deliver Me” – both great vocals on timeless (or formulaic, depending on your cynicism) themes. Great stuff, but I’d kill for a copy of the Tony Curtis selection “crabs in a barrel” and maybe do some GBH for the others.

simmer down

“From my personal point of view I’ve found that acquiring (buying, loaning, downloading, whatever method) more and more music actually makes me increasingly unhappy. That’s why I’ve reduced my acquisitions to almost nil recently. I pick up tunes only occasionally and there have been months without any purchase. I’ve dropped my presence on download/swapping arenas to almost nil as well. Some enthusiastic and nice people on dc++. I miss them but do I really need all that music available. No.
This increasing rush of re-issues and people’s bottomless greed for new tunes just makes me sick. It wasn’t like that before, people meekly waited and murmured not. And they were happier, because when you finally found something it was worth the long wait.”

Juha on the Blood & Fire Board. This obviously relates well to what Dubversion and Matt have been talking about – the “ipodisation” of music consumption. (I can’t be the first person to use that term, can I?)

Juha also runs this great Studio 1 albums site, which will no doubt inspire all you lot to download it all…