he will be sorely missed.

Posted by Andrew Clare on Tuesday, December 27th, 2005
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If you’re not doing anything on the winter solstice (that’s Wednesday the 21st, for those not into druidry), come see Morgen und Nite support The Telescopes at the Buffalo Bar. Here’s some details I nicked from a website; I might get round to writing some better advertising copy later, but you can check the Myspace for some noises from us, and see Plan B issue 8 for my Telescopes review.

The Telescopes + Detwiije + Morgen Und Nite

Buffalo Bar
(Wednesday 21-Dec-05)

THE TELESCOPES (in another universe… incredible and genuinely scary music - NME)

DETWIIJE (beautifully crafted music)

MORGEN UND NITE (synthesizers and drones)

*goo go gang DJS til late

Doors 8.30 - 1am. Tickets £5 or £4 (flyer/nus).Info: 020 73596191.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Monday, December 19th, 2005
(1 Comment)

I have plenty of time to reflect on Monday’s ICA discussion on the long and nauseous journey to the place where I do my part-time job. Really, I think, shivering from the after-effects of the ICA’s generous free wine supply, it was like that thing after you’ve had an argument and then you think of the thing you should have said, only much much much worse. Much worse. But that aside, it had been fun, talking with people about stuff and getting drunk for free on a nice balcony.

The only thing that really keeps coming back to me, once I’ve cured the hangover with tea and proofreading, is the flurry of anger I provoked in a fellow journalist.

The flurry seems to happen like this. The journalist, who has been sitting quite quietly up until now, although she has been darting angry looks in my direction, suddenly accuses me - and here I can’t remember her exact words - of saying something I haven’t said, not as an accusation per se, but as a starting point for a grievance of her own, like she can’t just have her grievance without it being a response to something someone on the panel’s said. Well, I haven’t said whatever it is. I’m so freaked out by having words put into my mouth that I jump to my own defence with a distinct lack of dignity, squawking ‘I never said that!’ like the fishwife I fear I might actually be. It shakes me up and I lose all my focus, but it appears she’s angry with me for, well, being me, and for editing a magazine that focuses on the ‘underground’ (god, let’s just call it the underside, that’s much nicer, like the underbelly of a tiger or something) in music as opposed to the ‘mainstream’. The poor mainstream, in the face of such a thing, is feeling beleagured. Why does Plan B hate it? What has it ever done to us?

Now, I wouldn’t mind, but - and I know I talk some shit sometimes, but on this particular night I have reined myself in considerably - I’ve just spent a good few minutes explaining how, much as I adore all that’s peripheral and odd, much as I love the blogosphere and the zineworld and so on, I recognise the limitations and restrictions of such spaces. I know their hermetic nature and I appreciate that it’s hard to find a way in. I’m a bit old, me, and I almost remember the generosity of the older NME and Melody Maker, how they were approachable magazines that guided you down new paths, and I also sense the ridiculousness of even making those underground/overground distinctions in the face of music itself, which is what we all seem for a minute to forget we’re talking about. I do Plan B because I want to communicate with people. I want to have a dialogue between us, the music and the readers, and that dialogue can be just as important as what the actual music is.

I’ve already said, when asked about Plan B’s coverage of major label acts, that we cover the things that we like. Major label, indie label, no label - do we like it? Does one of our writers feel the need to write about it so hard that they’re prepared to do so, beautifully? Yes? OK, it’s in. Full stop. Yes, sure we want to cover things that no one else has: what would be the point otherwise? That’s not just an ideological stance, it’s a commercial one too. When you can get all the info you need on the Kaiser Chiefs from your daily paper, why are you going to fork out £2.95 for a bimonthly that tells you about them all over again? Unless you know it’s written by someone whose writing is so exciting and valuable to you that you need to read their words (and that is a totally valid reason, btw, and one that I hope our readers take into account when buying the mag, because I sure as hell do when I’m commissioning - and yes, that goes double for the more well-known bands).

I’ve said some of this, bar the bit about the writing. I wish I had said that bit about the writing, because it’s fundamental to Plan B, but I’m thinking on my feet here, and I forget that people need telling how ace our writers are (sorry writers!). So with that in mind, it is just plain weird to be shouted at by someone whose main point seems to be that the Arctic Monkeys were great live and everyone knew the words to their songs, and that I am a snob because I run a music magazine that probably hasn’t featured them yet. I say probably, because I don’t think she has read Plan B.

The Arctic Monkeys come up a lot in this panel discussion. Careful listeners - and I’m sure there were some - will notice I did not at any point say anything negative about them, or about any band. I just want to make that clear. I do question their status as indicative of a new music revolution just because they used Myspace to get their music around, and ask that we don’t get so caught up in the medium of communication that we don’t listen to or talk about the music that ensues from this.

But I don’t even say this in the discussion. I don’t even want to talk about it later, but the journalist (who works for a daily broadsheet newspater, I only find out at this point) and I carry on talking about it anyway, each of us speaking an increasingly different language. The thing that bothers me – other than that I am a little bemused at being harangued by someone who works for Rupert Murdoch for the way I choose to edit a very small circulation music magazine that sets its own agenda – is that I don’t see why she’s so angry.

I am still not sure. It’s like, the underside or the underbelly or whatever godawful snobbish hole it is in which I dwell is warm and fun, but I do look out occasionally. I read the papers every day, I’ve a bit of a soft spot for the theoretical side of my trade, and I’m fascinated by all music, whoever makes it and within whatever commercial structures. Plan B is a commercial product, it’s not an art project, it’s not a fanzine. I know about her world, I make it my business to, but I don’t think she even has the slightest idea about what mine is like, or even what she might think it’s like. Yet I’m not angry. I’m pissed off about the retrogressive nature of a lot of current music, but you all know that, and I get a bit fired up about the lack of women involved in music, but you know that too. But should I be angry there’s a broadsheet music press in existence that covers some bands that I don’t really want to cover?

I mean, that would just be dumb, right?

But reverse that statement, and you’ve got her anger at me and Plan B.

In my confusion, I adjourn to the telly, where David Attenborough will tell me something amazing about creatures who are much more fascinating than we are. I have often thought that there’s no confusion that can’t be cured, or at least alleviated, by watching ants.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005
(3 Comments)

I admit it, it was vanity made me do it. I went on the ICA website to look for a listing for a panel discussion I’ve been asked to take part in tonight, something about DIY media. It’s not there, but this was: The London Nobody Knows, the 1967 film based on the books of my favourite London author, Geoffrey Fletcher, is to be shown, starting from tonight. I’ve never seen it, and I’m sure it won’t live up to the excitement of buying the book of the same title in a junk shop and following its author’s cynical, romantic eye around the crappy parts of London via his strangely wonky, Paddington Bear-ish sketches, but I would urge you to check it out, if you like London like I like London.

So obsessed was I with Fletcher at one point that I phoned up Penguin books to see if they could tell me if he was still alive. They said he probably wasn’t, but I wrote him a letter anyway, to go in a fanzine about urban decay. Anyway, someone who’s put a Fletcher obsession to better use is Bob Stanley, who once wrote this very nice piece about him in the Guardian, using the lovely word ‘irascible’.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Monday, December 12th, 2005
(2 Comments)

here’s another MP3 release on www.infinitechug.com it is i’m being good’s SPARES OR REPAIRS. there’s also some preview MP3s of the new i’m being good CD FAMILY SNAPS up there too. go fill yer boots.

Posted by Andrew Clare on Sunday, December 11th, 2005
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Thursday night was the Norwegian Voices event at the Barbican - event being the right word. Events, to my mind, are what classical people have when there’s lots of them in the same place, but they’re not in an orchestra. And, despite tonight’s featuring trad jazz, weird jazz, Sami folk fusion prog, extended vocal music, insane percussion, and Supersilent (who, we have decided, are a rock band) - despite a large proportion of that music being quite hypnotically wonderful - this was a classical people’s event in the oddest and most uncomfortable sense.

I don’t blame the Norwegians. From what I know of musicians over there, there’s a certain relaxedness concerning genre, and an informality that seems to permeate even the most academic music. To get together in a massive concert hall and celebrate with contemporary music 100 years of not being owned by Sweden seems a very sensible idea - and can you imagine the UK celebrating a national anniversary with women who sound like they’re singing backwards, squalling saxes and huge rumblings of meterological electronics? But this is England: we don’t do relaxed. We don’t mix things up, then sit back and let the music do the work. What we do, is we try really hard to appeal to lots of people at once, and then feel smug and uncomfortable about it. In this case, here is some modern music, right? So let’s make it really, really modern! Let’s put really awful visuals all over it, without respite, for a whole damn evening. Let’s project perfectly good poems, line by line, at silly angles, so that it looks like something off Brass Eye, and let’s film the performers and then manipulate it in ‘real time’ so they look all jerky-like.

Worst of all, let’s project behind Supersilent – a band so imbued with a sense of dark and light; a band so right and devastating that they’re like weather – simultaneous footage of the band playing that has been treated with whatever tool it is that makes them look like drawings done with pencil and charcoal, first seen, I believe, in the video for their countrymen A-Ha’s top pop hit, ‘Take On Me’. And let’s make this projection about a million feet high, so that anyone who enjoys watching Supersilent for the intense transfer of sound between and around a group of amazing musicians just can’t ignore it.

These visuals couldn’t be any more inappropriate if they’d featured dancing girls in marabou bikinis. They were the worst kind of unimaginative. But they were well-meaning, which made me think all day about why the concert organisers meant so well as to pay someone to do them. Why did we need them at all? This, after all, was mostly ‘art’ music, sold at £15-£20 a ticket to educated people. The sets by each artist and group were short and accessible, even the most musically extreme, and the awful Fiona Talkington was on hand to introduce things and fill up the dead air between sets, if required – her breathless trill of “You’ve a fan here, Jarle!” in the direction of genius drummer Jarle Vespestad was toe-curlingly priceless. And crucially, music – especially this odd brand of contemporary but emotive, jazz-inflected music – comes with its own wonderful visual stimuli built in, which is so ambiguous and fluid that you delight in feeling it’s yours alone: the dark, dripping undersides of rocks that I see when I close my eyes and listen to Supersilent won’t be the same stretches of shingle beach you see when you do the same thing, and that, arguably, is kind of the point.

When a band calls its albums just 1 to 7, and 7 is a live DVD that’s stark in the extreme (Kim Hiorthoy’s elegant, charged, black and white camerawork would have been very welcome here), you’d think that, if nothing else, could have suggested to the visuals people that they didn’t need all these twists and turns of dodgy virtual charcoal flickering above them. That their audience didn’t either. But that was the thing: the audience wasn’t the kind of audience who will go and stand in a darkened venue and just watch a band, and let that band’s music just be. It was a BBC Radio 3 audience, and for some reason, which I’m sure I could come up with given enough coffee and some funding, a confusion has arisen between accessibility and patronage, or between multimedia and just plain compromise in this odd grey area that Late Junction inhabits. And this translated on Thursday into this quite offputting and unmusical display of visual technology that was way more crass than anything I’ve ever seen at a club.

In the same way, the breathtaking footage of migrating spiderlings in David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth the night before was accompanied by god-awful, schmaltzy music instead of either, well, silence, or - more appropriately - the inspired recordings of Chris Watson, whose sound work is one of the main reasons I’m watching the series. In a taster for the next programme, Watson reverently explained how he managed to capture the strange sounds of a blue butterfly caterpillar (which is tended by ants, insect fans, in its larval stage!), possibly the quietest thing he’d ever recorded. However, I’m willing to bet that we’ll hear a few minutes of this, tops, before the poor caterpillar’s oscillations are drowned out by some sweeping strings, or some horrible poingy guitar stuff (this indicates tension or something). If it weren’t for the fact that I’d miss out on David Attenborough explaining the wolf spider’s mating technique I’d watch it with the sound off.

Why are we expected to need such stimuli to help us appreciate the wonder of spider-world or the elemental geometry of Supersilent’s music? Who makes that decision, and what is it based on, other than some very misguided notions of what constitutes popular demand, or how accomplished our imaginations are? Perfect technological marriages of audio and visual are possible, and when they happen they’re quite incredible (your imagination made real, for a second) but apologetic clashes of the two, conciliatory softening of the sublime with something a little more ‘friendly’ - that’s just dilution. And I want concentrate.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Saturday, December 10th, 2005
(2 Comments)