Just wanted to dash off a quick post on last weekend’s Supersonic, which I can truthfully claim is one of the most well organised, neatly programmed festivals it’s been my pleasure to attend. Plan B were representing in force and you’ll see a full review in the September issue (seems so long away). For now, though, here’s a few YouTubey things I shot to give you an impression of what went down. Hail Yow!
That’s David Yow fronting his new band, Qui. Bizarrely, Qui’s set was punctuated at various points by David Yow begging for the return of his passport. Apparently he’d got fucked up earlier in the day and given it away. It took him a day at the American embassy with the Southern Records people to get a new one. Crazy guy.
Atilla and Anderson of Sunn0))) in full grimm flight.
And last but not least, that’s Andrew Dymond aka Duracell who tore it up in the main room after Mogwai’s set with a stack of videogames themes recreated using drums, modular synth and laptop. “Are you magic?” shouted someone, who I think had had rather a lot to drink. You could see what he meant, though.
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by Louis Pattison on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 (2 Comments)
You’ve probably read AMP’s review of Faster Than Sound in the current issue of Plan B - or, indeed, here on her blog - but I wanted to pop up a few short YouTube clips that hopefully give a slightly different glimpse of the event. Taking place at Bentwaters, a Cold War airbase notorious for a rash of UFO sightings, Faster Than Sound is a unique sort of festival: a mix of experimental electronic music, modern classical sounds, and digital art, all taking place in the sort of desolate whereabouts that suggests nuclear holocaust is just around the corner.
The site is free-roaming, meaning you could just flop down in the geodesic dome and listen to the music, or roam off to stare through distant chain-link fences at strange silos, explore long-derelict huts, or comb the further reaches for all manner of sound experiments like this, the 360 degree speaker circle, where acts including Sonic Arts Network and Haswell and Hecker played sets.
Perhaps the weirdest experience of the day was the forest walk, a path along the perimeter of the site you walk wearing headphones. Tune them into the correct frequency and you hear the crackly radio broadcast of a military pilot following an unidentifed flying object above Bentwaters back in the Eighties. The spooky thing being, I’d heard it before; it’s the same broadcast sampled on the first drum’n'bass record I ever bought, Photek’s 1995 single ‘UFO/Rings Around Saturn’. I spent the whole walk waiting for the drums to kick in.
There were bands, too - here’s a kinda wobbly excerpt from D.A.T Politics’ set.
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by Louis Pattison on Friday, July 6th, 2007 (No Comments)
Look! I made a Plan B YouTube page. At present there’s only a couple of slightly jerky videos of No Age and KIT up there, which I filmed the other night at the Luminaire with my own unsteady hand and digital camera, but when I get a chance I’ll pop up some more footage from Sonar and Faster Than Sound.
here’s No Age
And that there’s KIT
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by Louis Pattison on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 (3 Comments)
A trailer from what we can reasonably assume will be 2007’s grimmest DVD release - the film debut from Nocturno Culto from Norway’s Darkthrone. I saw a bit of the finished version where Culto’s in some sort of a snowy wood and the camera’s shooting from his POV, like some black metal version of Peep Show. For a bit I thought he was wearing really long pointy shoes, but turns out they were just skis. Never mind.
This, of course, is the best black metal video ever.
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by Louis Pattison on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 (No Comments)
I wasn’t an extremely close friend of Jon Clee but when you live in a city as small as Cardiff you gradually get to know people who move in the same circles, or share similar interests or passions. If you’ve ever been to The Green Man festival, you sort of know of Jon, indirectly; it’s his designs that adorn their posters and flyers - bearded druids caught mid-transmogrification, stag antlers bursting from their heads, or strange, symmetrical collages that juxtapose rolling meadows and crashing waterfalls with teams of smock-clad scientists toiling away on radiophonic sound machines.
He made this great flyer for the show Plan B helped to promote with Cardiff’s Forecast last year.
Jon was a talented and extremely prolific artist and designer - a staggering proportion of the records, CDs, posters and flyers scattered through the city were decorated with his designs. In many ways it’s hard to think of the city’s independent music scene divorced from his telltale visual stamp. Jon also loved music for music’s sake: The Beach Boys and the Stones, but also The Make-Up, and Circle, and Titan, and plenty of obscure psychedelic things on vinyl with great names and amazing sleeves.
Jon was hit by a car on Saturday night on his way home. He hurt his head really badly and yesterday, he died. Cardiff is a smaller place for his passing. Rest in peace, Jon.
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by Louis Pattison on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 (10 Comments)
Currently writing a feature about the life and times of Dylan Carlson and Earth, and I’ve been hitting some of those old Sub Pop records hard. Everyone always goes on about 2, which is basically Earth in their most distilled form, but an album I’m really now only discovering in earnest, despite having owned it for a few years now, is Phase 3: Thrones And Dominions, which veers between drone heaviness and some really beautiful ambient moments. It’s strange, isn’t it, how Earth’s most abstract albums are also their most celebrated.
While it’s hard to get around all the mythology - Kurt, heroin, guns - it’s fascinating to uncover how Earth’s music has always been built on firm conceptual groundings and an interest in exploring sound, not merely creating it. I recently interviewed Dylan and he talked about how the new stuff was all about uncovering the drone sounds inherent in country and blues. Hex and Hibernaculum are as good as anything. It’s great he’s still making music.
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by Louis Pattison on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 (No Comments)
If Norris McWhirter were still alive, we might presently be seeing him passing a certificate to the good folk of Napalm Death. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of proto-grindcore classic Scum, Earache Records have made a video for their classic track ‘You Suffer’. Given that ‘You Suffer’ clocks in at one second in length, this makes it the shortest music video ever. Watch it here.
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by Louis Pattison on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 (1 Comment)
I’ve heard people describe the Tate Modern as some kind of graveyard to the avant-garde, revolutionary expression pinned up for easy consumption, sapped of their power like tins of beans on a supermarket shelf. I don’t really buy that, though; it makes the assumption that experimental creation must be, is always, an act of war. Of course, that’s conceptually really tempting, but looking around the current Gilbert and George retrospective at the Tate Modern, I have my doubts that’s true.
For approaching 40 years now, Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore have played the role of self-proclaimed “human sculptures”, creating a colourful dynasty of artwork from their home on Fournier Street in London’s East End. Typically, their pieces are large and lurid, housed in large single or arranged multiple frames; and almost without fail, the primary topic of their artwork is themselves. They appear propping up bars in blurry unfocus, walking the bare boards of their unfurnished house, grimacing like gargoyles on a plinth, or naked and dangling their saggy balls.
To Gilbert and George, the gallery is not a life-sapping museum space: they exist to be collected, pictorialised, documented, referenced. In doing so, they’re the classic mirror that reflects their surroundings. All their artwork is created by source material from in walking distance of their East London address, from the personal (their bodies, charted swelling, flopping, disintegrating; splashes of urine or sperm viewed under a microscope, luridly coloured, inflated to massive size to the social (racist graffiti and personal ads; pasted flyposters and leaflets preaching Islamic fundamentalism, or offering the services of an African witchdoctor).
You could accuse it of being conservative, you could accuse it of being reactionary. But as time goes on, I’ve begun to greatly admire this manner of creation. It’s a spirit I can identify in some of my favourite bands (Kraftwerk, Whitehouse), and also what John Peel meant when he said that great thing about The Fall: “Always different, always the same”. ‘Ploughing a furrow’, you could say, but I prefer to think of it as a steady, meticulous recreation of the same ideas, themes and practices; the idea being, perhaps, that truth is to be found in some bigger picture, revealed inch by inch. If “genius” (a horrible, misused word, as a current discussion on the Plan B forum attests) exists, surely it’s to be found in the small differences.
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by Louis Pattison on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 (1 Comment)
Look here: a neat YouTube video on the history of the Amen break, beginning with genesis as a 6-second instrumental bridge in the middle of a B-side of an obscure Sixties soul record by The Winstons, and charting its evolution into an endlessly repeated/reworked/ simulated/sampled/dissected building block of modern musical culture. The guy’s voice is a bit monotonous and he doesn’t like Squarepusher, but hey, that’s not a deal-breaker.
Along similar DIY broadcasting lines (I’m calling it “Vidipedia”, but not in polite company), I recommend Woebot TV - a guy called Matt, who likes prog records, dancing around with a TV on his head. Oh yeah, and I did a blog on the Guardian page as well. On reflection I think it might be a bit contrived but go take a look anyway, and maybe leave some nasty comments - I’ve heard you’re no-one in the blogosphere unless you’ve filled a few comments boxes with people who hate your guts.
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by Louis Pattison on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 (No Comments)
