Hollow Earth

For Christmas I bought Lulu a Vestax Portable Record Player. It does take 12" platters but it's cuter to load it with 7"s. So now I no longer collect records just for myself but vicariously as well. Recent things like the Post-Punk chart I made for FACT and DJ-ing the Loops Pre-launch (where I played only singles, and Lulu warmed up for me) have been indirectly as result of my spending more time poring through the 7" bin than I would have in the past.

There's a certain kind of record which I get her, and the three above are a pretty good example: female vocals (she has now a full complement of Madonna and Blondie records), great poppy tunes (nearly all The Beatles singles) and occasionally a bit of welly (the Joan Jett is her favourite). She has quite a full collection now, a couple of boxes large.

Her godfather Sacha has been enrolled into the game too and he called me from the record store formerly known as Reckless the other day: "Kate Bush: Army Dreamers?" "No, she has that." "Blondie: Heart of Glass?" "Got that." "Altered Images: Happy Birthday?" "Yeah sorry mate she's got that one as well. Keep trying." Eventually he got her Kim Wilde's "Kids in America" which was completely perfect. Kim looks so young on that sleeve.

The only sad thing is that recent songs aren't available as 7" singles. I read Bob Stanley saying the same thing in a Guardian piece commemorating the form's recent anniversary. No Kylie Minogue "Can't Get You Out of My Head" (which she used to love as a toddler). No Sugababes. No Britney (though you can get 12"s of "Hit Me Baby One More Time"). It's a tragedy.

A confession. I bought a copy of Micachu's "Golden Phone" on 7" for her the other day. But proceeded to keep it: (lying to himself): "Hmm yes, I don't think she'd really appreciate this". Bad Dad.

Someone pinged this over to me. I mean, there's an infinite amount of this stuff online, but it merits inclusion because I reviewed an excellent Charles Cohen CD way back when. My favorite Buchla creations are these - crazy magic wands that you wave around to control your Synth! Bit more interesting than a Keyboard innit!

Charles is an absolute master of the Buchla, but I bet what is springing into everyone's minds is (yes) Morton Subotnik. Touch, Sidewinder, The Wild Bull, Silver Apples. See what I mean about separating out musician from instrument? I went to see Subotnik talk at the Lux Cinema five or so years ago. He had a pretty close relationship with Buchla, commissioning him to build his first Modular Synth in 1960. At the talk Morton was enthusing about his idea of being able to sit like an artist in front of a canvas and "paint" in sound. I wonder if the "Music Easel" (1972) had some connection with this?

And what about the bit at 3:25? Surely Q Bass must have sampled a Buchla on his Boogie Times Tribe "The Dark Stranger" remix?

In the extensive research I did about Synthesisers over the last two years, as well as in other places, I checked out a lot of Synths on YouTube. It's actually surprisingly instructive! The alternative is, to my mind pretty woeful. The cult of Synths, as maintained by places like this site (love it though I do) is based upon what kind of technical pyrotechnics a synth is capable of. That's to say how many VCO/DCO chips it has, how extensive its Polyphony is (how many notes you can play at the same time), how elaborate its MIDI interface is, how deeply it can be programmed etc etc ad infinitum/tedium. These people talk about Synths like they are PCs (which has a faster graphics card or Pentium chip) or even Cars (Torque and Horsepower). In terms of musicality this is utterly infuriating and hopelessly wrongheaded, because of course the only criteria is how nice they sound. An antagonist would reply bolshily "Oh you're just not programming Synth X properly" but I fundamentally disagree- every Synth (or instrument for that matter) has a character and there is no getting away from that.....

The most utterly lovely sounding synths I came across were made by a guy called Tom Oberheim. You can Google him if you want to find out more, but not only were the Oberheim Company Synths fantastically musical and gorgeous-sounding, the ones he made for Marion Systems were beautiful-sounding too. I'm not a fan of the Moog (eugh) or even of the Roland Synths (a nasty kind of sound IMHO) and that's total heresy but these Oberheims are beautiful. The most interesting thing, and this runs totally counter to the ethos of Vintage Synth is that the most expensive ones (with all the "features" natch) are not the prettiest-sounding. Oberheim himself must surely be an artiste, because counter to the logic of business, he's said as much himself.

Following on from yesterday. People might be interested to know that the brain behind the Novation Controllers, which I believe are transforming Electronic music as we know it, is Novation Technical Director Chris Hugget. Fascinatingly enough Hugget also designed the OSCar synthesiser (1983) and, crucially, the WASP (1978) which enabled a similar revolutionary transformation with Post-Punk Electronics.

Novation is a British company and just recently won a Queen's Award for their Automapping software - that's to say as soon as you plug the Hardware in to the computer it automatically assigns itself to the virtual knobs on your Soft Synth. Other controllers are much harder to set up. Actually there are supposed to be better ones, but Novation have kind of cornered the market, and they're cheap! From bitter experience I can assure you that Akai's MPK49s are no substitute.

I don't know if people are aware of the enormous culture of Synth Demos on YouTube? Bloke wheels out coveted Old Synth and puts it through its paces. Type in the name of a Synth Manufacturer and see what comes up (try Roland, Yamaha, KORG, Moog, Arp etc) More often than not they're pretty awful. It's not really the correct axis with which to approach music is it? However some of them are quite wonderful. Especially the three that I'm going to post tomorrow.....

A great piece on Dilla!

I had been waiting to mobilise my pet theory about Wonky for a while - but gave SR the opportunity to post first. Anyway it looks like I must have been *way* too nerdy and indulged in ridikulous Techno-Babble in our exchange. My (largely unsubstantiated, by this stage only disputed) theory is that Wonky is a cross-generic phenomenon owing to the influence of the new wave of Soft Synth Controllers. Things like this and this.

(The Science Bit)

I know for a fact that Flying Lotus is all about his Novation Controller (I interviewed him for a monster article on The Control Surface and Virtualisation in the imminent Loops). I suspect Zomby's more recent stuff is using similar techniques, even if he's using a controller to manipulate samples (as opposed to a Soft Synth) from within a PC. It's the new face of electronic music and a weird flashback to how the control surface of the TB-303 was an escape route from the struggle of programming FM synthesis for DJ Pierre et al.

Snooping round the Bleep 43 website after having devoured the truly stunning Moon Wiring Club Mix and I stumbled upon this awesome mix devoted to the work of Conny Plank. And I thought I was a Plankophile! Superb scholarship! Some very obscure stuff in here. Conny's sound is something at once subtle and yet singular, as though a bell might ring in a vacuum.

The contrast between the two Kraftwerk takes, "Kohutek" (before Plank) and "Kometenmelodie 2" (after Plank) nails it; the Plank effect is ravishing. The first track is delightful enough, but the plangent/clangorous rain at the front of each bar is an utterly divine sound reducing the listener to a quivering goose-bumped jelly again and again. Like being a pussycat stroked by Thor. There still seems to be stuff available to buy from his studio.

I took a moment on Thursday and dropped into the amazing Island Records Exhibition in the basement underneath Phonica on Poland Street. There's an enormous space down there nestled beside the FACT offices, and it seems like no-one knows of its existence! It looked like attendance was pretty bad which is a real shame as it's rather a treat - the highlight being an exhibition case stuck in the back-room which is full of wonderful authentic stuff like Bob Marley's visa application and (I shit you not) the very MPC 60 which DJ Shadow recorded "Endtroducing" on. I've had a bit of an Island week as I've also been poring over the Island "Keep On Running" book, which features excellent pieces by personal heroes such as Vivienne Goldman, Lloyd Bradley and Paul Morley on the label as well as things like Tony Wright artwork which never saw the light of day.

Anyway I got to thinking and I remembered how Simon introducing me to Canadian Electronic artist David Pritchard's "Nocturnal Earthworm Stew" had triggered the realisation that there were all kinds of weird and wonderful records which somehow ended up on the label. The four above being apposite examples. Basil Kirchin's "World Within Worlds" (which Eno author David Pritchard recently procured a scan off of me), Italian Progster Franco Battiato's "Clic", Can refuge Rebob Kwaku Baah's field recording experiment with the Moroccan Ganoua tribe "Trance" and, of course, the perennial Island Records oddity "White Storm". Actually, the five of them almost stand together as an all-points-of-the-compass guide to the weird and wonderful.

My friend George has just made, I suppose "Produced" is the technical term, this movie. They ditched the rather clumsy strap-line: "The Inconvenient Truth about the Oceans" a few months back, which I think was wise, but really this is a story of similar magnitude to Al Gore's. At the current rate of exploitation there will be no more edible fish stock in the seas by the year 2048: the most mind-numbing statistic. If you're interested in finding out what you can do about the issue the film's website has some excellent pointers.

George fielded some questions from the floor very well at the World Premiere last night. He has come to be an expert on the subject. The final question asked when he had become interested in the topic. He gave the, I believe, sincere response that since he was a child he has been fascinated by the oceans. But maybe the truth was more inconvenient? As a film-maker, and this is not the first of George's opening evenings I have attended, I think this movie has happened to him rather than the other way around. Verily this is one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments when the enormity of events surrounding what someone has created not so much re-appropriates, but engulfs what the individual has done. You need to see this!

It's been over a year since Paul Arden died but the other day I received an email from Creative Review informing me that there was going to be a Seminar devoted to him. I slept on it, not thinking there would be a blind panic to get tickets and found, to my chagrin, that it sold out! This post, therefore, is my response to not being able to go along to that Seminar and also to make some kind of amends for not having written something at the time of Paul's death.

Paul and I knew each-other very well, and we were good friends. It's been slightly weird, even awkward, having someone you cared for die who was so very famous. Naturally Paul knew thousands of people, and he meant a great deal to many of them. I'm not the type to clamber over hordes in the attempt to plant a flag of my own - well, at least I waited a year till the hullabaloo died down! But I did think we were close.

I first met Paul as a runner at Arden Sutherland-Dodd, the company he set up with his brilliant son-in-law Nick. This was 1996 and I had just left Ridley Scott Films under a massive black cloud. I'd actually tendered my resignation to the then MD Jo Godman, but somehow the rumor mill had twisted this around. Apparently she had fired me because I'd used the (extremely basic) editing suite in the basement to make my own films. In fairness to Godman I was in a mess and had been getting progressively more eccentric in my tenure there - a combination of the extremely long hours one was expected to work and my getting wrapped up in the exploding Jungle Techno scene (and all that entailed...) I suppose the symbolic encapsulation of this would be my turning up to work with the Metalheadz logo cut into my hair!

Anyway, though we never actually discussed this, Paul had always believed that being fired from a company was more often-than-not a positive thing in one's favour. I on the other hand had got my act together, I haven't smoked a joint since October 1996 (or touched any other chemical for that matter), and was a clean, mean running machine - ultra-efficent and hard-working. So there was a kind of marriage of reputation and improved character. This guy wasn't anything like everyone suggested!

Very early on Paul and I had lunch, just the two of us, at Pizza Express on Dean Street. I remember we talked about my trip to West Africa throwing Techno Raves, my split-second writing Teletubbies (and being driven around Stratford-upon-Avon in Ann Wood's Rolls Royce) and my love of music. Paul was his usual self, a fount of hilarity - but seemingly not self-aware and in some ways sweetly blind to the world around him. Paul wouldn't regale you with anecdotes, or ever name-drop though he would occasionally lay some wisdom on you, he was just naturally charming. We ended up having lunch together a great many times over the years.

Eventually I stopped running, I remember being on set with him (among many places) at the oldest tree in Britain, in a warehouse in Hammersmith and at Black Island Studios, but I didn't lose touch with Paul. He started using me as a Photoshop operator - something I wasn't exactly qualified for, but picked up very quickly. He would come round to my house off Old Street and we would work in my tiny study - Paul occasionally exploding into one of his mammoth tantrums. I'd seen these many times in the office at D'Arblay Street - there was something at the same time epic and tender about them. Paul would practically hit the ceiling, explode, wave his arms around and curse. I'd seen people cowering at his feet when they were the subject of this wrath, but the endearing thing was just how quickly it would pass. You'd, for instance, shift an image a centimetre to the right and he'd go (diminuendo, wiping his forehead) "Yes...Yes...that's it...Yes". These rages never bothered me in the slightest, I kind of relished them actually, as I think other people who enjoyed his company would probably confess. There was always something rather glorious about them.

We did lots of jobs together in this capacity. A book cover for Hermann Vaske, a self-motivational manual for his film company (which I think perhaps contained the germ for "It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be"), artwork for his film the "The Man Who Couldn't Open Doors", bits and pieces of company stationary and even putting together a book on his father's lovely sketchbooks. One of my most abiding memories of this time is of Paul standing on our roof garden in the sunshine smoking his cigars.

Then I was lucky enough to be taken under his film company's wing as a Director in the back of my small film "ROAD". It was a very prestigious Commercials Production Company. Actually it wasn't a successful move for me at all. I didn't have the skills to back up what I was doing (like, for instance I do now) and to be honest I've always the lacked the will to hob-nob in Soho. I've seen what it takes to be a successful Commercials Director - you've got to be incredibly charismatic, thick-skinned, unwaveringly persistent, possessed of an unflinching self-belief and a deadly networker - none of which I think would apply to me. So, even though Paul said he loved my second animated short "Party Animals" (this after I'd left their books) - I suppose we parted ways for a few years. Later I got some free space in an open-plan office in Noho and Paul came round to do some work with me, and I remember him recoiling with horror at the neon-lit phalanx of glazed-looking office-workers: "I..I...I.....I...I...I can't work here" before promptly fleeing (something I should have done myself...)

In January 2008 I heard from a friend that Paul was very ill with Emphysema. So after my estranged grand-father's funeral in Kent I drove down to see him in the woods in Sussex. I took a couple of books with me, the catalogue of my other grand-father's collection and a sketchbook of drawings by an artist called John Scarlett Davis. We had a cup of tea and looked through both books page-by-page and chatted peacefully. He was his usual self, if more gentle than I remembered him. As I left Paul he faltered a bit, his greatest work he said was "It's Not How Good You Are", the other books were OK he said, but that was his favourite. I firmly stated that it was a classic, a towering work, that "it was everywhere", and he seemed satisfied and reassured. I think he'd be pleased that this Seminar was going ahead and that people were still adding to his book of condolences a year down the line. I'm sure his legacy will last.

Now overdue!

In the ongoing theme of slagging off My Bloody Valentine.

I do like this artwork. Disclaimer: I have a couple of these only (though originals natch) "Strawberry Wine" and "Ecstasy". I've passed over "This Is Your Bloody Valentine" more times than I can remember. I've also recently seen a bootie of "Sunny Sundae Smile" which I ought to have snaffled up. These and the rest (which *are* genuinely rare) you can find on a quite funky German sampler called "Things left behind".

There's three years between "Geek" and them signing to Creation. That's a long time. OK so "Strawberry Wine" is great, bits of "Ecstasy" are good, "Paint a Rainbow" is sublime but there's an awful lot of shit in there. Gives hope to all of us ;-)

Hewn at night from the garage door of a car-park on Great Sutton Street by some wanton hooligan. Actually I'm pretty certain it isn't, after all Banksy's work usually comes complete with some gauche conceptual gag doesn't it? And this is just a stencil of a cassette. Which is why I liked it obviously.....

The case in favour of it being a Banksy is that this area is strewn with his work. Some are quite old now, like the rats at the corner of Smithfield Market and the cash machine with the robot arm lifting up the girl at the foot of Roseberry Avenue. However, and this is why I became a late convert, there are more recent pieces like the rather charming cat, spoon and mouse on Whitecross Street which post-date his gallery celebrity. There's obviously no need for him to still create street art now, and the fact that he persists I think makes him more credible.