Hollow Earth

More or less in order, though my memory is clearer on the stretch from T. Rex onwards. Highlights have included the quizzical but interested response to Dr Buzzard's "Cherchez La Femme" and people liking "One World". Low-points include the Managing Director's (OK quite amusing) James Brown impression and the IT Technician describing The Meters as the worst kind of elevator music he had ever heard in his life (I surprised myself by being in-his-face outraged). Have to admit really swooning over Bowie's "Hang Onto Yourself" (with "Queen Bitch" greatest Rock track ever?), The Clash's "White Man In Hammersmith Palais" and T.Rex's "Electric Warrior" which I forgot is astonishingly, track for track, amazing. Tomorrow I solemnly promise I will start Wyatting.

Lulu is doing a school project on the 1940s, and she has visited the Imperial War Museum, so we dug out this great old photo (click to enlarge) for her to take in to class. On the far right is my Great-Grandfather Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Smith KCB, KBE, DSO, MC and to the left is De Gaulle shaking hands with Eisenhower. We think this must have been taken after the wartime liberation of one of France's North African colonies. My Great-Grandfather was (something approximately akin to) second-in-command to Monty so this stacks up. I met Arthur Smith when I was very young at my beloved Granny's house and I went to his funeral when I was 5. He was a very religious man and was known by the troops as God's General.

The archetypal Grime instrumental was Musical Mob’s “Pulse X” (2002), nothing more than a brittle drum track and an aggressive, pneumatic bass-line. If Youngstar, the track’s producer was a crow, or a sparrow, then within Grime Terror Danjah was a bejewelled Cockatoo. Unique among Grime Producers his baroque rhythm tracks craved more attention than, which as devices to frame the pyrotechnics of the MC, they were ever going to get. Other producers like Target, Danny Weed and Wiley brought original touches to their mixes – Danny Weed’s trademark accordion synth presets and Wiley’s drum-less “Devil” tracks spring to mind but didn’t create sonic interference for the MC. Terror Danjah was unique.

Jungle was a radically important music because it was the first truly indigenous British Dance Music. Grime, in which a generation of MCs who had cut their teeth chatting over Jungle, was an innovation of perhaps greater magnitude because it was the first indigenous form of UK Hip-Hop. Not a UK version of American Hip-Hop, but a Hip-Hop that sunk deeper into the musical DNA to arrive at a form that did as much justice to our Global location in the Diaspora as American Hip-Hop did to its relationship to Africa. It’s wrong to deny the basic importance of the rhythm track to Grime, because after all, UK MCs rapping over mid-tempo break-beats (Roots Manuva, Sway or Blackmarket Boy) as opposed to over hiccoughing UK Garage re-rubs, create precisely the fawning to US tropes which it was necessary to dispense with, but nevertheless Grime was all about the MC. Terror Danjah’s legacy, therefore, is a confused one.

2003, the date from which this collection commences, suddenly seems like an incredibly long time ago. A lot of us who picked up on Grime in 2002 found our interest tailed off drastically by the end of 2005. Critics complained that Grime had reached a glass ceiling; artist's ambitions seemed frustrated, in-fighting suddenly seeming less to outsiders like fascinatingly explosive braggadocio and more like the violent squabbling of the closely-cooped. This sensation of a scene gone wrong was cemented by MC Crazy Titch's incarceration for murder. Subsequently the number of physical releases dropped drastically and the vital energy of the scene, which had previously produced popular parties like Wiley's Eskimo Dance, ebbed away. Grime’s main audience drifted on down the ‘Nuum. Outsiders embraced Dubstep, some like myself, practically gave up on Urban Music altogether, having one's interest piqued by Bassline and Funky but never sated.

The entirely unpredictable punch line came in the form of celebrity MCs like Dizzy Rascal, Wiley and Tinchy Strider scoring chart hits. "Bonkers", "Wearing My Rolex" and "Number 1" have been all been very well, but they reveal little what made Grime so special in the first case; they’ve simply been “no brainer” music-business-savvy post-Shoreditch Chart Electro made hip by MCs with boatloads of charisma. There has been no “organic” breakthrough of artists in the way, for instance, that Run DMC exploded out of Old Skool Hip-Hop. Wiley, Dizzy and Tinchy still remain enormous talents, but divorced from their rightful production context, come across rather like decadent grandees squandering their artistic potential.

The last time I saw Terror Danjah was at an After Shock label showcase he had organised for Urban East 2005 in Stratford at the absolute peak of Grime’s eminence and promise. Crazy Titch was there performing “I Can C U, U Can C Me” (on TD’s Aftershock label), Sadie Ama performed “So Sure”, Shola Ama “So Contagious” and Bruza did “Bruzin’”. The producer’s stock could not have been higher. His vision was to create a kind of Soul-to-Soul style musical environment with singers and MCs all riding one producer’s beats. It didn’t work for the equally gifted Sticky and it didn’t work for Terror either. He would have been left on the shelf were it not for the recent support of Dubstep (forthcoming releases on Hyperdub) and IDM with this disc.

This compilation, on the bristling-with-life Planet Mu label, brainchild of Mike Paradinas’s (aka µ-Ziq ), makes many less mistakes than Rephlex the other great Post-IDM dance label did with their “Grime” compilations. Rephlex’s compilations came in refreshingly good time (usually bohemian circles need five years before which to embrace something as spiky as Grime, a process Poet and legendary blogger Luke Davies refers to witheringly as “half-life”). However that label committed the hugely embarrassing gaffe of the records not actually being Grime compilations at all, but documents of the nascent Dubstep scene. On the other hand, in the same way that Depth Charge’s J Saul Kane saw fit in the height of Mo Wax breaks culture to release a triple-disc set of Classic Electro, “Beat Classic” stripped of the vocals that were an essential part of the experience, Planet Mu have delivered us not with a Terror Danjah “Greatest Hits”, resplendent with “Cock Back”, “Boogieman” and “Not Convince”, but with a series of his instrumentals. Sometimes it pays to do the obvious thing and not the clever thing.

This isn’t quite the catastrophe it could be. TD was in the habit, like Wiley, of releasing instrumental discs. These would have been used primarily over the air or at the dance for people to MC over. But for the listener with a background in Techno to see the appeal of these vocally-unadorned riddims isn’t quite reading too far against the grain. These instrumentals were exceptionally special. If TD has any obvious forebear in the history of dance music, it would have to be the Lee Perry of Black Ark-era. Sonically the parallels are unmistakeable. At this time Perry had distinct sonic signatures: the mooing cow, the valley-deep/mountain-high phasing, the echoated dis-rhythmic percussion as texture and the amplified child’s bird water-pipe. A combination of all of them found their way into everything he did, in the same way onions and garlic feature prominently in Mediterranean cuisine. In an equivalent manner on every one of these tracks Terror Danjah has his bizarrely distorted “What will it be/Follow the beat” (Gremlin) voice, the horror strings, the strafing/glinting synth line, and the cackle. In cases the difference between tracks can be as simple as one element of his custom vocabulary brought to the fore and given a melodic twist. So for instance the strings carry “Haunted” (the instrumental of “Boogieman”) with the sublime “Crowbar 2” it’s the harp-like top line, on his remix of DJ Marsta’s “Fibre” it’s the bass-line. However, the more one is immersed in the Venusian Electro of “Gremlinz” the more these tics vanish from one’s ear-range, as though one becomes accustomed to the lush alien undergrowth and details like the quality of reverberations and the filigreed drum patterns come to the fore like busy insects or the glow of fireflies.

Because 3 is the magic number. The work of another friend, Marcus who is masterminding this for Kode 9. A very cool little compilation this one. Surprised how gentle and glacial these tones are, hearkens back to the halcyon daze of London's finest Art/Ambient Techno (Black Dog/ART/Rephlex) but this time plied by refugees from the Nuum (Is that fair?) Highlights being Kevin Martin's "Meltdown" and Zomby's "Tarantula" but gently enlivened by the slinky house of Cooly G. In the shops in October.

My friend Jake interviews Gang Gang Dance in Brixton. Cheerful stuff.

Directions: Directions in Music (Thrill Jockey 1996)

When I came across it in the racks of Bel-Air in Lausanne on my way back from holiday I was delighted. Putting the needle to the record I was overjoyed to hear that almost Country-and-Western-ish sound of the first Tortoise LP. So bassplayer Bundy K Brown was the unknown quantity? I've made a mental note to investigate his Soldier of Fortune / We Live in the Future disc.

Papa M: Live From A Shark Cage (Domino 1999)

However this is to do no justice to two other excellent "ex-curricular" Tortoise LPs. The first candidate being Papa M's awesome "Live From A Shark Cage". Noticing that Pajo was also a former Tortoise alumni I jumped to the hasty conclusion that like Brown he too was a missing X-factor on MNLWND, but actually it turns out he was drafted in to replace Brown on that second LP, scotching my grand theory! "Live From A Shark Cage" is blessed with these head-nodding grooves, spun on guitar with a Looper before being overdubbed with a filigree of acoustic picking, exquisitely pitched somewhere between the Cluster of Sowieoso and Boards of Canada. A Woebot fave...especially "Plastic Energy Man".

Gastr Del Sol: Upgrade & Afterlife (Drag City 1996)

And then there is this very nice LP by Gastr Del Sol, a band which included Tortoise's John McEntire performing various roles, with its groovy cover lifted from Roman Signer. What this shares with the Papa M is a gentle holding back from the now goofy-seeming futurity which stains a lot of music of this era. Combing the racks in the past year or so I have noticed huge amounts of this Post-Techno guff, with its Minimal-come-plain-uninspired artwork clogging up the place. Techno meant a whole load of "clever" kids who wanted to make "avant-garde" music could hijack the glamour of Dance Music and shift a few more copies than they otherwise would. Precious little real flavor or muscle can be heard in this music. "Upgrade and Afterlife" is nice if not as good as the Directions and Papa M records. "Camofleur", their next I *really* wanted to like, notionally a shift even further towards "proper" music was a bit weak.

Postscript: Allmusic provides a scarily long list of artists and groups from this period most of which I am only familiar with as a name: Trans Am, Cul de Sac, Bowery Electric, Mogwai, Tarwater, Ganger, 5ive Style, The High Llamas, Pell Mell, June of 44, Gaunt, A Minor Forest, Eleventh Dream Day, Poster Children, Shrimp Boat, Bastro, The For Carnation, Uptighty, Brokeback, Designer, Isotope 217, Come, The Sea and Cake, My Dad Is Dead, Dead Child, Exploding Star Orchestra, Bumps and Toe.

Unlike his sister, who paints and draws on paper, my little boy (4, just turned 5) likes to selotape cardboard boxes together. We do keep her better pictures but I wasn't about to store all these junk assemblages; I take a photo of them. This isn't a complete collection, as sadly some end up in the bin before I get to capture them. Apologies for the occasional mushy focus.

I wish I could link to the precise post on which Simon first described the Hardcore lineage as "The Continuum". Almost immediately, in the following sentence, he abbreviated it to 'Nuum. I'm an absurdly close reader of his and certain it was at Blissblog, not within another context. I distinctly remember thinking I didn't like the coinage one bit. I could see precisely what he meant but I wished to goodness he'd chosen a different word, it seemed a bit clumsy, a bit explicit, an intellectual term masquerading as slang. But in testament to his judgement it has stuck in a way that some of my own hopeless attempts at coinage never have. The concept was written large throughout Energy Flash of course, but somehow the lack of a precise word made the idea suitably fuzzy - because of course this is an etymological grey area. However, we call the Thames the Thames even when its source and mouth are difficult to pinpoint and when it is fed by many other rivers, so enough of the griping already!

It wasn't until the series of lectures that Mark organised for FACT (not that FACT) and The Wire that the term "Nuum" really came into focus and became the battleground it is today. Subsequently Reynolds has been edged into the role of gatekeeper, unwillingly expected to pass judgement on what is or isn't Nuumological. The Nuum has become a focal point for a raft of younger critics to express dissatisfaction with what they feel to be a critical hegemony. Also now it appears that if Reynolds, on the basis of entirely reasonable subjective judgments, doesn't like a piece of music that this infers that the music is not of the Nuum. As though on behalf of a dismissed employee people rally around promising that such-and-such an artist has authentic Nuum credentials, used to carry a record box for L Double, was in charge of Goldie's remaining tooth enamel or ran a Sex Hotline for Dem 2.

The whole thing about claiming to belong to "The Continuum" is fraught with complexities. The very use of the term or concept of the Nuum immediately implies that the person using the term is conceiving of this music within an historic context. This is incompatible with the lumpen nature of Nuum music, this kind of Middle-class intellectualism and self-consciousness is by definition absent from the Nuum. The moment an artist declares he making Nuum music he isn't - because to be a proper member of the Ardkore Continuum is to be a water particle in the river, not standing on a bridge looking upstream.

Now I didn't write the rules and I didn't come up with the concept! I'd freely admit to being a privileged Middle-class intellectual, but it wouldn't necessarily be the way I'd dissect it. In all probability I'd pussyfoot around uselessly. I don't even have much of a problem with any old music or musician "wanting in", they're welcome as far as I'm concerned.* That is simply how it works. I did try to make it along to one of those lectures but I wonder if anybody made this point? In some ways it's so blatantly obvious, and staring one in the face as to be invisible. Though of course it's only with the crisp focus of the word "Nuum" that this becomes so stark. There is, however a big stumbling block to my argument. One of the ways, beyond it being a Pirate Radio staple in London, beyond the involvement of a similar cast of characters, beyond its presence in a certain kind of grassroots record shop, in which a vaunted Middle-class intellectual is able to identify what is "of the Nuum", is how this music quotes itself. On the face of it this denotes that indeed it is conscious of itself.....doesn't it?

I was rooting around for examples of wholesale plunder, whereby an entire tune was lifted wholesale from one era to another to make a musical point of continuity but actually there were slim pickings, the best I can come up with is the Speed Garage remix of "Music is My Life". Most of the time, to return to my earlier metaphor, the quotations are molecular: accelerated breakbeats, klaxons, cut-up samples of gushing Divas, distorting basslines. Generally though they form a musical vernacular, and are not wheeled out to prove lineage. Often the most powerful signals of supposedly belonging to the Nuum are the least tasteful and most maladroit, the samples of T'Pau and the disgusting basslines, musical choices the Middle-classes masquerading as bad bwoys implicitly are uncomfortable with. From the perspective of my argument therefore, and I admit this is a little difficult to sustain, the artist's intent when making music is everything. To use a linguistic metaphor, to speak cockney is fine, for the University-educated to slacken their jaw and double their negatives ain't.

*...though honesty is a big thing for me..