Hollow Earth
Monday, November 30
Burj Dubai
Friday, November 27
Power-cut in EC1
Thursday, November 26
Indian Matchboxes
Tuesday, November 24
Brett Domino
Didaktische Einheit
Sunday, November 22
Calling Out Of Context
Many thanks to Richard and Jamie at the ICA for letting me participate in this. I wonder if Micachu, Charles Hayward (This Heat) or Alexis Taylor (Hot Chip) were as exited about the proposition as I was? This axis is one I'm passionately interested in and to be asked along, well frankly it felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I showed up in the van with my entire home studio (the tiny racked cube - with the MPC's green screen visibly lit perched on top - in the second picture) and engineers Charlie and Manuel proceeded to track out of the back of my Akai into a monstrous Pro-Tools rig (visible in the third picture). The contrast between my tiny rig and the assembled studio was hilarious, I wasn't exactly ashamed, I mean I know what I'm doing and why I use the kit I do, but I was slightly ill-at-ease with three engineers working around me. They were exceptionally cool guys though; graceful and understanding.
All the previous week they had bands to record and the like, up to ten sessions a day of studio mayhem, but in stark contrast I must have seemed rather like Ferdinand The Bull who just wanted sit quietly in the shade and smell the flowers. I think in fact they were greatly relieved when I opted to sit in the adjoining room and slice up samples for the best part of four hours.
The idea was that people were able to come in and inspect what I was doing and throughout this first part of the day people walked around my room. I sensed too that people were coming and going behind me, some resting on the sofa and listening to the track I was putting together. Actually I was too focussed on what I was doing to really pay much heed. Later on when we were mixing in the adjacent room (see picture three) people became more brazen, one chap literally standing between us and the desk. Ekow Eshun, the ICA's director stuck his head in at this point too, and, in a situation which bizarrely mimicked my first meeting with his brother Kodwo in the exact same building's lobby in 1996, when I said hello and introduced myself I managed to pronounce his name wrongly. Like his (legendary) brother he also took the opportunity of correcting me. Plus ca change.
Everything came together really nicely, almost magically, from the samples which I had recorded at home the previous night and about three o'clock I wandered through and announced that the composition was finished and ready to track out. I sort of had to speak up and grab everyone's attention as I had rather sunk into the background. I chose to output two stereo tracks of percussion, a stereo pair of voices and a pair of harmony. In picture four you can see how this looked in Pro Tools.
Charlie and Manuel, and I'm not making any claims for my genius when I say this, didn't quite know what to make of the clatter which I spewed out at first. Was I expecting them to loop this stuff up and work it up into a full track? I explained that the things I'm making at the moment tend to be around two minutes long and are succinct but dense. And actually as we all listened again to the track, which I called "Giochi" (the Italian for "Toys") its internal logic became apparent to them.
We worked on the 4 stereo channels for two and a half hours, applying some reverb here (they had some incredibly expensive Lexicon units), adjusting some levels and tweaking the EQ there. I've worked like this at home before into Logic but nearly always abandoned the results. This is because I've found Logic's software reverb, the ridiculously over-rated Space Designer, as well as its Amp modeling tools to be unpleasant-sounding. Patching to an off-board hardware unit and bringing the sound back in was infinitely preferable. We didn't alter the track's structure at all, and I'm sure Charlie and Manuel would agree that what we did was subtle, but nevertheless it put the icing on the cake.
posted by Matthew Ingram # 18:50
Thursday, November 19
Another bump for this...
Tuesday, November 17
Woebot DJ Set - The Foundry - Vinyl Pleasures - 14/11/09
Pylon: M-Train
The Feelies: The High Road
The Move: Fire Engine
John Cale: Helen of Troy
The Who: Bargain
Butthole Surfers: Cherub
The Pop Group: 3'38
Loop: Head On
Thin White Rope: Not Your Fault
Graham Parker: Discovering Japan
Dirty Projectors: Cannibal Resource
The Stooges: Down on the Street
Swell Maps: Robot Factory
Gary War: Highspeed Drift
Pavement: Summer Babe
posted by Matthew Ingram # 11:42
Sam Dancing
Monday, November 16
First Sighting
Friday, November 13
Position Normal: The Radio Show
The Belbury Parish Magazine
Thursday, November 12
The Shoreditch Moustache
posted by Matthew Ingram # 06:49
Wednesday, November 11
Little Miss Woebot
Tuesday, November 10
Matias Aguayo: "Ay Ay Ay"
Prompted by Simon's recent "feeling" column I pursued this record. Actually I have a bit of history with Aguayo. I first came across him a couple of years ago. At that time Jess pulled rank and pointed me at a nice review he'd done in 2005. "Are you really lost" is good but his EP for Soul Jazz which I had just discovered was even better, and I think cruelly neglected. I dunno, maybe it had something to do with Soul Jazz's embarrassingly perfunctory artwork. It was one of my favorite releases of that year.
Then more crossings. On our tenth anniversary last year Catherine and I went to an illegal loft party in Hackney. Marcus had sorted the music out and (I think I'm right in saying) was responsible for bringing Matias over. Manuel did a great set too I remember. I would have been more tuned in were C and I not having the most epic fight imaginable. Lol. Then in recent months Matias contributed a brilliant mix to our favorite perennial hipster's series.
Anyway, enough of the back-story already! In a year almost over-crowded with brilliant releases: Broadcast and Focus Group's "Witchcults of the Radio Age", position normal's "position normal", Micachu's "Jewelry", Belbury Poly's "From An Ancient Star", Roj's "The Transactional Dharma Of Roj" and Dirty Projector's "Bitte Orca" -here's another. If I'm being honest I'll have to profess that this particular record feels very close to my heart. I suppose it's the Post-Modern negotiation of ethnicity that I find most satisfying as well as how it plays so beautifully into a theory which I'm writing up as a white paper for the next issue of Loops. Strict non-disclosure at this moment in time.
There is one particular shadow that is cast quite large over the disc: Argentina (check), Seductive mesh of interweaving vocals generated by one singer (check), Electro underpinning (check) - yes it's our darling Juana Molina. I do, however, believe Matias arrived at his sound in sincerity and there's a stripped-to-the-waist, hard-raving muscularity to "Ay Ay Ay" that gives it an edge over Juana's stuff. His personality, too, is less in the way. Other things I hear are, amusingly enough, all Afro-Brazilian sonix heard through the prism of the West, so here is No Smoke's "Koro Koro", Bobby Konders' "Dub Masai Style", Cultural Vibe's "Ma Foom Bey" and Liquid Liquid's "Lock Groove (Out)" but also (another instance of a view backwards through the prism) the No Wave-inflected avant-dance of Aguayo's fellow South American Naná Vasconcelos "Bush Dance".
This whole issue of ethnicity has been on mind recently as we watched "Gandhi" back-to-back with "Lawrence of Arabia". Both inscribe a very eurocentric approach towards race and colonialism which would probably have infuriated Fanon and Bhaba - personally I feel Lean's is on balance the more sophisticated negotiation. However, in the strictest auto-biographical sense both Lawrence and Gandhi (who my godfather recently revealed stayed with his grandfather on a visit to Surrey as a young solicitor) adopted in extremis the trappings of a culture they were alien to. Historically speaking, theirs was a case of a kind of a precocious Globalism, and while from the perspective of political correctness we might scoff at Lawrence's native aspirations, his free-and-easy approach to what are the supposedly sanctified trappings of ethnicity, he's actually nothing more than a manifestation of the way we all now deal with other cultures.
posted by Matthew Ingram # 09:22
Friday, November 6
Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy
Further to my elaborate whingeing here I thought I owed a debt to the world to report the good news about this book. One criticism I baulked at leveling at the Krautrock film was that it trotted out the same old high canon of artists - I mean, even I'm not so petty and mean-spirited as to expect there to be much live footage of Floh De Cologne, Dyzan or Agitation Free, so I STFU on a topic which is basically dear to my heart.
This book, however, addresses this issue with elan. Wow, they did great! I even managed to at last identify this Liliental record which I was unable to prize from a record-shop owner I was pricing discs for in 1992, and had never seen again since. Simon has this recent habit of mentioning books and records which "mates" have made, well no less than 5 "mates" have contributed to this. Well done you lovely people!
posted by Matthew Ingram # 16:14
Schroeder
Thursday, November 5
Sarah's Story
Wednesday, November 4
Berna
Tuesday, November 3
Illustrated London News Picture Library
Sunday, November 1
The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
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