Heterotopia #1- Dave Swarbrick and Dirty Nappies

Frog Rock

Two interesting posts on Rock In Opposition: a primer from Ed and some thoughts from Alex. So I thought I’d crash the love-in and riff off on a tangent or two…

The Maximal and the Minimal

Like I said, I’m not really up to speed with the RIO bands so Ed’s post will certainly fulfull its primer function for me. I rather fear I know what I’ll find, though: lots of music that’s bold, daring and at times utterly brilliant. And yet I suspect it’ll leave me a little cold. Music I admire rather than music I return to again and again.

I think- ultimately- this is because I’m more of a minimalist. I take great pleasure from the small differences in repetition of a Steve Reich piece (y’know, I read that back and I wonder to myself why I’ve never got round to reading Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition)- whilst great, theatrical, maximalist stuff ends up sounding like endless repetition of the same, even if the harmonics are totally different or whatever.

Perhaps I have what Eno might call ‘frogs eye ears’…

“One of the interesting things about ears is that they work in the same way as a frog’s eye works. There’s an essay called “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” by Warren McCulloch, who discovered that a frog’s eyes don’t work like ours. Ours are always moving: we blink. We scan. We move our heads. But a frog fixes its eyes on a scene and leaves them there. It stops seeing all the static parts of the environment, which become invisible, but as soon as one element moves, which could be what it wants to eat — the fly — it is seen in very high contrast to the rest of the environment. It’s the only thing the frog sees and the tongue comes out and takes it. Well, I realized that what happens with the Reich piece is that our ears behave like a frog’s eyes. Since the material is common to both tapes, what you begin to notice are not the repeating parts but the sort of ephemeral interference pattern between them. Your ear telescopes into more and more fine detail until you’re hearing what to me seems like atoms of sound. That piece absolutely thrilled me, because I realized then that I understood what minimalism was about.”

(from here)

In maximalist music, everything’s moving at once. I’m like a frog watching a million flies- not knowing which one to hook on to and follow to its conclusion.

Perhaps it’s a question of stance. When I was struggling to ‘get’ free improv, my friend Graham (who plays with me in The Exploits of Elaine) told me to visualise the music as a complex sculpture. It might appear ugly at first, but if you keep wondering round it you’ll find a way in and then- whatever angle you approach it from, it’ll offer a thousand beautiful views. His advice worked and, to this day, I love free improv which- in the form of Peter Brotzmann’s Machine Gun or Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz- is perhaps even more maximalist and packed with even more flies than any RIO music.

Opposing the Opposition

There’s something bugging me about the name ‘Rock In Opposition’. It’s snappy- of course- but I don’t feel it does the music justice. As Alex says, some of the music from RIO bands was proof that punk didn’t have a monopoly on political music (indeed, I’d argue there’s a politics inherent in making something that daring- but that’s for another day). Here was creative music which- through its combination of various folk musics, jazz idioms and cultural tropes offered glimpses of a new, creative way of living (I’ve heard enough RIO stuff to know that this isn’t bland, Nitin Sawnhey ‘melting pot’ bollocks- but a daringly new music created out of disparate elements). So to define it ‘in opposition’ to capitalist hegemony does it something of a disservice. This, I guess, is my (democratised) Nietzschean/Stirnerian bent coming through: rather than acknowledge the master/slave binary and try to overthrow the masters, we should try to become masters ourselves. A world of masters! Stirner’s Union of Egoists! Don’t define yourself as ‘in opposition to’, but ‘for the creation of’.

It’s something we were careful to do with Records on Ribs: we wanted it to be a creative celebration of brilliant music and possibilities of new ways of doing things, not a reactionary gesture against a shitty record industry (hence our manifesto). Of course I think the record industry is bollocks: of course I think it needs ‘opposing’. But the best way to oppose it is to be creative; Do-It-Yourself and not wallow in negativity.

For me, Rock In Opposition is more suited to punk. A reactionary music. A negative music. A music that defines itself by what it’s against. From the fun (but infantile ) “what’ll piss off the system?” gestures of The Sex Pistols to Crass’ lyrics. Where’s the space for hope here? Where’s the utopianism? The Clash offered hints of escape by combining some world flavours, but Sandinista (on a major label, let us not forget) is so clunkily done and ultimately falls into so many of the traps of ‘world music’ (a new market for capitalism!) that David Byrne talks about (Byrne and Eno in one post!). The Ex did it far more successfully and- I would argue- transcended the limitations of punk in doing so (does this make them post-punk?).

The revolution will not come about through opposition, but through creation!

*Crass’ communal living and fanzine interviews contained an undeniable utopian element, and I can’t be too harsh on them because a) I fucking love them and b) they were one of the bands who first got me interested in anarchsim.

The Melancholy of Ghosts

Hauntology has always been tinged with melancholy. It marks the distance between the virtual (polytechnics and stone circles in Belbury) and the actual (yummy mummies and wifi’d coffee shops in Cirencester); it lurks in the sunken roofs and graffiti’d stones of abandoned quarry workings in Simon Dennison’s photographs of the summits of the Clee Hills; it’s written large in the title of William Basinski’s Melancholia. Even at its sunniest, it’s always a longing: a longing for the ghosts that lurk under the present.

“Childhood memories fade away/Like voices on the tapes that we made”

That line, from epic45’s Walk Lead to Happiness has always summed up hauntology in music pretty well for me: an attempt to grasp the intangible. Ghostly sounds as analogs for blurred memories. But the very act of remembering these memories (even half remebering them), brings them back to life. If this is melancholy music, it’s a melancholy of fulfillment. I feel brimming with content- sometimes bursting with joy- at this music: as if the vibrations coming from my headphones transport me to utopia for the duration of the album in question.

Yet there’s a darker side to hauntology too. Melancholy isn’t in a dichotomy with happiness- and neither is sadness- but it is more distant from happiness on the continuum. And it’s sadness that’s writ large all over The Caretaker’s new album- The Persistent Repetition of Phrases- a release that’s partly inspired (if that’s the right word) by the effects of dementia:

Slight glimpses of fond memories are endlessly repeated on yellow filmscreens, in the dark and dusty theatres of the human mind, until a loss of recollection occurs, leaving foreign fragments to a puzzle you can never put back together. Overall a very stirring and sad album, and a potent display of the musical uniqueness that makes The Caretaker so relevant.

William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops go beyond melancholy too. Here are pieces of music Basinski had initially recorded in 1982. Recording them onto tape in 2001 he realised they’d been damaged over the years- their initial ideals warped into strange, much darker forms. And then, as Basinski was finishing the transfer of these tapes, the World Trade Center was destroyed. He went onto the roof of his Brooklyn appartment building and watched New York in chaos. Past ideals crumbling.

I’ve long pontificated over this darker side to hauntology, but have been inspired to write this post by the video for epic45’s In all the Empty Houses, (possibly the finest song they’ve written) which has been made by my good friend EL Heath. Here, the memory is of going to granddad’s house. Grandparents’ houses are wonderfully evocative as a child: simultaneously alien, strange, new and exciting and comforting (family, familliar smells, friendly smiles and a crisp tenner from granddad).

Heath’s grandfather died in early 2009 and rather than let the memories fade away, he wanted to preserve the feel of his grandfather’s house. He did so by using 80s analog recording equipment- bulky video recorders and cumbersome editing software. This gives the video a strange quality- a hybrid of 00s knowledge and 80s memories (reflecting the 80s synths used in the song). And it’s recorded on tape so it, too, will one day fade away. Although thankfully, it’s been preserved for now on youtube. It genuinely breaks my heart, this video- the wasps on 1.21 are almost unbareable to watch. But at the same time it fills me with joy. As a fitting tribute to a much loved grandfather I don’t think it could be surpassed.

‘we will give you fat & blood’

A long time ago, my friend (and now housemate) Alex nagged me to start a blog. I did, but I didn’t really have anything to say. I think I wrote one post, about how Alex had nagged me to start a blog and how I always killed plants and forgot about it. It’s probably out there somewhere, preserved in an internet amber- waiting to be unearthed by some online archaeologists and hailed as an example of the nothing-to-say-but-saying-it-anyway vacuity of the blogosphere.

Now I have some things to say but haven’t bothered saying them, so hopefully the same fate won’t befall this blog. For a while, at least.

In the same spirit which inspires one to put up a picture before they’ve unpacked the boxes in a new house I’ve put an unpublished review of an Evangelista gig I saw at The Maze in Nottingham a few months ago below. A gig at which Carla Bozulich sang in the face of my terrified friend Hannah, something later recalled in Wire magazine’s piece on Evangelista.

Truth be told, it’s probably more a ‘reading’ than a ‘review’: an act of Deleuzean buggery of Carla Bozulich’s immense band. I may have missed the point of her music, but I hope I’ve managed to dislocate it into something useful.

Hysterical, Heretical, Transgressive- Evangelista at The Maze

Hysteria: madness of the womb. An insanity of the irrational woman- something to be overcome, theraputised, made to fit into ‘normal’, healthy society.

Only society’s not normal and it’s not healthy. It stinks, it’s putrefying, it’s rotten to the core. In these times it’s perfectly rational to embrace the irrational, perfectly sane to go insane. Old, transcendental modes of thought are no use; we need a politics powered by the injustices of the present- what John Hollway calls ‘the scream’, to power us to a better world.

Evangelista’s singer/leader Carla Bozulich sure knows how to scream, and her band have abandoned transcendentalism: there’s no calculated build up and release of tension here- it’s all of the moment. Songs are subject to Bozulich’s whims- she’s giddy on her heels like a little girl, now she’s staring psychotically at/into/through the audience. The music- lulled improv one minute- becomes a thrashing, throbbing monster the next- anchored by the throbbing low end of Tara Barnes’ bass.

Bozulich sure knows how to sing, too. Her dark, husky voice fills every corner of every soul in the room. Words wreck certainties leaving “monuments, architecture- lying at our feet”. War is declared- not only against the ugliness of the world but against the plastic passions that fill it. On Hello, Voyager! we learn what’s will fill the void: “there’s only one word that hasn’t dried completely in your parched throat”, Bozulich intones- “the word is love”. But this is no hippy ideal- this is love as a terrifying union of blood and hope. This is love that- as Bozulich sings on The Winds of St.Anne- “bursts from our chests”. This is love that can change the world.

It’s a fucking terrifying thing, this love. When Bozulich asks the audience “Love! Can you say it with me?” it feels far safer to say inwardly think ‘no’. But whoever said truth was easy? The title of another song Evangelista play tonight- Truth Is Dark Like Outer Space- is instructive here. Cowards can have their plastic passions- the brave should plunge into that darkness, “buzz through the dark skies with their hands in their pants” and embrace Evangelista’s daring, hysterical future.