Da GobliNN - God Reactor (2020)

Here's another you've never heard of, although to be fair, me neither, so we're both in more or less the same boat even if I'm sat slightly nearer to where the sandwiches are stowed away by virtue of my having been spinning this banger for a good couple of weeks now; or specifically I've been spinning a CDR burned from the download. I would have had it pressed onto a series of wax cylinders, obviously, but I ran out of the blanks.

As a rule I tend to steer clear of arbitrary typographic eccentricity, but God Reactor caught me on a good day and it was on the New York Haunted label, so that seemed like a recommendation. It's your basic dirty old school acid, but as with a lot of stuff on this label, it never quite does what you might expect it to do and ends up going all sorts of unfamiliar places, sonically speaking, nevertheless riding on the familiar squelch and crunch-clap of the form, and with the music swelling in waves, coming and going, up, down, back up again, then right up - both mesmerising and euphoric without looking like a wanker.

In theory we have four tracks, then six remixes of God Reactor, but so remixed as to be entirely different tracks. At least I've been listening to this for a couple of weeks and I still haven't spotted the connection; so ten tracks, for the sake of argument: some familiar acid without, as I say, quite doing anything you might expect, plenty of harmonics and loops and snippets of filtered noise, although not quite anything the milkman could ever whistle; and then the L/F/D/M remix which makes me think of bass music, as in the Miami thing; the May McLaren remix which - for fuck's sake - is the most eighties thing you've ever heard and could almost be Trevor Horn's version of Front 242, yet somehow very much belongs to the God Reactor whole despite itself; and I'm not going to describe every last track, but there's a lot of stuff going on here, and for something to which repetition is so obviously fundamental, no-one seems to be reheating any existing recipes.

God Reactor is why you really, really need to open yourself up to new shit every once in a while. I know that now.

808 State - ex:el (1991)

Ordinarily I'd have no truck with the sort of self-conscious typographic gymnastics which flout the convention of titles beginning with an upper-case letter, but Ex:el looks weird, so just this once…

This probably wasn't the best album recorded by 808 State, but it's the only one I bought - apart from the thing they did with MC Tunes - so it's the one I'm going to write about. I know they paid their dues and all that, and one of them was A Guy Called Gerald, but listening to this in 2018, I can't help think of all those camouflaged knobs who spent the latter part of the eighties impersonating Front 242, scowling and chanting about obedience over the usual sequencer riffs, all wearing sunhats and blowing whistles by the next decade, having decided that all that techno stuff is dead easy and was only what they'd been doing all along anyway, plus the clubs are a lot safer now that it's not just black people*…

I went back and listened to Newbuild on One'sTube so I know that wasn't where they were coming from at all, and yet that's what ex:el sounds like for the most part. It's too expensive, although as such seemed very much at home on ZTT - acid house which Trevor Horn would be able to understand through being a patently better standard of dance music. Mostly it's beats with a series of jazzy riffs noodling up one after the other in orderly fashion - which is what camouflaged knobs thought acid house did, and which I suspect may have been responsible for intelligent house, or whatever it was called - the ponderously shit stuff. Like most things aimed at either the feet or the arse, intelligent is rarely anything like so satisfying as stupid, which is why the best track here is Cübik because it's a great big slab of square wave during which we can close our eyes and pretend we're listening to Altern-8. The thoroughly overrated Björk provides characteristically arbitrary vocalisations on two tracks, underscoring the image of a band pissing about in the studio, trying out stuff to see what will happen; also underscoring the truism that the best techno albums tended to be collections of established bangers - because that's the best word I could think of - and techno artists shouldn't make albums in the same way that, for example, Yes, made albums.

So ex:el isn't bad, but apart from Cübik and maybe one or two of the others - depending on just how many of those fucking things you've taken - it's more or less a collection of theme tunes and incidental music for regional news programmes.

You'd be better off with the real thing.

*: Because the internet is mostly thick twats these days, I feel I should explain that I present this statement as an example of the sort of thing a camouflaged knob who had spent the latter part of the eighties impersonating Front 242 might say. I am therefore commenting upon a fucking stupid observation rather than making one.

pH2 - Gut Acid (2017)

For the sake of argument, let's assume our understanding of music works like language. You're born, you learn to make noises, you learn to imitate words and phrases, and eventually you learn what they mean and are hopefully able to arrange them in sequences of your own composition. I say hopefully because I'm not convinced everyone gets all the way with that last stage, and some seem to be stalled, having no need to express anything much beyond what they can say with a few stock phrases; and so it is with music, which is why there will always be artists who sound more like tribute acts than anything in their own right. It's easy enough to work out why such and such a piece of music has a certain sound, and how to duplicate it, and that's what most people tend to do.

Peter Hope, on the other hand, seems to have a particular insight in so much as that first and foremost he understands what music does, how it works, even before we've got to the instrumentation or the notes. Both Hot Crow on the Wrong Hand Side and Destroy Before Leaving had pure strains of blues and even jazz running through their DNA without necessarily imitating anything; and now there's Gut Acid, another wild tangent spun from a similar understanding, albeit an understanding of something completely removed from pastures in which the Box or Exploding Mind did their thing. As I understand it, Gut Acid came in part from tracks issued as Criminal Face and originally recorded at the height of acid house at the tail end of the eighties, along with more recent material expanding on the same in collaboration with DJ Parrot and David Harrow. So it's vintage material, or in the spirit of vintage material, or possibly both, but the important thing is that it sounds fucking great right now.

In the wake of acid house, as it all turned to techno or went Balearic or whatever, the bargain bins filled with failed acid, records which missed the target because they'd never quite understood what they were trying to do in the first place, imitating a sound and in imitating it, somehow ending up resembling one of those fucking awful 12" extended mixes some Trevor Horn impersonator routinely pooped out for every shit band going. The lesson in this was that not anyone could cut a dance record after all, and certainly not acid house. Gut Acid uses a few of the same boxes you may recall from Phuture and those guys, and there's the occasional non-tune representing the equivalent of a keyboard smash on a Roland TB303, but as with Hope's other efforts, this is a long way from the methodology of Noel Gallagher pretending to be a Beatle, and there is a lot here which you won't have heard before; but what he duplicates, and which he gets absolutely spot on is the feel of acid, the spirit, the euphoric bubble up and surge seasoned with a hint of something dark. These eight tracks pound and hypnotise, inviting even the most sober and drug free amongst us to concentrate on mesmeric glitches and details.

I'd say more but there's only so much point to writing about music, and I don't want to turn into Paul Morley; besides which Gut Acid is one which really speaks for itself, and it's only a few quid so you should probably give it a listen.

Buy it here.

The KLF - The White Room (1991)

My suspicions were aroused way back in the eighties when an interview with the lads in some music paper revealed how they had taken to calling themselves Rockman Rock and King Boy D, just like the rappers you see on the telly, and which seemed to carry a faint stench of trying too hard. At some point I was slung a tape of 1987 (What the Fuck is Going On?) by someone who assured me it would blow my mind, which it didn't, and in fact I thought it was fucking awful. Then there was Doctorin' the Tardis which was also wank, unless you regard everything which makes a reference to Doctor Who, no matter how ham-fisted, as a work of genius. It was big, bold, crass, and populist according to theories set forth in their book about how to have a hit single, but it sounded exactly the same as their supposedly philosophically cunning underground material to me. Finally they became the KLF, most of which passed me by, excepting a version of What Time is Love? which I had on some compilation album, and which was okay, I guess.

Surprisingly, I didn't have high expectations for this record. To be fair, I didn't have any expectations, not really. The above impressions were fleeting, and there must surely be some reason for their popularity, I told myself. The White Room seems to be in all sorts of lists of best things ever, so fifty cents in a sale seemed like a risk worth taking.

Except I get the thing home and find I've bought me a fucking hip-house album, and whilst hip-house may not have been an entirely worthless genre because there are always exceptions to any given rule, it sort of was when you really think about it; and this is hip-house fused with whatever you call music recorded by middle-aged white guys utilising the voice of a black man suggesting we put the needle on the record when the drum beats go like this. Underneath it all are a couple of nods in the general direction of acid, trance, or whatever title it had been given that week. They're decent enough tracks, but as with everyone else who ever knew better through having been to art college, the KLF can't let anything simple work on its own terms and have to throw a shitload of once trend-setting tech at it as a self-conscious distraction from the fact that they might have felt more comfortable rocking out as a traditional Hawkwind covers band. Thus did we end up with stadium house, which in this case can be equated to Trevor Horn's idea of dance music, which can in turn be equated to the proverbial unidexter at an arse kicking competition in utilitarian terms. Naturally the KLF hired a bunch of marginally funkier helpers so as to keep the thing from bearing too close a resemblance to a school geography project, not least being Tony Thorpe of 400 Blows; but ultimately the best which can be said of The White Room is that it isn't quite as funny as Porridge's attempts at house music.

Excepting things involving Ken Campbell and the novels themselves, has anything good ever resulted from thematic overinvestment in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy? I'm struggling to think of anything. It might be argued that Drummond and Cauty eventually redeemed themselves with their worst artist of the year award and the spectacle of Rachel Whiteread puckering her mouth into a dog's bottom of disdain as she grudgingly accepted all that lovely lolly whilst loudly announcing that it would of course be given to starving artists, because it matters that they shouldn't have to get real fucking jobs like normal people; but that came after and as such provides little consolation as one struggles to get through the full, terrible forty-three minutes of this bollocks.

The Art of Noise - Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise? (1984)

It was the timing which sucked me in, the timing combined with the novelty of a record made from replayed samples of existing sounds, something which then remained unknown outside the Fairlight CMI being put through its paces on an episode of Tomorrow's World. Back in 1984, I was obsessed with the Italian Futurists and felt they shared some sort of rebellious impulse in common with the music I tended to like; so when this lot turned up, openly acknowledging Luigi Russolo's Art of Noises manifesto and on a label named after one of Marinetti's concrete poems, it caught my attention; and yet something didn't quite sit right. It might have been some sort of misplaced proprietorial regard of Futurism on my part - these people were cashing in on the thing which only I knew about and only I really understood and they hadn't asked my permission; but also it was irritating how Trevor Horn, when asked about Zang Tumb Tumb, said only that it was an onomatopoeic percussive sound, adding I suppose it's rather Dada.

Next they seemed to be everywhere, and so much so that I heard every single track on this album long before I bought it, which was actually a couple of years later on a wet Saturday afternoon when I couldn't really find anything else in the record shop. By that point the thing had become so ingrained that it couldn't fail to sound good, as indeed it did, and as it still does. It's sharp, funny, and stupid, and it has all sorts of things going on, and it's beautifully produced as you would expect; but I don't know if it was ever important or even particularly ground breaking, as many have since claimed.

The samples were, so I am informed, mostly presets which came with the Fairlight CMI, so most of what Art of Noise did was in the arrangement, and presumably in Horn's ability to make it all sound as lush as a Ferrero Roche advert; because at best what we have here is what Throbbing Gristle would have been were they all nicely behaved Oxbridge graduates, which is why Paul Morley made for such a good fit. The clues are all over the place, not least in sampled bass lines playing what may as well have been Rock Around the Clock and so inadvertently foreshadowing Jive Bunny; and then more recently I rediscovered a tape of the Horn promoting the first Art of Noise record on the wireless, during which he opined:

I think the truth of it is that people don't learn how to play their instruments properly nowadays. They learn how to talk to the music press. They learn how to do their hair. They learn about what to wear and what to say, but the basic physical learning of - do you know of anybody in a group nowadays who is a good guitar player? Do you know if the guitar player in Duran Duran is a particularly good guitar player? In the old days you knew who was a good player, you knew that Eric Clapton [was a good guitar player].

Seriously, grandad, fuck the fuck off. Of course, Morley and Horn were only ever involved in the most negligible sense, at least according to J.J. Jeczalik, but it seems significant that they were able to hitch their wagons to the Art of Noise in the first place without anyone noticing a disparity. Morley dismissed later Art of Noise releases as novelty records, seemingly implying that this one should be considered high art, which doesn't really work. It's great pop music, but it was never art, which, considering how Art of Noise achieved a whole shitload of musical firsts, is quite shocking; but then you might also argue that Jive Bunny did a whole load of stuff no-one had done before.

Nagamatzu - Shatter Days (1983)

When I first moved away from home I was sharing a house with one Reuben, a sculpture student from Ipswich. Happily we had similar musical tastes centred around shared appreciation of a cannily programmed drum machine, tastes which allowed us to present a united front against the third member of our household, a painting student named Kevin who was into jazz and real music, whatever the hell that was supposed to be. We all got on fine most of the time, but occasionally we'd argue.

'Synthesiser!' Reuben would spit as an expletive as Kevin shuffled back to his room and all that proper music he listened to, Pat Metheny or whatever.

Anyway, at some point Reuben slung me a tape of a group called Nagamatzu. I'd never heard of them. 'They're from Ipswich,' he told me. 'You might like them.'

I did, and I kept an eye open ever since, somehow missing them each time they resurfaced - not that they were exactly putting themselves about. So for much of the last thirty years, Nagamatzu have remained more or less that band which I taped off Reuben from where I stood, even as I'd seen the name of Lagowski - one half of Nagamatzu - crop up in numerous fanzines without realising there was an association. When Shatter Days was reissued on vinyl, seemingly out of the blue, I accordingly nearly quacked my pants with excitement. I hadn't even realised it was called Shatter Days.

It's just four tracks, supplemented by a few things contributed to compilation albums around the same time, but Lordy it's powerful. It's also of its time, as the unfortunate qualifier would have it, in so much as I'm pretty sure that's a Roland TR606 I can hear spanking out a typically android rhythm, and as a fan of both Joy Division and the Cure, these are probably the sort of bass lines I would have played through my flange pedal, had I owned a flange pedal; but before I present an impression of something which sounded like a hell of a lot of other backcombed material of 1983 vintage, Nagamatzu put vaguely familiar elements together in a combination which greatly exceeded the sum of the parts. It's not so much that they ever sounded like either New Order or the Cure as that this is what New Order and the Cure should have sounded like but didn't, because New Order turned into some sort of extended Trevor Horn remix and the Cure were always better as the Joy Division you could eat between meals without ruining your appetite, before it went all self-consciously Alice in Wonderland.

Anyway. Other bands - fuck 'em. Shatter Days still effortlessly strikes that fine emotional balance achieved on only a couple of New Order records, somewhere betwixt the sun bursting joyous from the heavens and a vague memory of once having felt like slashing your wrists at a bus-stop in Huddersfield, a sort of bitter-sweet euphoria for want of a less comical description. What seems astonishing is that they achieved such an effect by such apparently minimal means, chugging bass riffs and just a couple of notes with which to render something that essentially does the same job as Michaelangelo's Creation of Adam. This one really is a masterpiece.