Musique Non Stop - BOILER ROOM TV News |  |
- Pinch & Mumdance “Big Slug (feat. Riko Dan)”
- Solar’s Spots
- “The Irony Question is Irrelevant”: Why Nothing is Cool
- Outside the Outside: Defining NYC’s Hardware-Heavy Sounds
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Oh honestly – do you need to be told? Really? Pinch. Mumdance. Riko Dan. The don of Bristol bass, the Subloaded kingpin, the man who’s been making your chest rattle since day. The genre-wrangler who knows skate punk and happy hardcore inside out, can bash out dancefloor bangers like it’s nothing AND make make an era defining grime riddim. And the London City Warlord, the man who’s been adding the meanest of dancehall menace the UK underground since the earliest days of Roll Deep. Do you REALLY need to be told to press ‘play’?
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Posted: 14 May 2015 02:02 AM PDT
 There’s a curious kind of rapid acceleration in both exposure and acclaim that occasionally befalls so-called ‘DJ’s DJs’. They quietly ply their trade on a local level, wholly happy with their lot, before everything just…sorta falls neatly into place all of a sudden. Impossible to say who’s flipping the cosmic switch from ‘unsung’ to ‘ubiquitous’, but the next beneficiary of this heartening o̶v̶e̶r̶n̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ decades-in-the-making success story seemingly has his cards marked. The planets are aligning for Solar Langevin. The dedicated (and thoroughly charming) Cali vet has been busy as of late. Having wowed Dixon on the off-chance, he’s been welcomed into the wider Innervisions family under the don’s patronage; there have been BiS radio slots and instalments in various podcast series, Dekmantel included; he even starred in Trouw‘s farewell run, spinning alongside BR favs Patrice Baümel and Gilb’r. Much of this is built atop the groundwork of the No Way Back series of parties he helmed in native San Francisco and L.A.  Some serious guests have come through over the years: Willie Burns, Xosar, and Daniel Avery rub up against heavyweights like Model 500, Alexander Robotnick, Metro Area, and heaps more besides. It all mirrors the bossman’s impeccable taste and verve as a selector, bridging the gap between contemporary luminaries and their singular forebears with panache. Even the flyer aesthetic tips the hat to camps both old and new. Ahead of his inaugural Boiler bow at our Dekmantel x IR party within Barcelona’s El Monasterio next month, it felt appropriate to tap up Solar and get a keyhole look into his encyclopaedic brain while we still could, given that he won’t be sat still for much longer. Read on for a primer on a dozen curios from his hometown’s formidable scene – or, as the man himself would have it, “scratching the surface and connecting the dots through my influences and inspirations from San Francisco/Bay Area’s affluent musical heritage.” Like we say: dedicated. SOLAR: “My parents were both in the rock’n’roll world with Grateful Dead and such, so that was the kind of music I listened to in the background as a kid. A lot of San Fran bands emerged from both the punk and psychedelic scenes at the end of the 70s. I wasn’t around during that time, but I heard them in my later teen years, and that definitely spun me in all kind of directions: weird psych rock, more left-field experimental, and Skinny Puppy kinda stuff. There was a kinda hard-nosed attitude in the era that branched out quickly, using instruments but leaning on the electronic side. A lot of the selections below are before my time. I cut my teeth attending punk rock shows, then hitting the clubs around the time acid house kicked over here. There were a lot of weird clubs that would play a mixture of this stuff in the late 80s. Just now my girlfriend was looking over the list and said, “oh you have a lot of women in there.” I don’t quite know what draws me to that, but it was prevalent in the era. It’s stuck with me. I’ve had great shows lately in Zurich and Amsterdam, plus four hours at Panorama Bar [alongside Surgeon, Gerd Janson, Mr Ties, Dixon & more] which was obviously a highlight. Making concessions for crowds can be a bit tricky. My sets are never going to be 100% obscurities – there’s tons of current stuff that I enjoy playing, for sure – but I always try and keep some originality in there. I like slipping curveballs in that you might not know; music I’d like to hear on the dancefloor. For me at least, you have to be feeling super confident to pull off some records. I think, ‘oh I wanna play this, I wanna play this!’ but some tracks with sloppy drumming and crazy tempo changes are hard to mix, especially given they’re non-digitised, so they just sit in my bag. But you work around it, and hopefully people give you a little understanding that you’re taking a chance. I understand the fear of fucking up, I really do get it, but there’s just so many people playing it safe… There’s loads more I’d love to speak to from all over the place – old material outta Canada from Ceramic Hello and Vanishing Heat; newer Krauty stuff from Gnod; the chase scene from The Warriors – but I know we’re crunched for time. So let’s roll with this dozen from S.F.”
Stevie Nicks – “Doing The Best I Can (Long Drum Demo)” [Modern Records; 1989]
“So this is bit of a strange one as Stevie Nicks would seem a little out of place with the rest of the music here. The Sisters of Mercy sounding drum machine, Simon Gallup bassline and Stevie's aching voice on top: my dream track if there was a clean version of it.
She was originally from the Bay Area, and when I first moved to California as a child her voice was always around on the radio or my parents’ hi-fi. I was totally hypnotized by that haunting, raspy voice. I used to cut out pictures of her and tape them all over my school binder. This demo as far as I know is not available anywhere except this really poor quality Youtube version.”
Megan Roberts – “I Could Sit Here All Day” [1750 Arch Records; 1977]
“This was laid down in early ’76. Megan Roberts was a Mills College Center for Contemporary Music graduate, where a lot of the early electronic experiments happened. The track has a very primal scream therapy quality to it with mad drums and crazy synth lines coming in and out. Kind of pre-dates the no-wave/post-punk sound that would soon follow. Definitely not easy listening!”
Pauline Anna Strom – “Freebasing” [Trans-Millenia Consort; 1983]
“I found this record digging at Groove Merchant here in San Francisco a few years back. This record is more of a synth/ambient/new age thing made in 1983. The names of the tracks caught my attention: "Mushroom Trip", "Freebasing"; although she claims to never have experimented with drugs. She explains it "a mind trip without the chemicals."
This was all made on a Prophet 10 synth (built by Dave Smith who manufactured them in San Francisco and continues to build high quality synths here). As soon I put the needle down on the wax I became obsessed going on a mad three year search to find the rest of her otherworldly LPs. There’s a nice description on her Discogs bio, too.”
[Dep Ed – As far as closing bio sentences go, you could do a whole lot worse than the following: “She shares her apartment with Little Solstice – her beloved Cyclura Iguana.”]
Tuxedomoon – “Day to Day (Demo 78)” [Cramboy; 2011]
Minimal Man – “Jungle Song” [Subterranean Records; 1981]
“Slo-mo, sci-fi funk sleaze from some more San Francisco electronic legends, this time in the form of Patrick Miller. This is the kind of stuff I love to put on mixes as I feel the tempo and mood is perfect.”
Chrome – “Distance” [Dossier / King of Spades; 2002 / 2014]
Damon Edge – “Alliance of Hearts” [New Rose Records; 1985]
“Can't say enough about Chrome/Damon Edge/Helios Creed. My mind was blown open from the first time I heard them, and still is all the time. A huge influence on so many levels. Sometimes I wonder what music would be like if they didn't exist. Fun fact: I actually put them on the first mixtape I made after purchasing my first pair of Techniques before I know how to beat-match!”
Baby Buddha – “Little Things” [Posh Boy; 1981]
“Picking the tempo up a bit with some freaky spoken word robotics. Josh Cheon from Dark Entries actually put this and the Tuxedomoon on the latest BART compilation, amongst a bunch of other killer Bay Area post-punk oddities. Definitely something to check out!“
The Vanishing – “Lovesick” [Gold Standard Laboratories; 2004]
“The Vanishing was an SF band that were actually from my time as I was a bit too young to catch the previous artists mentioned. They were always playing amazing shows here and I tried to never miss them as it was always a memorable night. The combination of front-woman Jessie Eva, Brian Hock's primal drums and wild, heavy synths of Billy Bates would always turn their shows into a total frenzy.
Brian and our good friend Tasho (aka Its Own Infinite Flower) do an event together known as Hostile Ambient Takeover which focuses on our influences from all of this crazy music and live contemporary acts exploring noise, electronics, left-of center body-music, and visual performance. We have had some great shows with Hieroglyphic Being, Business Etiquette, Thrones, Pharmakon, Kit n Claws, etc…”
Its Own Infinite Flower – “Cloudburst Of Honey” [self-released; 2011]
“So this is one of Tasho's beautiful drone pieces. I think this was filmed at Bay Area 51, the compound where we host Hostile Ambient Takeover and where Tasho and Brian live and have their studios.”
Kit n C.L.A.W.S. – “Toxoterror” [Gooiland Elektro / Enfant Terrible; 2014]
“Another new group out of SF doing some killer live shows and recordings. It's Joshua Kit Clayton and Brian "C.L.A.W.S.” Hock with their EBM, acid-sludge lurker "Toxoterror". C.L.A.W.S just sent me a bunch of solo stuff that I hope sees the light of day soon. Totally destroys!”
– Don’t miss Solar laying down his wares at our Dekmantel x IR party on June 21st alongside Ben UFO, Makam, Sassy J, The Mole & some more amazing stuff we can’t talk about right now. Head HERE for more info –
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Posted: 13 May 2015 11:58 AM PDT
Late night dancing, in tiny dives and mega-raves alike, is by its nature ridiculous and indulgent. It’s a parallel world where friendships can live and die and major social schisms can be opened up around differences in kickdrum patterns: as Pinch once said to me of the tiny fluctuations in early dubstep: "It’s funny, sometimes those things that are really close to home but aren’t quite what you want rub you up more than something that’s miles away – maybe the [musical] equivalent of years of Protestants and Catholics killing each other over tiny differences in scripture…" And somewhere in that point of tension between the lust for the new and the desire to repeat and repeat a weekend ritual that works ("I want to feel like this forever!"), comes the endless fracturing that keeps our world so constantly surprising and constantly silly.
 Laugh at the macro- and micro-genres that are always splintering off from dance music, though, and nine times out of ten it will come back and bite you in the bum. It’s a lesson I’ve learned repeatedly over the years: every time I’ve been snobbish about any genre or sect within clubland, I’ve been tripped up by realisation of its importance in the continued evolution of the wider culture or – just as likely – found myself out on a dancefloor somewhere, sheepishly realising that it was just straight-up brilliant. And the music scene itself is very self-aware about this, constantly able to bring back anything that’s looked down on and turn it into something that you can’t help but wanting to get in amongst. There’s a dread word that tends to come up whenever genres or stylistic tics get rehabilitated: IRONY. Nobody wants to be ironic, do they? That’s what – spit – hipsters do right? Pick things that are deliberately naff, and prance around being fake and snide, sniggering at the thing they pretend to like. But on the other hand, when you’re on the dancefloor at 3am, who wants a dry history lesson? The fact is that ravers are by nature piss-takers, and generally aware of the ridiculousness of what they do – again dance culture’s peculiar self-awareness – so, yes, there is irony in revivalism, because quite often it’s just funny. The "irony question" is irrelevant: ultimately in that crucial party context dance music either works or it doesn’t.What got me thinking about this was Hudson Mohawke, Rustie, Jackmaster, and a couple of the LuckyMe team throwing a trance and hardcore session with guests Cloudo and Mayhem, done early evening with no advance tickets to feel like the Glasgow underage raves they all came up through. They’d long been planning it, to quote LuckyMe’s Dom Flannagan, "because it’d be funny" – and from the Bonkers-style flyer (designed by LuckyMe’s Eclair Fifi) on down, it is spectacularly funny… but obviously utterly sincere. And no surprise either: how much lovingly delivered tribute to trance and hardcore is there in Rustie and HudMo’s catalogue already, after all?Likewise, look at PC Music. There’s an awful lot of flapping about whether their referencing of j-pop, trance, hard house, happy hardcore, R&B and so on is done out of love or satirical intent – but as I discovered in Texas, "the jarring stylistic leaps, the archness, the refusal to delineate what's pisstake and what's not: this is jumbled, scrappy Britain all over… an expression of something deep and weird in the collective unconscious." It’s the expression of people who’ve grown up with populist but hyper-intense electronic music as part of the cultural landscape, and therefore as part of them. And when you’re in the thick of things, witnessing them rock a party, you know that the "irony question" is irrelevant – just like whether someone is "outsider" or not is irrelevant – because ultimately in that crucial context dance music either works or it doesn’t, and increasingly PC music are showing that for them it does.  So let’s hear it for all the dance forms that I and other people looked down on or looked away from. For Liberator-style "acid tekno" which BR contributor Ian McQuaid convincingly defended earlier this year. For donk: I along with the rest of the south had smirked along with Vice post "Put a Donk on It", right up to the moment that DJ Haus brought Blackout Crew down to London and I witnessed what a brilliantly honed operation they were and what sense they made in the club. For makina, the gritty Tyneside rave-with-MCs microgenre so locale-specific that it doesn’t even reach Sunderland. For blissful jazzy drum’n’bass and broken beat, so often written out of underground history in favour of a narrative that limits London’s pirate radio culture to expressions of "mechanismo" (©Kodwo Eshun), or simply sneered at as "coffee table". It’s the voracious need of DJs to drop something that will surprise and delight by triggering unexpected synapses.For pop-trance, which acts like Cornelia, Strict Face and DJ Paypal and friends, as well as the PC Music crew, remind us has its melodies indelibly woven into generations’ synapses. For brostep: however much you loathe it and laugh at the excesses of 2011, trust me it’s going to come back in forms you never imagined one day. For hard house which gave us some of the biggest bangers of the nineties. For breaks, which is capable of a lot more than you probably think (and, contra one contrarian DJ’s view that it’s “middle-class garage” has had the likes of Brockie, Zinc, Slimzee, Shut Up And Dance and the Ragga Twins come through it and was instrumental in the birth of grime). For progressive house… well, OK, that is 99.9% fucking monstrous, but even this bloated horror had genuine magic moments which you can still surprise people with in a set today.And that’s the point here: this isn’t some hey-wow-everything’s-great screed, this is simply how dance music works. It has always been about the Darwinian force of the crowd, about what works in the moments, and the voracious need of DJs to drop something that will surprise and delight by triggering unexpected synapses, including those in the memory banks. So yes, dance music is full of absolute irredeemable tripe, of course it is, and there are a million tunes out there that deserve their obscurity or derision – but if there’s even so much as a glimmer of something great within a scene or sound, rest assured that eventually some bright spark will find it, amplify it and prove the nay-sayers wrong. So be careful what you sneer at, unless you like having your bum bitten. The post "The Irony Question is Irrelevant": Why Nothing is Cool appeared first on BOILER ROOM.  |
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Posted: 13 May 2015 09:21 AM PDT
Earlier this Spring, Boiler Room brought together a handful of musicians from the L.I.E.S. and Styles Upon Styles camps in a dusty New York space for a 100% Hardware showcase: all live, all analogue, and all artists with a firm grip on their sound and aesthetic. The recordings of Gut Nose, Person of Interest, Certain Creatures and Gavin Russom are available now (hit the hyperlinks), and below is a deep dive into the whys and wherefores of what they do.
Struck by the continued coherence of this specific aesthetic in this specific locale, we asked NYC-based writer Gabriel Herrera to think about where it’s come from, where it’s going, and what it all means. Why New York? Why analogue synths? Can you be an outsider when your ultra-limited 12″s are currency for wealthy collectors? How can a scene that refuses to be defined sustain its identity? Find out, if not the answers, then at least a few even more interesting questions below…
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Genre is a much more confused and confusing concept than it once was. Certain corners of electronic music in the early 21st century have certainly begun to form identities distinct and sovereign from the mainstream, but these remain extraordinarily hard to get a handle on. We’ve seen highly specific styles linked to inanely broad-seeming genre names – for instance, the post-Night Slugs Club Constructions aesthetic collision that’s daunting to label beyond the catch-all term "club music," or the vast range of experimental sounds that get blanketed as "power ambient."The most notable (or detestable, depending on your level of cynicism) of these terms, "outsider house," denotes an impressively robust grouping of producers and labels that have distinguished themselves through a dedicatedly reactionary approach. Embracing analogue hardware – or software that can approximate analogue sounds – has informed a swath of contemporary productions rooted in an oblique mix of house, techno, and noise. Artists at the periphery of club culture are almost invariably drawn towards the centerBy now you’re likely familiar with some of the labels peddling these sounds – Bill Kouligas‘ PAN, Ron Morelli‘s L.I.E.S., and Will Bankhead’s The Trilogy Tapes are probably the most prominent – and their heads, who’ve been quasi-canonized as "outsiders" in a few short years. It’s funny to consider how that often-derided genre name that initially brought many of these artists and labels together in a journalistic sphere is now little more than the punchline of a few Twitter jokes.Yet, there’s an undeniable social and cultural cohesion to the output of these collectives. The mutual interest in DIY aesthetics distinguishes these artists from the mass markets of electronic music and is essential to their ability to flourish peripherally in the first place. As ever, the familiar notion of the "underground" gets co-opted as a marketing strategy by a booming dance music industry, and promoters everywhere scramble to sell exclusivity with a price point to match. Artists at the periphery of club culture are almost invariably drawn towards the centre, especially if they want to play live to more than a cultish local audience.  Members of all the aforementioned labels have had sets at Berghain / Panorama Bar, Ron Morelli has played larger-scale clubs such as Brooklyn’s Output; Bill Kouligas curated a two-week music festival around his label, including performances at MoMA PS1’s Warm Up. In some senses these bookings signal voluntary membership in the club establishment, but on the other hand little has changed in terms of how the music presents itself as independent. The hyper-limited edition white labels are still abundant, as are cassette releases…and the price tags haven’t gone down yet, either. Through an uncompromising aesthetic vision – or maybe a stubborn one – the music endures. What makes these artists capable of earning continued attention within such marginal spaces without getting drawn into the mainstream? It makes sense to consider the artists themselves: as Bill Kouligas points out, there exists "a very false and very seamless narrative of how art and music comes together stylistically and conceptually," which his work attempts to resist. "It is funny to me," he continues, "as actually this approach seems far more honest and organic than artificially attempting to present seamless ‘scenes’ that only exist once the curator, or journalist, decides to." It seems Kouligas might be in on the Twitter jokes as well. They arrive at stylistically linked sounds through diverse – and sometimes perverse – methods.So far, the audience and press have failed to assimilate outsider house into the neatly-organized canon; there is not yet a neat notch on the subgenre belt. And read almost any interview where a musician associated with outsider house gets asked their opinion on the moniker, and you’ll find that none of them answer kindly; with indifference, at very best. These are all, like Groucho Marx, people who refuse to join any club that would have them as a member. In fact, part of what makes artists on labels like PAN and L.I.E.S. so fascinating is how they’ve managed to arrive at stylistically linked sounds through diverse – and sometimes perverse – methods.Take California native and L.I.E.S. mainstay Bookworms, whose analogue setup you can see in the Boiler Room showcase, is a far cry from his early days programming kickdrums using Music Generator on the first Playstation console. Bookworms’ eventual transition to an MPC resulted in his biggest track yet, "African Rhythms." More recently he’s adopted a number of synths which have opened up a wide range of possibilities, like working with label mate Steve Summers – who introduced him to Morelli in the first place – as Confused House. Bookworms' ability to migrate between myriad analogue and digital interfaces, especially by moving backwards down the chronological spectrum of technology, suggests an indifference to production history as a linear thing.  Then there’s Gavin Russom, a lifelong musician with a background in composition and the technical expertise to build and repair synths for James Murphy and tour with LCD Soundsystem. Add to this a discography spanning more than a decade, and Russom’s pedigree admittedly exceeds most of the artists on L.I.E.S. Despite that, Russom's modest 3-track 12" on the label, Mantle of Stars never overstates itself and humbly draws from a wide range of sonics, from squelching acid to spectral horror soundtracks. Having only joined the family this year, his hardware expertise makes his detailed synth psychedelics seem right at home on the label. Hardly formulaic, L.I.E.S. gathers talents from unique backgrounds with the common urge to experiment and dodge conventions. New York’s contemporary history as an incubator for alternative dance music (to say nothing of its history with decades-worth of precursors) has helped to stir the creative conditions necessary to grow a label like L.I.E.S. Without the availability of niche venues like Bossa Nova Civic Club and Body Actualized Center, and semi-legal warehouse venues such as Trans-Pecos and 285 Kent, it is challenging to imagine bringing together producers with similar artistic whims. "There’s nothing interesting to me about the world of digital."This is especially true when so much hardware-driven electronic music resists making its presence focused on the internet anyway, thanks to the aforementioned proclivity towards white label vinyl releases and cassette tapes. Morelli himself has accepted digitally releasing his label’s music with a great deal of reluctance, noting that "[i]t kind of defeats the whole purpose of it… [t]here’s nothing interesting to me about the world of digital." With Morelli’s move to Paris, however, and the label’s recent focus towards artists outside the United States, there has been space for other labels and artists to continue harvesting New York’s underground electronic talent.Styles Upon Styles, an imprint best known for its strictly-curated Bangers & Ash series, is one such label, having continued to showcase new talent from New York’s electronic music periphery. Artists who release on Bangers & Ash must create one conceptual track on side A, with an accompanying club-ready track on side B. The A-side of Certain Creatures’ first release on the label features a collaboration with Stuart Argabright of Ike Yard, a mid-period Factory Records band caught at the overripe end of No Wave. The ease with which Argabright’s vocals punctuate Certain Creatures’ angular rhythms indicate a welcome dialogue with past generations of alternative electronic music in New York that Styles Upon Styles is championing, and in this case, directly facilitating.  In like manner, their release of Gut Nose’s Filthy City also seems to vaguely call upon the past as a reference point for contemporary music, although in this case hip-hop is a more important primer. In its best moments, Gut Nose sounds like DJ Premier instrumentals run through a paper shredder underwater, which pushes it even further past already blurred genre boundaries. It’s some of the label’s most exploratory work yet, and perhaps most indicative of what’s to come. While the current era of idiosyncratic producers making distorted electronic music might resemble the forbearers of house and techno in their attraction to analogue interfaces and the lack of conventional precision in their work, they differ from the parent scenes considerably in collective memory and attitude. Once house and techno were acknowledged as legitimate and established forms of music, they were celebrated; artists made house music tracks about house music. As mentioned earlier, though, most contemporary artists who get pinned with the outsider house label would openly reject it. Somehow, it frees people up from the "paralysis of choice" while retaining choiceThis handful of artists has corroded genre conventions in a way that’s opened up more possibility for a nuance in a musical ecosystem so polluted with taxonomies that they’re nearly meaningless. Somehow, it frees people up from the "paralysis of choice" while retaining choice – and paradoxically returning to the foundational and essential within club music in its use of analogue equipment.If these artists so strongly avoid historicising and classification, will they and their cultural infrastructure survive in the long term? Truthfully, the answer for many could be no: they might just retreat into the background and fly under the radar without anyone paying attention to them historically in the same way that they have for artists who we identify with labels like Chicago house or Detroit techno. They might become actual outsiders, making noise for nobody.  Outsider house, or whatever people will call it years from now, will survive simply because it means something different for every person listening to it. As we all ascribe personal meaning to the art we consume anyway, maybe this belligerently "non-genre" genre might just be the most honest approach to categorisation, and perhaps a scene that flirts with doom and even denies its own existence might be the most perversely viable kind of cultural movement for the information age.
– All photos by Nathaniel Young & Matt Sherman –
– For all recordings of the 100% Hardware showcase, head HERE –
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