music post again

RIP Malcolm McLaren. You were often ludicrous and incompetent, but you were important.

McLaren grew up in Stoke Newington (shout-out to my ‘hood!), and his mother reportedly had an affair with Charles Clore “the man who bought Selfridge’s”. (When I read that, suddenly a light goes on in my head – he must be the Clore who many university buildings are named after!)

Here are some of McClaren moments:

Bow Wow Wow – C30 C60 C90

Bow Wow Wow were manufactured to sell new romantic clothes, but they’re the still the perfect post-punk act. The tribal drumming motifs get me bopping around every time. (I love that whole tribal drumming phase on the Early Eighties – Ants, Creatures, etc.) A constantly retightening spring of energy.

Annabella Lwin has super-awesome style also – we used her on the front of a Black Plastic flyer.

Bow Wow Wow were formed after McLaren pinched some of the members from Adam and the Ants.

Malcolm McLaren – Double Dutch

I have fond members of skipping over the skipping rope to this at the Eighties Night at Whitby Gothic Weekend. Well, I say, ‘skipping’, I mean tripping over once and giving up.

And of course…

Sex Pistols – Anarchy in the UK

video post – electro, industrial, new beat

Here are some things I’ve been listening to in the last couple of days, some disciplined music.

The Human League – The Black Hit of Space

“It got to number 1, then into minus figures…” Chilling synths taking over the universe.

Cabaret Voltaire – Do the Mussolini (Headkick!)

Here’s a second selection from Sheffield. Extremely simple refrains complexified with interference.

DAF – Der Mussolini

As we’ve had one industrial/new wave classic mentioning Mussolini we might as well have the other. (Someone seems to have put this video together for Youtube!) The slightly unspooling then re-quickening backing riff just keeps pulling you back in.

Severed Heads – Dead Eyes Opened

Beautiful frosty electro track. I can’t do it on a video, but in Belgium it’s played at 33rpm+8 (rather than 45) to make it into ‘new beat’. (I find it difficult to make myself do that anyway, though… my DJing instincts generally push me faster, rather than slower!)

A Split Second – Flesh

Fully Belgian new beat classic on proper industrial label Wax Trax. Again, this one is supposed to be slowed down to 33+8.

Ellen Allien – Send

Cold minimal techno from the incomparable Ellen Allien. Whiplash percussion and a slowly approaching riff, echoing up and down the octaves.

Simian Mobile Disco – 10000 Horses Can’t Be Wrong

Perfect staccato beats, degenerating towards the centre.

Kraftwerk – Pocket Calculator

This is the version off The Mix. Kraftwerk constantly re-update their own music, perfecting and perfecting. This one is very Underworld-y.

Underworld – Cowgirl

I sometimes think that Underworld just sound like all of music, in its entirety, with the texture reorganised. So many sounds.

the hummadruz

This morning, as I walked to work, spring seemed to be around (despite the grey). Something about the air changes at this time of year. It’s lighter; less against you. On Sunday, after C. and I had been to visit his parents, we walked in the countryside. C.’s parents live in the interstices between the London, Hertfordshire and the countryside. You take a bus from Cockfosters, so it’s on the tube, but just opposite their front door is a field where you can walk and walk. If you turn left at the corner of one of the fields you can walk across to the stone needle statue in the grounds of my university – so strange that C. grew up just adjacent to the place where I’ve spent so much of the last decade.

C.: “That’s the field where C. shot T.”
I look at him quizzically.
“I mean, in the video.”
“It’s nice that there are places you can walk around with a replica weapon in London and not get arrested… I suppose.”

We spoke of the year to come, the summer progressing towards us. Long afternoons lying on the grass and listening to aeroplane noises. C. suggests this is not, in fact, aeroplane noises, but the hummadruz. At first I think this is just some nonsense (I mean, ‘hummadruz’, how made up does that sound?) but further research reveals this to be a Fortean phenomenon preceding frequent air travel. Even more delightfully, there isn’t a conclusive reason for it.

I always tend to be heartened by hearing of inexplicable things. Things that resist easy schematisation seem more real somehow (and give me hope that everything isn’t just subsumed by the capitalist system). The optimism of earthquakes and the eventual heat-death of the sun.

pro-crastination

It’s astounding how productive one can be when one has an essay due. Never otherwise is my house so clean and tidy. I can be bothered to go out and flyer for my club nights when I should be reading (or vice versa, depending on how much I don’t want to do one or the other). Perhaps next I will alphabetise my socks. I discovered there is a blog promoting this as healthy – Structured Procrastination. One needs to construct the series of things that need to be done so that the important ones are eventually acheived. Careful administration, rather than eradication, is the attitude one should hold towards procrastination. Phew.

I am, of late, having urges to become accomplished. I spend most of my time at work looking at websites for tango classes, life drawing classes, cookery courses, that sort of thing. I’m extremely discouraged with university at the moment and am seeking to improve myself in other ways.

It’s one of the curses of wishing to be a renaissance person (awkward, clunky phrase, ugh) in the schematised capitalist system. One can only become a low-paid admin drone with an excellent line in dinner party conversation.

mew mew

Fashionable young person’s recreational substance ‘meow meow’ being sold as plant food to evade licensing has a historical precedent, as I discovered in my reading yesterday:

[on the 1729 banning the sale of gin without a licence] “They responded by inventing a vending machine that was fondly known as ‘puss and mew’. It worked like this: a customer approached the machine and said, ‘Puss’. Behind the machine was concealed a vendor who responded with, ‘Mew’. Out came a drawer and into it the customer deposited a few coins. No sooner was this done that the vendor snapped back the drawer, only to push it forward a few moments later, this time with a dram of gin.” Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason, Jessica Warner

Debbie Harry – Backfired

I was reminded today of this fantastic Chic production song by Debbie Harry. Not being able to find it on Spotify, I went to YouTube it. Amazingly, the video turns out to be by H R Giger! Should be awesome, right?

This video illustrates why I think movie-makers should be really careful with new production techniques (such as CGI). Until they’re sufficiently developed, they can look really lame.

police reading

I’m reading Deleuze and Guattari again; Anti-Oedipus. I’m really quite hostile to D&G, but in a way that makes me feel inadequate; I am the micro-fascist police reader, imposing all my captures on things. It’s not that they’re wrong, it’s that I take the place of the behaviours they oppose. Neurotic, controlling.

I’m not sure how much I understand… the disorganised style makes it unclear. I tried to pin down what I thought was an argument in seminar the other day, but Professor A mocked me, told me I wasn’t following and sent me away to read Difference and Repetition. “You haven’t read it? But what have you been doing, all these years? What on EARTH have you been doing?”

What indeed. Does everyone have more time to read and capacity to concentrate or are they just better at hiding their ignorances?

higher education cuts

It’s not looking good for the future of higher education in this country. Peter Mandelson offers no comfort to academics.
Nice to receive this message from the Secretary for Business, Innovation and Skills, as the Secretary of Education job was devolved into the Secretary for Business, Innovation and Skills and Secretary for Children, Families and Skills jobs a couple of years back. What is underlined between these two roles is that this is not education, this is skills-training; the family as a key resource to be developed for business.

Commodification & Subjectivation: A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter

I am studying the artwork as commodity at university at the moment as part of a module on ‘Commodification and Subjectivation’, but maddeningly I forgot about this one: ‘A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter’ by Caleb Larsen, which is fairly interesting to contemplate with regard to commodity and subject. It’s a work which constantly attempts to sell itself.

It’s interesting to try to identify a subject at work here (artist-creator? the capitalist system? the object itself?) but strictly it’s all of the above, putting me in mind of Deleuze on structuralism: “Structuralism is not at all a form of thought that suppresses the subject, but one that breaks it up and distributes it systematically, that contests the identity of the subject, that dissipates it and makes it shift from place to place, and always nomad subject, made of individuations, but impersonal ones, or of singularities, but pre-individual ones. This is the sense in which Foucalt speaks of “dispersion”; and Levi-Strauss can only define a subjective agency depending on the Object conditions under which the system of truth become convertible and, thus, “simultaneously receivable to several different subjects.”” (How Do We Recognise Structuralism?, 1967)

H*TR*K

I have decided that ‘HTRK’ (‘hate rock’) can also be pronounced ‘hurt rock’ ‘hat trick’ ‘hot rack’ and so on. Please start using these around trendy post-punk people to make them slightly uncomfortable as to whether we’re stupid or if they are.