Category: reports/essays

Best CDs of 1999

Underworld, Mouse on Mars, DJ Krush, and more

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

1. Beaucoup Fish
Underworld
(JBO)
Take the title of the accomplished British dance trio Underworld’s latest album to mean what you like. The peculiar word pairing Beaucoup Fish may simply be an expression of the breadth of material here. The vocals alone range from the intricately computer-enhanced engineering of the opening track, “Cups,” to the Depeche Mode–style crooning of “Shudder/King of Snake,” to the deadpan spoken word of “Bruce Lee,” on which vocalist-guitarist Karl Hyde intones a mash of wordplay that imitates the digital cut-and-paste methods the band often uses to process its lyrical content. Now, keep in mind that this is by no means a vocal record. It’s a dance record, and as expansive a dance record as we heard this year — replete with sultry, soulful, cinematic, midnight-hour cruising epics (“Cups,” “Push”) and driving anthems, like “Kittens,” which keenly recalls “Rez,” the early, pulsing techno niche hit that cemented the group’s renown. A love for detail threads through the album, which hums along like an expertly coded program, bringing us an iteration closer to the day when machines are fully appreciated as instruments.

2. Niun Niggung
Mouse on Mars
(Sonig/Rough Trade)
A wide-ranging full-length from one of the most hard-to-pigeonhole duos in electronic music — part dance music, part environmental, with nods to everything from hip-hop to chamber composition.

3. Kakusei
DJ Krush
(Sony/Red Ant)
Released initially on Sony in Japan, this is Krush’s tribute to DJ Premier: virtually no vocals, just loop after loop of abraded hip-hop that follows a rhythm skewed like the gait of a wounded animal.

4. Scope
Nobukazu Takemura
(Thrill Jockey)
Superminimalist music that plays doppler tricks on your ears with carefully choreographed patterns of clicks — a blueprint that’s an end in itself. Experimental electronic music has more than its share of pointilists. Takemura distinguishes himself with a composer’s sense of dramatic arc, distinctly Eastern tones and much sonic subtlety.

5. Parallel Processes
Jake Mandell
(Worm)
The album takes its title from computer terminology for multitasking, but unlike much electronic music being produced in this moment of inexpensive CPUs and a flush economy, Mandell’s is a distinctly human effort: warm, humorous, playful, single-minded.

6. The West
Matmos
(Deluxe)
The atmospheric world of electro-acoustic music, meshing the digital and the analogue, gets an incredibly crafty addition thanks to Matmos, the conceptually oriented San Francisco duo, and a host of friends (on, among other things, slide guitar, drums, jew’s harp, and trumpet).

7. Modulation and Transformation 4
Various artists
(Mille Plateaux)
Three CDs of dedication to near silence and vertiginous depth. Ambient music tends to get typecast as sonic wallpaper, and this claustrophobic collection takes revenge on that mindset. It features Terre Theamlitz, Low Res, Mouse on Mars, and Kerosene, among others.

8. Cadman Requiem
Gavin Bryars
(Point)
Another beautiful set of compositions from one of the earliest musicians to directly influence Brian Eno. Bryars is best known for his Jesus’s Blood Never Failed Me Yet, a tape-loop composition from the ’70s that resurfaced in 1993 with additional vocals by Tom Waits. Cadman is a five-part requiem for a friend who died in the 1988 Lockerbie jet terrorist bombing; it’s an achingly beautiful piece scored for voices and strings, with all the hush of a Gregorian chant. Also included are settings of eight poems by Etel Adnan and a piece titled Epilogue from Wonderlawn (1994), a minimalist work for strings. The album shows that “ambient” is about artistic intent, not technology.

9. Royal Astronomy
µ-Ziq
(Astralwerks/Planet µ)
More electronic explorations from one of Britain’s bright young things, composer-performer Mike Paradinas, a close associate of Aphex Twin known for his humor and love of rhythmic barrages and video-game sonics.

10. 20′ – 2000 (series)
Various artists
(Noton/Raster)
Not an album but a series of short CDs produced by a variety of musicians in response to the following challenge: write music for the last 20 minutes of the 20th century. The 12 releases, one for each month of 1999, feature: Komet, Ilpo Vaisanen, Ryoji Ikeda, coH, Beytone, Senking, Thomas Brinkmann, Scanner, Noto, Mika Vainio, Wolfgang Voigt, and Elph. Much of the music is microsonic in nature, more a matter of technological ambivalence than of high spirts, more sine wave than auld lang syne.

Electronica for Dunderheads

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

[Note: this essay served as the introduction to a supplement about electronic music, published by Pulse! magazine in 1999. In print it was intended to be designed to look like a parody of a “… for Dummies” book.]

Letter from the Publisher

Greetings. Welcome back, perhaps. The publishers of the Dunderheads series would like to take this opportunity to apologize to students of our previous editions of Electronica for Dunderheads, which became outdated more quickly than we had intended. This 32nd edition is highly unusual, in that it is the third edition to be released in 1999. We introduced Electronica for Dunderheads (“From Aphex Twin to Bjork”) in the now halcyon year of 1996. The circumstances were themselves unusual, in retrospect; the subject of electronic music only came to our attention after the focus groups we gather regularly at our home office in Livingston, N.J., reacted quite favorably to a Muzak arrangement of a Portishead song then playing regularly in our elevator.

Since 1996, our research staff has struggled valiantly to keep apace of the trends. Why only a year ago, it would have been unthinkable to publish a guide to popular electronic music without mentioning the band Crystal Method, whereas today it is not only feasible, it’s almost necessary — well, except to make a point such a this: Change is the only constant in today’s accelerated world of popular recordings.

Nor, apparently, is history free from the waves of trends that have come to comprise the ever-shifting canon — to paraphrase our crack team of interns. They tell us, for example, that today a mention of septuagenarian French composer Pierre Henry is de rigueur, whereas previous editions had nary a mention of his experiments. (Our interns also tell us that if we describe this 32nd edition as a “remix” of the 31st edition, that will be meaningful to you.)

In any case, welcome to the latest, authoritative (that is, for the foreseeable future — deadlines, paradigmatic culture shifts, the sudden Stateside viability of Eurodisco, and other acts of God notwithstanding) edition of Electronica for Dunderheads. And we hope that if you find the experience enjoyable you will try some of our related, and less volatile, volumes: Musique concrete for Dunderheads, Field Recordings for Dunderheads, Prog-rock for Dunderheads and RealAudio for Dunderheads. Coming in Fall 1999: MP3 for Dunderheads.

Chapter 1: Building a Collection

We assume you have picked up this guide to contemporary electronic popular music because you are intrigued and, being aware of your dunderhead status — the first step toward enlightenment — you wish to be more informed.

Perhaps your ears were enchanted by the percolating soundtrack to some current car commercial, or perhaps the repetitive rhythms forced upon you by a younger sibling or neighbor have proven unusually seductive and, rather than call Mom or the cops, you’ve decided to dance with the enemy.

The first step in building a CD collection is recognizing the area of music that interests you. Electronica represents a broad spectrum. Genres aren’t thoroughly helpful, but they do provide a starting point. It’s also impossible to do them justice in this constrained space, but let’s give it a try. Ambient is considerably slower — it’s almost beat-less — than trip-hop, which is slower than jungle (though some cuts by the musician Tricky are closer to hardcore rock than to the slo-mo sounds generally associated with trip-hop), which is always slower than gabber.

Of course, genre distinctions mean more than variations in speed (measured in BPM, beats per minute). Trip-hop is simply a kind of languorous pop music that learned (in general from hip-hop, but also from lots of other types of experimental and even academic music) that you don’t need real instruments to make music. Trip-hop tends to set voices atop tracks that are made from samples. Jungle, to cut to the chase, is thought to be instrumental (that is, vocal-free) music that borrowed from house music (dance music played at warehouse parties, thought to have been derived from disco) but rid itself of ornamentation. Drum’n’bass is a more experimental wing of jungle. Techno is a faster and, at times, less anthemic analog to house; if house celebrates the people dancing, techno celebrates the machines that people become while dancing. Conscientiously vapid, gabber is, in essence, techno at 78 rpm.

Suggested Listening: for ambient, Aphex Twin‘s Selected Ambient Works II (Warp); for trip-hop, Tricky‘s Maxinquaye (4th & Bway); for drum’n’bass, Photek‘s Form and Function (Science/Astralwerks); for techno, Juan Atkins‘ Wax Trax! MasterMix Volume 1 (Wax Trax!/TVT).

Suggested Reading: Matthew Collin and John Godfrey’s Altered State: The Story of Ecstacy and Acid House (Serpent’s Tail), a British book recently published in the U.S. in an expanded second edition (see, everyone has trouble keeping up); Simon Reynolds’ Generation Ecstacy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (Little, Brown).

Chapter 2: Art & Commerce

If DJs always seem to be grimacing behind their turntables, like highly mindful scientists, do remember that academic music composition is one of the pillars of electronic music, another being experimental media art.

For every wistful, poppy mingling of beats and soothing atmospherics (think Bjork, think Massive Attack, think the Orb), there’s a late-’60s MFA thesis on tape music, or analog synthesis, or the physics of sound gathering dust in a university archive. The makers of electronic pop music today are a disparate crew — former skatepunks, indie-rockers, and new-age mystics account for a solid percentage — but one thing they tend to have in common is “big ears.” Stalk one of them home from a rave and you’ll undoubtedly find closets full of records, tapes and CDs — their own archives.

Meat Beat Manifesto and Squarepusher, for example, vociferously credit Miles Davis’ early electric recordings for the sounds mined on their recent albums. To go back a generation, Brian Eno is similarly beholden to Erik Satie, whose dog-eared “Gymnopedes” are among the earliest examples of ambient composition. Though electronica is, if you believe the hype, the music of the future, its sample-based nature keeps it assuredly rooted in — and rifling through — the past.

Suggested Listening: Brian Eno‘s Ambient 4: On Land (Editions Eg.), a lovely early-’80s work, oblivious to the pop culture soon to foment in its quiet wake; Steve Reich‘s Reich Remixed (Nonesuch), on which nine musician-producers rework the minimalist composer’s oeuvre; Autechre‘s Tri-repetae++ (Warp), young Jedi masters of experimental dissonance and static, but you can kinda dance to it.

Suggested Reading: Paul Griffiths’ A Guide to Electronic Music (Thames & Hudson) is a concise study of the academic foundation of electronic pop music; the 1979 book is tellingly out of print — though, one imagines, not for long.

Chapter 3: The Future

Well, we’re admittedly a bit cloudy on this one, but certainly the future will bring a 33rd edition of Electronica for Dunderheads, with new genre terminology, an expanded discography and bibliography, and, inevitably, another apologetic note from the publishers. In the meanwhile, happy record-hunting.

Suggested Listening: Matmos’ Quasi-objects (Vague Terrain), conceptual art projects disguised as experimental pop music; Otomo Yoshihide’s Filament 1 (Extreme), trenchant snippets of extended, razor-sharp tones, and you’ll thank him for it; Madonna’s Grammy Award-winning Ray of Light (Maverick), produced by electronica legend William Orbit and destined to be aped by other pop stars looking to remain current.

Suggested Reading: hyperreal.org. If we’ve learned anything in the time we’ve been producing the Dunderheads series, it’s that print is ephemeral. This web site is one of the key loci of electronic music on the Internet.

Originally published, in slightly different form, in Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine, May 1999.

Best CDs of 1998

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

1. Permutation
Amon Tobin
(Ninja Tune)
Endlessly listenable, Tobin’s latest full-length mostly eschews the Brazilian native’s bossa-nova penchant for cut-up variations on classic jazz.

2. Form & Function
Photek
(Science/Astralwerks)
Rarified to his fans, antiseptic to his (mistaken) detractors, Photek sums up his early drum’n’bass work with a combination of archival material and remixes.

3. Sound for Spaces
Scanner
(Sub Rosa)
Burbling, threatening ambience pervades this collection of site-specific work by the British musician who is obsessed with surveillance and the shape of the human voice.

4. Music Is Rotted One Note
Squarepusher
(Warp/Nothing)
Gone are the cheeky themes and percussively aberrant drum-machine exercises. Here, Squarepusher rekindles early jazz fusion, at times abrasively funky, at others splendidly spacey.

5. LP5
Autechre
(Warp/Nothing)
A MiniDisc-only release got Autechre (aka Gescom) much of its press this past year, but it was the duo’s latest full-length that truly cemented their seniority in experimental audio.

6. chotto matte a moment!
icu
(K)
Like Tortoise, World Standard and the Tied & Tickled Trio, icu mixes up live instrumentation and electronic skills. The trio’s brand of threadbare party music is sure to please.

7. Mold
Praxis
(Yikes)
Bill Laswell releases so much music, he’s due to produce a gem like this group project on occasion. The CD consists of tidy cinematic cues — think Oval remixing Peter Gabriel.

8. Country Gazette
World Standard
(Asphodel)
Taken literally, “country music” suggests a landscape of sounds. This international quartet mixes various string instruments with select electronic effects to evoke the exoticness of home.

9. Consumed
Plastikman
(Novamute)
Richie Hawkins suggests techno, long the bastion of flailing mechanized dance numbers, as a highly nuanced act of introspection.

10. We Are Reasonable People
Various artists
(Warp)
The Blue Note of electronica labels releases a state-of-the-music compilation. The highlight Aphex Twin squares off with Squarepusher. Also aboard Plaid, Plone, Red Snapper, and others.

The Swing of Things to Come

Electronica borrows techniques that jazz has been beta-testing for decades — and returns the favor

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

To suggest that electronica owes a debt to the past is an understatement. The genre is built, to a great extent, from samples of previous recordings. And no single well of musical history has proven as potable to electronica’s practitioners as jazz.

As both literal source material and as inspiration, jazz informs electronica with a singularity that no other genre approaches — certainly not rock’n’roll, whose star system and song structure bear little resemblance to the electronic scene; not classical, whose experimental wing nevertheless inspires today’s digital sonic explorers; not even hip-hop, which laid the foundation for beat- driven, sample-laden pop.

Jazz, though, informs much of today’s electronic music. Turntablists like the Invisibl Skratch Piklz crew and Mix Master Mike explore a musical athleticism with LPs that consciously recall Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s avant-garde jazz showmanship. Portishead and Tricky have defined trip-hop — essentially downbeat electronica plus vocals — as a field of modern, smoky cabaret. Funki Porcini and Amon Tobin have built entire albums from wildly reconfigured samples of jazz licks and caterwauling drum solos.

And of late, electronica has been reciprocating. When Norwegian jazz trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer was putting together his own material in 1994, he began to explore the ambient-minded textures of Bill Laswell. The result appears on his new album, Khmer (ECM), which augments a midsize electric-jazz band with samples and electric percussion. On tour, Molvaer has added a DJ, who spins records into the band’s sound. Khmer includes a second CD, with remixes of tracks by the Rockers Hi-Fi, Mental Overdrive, and the Herbalizer, who Molvaer befriended at a jazz festival when he lent the band’s trumpeter his Harmon mute. Molvaer enjoys the remixers’ sometimes drastic
reworkings of his own recordings. “I have heard thousands of versions of ‘’Round Midnight,’ he says by way of comparison, “and some of them I am sure Thelonious Monk would not recognize.”

He associates remixing with jazz’s tradition of revisiting a select songbook. “Jazz musicians have done this by playing standards,” he says, his awkward English not diminishing his enthusiasm for the subject. “Remixes are doing one thing that is there, but taking a different angle. And you can also kind of ‘design’ things. Like, if you heard a song and you wanted it to be on the dance floor, you could do a New Yorican soul mix, or you can do a drum & bass mix.”

Arriving from the opposite trajectory, Jack Dangers wanted to inject some jazz into his band Meat Beat Manifesto. So he rented two of his favorite musicians, reed player Bennie Maupin and synthesizer player Pat Gleeson. The results appear on a tune called “The Thumb” on MBM’s new album, Actual Sounds and Voices (Nothing), a tensile bonding of industrial rock and jazz fusion. Elsewhere on the record Dangers sings, “Beamed from the Hale-Bopp through bebop, Do you know what I mean?/ Triggered by a laser beam, listening to A Love Supreme.”

“All this music’s improvised,” says Dangers, whose favorite jazz includes the work of George Russell and electric-era Miles Davis. “You turn a computer on, [but] it’s not going to do anything for you. The way this music starts, it’s not up here” — he points to his head — “not, Oh, I’ll write something down. You slam a beat in, get it going, [add a] bass line, loop it up, whether it’s in a computer or a sample or on a hard drive. If there was a tape machine which did all that, people would have used that 20 years ago.”

Beth Custer is one of San Francisco’s most in-demand clarinetists. She’s best known for her long stints with the jazz-inflected Club Foot Orchestra and the world-beat Trance Mission. Her duo Eighty Mile Beach just released its debut, a dreamy trip-hop affair titled Inclement Weather (Om Records). Besides singing, she plays most of the instruments (clarinets, keyboards, glass harmonica); partner Christian Jones provides the beat loops and produces. A highlight of the album is the song “Red Helicopters,” which opens with a Monkish piano motif; the tune’s analog origin belies the digital nature of the recording process.

“I’ve only worked with Grassy Knoll’s Bob Green and with Christian in this realm, and I’ve never found working with technology a drag,” she says. “Because they are so artful, it never occurred to me that they’re not using an instrument. The only frustrating part,” she adds, “is setting up.”

For trumpeter Ben Neill, the challenges of “setting up” are what help inject personality into his technologically-enabled music. Neill has been developing his “mutantrumpet” for several years, collaborating with DJ Spooky, who appears on his new album, Goldbug (Verve/ Antilles), among others. The proprietary trumpet features multiple bells plus devices that trigger computerized effects, including live sampling and stage lighting.

“What it’s about,” he says, “is introducing improvised elements, which are in a sense imperfections, into the programmed music environment. The electronics become a third virtual player; they respond differently some nights than others. In some cases, I’m doing manipulations on things that have some degree of randomness.”

Though Neill is classically trained, his trumpet’s pop-jazz flavor has proven especially enticing to acid-jazz fans. Improvisation plays a strong role, though he says it’s informed more by American avant-garde composers Terry Riley and La Monte Young than by Miles Davis.

“I feel like we’re getting more into improvising using the computer technology as this mediator between two people,” he says. The suggestion is that not only does electronica have a lot to learn from improvised music, but that this may be the start of a mutual admiration society.

This originally appeared in a special dance report issue of Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine in November 1998.

Best CDs of 1997

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

1. Chiastic Slide
Autechre
(Warp)
Arid yet fanciful, Autechre (Sean Booth and Rob Brown) rebukes the suggestion that machines must be “humanized” in order for them to sing.

2. Autoditacker
Mouse on Mars
(Thrill Jockey)
Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner construct daydreamy soundtracks for everyday life, impressionist strolls through the Information Age.

3. Richard D. James Album
Aphex Twin
(Warp/Sire)
The man of many pseudonyms outs himself with a personal, mostly instrumental record, ranging from elegant contemporary classical to Ween-like pranksterism.

4. Hard Normal Daddy
Squarepusher
(Warp)
Drum’n’bass means staggered, bubbling, relentlessly shifting; Tom (Squarepusher) Jenkinson is among its foremost dealers.

5. Delivery
Scanner
(Rawkus/Primitive)
Robin (Scanner) Rimbaud lifts intimate moments from unguarded portable phones, and ups their emotional intensity with improvisatory de facto soundtracks.

6. Soothing Sounds for Baby, Vol. 1
Raymond Scott
(Basta)
As the burgeoning electronic-music community casts back in time for a legacy to claim, it couldn’t have asked for a more eccentric uncle than Scott; this reissue dates from early ’60s.

7. Lunatic Harness
µ-Ziq
(Astralwerks)
The calypso of the recent future.

8. Matmos
Matmos
(Vague Terrain)
Perhaps the finest debut of the year — experiments in concrete music, sampling, and atmospherics. A minor-key miracle of home taping and sonic construction by Drew Daniel and m.c. Schmidt, aka Matmos. Though the elements seem austere and experimental, all snippets of near-silent effluvia, the results are strangely poppy — at times sounding like like an Oval remix of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Addictive.

9. Bricolage
Amon Tobin
(Ninja Tune)
Like labelmate Funki Porcini, Tobin unearths drum’n’jungle rhythms in the strangest, most familiar places. (Also check out the followup EP, Piranha Breaks.)

10. Homogenic
Bjork
(Elektra)
Few have managed to sing atop electronica (actually only a segment of this album) without muffling it.