Guest appearance on the forthcoming Luga record

Earlier this year I wrote and recorded a guest vocal for the next Luga album. Both the track and the album are called Behind The Lights and will be out soon on Distant Noise Records.

Lewis approached me regarding doing a vocal, and I gladly accepted – it was actually the first time any other band had asked me to do a guest appearance, something I had been hoping to be asked to do for ages.

The backing track that he sent me instantly hooked me. For some (probably entirely subjective) reason synth melodies and type of rhythm used put me in mind of Tangerine Dream’s soundtrack for the film “Firestarter” (one of my favourite movies as a teenager) – a nice nostalgic feeling which ensured that I immediately felt at home “in” the piece.

I recorded a version of this vocal in about half an hour – and then spent about six weeks worrying that it was unfinished and generally not good enough. Thankfully Lewis’s positive response helped me overcome my natural doubts.

If you’re interested in having a listen, there are some tracks available to stream in Soundcloud format at Luga’s website: http://lugamusic.wordpress.com/

Sarah Palin. She’s a card.

Leaving aside the content for just one second, spare a thought for the poor ghostwriter who had to drum this one up.

Talk about treading a fine line.

On the one hand, she speaks like an idiot; you couldn’t print what comes out of her mouth because it wouldn’t make any sense.

On the other hand, you can’t tart it up and make it sound academic because it would then be obvious it had been scripted for her.

Getting the right balance must the hardest of political balancing acts.

So – think on’t! http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/dec/09/sarah-palin-obama-boycott-copenhagen

A slip into entropy?

This one quoted from Simon Reynold’s article on The Guardian website. Such a perceptive and accurate article, which the last paragraph (not quoted here) ruins slightly (I don’t agree with the conclusion). But nevertheless, this bit is excellent:

The fragmentation of rock/pop has been going on as long as I can remember, but it seemed to cross a threshold this decade. There was just so much music to be into and check out. No genres faded away, they all just carried on, pumping out product, proliferating offshoot sounds. Nor did musicians, seemingly, cease and desist as they grew older; those that didn’t die kept churning stuff out, jostling alongside younger artists thrusting forward to the light. It’s tempting to compare noughties music to a garden choked with weeds. Except it’s more like a flower bed choked with too many flowers, because so much of the output was good. The problem wasn’t just quantity, it was quantity x quality. Then there was the past too, available like never before, competing for our attention and affection. The cheapness of home studio and digital audio workstation recording, combined with the wealth of history that musicians can draw on and recombine, fuelled a mushrooming of quality music-making. But the result of all this overproduction was that “we” were spread thin across a vast terrain of sound. That’s why, if you look at the end-of-year or end-of-decade polls across the gamut of music magazines, there’s so little overlap. If even a relatively non-diffuse community like Pitchfork could only find its centre around records that came out in the early years of the noughties, it suggests that the culture-wide slide into entropy is speeding up.

This idea is actually addressed in one of the Pitchfork top 10 [album's of the decade] commentaries, on Arcade Fire’s 2004 album Funeral, which is their No 2 album of the decade. Ian Cohen writes: “Whether it’s due to increasingly fractious listening habits or the increased ability for dissenters to be heard, Funeral keeps on feeling like the last of its kind, an indie record that sounded capable of conquering the universe and then going on to do just that.” Pinpointing the blogosphere’s greatest liability (there’s no cool or ego-burnishing value to be generated from agreeing with other people) Cohen further notes that “the consensus hyperbole that met Funeral resulted in any record that threatened to reach that level becoming met with severe scrutiny or even outright derision”. He concludes, wistfully, that “still, we wonder if there will ever be anything quite like Funeral – something tells me that as music becomes even more readily available to us in the next decade, we’ll still go through it all in the hopes we can find something with the unifying force and astounding emotional payload that only albums like Funeral can provide”. What Cohen is saying here suggests that my two interpretations of Pitchfork’s slant to the early noughties may actually be more closely related than I’d thought: that musical value and consensus are intimately connected.

A million tiny audiences

I’m currently in the process of doing some serious writing on musical and media trends in the Noughties. Over the next few weeks I shall re-posting here (i.e. stealing) huge chunks of other people’s writing on the subject. This is from Alex Petridis’s review of the Noughties and chimes with a lot of my current thinking on the subject.

The UK innovations frequently seemed the best; yet, despite predictions to the contrary, virtually none of them crossed over and really made a dent beyond the specialist market. With a couple of exceptions (there’s an argument doing the rounds that a track by Britney Spears, of all people, bore a dubstep influence), none of them have impacted much on the way pop music sounds, in the way acid house or trance did. Dizzee Rascal and Tinchy Stryder began their careers rapping on east London’s grime scene, but they only really became household names when, for better or worse, they abandoned grime’s thrillingly edgy clatter and starting making commercial pop-rap.

Perhaps grime and dubstep were simply too abrasive and strange to be successfully watered down for mainstream tastes. Instead, they were big on the web. For all the talk of the MySpace-assisted success of Arctic Monkeys or Lily Allen, it’s hard not to think that one of the web’s biggest effects might actually be the opposite of the kind of will-of-the-people surge that powered those artists into the limelight. Instead, the net might have made music a more scattered, microcosmic experience, where a wealth of blogs and messageboards mean that anything, no matter how recherche, can find an audience – just not a stadium-filling, platinum-selling one.

In the future perhaps every artist will be famous for 15 comments. And perhaps we’ll never see mass movements like punk, Britpop or rave again, nor the kind of rupture in mainstream tastes that would baffle a time-travelling Top of the Pops viewer. It might not be the sort of progress we’re used to, but it would be progress nevertheless.

One little distraction…

…was all it took. A moments’ lapse of concentration, and the gorgeous melody I had in my head all morning got consigned to the great Recycling Bin in my head, never to return.

When, oh when, will I learn to take my Dictaphone with me everywhere I go?

Balls.

Okay, so…

…the verdict on Elizabeth Fraser’s debut solo single, “Moses”.

First things first: no, it’s probably not the most groundbreaking release ever. BUT:

1. The Spaceland mix is worth its weight in gold. I normally think people who say this kind of thing are fools, however: I really think it could have been the A-side;
2. I’ve been waiting 12 years for her to release something under her own name, so that’s a lot of hard-to-satisfy anticipation;
3. Judging by the tone of the recent Guardian article (below), she needs a lot of encouragement to release anything these days. So, buy it, if you can – hopefully the fact that it’s nearly sold already out will spur her on to release more…
4. It features a comedy accordion.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/nov/26/cocteau-twins-elizabeth-fraser-interview

riverrun

Earlier this year I finished an album of ambient music, which I have been working on (on and off) for about fifteen years.

I will be releasing this music as a side project called riverrun, named (for symbolic and allusive reasons) after the first line of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.

I have set up a Myspace page for the project, where you can hear some of the tracks. It is http://www.myspace.com/riverrun-danielland

Sometime next year, when things relating to the Daniel Land & The Modern Painters album have settled down a bit, I’m hoping to put the riverrun album out on a small label. 

In the meantime, you can download a single from it – for free – from Brin Coleman’s ambient netlabel, BFW Recordings: http://www.bfwrecordings.com/releases/riverrun-HamworthyCommon.php

Touchstones

• Fellini’s “Amarcord”
• The night crickets of Ghana
• Gazing at old maps
• Sticks and stones
• He Loved Him Madly
• Monolith/stereolith
• Repeat echoes connoting rectilinear spaces
• Versions of the present that we suspect run parallel to the one we have agreed to live in

What record am I listening to?

The intellectual values embodied in music

At some level, most people intuitively understand that music embodies and implies a set of philosophical beliefs, and that the decisions an artist (or listener) makes are bound up with (and inextricable from) those personal beliefs.

In my experience, this tends to be a profoundly controversial idea – one which, when mentioned, tends to elicit responses along the lines of “You’re thinking about it too much”. There are probably many reasons for this, the main one being that people would prefer to believe that their taste decisions are purely a matter of personal choice.

But the idea that taste-related decisions embody philosophical beliefs is not nearly as intellectual an argument as it sounds. It is actually quite a common thought process, which many of us have. It’s easily recognisable when viewed in slightly different terms.

The very fact that you a reading this, means that you know who I am, and that presumes that you are either a friend of mine (who shares some of my important personal values) and/or that you are engaged in a relationship with my band’s music (which again assumes that we share some of the same musical values). So I can assume some things about you.

Firstly, you will probably be in your twenties or thirties, and about half of you will have been to university, where you would have studied a subject in one of the cluster of humanities subjects. You will probably imagine yourself to be of above average intelligence, and would probably not be too concerned about making money (although it’s always nice to have some).

Also, and this is important, a majority of you will be somewhat suspicious of mainstream popular culture in one way another – i.e. your taste decisions will be in some ways oriented against the mainstream. I can also assume that what little mainstream culture you enjoy (however grudgingly) you will probably regard as a kind of guilty pleasure. In general, you prefer your films intelligent (probably subtitled) and your bands on minor labels. A smaller percentage of you may have a penchant for collecting things on vinyl (regardless of whether you have a working vinyl player!) and you secretly find it disappointing when a band you’ve followed for years breaks into the mainstream and starts making “bland” music.

How do I know this? Well, it’s natural isn’t it? You wouldn’t be here reading this if you didn’t meet some of those conditions, the fact that you know who I am means that you probably get a lot of your cultural information from outside the mainstream media sources. You like to hunt for things, that’s how you know who I am. The rest follows.

I am not trying to build up a profile of you for demographic or marketing purposes; I a merely using this as an illustration of my second point, one that (now we’re acquainted) I consider I can make without offending you. In order to make this point, I need you to answer me one thing, and honestly. When you meet someone for the first time (i.e. in a bar, or in work) – do you find yourself a little disappointed in them when they confess to liking a very popular aspect of culture, such as The X Factor, soap operas, or the latest Hollywood blockbuster? This is a reaction I have myself, if I am honest.

But where does that sense of disappointment come from? The easy answer is to say, “Well, I would know for their answer that I don’t have anything in common with that person”. But that’s unsatisfactory. Answering “It proves that I wouldn’t have anything in common with them” reveals an underlying assumption that the taste decisions a person makes directly reflect the kind of personality that they have.

This doesn’t have to be snobbish by the way, because it can just as easily work the other way round too – an X-Factor lover might find somebody “cultured” to be boring. Both perspectives are equally valid.

In my own particular case, the sense of disappointment that comes over me when (for example) an otherwise charming and good looking potential date reveals that he enjoys popular culture, reveals an aspect of my personality that equates popular culture with a cluster of other values which I find generally distasteful. So, “Mass produced culture” equates with things like “Dumbing down”, “Clichéd”, “Over-produced”, “Hollywood”, “Celebrities” and so on – a bundle of values and ideas which represents that which I DON’T like about culture.

Of course, we define ourselves as much by who were are as by what we are not; my response reveals that I define myself as much as a person AGAINST the values of mass-produced culture as one that is for the values of independent music. In a situation where someone confesses to being a fan of popular culture, I am disappointed because their taste decisions connect with a bundle of intellectual ideas that I find distasteful, those kind of “cultural tracers” or what I have taken to calling the “shadow values” embodied in culture.

Almost everyone believes this on some level. So I am not sure why this has been such a controversial idea. Almost everyone feels that the cultural decisions they make reflect something quite profound, or should I say fundamental, about their personality. And it’s widespread: you only need to look at last year’s widespread attempts on social networking sites to prevent the X-Factor cover version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah from becoming the Christmas number one to see that people are prepared to militantly organise themselves to fight for their taste decisions. On some level we intuitively sense that our taste decisions embody our most deeply held beliefs and that there is something of crucial importance going on within them.

Since writing this, I have found an interesting article which I think bears some relevance to this topic: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2004/oct/05/popandrock.conservatives2004

 

Article on shoegaze music

Can’t remember if I ever posted this; this is an article that I wrote on the history of shoegaze music which was published in a couple of places online.

In 1998 I was so out of touch with guitar music that when a friend loaned me a copy of the Cocteau Twins Milk & Kisses, I thought it was quite a ‘normal’ Indie record. It took me a few repeated lessons to see what the fuss was about – and even then, I would naively put the record on at parties, expecting people to get excited about it (most people were listening to things like Black Grape and the Manics). In contrast, I had grown up listening to things like Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, and Brian Eno, and I had been making pulseless, guitar-less ambient music for five years, so I was not well versed in guitar music at all. I suppose I also found the guitar itself somewhat suspect, redolent of too much posturing and a kind of machismo I couldn’t identify with; I liked music that floated.

Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie was the first person I ever heard who could make a guitar float, and this was such a revelation to me that I pretty much listened to nothing but the Cocteau Twins for the next three years. It consumed me. But in some ways I was still living in a bubble – not having ever been in to popular bands, I really new nothing about the recent history of popular music, and I did not even hear the term “shoegaze” until 2001. At this time I was in a long distance relationship with someone who was the biggest shoegaze fan, and he slowly hooked me on it via a series of compilation cassettes (cassettes: almost unthinkable now in an age where people send music to each other via email). I wasn’t very impressed with much of what I heard on these tapes, but what surprised me as I did my research into these bands was how big this scene was, how totally it dominated the scene for more than a year, like Grunge which had followed it. I knew lots about Grunge, how come I had never heard of shoegaze?

Of course, by the time I got around to hearing about “shoegaze” it was deeply, deeply unfashionable, and something of a dirty word in the United Kingdom. As a 2007 Guardian article on shoegaze says, it was “A byword for naffness and overindulgence” and “A type of music that Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers had said he ‘hated more than Hitler’.” As a newcomer to the genre, ten years after the fact, I could see a certain amount of truth in this. Having not grown up with it, and having no nostalgic connection to it, I was able to make reasonably sound judgements about the musical quality of some of the shoegaze bands. Ride seemed weak to me, the material not strong enough for the band’s talents as performers. Chapterhouse were a flash in the pan – a couple of great singles, great production, but the remainder totally useless. Swervedriver were surely a joke. My Bloody Valentine: unquestionably excellent after Isn’t Anything; everything before it was crap.

And so it went. After much resistance I loved early Verve (I didn’t bother to listen to the tape for ages; I was expecting Urban Hymns) and my ears pricked up totally when I heard Slowdive, undoubtedly the best of the post-My Bloody Valentine shoegazers. If I hadn’t heard Slowdive when I did, I probably wouldn’t be in a band now, because few records have caused me to reassess my views as much as Just for a Day. Don’t get me wrong, I would never argue that it is a classic album, it’s probably not even the best thing that Slowdive did (many purists would say Souvlaki is that) – no, what Just for a Day showed me that it was possible to fit that kind of floating, ultra-ambient, Guthrie-esque guitar within the confines of “real” song – i.e. a song with a melody, English words, and a pretty normal male voice. Just for a Day is the most spangly and textured of all shoegaze records, and yet it’s also got some of the strongest songs – that was the biggest revelation for me; like most revelations, it was the most blindingly obvious thing to do, I had just never thought of it. And I have done very little except this since.

When I started making shoegaze music, I was unaware that there was a massive new-wave of shoegaze emerging, starting in the states and filtering over to the UK. In fact, during the five years or so that it took me to get a band together I almost lost faith with shoegaze – the occasional treats in the right dirwection from artists like Sigur Ros and Ulrich Schnauss not enough to sustain me. The scarcity of new shoegaze music made the soundtrack to Lost In Translation a bona-fide cause celebre, being as it was made up almost exlcvusiverly of shoegaze music and featuring the first new compisitionbs from Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine in over a decade.

t wasn’t at all clear to me how big this movement was until I heard Ulrich’s DJ set at The Big Chill festival in August 2007. He played probably twenty of the best shoegaze tracks I’d never heard, bands that I had never heard or heard of, and I couldn’t believe that this stuff was out there already.

Almost at once it seemed to me as if shoegaze was everywhere, influencing everyone, and it seems socially acceptable to like it and to admit to being influenced by it. Shoegaze seems to have escaped the “dirty word” status of old. Even though it still bemuses some critics, there is no doubt that there is a much more receptive climate to shoegaze now, something that I am sure My Bloody Valentine (probably the most improbable reunion of recent times) are savvy enough to realise (a reunion in the late 90’s would have been unthinkable). And I think it’s a testament to how far the genre has come that the term shoegaze is applied to acts as varied as (to pick two random examples) Auburn Lull and Amusement Parks on Fire, bands who to all intents and purposes are polar opposites of each other. I suspect that this is because the term “shoegaze” has passed out its original, specific, meaning (Thames Valley Indie bands in the early 90’s) and become a synonym for a particular approach to sound – one that has global resonances and many ways of applying, much as the term “Ambient” originally meant something very specific (Brian Eno’s environmental music) but has since grown and evolved into many different areas.

With the benefit of hindsight we can see that the early shoegaze records of the 1990’s were really seeds that took about a decade and a half to grow. Recent film soundtracks (Mysterious Skin; Lost in Translation) and creditable artists (Ulrich Schnauss) might have speeded shoegaze’s return, but historical factors also play a part: people connect more with dreamy music at times of word crisis – note for instance how psychedelic music flourished during the Vietnam War. There are many similarities between that time and this, actually, as we enter the sixth year in what becomes increasingly evident is an unwinnable, unpopular war in Iraq. Under these conditions (as Ulrich Schnauss pointed out in the same Guardian article mentioned earlier) psychedelic escapism is a major part of shoegaze’s appeal; or as James Chapman, leader of Mercury prize nominated Maps, says, “It offers a much more profound way of trying to cope with a bad world… offering hope rather than breaking your guitar and shouting ‘fuck you!’”