Fever Ray x Dummy

Fever Ray / Karin was extraordinary in every possible way.

Sipping weak coffee backstage at the Southbank Centre on a muggy Saturday, thinking about interviewing Karin Dreijer Andersson. A chat about her music seems a bit prosaic. As an artist, she does not have much time for the niceties of the modern music industry, much less explaining herself to dolts with Dictaphones. For one, The Knife , the Swedish electro band that she plays in with her brother, has a reputation for being an outsider act: they performed behind curtains of mist, were rarely photographed without 17th century Venetian masks and hardly ever granted interviews. Musically, the group trod a similarly de/personal route on their three albums, the last of which – Silent Shout – stormed the Swedish Grammies even though it was a dislocation of euphoric trance’s rhythmic template, shifting European house’s home from urban havens to the tundra of the far north.
So, when news got out that Karin was working on a solo project called Fever Ray, it was hard to imagine – what does a constituent part of such a singular band sound like? As it happened, from when lead single If I Had A Heart started popping up on blogs toward the end of 2008, Fever Ray has turned out even more critically acclaimed and artistically fulfilled than the Knife. The album, released on Rabid in March, locked into the terror in the air, delivering an astonishingly bleak and personal take on industrial/EBM, minimal wave, 21st century neo-primitivism and 1980s electro pop.
Thankfully, her stage show, choreographed by Swedish video director and artist Andreas Nilsson, is as extraordinary as the album or of anything The Knife have done. Chatting before her Royal Festival Hall sound-check, for the gig she was playing as part of the Ether Festival of digital art, she seemed light, charming and surprisingly open.

Tell me about the ideas for the tour and the stage show.
Sure. I’ve been working with Andreas Nilsson, who directed the video for If I Had A Heart. He also did the Knife’s stage set design, so I have been working with him for this one. I think we started working this October, discussing what to do. I think we wanted to build something out of the primitive and more primal feeling of the music and as a contrast to that also something very, very hi-tech. We are like five or six people on stage, with primitive cultures face paint and more folk orientated outfits, and also we work a lot with lasers.

I really like the album’s tribal, almost religious feeling.
I just wanted to make something very slow, and something that took time to get into. I didn’t think much before I started about what I was going to do. The tribal feeling or that primitive feeling, you get that feeling when you work with so few elements. I work with very, very simple instruments and beats, and it’s quite monotone – I think it’s very repetitive in its arrangements.

So folk music is a result, not a starting point?
Yeah, I don’t know what makes you want to do a certain thing. I watch more films to get inspiration than I listen to music. I try to create atmosphere more than, sing a song.

Does that cross over into the live show?
I think the live show is a way for the music to continue developing and changing. I think it’s very important for the music and visuals to have the same idea to start from.

It’s almost like you’re offering a three-dimensional experience.
That would be good if that happened. Yes, I think that just to open it up maybe, to continue where the album finished – that’s where the live show starts.

Do you find yourself wanting to limit the instruments you use?
Yes. I think I work quite minimally with as few tracks as possible.

It’s quite an old style of minimal music you play.
I suppose I still like to listen to Plastikman, who is very minimal. In the production, I listened a lot to this Phil Collins track In The Air Tonight which, I think, is quite minimal. There’s very few instruments in it, but every sound is so taken care of, I think it’s very deep when it’s very big, but when just a few things get their full potential, that’s very interesting.

Do you find it strange intellectualising music?
I don’t. I don’t think that is good to do with my own music.

Why?
I work so much with raw feeling and emotions, they are like instant things. I’m not good at talking about my music. And I’m not interested in doing it. I can talk about other’s music [laughs]. I don’t think it’s good to tell too much and I think it’s important for music to keep the possibility to work with ideas and emotions, and if you explain too much, you destroy that, their own interpretation, their own possibility to have their own ideas. It is better to just give small hints.

That’s generous.
We talked about that this morning: What is this live show about? I think we’ve done nine shows together so far, and I think we’ve got something going on onstage. If you come to this show with an open mind you can be part of what’s going on, but if you don’t – if you expect a certain thing and expect us to do it for you, then you’ll get excluded in a way. I don’t think we’re very communicative. It’s important to come with no expectations.

It’s interesting you say communicative – another one of my questions is about the place of storytelling. Which seems unusually direct for you?
You mean the lyrics?

Yeah.
I try to be direct without saying too much. It’s a good contrast to have very physical words and very straightforward words, in contrast to the music, which may be very monotone and not saying very much. It’s also about creating dynamics in between the music and the words.

Is it about the sound of the word?
It can be, that is very important, the sound of the word. Also the meaning of it, but even more so the sound. The performance is also important. How to sing a lyric – with what kind of voice you want to use can change a lot – how you want to say it, what makes it more obscure or more direct with a low-pitched voice or a high pitched voice. Whether you scream it out or whisper it – that makes a real difference. I think I work with that a lot.

Personally, I found what she said about hiding herself behind the ideas and the emotions really interesting. The obliqueness of the Knife and Fever Ray’s performances are not reclusive. It’s construction, not concealment. In the past she has, with that Nordic sense of cost and dignity, subtly criticised the cheapening of music by its licensing to advertisers, and I think that ties in. She sees her take on some of the most ephemeral forms of pop music (Eurotrance, 1980s synthpop) as high sonic art – though she’ll never shout about it. Fittingly, the next project on Karin’s list is an opera, Tomorrow In A Year, about Charles Darwin’s Origin Of The Species. But Fever Ray, in contrast to The Knife, is more than cold artistry. Much has been made of the deeply personal direction of the album. Its themes – the darkness and wonder of childhood, friendship and nature – are direct and clear, from the videos following a groups of children down a Styx-like river to the lyrics on gardening, friendship and dishwasher tablets. It’s the sound of an artist, a Major Talent even, opening up, looking out.

Something that I really like about the lyrics is the constant repetition of nature, particularly the sea.
I grew up on the west coast of Sweden. 12 years ago I moved to the east coast, where there is no salt water, which makes it not a real sea. I have a very romantic idea about the sea. I also really like to read. I don’t really know why, but it means a lot. This wide-open space, the beach by the sea, it’s very interesting.

You seem a little detached.
I just live in the city, where you just look at things.

Tell me about the opera you’re doing.
We started about a year ago. This Danish company, Hotel Performa, asked us to write music for an opera about Charles Darwin. I think what led us to this thing is that they’ve done so many interesting things, they work so much with a mix of performance, theatre, music, film and modern dance. And we have been working with The Knife for seven years or so, and we really wanted to do something else. It premieres in September, so we’ll be finished soon.

Was it nice to get your teeth into something so big?
It is opera in the old-fashioned sense, but we were free to do what we wanted. It is very much a Knife opera.

Was it your idea or theirs to make Charles Darwin the subject?
It was theirs.

It seems a very Knife-y subject.
His thoughts and ideas have been used for very many bad things, but when you start to read his own writing, like The Origin Of The Species, and his notebooks and letters, you hear his own thoughts, you really understand that he was a great humanist. This Origin Of the Species, it’s so fantastic – it’s just all about diversity of everything. It is so free, and it has no hierarchy. That is what we focus on, the original idea. That’s what a performer wants to work with as well, to show how much it is like everything in life and not about the religious aspect. That is also, of course, interesting, but it gets very political if you focus on too closely on that side of his writings. He was a very modern man.

Is there a sense of evolution to the way you work? Have his writings influenced your work?
There is a steady ongoing evolution to everything. And to be doing it for a year it gives you a totally new time perspective. After reading Charles Darwin, you get a completely new relationship to time.

How do you mean?
It’s something so huge! I mean, in one sense, with geological time, it’s since the world started until now, and you have a human’s life in time, that’s also something, and something about now, very contemporary things. That’s how we work in music, with three perspectives, three layers around time. It has been great – I have read his writings, his letters and so on. It’s been a great year.

You mentioned on the album that you’re “very good with plants”. Are you a keen gardener?
I have an idea about myself having green fingers. But, no, I don’t have so much time for it [laughs].

Would you like to?
Maybe when I get old. But that is also something interesting about time and plants. To go out into nature and work with things that have this year’s cycle, plants that come out in Spring, and die or go to sleep, this thing that continues and keeps on going on and on. That’s a good way to be. I think people who are like gardeners are happy.

I heard that a lot of the album was written when you were really, really tired. Are you getting more sleep now?
Yes. Sleep is not always possible, but I try to sleep more.

Is it having an impact on your music?
Yes! I think it is a good impact. I don’t think there will be any more albums like this one.

The Knife’s opera, Tomorrow, In A Year, opens in September. Fever Ray has various European and festival dates over the summer.

The Big Pink for Dummy

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful (wall of) noise-pop from ex-squatter and basically the king of Stoke New. Dummy piece, yep, Next.

“He was stood over me with a needle and mentioned in passing ‘I don’t sleep very much’. I kind of stopped wanting a tattoo then.” Robbie Furze from the Big Pink, a tender, scuzzy band who stand somewhere between the Big Black, Love and GZA, is telling a story about the time he played with his old Digital Hardcore band, Panic DHH, in a vast Berlin squat. He played across the squat empire of Europe for the last few years, and ran a label called Hate Channel with his best friend Milo Cordell, who is also in the Big Pink. “We wanted it to be the most aggressive, pure sonic assault you could take! But noise gets self-indulgent. I mean, where can noise go? Melody is much more interesting and song structure is really, really cool.” This is why they set Big Pink up – a shared desire to make very fucking loud music that was really, really beautiful.

After getting together halfway through last year, they released 200 copies of Too Young To Love last year on their friends’ label House Anxiety, complete with a typically tender and brutal hardcore Dennis Cooper image that their live bandmate Daniel O’Sullivan, who also plays in Sunn O))), sorted out. (Milo: “we got in touch, and he was really cool and let us have it. Otherwise we would have stolen it.”). Since then, they’ve been, in Milo’s words, “playing loads of shows, touring with TV on the Radio, writing more songs , chasing girls, staying up late, basically expanding our minds.”

When we were talking about how played out noise is, Milo jumps in, and points out how many bands on his label, Merok (like Klaxons and, of course, Crystal Castles), started out doing pure noise. “You know, the line isn’t that clear. We still love noise – it’s not like Right, that’s the END, you know? Sure we have songs and tunes, but we’re not no longer an extreme band.”

The Big Pink do this point-counterpoint a lot in the course of conversation – ideas change, confrontation is embraced, and contrariness is chased. You know, I think that this stance of aggressive passion, ripping-up-and-restarting is what makes the Pink stand head-and-shoulders above the other Throbbing Gristle-referencing bands that seem to be everywhere at the moment. One sec they’re painful, brutal, cloaked in feedback, the next they’re breaking your heart. “One day we say never, never, never, never will we ever have strings, but we could be dying for them the next,” says Milo. “You know, consistency is boring. Maybe that’s contradictory, but hey, fuck, better that than hypocritical, right?”

August post-punk label 4AD signed them a couple of weeks ago. At the beginning of the interview, I asked them why they wanted the Big Pink on their books, and they were like, ‘Yeah, we’re good looking, and great people. And the Pink are awesome,” and then they fell about laughing.

Salem Next piece for Dummy

Salem, one of the most exciting bands from the end 2008, in a Next piece for Dummy

This duo from Chicago make beautiful, terrifying slowed down crunk that turns every day into night and every night into the Northern Lights. When Merok Records put out the Water EP from the Chicago-Michigan-New York trio (John Holland, Heather Marlatt, and Jack Donoghue), it sold out straight away, as did their Yes I Smoke Crack EP on Acephale.

On the one hand, their music is a blend of chopped’n’ screwed compositional music, hard-edged industrial and that violence-stained disco that Chromatics have perfected, and their visual output is fittingly beautiful/horrifying. On the other, they have hardly any pictures (John apparently has never been photographed, though their Butt magazine interview seems to have one blurry one) their interviews are kind of scant, and they don’t seem that bothered about social networking sites.

Biog-wise, Heather and John met at an arts boarding school (“He asked me if I wanted to be his friend and we have been since,” Heather emailed), and Heather met Jack in Chicago eighteen months ago, and started working with Acephale in early 2008. They’re finally going to start playing to the public soon.

Here’s some stuff about what they like: “We like blue raspberry flavor, Marvel vs Capcom 2, dirt bikes, baths, our snake Sasha,” they write over email. On the rap influence: “Its not really big where we’re from. When John was in Junior High and all the other kids were into grunge, he would go home and watch MTV Raps. So he is very knowledgeable. We like screwed and chopped music, but there’s better rap we’re affected by than screwed/chopped, Atl Trap , Footwork . [We’d like collaborate with] Gucci Mane, DJ Nate and Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em”. I mentioned something about the cold, and they said “We like winter when it snows everyday. Winter is so much prettier then spring. We sort of segregate ourselves from the everyday I guess, we don’t have TV or anything. We are more influenced by nature as seen on youtube.” On sleep, Jack said “I’ve never slept that much. I feel like I’m giving in to my body when I sleep, and I don’t remember my dreams anyway, so it seems like a waste of time.”

Apache Beat for Dummy

Another Brooklyn band, pretty good.

Bands should kill boredom. I’m chatting with Apache Beat, a Brooklyn band who play crisp, doomy and slightly tropical rock music before their gig in Camden, headlining a tour here for the first time. They just finished their album, Last Chants, produced by Martin Bisi (who also did LPs by Boredoms, Sonic Youth and Afrika Bambaataa), about two weeks before, and they say it’s pretty weird playing the songs out. Ilirjana Alushaj, the singer, says: “We just finished our album, and we realised that we needed to make it sound reasonably like it. We made it so complex. We just want it to sound big. We never play the same song twice. It’s fun to play but you’ve got to avoid the routine. It’s strange committing because we’re so indecisive. There’s a lot of good ideas – writing’s a process of whittling it down to the essential thing, whatever the song really is.”

Apache Beat came together in Brooklyn around at the end of 2006
a few years after Ilirjana moved to New York from Sydney Australia (she also lived in Serbia for a bit, it’s in her accent slightly). She set up a band with her guitarist friend Phil. Named after Klaus Dinger’s name for the Motorik sound, they started actually playing together properly a few months later (Phil: “People started wanting us to play. That was weird”). Not too long after a 7” single, Blood Thrills, came out on Summer Lovers Unlimited (“Owner Doug [Ko] was great. He let us do whatever we want, and didn’t mind when we took way to long to record the stuff and wasted his money in the recording studio”, says Mike Dos Santos, the bassist) about nine months ago, followed by the stunningly melodramatic Tropics in October 2008, in between which they’ve toured with everyone from Crystal Castles to School of Seven Bells.

When I ask Ilirjana about her music writing (she runs a really great online magazine called The Pop Manifesto ), she almost plays it down, saying “I was always in music, making zines or throwing parties, and I’ve always been in a bands – I have a very short attentions span.” With Apache Beat, there’s this kind of flowing, twitching thing, a total urge never to be boring. Sometimes it can be overpowering, but mostly it’s really fucking good.

Angus Tarnawsky, the touring drummer says about something interesting about: “It’s not easy. But it definitely is fun. we all come from improv backgrounds, and a lot of that spontaneity is flowing into the performances. which can only be good. You can go through a big psychological thing – Is this good enough.. This is bad. But then it hits you – things are also good. This is the thing we all signed up for, whether we it or not.”

My Tiger My Timing for Dummy

Next piece on really cool new band called My Tiger My Timing

“I made a resolution to take up Pilates and form the band. Now I’m only doing the band.” Anna Vincent is talking about forming My Tiger My Timing , a minimal and earnest London electro band that she sings and plays keyboards in. Jamie Harrison, vocals/guitar/bass, finishes the story: “We decided to set up the band at a New Year’s Eve 2007/8 party. January’s usually written off, this time we formed a band. We’d been wandering around in a dream-like state. Now the band is the dream. ”

We’re sitting around Spitalfields Market late on a chilly afternoon. They both seem really, really nice and pretty smart. They joined by Anna’s brother James, Gary Drain and Seb Underhill in the Arthur Russell-referencing, New Cross-based band, My Tiger My Timing. On their own label, Silver Music Machine, they put out pop music with its middle stripped. Their debut single, This Is Not The Fire, came out a few days ago, and it sounds distilled, concentrated – it’s electro with its bones showing. Anna: “We wanted to do something that was more about rhythm and texture, without any frivolous bits. We’ve been quite puritanical about the way we make up the song. If you allow yourself to do anything, it can be limiting, whereas a narrowed field can be freeing.” As Jamie says, even their visual element is stripped down, using only primary colours: “It’s become basic but vibrant, and the more striking for it, and the music is primary. Rhythm and melody. Texture and atmosphere. It’s almost a dissociative technique – you’ll listen, and realise that you’re hearing something created by a pop song. There’s something about a synthesiser that offers that difference of interpretation. You’ve totally taken away the emotion – you allow people to add it for themselves. “

If the idea of a south London band playing deconstructivist electro pop rings a bell, then it’ll come as little surprise that Hot Chip are all over this. Joe Goddard has produced some songs for them, joining Andy Spence from New Young Pony Club, who produced This Is Not The Fire. There’s a similar, almost unnerving not-fucking-about sense to MTMT’s plans, from releasing their music themselves, to playing in the with the lights off to prove they can. Jamie: “We never wrote down a manifesto, but we should have. Focus isn’t a dirty word. We rehearse the set for hours and hours and hours, so we can play it the dark, which we do.” Anna agrees: “That’s what the single is about – that moment before you unleash something, when you know the fire is just round the corner.” Jamie: “Even our name is determined… Ferocious and precise. It was either that or Super Bingo Bingo Time, which I still think is a great name.”

Arthur Russell for Clash

One of many hagiographic Arthur Russell pieces I've put my name to, this little blighter came out in Clash in the Autumn of 2008.

New York, 1983. On the Staten Island ferry, a man, alone but not lonely, is gazing into the distance over the water, his head full of music blaring from his Walkman headphones. It’s probably his own – he likes to listen to the songs he made while looking over the Hudson into the Jersey lights. This is Arthur Russell, the undisputed king of the downtown disco scene, a man who quietly made some of the most extraordinary music of all time until his AIDs-related death in 1992. As well as being a supremely gifted dance producer, he was also a renowned composer, folk singer, classical cellist and experimental musician who counted people like Philip Glass, Richard Hell and David Byrne as mates. When he moved to New York in 1973 from a San Francisco Buddhist commune, Allen Ginsburg let him siphon his electricity. He produced six albums, over a dozen 12” projects and several hundred unreleased cassettes, hundreds of reels, dozens of DATs, and countless thousands sheets of music and lyrics. Yet, despite his talent and beyond-prodigious creative output, he died in almost total obscurity. Gradually though, something extraordinary happened: as word slowly spread of the eccentric mastermind standing at the heart of late-20th century music, Arthur’s work is taken up, rereleased, played out. Biographies were written, minds blown, and everyone from filmmakers to forward thinking party organizers took up his cause. Now, in 2008, with a new LP, Love Is Overtaking Me and film, Wild Combination, Arthur Russell is finally finding the mass audience he craved – and deserved. Over the next few pages, we’ve compiled our own Arthurian legend: five DJs, producers, singers, fans and fanatics on the most important musician you’ve never heard.

JD Twitch (Optimo)
As part of the DJ team Optimo, Twitch has been playing Arthur Russell to crowds around the world for more than a decade

I’ve was vaguely aware of Arthur Russell’s existence for as long as I can remember – a song like Go Bang never leaves you when you hear it, but it wasn’t until I read a review for Another Thought in 1994 that I started to connect the dots between his disco stuff and his other work. And it just wiped the floor with me! I was having a particularly bad year emotionally, and though it sounds cheesy to speak of music “saving lives”, in this case, it’s true: Arthur Russell’s music really did save my life. And after that, I just became completely obsessed with the man and his work. Every time I play ‘Is It All Over My Face’ out, it always sends ripple of pure joy through the crowd. There’s just something about it – whether people have heard it a hundred times before or just that evening, they love it! There’s something so beautifully playful about it, so totally unlike any other dance music. Maybe it’s the words… “Is it all over my face… You got me love dancing”. Sometimes we play ‘Kiss Me Again’, this Dinosaur track, as a reward at the end of a really, really good night, and it’s been so wonderful to hear the crowd upstairs singing it on the way home – this song is still framing these great times. One of the reasons for his resurgence, apart from what you could call the internal logic of the zeitgeist, is as part of this general interest in dance music’s pre-history; which is itself probably to do with the fact that not so much exciting new stuff is coming out at the moment, since minimal disappeared up its own arse. It’s funny, when I was growing up disco was this dirty, dirty word, but that was only because of what I was hearing on the top 40 and in my mum’s car. So when I heard that Dinosaur L stuff, it was amazing to hear dance music that was that imaginative, that out-there – it really felt as if I found someone who understood the way we saw music! He just covers so many different schools, and covers them so well. From his well-known disco stuff to that ambient work to that Love Is Overtaking Me, which is essentially a country record! I mean, it’s just so out there – it could have been made twenty thousand years ago, it could be made tomorrow. But the most wonderful thing, I think, is that so many of these amazing songs were written just waiting for his boyfriend to come home from work.

Tim Lawrence
Journalist, author and academic Tim has written the first full length biography of Arthur, Hold On To Your Dreams, out next year.

I was really drawn to the figure of Arthur Russell after hearing about him while researching Love Saves The Day, my history of Dance music in the 1970s. I was drawn into this strange, evocative dance music – and the way that he was this central figure in all these different scenes in the late Seventies/early Eighties. He was really there at the formation of these incredible experiments in rock, disco, hip hop and “compositional” music: his story is really the story of creative New York during that time. Any kind of eclecticism was genuinely, genuinely shocking until very recently, and I think that Arthur in some way heralded in this post-tribal musical age – which is why he strikes a chord with us in the Age Of The iPod. Everyone now had Girls Aloud next to Mongolian folk music next to Hip Hop next to Steve Reich on their iPods – something Arthur would have no doubt been happy about. However, it’s essential we don’t think just because we can download a song in seconds on our laptops, we are somehow more enlightened, that we have somehow progressed, that we’re kind of close to Arthur’s incredibly genre-less taste. For him, it was never about easy access and standing on the sidelines: it was about active engagement and being in the thick of a real, physical, social commitment to music.

Andy Butler
Andy Butler plays in a dance band called Hercules and Love Affair

You know what I just found out? That Arthur Russell was a really, really big fan of the Muppet Show, like me. It’s funny because I’ve always thought that his music had a real Muppet-like sensibility – it’s really almost child-like, the quality it has, and like most children’s music it has this colourful, vivid imagination and simplicity. It’s magical. It’s just the sound of this lunatic musical freedom – and the way that those records worked collectively: it wasn’t the sound of just one person, but the noise of a whole bunch of people expressing themselves! It was super, super inspirational to hear that kind of collective, family atmosphere – where the attention is spread out over the whole band – itself a very punk idea. Derrick Carter actually first bought me a copy of Dinosaur L’s Go Bang – before I had heard that line sampled in so many house songs [Todd Terry’s Bango (To The Batmobile), to name but one – Ed], dancing at Body and SOUL, places like that, and he was such a huge part of that community. Dancing there, arms in the air, to these amazing songs that first played in the Paradise Garage: I was participating in the traditions. Arthur Russell, for me, was all about finding my roots.



Lola Love
Singer and dancer Lola Love collaborated with Arthur on Go Bang (under the name Dinosaur) and Wax The Van (under the name Lola)

I got to working with Arthur through my then-partner [disco producer] Rob Blank in the early 80s. I had just come off tour with Mr. James Brown and heard this wacky, funky, popping sound playing in our apartment – I loved it! It was just so avant garde, so experimental – and that’s what were my roots were. So we got to working together. We hit it off so quickly. He was such a perfectionist, like me, but his a perfection was a room of people losing their minds – that was what interested him – how wild people got. He’d always say “Wilder!” And you go crazy. Then he’d say “Go wilder! Wilder still! Wilder!” That was his collaborative style, you see: he didn’t order you around, he’d just make you be who you are. Working with him such a free, beautiful, creative experience. It was… it was [sings] “Bang a bang a go bang go – OW!” That’s how it was! And you’d never hear him go wild himself, like some producers do, but when it sounded right, he’d let a smile spread across his face. That’s all: a nod, and a smile. Even when we played at the [Paradise] Garage, that was the way he was: he’d never soak up the glory in front: he’d just sit at the back with his cello, letting the others tear it up. It was like a crazy, intense acid trip at the time: every night would be so wild. So wild you can’t imagine, honey! People would just loose their minds when we played. It was an interesting time, and downtown [New York] was an interesting place – and Arthur Russell was the most interesting person there. Whenever I’d invite him round for a party, he wouldn’t really socialise, he’d just stand in the corner, taking it all in, watching. He was like a ghost, you know! He’d just appear in a flash of smoke, and there he’d be – the most sweet, kind guy in the world, and then he’d disappear again, right away. And all that would be left was the smoke. The smoke would still be there.

Steve Knutson
Steve Knutson, as head of Audika Records, is devoted to rereleasing Arthur’s work.

My introduction to Arthur's music came from the legendary DJ, Walter Gibbons in 1986. Walter was a buyer at Rock & Soul, one of the infamous DJ shops in New York, and I sold him records while doing sales at Tommy Boy. We became quite friendly and invariably spent a lot of time discussing music. He told me about this odd genius he was working with. A few months later he gave me a copy of the Sleeping Bag 12", "Schoolbell/Treehouse" that he remixed. Hearing it changed my life. The intimacy of his voice and instrument first grabbed me. What I heard was pure consciousness. No separation between the voice and instruments. Holistic and deeply spiritual. Allen Ginsburg said it best, "Buddhist Bubble-Gum Music". After my introduction from Walter, I searched around for everything that I could find of Arthur's music. It was tough as there was little to no information out there (this is still the mid-80's), and I relied on simply searching through used bins in record stores, or asking my fanatical dance music friends for insight into his various pseudonyms. I was easily confused and taken aback by the (what I thought to be) disparate styles and elements of his music. I vividly remember buying "World Of Echo" when it first came out and being really disappointed. It wasn't a disco record, it was something else and I did not understand. But after finding the album "Instrumentals" I had an epiphany. What I heard in Arthur's music wasn't genres, I was very simply hearing "Arthur Music". Being the selfish sort, I had to hear this music, and the only way it was going to happen is if I compiled and released it myself. I'd known Will Socolov from Sleeping Bag for years and one day I asked him for Tom Lee's [Arthur’s life partner] phone number. I called Tom and we got on like a house on fire. The first time at his apartment Tom immediately began bring out cassettes of unreleased music. It was heaven! All in all around 1,000 plus tapes of music exist. And then there are dozens of manuscript books, hundreds of pages of lyrics and song sheets. It's almost never ending – it’s been all consuming at times, and I must has spent hundreds of hours compling these CDs! In the process, I've met with and corresponded with dozens of Arthur's friends and musicians. No one has ever uttered anything but love and respect for the man. Frustration, yes, but also deep respect, and love.

Matt Wolf
Filmmaker Matt Wolf’s Arthur Russell documentary Wild Combination has played around the world, including a very successful run at London’s ICA, the Berlin Film Festival and New York’s IFC, where it was the highest grossing film in its class.

Arthur's story is about more than just his experience as an idividual—it's about a particularly fertile period in Downtown New York's cultural history, it's about the experience of being gay and living with AIDS, and also it's about the cathartic process of making art and pursuing popular success at a time when those two things seemed possible and within reach. I think disco presenting a really liberating social context to create music. The early underground discos were very different than what people commonly associate with the genre: Studio 54, John Travolta, etc. The Loft was a kind of social experiment where David Mancuso brought together an incredibly diverse group of people: black, white, gay, straight, hippies, artists, and they danced together. There was a kind of essentially positive attitude in this context—you might compare it to a child's birthday party. But the repetitive serialism of minimalist composers and the structure of Buddhist mantras could certainly be correlated to the patterns of disco dance records. As a counter-cultural space, disco seemed like an obvious extension of Arthur's experience in a Buddhist commune in San Francisco.My favorite moment in the film is the scene where Arthur and his boyfriend Tom meet in the East Village. It's a very romantic, tender story and we use really beautiful Super 8 imagery of an old school, rundown ice cream shop in the East Village to bring that story to life. Arthur could certainly be perceived as an eccentric figure—he was constantly thinking about music, listening to endless variations of his songs on headphones. Another moment that really strikes me is a videotape I have of an early performance where Arthur plays the guitar. When he's finished, he takes off his pumas (presumably his "performance sneakers") to put on his vans, or I guess his street shoes. He was such an endearing weirdo in that way. But I was also really drawn to the ordinary moments in his life: watching the Muppets Show with his boyfriend on the couch, brainstorming the name of a record company while listening to James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag." There was a time that Arthur told a collaborator and business partner Will Socolov that "Music can heal. That music isn't something that you just go dancing to, but that it can really heal you." That really stuck with me. I love Arthur's persistent connection to childhood and childlike experience. He struggled; he created obstacles for himself and frustrated his collaborators and his loved ones. But I think, unlike many other people, Arthur was able to connect to this primal place of childlike innocence and fun. And I love going there with him.

LOTP for FACT

Quick chate with one of my favourite bands of the last few years, Late Of The Pier...

Late of the Pier’s space odyssey started in the verdant summer of 2004 under the gleaming spires and proud turrets of Castle Donnington. Since then, they’ve made the kids dance dance dance with their indescribably beautiful hair and chrome-plated squat-suited electro. The debut album, Fantasy Black Channel, is produced by Erol Alken and sounds like a ship made out of heroically gleaming metal piloted by android Knights of the Realm of Infinite Sublimity. We chatted with lead singer Samuel Eastgate in the departure lounge of Heathrow airport.

Hi Sam!

Oh hello.

So, the new album is out now…

Yeah. It was finished in March actually, and we wanted to release it right away. But that would have been a very silly thing to do, as word spreads quite slowly, and still very few people knew who we were, and those that did would have been really surprised to see it out.

That sounds almost cynical.

Yeah, I dunno. We definitely wanted it be like the first chapter of something special, like the first step of a beautiful journey. That meant people would have to buy it and realise it was out. I mean, some people and some magazines have behind us since the early days, but a lot have only recently gone Oh, hold on…

I heard that the album was recorded in one big old house?

Yeah! When we signed, we thought Let’s do this properly. It was a conscious decision, definitely. We just thought, if we want this to be good, we had better be doing this all time, so yeah, we rented this huge derelict mansion with shoddy foundations just outside Nottingham and recorded the album there. There’s something about the immediacy of living in such close quarters, being able to get up every day and just make. It was nice relying on gut instincts there. And thowing really good parties.

There’s something very “English eccentric” about that idea: retiring to the country to make this strange psychedelic work…

Yeah, I suppose there is! But we’ve never seen ourselves as a particularly English band: a lot of the music that we’re into is from all over the place, which I suppose is totally normal, isn’t it? The psychedelic thing is interesting though… A forming point for us was stuff like Revolver-era Beatles, and talking about drugs, though none of us had ever taken drugs. So I suppose what got us together was the idea of mind-alteration rather than mind-alteration. It was totally just us going into this world of our own and thinking our own way. What was really lovely a few years ago was coming to London and Way Out West, the Underage thing and all that… Seeing these kids that just got it.

F&M review for Fact

Fujiya & Miyage

Lightbulbs

Full Time Hobby 

Of all the ways to start an album, a bad joke about a rather tragic child star has to be among the worst: the song's called Knickerbocker Glory, and it's about the "ghost of Lena Zavaroni", who died of anorexia nervosa - geddit? Us neither. Anyway, it's strange that such a poor taste begins Fujiya & Miyage's third LP. I mean, few bands have traded so hard on their superlative taste: their previous album, Transparent Things had us crits gushing about its reworkings of Serge Gainsbourg and Krautrock, its tailored updating of rare italo synths and no wave elastic funk, and those influences are on Lightbulbs:there's a lovely bit of Tangerine Dream/Popul Vuh synthesized piano on the title track, and the closer, Hunrdeds and Thousands, a reprise of that horrific opening gambit is a lovely mix of restrained psychedelia. The new drummer, Lee Adams punches his weight nicely, with decent work on Dishwasher. Still, overriding the album's theoretical plus-points is a teethgrinding smugness. In combining elements from kommishe to slow funk, singer David Best's vocals are so, so deadeningly self-aware that the music is robbed of any viscerality, its heart-and-soul thrill. Through its murdering brevity, the album's taileating mixture of selfawareness and self-satisfaction... I don't know. All I mean is that a knowledge of German Oak is no substitute for a soul and Lightbulbs sounds like branded-denim adverts from the mid-nineties. It's just really, really fucking boring.

Coming Soon, Plan B

Coming Soon are a lovely French band, part of a flourishing anti-folk scene over there. Plan B, September issue:

First notes: Small places make big sounds. Coming Soon are a six-piece anti-folk band from the small town Kidderminster in the French Alps. They sound a lot like Ezra Pound and cold winters and hot summers and Bob Dylan cover art from the 1960s. “We grew up listening to birds, waves, trucks and garbage men, in a small town in between a lake and a mountain with a lot of graveyards. We all had very stimulating dreams,” says de facto leader Howard Hughes. “But we left 'cause it's small and we get bored. Sex shops are too far out of town and you can always meet some old friend who owes you money. You know the Lou Reed line, don't you? There's only one good thing about a small town: you know that you want to get out. That's strong enough.” They formed in early 2005 and while scratching and studying they visited New York, to party, and Berlin to work with Kimya Dawson and Paris to work with Stanley Brinks of Herman Dune. After two grind years, hustling labels, touring constantly (including a recent slot supporting Wave Pictures) and sneaking their demos into copies of Les Inrockuptibles (to “meet big producers and get instantly famous around the world”), it paid off, Paris’ Kitchen Music finally got in touch. The debut album is called New Grids, and on the CD is a drawing of a compass. In the midst of Hebrew letters and phonetic names of faraway places is the word Kidderminster, written at south-southwest.
Second notes: Loves saves days. Within the band are lovers with clarinets and friends with cameras and brothers with each other. One pair of brothers is Leo Bear Creek (who joined the band aged 13 playing drums and ukulele) and Ben Lupus (who draws dance steps and plays a banjo). When I ask Howie for a story about love, he tells me that both are somnambulists, and when sleeping together, Leo talks and Ben answers. This story breaks Howie’s heart. “It is a collective in a way; a ‘DIY’ thing where we try to trade roles & parts, like a hip-hop band, like a mafia where nobody wants to be the accountant forever (even if it's safer), because individuality makes you get up in an angry mood every morning and the band makes life bearable. We have this anthill with five breeding queens.” On the live experience: “We trade mics, we step on each other's feet and find all sorts of last minute stage ideas. Touring is a sheer beauty, there are at least two couples in the van and I spend my afternoons looking for post offices to write to my wife. Love obviously plays a major part in this game.”

High Places for Dazed and Confused

A lovely interview I from months ago on Dazed's ticket. Really, really cool band, and a really sweet couple:

High Places are really sick of fighting. "Everything extreme you can think of has already been done. Like if you want to see someone fucking vomit on the floor and beat their fists, you can, but it's done man," says Robert Barber. Rob plays nearly all of the instruments live in High Places, and Mary Pearson sings over the top, though that division doesn't stick in the studio. They're a really nice art-folk duo who live in flat in Brooklyn with their cats and sound like every song you've ever heard played backwards all at once.
They've played warehouses and split singles with Xiu Xiu and blown up The Smell with No Age. (Rob: "Everyone expects linked bands to be like mini-versions: people can't believe we're friends. But we love playing to new ears."). Pearson's a Michiganer who studied classical music and does projects about minimalism and immediacy and plays the bassoon. Barber grew up taking the Saturday train to New York to go skateboarding and studied printmaking at art school and designs some of their awesome covers with Pearson, like the red and yellow 03/07-09/07, which is a collection of EP and comp tracks.
Sitting over lemonades in Café Oto before the first date of their first European tour earlier this month, Pearson agrees that aggression is played out. "We get called childlike sometimes, but whatever. If that means we're honest, wide-eyed, then that's cool. When you see someone freaking out, it's like 'Yeah, that's interesting...'"
Barber and Pearson met through mutual friends (one of the Death Set, actually) in 2006 or so, and wanted to get together immediately. "We met while we were in the middle of our solo projects, and we just decided to work together," says Barber. Adds Pearson: "It was nice to do something not thinking too much – I find it really refreshing to collaborate and not have to think about, you know, classical form. I never annotate our music, but sometimes I'm still like 'You can't just change time signatures like that!' And Rob's like 'It's fiiine! It sounds good to me.'"
"We make tracks kinda like a collage, actually," says Barber. "We just make these small bits of a sound, sample them and piece them together later into songs." Pearson laughs: "The first song we did was just like messing about on a computer – emailing sounds to each through the walls. The other day I was just making this really horrible noise through a recorder, and we're going to loop that. I was reading Carl Sagan's Varieties of Scientific Experience, it's all about how there can scientifically be a God – this book about man's place in the universe. I got so obsessed with it last summer! But you have to stop drawing your place in the universe all day. It's good to have mundane tasks to stop your head exploding."

Advertising piece for BlowBack

This little wonder featured first in BlowBack, a sadly missed street-style publication.

Late in 2005, everyone’s favourite monobrowed monkey Noel Gallagher was spitting blood at Jack White for writing a song for Coca-Cola. "What the f**k is he playing at? He dresses like f***ing Zorro on doughnuts! What the f**k is that about? He ceases to be in the club. He's supposed to be the poster boy for the alternative way of thinking… I'm not having that, it's f***ing wrong.” A song! For Coca-Cola! Cue a great deal of hand-wringing and finger-pointing from the indie fraternity. “Sell out” was thrown about on blogs and broadsheets the world over. Principles not price, man! So far, so standard, just another easy tirade. The weird world of music licensing – when a track is allowed (licensed) to be broadcast – was made a little weirder a few weeks later. When all the dust had settled and Oasis made a quiet announcement. Their All Around The World had been sold for a AT&T ad.

There is an imagined time, somewhere before that Phat Planet Guiness ad, even before Kurt was horrified to find out Teen Spirit was a deodorant brand, when advertising was a filthy word. When no cool, alternative musician would consider letting a dirty ad man at his or her songs. When Babylon Zoo or Stiltskin could be laughed out of town for jumping on a Levis TV spot. A lot of this must be hazy nostalgia for a vaguely “realer” time, but a quick look over who’s been licensing what so far this year raises a few eyebrows. Bands on ads in 2007? They’re cool. Commercialbreaksandbeats.co.uk - an online database of music used on UK ad spots – reads like a Dazed and Confused contents page, with turns by Devandra Banhart, Black Keys, Fujia & Miyage, New Young Pony Club, Colder and Roxy Music all listed this year alone. Artists that were once spoken of in hushed, reverent tones by musos, like Vashti Bunyan or Arthur Russell, now feature on phone adverts. Most surprisingly of all, hardly anyone calls them a sell out.

Not to say that every licensed band out there are willing to drop their trousers for the next adman that calls. Far from it, these bands are reacting to – and acting in – a world that’s incredibly brand savvy. For Ayla Owen, Director of Music at Leap, the music licensing and publishing house behind Levis’ and KFC’s legendary soundtracks, “these bands are very aware of how their music is presented. Some brands are more attractive than others, but they don’t just want to know about the brand itself, they want to know about the director and the script.” This is one of the reasons that bands are happy to be used in commercials - their sheer quality. We all know that Spike Jonze, Jonathan Glazer and Michel Gondry started out directing adverts and we’ve all cooed over Sony’s coloured balls and paint splashes. Advertising is an established step on the trail for almost any ‘creative type,’ whether you’re a writer, a director, a musician - or indeed a music exec. This removes both the stigma of the dreaded corporate dollar and the fear that the ad might turn out a bit, well, shoddy. Abla El-Sharnouby, head of publishing at Five Missions More, a music publishing and licensing consultancy with MTV and The Beeb in their portfolio had a few words to say on the subject. “Creatives [at advertising agencies] speak the same language as musicians: they’ll want to make a cutting-edge ad with the best underground music. Even if that’s not exactly what the clients themselves want,” she laughs. Music selection is an incredible creative process in itself. Sam Reid from Hear No Evil, a Soho music consultancy could be talking about DJing when he says “it’s a very fun but subjective job. You really can’t put your finger on what makes an ideal track – some songs just fit.” Needless to say, most bands don’t have an issue with “fitting in.”



Bands aren’t selling out: they’re buying in, and are very clued up about how they’re doing this. This is the "myspace generation", after all: image is everything for a new band, and its kissing cousin self-promotion needs a tight control over how images are used. Fine for The Clash to finally reach number one on the heels of a Levis ad, with Should I Stay..., but when Joe Strummer’s image was used for a Doc Martins ad, heads rolled. Using images from photo library Corbis, ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi showed the icon in heaven wearing DMs underneath a toga – a clanger so bad it lost Saatchi the contract, and the person responsible for distributing the picture had their employment “considered.” Promotion and control are the key, but it’s got to be the right situation, the right ad and the right product. “Association with a ‘cool’ brand is great for a band, and it’s not seen as working for ‘the man’ in the same way as it might have been. Look at how many kids there are wearing Puma or Nike T-Shirts – they are essentially happily wearing an advert,” says Ayla. “It’s brand association.”

Punting your track out to an agency is more than locking onto a ‘cool’ brand – for an even vaguely alternative artist, it’s a way of contacting and connecting with a far, far wider audience than an independent or below-radar label could hope for. Abla: “a prime-time ad reaches literally millions of people, millions of people that might never come into contact with that artist. Just look at Nina Simone: thirty seconds on a Muller advert and a new Best Of is released” Whatever misgivings a listener might have about an artist’s five decade-long career being crammed into a thirty second yogurt ad, it didn’t lose her estate anything: 2006’s Very Best Of Nina Simone’s first track was Ain’t Got No, I Got A Life, and was one the year’s best sellers. While bands selling huge quantities by being “that band off that advert” is nothing new – just ask Babylon Zoo – the need for publicity is far bigger today than it ever has been, simply because it is harder to make a the same splash in the far bigger ocean. The price of launching a band in 2007 is astronomical – The Guardian set it at a cool £594,000, with each TV ad weighing in at £10,000. Abla: “we really try to promote music that wouldn’t be heard otherwise, that would be pitched otherwise. More independent, alternative, underground, whatever, artists are being featured on ads. It’s now far cheaper to feature a song by an up-and-coming artist than it was even two or three years ago, because of increased demand and there are also just so many bands out there.”

The digital revolution has provided a multitude of different places for advertisers to associate themselves with ‘cool’ bands, from viral marketing to podcasts. “There are so many avenues you could go down for entertainment,” says Abla. “Which means that people are very sophisticated about what entertainment they consume.” Ayla of Leap agrees. “I’m surprised that we haven’t seen a purely digital superstar – someone who side-stepped traditional record companies and was marketed entirely online.” The story’s subtext is the much publicised death of the record industry. June saw the closure of the country’s biggest “independent” store, Fopp, and the release of Prince’s new album, given away with every Mail on Sunday, and the ongoing nosedive of album sales. The industry is in dire straits. Advertising might just be part of the solution. Before music is declared D.O.A., let’s raise a glass for the ambulance chasers. Sell out? No sell out!

Foals FACT 7 of the year

In which I get very excited about Hummer, Foals' unmistakably brilliant single, and interview the singer Yannis, for FACT magazine
Hummer dropped in April, and – to be frank – it wiped the bleedin’ walls with us. Eight months on, it still leaves us gasping. Despite being an attempt to transcribe minimal techno’s precision and rigour to fuck-up the peculiar mixture of try-hard laziness that infects today’s dull-as-dishwater indie scene, Hummer is as sonically breathtaking a call-to-arms as rock’n’roll ever has heard. Yes, it is precise and unnervingly accurate from conception to execution, but it’s also a breathless, sweaty affirmation of youthful destruction, snotty arrogance and rhythmic raw power. Rather than the measured, perfection it was aping, there is the furious, vainglorious tumult of ideas – its drums alone bring to mind Don Cabellero, Topper Heddon, The Field, Neu, Timbaland and Fela Kuti – that only the most thrilling singles have. Just ten seconds are allowed to pass before the tugging hook snares you – this song is so desperately full of fresh ideas, impertinent diffidence and ruthless unwillingness to conform that seizes this hour, this minute, this second by the jugular before it skids, grazed, to a halt. Hummer is an obnoxious, snotty record, a song which head-butts every tepid, lazy stylistic cliché that surrounds modern indie; and that, ironically, is the most perfect an argument for independent guitar music I can think of.

FOALS INTERVIEW:

Foals have had a pretty damn good year. In summer 2006, they were a twinkle in the eyes of a set of Oxford mathrock and techno-loving student students. Eighteen months later, they’ve wowed crowds at stadiums to squats from here to Texas, dropped Kompakt mixes and had their choons played on Skins – all this at just two Transgressive singles (there’s the third, Balloons, out on 10th December) and a live EP old. To top it all, they’re received the coveted (and entirely imaginary) FACT 7” Of The Year gong for their April single Hummer. With a new, Dave Sitek of TV On The Radio-produced album in the bag, we chatted to their tea-sipping vocalist Yannis.

So, you’ve won the 7” of the year…
Yeah, we’re really surprised. We really like FACT, you’re quite discerning. We haven’t quite accepted it.

2007 went pretty well, eh?
Yeah, it was pretty wild, I guess. A year ago we weren’t yet signed, and yeah, we’ve come a long way I suppose. The thing is that it doesn’t really register when you’re in the middle of it, but it does feel like we’re getting more reactions at shows, which is weird because we only started this band to irritate our friends by trying to write pop songs and be banal. You know, show that music is about communication, not just displays of virtuosity. We just wanted to make fresh and authentic pop music.

Do you feel like you’ve done that?
We don’t know – we’re a small family and we stick together, it’s hard to see outside of that. The angst, self-doubt and criticism are still there. We’re quite agitated, so we have to keep moving.

How was the recording of Hummer, and how do you feel it matches up?
We wanted it to sound very clinical, like we were trying to be tight, not slapdash, drawing influence from every single note and piece of sound, so the overall big “sound” was constructed out of lots of little sounds working against each other. When we were recording it, we were shacked up and getting drunk, playing horseshit and making pop songs. The irony is that I don’t ever listen to it know – it’s not my favourite song. I must have listened to it 700 times when we were mastering it, so by the time we heard it finally we couldn’t tell if was good or not. We just wanted to get it out before we split up.

What music have you enjoyed this year?
Cornelious’ record was amazing, such sumptuous production. Yeasayer are so fucking tribal it’s unbelievable. Fuckbuttons are awesome, so are Metronomy and Cut Off Yr Hands. I know it’s a bit old, but the whole Dubstep thing is awesome, especially Burial. There’s a really cool noise thing happening in Oxford – it’s like a reaction against all these really technical bands, just like punk reacting against prog. There’s lots of bands who just don’t give a fuck and just want to make loads of noise. Timbaland is breathtaking, still. It’s like, with all these amazing things happening, why fucking bother making music that sounds like it is ten years old?

What have been the highlights of your year?
Doing an album with Dave Sitek in New York – just incredible, he’s a fucking genius, so playing and getting high all day in New York… and playing on Jules Holland was great. Generally though, it’s been playing and touring which has been amazing and not having to work a shitty job. This music is like knives; we’re making knives to cut things with, and people reactions seem good. We still love playing house parties.

What are the reactions like?
It gets very energetic. Jimmy broke his tooth one time… There’s also something that comes out when we play – people rip down and kick though walls. It’s like this weird, primal urge that comes out when we play. You see someone fucking up their house because they’re so wild, which is always odd. You’re like “Why are you hanging off your light?”

What are the lowlights?
Never having enough time to read.

Nancy elizabeth review for Fact

Nancy Elizabeth
Battle and Victory
Leaf

Nancy Elizabeth sounds like the most extraordinary hit-your-head-off-your-desk, whimpering-like–a-demented-man-child minimal folk that comes out of nowhere, like ghosts from the battle of Hastings playing samurai harps made from widow’s hair, and it’s awesome, till you realize she’s on Leaf. When you’re share a label with Murcof, Colleen, Susuma Yakota and Efterklang, that’s kind of taken as given. Still, it’s a damn good album, with the kind of imaginative folk that is giving the north-west (she’s a Wigan las) such a good name at the moment.

What strikes you about Nancy’s music is how spectacularly poised and still it sounds – unlike Seth Lakeman, to whom she is oft compared, nothing is rushed. ‘Hey Son’s’ swirling harps are played almost Satie-slow, with her voice – a soft yet throaty howl not a million miles away from Beth Orton or Joni Mitchell – ripping the fuck out of the chorus with the supreme, practiced gravitas. ‘Coriander’ is another revelation – though the key instrument is hand-plucked Thai Khim, and other instruments on Battle and Victory have similarly alien tones, from Appalachian dulcimers to Celtic harps, her music is refreshingly grounded in the music of our Scepter’d Isle. This album was recorded entirely in a stone cottage in Wales, and Christ does it show – if, like me, you occasionally like to pretend to be a medieval Welsh freedom-fighter escaping with your ragged band through the valleys while running for the tube, this is the album for you.

Arthur Russell doc piece for Dazed

A news piece in Dazed and Confused’s October 2007 issue

“Another Thought: The Arthur Russell Revival Peaks With New Documentary”

Arthur Russell has always cried out for a biography. An obscenely gifted classical cellist, singer and disco producer, he was a student of north Indian music in Buddhist communes who moved East to NY when disco was bubbling under and collaborated with everyone from Phillip Glass to Larry Levan In eighties New York, he perfected his mix of outsider pop and spectral, mutant disco until his tragic, AIDs related death in 1992. While Soul Jazz and Rough Trade’s superb compilations, and Jens Lekman’s recent EP of Russell covers have brought him out of the cold, much of the man behind the music remains obscured by myth. A new film is set to change all that with a documentary about his life and times. “I wanted to take a fairly experimental approach to Arthur’s music. What I ended up doing is closer to a documentary with a full story told by Arthur’s friends and family, one that’s saturated with lots of visual material and archival clips,” says director Matt Wolf. “Arthur’s story is about more than just his experience as an individual—it’s about a particularly fertile period in downtown New York’s cultural history, it’s about the experience of being gay and living with AIDS, and also it’s about the cathartic process of making art and pursuing popular success at a time when those two things seemed possible and within reach. Arthur could certainly be perceived as an eccentric figure—but I was also really drawn to the ordinary moments in his life: watching the Muppets Show with his boyfriend on the couch.”

www.arthurrussellmovie.com/
The film will be released in early 2008.

[ends]

Reviews: Crystal Castles, Sebastian Tellier, Big Dada Comp

Here's a few assorted reviews from the last year. All Fact Magazine, would you believe:

Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles
(Last Gang)

Though their 2007 credentials stand – Klaxons and Uffie remixes, a ne’er-more-oblique myspace yelling “murder, blank looks on girls, knives” as influences and are fond of saying “taxidermy” in interviews – Crystal Castles’ debut sounds so unashamedly electroclash it’s astounding there’s no DJ Hell hidden track. Which is lovely to be reminded of: grabbing the music of the last seven years, forgetting about the real shit and running for August 2001 like there’s no tomorrow is A-OK with us. Crystal Castles is tender, escapist ragtime for an economic downswing and a seven-year-old war on terror. What makes this LP special isn’t the “sonic invasion” they push, but its control and compassion. ‘Crimewave (Crystal Castles vs HEALTH)’ is a hard-edged song, but its graceful keyboard loop is malleable rather than mayhem-lead and ‘Vanished’s sparking hi-hats and reverb-laden construction owes as much to Suicide’s plaintive thuds as CC’s aesthetic owes to Vega and Rev. When the sonic destruction-as-creation their shows promise lets rip, as it does on ‘Xxzxcuzx Me’ and ‘Love and Caring’, it’s more of a refreshing hint than a full Glasgow kiss towards noise, and while their remixes and PRs press the “8-bit chaos” button, the tone general of this eponymous debut, with its concept-driven, sexually platonic tidy electro, is closer to Fisherspooner than Venetian Snares. And nicely done it is too: Ethin and Alice could easily slip into the undergrowth, but don’t brush over them – this is a don’t-sleep album for people who need more sleep.

Various
Well Deep: Ten Years Of Big Dada
Big Dada

Thankfully, for a hip-hop label based in the UK, this greatest hits and misses retrospective, is free from the mundane aggro that makes UKHH the sick man of music. Where the Low Life stable celebrate the parochial and the insular, Big Dada’s abstract eccentricity trots the globe – French farce-core jams from TTC, King Geodorah’s DC Comics raps and Diplo’s baile funk are represented here. Of course, the two discs are full of English national anthems – Roots Manuva's 'Witness (1 Hope)' still sounds as oh-my-days heavy as it did six years ago, and Wiley’s '50/50' makes you miss him about 500 times more than listening to Playtime Is Over in full did. It’s the humour, stupid: while Jehst’s peers look like they’ve never seen an episode of Allo Allo in their lives, Roots Manuva’s legendarily self-deprecating sports day video on the accompanying DVD is a joy.
A little more weight would be welcome, though. cLOUDDEAD – the band that launched a thousand blogs – sound far easier to explain than actually, you know, enjoy, though the magnificent Boards of Canada mix of Dead Dogs is a suitably majestic piece of the British pastoral. The astonishing thing about this collection is how bleeding edge almost every song on this record sounds – New Flesh’s 'Stick And Move' sounds as much like the future as it did five years ago, which can have a strangely merciless bent cumulatively. That quibble aside, Big Dada have spent a decade proving that anti-pop hip-hop doesn’t have to neglect the party principle – for most rappers here, MC means move the crowd. These are the anthems, so get your damn hands up.

Sebastian Tellier
Sexuality
Lucky Number

There are many “one moment of genius, 60 minutes of mediocrity” musicians in the world, but few are eccentric French Christ look-alikes with Air, Mr Ozio, SebAstian, and Daft Punk on their facebook, fewer who theme albums around issues of the human heart and are studio wizards with doom-prog dads. Fewer still have penned a track as “whimper like a manchild” as ‘La Ritournelle’. If Sexuality were made up of twenty-second samples, this would be as much of an instant classic as La Rit. But while none of these 11 slabs of spacey Eurosoul is without its own “wow” moment, many simply disappear away into their own faultless shimmer. It’s not until ‘Sexual Sportswear’ arrives in all its galloping, cosmic glory that Tellier does anything more than announce his unbearable relevance of being—he actually proves exciting and exhilarating for the full sweat-drenched length of a track. Much of the remaining 10 songs disappear into a vodocoder’d cosmic disco haze — an immaculately filthy bassline here, graceful chord structure there, but too often something feels missing from too many songs. This said, there is understated yet stately presence at work here, and when it a songs blasts, it fucking blasts — like on ‘Elle’s shift from cheese stomp to elegant rubber soul or on album closer and masterpiece ‘L’Amor Et La Violence’. Its heartbreaking, whispered words ebb over a sobbing, tailored synth line that builds and breaks over 5 minutes and 22 seconds of sumptuous beauty — it’s so moving that you forget to care that Seb may well have his tongue firmly between his molars. Tellier is musician to love and follow — his Sessions and Universe collections, and the multitude of remixes kicking about prove his unerring genius for style, eccentricity and melody. One day, Tellier will drop the album he has been promising for te best part of a decade. It pains me to say so, but Sexuality doesn’t feel like it.

Monkey, Don’t!
Gubbins
Manna Records

Gubbins is about getting high in a seaside town. Though Mark Robson (the wistfully troubled mind behind Monkey, Don’t!) is now settled in London Town, you get the feeling he’ll never leave his sleepy Hampshire roots. Not that that’s anything to be ashamed of: some of best recent British oddball music of the last decade (Beta Band, Super Furry Animals, Gorky’s, Field Music) has come out of toe-kicking suburban life. Coiled tedium, blissful mindlessness, stupid jokes – this’s Monkey, Don’t!’s territory. The songs drift into on another – this is an album of restless, parochial, eccentric invention. Street Of Sound has Acid House beat-throbs mixed into the Kinks’ guitars and Lalo Schriffin’s breaks – a combination that sound as natural as it would if they were all bought in a three for £12 bin at Woolies. The twee is never more than two steps away from this record, but its brilliantly clever arrangements provide enough to keep you from wanting to listen to Black Flag dead loud. Metaphor alert: like your home town, this is an album that is wonderful in its own, implacable way, and though you’ll be unbearably annoyed if you stay more than two hours, you’ll get strangely defensive should anyone take the mickey out of it.

Tim Westwood for Insight (honestly)

Honestly, I actually think that Tim Westwood is an alright bloke. As Pharrell Williams said, “the people who don’t know him don’t know nothing. F*** them: everyone else get your shit together”. For Insight.

As well as coining phrases like “that rust game is intense!” on his Pimp My Ride UK show, Tim is one of this country’s finest, most passionate, experienced, committed and respected DJs in Britain. Radio 1’s longest-standing DJ, he has been Hip Hop’s most passionate propagandist since he was DJing at the Gossip club in the early 80s and helping to launch Kiss FM in its days as a pirate radio station, a time when Hip Hop was written off as fad. Tim has never just stood at the sidelines of the culture, though: he organized early Def Jam stars like Beastie Boys’ UK tours, sold over 2m albums and has teaches young offenders at Feltham prison how to control the ones and twos. That’s something you don’t see Steve Lamacq doing.

It is this, and his infectious, school-boy enthusiasm for rap music in all its forms that has earned him the praise of the rap community – Hip Hop Connection Magazine (who know a thing or two about this) have voted him Best Radio DJ every year since 1992, and everyone from 50 Cent to Pharrell Williams, who once said “The people who don’t know him don’t know nothing. Fuck them: everyone else get your shit together,” to Pete Rock, who called Tim “A Hip Hop brother,” count him as a mate. You ever laughed at him for “talking like a rapper”? He talks like that because he’s been hanging about with rappers for 25 years. He’s in town for the Brighton City Festival, and as Snoop Dogg recently pointed out “you can can’t come to the kingdom and not see the prince.” Yet again, we couldn’t agree more with the Doggfather, so Insight chatted to a surprisingly humble and mild mannered Tim Westwood the other week. Big Things!

So you’re coming to Brighton in October? Yeah man, I’ve been down Brighton a lot. Used to play at – what was that spot called? – the Zap Club. People are really good there, they wanna party, people love the magazine they know what time.

You were with Hip Hop since the early days, weren’t you? Yeah, man! I got into it when I heard Rapper’s Delight by Sugarhill in ’79. Back then, man, it was just fun music, party music you know. I was working a club called Gossip back then, the time of Spoony Rap, Cold Crush and all that. You could really identify with the records – you could just see the power of the music then. It was street music, party music. Dancing, breakdancing was real big then. A lot of people really knew about it – it was big.

How has Hip Hop changed since then? It’s the most dominant youth culture on the planet now. It has its own sneakers, fashion lines, culture, everything. When it becomes “the voice of youth” you know that it has its own responsibilities as well.

Is this where your work with the young offenders comes in? Yeah… I mean that’s no big thing at all; everyone does something like that. [pause] I mean, it’s such a phenomenal blessing to work in the game that – I’ve been blessed, you know? – you’ve got to pass some of what you’ve learned along. Hip hop has that duty built into it though – everyone is involved with community projects, rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. It’s community music, so the players are community aware.

Your father was Bishop of Peterborough, and you’ve previously talked about how proud you both (as self-made men) are of each other; and you seem to hold very strict morals. Isn’t it ironic that you work with what is seen as a very amoral or immoral music, yet you don’t drink or take drugs, and you don’t allow profanity on the air? I hope there is a moral obligation there – my father’s a very good man. But many players in the game don’t drink or blaze either. Funkmaster Flex was something of a mentor to me, and he doesn’t touch that: he is that focused. A lot of artists don’t party though. Time was when you’d be able to do all that, smoke weed, drink, you know, but now the work is so crazy hard that if you were out late you just couldn’t handle it.

What’s on the horizon for Hip Hop? Hip Hop right now is very creative, but records just ain’t selling. Time was when, with all the Kanye / 50 thing going down, [Kanye West and 50 Cent recently went head-head, both releasing their albums on the same day. Kanye West “won”] their records would have done millions but now the struggle to sell a tenth of that. Still the creative energy is there. At the most we’re in a real party Hip Hop phase – it’s all very Dirrty South at the moment. It is always moving forward this culture.

Tim Westwood plays the Brighton City Festival on the 25th October. The Festival will be held at various venues around town. Tickets £15. brightoncityfestival.com

Italo Disco for Arena Online

A piece for Arena's July 2007 issue on Cosmic/Italo Disco.

Given the confusingly longstanding influence of the 1980s on everything from music to fashion to global power relations, it was only time before Italo Disco was going to get a relook-in. And about time too; for anyone who found last week's Mercury Prize nominations less than inspiring there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Just as noises like handclaps and piano loops looked like they were resigned to the dustbin of history, a new generation of producers is starting to channel the spirit of a set of European producers who made their own versions of US disco in the early 80s.
Pioneers like Giorgio Moroder began making electronic versions of American funk and disco records, rumour has it, because of a dearth of musicians who were able to play Moroder’s galloping basslines, but the music exploded because of an economic crisis – unable to import the increasingly rare dance records, many ventured into the studio to fabricate the tracks on a shoestring budget, resulting in minimal mixes of drum-machine percussion and melodic keyboard hooks. This post-disco, pre-Acid House electronic dance music is widely known as Italo Disco, but its reach went far beyond its Mediterranean heartland, influencing legendary early house DJs like Larry Leven and Frankie Knuckles, as well as a slew of Mitteleuropean disco producers.

This blissed out cosmic disco arguably fathered the Acid House boom: a certain small post-party club called Amnesia in Ibiza played Italo Disco and House as the sun rose to whoever was still awake. In 1987 Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling got mashed there – then decided to invent modern clubbing. Italo Disco was largely written out of the history books, though. Until now, that is.
Blame that 'Over And Over" tune: it all kicked off with Hot Chip totally understandable but astounding rise to ubiquity last year. Hot on their heels are a slew of ball-achingly cool acts, all taking their cue from the soft, slow, serotonin-rushed disco of the mid 80s. Take Noze, Parisians who are releasing the most sunkissed, airbrushed grooves this side of 1986, Still Going, the latest signing to LCD Soundsystem's label DFA, or the works of labels like Italians Do It Better. No that this cosmic disco revival is only the stuff of vinyl beards: hugely popular parties like And Did We Mention Our Disco and Adventures Close To Home have been sending ripples through clubland for months, and new nights Horsemeat Disco and Cocadisco are leading us four by four back to the millanarian gooves of the mid eighties.


Unlike most dance music, it can sound just as good at home as in a barely industrial building. Like most dance music, however, it was almost exclusively distributed on vinyl, meaning that most original records are now either warping in the Balearic sun, covered in 25-year-old beer or changing hands for hundreds of pounds on eBay. You're far better off tracking down recent reissues or releases on CD:

Greg Wilson – Credit To The Edit
(Tirk)
This is a collection of Mancunian 80's soul boy legend Wilson's best re-edits. Taking his favourite US disco tracks into his grimy mitts, he'd chop and twist reel-to-reel tapes into shape with a razorblade and ruler. In other words, dude would literally cut the tape up until it sounded like he wanted it to. Christ. Though not strictly Italo Disco, its glittering yet organic texture (and Chaka Khan’s yelping) make it a great introduction to the genre.
www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:kjfixqqsld6e

Morgan Geist – Unclassics
(Environ)
Great collection of Italo Disco underground classics from 1978 to1985, full of requisite sleeker-than-sleek synths and churning beats. Compiled Morgan Geist of Metro Area. Fantastic it is too.
www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:39fwxqqsldhe
myspace.com/morgangeist

Confuzed Disco – Italian Records Retrospective
(Irma)
This is it – the best collection of the best tracks from the record label that gave the genre its name. If this doesn't make you want to don cut-off shorts and snort anonymous white powder as the sun rises over the White Isle in 1985, I doubt much will.
www.myspace.com/confuzeddisco

Lindstrom – It's A Feedelity Affair
(Feedelity)
Let's start the resurrection: it's onto the new guard. This Norwegian fella occasionally takes time out from chopping wood, hunting whales and stuff (p'raps) to release some of the most blessed, blissed out, slowed down disco on Planet Earth. Dignifies himself as one of the few musicians you can see at Fabric and listen to over the Sunday Papers.
www.myspace.com/feedelity

Studio – West Coast
(Information)
Glorious, elegant, daft, cowbell, slurred dance music, reinvented by a pair of Swedes. First pressing sold out. Second pressing sold out. Now it's on the third, finally, and it DESTROYS.
www.myspace.com/sstudio

Henry Rollins interview for Insight

Hipster HC, whatever: interviewing your hero and him turning out to be an incredibly cool guy is one of the real joys of the game. Seriously people, if you haven't read Get In The Van, you totally should. Here's Hank making my week in July '08:

Henry Rollins is culture’s Kurtz, our Hemingway and your favourite uncle. A DIY punk with guts of steel, he’s also written one of the most moving memoirs about music (or anything) that I’ve ever read, Get In The Van, the exhilarating and gutwrenching story of his own private 1980s. He cut his teeth as lead singer of early eighties Californian punk crew Black Flag, the band that inked a thousand tattoos, sold a million six-packs and sent trillions of kids down the road to Do It Themselves. Aside from fronting the greatest hardcore punk band of all time, he’s also a renowned author, publisher, comedian, broadcaster and human rights advocate. The guy’s led what you could call an interesting life, and for one so famed for his no-guts-no-glory mindset, he came across articulate, sensitive and really, really fun. Basically, if there’s one person to spend an hour and a half listening to, it’s Hank. We called him up in Bangkok, and you really should go and see him this month.

Hi Henry!
Hi Charlie, how’s it going? I’m sorry this is late – I had an interview earlier and it overran, but thank you for ringing back and holding on. I admire your tenacity.

OK, no problem. Do you want me to call back later, or…
Let’s do this now: where I’m going this afternoon is ultra remote – no phones, no email, no electricity. So it has to be now. Let’s go for it now, and step on the other guy’s toes. Is that good with you?

Oh cool, yeah. So what are you doing out there anyway?
I’m going on a mission this afternoon that’s classified. I’ve been sworn to secrecy by the people with me, and I can’t tell a soul about where I’m going until afterwards. But believe me, you’ll hear in time!

Right! So tell me about the spoken word tour.
I’ve been on tour since September last year, and it’s a record of where I’ve been and what I’m doing and what I saw. Because of how it develops, the first 20 shows are never like the last 20 shows, because so much shit has happened in between. It’s been nearly a year, and I’ve done some pretty interesting stuff in that time, like going to Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan. Like when I was in Islamabad last year when Bhutto was assassinated, I saw a huge smoke cloud from my hotel, burning tires, and I was That’s where I’ve gotta be! That’s where it’s happening! Not in some vampiric, voyeuristic way, just in the sense that I want to learn the lessons. It’s one of the few ways that a man of 50 who is long of teeth and grey of hair can stick it to The Man! By going to Tehran, talking with prostitutes and waiters and bus drivers and then telling people You know what? Those “evildoers”, they’re really cool, and really normal as a matter of fact. How do you like them apples? And a lot of people don’t like those apples, believe it or not. You’d be amazed at how much shit telling people that other people are normal and cool gets you into, because The Man – whether he’s a some oil-hungry Neocon pussy or an Islamofascist asshole – doesn’t want you to know that.

What’s it like doing a show in Syria or Islamabad or Lebanon compared with a show in, say, Brighton?
Oh, I wasn’t doing a show; I was just visiting.

OK…
I always just drop in places I’m curious about, and see what up there. If I wanna know about somewhere I just go.

Do you think you’re a brave man?
Absolutely not, no way! I’m not a tough guy in any way whatsoever, man: if someone pulls a gun, I’m running away as fast as I can. I just want more from life than sitting around watching The Sopranos on DVD.

I heard you slept in Uday Hussein’s bed. What was that like?
It was a bed. Just like any other, but it was in the son of Saddam Hussein’s torture camp, with the hooks in the wall where he hung women up. When I was doing the USO stuff [Henry regularly visits troops in warzones and military hospitals], we were in the compound in Baghdad, and Uday’s palace was where some soldiers go for R+R – a place you can get air conditioning, a cold beer and a chance to watch Lethal Weapon or whatever on DVD and feel like you’re not in the middle of a war. So the guy was like on our first day in the Green Zone [adopts drill sergeant voice] One of you will now have the dubious honour of sleeping in the bed of Uday Hussein! And I was like Wow! What’s that going to be like? That’s MINE!

I though it was really cool how you once said that your way of protesting the war was visiting the troops.
I hate this war that Bush and his evil, evil gang of corrupt pondwellers have embarked on, but I have maximum respect for the troops who are fighting and living it every single day. So when USO [the organization that provides entertainment and support to US troops] said some of the guys out there like my stuff and they asked me if I wanted to meet some troops, I – of course – said yes. And it’s tough, man. These are guys who have seen and done more than anyone can imagine. I’ve talked to guys in hospital with pins stuck through their arm, amputees, people with their face blown off – things that no-one can ever imagine. The saddest thing is that these guys, their whole life has instantly changed. Whatever their plans were, however they thought their lives would pan out, those plans have to change, and so do the plans of his wife and his whole family. And there are no words for the rage that that gives you. Seeing that shit, it reminds you how much work is to be done.

What’s the toughest thing you’ve ever had to do?
What, you mean personally, in my life?

Yeah.
Grow up, I think. Having to realise that life is a lot tougher than you ever thought, and how hard you have to work at it. Realise that you have to use more than aggression in life, and that there are other people besides your whiny pissy little self. Yeah, that’s a tough lesson to learn, and it took a long time to penetrate my thick cranium, longer than most people. I had to have it kicked into me.

Are you an artist?
I’m not an artist, no. A bullshit artist, maybe… Musicians are allowed to have a long 18th year, if you know what I mean, a life with no responsibilities to speak of. But then you meet people who are like 21 with two kids, and that’s real, you know – having a human being that depends on you making money to stay alive. And you have to hustle hard then. A lot harder than strapping on a guitar and being like This is my office. You can't be surrounded by booze and drugs and girls and be like This is my nine-to-five and still connect on meaningful level to the guy driving the bus who is buying your record. Luckily, I make rent though, but I've gotta hustle. That’s why I do what I do, you know, the films and so on, the 300-day tours – I still have that minimum wage, how-am-I-gonna-make-rent mindset.

Why do people love Black Flag?
I don’t know. I really don’t know. I mean, I had nothing to do with the band – all the stuff that is remembered as classic Black Flag was written before I joined, mainly by Greg Ginn. I was like the fourth singer, so when someone says they love the band, I say, Yeah, me too, I’m a big fan.

Really? Because for me, you kind of are Black Flag: I can’t imagine the band without you. Even if you didn’t write the songs, you kind of do symbolize the band.
I was in the version that recorded the album Damaged and I was in the version that toured it internationally. So yeah, people around the world do think of them and me, which is cool, because they’re a really good band. But in terms of their appeal… Stuff like 'Six Pack', which is such a cool song, it’s absolutely awesome, was before my time. I had really nothing to do with that.

It’s about twenty past 10 here. What should I do with the rest of my day?
How much time do you have? If you get time, read some stuff on the internet. Get informed and inform others. And when the sun goes down, I’d think about getting laid and making dinner.

What should I do in August?
Oh man… Apart from see my show? You could go to North Africa. You’re like nine hours away from Marrakech, go and see what it’s like over there. Or book a flight to Phnom Penh in Cambodia and see the Killing Fields – it’s the rainy season over there, so all the bones and teeth will be exposed.

Cool! Cheers for this Henry.
No problem man. See you on the road sometime.