EILIS: Jenny and I were discussing suicide pacts at an exhibition opening and the conversation turned to Kurt Cobain, and we realised he was a really important early teenage obsession - the first grown up who fascinated us - inspiring these careful pencil drawings, melodramatic poetry, and scrawled journals... For some people thats the last time they sit down to make art, for others its the first time they take making art seriously.

JENNY: The kind of aspect of 'teen art' that interests me is that it seems to be a totally different impulse to the way I make art now. I don't even think that I thought what I was making was art when drawing pictures of Kurt on copybooks etc. It seems to be more of an innocent impulse where the only motivation is allowing yourself to spend time thinking about that person. It's kind of an exercise in obsession.

EILIS: We figured a lot of our peers probably had the same experiences, and we wanted to celebrate the vitality of that first expressive teenage art as much as we wanted to re-visit our old Kurt obsessions.

Is the exhibtion a piss take, steeped in irony or is there part of you that thinks its worth commemorating Kurt?

EILIS: The exhibition is quite sincere. We were aware of how it could come across as a joke, or immature, and that didn't really bother us. We knew some people would get it, and some people wouldn't. I think most people who saw the show got it.

The idea of commemorating someone like Kurt is a really confusing concept, and thats why I really wanted to do this exhibition. There's so much going on with the idea of a tribute to Kurt because he was so vocal about hating his celebrity status, but at the same time he feared being forgotten. Recently I've been really interested in that kind of moral confusion - believing in one thing while being unable or unwilling to avoid participating in its reverse. I think most Kurt Cobain fan art is trapped in that confusion.

JENNY: Yeah, I can see how the show could be interpreted as a piss-take and i think there are certain elements concerning celebrity and worship which we've attempted to undermine but essentially we're genuinely intrigued by the kind of artwork made by fans and feel that there's a kind of intensity to it that's quite unique.

EILIS: Yeah, there's an undiluted enthusiasm in it that I admire because as you get older it usually gets complicated by cynicism and art college.

Where does the vintage teenage art on display come from?

EILIS: We put the word out about our plans for the exhibition, and some friends gave us their old drawings. We also spent a lot of time on Kurt Cobain fan sites and YouTube and found a lot of people still making crazy Kurt Cobain art, and other people still proud of Kurt art they made ten years ago.

Figures like Kurt Cobain tend to inspire an obsessive fanaticism among teenagers - why was/is there such an identifaction with him and are there any comparable figures today?

EILIS: I think Kurt Cobain had an amazing charisma that's hard to find. He's kind of an eternal teenager. He was a master of apathetic melodrama - a kind of "yeah, I'm completely emotionally tortured, but.. whatever.." attitude that is achingly cool. To me Kurt Cobain isn't really a person who ever existed, he's like a fictional figure thats a part of my past, like an old imaginary friend, but one that I happen to share with millions of other people my age. I think its much easier and more rewarding to be fanatical about a dead celebrity than a living one. There's only a limited amount of information and photographs to look at, and then you get to imagine the rest yourself.

JENNY: I kind of wonder what how this kind of fanaticism would have been affected had he not committed suicide and how much this kind of 'cult of martyrdom' has affected such obsessions. These kind of stories are great fodder for documentary makers and biographers as they seem to allow myths surrounding these figures to escalate. It seems that teenagers are more susceptible and/or willing to buy into these myths.

EILIS: I can't think of any comparable figures today. I'm not sure if thats because I'm older and I'm not really interested in celebrities, or if its because popular culture and the music industry has changed so much since the early 90s. With the charts being so diverse, and the music industry getting more democratic, and everyone having huge music collections, I'm not sure its possible anymore for one persons death to affect so many people on the scale Kurt Cobain's did.

The show opened last and runs by appointment until Kurt's anniversary, the 5th of April. For more information email info@eilismcdonald.com and check out this for more info.

Labels: Art, Eilis McDonald, Jenny Brady, Music, Seomra Spraoi

LCD Soundsystem: Some Brainless Greenday Politic-ing Meets the Robots.

Many critics conflated themselves with the voice adopted by Murphy in "Losing my Edge," oddly seeking to endear themselves to the panic of trend chasing and the danger of kids outstripping them in the hipster stakes. But wasn't this missing the point?

I'd always liked "Losing My Edge" for how it cataloged the stifling weight of 'been dones' bearing down on us since a booming American post-War economy first threw up a mass consumable pop culture. Suffering from an overwhelming hangover of cultural references leading to creative blockages the track claimed a lineage from all originators, a Faustian pop cultural pact that echoed Jaggers's hushed Satanism in "Sympathy for the Devil." This compulsive back trailing led to a healthy exorcism of all guilt or expectations of the "new" letting us revel to party soundtracks that felt right for now.

Unfortunately for James Murphy , his whole celebrated beats and guitar collision has "been done" better on LCD Soundsystem's debut. Leaked on the net months prior to its release much of the hype you might expect around the album slowly deflated, farted out across staggered reviews as the album fell into the hands of music bloggers one after the other.

"Get Innoucous" starts the album off with 'Losing My Edges' drum beat and the pulse of a straight lift from Kraftwerk's "The Robots." The eventual repetitious female vocal that creeps in will lend itself well to house edits. Its hard to find anything on the album that'll set off house party bedlam ala "Daft Punk Are Playing at My House" but perhaps their previous genius will shine on the no doubt endless amounts of dancefloor remixes set to follow.

"All My Friends" carries a harrowing piano line and sketching lyrics that paint the cinematic of a loneliness and depression that comes from reflecting on the stupid decisions of youth. "Watch the Tapes" will leave you feverish with the constant thud of musical echoes informing LCD's sound. That cocky vocal pout of "Daft Punk is Playing at My House" comes through briefly on "Time to Get Away."

"Someone great" is the only track that points to a real maturing in Murphy's sound. The only hint that he's played with a few toys other than simplistic drum machines in an attempt to recapture the stumbled on brilliance of the first album. With its swirling bleeps and crisp underlying drone, the track maps a clear direction away from disco punk antics.

If the album has a real gem its "North American Scum". Swaggering with an expected proud gait of statement, a murmouring bass line is accompanied by a brilliant theatrical wail of a chorus that runs back to fears of "kids who want to make the scene." There's also some brainless as Greenday poltic-ing as NYC becomes the "furthest place you can live from the government," Murphy's criticism of power owes more to the inability of "parties to go all night" than the imperial war of his nations leaders, urban poverty or even NYC's fierce recent gentrification dealt with on "NY I Love You" with a taste of rom-com heart break.

You'll find this album all over the net, but if you just want to gander of its flavor, its streaming over at their Myspace.

Labels: LCD Soundsystem, Music

# posted by antrophe @ 2:04 PM

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Tuesday, March 13, 2007

DJ C Interview: Mashit's Mashup Maestro

Nothing has turned me onto as much ass quaking good music this past year as the track listings of DJ C mixes. Dealing in nuthin' at all but the best dance floor shakers, DJ C and his endless output is a man to pay attention to. Rampaging across genres for the ultimate ass jiving party sounds to spice up his own Boston bounce, DJ C doesn't hold back with the output. At the centre of the recent brilliant bastard rebirth of jungle fronted by showstoppers like Aaron Spectre, Mashit deserves your categoric full attention. Especially as it generously throws all of their artists output up on the net for free download.

Take a track like DJ C's Quality Diamond colloboration "Let It Billie," remashing a classic regaee version of Jackson's Billie Jean with some infectous jungle rattle that will make even the heads of the most cynical "breakbore" detractors turn. Those excited by his more recent dancehall flavoured colloborations with Chicago vocalist Zulu will be delighted to note the forth coming releases "Body Work" and a 12 inch called "Darling" with a remix by Montreal's Ghislain Poirier, both on Community Library and distributed in the UK by Baked Goods.

The early release of three tracks from his "Sonic Weapons" debut album on Bristol's Death $ucker Records will awake the attention of any genre blenders rapt to the sucker punch surprises of his copious "B" series mixes. In this interview DJ C tocuches on the frustration of experimentalism prior to Rupture's mash mainlining, Bush's re-election and how Mashit intends to kit itself out for musical distribution in the digital DJ-ing era.

What's the "C" stand for?

During one of my psychedelic phases I was having visions. I could see things that weren't there, at least not in the every-day plain of reality. This was before I was a DJ. I was making 4-track tapes and releasing albums under the name See. That name quickly morphed into Cee, and eventually became DJ C.

Whats this boston bounce all about and will my elderly rural parents like the waltz aspect of it?

There's really not too much of a waltz aspect to my bounce tracks. It's more of a swing, or a shuffle feel, with an up-tempo broken kick, and a snare or rim-shot drop on the 3. It's a sound we developed in the Beat Research labs. DJ Flack's been developing some more waltz-y tracks lately, or at least they're in 3. Not sure your parents would like them, but they're probably baby-boomers right, so who knows?

How did you get drawn into music and DJing and when did you come to really start to obssess about it as a DJ?

I've been into music since I was a young child. My father — a painter/ poet — would make percussion instruments and play them with me as an infant. All kinds of experimental, pop, and classical music was always wafting through the house. I received a guitar for my 5th birthday and felt as though I was Elvis. Before I got a real drum kit I used to make drums out of pots, pans, cardboard boxes, and pillows and play them with kitchen utensils. I would record that on my little cassette machine, and eventually I figured out that I could multi-track by playing the last recording I had made through my step-father's speakers, on his tape deck, while playing along and recording another cassette on my machine. One thing lead to another and eventually I wound up making electronic music and DJing.

You are part of the Riddim Method collective which takes an almost academic approach to mixing and the relationship between different forms of music, can you tell me how this collective nerding came into being and whats its purpose is?

Most of us are from Boston, with the exception of Kid Kameleon, but we all came together through music. 10 years ago DJ /rupture and I co-founded an event-production collective with some other folks. DJ Flack and Ripley became members of the collective over time, as did Aaron Spectre, Hrvatski, and many more. We met Kid Kameleon, Wayne&Wax, and Pace later, but it turned out they'd all been to, or been fans of those Toneburst parties.

We're all part of the Beat Research crew too. Flack and I have been running Beat Research as a weekly event for the past 3 years, and have had over 100 guest performers/DJs come through. The members of the Riddim Method crew are kind of like auxiliary Beat Research residents. The Riddim Method blog began when we realized that another group of DJs had started a blog at beatresearch.blogspot.com and we were like "Hey! that's our thing." In was actually really positive as it inspired us to start our own group blog. It's really just a forum
to talk about stuff we're into.

You and others in the Riddim Collective frantically blog about music, how do you think music blogging has affected underground music scenes?

Music blogs are really important these days. As a DJ, especially, it's a great way to find out about new music, and communicate with other folks about it. I also appreciate being able to get stuff off my chest too.

On the Mashit label you give away tonnes of free MP3s, do you not think you are taking a needless hit through this given the whole debate around music piracy? Also how come some tracks never seem to end up as pay-for-download after vinyl releases? I'm thinking of Gone-a-Jail here which an awful lot of people must want.

The business model behind Mashit when it began was to give out all the music for free in digital form, and then sell it on vinyl. The free digi-files would help spread the word, and then DJs, who were mostly still only playing vinyl, would buy the tracks if they liked them. Digital distribution is so powerful. You can put a file on a server with virtually no cost and make it available for thousands of people around the world to get it easily. If we only sold our music on vinyl, and even CD, and used traditional distribution methods, we would not have NEARLY as much of our music out there as we do, and that bodes well for touring, networking, etc. It's all worked very well.

In the past couple years there's been a big shift in the DJ industry, though; a landslide of folks shifting over to digital DJing. This has been fueled by the coming-of-age of CD players that feel like vinyl, and real vinyl controllers for digital libraries. I use Serato Scratch Live which uses time-coded vinyl records to control my iTunes library on my laptop, and it's completely opened up the way I DJ. Like it or not, this is putting a serious dent into the vinyl industry. Many major vinyl distributors and stores have been going under. Don't get me wrong, there are still a lot of folks who do use vinyl, including me sometimes, but the tides are turning.

Needless to say, Mashit's original business is doesn't apply as well today, but that's OK. Because it's incredibly cheap to distribute music digitally, and now that so many folks are DJing digitally, that's what we'll focus on going forward. Mashit will be re-tooled for the future over the next year or so.

Are your mixes fully hands on and what sort of set up do you need for a show?

In the past I tended to categorize between DJing and performing a set of my own music. I've toured in Europe 3 times with just a laptop and and 8 channel MIDI mixer which I use to control my tracks in Ableton Live. It's a really simple setup, but it allows me to present my own
material as a continuous mix while tweaking, dubbing, looping, and effecting things on the fly. I looked at DJing as a way to present other peoples music, for the most part. I'm not looking at ways of combining these together, and blurring the lines more. No need to compartmentalize, ya know?

I spent most of last summer insisting people listen to the Bouncement mix, what's your own favorite in the series and why is there such a series in the first place?

"Bouncement" was my fave for a while too. I also really like "Boots," and "Baltimore" when the mood is right. Lately I've been into the "Blentcast" mixes. Unlike the rest of the "B" series up to that point, they're fiercely eclectic, which is more like my DJ style in general.

The series began just because I had ideas for so many mixes the names of which start with the letter "b". I've still got a lot more up my sleeve. Perhaps it will shift to a different letter at some point, though.

The new Traced Milk EP really shows a more chilled out side to you, how come this is hidden away in your non-stop party mixes?

Well, again, that's part of the reason why I like the "Blentcast" mixes. I take it out there with some more mellow stuff, even some chilled out rock by folks like Wilco, TV on the Radio, and Donavan. There's also the "Berlin" mix, which is super chilled out. I actually went through a major ambient phase back in my early days as a DJ.

There's a set on my site, on the "Music" page, called "Mid '90s Style Chillout Set." It was recorded in '02, but consists of stuff I used to play back in '95/'96. Back then I recorded under the name Electro Organic Sound System. I had an album out in '96 of ambient/chillout-ish stuff, and another album out in 2000, which began to bridge the gap between my more chill and the jungle/breakcore side.

In one interview you described how impossible experimentalists in Toneburst found it to get club gigs back in the day, what sort of venues did you end up using?

Half of us were students at the Massachusetts College of Art, and the other half were students at Harvard. In the beginning we started out at a small art-space outside the city. The first party we did in Boston was at a store-front complex that a Harvard architecture student was using as a studio/living space. We eventually went on to stage events at the Boston Children's Museum (an event called Child-Style), the Boston Museum of Science, and of course Massachusetts College of Art and Harvard, as well as many other colleges.

You sometimes get characterised as 'one of those new fangled breakcore djs' when your sets are anything but confined to one genre, how do such off hand descriptions make you feel?

That's OK. It's difficult to categorize what I do and I like it that way. I'm excited to see that there's finally a movement — at least here in Boston, but I think all over too — of folks who are into eclectic genre blending. I think DJ /rupture has been a driving force behind that and folks like Diplo have helped to popularize it. In the Toneburst days, and still when we began Beat Research, we were reacting against the club and party DJs at the time. You know, the ones who when asked what style they play say "progressive-trance-breaks," or something super-specific like that. We would go out to the drum 'n' bass night and it would be the exact same beat all night long. Not only that, but they cared more that a track was new than weather it was actually any good or not. Now it's finally hip to experiment with mixing wacky things together and I'm really happy about that.

A blurb on Mashit describes how the anti-Bush mix you released prior to the election was part of a protest music "alive and well" because of the net, do you think the net facilitates other forms of dissent stateside or is it all right wing/neo-con bloggers?

Oh yeah. The net facilitates it all. There's a bunch of everything out there. As destructive as our administration has been, I have to say that free speech is alive and well. Probably in large part due to the internet, and blogs. Much of the mainstream media here really sucks 'cause they're controlled by corporations who have a lot riding on keeping things the fucked up way that they are, and during some of the more scary moments over the past few years here, the Bush admin
has struck fear into the hearts of journalists. On the other hand, the media has to keep afloat when they're losing the attention of consumers to the internet. It can be difficult to weed through all the conflicting info, but you can't say the system's not open. I'm also an avid listener to National Public Radio which generally does a great job of presenting news and information.

In a Spannered interview Ripley described being active as a street medic, were you ever active in the post-Seattle protest upsurge or do you think music is the best medium you have to make political gestures? You were involved in a group called BEATS NOT BOMBS?

I've participated in street protests from time to time, but not nearly as actively as the kind of involvement that Ripley was getting into. I tend to get more involved on the political campaigning side. When I see a candidate who I think will help to make things better, I will donate money and do fundraising events. I feel as though I should personally apologize that Bush was "reelected." I did try though. I traveled up to New Hampshire and went door to door asking people to vote for Kerry. And on election day I worked at a polling place making calls and even picking people up who needed a ride to the polls. Kerry did win New Hampshire, which had been a republican state before that, so that was a tiny ray of light on a deep and
darkly shadowy day.

Do you have much contact with Trouble and Bass and otherstate side crews doing vaguely similar things as yourself? Where should people look to follow whats happening on that side of the Atlantic?

I've played a few shows with Mathhead of Trouble and Bass, and have also met Drop the Lime and Stareyes. As a matter of fact, I just finished up a remix for Star Key, who's also part of that crew. Looks like their parties have been off the hook. I don't think there's one singular source about these type of goings on in the states. Just gotta' keep your ear to the blogs I guess.

Labels: Breakcore, DJ C, Interviews, Music

# posted by antrophe @ 9:18 PM

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Monday, March 05, 2007

Matt Stokes The Grave Of Rave

Hope of an interview with Matt Stokes led me to hold out on putting a blog up about recent happy hardcore on an organ shennigans down in Christchurch cathedral. Stokes's two fold work also piqued the interest of dance music fans across the city with the first exhibition of the new year in Temple Bar Gallery.

A recipient of the Beck's Futures award in 2006, Stokes' "Lost in the Rhythm" exhibition was a pared down version of his Glasglow show "Lost in Arcadia." The show focused on the pheoneonemon of rave as it expressed itself in Cumbria in the early nineties.

In city enviroments swarming with abandonned warehouses and later on sites off major motorways, shelter from state eyes was easily found, but in rural Wales local organisers like Out House Promotions used some lateral thinking to settle on quarry caves as a party zone.

The exhibition was ridiculously simple, with the artifacts of a very localised rave scene displayed in a boring set of cases like archaeological nuggets from pop cultural memory. Flyers, membership cards, t-shirts and newspaper cuttings, DJ mix tapes and a scattering of photographs were the scrap book that presented an ordering of the period within which the parties happened.

A massive section of text illustrated the rebel impulse behind a rave culture that beat against state survillance and eventual repression through the CJA. 'If you found the helicopter then you found the party' remembers one party goer quoted. Stokes locates rave in a cannon of working class popular moments of cultural outlawdom as subversive movement.

Visually the exhibition was disappointing. The accompanying film of the Northren Soul scene "Long After Tonight" seemed to be missing on the day I was there, a TV sat at an awkward floor level angle replaying a badly edited loop of TV news with a local copper summating all paniced parental fears. A speaker sat in one corner as if it had just been humped there, useless with no character or joy to it.

With an exhibition devoid of atmosphere and bereft of the enthuasism that surely had to drive the period, so Stokes should consider himself in a very lucky position to get away with this, able to present his teenage weekend music and partying habits as a work of art is a lofty privilege to aspire to. Start stockpiling those gig flyers now.

Down in Christchurch Cathedral it was a whole other story as Dr Groove briliantly describes. Arriving down early at ten to eight was useless as the 800 maximum space was already full. Being unable to get in did allow plenty of time for scheming up one liners and jokes about this conflation of mass and the rave massif. In a period of a happy hardcore famine, its no surprise the protestants would close the door on us for fear we'd disecrate the water cistern.

Labels: Art, Music

# posted by antrophe @ 6:03 PM

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