Alan Vega (1938-2016)

More death (it is 2016 after all): Alan Vega of the band Suicide died on July 16. Apparently he was 78 -- I thought he'd be more like 58 but what do I know. In any case, lots of stuff written about Sucide since his death, the best stuff being here and here and here. Even Bruce Springsteen had something to say about it.

I first heard of the band, I think, in 1987, when I saw R.E.M. on their Document tour. During the encore, the band, unexpectedly, did a bunch of covers: They covered "Strange" (Wire), "See No Evil" (Television), and "What We All Want" (Gang of Four). Then, lead singer Michael Stipe also mentioned another band, Suicide...which, he admonished us, we should be listening to. So being incredibly impressionable, I went out and searched out their stuff, all of it. To say Suicide was the weirdest of the lot (and that's saying a lot, when you think about how weird Wire was in the late 1970s) was not an understatement. I was completely blown away by all this music but Suicide was really an outlier, like music made by aliens. You could break down the constituent parts (50s rock'n'roll iconography, punk rock attitude, electronic music straight from krautrock via Kraftwerk) but the outcome was like an alternative soundtrack to a nihilistic version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The first self-titled album (1977), people, will tell you, is brilliant. And another thing people will tell you: it still sounds ahead of its time. There are a few albums like that, that still sound completely OUT OF TIME, not rooted in any time period or decade or idiom. The first Suicide album is like that. I give you two songs by them:

This is "Ghost Rider," the opening track on the debut. Look at the intensity of Vega's face. His stage antics were legendary. Taking a page out of the Iggy Pop rulebook, Vega would threaten the audience, confront them, fuck with them, and totally subvert any semblance of the normal accepted conventions between performer and audience. If you were in the audience, you were likely to be kicked in the face. Here, in "Ghost Rider" he kicks you in the face.. in spirit, just by standing almost in one spot, his eyes boring through your skull.



And here is their magnum opus, "Frankie Teardrop." Ten-and-a-half-minutes of aural violence, laying the foundation for Throbbing Gristle and everything after.



I hate the word "singular" when music critics use it, but really, Suicide deserves that descriptor. They were, to use another cliche, one-of-a-kind.

Here is a wide-ranging interview with Vega from 2002 with one of my favorite pop culture writers, Simon Reynolds.

Sparklehorse - See The Light

A friend, Ben, recently died, on July 5, in New York. I was lucky enough to know him for the past few years. This is for Ben.

La Femme - Sur La Planche

Been listening to music by La Femme, a French electronic surf pop band whose album Psycho Tropical Berlin (2013) is hard to get out of your mind, once you've heard it. Various websites say that the band is a krautrock band, but I honestly don't see it. They have a strong surf rock vibe (that twangy echo-y guitar) but with a artsy post-punk-ish pretensions.

It's basically high-energy electronic pop music with melodies designed for maximum indelible impact on your brain.

The first time I heard them was this song, "Sur La Planche" which was featured in an ad for a Renault automobile. And really, most of their songs should soundtrack auto advertisements. They're perfect for that. Since that album, they have released a couple of standalone singles ("Sphynx" and "Ou va le monde?") but if you like the following song, get the album. It's a total cheer-upper in these dark and disturbing times.

Delia Derbyshire - Pot Au Feu

Delia Derbyshire doing "Pot Au Feu." Recorded in 1968 and released on BBC Radiophonic Music (1971). Someone on the wiki site helpfully notes:

This is three minutes and nineteen seconds of paranoia, virtually a rave track circa 1991 in its structure; a stattering, pounding teleprinter-paced bassline worthy of Timbaland as the tension builds, then a moment of chaos and crisis, an alarm-bell of a book recalling the 'panic/excitement' lines so prevalent in early 90s hardcore.

Pot-au-feu is a French beef stew but that's not really relevant.

Pink Floyd - Middle

Been listening to a lot of middle-period Pink Floyd recently, stuff from 1970 to about 1975. There's nothing particularly uniform about this period but I appreciate their ability to fuse pop with some moderate experimentation. There are two very high-quality BBC sessions from 1970 and 1971 that are circulating (use The Googles and ye shall find). Both sessions find the band firmly in their first post-Syd incarnation--no weird loopy psychedelic pop songs--but rather a bit of pastoral hippie music with bits and pieces of musique concrete. Most of the material is from Atom Heart Mother (1970) and Meddle (1971). Here is "Fat Old Sun," a rare David Gilmour tune that they dress up with loud electric guitars and rustic organs:



Have also dipped my toes into the live world of Floyd, particular their spectacular late 1974 tour of Great Britain. Here, they performed a superb setlist, including three completely new (at the time) songs, opening with the gorgeous "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and following up with the vitriolic, bilious, and brilliant pair of "Raving and Drooling" and "You've Got To Be Crazy." There's something quite attractive about musical acts introducing lots of new unrecorded songs on tours. You would hardly find that these days.

The latter two songs would, of course, many years later, show up on the Animals (1977) album under entirely different titles. These three epic (and I really mean, EPIC) songs were then followed by a complete performance of the soon-to-be classic rock warhorse of Dark Side of the Moon, which for all its faults and its over-familiarity and identification with the most reactionary dad-rock, still sounds remarkably beautiful in 1974, performed by a four-piece. Finally, the show concludes with a lengthy "Echoes" where the band gets a bit of their rock out. Awful lyrics (hello Roger Waters?) but you can't fault the tremendous musical execution.

From that 1974 tour, here is "Any Colour You Like"--actually from their Wembley performance on November 16, 1974. Gentle psychedelia for the cognitively-impaired and sleep-deprived hippie in me. Every bandmember is amazing here but of particular note is the bass playing by Roger Waters, someone not normally known as a musician of any note, but here he really takes the axe by the hand and more than acquits himself on the instrument in sometimes busy and sometimes extremely understated ways, often alternating between beautiful bass runs up and down the fret boards to soft harmonics and suspended notes (hear the parts, especially, from about 3 minutes in....) Fantastic stuff....



I should add that things seem woefully not right now and there is no hope that they will get better. In fact, there's a good chance that things will be... very difficult, for the near term. Family, relationship, and work, the triad that holds things up -- none of these things are in a healthy state now. And doesn't the world seem a dismal place? Tragedy, death, violence, prejudice, conflict, etc. -- you wonder what happened.

In that spirit, let me offer one more Floyd tune from that era, one that reminds us that a small piece of music can be, in the right circumstances, a salve for the soul. Here is a beautiful demo by the absolutely underrated Richard Wright. This is a demo of the chords that later made up the song "Us And Them" from Dark Side. Listening to it, I am reminded that it is possible to forget things for a while and imagine a better time. Music has this paradoxical capability to let you sink completely within yourself and yet, while at the same time, allowing you to totally forget yourself too.

Metal Box

New purchase! P.I.L.'s Metal Box, originally released in 1979 (and later re-released in the U.S. as Second Edition). Snagged this off ebay. It was pricey but this was an original issue from 1979. The outside canister obviously has some wear and tear, mostly (I presume) from oxidization over the past 37 years. But the vinyl appears to be in mint condition -- a brilliant album spread over 3 records. One of the reasons for getting this on vinyl is that the bass, played by the incomparable Jah Wobble, is very compromised on the CD editions. On vinyl, everything really jumps out at you. So now I own an original first print!

Not sure if I've ever written about this album -- it is undoubtedly one of my favorite albums of all time. And yet it is also one of the most difficult listens, especially the first time. It's not really 'musical' in the conventional sense, but drawing from dub, especially, creates an entirely new (for the time) sonic blueprint based around discordance, repetition, and atonality. Its hypnotic nature derives actually from the fact that there's almost nothing musical and pretty in it (well, except for the concluding instrumental "Radio 4.") And yet, in the mesmerizing nearly 8-minute grooves of "Poptones, you can get totally lost after a few minutes. One of the greatest dub/post-punk tracks every recorded. Hell, one of the greatest tracks ever recorded by anyone anywhere.

Débruit - Percute

This is from the album Outside The Line (2015) by the English artist Xavier Thomas who goes by the name Débruit. More about him here. A new album, entitled Débruit & Istanbul, is about to come out in a couple of weeks.
 

Unfortunately, I can't embed the track here. But you can listen here.

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

Someone once wrote a book called Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.
Which is really a great title for anything, don't you think?
It captures the friction between hope and reality that characterizes so much of life.
Yes indeed.

I've always liked this song:

Walter Becker - Book Of Liars

Donald Fagen - I.G.Y.