Fearless

Sometimes albums from the recent past, the last year or so, are the ones that get forgotten about. One of 2019's albums that I've bene making time to go back to is Richard Fearless' Deep Rave Memory. Fearless has honed his sound in recent times, purifying everything down to a sleek, industrial blend of ambient acid techno. Death In Vegas moved in this direction in 2011 with the Trans- Love Energies album and then even moreso with 2016's Transmission, a double vinyl set of futuristic techno, Detroit via East London. His studio is a shipping container overlooking the Thames and London's Docklands area, a metal box filled with vinyl, computers and vintage gear. There's an article with pictures here. If environment and psychogeography affect the production of art- and I think they do- then this combination of shipping container, East London and the river must have played a role in the increasingly purified sound that has come out of Richard's imagination. Deep Rave Memory, the title track, is an eleven minute trip, a kick drum leading us in and and a discordant synth sound, two notes up and down, a wobbly siren sound behind it. An acidic topline comes to the fore. Four minutes in it all shifts, a siren synth refrain taking over before most of the elements drop out and then build again for an increasingly intense, sweetly melodic second half. 

In 2018 Richard put out Honey, a one off single with Sasha Grey, a song I've raved about before. You can find it at Bandcamp. The year before he released Sweet Venus, a limited 12" only release that seems to be coming from the same place. Sweet Venus starts with an erratic dancing synth line and a spray can hiss of percussion before a long, ghostly, distant chord comes into play. It came out on Fearless' own label, Drone. Label name and sound perfectly aligned. It all goes off just before three minutes, the drums accelerating, the track suddenly gathering momentum, a techno bullet train.

Working backwards in 2014 there were two 12" singles, Higher Electronic States and Gamma Ray. Gamma Ray is clearly part of this, an eight minute slice of tension and release, pattering drums, metallic hiss, more looping synth notes flitting about, bouncing around a shipping container above a river.  

Gamma Ray

Sally At The Disco

Last year A Man Called Adam returned from the Balearic wilderness with their excellent Farmarama album. Various songs have been remixed, reworked and dubbed out, by Sally and Steve themselves and by others including Prins Thomas. Covid and lockdown put paid to the original plans for release but now the entire package is out, eighteen remixes and dubs plus a fifty minute mixtape pulling them all together. The full release is at Bandcamp. The Prins Thomas remix is characteristically inventive and sprightly, a snaking guitar line, some analogue synths, Sally's part spoken, part sung vocal and a complex, twisting rhythm. 

The PV Lash Up of the same song, Paul Valery At The Disco, is a giddy floorfiller, a thumping house drumbeat and wonderfully silly keyboard part guaranteed to have you both dancing and smiling. 

Earlier this year Sally recorded a vocal for a new song written by Balearic militants Leo Mas and Fabrice. This Unspoken Love had summer written all over it- now in the darker days of autumn it's still working its magic. The dub version, also available at Bandcamp, a a dark, insistent house chugger pointing its face towards the night skies. 

Virus And Tantra

David Harrow, resident of Los Angeles and purveyor of fine dub since the days of On U Sound in the late 80s, has been unleashing weekly releases into the ether, digital dub with acres of wide open space and pressure. The latest one, PurpleCircle (Virus Dub 5), is a delight and is on Bandcamp here. The previous week was Maskup (Virus Dub 4), all smoke, echo, bass and melodica. Nod your head here. They're a dollar each, roughly 98 pence for those of us in the UK. 

Less laid back but just as transportative is David's work in the mid- 90s as Technova (recording for Andrew Weatherall's Sabres Of Paradise and Emissions Audio Output labels. Andrew and David began to work together after bumping into each other London's clubs. When David said he had some music recorded Andrew said he'd put it out on Sabres without even hearing it). Tantra, a 1994 12" single and album, is especially good. This is the full twenty one minutes of Tantra, a late night, post club dub techno excursion.

On the B-side Innersphere remix Tantra as Tantrum, ten minutes of trancey- techno workout. Nothing wrong with some techno for Tuesday is there? Certainly puts your head in a different place and shifts things up a gear.

Tantrum (Innersphere Mix)

Monday's Long Song

One of the things the UK should be very grateful for is that whilst we are in the midst of a world pandemic and a country whose own record of dealing with said pandemic is, to say the least, mixed, we are fortunate to have surfeit of celebrity epidemiologists, people who have somehow managed to combine careers in soap operas, as TV personalities and as the frontmen of rock 'n' roll bands (and doesn't that sound like a very 20th century occupation) with becoming experts in the transmission of disease and the social policies that should accompany infectious disease. How they've managed to find the time to gain their degrees and PhDs, not to say the hours of laboratory work involved, with the endless touring and rehearsing is a mystery. 

Many of them also seem to be under the impression that their edgy and free thinking views are hardly reported anywhere in the 'mainstream media' (or to quote Ian Brown the 'lamestream media'- nice one Ian). I think we've reached a point where anyone who uses the letters MSM or 'lamestream media' in a debate should be automatically disqualified from taking part in it. One thing the UK does not seem to be short of is libertarian right wing voices presenting their views in the mainstream- during the years of the Brexit debacle the BBC gave the right wing a voice every single day, time after time, on the news.  It gave Farage a voice on Question Time on over thirty occasions. That's all quite mainstream isn't it? The newspapers may be suffering from falling physical sales but their online presence is huge and they still play a key role in setting daily political agendas. At last reckoning the voices of the libertarian right can be found in The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, the Telegraph, The Times, The Sun and The Star not to mention magazines such as The Spectator where the views of maskless warriors like Toby Young are printed weekly. ITV and Sky News are available to fill in any gaps that these may have left. I think the mainstream media have this area fairly well covered. On the internet places such as Twitter, which has forty eight million daily users, are forums where 'non- MSM' voices are widely heard and amplified. If you're are a celebrity epidemiologist and you decide it's high time your important voice was heard on subjects such as wearing a small piece of cloth over the lower part of your face when in Sainsburys for fifteen minutes to prevent other people potentially catching your germs, there aren't exactly a shortage of places ready to report your wisdom. 

The same celebrity epidemiologists should also possibly take a look at their views and then enter a period of self- reflection, examining other well known figures who share them. If you find yourself on the same side of the fence re: mask wearing, as say Donald Trump (worst Covid 19 death rate in the world), David Icke (believes the world is ruled by a shadowy cabal of lizards) and Nick Griffin (disgraced racist and former leader of the fascist British National Party), maybe you need to think again. 

Ian Brown, former frontman of The Stone Roses, recently Tweeted about masks being muzzles and the removal of freedoms. If anyone was going to be susceptible to Youtube conspiracy theories it was going to be Ian but his increasingly demented defence of his opinions was sad to say the least (and in no way related to the release of a particularly poor single). Screaming into the internet with caps lock on, suggesting that Dave Haslam had no right to counter Ian's views because his Dad was a vicar from Birmingham, using the hashtag #researchanddestroy when it seemed his own research was a ten minute Youtube video, Ian looked less like the loose limbed, sugar spun hero from 1989 and more like an advert for the view that long term marijuana use really does damage cognitive function. In 1990 Ian famously said 'it's not where you're from, it's where you're at'. Ian is not at anywhere we would want to be. The frightening thing is the number of his followers who reply praising him for 'dropping truth bombs' and 'telling it how it is'. Funny how many of the free thinkers have to follow a leader and tow the line. 

I have no real love of Oasis so Noel Gallagher's continuing spiral into becoming the Rt. Hn. Member for Burnage (Con) doesn't dismay me that much but his small minded, infantile comments about masks recently were a new low. Noel doesn't want to wear a mask because 'there's too many fucking liberties being taken away from us now'. He was challenged for refusing to wear one on a train and said 'I choose not to  wear one and if I get the virus it's on me and not on everyone else. If every other cunt is wearing a mask I'm not going to catch it off them and if I've got it then they're not going to catch it off me'. An overindulged rock star who went straight from living with his Mum to living in a mansion in Primrose Hill thinks everyone else should wear one but him. There's this thing called society Noel, it's a community where we all to some extent do things that are for the good of everyone else. I wear a mask in the shops to protect you and you wear one to protect us. We all help each other by doing things which may be inconvenient but which are for the common good. However Noel thinks he is above this. His backbench Tory MP views would have found great favour with another heritage act, the 1980s Conservative Party, and its frontwoman's views that 'there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women'. 

Van Morrison, another over indulged rock 'n' roll 'maverick', has been throwing his views about lockdown into the ring. But, y'know, it's Van Morrison, who gives a fuck? There can't be many people who have paid much attention to what Van Morrison has said or done since Astral Weeks came out (1968 for the record), apart from being forced to endure Brown Eyed Girl at wedding receptions. 

Wearing a mask seems a bizarre hill to make your stand on. The view that you have suffered some essential loss of a fundamental freedom by wearing a face mask for ten minutes while in a shop is bewildering. There is also a view gathering pace that some shadowy, deep state overlords have invented the virus and are using it to remove all our freedoms, that the government wants to lock us all down and control us. The people sharing this view, like Ian, say that the Covid 19 app is being introduced to track your movements so 'they' know where you are. They always share these views on their mobile phones (which already have their data and can track their every movement and message) and on social media platforms (which, ditto). If the shadowy overlords really do want to control us all and this is the start of it, they couldn't have picked a worse government to do the job. I don't know if Ian et al have been so busy studying for their epidemiology degrees that they haven't seen any TV news but this government is wilfully incompetent, they can't control their advisors never mind the whole country. Their senior advisor can't cope with having to do a couple of days of primary childcare on his own without driving two hundred miles despite laws to the contrary. Look at them. Look at Matt Hancock and Dominic Raab, two men who seem to have gone directly from being deputy head boy at a minor private school to secretary of state. These overpromoted imposters are the men selected to shut us down and remove our freedoms forever? Really? 

Here is some music from Chocolate Hills. 

And At The Same Time

Electricity Comes From Other Planets

I haven't posted any Velvet Underground on a Sunday for ages (or any other day for that matter but there's something about the 1968- '69 era Velvets that seems very Sunday to me). This song, one of the last of the Cale- period Velvets, came out in the mid 80s as part of the VU album and then again in 2017 as part of the recreated 'lost' 1969 studio album. It's a blast, opening with a superb sounding clipped guitar chord, the sort of chord that makes people pick up a guitar in the first place. Almost immediately there's a funky riff joining in and that pacey rhythm. Lou Reed starts singing all kinds of nonsense while other voices join in off mic and several attempts at backing vocals are made, all very loose. Lou is riffing about where evil lurks and the mirror's edge, New York buildings, electricity coming from other planets, the Pope in a silver castle and Martha and The Vandellas. There's the descending 'wrong, wrong wrong' backing vox part that it's impossible not to join in with and which can get stuck in your head for days.  

Temptation Inside Your Heart

Talkin' Funny And Lookin' Funny

Mentioning Brian Eno and David Byrne's 1981 album My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts earlier this week sent me back to it once again, a record that still sounds fresh and contemporary despite being four decades old. Byrne and Eno's use of found voices and rhythms prefigured a lot of what would become standard later on in the decade and after. On Help Me Somebody they took a sample of the Reverend Paul Morton and laid him over some busy, funky percussion. Morton is all fire and brimstone while the guitar riff chatters away- 'you make yourself look bad/ help me somebody/ take a good look at yourself/  and see if you're the kind of person God wants you to be'. An African highlife guitar riff comes in. Ghostly noises echo around, like a short wave radio between stations. The combined effect is like standing and waiting to cross the road at a junction with three different buskers playing within earshot, a street preacher venting forth and the traffic flying past noisily- but in a way that makes you want to stop and dance and lose yourself rather than cross the road and get to wherever it is you are going

Help Me Somebody 

As the song gathers pace the Rev. Morton carries on , swallowed up at times by the incessant rhythms and looping melodies, 'There's no escape from Him/ He's so high you can't get over Him/ He's so low you can't get under Him/ He's so wide you can't get around Him/ If you make your bed in Heaven He's there/ If you make your bed in Hell He's there/ He's everywhere/ Help me somebody'. 

Decline And Fall

Sean Johnston in his A Mountain Of Rimowa guise specialises in long, undulating tracks, melodic and euphoric chuggers, packed with those head tilted back, eyes closed beatific moments, where if you were in a club or in a crowd there would be an act of communion, of music transcending its surroundings. Under the circumstances, these moments aren't happening  but we can dream. 

The ep, titled The Decline And Fall of A Mountain Of Rimowa, has three new tracks plus a remix. No More (with a remix by Each Other) is all the above and more, a driving bassline and swooping synthlines, piano and some Joubert Singers style vocals for added bliss. Likely to provoke arms in the air, hairs on the nape of the neck raised, tell a random stranger you love him/her emotions. 

His Brothers And Sisters In The East starts out slow, ticking drum machine and piano chords and adds then drops in a gurning acid part, sneaking it in and it leaves it there, repeating, looping onwards and outwards.

The Joker builds slowly and intensely, spaced out bleeps and a deep, pulsing bassline. The breakdown at four minutes and subsequent re- entry of snare, bass and synths is like swimming through warm water towards the sun. The topline bounces around just out of reach. And then it's 5am and it's time to go home.