Mars, Arizona

Long time reader Spencer got in touch last week with a proposal- he picks a tune and sends it to me. I write about it. 'Start with how it makes you feel', he said, 'then it could be a memory... or the visceral sense of hearing it for the first time'. 

I said I was game, it's an interesting idea for an irregular series and we can see where it goes. Then he sent this, a remix of a 2005 Jon Spencer Blues Explosion song...

Mars, Arizona (DFA Remix)

I knew it but hadn't heard for years- I can't remember the first time I heard it but as I clicked play it came flooding back. At the point it came out DFA were riding the crest of a wave, reinventing post- punk and indie dance in a post Twin Towers New York (DFA was formed in 2001 after James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy met while working on David Holmes' Let's Get Killed album. Murphy went on to put together LCD Soundsystem in 2002 and release their definitive and debut single Losing My Edge later that year). 

DFA don't do things by halves and don't spare the senses either. This is a ten minute slab of noisy mid 00s dancefloor action. It kicks in instantly with fuzz and static and then a crash of a piano falling over. Drums and shaker are dropped in and we have a groove, with more bent out of shape piano stabs and a gnarly bassline, the sort of bassline you can feel. It's tense and urgent but aimed at having fun, making people twitch and dance. 

The voice Jon Spencer eventually appears, singing/ howling his 21st century blues, 'I wanna tell you everything I'm thinking of/ Well I can't talk now with my mouth full of love'. The piano bangs away and the bassline writhes, a storm gathering, before the breakdown at five minutes thirty, a long piano chord fade out and then we're into the second half, the drums come back and a distorted synth sound takes over, knobs being turned all the way round the dial and back again and again and again... It's a glorious, hot, noisy mess, the soundtrack to nights of sticky floors, lost jackets, a pre- smoking ban world, missed buses, drunken kisses, ripped jeans, The Fall fed through a synth workshop in early 21st century Brooklyn. 

Monday's Long Song

It's become one of those things you see on the internet, that since David Bowie died in January 2016 the world has gone to pieces, and while the two may be coincidental rather than related you can't help but feel some grand cosmic imbalance was created when David Jones breathed his last breath and that we've been sinking into the abyss ever since. The five years since 2016 seem to have passed very quickly too, events hurtling at us at a rapid speed, leaving us no time to get to grips with things before some other calamity strikes us. 'News had just come over/ five years left to cry in', the man himself wrote and sang in 1972. 

In 2013 James Murphy, the LCD Soundsystem man I posted about last week, got his hands on one of the songs from Bowie's comeback album The Next Day. He cut and looped some clapping from a Steve Reich track, sampled the synth from Ashes To Ashes and created a monumental remix, minimal, sleek and modern. Bowie sounds superb too, back in touch and vital, 'your country's new... but your fear is as old as the world'. The full ten minute version is the one you want obviously, a long remix that you don't really want to come to an end. 

This the edited version. It's worth mentioning that the 12" release was a beautiful artefact, white vinyl, die cut and embossed sleeve. The hole in the centre was square rather than circular.

Love Is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix By James Murphy For The DFA Edit)

The Next Day was trailed by Where Are We Now?, Bowie's nostalgic tribute to the years he spent in Berlin in the mid 1970s. He recorded it (and the whole album) in secret in autumn 2011 and released the single onto the internet without fanfare on his 66th birthday. 'Had to get the train from Potsdamer Platz/ You never knew that I could do that', he croons, a man looking back at his youth, 'just walking the dead'. Time passes, everyone ages, nothing stays the same. The Berlin of 1975 and the Berlin of 2011 are as different as a city could be. David Bowie of 2011 was not the same man he was in 1975. And though he and we didn't know it then, he had just five years left, almost exactly to the day. 

We Pack And Deliver Like UPS Trucks

Another Clash sampling delight, possibly the pick of the bunch, is M.I.A.'s masterpiece Paper Planes. Producer Diplo sampled Mick Jones' guitars from Straight To Hell, bent them about a little and allowed M.I.A. to do her thing. The gunshots and cash registers on the chorus are perfect and the song is a blast from start to finish.



The DFA remix is alright too.

Paper Planes (DFA Remix)

A Big Hand Please

I didn't put this in my 2013 list. I can't imagine how I missed it when I listen to it now.

Clinic 'Tomorrow'(DFA Remix)

Clinic, from Liverpool, have been around for about a decade, chucking out great little records. Velvets style organ, two chord stomp, and Ade Blackburn's nasal vocals. Their first single was the brilliantly titled IPC Sub-Editors Dictate Our Youth. They always make an effort with stage clothes- surgeon's outfits, Sgt Pepper jackets with surgeon's masks, Hawaiian shirts with surgeon's masks. When I stumbled across them soundchecking last year they were in their home clothes. Most strange. You like to think they'd wear the masks for a soundcheck. This is Tomorrow off last year's Do It! lp, bent into new shapes by James Murphy's DFA (LCD Soundsystem), came out on 10" vinyl. Very good.

Tomorrow_(DFA_Remix).mp3