A January 1995 episode of Top Of The Pops came up on the repeats on BBC4 recently including this performance of Protection, Tracey Thorn and Massive Attack in imperious form. Protection is one of the 90s best songs, a genuine jaw dropper on first and subsequent listens and a song its impossible to turn off once it starts. Tracey's voice is perfect for the song, her singing a perfect blend of strength and hurt and her lyrics, switching the gender around mid- song, spin the song around. Protection, the album, came out in September1994. Following up Blue Lines was never going to be easy but Protection mainly manages it with the title track and others- Karmacoma, Sly, Better Things, Three and Spying Glass, some of their best songs. The cover of Light My Fire less so maybe. But Protection is the towering achievement, a song that even mid- 90s Top Of The Pops can't ruin.
Tracey's songs and recordings outside Everything But The Girl, both solo and with other people, are many and various. I thought, having listened to Protection a few times and then heading to the Andrew Weatherall remix of Tracey's Sister from 2018, that a Tracey Thorn solo/ collaboration mix might work. And it does.
Protection came out in 1995, one of the singles/ songs of the 90s. The 12" came with this Brian Eno remix, a ten minute ambient affair. It had already been the lead song on the album Protection, released in 1994 and an obvious choice for a single.
Raise The Roof was a 2007 Tracey Thorn single, and on her solo album Out Of The Woods. Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve, Richard Norris and Erol Alkan's psyche outfit, twist it into new shapes and spaces.
Sister was the lead single from Tracey's 2018 album Record, a song with Corinne Bailey Rae and Warpaint's Stella Mozgawa on board. Tracey sings the line 'And I fight like a girl' and makes it sound like the toughest, most menacing line she's ever sung. Andrew Weatherall 's remix (and the dub version too) are ten minutes of late period Weatherall brilliance, chuggy, dubby remix splendour.
Moving Dub is from No Protection, the Mad Professor dub version of Massive Attack's Protection. Moving Dub, with Tracey on vocals, is Better Things sent through the dub blender.
Night Time is a cover of a song by The Xx, released as a standalone solo EP in 2011. It has husband Ben Watt on guitar. The Xx asked Tracey to cover it for a compilation of covers of their songs by their favourite artists they were planning. It never happened except for Tracey's cover. Drums, programming and production were courtesy of Ewan Pearson.
This is brand new from Roger Eno and ahead of an album in October called The Skies They Shift Like Chords... Tidescape is minimal and for want of a better description ambient/ neo- classical, a four minutes forty seconds meditation on staring out at the sea, led by Jon Goddard's ringing guitar high note and a low key bed of other instruments- I can hear an organ and a clarinet I think, maybe something else too. It comes with a video that has slow moving, grainy footage of an empty beach at sunset, a dilapidated pier, and the sand and sky a blurry wash of browns and greys with the faintest hint of sunshine as a pale yellow horizon. If you're anything like me you may find it all profoundly melancholic but it does also manage to leave you feeling ok. I think.
Roger's brother Brian also has a slow moving, melancholic, ambient track inspired by the endless flux of the beach, this one from the soundtrack to Derek Jarman's Jubilee in 1978.
Last year I ran a short series of weekly posts where regular reader Spencer sent me a song and I wrote about it. It went really well, all the songs/ tracks were right up my street but none had been posted here before. They were in the main long, intense, gnarly, electronic dance music- Model 500's ground-breaking Detroit techno, a DFA remix of Jon Spencer and his Blues Explosion, I-f's 90s electro classic Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass, La Funk Mob's supercharged Gallic breakbeat, Factory Floor's 21st century acid house.
Spencer sent me this a couple of weeks ago, a song in a very different vein to the ones he sent me in the autumn and one completely new to me. This is The Moon's Lament by Cindy D'lequez Sage. I can't find an mp3 of the song so it's Youtube only I'm afraid.
Lots of reverb, a guitar strummed faintly and the husky, somewhat opiated sounding voice of Cindy, expressing some dissatisfaction and setting out what she wants- 'feasting with panthers is alright for some/ But me I'm a planet and I still need some fun'. A wolf howls. A guitar solo rips its way in, valve amp pushed to the max. 'All my friends are mirrors and all my mirrors my friends/ In the olive grove so fair, failed eyes I whisper/ I don't want your food, I don't want your cups/ I just want some love'. Spooked and more than a little haunting, there's a touch of Nico about the voice and the delivery, of The Bad Seeds about the tone and the music, and of Spacemen 3's bluesier moments.
The song plays over the closing scene/ credits of a 2009 Peter Jackson film, The Lovely Bones (Spencer's seen it, I haven't yet), a murder/ supernatural thriller/ horror starring Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci. Both Ronan and Tucci were praised for their performances and I don't think I've ever seen a bad film with Saoirse Ronan in it.
The film appears to have divided critics somewhat. Rotten Tomatoes says, "It's stuffed full of Peter Jackson's typically dazzling imagery, but The Lovely Bones suffers from abrupt shifts between horrific violence and cloying sentimentality". It was scored by Brian Eno. The soundtrack includes songs from Eno's own back catalogue, mainly the 70s including The Great Pretender, Baby's On Fire and The Big Ship, along with songs by Paul McCartney, Cocteau Twins, Van Morrison and Tim Buckley.
There is very little on the internet about Cindy which is in itself odd- virtually no information, background or biography. She doesn't seem to have recorded anything else and the song isn't on the CD release or the soundtrack to download. Wikipedia says this about the film's closing credits- 'For the film's ending, Eno uncovered a demo he had done in 1973 and reunited with the vocalist to create a proper version for the film, commenting: "That song from 1973 was finally finished in 2008!" I'm assuming this is a reference to The Moon's Lament. Some Youtube commenters reckon that the song is Brian Eno with his voice pitch shifted. A couple think it's Van Morrison. Some chip in to say Cindy is real, is the songwriter and the singer. One commenter says that Cindy is real and is her mum. Another that Cindy died 'last year' (comment left a year ago, in 2022). I'm not sure Youtube comments are necessarily evidence that would stand up in court so the identity of Cindy remains unclear. It's all a bit of a mystery. If anyone knows, please write in to the usual address.
After their summer highlight Jezebellearic- nine minutes of warm sounds, waves lapping on the shore and the voice of Ibizan DJ Alfredo- Jezebell have returned for autumn with some electro, cunningly renamed as Jezebellectro. The title track, Jezebell Spirit, is six minute long tour de force, funky as a mosquito's tweeter, pummelling dancefloor electro, recasting a familiar song into new shapes. You can get the EP complete with another track Dumbell and a pair of remixes at Bandcamp.
You'll probably recognise the source- underneath the pumping drums, rattling snare and fizzing synth lines is a Brian Eno and David Byrne ground breaker from 1981, polyrhythmic Afro- beats and the disturbing found voice of a TV preacher performing an exorcism. I bought My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts back in 1987 and it's an album that still holds a huge amount of power, the layers of electronics, sampled voices and drums and rhythms borrowed from African and Middle Eastern cultures. They encountered a certain amount of legal action at the time and since and have recently been accused of cultural appropriation but it remains a staggering, forward thinking, pioneering record.
Some Brian Eno for Sunday, mainly focussing on his ambient and/ or soundtrack music but with a more meaty cut from his 1981 collaboration with David Byrne thrown in for good measure, the perfect relaxed start to a Sunday in May. There could easily be another three of four follow ups to this mix without even scratching the surface of Eno.
We got back from Mallorca yesterday afternoon, Manchester welcoming us back with some biting April cold. Funnily, when we arrived in Mallorca on Monday morning and got to our hotel at Palma Nova it was both cold and windy, the palm trees being blown around all over the place by the strong wind coming in off the sea. The weather got better as the week went on and on Thursday we all got sunburnt sitting/ lying by the pool and on the beach. The break was just what the three of us needed, some time away from here and away from everything that has been going on since Isaac died last November. Not that we didn't take it with us- one of the rules of travel is wherever you go, you're still you- but we were able to unwind and relax. Some of the physical symptoms of grief lessened while we were away, a fact brought home to me when we were in the taxi from Manchester airport yesterday, driving up one of the main roads back to Sale, and some of those physical symptoms suddenly re- appeared. 'Hello darkness my old friend', as Paul Simon put it.
It was very good to be away though and Mallorca has got a lot going for it- a beautiful island, with beaches and mountains, that magical Balearic feel, and a wonderful capital city in Palma. It also has some superb 1960s concrete modernism in its hotels, constructed for the arrival of mass tourism in the 1960s. They pepper the coastline all the way from Palma down the coast to Palma Nova and Magaluf. The bars, restaurants and hotels were only just re- opening after the winter, the season not fully started yet with plenty of places still closed or in the process of getting ready for the summer. We haven't been anywhere since summer 2019 and I'm sure we'd have been happy to be anywhere but Palma Nova and its surrounding areas were very much exactly where we needed to be for a few days.
The beach at Magaluf has this view, the uninhabited Isla de Sa Porrassa sitting in the bay, stunningly photogenic at dusk and during the heat of the day.
This is the theme from Top Boy, the inner London crime drama that started on Channel 4 and was then reprised by Netflix. Brian Eno's theme works just as well as a piece of semi- ambient, instrumental music as the theme to a gritty crime drama.
This week's Sunday half hour mix comes from Bristol courtesy of Massive Attack. It's difficult now to remember exactly the impact Massive Attack had back in 1991 when Blue Lines was released, instantly switching on the heads of people to the reggae/ dub/ hip hop (soon to be trip hop) sound. Ravers, house heads, indie kids, almost everyone, was suddenly listening to something else. They went on to make some stunning songs and records after that but maybe with slightly less of 'the shock of the new' that they had in spring '91 (a time when they also dropped the word Attack from their name due to the bombing of Iraq by the US led coalition). Protection and Mezzanine both had outstanding songs and moments (plus the various remixes and versions, not least Mad Professor's dub of the whole Protection album). After that my interest came and went and I've dipped in and out (dipping back in for the remixes from Heligoland and 2016's Ritual Spirit EP.
The thirty seven minute mix below tries to avoid the obvious mixes even if it goes for some of the big hitter songs and has a dub vein running through it, ideal for making your Sunday breakfast too. I realised putting it together that it could be three times the length without any drop off in terms of quality. It takes in vocals from Horace Andy, Tracey Thorn, Liz Fraser and Hope Sandoval, remixes by Brian Eno, Mad Professor, Larry Heard and Gui Boratto and has the combined talents of Smith And Mighty, Johnny Dollar and Nellee Hooper at the producer's desk.
I took this picture in Manchester walking down Oldham Street back in August. A month from today it will be Boxing Day and the whole Christmas thing will be done and dusted bar the leftovers. The longest day will have passed and we'll be heading towards the new year.
As Tony Wilson/ Steve Coogan says in 24 Hour Party People,“It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,' says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away.” (thanks to Guarin Tees for reminding me of this quote recently on social media). A lot of people are going through a lot at the moment and it's tough sometimes to keep going and remember that all this will pass. Which it will, sooner or later.
Today's music comes from Brian Eno, no stranger to literature and clever quotes himself. Here he was with long term collaborators his brother Roger and Daniel Lanois and the soundtrack to the 1989 documentary For All Mankind. It's as good a way to start Friday morning as any.
Back in 1984 David Lynch attempted to film Frank Herbert's novel Dune, an epic science fiction story set on a distant planet which is entirely desert where the most valuable substance in the universe is a consciousness expanding spice. Among the cast were a young Kyle McLachlan, Virginia Madsen, Patrick Stewart and Max von Sydow. It was also one of Sting's big adventures in acting and if that weren't enough came with a soundtrack by Toto. It bombed, critically and commercially. One of the reviews said that 'several of the characters in Dune are psychic, which puts them in the unique position of being able to understand what goes on in the movie'. I haven't seen it for many years but I think it was a film which only really made any sense if you had read the novel and for those that hadn't it left them with a lot of work to do. It's been remade by Denis Villeneuve, is in cinemas now and has been much reviewed much more positively than the 1984 by both critics and fans. I haven't seen it yet but would like to.
The 1984 film's soundtrack was almost entirely by Toto except for one piece of music from Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. In some ways sci fi soundtracks are the perfect place for Eno's ambient synth music.
If you want more, there's a full length, twelve minute version of Prophecy Theme on Youtube. Amusingly, when you type Dune 1984 into Google below the first search returns in the People Also Ask box, the first suggestion is 'is Dune the worst movie ever?' Lynch was disappointed with the final cut, having been instructed to cut the three hour running time down to a more manageable two and a quarter hours. He ran out of money for the FX too and ended up with something he wasn't' happy with but which had his name on it and disowned it. Three different versions have been screened at different times or in different places. Eno's Prophecy Theme at least is something that survives whatever version or cut is being shown.
Brian Eno's Ambient 4: On Land came out in 1982, an album combining synthesiser notes, found sounds including animals and rural recordings, recordings from other projects that finally found a home and the contributions of musicians such as Bill Laswell, Daniel Lanois and the recently deceased Jon Hassell. The tracks reference real places- Lizard Point, Lantern Marsh, Leeks Hills and on the final track Dunwich Beach, a Suffolk port which was the victim of coastal erosion and disappeared into the sea. The album is eerie and unsettling despite the beauty of the recordings and there's a sense of loss throughout it, suggesting the faded glamour of deserted British seaside towns out of season or the ghostly weirdness of the English countryside at dusk in autumn.
When Alan McGee told Primal Scream to turn their run of singles in 1990- 1991 into an album the end result was Screamadelica. The singles that led to it were era- defining and a total change of course for a band who were first 60s indie janglers and then Stooges style rockers. Taken together the singles- Loaded (I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have remixed/ demolished by Andrew Weatherall), Come Together (an epochal Weatherall mix and a summer sun kissing, Elvis referencing Terry Farley version), Higher Than The Sun (various Weatherall mixes and an eight minute Orb mix) and Don't Fight It, Feel It (Weatherall and Hugo Nicolson again at the helm, no guitars, no Bobby, Denise Johnson singing)- are a compilation released together. Add Movin' On Up, a Jimmy Miller Rolling Stones/ gospel fantasy made real, and you still have a series of singles. Slip Inside This House almost sounds like another single, a tripped out acid house cover of The 13th Floor Elevators with Throb singing. It's the rest of songs that turn Screamadelica from an all- the- hits 1991 compilation to an album, sequenced to work from start to finish, a trip/ journey unfolding over four sides of vinyl. I'm Coming Down and Damaged are a pair of ballads, one a Pharaoh Saunders influenced hit of comedown and the other a country blues, a pair of album tracks that give the album a different pace and vibe. The glue that holds it all together are the other two Weatherall / Nicolson songs, Inner Flight and Shine Like Stars. I'll come back to Shine Like Stars, the perfect closer for Screamadelica another time- instead here is Inner Flight.
Hugo Nicolson provided the studio nous and production skills for Weatherall to translate the spirit of the times and his encyclopaedic record collection into recordings. Inner Flight is a trippy, Pet Sounds on ecstasy instrumental, floating in and floating on, a circling melody line and some stellar, wordless ooh ooh ahhh backing vocals drifting in (sampled partly from C.B. Cook along with some drums from Dr. John's Gris Gris). If you listen to the last forty seconds of this 1974 song from Brian Eno you'll spot where Andrew pilfered the sound effect from for Inner Flight's intro as well.
Yesterday felt like the first day out of the winter, maybe not spring but a step towards it- sun shining, blue skies, wispy clouds, first shoots of flowers appearing.
Brian Eno's work has always been very linked to colours, from his album with his brother Roger last year (Mixing Colours) all the way back to the 70s. Deep Blue Day is beautiful piece of work, recorded for his 1983 Apollo: Atmospheres And Soundtracks album and re- used in 1996 in Trainspotting in the scene where Renton dives into The Worst Toilet In Scotland in search of a suppository. Deep Blue Day (recorded with Roger Eno and Daniel Lanois) is gorgeous, an gently ecstatic drift of synths and pedal steel guitar.
That gives me the excuse, if one were needed, to post this re-edit by Mojo Filter of Eno's 1975 classic Another Green World, Eno's semi- ambient, piano led original pushed into Balearic waters with a drumbeat and a truckload of samples, including a child saying 'L- O- V- E, Love'. Play one, then the other- Sunday morning sorted.
2020, it goes without saying, has been a year unlike any other. When the first lockdown kicked in back in March, schools were closed and everyone bar essential workers was told to stay at home, I briefly wondered if writing a music blog was suddenly a redundant activity, a bit futile and inadequate in the face of what was happening. The fear back in March was real, the scenes of people dying in hospital corridors in Italy coupled with rising case numbers and deaths and the sheer ineptitude of our government made everything else- even Brexit- seem inconsequential. In fact, as the weeks of lockdown turned into months and now almost a year of lockdowns and Tiers, music has been one of the things that has helped and despite our individual isolation has been one of the things that has brought us together. Anyone that has logged onto one of Sean Johnston's Emergency Broadcast Sessions and seen a community coming together in the chat function, enjoying hours of Sean DJing and chatting away will have seen how important music is as a release, as a connection and as simple escapist enjoyment. And despite everything there has been loads of great music made, written, recorded, produced and released this year. In some ways, I've enjoyed more new music this year than in many recent ones.
Albums Of The Year
The best albums this year seem to have reflected the year (some of been made as a result of lockdown and time artists have had to create). There are masses of albums that have been floating around and that caught my ear. Before I get into the list proper, these ones have all been part of 2020- Wedge by Number, an exuberant post- punk, dance album with an ACR remix to boot, Julian Cope's Self Civil War (my last gig before lockdown, in February, was Julian at Gorilla), Steve Roach's Tomorrow, Rickard Javerling's 4, The Orb's Abolition Of The Royal Familia (or at least parts of it), Youth and Jah Wobble's Acid Punk Dub Apocalypse (an album with multiple guest stars, including Hollie Cook, Alex Paterson, Blue Pearl and beats from Andrew Weatherall and Nina Walsh and which sounds good when it's playing but which I can't remember much about when it's not), Rose City Band's Summerlong (the latest Ripley Johnson project, cosmic country/ boogie, some of which is superbly out there, a blissed out version of Laurel Canyon), the nine remixes that made up Unloved's Why Not release (including a superb Richard Sen remix and dub plus outstanding remixes from Phil Kieran, Hardway Bros and The Vendetta Suite), a similar release by Joe Morris, nine remixes of his Balearic album from the year before compiled as Exotic Remixes, and a follow up to his The Malcontent Volume 1 by Duncan Grey (who drip fed us some great standalone songs throughout 2020 before giving us The Malcontent Volume 2). An honourable mention too to three albums that were made decades ago but only saw the light of day this year- Neil Young's legendary Homegrown, Rig's Perfect and Bushpilot's 23, three very different but better late than never albums. I also loved A Man Called Adam's career spanning oddities and extras round up Love Forgotten, a digital only release that packs a huge amount into it's twenty songs.
I know that I should have heard Working Men's Club by now and just haven't got round to it despite them appearing to be right up my alley. They're on my list, as are Sault who everyone else I know raves about and I just haven't dived in there yet.
These are the twelve albums that have been the pick of 2020 at Bagging Area, in roughly this order even if finding a meaningful way to rank them is really tricky. The albums at the top of the list could be placed either way round depending on which I'm listening to at the time.
12. Future Beat Alliance 'Beginner's Mind'
An immersive nine track trip taking in ambient, drones, acid and the melodic futurism of 2th century Detroit techno.
11. Kelly Lee Owens 'Inner Song'
A strong set of electronic songs and grooves from Kelly and a step on from her debut (which I loved). Corner Of My Sky, intense, weather beaten 2020 techno with John Cale's vocals stood out but everything else on it, from the banging grooves of Melt! to the bleary eyed soundscapes, sounded as good.
10. GLOK 'Dissident remixes'
GLOK's 2019 record was as good as anything else out last year. The remix album was trailed by one of the final Andrew Weatherall remixes, a beautiful but low key, urban ambient remix of Cloud Cover. Across the rest of the record were some equally innovative versions from Richard Sen, C.A.R., Leaf, Minotaur Shock and others and from GLOK (Andy Bell himself).
9. Brian and Roger Eno 'Mixing Colours'
A beautifully meditative set of treated piano pieces that drift out of the speakers and around the room. Made perfect sense back in May when I was raging about VE Day and contemplating turning fifty.
8. Richard Norris 'Elements'
Five long tracks made with modular synths, lovely pulses and washes of sound, hypnotic analogue sequences and gentle drones that built on his Abstractions records from 2019 and his excellent Music For Healing series from the spring and summer- deep listening for difficult days. Richard has made some of the defining sounds of 2020 for me.
9. The Long Champs 'Straight To Audio'
A one man band from Wales (Lloyd Jones) making chuggy, trippy instrumentals that found favour with Andrew Weatherall's Convenanza and the Weatherall/ Johnston travelling disco A Love From Outer Space. Multiple, shimmering guitar tracks, washes of FX, slow motion dance beats and a style of upbeat shoegaze that transported me when things seemed irredeemably gloomy.
8. Four Tet 'Sixteen Oceans'
Released as lockdown struck Kieran Hebden's latest record, three sides of vinyl plus a fourth of locked grooves, is a distillation of everything that he's good at. Teenage Birdsong came out in 2019, those skippy beats and lighter- than- air melodies pointing the way, and the rest of the album lived up to it. When I was hearing this in March it seemed like it made a stake to be the year's defining record and it hasn't diminished that much in the time between. A cut above most of the rest.
7. Rheinzand 'Rheinzand'
Rheinzand are a trio from Belgian who have made the darkest disco and the headiest sounds of 2020, a stunning twelve song record with a hot, sticky cover of Talking Heads' Slippery People and in Fourteen Again a song to keep picking up the needle and putting it back to the start. One of those albums that made you/ me forget everything and just focus on being in the music, in the moment.
6. Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini 'Illusion Of Life'
This record sound tracked March for me and will forever be the music of lockdown 1- drones, industrial ambience, some intense and dense atmospheres and mesmerising waves of noise. It is beautiful and ominous and sometimes a really difficult record to pin down. These are the sounds that increasingly have been where I've headed as the year has gone on and if Daniel hadn't recorded another album in lockdown that just pips this one, this could easily be my album of the year.
5. Sonic Boom 'All Things Being Equal'
Pete Kember's first new album in decades, an analogue synth based set of songs that are exactly what he's been doing for three decades but which sound like a new idea. The lead single, Just Imagine, is one of my favourite songs of this year and it sits among the hypnotic, beguiling, psychedelic trip of the rest of the record. When it's on the turntable it engulfs you and fills the room, Pete seeing through his own hallucinations to deliver a political message of kinds- the way you live your life matters.
4. Roisin Murphy 'Roisin Machine'
The glitterball, dancefloor dynamics of Roisin and DJ Parrot turned into album form, songs segueing into each other, tension and release, and Roisin's singular vision front and centre. Dazzling in places and dizzying in others, 2019's single Incapable and 2020's Something More showcasing the just- this- side- of- demented disco pop that she's made her own. If New Year's Eve parties were a thing, this record would be best slipped on at about 10.45pm and then played through to midnight. This performance was filmed in lockdown in Ibiza.
3: A Certain Ratio 'Loco'
Loco, the first ACR album for twelve years, came out in September, a ten song record that seems to try to fit onto one disc everything that makes them who they are: post- punk veterans, 80s funk experimenters, late 80s/ early 90s acid house dance movers, a motorik Berlin- inspired pop group and writers of Mancunian love songs. It's a completely self- contained record- it sounds like them and could only have been made by them, and Jez, Donald and Martin sound revitalised. Sadly, it came only weeks after the tragic death of Denise Johnson, who had sung with the band since the early 90s and who sings on four of the songs on Loco. Along with her solo album which came out at the same time, it's a fitting tribute.
2: Daniel Avery 'Love + Light'
In lockdown Daniel shut himself away in his studio, a shipping container overlooking the Thames and made music. Ghostly ambient moods, intense sounds that ripple and shudder out of the speakers, late night/ post- club washes of calming noise, bleepy melodies that pull at the emotions and some blistering techno capable with a few heart- stopping moments. A gorgeous, immersive record that sounds like the respite we've all needed this year.
1. Andy Bell 'The View From Halfway Down'
Andy stopped off from the Ride re- union and his cosmic adventures as GLOK to make a solo album and it hasn't been far from my turntable since it's release in the autumn. Opened by the late 80s guitar attack bliss of Love Comes In Waves and then followed by the rolling reverse groove and backwards vocals of Indica, the album is the perfect marriage of texture, sound and feel with songs- Skywalker is beautiful, sun kissed psychedelia, Cherry Cola is upwards looking, dreamy psyche- pop and album closer Heat Haze On Wayland Road is seven minutes of shoegaze updated for 2020, a Hooky- esque bassline and some achingly lovely synth sounds.
Neither Album Nor Single But Something Else Entirely Releases Of The Year
Richard Norris 'Music For Healing 1- 12'
In between my albums and singles of 2020 there is a series of releases by Richard Norris, twelve twenty minute ambient/ deep listening tracks, recorded and released with the intention of giving people music to help them switch off and to cope with the stresses of the first lockdown. The twelves pieces are all beautiful, meditative, immersive pieces of work that are as much part of 2020 for me as anything else I've written about here- they are neither albums nor singles but something else entirely (although the twelve have been edited down to much shorter pieces and compiled as a CD which is highly recommended).
Singles/Songs / Remixes/ EPs Of The Year
I'm not sure what even constitutes a single anymore and it probably doesn't matter. Anyway, a top forty five, the number most associated with the single format (apologies to anything I've missed and there will be something).
45. Fireflies 'The Machine Stops'
44. Joe Morris 'The New Dawn Will Come' EP
43. Stray Harmonix 'Mountain Of One'
42. Apiento and Tepper '17- 44- 58' EP
41. A.M.O.R. 'The Decline And Fall Of A Mountain Of Rimowa'
40. Fontaines DC 'A Hero's Death'
39. Rich Lane 'Barry Island'
38. Michael Son of Michael 'Babylonian Beaches' Rude Audio Remix
37. Pye Corner Audio 'Where Things Are Hollow 2' EP
36. Golden Fang AsTRiD
35. Doves 'Carousels'
34. Sink Ya Teeth 'Somewhere Else'
33. The Orielles 'Bobbi's Secret World' Confidence Man Remix
32. Thurston Moore 'Hashish'
31. Sinead O'Connor 'Trouble Of The World'
30. Roisin Murphy 'Something More' Crooked Man Remixes
29. Massey v Sir Horatio 'Music Control'
28. Leo Mas and Fabrice ft. Sally Rodgers 'This Unspoken Love' and dub mix
27. Rich Lane 'Prusik' (Live From The Woods) from the Knots EP.
26. Dreems 'Shark Attack' EP
25. Night Noise 'Dancing In Space' EP
24. Fjordfunk 'It's All Black' Hardway Bros Remix
23. Woodleigh Research Facility 'Woodleigh's Lament'
22. Number 'Wedge' A Certain Ratio v Number (ACR Rework)
21. Dan Wainwright 'Raindance' EP especially the pagan house of A Blessing
20. Duncan Grey 'Steve Killage'
19. The Avalanches ft. Jamie Xx, Neneh Cherry and CLYPSO 'Wherever You Go'
18. Richard Norris 'Golden Waves' EP
17. Woodleigh Research Facility 'Medieval Dub'
16. The Venetians 'Son Sur Son' Andrew Weatherall Remixes
15. Django Django 'Marble Skies' Andrew Weatherall Remix (from 2018 but unreleased until this year).
14. Cantoma 'Closer' Apiento remix
13. The Orb 'The Weekend It Rained Forever (The Ravens Have Left The Tower)'
An album track but I'm sneaking it in here because it shows what Dr. Alex Paterson can still do when he gets everything exactly right- a long, meandering, slightly spooky ambient future classic, Blade Runner and pouring rain, and another track that chimed in tune with lockdown in March.
12. Moon Duo 'Planet Caravan'
A ten minute long cover of a 1970 Black Sabbath song that is the pinnacle of chilled out, take your time guitar playing and whispered vocals. From a Sacred Bones compilation.
11. Andy Bell 'Chery Cola' Pye Corner Audio Remix
The album song made even better, layers of cosmic synths and the ending, where it breaks down into folky acoustic guitar, is sublime.
10. Andy Bell 'Love Comes In Waves'
Shimmering guitar lines beamed in direct from 1989 and a vocal that surfs over the top. Euphoric guitar pop. Summer 2020.
9. Woodleigh Research Facility 'Monthly EP Series'
These should probably be presented above with Richard Norris's Music For Healing series. In January Andrew Weatherall and Nina Walsh began a series of digital only, three track EPs to be released monthly throughout 2020. Events overtook them but the releases kept coming and there are some magnificent pieces of music contained within the folders- a few highlights include Birthday Three from January, Fume Homage a month later, Somnium from March, the tracks from the autumn with Joe Duggan's poetry over the top (Downhill and Play Bingo With Me), the Karra Mesh EP in May and July's Substation Glow and from the latest release The Fallen.
8. Bicep 'Atlas'
I slept on this a bit at first, thinking it was just another Bicep track, but its peaks, the ebb and flow, the rippling toplines, rattling drums, snatches of vocal and happy/ sad house music have been coming around again and again since it came out in March.
7. Formerlover 'Correction Dub'
A bonkers but enthralling collision of dub and Nigerian rhythms by Justin Robertson with his wife Sofia on vocals, speaking/ singing about domination and suchlike.
6. Aimes 'A Star... In The Sky' plus Hardway Bros remix'
Massive sounding sci fi chuggy dance music with a bouncing bassline and portentous vocal sample. Ridiculously good and with Saturn and Jupiter about to be in close conjunction in the sky next week well timed for pulling out again.
5. Sonic Boom 'Just Imagine'
I mentioned this in the album review above but it's such a wonderful, tripped out, wiggy song, Pete asking us to imagine being a tree/ simplicity/ being truly free as the analogies rhythms and synths whirr by.
4. Andrew Weatherall 'Unknown Plunderer/ End Times Sound
This pair of deep cuts, experimental end of the world dub with spaced out sound effects and some guitar from beyond the solar system by Andy Bell (him again), were released on February 21st, four days after Andrew died, a piece of timing no- one expected or wanted. The two tracks demonstrate why he was such a gifted producer and why he is so missed.
3. Green Gartside 'Tangled Man/ Wishing Well'
This came out of nowhere on 7" in the summer, a gorgeous pair of covers of songs by British folk singer Anne Briggs, the golden voice of Green Gartside reborn with some sumptuous dubby folk- pop music. I love it when a single blindsides me and this did exactly that.
2. Andrew Weatherall 'The Moton 5' EP
Four slices of Lord Sabre's customary, easy brilliance, not least in the title track of this EP which glides in with a propulsive bassline, a mechanical rhythm and some very moody synths. The strings that come in at two minutes add some drama to the chug and then it all then glides on, seemingly endlessly but actually only for another five minutes. The Moton 5.2 strips it down and delivers an alternate take. The 12" EP came out in April, two months after he passed and sounds like what he always promised on his Music's Not For Everyone radio show for NTS- tomorrow's music today.
1. Daniel Avery 'Lone Swordsman'
On the morning of February 17th Daniel Avery was in his metal box studio when he heard of the death of his friend and mentor Andrew Weatherall. He captured his feelings in this piece of music, four minutes of emotional, instrumental dance music that captures the spirit of the man and how many people felt with him suddenly gone- a breakbeat, some synths, an unfolding chord sequence and what appear to be the root notes of Smokebelch occasionally peaking through. In a year where emotions have often been very close to the surface, Daniel made a piece of music that is simple and minimal but layered and nuanced and extremely moving. Proof as well that music helps, and that when times are hard music is often the answer.
Another Bagging Area mix for you, an hour of old and new and fairly ambient/ drone/ instrumental based but with Mark E. Smith turning at the end to add his inimitable voice to proceedings. In fact the only other voice is Andrew Weatherall's, heard briefly at the end of Prana Crafter's Starlight, Sing Us A Lullaby, a moment that got to me the first time I heard it. You can find Tiers In December on Mixcloud.
Kams: Hopfen (Richard Norris Remix)
Stray Harmonix: Mountain Of One
Harold Budd: The Pearl
A Winged Victory For The Sullen: Keep It Dark, Deutschland
This ambient/ kraut hybrid was recorded by Brian Eno and Harmonia in 1976. Eno heard Harmonia in the early 1970s and said they were 'the most important band in the world'. A trio made up of Neu!'s Michael Rother and Cluster's Roedelius and Moebius has as good a claim to that title as anyone I guess. Eno eventually hooked up with them in Forst, in rural Lower Saxony, West Germany. They worked on some sessions for nearly two weeks before Eno headed onto Berlin to meet Bowie and begin work on what would become Bowie's Berlin Trilogy. Puzzlingly Harmonia '76 (as the Harmonia- Eno collaboration called themselves) then left the master tapes unreleased until 1997 when Roedelius rescued them and put them out as Tracks And Traces. A 2009 re- issue expanded the album with some digital clean up of the cassette recordings. Atmosphere was one of the additional 2009 tracks, three and a half minutes of arpeggio, synth textures and a rhythm track that is made up of hiss and echo.
Harmonia's debut was the self- explanatory Musik von Harmonia, a record they put together in 1973 using a very basic mixer and three tape machines, a Farfisa organ, a piano, a rhythm machine and some guitars and a very open-ended approach to making music.
I finish work for two weeks today. I could add lots to that but for the moment I'll just say it's been a long time coming and a rest is very much needed.
In 1985 Brian Eno recorded what could be his purest expression of ambient music, the sixty one minutes of Thursday Afternoon, a drifting, reflective piano piece, endless and unchanging. It seems to be as long as one of those Thursday afternoons we all experience as children where the rain keeps us indoors and there is nothing to do or the listlessness we feel as teenagers. An hour listening to this is time well spent- I suppose that's a lesson we learn as kids and in our teens, that doing nothing requires a certain kind of resilience. Eno captures the essence of doing nothing, something we've returned to at points this year.
Eno's 1973 album with Robert Fripp (No Pussyfooting) was an experiment in tape delays and Fripp's guitar playing, parts of which were then turned into loops, creating this dense, layered piece of work. Side two of the album was taken up with a track called Swastika Girls (named after a picture from a porn magazine) and is a far less tranquil and reflective affair, an eighteen minutoe long experiment in disconnected bursts of Fripp's guitar and tape delay noises. Bowie and Iggy loved it apparently.
Harold Budd has died aged 84, of complications arising from Covid. He was a master of ambient music, a composer, pianist and guitarist who played an enormous role in developing what ambient music sounded like in the 1970s and 80s, often with Brian Eno (their joint albums Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror and The Pearl are incredible works, Harold's soft, atmospheric piano playing at the centre of the sound. If ambient music has a centre). Eno, Budd and Daniel Lanois made The Pearl in 1984, a highlight in the back catalogue of all three men, an album reprising the piano textures and treated electronics of Plateaux along with nature recordings. He worked with Cocteau Twins and then later with Robin Guthrie- their 2007 Before The Day Breaks album is a beautiful blend of treated guitars, FX and piano pieces. Ambient music, by definition, is supposed to be background music. Budd's works carry emotional weight that make it much more than wallpaper to chill out to.
Earlier on this year I wrote about Manchester band Rig, one of the groups making a noise thirty years ago, caught up in the excitement of being in a city which had become the centre of the world for a while. Rig formed in south Manchester, the Didsbury/ Withington/ edge of Stockport part of the city and signed to Cut Deep Records. They supported Inspiral Carpets on a nationwide tour and contributed songs to two well received compilation albums, Home and Hit The North. Home had songs by Mark E. Smith, Milltown Brothers, New FADs, Paris Angels, World Of Twist, Rainkings, Swirl, What? Noise and Peter Hook's Revenge. Hit The North split it's two sides of vinyl into rock and dance sides had several of the above as well as The Man From Delmonte, Rowetta, Ruthless Rap Assassins, Krispy Three and a few others of whom I know nothing/ remember little (The Australians, The Bedflowers, The Jerks, All Of My Life). Between them they sum up something of the spirit of the times, lots of bands exploring new ideas, dance rhythms moving into rock music, guitar bands growing their fringes out, DJs and rappers, and some of the bigger players on the scene doing something on the side.
Killing time in lockdown Rig's guitarist Darren began to go through his archive of posters, flyers, music press clippings and photographs and put it all into one place (a blog, here). As he began to write about the story of the band and Tweet links to the posts, Rig's former record company Dead Dead Good got in touch and said they were interested in re- releasing the band's singles digitally. Dead Dead Good was set up to release The Charlatans early records by Northwich's Omega Records shop owner Steve Harrison but also had a massive hit in 1991 with the pop- rave classic Insanity by Oceanic.
One thing led to another and Darren began to tidy up Rig's back catalogue and got hold of the original master tapes, boxes containing DATs, reel to reel tapes and cassettes. He then came across the mini- album they recorded in the spring of 1990 at Suite 16, a recording studio in Rochdale previously used by Joy Division, Gang Of Four, The Fall and Teardrop Explodes. For some idea of the blue plaque worthy history of the place, Joy Division recorded Atmosphere there. Between February and April 1990 Rig recorded at Suite 16 with Manchester legend Stuart James producing and Swing Out Sister (and ex-ACR) Andy Connell playing keyboards on some of the songs. The songs were then shelved when Cut Deep Records were bust and Rig moved on to Dead Dead Good, re- recording some of the songs while also moving onto new ones.
Lost albums, thirty years old, recovered and restored are a great story, all part of the fabric of music. Rig's tapes were baked to remove the moisture from them, digitised and then Italian producer and engineer Matteo Cifelli remastered them. The six songs recorded in Rochdale, never previously released, have compiled alongside their cover of ESG's Moody which came out as a white label (produced by ACR's Martin Moscrop), the pair of songs from Home and Hit The North (B.R.O. and Thud) and another unreleased one called Spoilt Bastard. I posted Moody (Dance) back in September, a 1990 take on the Scroggins sisters early 80s punk- funk with a sample from My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts but it's well worth another airing.
On May 30th 1990 Rig played at the Richmond in Brighton. This video catches them playing V-Funk, all youthful energy, frenetic rhythms, noisy- funk and wah- wah guitar while singer Adam's stream of consciousness rides over the top. V- Funk in it's Suite 16 form opens the album, a big, brash blast of mutant south Manc indie- funk.
Rig's album, ten songs in total, was released by Dead Dead Good last Friday and with some typical Mancunian confidence is titled Perfect. It was recorded when the group were all twenty and is being released as they all turn fifty. It's available digitally from all the usual streaming sites and some download ones too here. It's funny how sounds and styles swing in and out of style. There's much on Perfect, given a buff and polish this summer, that really doesn't sound three decades old, that actually sounds very contemporary-the heavy duty rhythm section, the off kilter mutant sax and keys and the rapid fire, choppy guitars, Rig sounding like a band who have arrived thirty years too late but bang on cue.
A few weeks ago I got a message from Tak Tent Radio, an internet radio station broadcasting out of Edinburgh, asking if I'd like to do an hour long mix for them. I was flattered, obviously, and said yes. Ali said musically Tak Tent is a total 'free for all so play whatever you like'. If you have a dig around on their website you'll see that it is with everything from Italo and electro to gospel and Scots folk, ragas and psyche- pop and Aiden Moffatt to Richard Youngs playing Hawkwind and Flux Of Pink Indians. In the end I put together an hour of music that follows in some kind of line from the Isolation mixes I was doing in the spring and summer, ambient and tracks with found sounds, drones and noise, some Durutti Column, some Two Lone Swordsmen and some clattering, spooked out Eno/ Byrne style stuff. The samples in Maurice And Charles's I, Carpenter and the voice of Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken gave me a title and a reference to the ongoing horror show/ political reality TV show that is going on in the USA. It went out yesterday morning and you can find my Find The President mix to stream at Mixcloud here.
I almost titled it after Snake's line in this clip...
Tracklist
A Man Called Adam: Easter Song Gospel Oak FX/ Speaking In
Tongues
Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini: Interrupted By The
Cloud of Light
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
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'.
