Tag:

Smith & Mighty

Terminal Vibration: Bonus Round

Posted on April 19, 2018 @ 11:45pm by Coqui

Picking up where we left off with the last chapter (Imperial Slates) and in light of the recent Parkway Bowl Disco Mix, it's as good a time as any to touch on a key element in the Terminal Vibration blueprint that doesn't fit anywhere else in the schema. Consider this a cool breeze of an interlude between last episode's heavy dub shapes and next week's hip hop brakes. At the interzone between post-disco, new wave and boogie, there lies a sound that runs like a thread through the 80s (and beyond). This sound is encapsulated up by no one quite as much as (you guessed it) the Compass Point All Stars.

The crucial ingredient that sets this sound apart from what everything that came before is the thorough absorption of dub reggae's sonic toolkit into dance music's fabric. One can hear the reverberations echo through the ensuing years, most obviously in the spangly textures within the music of house figures like Bobby Konders (and by extension much of Nu Groove's output), Larry Heard and Tony Addis' Warriors Dance setup. The thread then gets picked up by the likes of The Future Sound Of London (the earlier material in particular, see Accelerator, The Pulse EPs and the Earthbeat compilation), The Orb (Perpetual Dawn, Blue Room, Toxygene, et. al.) and even progressive figures like Leftfield and Andrew Weatherall.1

Tangentially, large swathes of trip hop - Massive Attack, Smith & Mighty, Bomb The Bass and loads more - seem to flow naturally from the more downbeat corners of Grace Jones' (I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango), for instance) and Wally Badarou's (literally, in the case of Mambo) discography. And like trip hop, this is a territory that I only mean to touch on briefly in the context of the Terminal Vibration series, as I plan to spend a much more time in this region in the not-too-distant future, with a feature of its own. Like I said, this is just an interlude of sorts.

This sound - which I'm still rooting around for a good, concise name for - was a key part of the story of what went down sonically at the Paradise Garage. Larry Levan's production on Gwen Guthrie's Padlock mini-album epitomizes the sound, in which deep grooving bass, spangly synthetic textures, dubbed-out percussion and disembodies vocals all coalesce in a swirling headphone symphony. This is a four-dimensional, tactile approach to sound design that pulses through the era like a homing beacon, bringing all manner of disparate figures into the fold as the decade rolls on like the pied piper.

As I was saying before, the key crew in all of this was the Compass Point All Stars, who cooked up something quite special down in Nassau on a series of records for artists like Grace Jones, Gwen Guthrie and the Tom Tom Club. Island disco, Parallax Pier, coastal dub... whatever you call it, it's very much a sound all its own. It's interesting to note - and I've mentioned this before - the way Caribbean transplants Grace Jones, Eddy Grant and Billy Ocean all seem to have put in early work hammering this sound out in isolation over the course of the prior decade, their unique geographic perspective informing the music they were making within the context of what was the by-and-large straight up disco community.

Then there's the whole new-wave-gone-to-the-tropics phenomenon that probably started with the Talking Heads' I Zimbra and Remain In Light (who were coming at it from a West African-informed trajectory), and The English Beat's shimmering Caribbean inflections. I'm talking about Burning Sensations' Belly Of The Whale, Haircut One Hundred's Pelican West and XTC's It's Nearly Africa, not to mention David Byrne's production for The B-52's Mesopotamia mini-album (the influence of which seemed to stick around through their third album, Whammy!, even informing certain corners of their Cosmic Thing comeback in 1989).

The whole thing wraps around to the extent that the Talking Heads seem to be influenced by the groups that they influenced themselves (along with the Tom Tom Club's records), going full-on tropical with Speaking In Tongues, which was actually recorded at Compass Point. It's a sound not unlike what Kid Creole And The Coconuts had been up too, a sound that was co-opted and given a dark twist by Jerry Dammers on The Special AKA's In The Studio. Interesting that many of the ska bands ended up shearing into this territory, with English Beat songs like Ackee 123 seeming to split the difference between calypso and township jive.

One doesn't need to search far to find the real-deal flipside to these island incursions in the honest-to-goodness Jamaican disco like Crashers' Flight To Jamaica (Cool Runings) and Third World's Now That We Found Love (which despite hailing from 1978 sounds like something from, oh about 1993), while music coming out of Africa like Juju Music by King Sunny Adé & His African Beats and Tony Allen's Afrobeat 2000 squared the circle between new wave post-disco and their Yoruba/afrobeat roots. Once again, the circular logic is in evidence throughout, with the original influence being touched in turn by the music they'd originally influenced. And on and on and on.

And let's not forget Thomas Leer's globetrotting, sun-warped new pop, records like 4 Movements and Contradictions where he perfectly captures that Mediterranean drift between Tangier, Cairo and Ibiza (and often makes me flash on The Jewel Of The Nile!). There's also Suicide's second album, the glistening, mirage-like synths of which - coupled with Ric Ocasek's ace production - which always struck me as an almost unexpected detour into such sun-kissed terrain.

In many ways, I've often thought that records like Dream Baby Dream and Suicide: Alan Vega · Martin Rev run parallel to certain Arthur Russell records like Let's Go Swimming, In The Light Of The Miracle, Lola's Wax The Van and Dinosaur L's In The Corn Belt. Indeed, large swathes of the Sleeping Bag catalog sit quite comfortably in this vein, as does much of the early Easy Street output. Even European dance music like My Mine's Hypnotic Tango's and Yello's exotica-tinged sides seem to fit into this puzzle with ease. To reiterate, the currents of this music seem to run through the very fabric of the era's dancefloors... but that's another story for another day, and I've already gone on far too long tonight.

1. One of the great musical epiphanies of mine a few years back was realizing that Leftfield were merely picking up where Bobby Konders and No Smoke left off.

Colourbox – Baby I Love You So

Posted on March 31, 2018 @ 7:18pm by Coqui

Colourbox - Baby I Love You So (featuring Lorita Grahame)

(4AD: 1986)

When I think of records that came out of nowhere as a complete bolt for the blue, any number of iconoclastic tiles spring to mind; records like Model 500's NIght Drive, 4 Hero's Combat Dancin', Tricky's Aftermath, and so on and so on. Yet if there's one (largely unsung) record that belongs in the same league as those future-pre-empting classics, then it's this bad slab of wax from Colourbox. Lodged in between the burnout end of post punk and the dawn of Britain's post-hip hop blues in the shape of Soul II Soul, Neneh Cherry, Bomb The Bass, The Wild Bunch and Smith & Mighty (the sound that would come to be called trip hop), this 12" seems to presage Bristol's sound of the nineties in its dubwise, post-disco grooves.

On the face of it, Colourbox were an unlikely proposition: brothers Martin and Steven Young set out in 1982 with a dark, claustrophobic sound reminiscent of the less skronky side of Rip Rig & Panic (just as that crew were winding down with their Attitude LP, in fact). The new pop sounds of ABC and The Human League had swooped in to become the sound of the moment, and the glitz and glamour of MTV and Nick Rhodes were in full swing. Shiny was in, darkness was out, and many of the latter day post punk bands suddenly seemed to be out of step with the zeitgeist. Even in Simon Reynold's epic Rip It Up And Start Again, many of groups of this era merit only footnote status...

And yet... and yet, this Indian Summer of post punk features considerable treasures hidden in its shadows. Much like the contemporary output of Compass Point Studios, these records as often as not served to provide a metaphorical link between Metal Box and Newbuild, that is the post punk past and the electronic future. I'm talking about records like 23 Skidoo's The Gospel Comes To New Guinea, 400 Blows' Declaration Of Intent, Mark Stewart's Learning To Cope With Cowardice, Fats Comet's Don't Forget That Beat, Section 23's From The Hip, but above all Colourbox's Baby I Love You So - the March 2018 record of the month and a dubbed-out post-disco, proto-trip hop 12" masterpiece.

Cloaked in evocative crimson artwork (provided by 23 Envelope) that springs from the clearly-defined 4AD design aesthetic, it nevertheless maintains a rude, street-level edge that seems to whisper nineties. From the sleeve on downward, this record screams trip hop so clearly that if it were strewn out alongside Maxinquaye, Dummy and Blue Lines one might assume they were all from the moment. After putting the record on the turntable and starting it a spinning, you quickly find out that the sonics are just as forward-thinking.

The record's a-side is a Baby I Love You So, a cover version of Jacob Miller's epochal reggae classic, famously produced by Augustus Pablo (who in turn dubbed it out into King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown, easily one of the top five dub traxx of all time). On the face of it, one might think it folly to attempt to version one of the great front-to-back 7" singles of all time, but from the opening bars it quickly becomes clear that you're dealing with something special.

With metallic percussion along the lines of Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound productions, the beat tumbles forward at a downbeat pace as the bassline throbs with metronomic precision. Then, a searing guitar figure cuts through the track like a knife, following Augustus Pablo's melodica line from the Jacob Miller original note for note. Lorita Grahame bluesy vocals anchor the track in the soil, while her cooing backup vocals seem to drift gently toward the clouds. Grahame's whole approach is actually the linchpin here, betraying the track's entire m.o.: this is lover's rock rendered as a torch song (sound familiar?). The whole thing simply had the misfortune of coming out about a decade before it's time... in 1995 this record would have fit right in. 1986? Forget about it! It couldn't have been more anachronistic if it featured a Neptunes remix.

Like Mark Stewart's self-titled 1987 LP, the hard edges of this record's digidub percussion and spectral atmosphere seem to outline what would become the roots-n-future mashup of the Bristol sound. With the Burt Bacharach covers of Smith & Mighty and The Wild Bunch and Massive Attack's moody cover of Chaka Khan's Any Love waiting in the wings, the whole thing comes on like an unlikely blueprint for the Bristol blues. Augmenting the record's almost cyberpunk-by-default tone are film samples from John Carpenter's Escape From New York sprinkled liberally throughout the track. If it all sounds too good to be true, then yeah... we're on the same page.

Of course, the b-side's even better. Looks Like We're Shy One Horse/Shootout makes literal the connection between Augustus Pablo's man-from-the-East melodica stylings and Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western OSTs with what amounts to a dubbed-out discomix cover of the theme to One Upon A Time In The West (with samples from the film - along with Duck, You Sucker - once again sprinkled liberally throughout). That same searing guitar is back, this time sawing out the theme's refrain as whistling synths soar through the ether, horns punching in ever so often. Picture the midpoint between Joe Gibbs & The Professionals' African Dub All-Mighty records and Bandulu's Antimatters/Cornerstone/Redemption trilogy and you wouldn't be too far off. Once again, simply stunning.

At about five minutes in, the groove cuts out and you're left with droning atmosphere for a spell before the whistling synths return - this time pitched down a couple octaves - in such a way that wouldn't sound out of place scoring Ridley Scott's Black Rain. This is billed as the Shootout portion of the track. Then, a downbeat-the-dub-ruler beat kicks in and Repo Man-esque choirs fill the sky, as the track creeps toward its denouement with clockwork inevitability. This is Deckard in a trench coat, staggering through rain-soaked streets music. Cyberpunk, once again, on both sides.1

I can't imagine what it must have been like, hearing this back when it first came out...

1. If someone ever gets around to making that Neuromancer movie, would they please hire me on to be the musical supervisor? Thanks!

Terminal Vibration VI (Imperial Slates)

Posted on March 19, 2018 @ 10:54pm by Coqui

And so we cross the threshold into the 90s, where the aftershocks of dubbed out post punk were continuing to live large. This was the context through which I linked up with the music in the first place, working my way back from the nascent sounds of trip hop's bricolage and the heavy atmospheric techno seeping in from all corners of the globe. In what must be a rather atypical entry into the music, I'd initially become aware of various post punk figures by way of their dalliance with nineties dance and accordingly began exploring their own music in earnest.

Right off the bat, Mark Stewart was the strange attractor of the Bristol scene, rubbing shoulders with the trip hop trinity of The Wild Bunch/Massive Attack crew, giving Tricky the impetus to strike out solo (with the epochal Aftermath, which Stewart co-produced) and Smith & Mighty, who turned in their first remix for Stewart's Stranger Than Love. That's quite clearly a profound influence on the Bristol blues and accordingly sent me both back in time, to Stewart's 1987 self-titled LP, and latterly to his 90s records Metatron and Control Data which were of a piece with contemporary outfits like Meat Beat Manifesto and Renegade Soundwave.

Meat Beat Manifesto split the difference between post-industrial noise and post-Bomb Squad hard-edged hip hop, shot through with a healthy dose of dub's bottom end, the combination of which found Jack Dangers' crew essentially creating the template for the big beat of The Chemical Brothers. They're actually poised right at the edge of this chapter and the next (which will trace the contours of hip hop beats as the decade turns), so they will be covered further next time out, but it's important to note the bass-heavy vibes of Radio Babylon within the context of dub and related capers taking center stage today.

Similarly, Renegade Soundwave slotted in quite naturally to the post punk drift, where they rode that third rail between dub, hip hop and a skeletal, stripped-down take on cut-and-paste indie dance. After taking Britain's dancefloors by storm with rude 12"s like The Phantom and Ozone Breakdown, largely defining the interzone between electro's rhythm matrix and big beat's rolling breaks. RSW's debut album, Soundclash, rocked the dancehall with heavy beats and dub's bottom end backing Gary Asquith's wiseguy microphone antics, while In Dub largely eschewed vocals altogether in favor of atmosphere. A couple years later, Leftfield remixed the crew's eponymous Renegade Soundwave 12" into a 4/4 slab of stomping tronik house magic.

Leftfield themselves offered another conduit back into post punk with John Lydon's vocal spot on Open Up, which sent me back to Metal Box and sideways to Lydon's contemporary solo bid Psycho's Path (which happened to feature remixes from Leftfield and The Chemical Brothers). Leftfield's two 90s LPs boasted their own moments of dubbed out magic: Leftism boasted a cinematic, widescreen sound that touched down with shimmering techno, pounding house missives and occasionally ducked into trip hop, while Rhythm And Stealth stripped it all back to hard-edged electroid grooves and smoked-out isolationism. The latter especially works remarkably well alongside the likes of Bandulu (on one hand) and 23 Skidoo (on the other).

23 Skidoo took an interesting turn themselves in the 90s, opening up their Ronin imprint and putting out UK rap records by Roots Manuva, Deckwrecka and Rodney P. even as they amassed a huge back catalogue of unreleased material (which was eventually collected on the deluxe edition of the Just Like Everybody compilation). The group's self-titled LP released at the turn of the century was a mini-paradise of rolling breakbeats and moody downbeat that seemed to square the circle between their brand of atmospheric post punk and trip hop.

And yet if there was one group that seemed to hallucinate trip hop years before it seeped out of Bristol, it was Colourbox, whose Baby I Love You So took Jacob Miller's lovers rock staple and twisted it into a steely-edged, Escape From New York-sampling dread torch song that came on like something from Tricky 's Pre-Millenium Tension. However, the flipside was another matter altogether, with Morricone's spaghetti western vibes writ large on Looks Like We're Shy One Horse/Shoot Out's discomix showcase which glided on a motorik 4/4 pulse before collapsing into a downbeat-the-dub-ruler conclusion.

Incidentally, I discovered a lot of this music through The Future Sound Of London's Radio 1 Essential Mix 2 (from 6/3/95), which seemed to source ISDN's weird, twisted trip hop in the dread post punk of 400 Blows, Fats Comet, 23 Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire and A Certain Ratio. That mix really opened up a whole world of music beyond what I'd previously been exposed to, even betraying the first rumblings of the duo's fascination with sixties psychedelia. Their Dead Cities swan-song - along with its surrounding singles - was also very much of a piece with this post punk terrain as well, continuing where the likes of 23 Skidoo and Cabaret Voltaire left off.

On a similar note, Andrew Weatherall offered up another crucial incursion a couple years later with his Nine O'Clock Drop compilation, which happened to overlap with FSOL's Essential Mix in spirit, with the added bonus of the aforementioned Colourbox b-side. That compilation managed to beat the post punk gold rush to the punch by a few years, enshrining a whole brace of great late-period avant funk shearing into electro in one essential package (for the uninitiated, at least). Weatherall's own music always had a bit of post punk flavor just beneath the surface, especially on The Sabres Of Paradise's Haunted Dancehall and much of Two Lone Swordsmen's output. With the Swordsmen ultimately morphing into a full-fledged post punk band with 2004's From The Double Gone Chapel, well, it certainly stacks up.

Another group that made a similar transition into full-fledged songforms was Bandulu, who started out dealing in tough, cinematic techno missives before gradually stripping layer after layer away to reveal a skeletal, metallic, dubbed out blueprint of street-level techno before ultimately winding up with their masterstroke Redemption (which featured honest-to-goodness reggae cuts like Detention and Jahquarius). There was also that whole side of the group's output that delved into downbeat electro-dub like Deep Sea Angler, Agent Jah and Chapter 6, very much of a piece with contemporary digidub. Chapter 6 in particular finds the group shearing insouciantly into proto-dubstep territory.

Many miles away Basic Channel synthesized an elegant, spacious systems music that was something like the kosmische flipside to Bandulu's tuff minimal techno. Basic Channel's run of 12"s seemed to seep into dance music's consciousness quite gradually as the nineties progressed, before ultimately reshaping whole swathes of the scene in its image by the time the decade was over. Like The Velvet Underground, they almost seemed to make more sense in the following decades than they ever did in their own time. The duo even delved into straight-up dub with their Rhythm & Sound records, which - similar to Bandulu's contemporary evolution - found the duo dealing in spacious, stripped-to-the-bones reggae that came on like Kraftwerk gone dub.

Now, if there's one thread to connect all of this firmly back into the 80s then it is surely digidub, that faithful post-dancehall music that was trip hop's shadowy fellow traveller throughout the decade. Smith & Mighty even put out Henry & Louis' Rudiments on their own More Rockers imprint, while their Steppers Delight EP (from 1992) seemed heavily influenced by digidub in its twisted proto-jungle shapes. The Dubhead and Dub Out West series of compilations chronicled first rate digidub springing from this nexus, with Smith & Mighty even turning in some digidub sides under the Blue & Red banner (which ultimately culminated in the Time Will Tell collaboration with Henry & Louis).

Coming in from the arena of real-deal reggae, the Mad Professor's Ariwa setup was a steady hand on the scene, running from the eighties firmly into the nineties, releasing atmospheric records like Aisha's High Priestess, Mad Professor Captures Pato Banton and the almost ambient-reggae of Bim Sherman's Miracle. Famously, the Mad Professor even reworked Massive Attack's Protection LP into the No Protection set, which was claimed to have surpassed the original in some quarters.

Similarily, Adrian Sherwood reworked Primal Scream's Vanishing Point into the excellent Echo Dek after cutting a parallel path through the same period. Sherwood's On-U Sound outfit put out records - significantly harder-edged - like the aforementioned Mark Stewart material, along with Tackhead's own output and leftfield dub experiments like African Head Charge and Creation Rebel. Like Ariwa, On-U Sound seems to offer a seemingly bottomless well of first rate dub (of which, if I'm honest, I remain woefully under-educated on!).

And then there's Jah Wobble, whose looming presence throughout the nineties found him appearing on scores of key recordings as the decade progressed. The man was everywhere! Dropping the throbbing bassline for The Orb's Blue Room and Primal Scream's Higher Than The Sun (A Dub Symphony In Two Parts), collaborating with Brian Eno on the Spinner LP and taking part in various trip hop excursions with the likes of Bomb The Bass, Ramshackle and Shara Nelson, you couldn't turn around without hearing his full-bodied basslines pulsing from the speakers. Throughout the decade, his own records with The Invaders Of The Heart were excellent excursions into post-fourth world soundscapes, often featuring techno figures like Andrew Weatherall behind the boards (as on the awesome Bomba).

Similarly, Bill Laswell's Material project returned after a five year hiatus with 1989's Seven Souls, a record whose own fourth world shapes seemed to ring in the decade with spoken word narration provided by William Burroughs. The record was effectively reworked ten years later on The Road To The Western Lands, which featured trip hop figures like Tim Simenon, Talvin Singh and DJ Soul Slinger. Hallucination Engine refined this formula and featured the awesome Mantra, which was reworked by The Orb and later kicked off their Auntie Aubrey's Excursions Beyond The Call Of Duty collection of remixes for other artists.

This compilation was yet another key gateway into post punk back in the day, featuring reworks of songs by Killing Joke and Wire alongside the Material entry. Also noteworthy is the presence of frequent Orb collaborator Thomas Fehlmann and Basic Channel's Moritz Von Oswald in the German post punk group Palais Schaumburg. One thing that makes The Orb fascinating is how they happen to spring from this post punk diaspora only to make a splash in the Second Summer Of Love with records like Little Fluffy Clouds and A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld (see also The KLF). You can just feel the implied presence of post punk in the surfaces of their music and in the pulsing dub engine within.

Check out this fascinating interview1 with The Orb's Dr. Alex Paterson where he gives something of a musical history of a life lived within music.

Consequently, Bill Laswell ended the decade with the awesome Dub Chamber 3 and Material's Intonarumori, a deeply warped hip hop record in the spirit of The Ghettovetts and Death Comet Crew, which leads snugly into the next week's episode. To be continued...

1. Check it out @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Da9EMy_Ggs.

LISTEN NOW

TV6 Imperial Slates

  1. Pato Banton My Opinion (Ariwa)
  2. Colourbox featuring Lorita Grahame Baby I Love You So (12" Version) (4AD)
  3. Blue & Red Amid The Ether (Shiver)
  4. Renegade Soundwave Black Eye Boy (Mute)
  5. The Sabres Of Paradise Ysaebud (Special Emissions)
  6. Material Mantra (Axiom)
  7. Massive Attack featuring Horace Andy Spying Glass (Wild Bunch)
  8. Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart Bomba (Nonsonicus Maximus Mix) (Boy's Own)
  9. The Future Sound Of London Hot Knives (Virgin)
  10. Meat Beat Manifesto Radio Babylon (Play It Again Sam)
  11. Mark Stewart + Maffia High Ideals And Crazy Dreams (On-U Sound)
  12. Primal Scream Wise Blood (Creation)
  13. Red Snapper Thomas The Fib (Warp)
  14. 23 Skidoo Meltdown (Ronin)
  15. Henry & Louis Beulah (Unforsaken Land) (Nubian)
  16. Colourbox Looks Like We're Shy One Horse/Shoot Out (4AD)
  17. Material The Western Lands (A Dangerous Road Mix) (Triloka)
  18. Rhythm & Sound featuring Willi Williams See Mi Yah (Burial Mix)
  19. Bandulu Detention (Burial Mix)
  20. Leftfield El Cid (Hard Hands)

Dubstyle!

Posted on March 6, 2018 @ 9:44pm by Coqui

A slight diversion into dub presented by DJ Slye and starring a cast of thousands.

Now that we've reached this point in the whole Terminal Vibration trip - the mid-point to be exact - and what with all the talk of Jah Wobble and bass pressure and dread, well, it got me thinking about the original dubmasters and pulling out a bunch of my old dub records and messing around a bit on the turntables. The result was this rough little mix, which was largely inspired by a bunch of my old dub cassettes that used to get a lot of play back in the Colt days. My love affair with dub started in earnest way back in the late 90s with a King Tubby comp - the impetus for my exploration was trip hop, specifically Smith & Mighty's oeuvre - and since then I've never looked back.

Put crudely, dub was born on the b-side of the reggae 7" single, where the instrumental version of the a-side would be pressed so that deejays could chat over the top at the soundsystem Saturday night. Eventually, certain producers - producers like King Tubby, Herman Chin-Loy and Lee "Scratch" Perry - started messing around with the master tapes, accentuating particular aspects of the record, beefing up the bottom-end, dropping in snatches of the original vocal and running it all through the effects units, in the process fomenting a musical revolution. This was head music with a heavy beat, and things would never be the same.

Full-on dub LPs weren't long after, and dub's methodology (and arsenal of production techniques) even started to creep onto the a-side in more spacious, and spaced out, mixes. Eventually these techniques filtered out into pop music via post punk and disco - thanks to producers like Dennis Bovell, Adrian Sherwood, Walter Gibbons and François Kevorkian - and the rest was history: suddenly the combination of a mixing board and an effects unit became a musical instrument in its own right, and the virtuosos came fast and thick to work their magic in the ensuing years. It's hard to imagine the sound of the 21st century's crop of alternative r&b artists without dub's O.G. mad scientist innovations.

The idea with this particular mix was to trace the dub contagion from its peak-period mid-seventies development alongside contemporary Jamaican roots music through the digital (dancehall) eighties and the big beat nineties on through the next century, stopping off at outposts in dancehall, post punk, techno, trip hop and even grunge(!) before winding up at the lonely, desolate tundras of Rhythm & Sound. The cutoff point was dubstep, which will clearly merit a mix of its own. In truth, I envisioned Dubstyle! as a Star Wars-esque trilogy, with this mix standing as the A New Hope/Downbeat The Dub Ruler entry, to be followed this summer by a post-disco dancefloor extravaganza and wrappping up with an electro-dub/step-r&b apocalypse later this fall. And so... that should give you some idea as to what to expect. Or not?

This is by no means a primer (it actually departs from straight-up dub fairly quickly); think of it instead as a little tribute to a sound that has been very good to me (dub be good to me) over the years, a sound that wouldn't have been possible without a handful of mad producers who pushed their machines to the absolute limit, writing their dreams onto magnetic tape nearly fifty years ago and ushering in the future in the process...

  1. Keith Hudson Hunting (Mamba)

    2. Pushing off into Keith Hudson's mystical swamp of dub. The atmosphere comes on thick and heavy from the jump, with a trilling flute, jungle atmospherics, rolling percussion and a jagged guitar cutting its way into the darkness before that bass comes in and washes over EVERYTHING. This is 1974, son.

  2. Augustus Pablo King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown (Clocktower)

    3. Maybe the most famous dub record ever? Augustus Pablo runs Jacob Miller's Baby I Love You So through King Tubby's illogical deep space machinery and turns in a total killer. With Pablo's melodica stylings in full effect, this righteous slab of Morricone-inflected dub was only just edged out by the ramshackle caravan vibes of East Of The River Nile when I compiled the Parallax 200. Futuristic like Kraftwerk, yet ancient as the Ziggurat of Ur.

  3. King Tubby Dub Fi Gwan (Blood & Fire)

    4. As far as I know, this absolute gem only saw the light of day when Blood & Fire put out their Dub Gone Crazy: The Evolution Of Dub At King Tubby's 1975-1979 compilation. Unbelievable! It's a low key masterstroke, replete with moody organ, bottomless bass and exquisitely four-dimensional sound over a slow-motion 4/4 rhythm. The highlight for me is the disembodied clavinet that materializes in the drop out.

  4. Joe Gibbs & The Professionals Gates Of Zion (Joe Gibbs)

    5. This from the flipside of my 7" reissue of Chalice's Good To Be There, although I'm somewhat certain that it isn't actually called Gates Of Zion; it actually sounds like a dub version of Dennis Brown's Whip Them Jah Hah. I only know this because the actual Gates Of Zion appears on the 12" version of this single, which I tracked down on the strength of this very dub (only to be disappointed!). Confused yet? That's par for the course with reggae... versions all over the shop! Anyway, this is another excellent slab of organ-led discomix reggae - this time in quintessential Joe Gibbs stylee - anchored by a ten ton bassline and haunted by disembodied voices in the ether.

  5. The Upsetters Return Of The Super Ape (Island)

    6. Weird dub from the excellent Scratch-helmed Upsetters LP of the same title, which features striking sleeve art from Tony Wright of a rampaging giant ape holding a tree in one hand and a spliff in the other (surely one of the top five sleeves ever?)! This is peak-period Lee Perry, the mad scientist operating deep within his Black Ark studio and turning out a swampy, sun-glazed groove unlike anything else around. Watch in awe as that sleepwalking, low slung skank gives way to a heavy downbeat in the climax climax... French, you're one of a kind!

  6. Aswad A New Chapter Of Dub (Mango)

    7. Wicked electronic reggae creeping - like the contemporary work of Prince Jammy - ever so slightly into digidub territory. Got this on the back of a recommendation from the cat behind the counter at the shop where I picked up Return Of The Super Ape... damn, nearly 20 years ago. The star of the show is undoubtedly that fat, wandering electronic bassline, which pair with a rock hard drum beat to drive the group's signature drifting horns along with a mad haunted house grand piano!

  7. Mark Stewart + Maffia Liberty City (On-U Sound)

    8. Taking an abrupt left turn into abrasive post punk, we've got this killer cut from Stewart's Jerusalem EP, which also features the rock hard High Ideals And Crazy Dreams. Liberty City has that massive Adrian Sherwood-engineered Maffia bottom-end in full effect, joined here by a nagging sax refrain and sublimely spectral backing vocals rising from the ether. These Mark Stewart records are essentially the square root of trip hop. What with the Bristol connection, well, it stacks up. I've often wondered if the sound on these early Maffia records were inspired by the clipped, heavy duty basslines of the early Studio One material (see Burning Spear's debut). And are those discordant cuckoo clock sounds sampled from Fellini's Satyricon? I wonder...

  8. Derrick Harriott Dub Whip (Hawkeye)

    9. For me, this dub version of the Dazz Band's Let It Whip is one of thee key records of the eighties, existing as it does at the cusp of the discomix reggae and digital dancehall eras, its heady dubwise flavors are shot through with the neon glow of contemporary electroboogie. Running parallel to things like Grace Jones' Compass Point records, it also seems to contain the germ of Mtume's Juicy Fruit, Massive Attack's Protection and even SA-RA's The Second Time Around.

  9. Prince Jammy Megabyte (Greensleeves)

    10. The second record in this mix - in a row! - to feature in the recent Parallax 200 extravaganza. This from Jammy's wicked Computerised Dub set. All crisp drums and brittle textures, it's something like contemporary arcade music run through dub's hall of mirrors. Yet another one of these eighties records that mean the world to me, I'd single out it's Kraftwerk-gone-dancehall re-envisioning of Jammy's contemporary digital productions as particularly crucial. I wish I'd picked this up when it came out... five year old me would have loved it.

  10. Soundgarden Fopp (Fucked Up Heavy Dub Remix) (Sub Pop)

    11. AKA Last Action Hero Dub. The second bolt for the blue here, and probably the biggest surprise... bear with me though. This grunge-tastic cover version of the Ohio Players' Fopp (strangely enough, if you listen to the Players' original, the first minute seems to predict the whole grunge sound, vocal style and all!), taken from Soundgarden's second EP, lays the blueprint for the band's whole warrior chief sound (as heard in Spoonman, et al.). However, the dub version - perpetrated by grunge super-producer Steve Fisk - takes the track to a whole other level, showcasing the possibilities of dub within the context of rock 'n roll fury. With hollowed-out beats and a vastly more spacious mix, the guitar pyrotechnics of the original track compete with snatches of synth, film dialogue and spectral hints of brass and the blues as Chris Cornell's multi-tracked banshee wail pours down over the track like molten silver.

  11. The Future Sound Of London Papua New Guinea (Dub Mix) (Jumpin' & Pumpin' )

    12. I've always loved this short little dub version from the Papua New Guinea 12", which says everything it has to in just over a minute. It also makes the dub flavor of the original track - by virtue of its bassline nicked from Radio Babylon - literal, with rock hard drums tumbling down upside your head and down into the echo chamber.

  12. Bandulu Run Run (Blanco Y Negro)

    13. Sprawling deep space reggae from London's premiere electro-dub outfit. Positively holy music, as far as I'm concerned. I used to listen to this over and over back when I first got a hold of it, mind properly blown on the track's fathoms deep bassline and gloriously filmic sweep. Like reggae slowed down and stretched out across glistening infinity's plane. Records like Cornerstone, Guidance and Redemption came on like the ruff, rugged and raw street-level flipside to Basic Channel's elegant dub symphonies. Back in the day, Bandulu were basically my Led Zeppelin.

  13. Peter D. Jah Pure & Clean (Nubian)

    14. Majestic digidub from erstwhile Smith & Mighty secret weapon Peter D. Rose. With sweeping string vistas, synths and an ethereal vocal chorus all flowing into the mix, that tricky riddim still manages to take center stage. Originally from the Dub Out West Volume 1 compilation, I first heard it on Smith & Mighty's DJ-Kicks mix in the late nineties. It took me forever for me to track down its original source in the pre-Discogs era! Incidentally, the windswept drift of this track always makes me think of looking down at the beach from Mayagüez in the late afternoon under overcast skies, rain pouring down on the waves crashing on the horizon.

  14. Terminalhead & Mr. Spee Twisted System (Ruts DC Dub) (Push)

    15. The Ruts DC rework is where its at, with that gently gliding rhythm and haunting vocals in the mist taking the track to another plane altogether. I love the way those warped horns elbow their way into the mix from time to time, seemingly trying to wrest control of the track. Percussion like sheet metal phases in and out of the mix. The whole effect is quite uplifting, actually. Ruts DC were a punk band gone dub from the O.G. punk era, who happened to provide dubs to a couple of the Terminalhead records. You sort of wonder about how these things come about. One of the great things about the 90s was the way they were absolutely littered with unlikely little one-offs like this. Corny as it probably sounds, it's a big part of what made growing up in the era so special. I remember thinking at the time that this could have been a huge crossover hit... well it was in my neighborhood anyway.

  15. The Sabres Of Paradise Wilmot (Warp)

    16. This is essentially a dub version of Black But Sweet by Wilmoth Houdini & The Night Owls, perpetrated by Andrew Weatherall's Sabres Of Paradise. This the single version: the LP version from Haunted Dancehall rides a righteous skank, but strangely enough the block rockin' beats of the single version seemed to make the most sense in this context. That and the deadly Link Wray-esque guitar lines of Tom Baeppler and those maniacal, uncredited female vocals. You want to play this very loud. I've actually got an epic Weatherall feature in the works... so stay tuned.

  16. Primal Scream Duffed Up (Creation)

    17. More Adrian Sherwood, this time from much later, dubbing Primal Scream's 1997 LP Vanishing Point to abstraction (in much the same way that the Mad Professor had with Massive Attack's No Protection around the same time) on the Echo Dek mini-album (my version actually came as a box set of 7" singles). This tune is truly unlike anything else: brittle 808 electro drums, dubwise percussion, harpsichord and a warped horn section collide into a dread hallucination of what jazz might have mutated into in an alternate dimension. Someone really ought to put together an edit of the 1973 film starring Barry Newman with both Scream albums providing the soundtrack...

  17. Bill Laswell Cybotron (ROIR)

    18. Majestic dubbed-out slow-motion rotating phone booth music from Bill Laswell, Jah Wobble and Nicky Skopelitis in this post-Material project from the year 2000. This from volume three in the Dub Chamber series, so it's in good company. With a bassline as big as the ocean, this rolls on metronomic breakbeats and sheets of valve-soaked sound sweeping in and out view, receding onto the horizon. It's all rather cinematic. File under Neuromancer: possible soundtrack music, Vol. 127.

  18. Rhythm & Sound King In My Empire (featuring Cornell Campbell) (Rhythm & Sound)

    19. Basic Channel in straight up dub reggae mode, with the great Cornell Campbell on the mic. I remember back when these Rhythm & Sound records came out, it took awhile for me to work out it was the Basic Channel guys opening up a new chapter (of dub). These records were so empty, so pristine, so perfect, inhabited by that brilliant, lonely Chain Reaction sound. The other record from that era that I think of in the same breath was Plastikman's Consumed. This actually from a bit later, 2004. Dubstep waiting in the wings...

Terminal Vibration V (What Time Is It?)

Posted on February 16, 2018 @ 8:48pm by Coqui

As the hours keep turning and the moon hangs deep in the sky, we move toward the back of the crate toward the voodoo records. Here's where we get into the heaviest, most atmospheric music that could loosely be termed punk funk without shimmying into krautrock territory. Word of warning: things are gonna get weird. Escape routes take you everywhere from West Africa to the Caribbean, from Brazil to Indonesia and from Bristol to The Bronx. Far and wide. Today's chapter essentially boils down to three post punk dynasties: The Pop Group/Slits continuum, Material/Bill Laswell and the mighty Public Image Ltd. (and related solo endeavors). All of which - critically - take you well into the nineties and beyond, tributaries cutting a jagged path across the landscape to feed into pockets of industrial, hip hop and technoid innovation leading right up to the present day. But first, let's start at the beginning...

Public Image Ltd.'s Metal Box is in essence the the Rosetta Stone of the whole endeavor, a decoder ring of sorts. When you come to terms with the record, suddenly everything else makes sense. Albatross sets the tone with a twenty ton bassline snaking its way through ten minutes of grinding, cavernous funk, followed swiftly by the spidery guitar of the filmic Memories and the return of Death Disco - the group's 12" tour de force - which gets transmuted here into Swan Lake (the guitar at one point mirrors Tchaikovsky's ballet of the same title). In all three Lydon wails like a banshee, Levene splinters his guitar into jagged arcing feedback and Wobble walks his bass across the track like a brontosaurus. The story goes that the trio had been been mainlining on krautrock and Jamaican dub, and it's all in full effect here: the bass towers menacingly at center stage while the guitars often recall Michael Karoli's spidery fretwork on Tago Mago.

Like Funkadelic's The Electric Spanking Of War Babies, Metal Box appears to deconstruct itself before your eyes over the course of its hour-long running time. Tunes like Careering and The Suit are the jaded, staggering flipside to Swan Lake, while Graveyard eschews vocals altogether, staggering zombie-like through the Gothic crypt. Socialist - another instrumental - comes on like the dub version of a straight up punk song circa 1977. Similarily, Chant is another x-ray punk endeavor - maddening in its atonal repetition and refusal to release - while No Birds is the closest thing here to PIL's First Issue and Public Image. The closing1 Radio 4 is a drifting synth instrumental anchored only by Wobble's bassline, who also dominates the heavy dub stomp of Poptones.

Out of the three principal malcontents in PIL, Jah Wobble spent the most sustained time in this fertile territory at the intersection of funk and dub. His solo debut Betrayal even used some backing tapes from the PIL sessions (which accordingly got him kicked out of the band) and turned in a worthy successor to Metal Box, with synths and atmospherics taking on an even wider role in the sound this time out (not to mention looser, more nimble rhythms). Blink and you'd swear the vocals in Betrayal - the track - came courtesy of Shaun Ryder! It's a promising beginning to what turned out to be a long and fruitful discography at the nexus of funk and dub.

Two of Wobble's subsequent records were collaborations with Can bassist Holger Czukay that perpetrated further capers in this arena, with Full Circle (also featuring Can's Jaki Liebezeit on drums) boasting the post punk dancefloor classic How Much Are They? (which eerily seems to predict the atmosphere of The Good, The Bad & The Queen record) and Snake Charmer (featuring atmospheric guitar by The Edge of U2 fame!), the latter of which takes matters strikingly close to contemporary electro boogie. And I mean running in parallel, two steps away, too close for comfort. Glenn Close, even. Hold On To Your Dreams, in particular, which features High Fashion's Marcella Allen on vocals, could slot rather comfortably into a set alongside contemporary Ashford & Simpson, Gwen Guthrie and the S.O.S. Band. Conversely, the title track's atmosphere bears an uncanny resemblance to My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, which is no small praise indeed.

These fourth world vibes turned out to be the lifeblood of the man's output for the next decade plus, where he drew influence from Jamaica, North Africa and even the Celtic music of his own British isles for a series of albums with his new band Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart. This phase of his career will be covered further in the next chapter of Terminal Vibration (where we trace all these threads through the latter half of the decade into the nineties), but Wobble actually got around to issuing the Invaders Of The Heart self-titled debut 12" as early as 1983 (the year of Snakecharmer, in fact). It's an utterly beguiling record - spread across three separate mixes - with Wobble's trademark wall of bass riding a motorik post-disco groove across the Sahara, as trumpet arabesques and sampled wailing vocals weave across its surface. I always loved the way that synth bass comes in at times to echo Wobble's pulsing b-line ever so often. It's all very much in keeping with the Byrne/Eno experiment, especially, but also things like Thomas Leer's 4 Movements and Tony Allen's N.E.P.A. LP. Future music, in other words. With the icon Wobble clearly having a hand on the pulse.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, another bass player was embarking on his own excursion that would carve a similar trail across the post punk landscape. I speak now of Bill Laswell. Laswell was a journeyman bassist who'd cut his teeth in various funk bands around Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan before moving to New York before hooking up with Michael Beinhorn and Fred Maher to form the initial incarnation of Material. The trio got their unlikely start as the backing band for Daevid Allen's twilight-era New York Gong before cutting a trio of EPs for Red Records.2 The band debuted in 1979 with Temporary Music 1, a dense, lo-fi slab of prog-inflected post punk that ran the gamut from On Sadism's mid-tempo punk funk to the Canterbury-esque prog moves of Process/Motion. Temporary Music 2 followed a couple years later with cleaner production and a more spacious mix, boasting the motorik dancefloor moves of Secret Life and Dark Things' foggy post-Bitches Brew atmosphere. American Songs rounded out the trilogy the very same year, with tracks Ciquri - the next in their line of mid-tempo funk tracks - and Discourse, which illustrate the band's comfort with the form (which I suspect - once again - is down to the band's jazz roots). Still, the rockier Slow Murder is almost-new wave in the same way Public Image was. One suspects that they're feeling the spectre of Remain In Light-era Talking Heads throughout.

The band followed these EPs with two albums in quick succession: Memory Serves (1981) and One Down (1982). Memory Serves picks up the thread of rough-and-tumble post punk from the EPs, even bringing back some of the proggy/fusion-tinged flavors of Temporary Music 1. Rollicking punk funk tunes like Memory Serves and Conform To The Rhythm are accompanied by appropriately doomy vocals from Michael Beinhorn (in the former, he almost sounds like an off-the-rails Oingo Boingo-era Danny Elfman), while the abrasive Square Dance manages to surpass the atonality of even Temporary Music 1. Conversely, One Down makes an unanticipated swerve into nearly straight up electroboogie territory. Featuring vocals from the likes of Nona Hendryx (who also worked with the expanded Talking Heads during the same time period), Bernard Fowler (of the N.Y.C. Peech Boys and later Tackhead) and a pre-fame Whitney Houston (on the stately ballad Memories, also featuring Archie Shepp in an uncharacteristically gentle mood), this is very much of-the-moment, state-of-the-art boogie a la Hold On To You Dreams. With Roger Troutman-esque talkboxes dominating the Beinhorn-voiced tracks, the transition is complete. The band even turns in an excellent cover of Sly Stone's Let Me Have It All! Everything here fits squarely alongside the likes of Mtume, Kleeer and the Compass Point records.

Sandwiched between both albums is the Bustin' Out, which found the band moonlighting on ZE Records and makes sense of the band's sudden shift in direction between the two LPs as they thoroughly absorb the label's mutant disco aesthetic3 for some tasty rubberband funk action. At this point, activity from Material essentially halted until the end of the decade while Laswell devoted serious time to his Orange Music studio, working on various projects for Celluloid Records like mid-eighties albums from The Last Poets and Fela Kuti (which sadly don't rival their legendary 70s output), along with the storied five rap records (to be continued).

Like Jah Wobble, Laswell's increasingly global vision continued to expand throughout the the decade, and by the nineties he was mixing up hip hop, funk, dub and African rhythms into a heady stew that were very much apace with post-Eno Ocean Of Sound vanguard. Interesting to note Laswell's presence on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts way back in 1981, playing bass on America Is Waiting. Also interesting to note that Brian Eno returned the favor the following year, contributing to One Down's Holding On. Once again, all these seemingly disparate figures rubbing shoulders around this time (roughly 1979-1983), figures like Brian Eno, Fela Kuti, David Byrne, The Last Poets, Afrika Bambaataa and Laswell himself, speak to not only the catholic elasticity of Celluloid's broad-minded setup but also the intoxicating spirit of cross-pollination that hangs over this era like a magenta haze.

As if to prove the point, the Tackhead/Fats Comet organization were beginning to gather steam just as Material went on indefinite hiatus and PIL splintered into a thousand pieces. Interesting that core members of the crew started out in the backing band for Sugar Hill Records, laying the backbone for the early rap classics that surfaced on the label during its heyday before striking out on their own as a 21st century avant funk crew upon meeting On-U Sound-man Adrian Sherwood. One can certainly hear traces of records like New York New York, Scorpio and Message II (Survival) in the DNA of the crew's twisted cyberpunk grooves. Fats Comet's Don't Forget That Beat is a slap-bass fueled, funk-tinged electro workout akin to Hashim's Primrose Path - released the following year - albeit with a groove that rolls at a breakneck pace punctuated by machine gun beatboxes and freewheeling Art Of Noise-esque orchestra stabs. Conversely, Stormy Weather rocks a dynamite go-go beat while an almost-prog/fusion guitar shreds through the groove (and your eardrums), pointing the way forward to the group's next phase as Tackhead.

Tackhead found the crew on Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound and the BPMs were accordingly dialed down to an herbalist's pace, matching the post punk stomp of the Mark Stewart records they played on as The Maffia. Hard-edged downbeat slates like High Ideals And Crazy Dreams and Liberty City (both from Stewart's Jerusalem EP) glimpse a nightmarish vision of dub that prefigured what much of the best trip hop would become.4 It all came to a head on Stewart's third, self-titled LP. Leading with the metallic Survival - where the Maffia gets to revisit their very own Rapper's Delight bassline! - a master class in pulverizing machine riddims and the inimitable wail of Mr. Stewart, it makes the flashes of cyberpunk dread hanging around this crew explicit. In fact, much of the record is built around samples and quotes from other songs - a Trouble Funk breakbeart here, some Billy Idol guitar there, and a Moroder bassline capping it all off - which puts it at the bleeding edge of sound collage right along with hip hop's burgeoning sampladelia. It's nearly as patchwork an affair as something like Tricky's Maxinquaye (which Stewart had a crucial influence on, even producing Aftermath while mentoring young Adrian Thaws). Trip hop dress rehearsals like Forbidden Colour offer up a downbeat cover version of David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto's Forbidden Colours, while Hell Is Empty sounds like the most twisted Close The Door-era Terranova track imaginable. Stranger Than Love even put Smith & Mighty on wax for the first time when they contributed the dub version to its 12" single, making the link between post punk and trip hop Bristol explicit. In retrospect, it's rather fitting that a figure like Stewart would stand at the intersection of both eras, both scenes.

Mark Stewart started out in a little crew that grew up frequenting funk nights together as youngsters - where they'd get down to the sounds of BT Express and The Fatback Band - and reggae at venues like the Bamboo Club.6 It only makes sense that such heady origins would be felt considerably in the band's subsequent recordings as The Pop Group. Their hard funk roots can be heard in deeply warped fashion on The Pop Group's debut LP Y (which actually pre-empted Metal Box by a few months) and the She Is Beyond Good And Evil, which pulses almost subconsciously on a walking bassline while the remainder of the track - especially Stewart's throat-shredding wail - seems to dissolve all around it. Produced by Dennis "Blackbeard" Bovell, it sets into motion a particular sensibility that would become the basis for the Y Records7 sound: sparse instrumentation played loose in an aggressively atmospheric soundscape, captured brilliantly with Bovell spacious, three-dimensional, clear as a bell production. Bovell's skill behind the mixing desk pays immediate dividends when the band hangs a left turn into some of their more outre passages (like a vivid snapshot of chaos, where you can nevertheless clearly discern every element in the image). Indeed, there's a considerable free jazz presence in the group's wilder, more abstract passages, which puts them to the left of even PIL. Put simply, one cannot overestimate the centrality of The Pop Group. Along with PIL's music, this is ground zero for post punk's twisted take on funk, a sound that takes you into the nineties and beyond via funk metal and myriad other sounds. In fact, Y's opening track - Thief Of Fire - even sounds like an apocalyptic precursor to The Red Hot Chili Peppers!

The Pop Group followed Y with the We Are All Prostitutes, where Mark Stewart's lyrics grow yet more didactic and political even as the band's groove settles deeper in the pocket. The group's final record, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?, was - at the album level - actually more straightforwardly funky than anything that had come before, settling into a watertight post punk boogie that nevertheless retained a healthy dose of chaos in the mix (much of it provided by the ever dependable Stewart, who - much like Iggy Pop during The Stooges era - simply won't be reigned in). It was along these lines that the band ultimately split, with the rest of the group shearing off to form bands like Rip Rig & Panic, Pigbag, Glaxo Babies, Shriekback and Maximum Joy, while Stewart - as discussed earlier - hooked up with Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound setup for that blistering series of records in the mid-eighties.

On the flipside to The Pop Group coin is a band equally central to the post punk story. In many ways, The Slits were something of a sister group to The Pop Group, as both bands dropped similarly unruly, junglistic debut albums within months of each other in 1979 (both of which were produced by Dennis Bovell). Both groups shared a sense of shedding the constraints of civilization and starting from scratch - Back To Nature as Fad Gadget once opined - and in many ways their debut albums came on like field recordings of some as yet undiscovered tribe, in the way that My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and Can's Ethological Forgery Series seemed to conjure up similar images. And just as The Pop Group washed up on Y Records upon departure from Radar, The Slits put out a record on Y after leaving CBS. Appropriately enough, it was the split 7" single In The Beginning There Was Rhythm/Where There's A Will There's A Way: a head to head duel with The Pop Group.

The Slits' debut album Cut was an instant classic, with (once again) perfect production from Dennis Bovell. There was a heavy dub/reggae presence to the record - perhaps moreso than anything else discussed today - with atmospheric reverb wrapped around the band's skeletal, turn on a dime playing. The rhythm of tunes like So Tough and Instant Hit seem to be happening on multiple plains, every note played like a phrase imbued with myriad layers of meaning. The extraordinary thing about The Slits is that even at their most shambolic, they manage to maintain a strong pop sensibility. I'd wager that you could give this album to any fourteen year old and chances are they'd fall in love with it. This strength was explored further on the band's excellent cover version of Motown standard I Heard It Through The Grapevine (on the b-side of the Typical Girls), which remains my absolute favorite version of the tune (just beating out the Gladys Knight & The Pips original). Built on an unlikely bed of vocal humming, it rides the trademark group's skeletal rhythms with a chanted lyric from Ari Up in one of the great not-Disco Not Disco-but-could-have-been moments in post punk.

Return Of The Giant Slits, the group's second and final album found Dennis Bovell behind the boards once again, this time cranking up the atmosphere to distinctly oppressive levels. Now there was a heavier worldbeat presence in evidence throughout, which found the group looking to Africa for inspiration around the same time the likes of Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno were making their own forays into the same territory. The opening song Earthbeat rides furious tribal drumming while the ladies' voices hover disembodied above the whole affair. The remainder of the album shares more of a similarity to the debut, albeit viewed through a murky prism with heavier emphasis on sounds and textures beyond the relatively straightforward bass/guitar/drum setup of the debut. Interesting to note the presence of Neneh Cherry in the group at this point, that strange attractor of British beat music throughout much of the decade, who would go on to have a profound influence on British club music and the sound that would come to be called trip hop.

Once The Pop Group and The Slits had both disbanded, the Y Records aesthetic really begins to be forged in earnest, establishing a loosely played post punk boogie8 seemingly sourced in The Pop Group's tendency to operate at that thin jagged line between order and chaos. In truth, that's the only place to be, where the tension between the two is at its absolute tautest. Depending on which of the label's groups we're talking about, the emphasis falls on one side or the other. To illustrate the point, let's dive into a three-band post-Pop Group sub-section...

Maximum Joy hold court at the less chaotic end of the spectrum, rivalling even The Slits' pop brilliance with their solitary album Station M.X.J.Y.. The crew operated very much at the axis of boogie - in the tradition of ex-punks getting down at the disco - but they managed to do it more convincingly than just about anyone else in the scene. Typically led by the sing song vocals of Janine Rainforth, the tunes would skate nimbly along loose rhythms with an abundance of bright flourishes slipping into the mix. It's a sound that's also evidenced in 12" singles like Stretch and In The Air, records that were practically new pop even as they maintained the rude, shambolic spirit so crucial to post punk's edge. One would expect nothing less from a Y Records outfit.

Interestingly, Bristol mover and shaker Nellee Hooper started out in this crew before blazing a path through the island's hip hop scene to help define the burgeoning UK urban sound that would culminate in trip hop. At this point it makes sense to highlight the considerable lattice of connection going on here today, with the presence of Mark Stewart (as already mentioned) tied into not only Tricky but also Smith & Mighty and The Wild Bunch that would spawn Massive Attack. You can clearly trace a straight line between late seventies Bristol and the nineties Bristol surveyed in Smith & Mighty's Bass Is Maternal, Tricky's Maxinquae and Portishead's Dummy. Of course, I'm getting ahead of myself again; suffice it to say Station M.X.J.Y. just might be the greatest pop record on the Y imprint.

Rip, Rig & Panic, by contrast, dwell at the most chaotic end of the spectrum, conjuring a defiantly post-Miles' On The Corner racket as they worked their way through three albums in as many years (starting in 1981). The band named themselves after a Roland Kirk album from 1965, so you'd be right in expecting the heavy hand of free jazz to hang over the proceedings. Rather fittingly, Neneh Cherry was a key member of this crew upon the disintegration of The Slits. Fittingly because her step-father was the great Don Cherry, whose fourth world-preempting recordings from the Brown Rice era are very much of a piece with what her band were up to here. In fact, if you imagined a more abrasive, atonal version of Don's Hear & Now, then you wouldn't be too far off. Fascinating the way the free wing of jazz often seems to overlap with post punk sonically. Of course, the group did have the occasional almost-pop moment - tunes like Bob Hope Takes Risks and Constant Drudgery Is Harmful To Soul, Spirit & Health that seem to arrive at a post-disco boogie seemingly by accident - but their hearts quite clearly lie in the abstract. This is a tangled, untamed music that strains at the label post punk, threatening to double back and break into the seventies for proper account alongside the likes of Miles Davis, Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders.

Lying somewhere between the chaos of Rip Rig & Panic and Maximum Joy's glossy sheen is the beloved Pigbag, a band that managed to blend the searing post-Miles brass of the latter with the dancefloor dexterity of the former. The band's debut single, Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag, even climbed to #3 in the UK! Rocking a frenetic post-disco rhythm replete with furious percussion and a looming bassline, the band seem to offer up a nightmare version of Madness' ska with tight-as-a-drum horn charts ruling the tune even as spectral brass creeps in and out of the mix. Throughout the band's three year tenure - overlapping perfectly with that of Rip Rig & Panic - Pigbag managed to consistently run down some spooky voodoo on wax. Dr. Heckle And Mr. Jive - from the debut album of the same name - launched drowning arcs of eerie brass across a nagging bassline and rolling percussion, while the uptempo Getting Up placed the band's horn charts front and center over furious percussion and chicken-scratch guitar while holding down a pulsing 4/4 rhythm. Like Maximum Joy, the band can play it remarkably straight and go for the dancefloor jugular, yet at a moment's notice they can veer off into leftfield with dense, oppressive atmospherics that rival that of Rip Rig & Panic.

The final crew in the mix today is 23 Skidoo, which I've appropriately only revealed just now. While not a Y Records band, they were fellow travellers exploring a densely atmospheric fourth world vision. The band came crashing into the public consciousness with The Gospel Comes To New Guinea, a ten-minute slab of churning, murky post punk funk. Group chants and strange woodwinds fade in and out of the fog as the band seem to pound out their beat at the other end of the cave. This is 23 Skidoo clearly taking the field recording ethos of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts to its logical conclusion. The band's debut LP Seven Songs found them alternating between the droning atmospherics of New Testament and the relatively straight up funk of Vegas El Bandito, but it was the closing Quiet Pillage9 that pointed the way forward to the band's next obsession: Indonesian gamelan music.10

The Culling Is Coming was the band's second LP, and the debut's occasional funk had given way to pure, shadowy atmosphere. The opening G-2 Contemplation launched straight into the first of the band's explorations into gamelan music, a sound they interpret as deeply in thrall to the strange. At times reminiscent of the more nebulous portions of the Third Ear Band's Music For Macbeth, it could just as easily score the eeriest moments of Fellini's Satyricon. Tone poems like Shrine and Mahakala are like being lost in the fog of a deserted temple, while the closing Healing (For The Strong) reveals that the temple wasn't deserted after all! In essence, the record prefigures what would come to be called dark ambient years later, about as far from the dancefloor as could be.

Which makes the about face of Coup all the more astonishing. Turning up on a non-LP 12" later that year, it was the band's greatest pop moment. After two bars of the band's crispest drum beat yet, Sketch Martin drops that bassline into the mix before horn charts sweep in to carry the melody. I say that bassline because it was later resurrected by The Chemical Brothers fifteen years later for their epochal big beat classic, Block Rockin' Beats, which came crashing into the charts in 1997. Meanwhile, the flipside's Version (In The Palace) feeds Coup through the cold machinery of dub.

The band's final album - Urban Gamelan - featured a new version of Coup titled F.U.G.I. and a couple more moments of low slung funk, but it was mostly devoted to the band's atonal gamelan symphonies. Like I said, the exit routes from today's music shoots you out all over the globe, and that pan-global vision was one of its greatest strengths. In the decades to come, 23 Skidoo's music was actually rather well curated. At the turn of the century, their album were reissued on the heels of the band's self-titled reunion album just as the post punk revival was starting to gather steam. On second thought, reunion might be a bit of a misnomer. As the Just Like Everybody compilation proved, the band had been far from dormant. Rounding up two discs worth of unreleased nineties material, it showcased some of what the band had generated while loitering in dance music's shadowy back alley... the same back alley where all manner of post punk figures were lurking throughout the decade.

You see, the band played on...

1. Note that the original triple 12" record was designed to be played in any order, so the tracklist I'm using is the one delineated by the Second Edition reissue (after all, that's how I encountered this record in the first place, stateside brother that I am).
2. These three EPs are handily compiled on the relatively easy to find Secret Life anthology.
3. In fact, the band managed to contribute a song to all three volumes of the Disco Not Disco series, which essentially enshrined the mutant disco sound. If I'm memory serves, they were the only artist to do so.
4. Put simply, twisted hip hop staggering down the back alley in a desperate state, its mind warped on unkind substances and unhealthy emotion. But that's another story for another series, which I'll delve into further at a later date.
6. Simon Reynolds, Totally Wired (Soft Skull Press, 2009), 94.
7. The label - started by Disc O'Dell - that seemed to spring up around The Pop Group nexus upon their departure from Radar.
8. Although, they did put out Sun Ra's Strange Celestial Road and Nuclear War LPs as well.
9. Doubtless a play on Martin Denny's exotica touchstone, Quiet Village.
10. Incidentally, a fascination shared with Claude Debussy when he crossed paths with the music nearly one-hundred years earlier.

LISTEN NOW

TV5 What Time Is It?

  1. Jah Wobble/The Edge/Holger Czukay Snake Charmer (Island)
  2. Brian Eno & David Byrne The Jezebel Spirit (Sire)
  3. Public Image Ltd. Death Disco (Virgin)
  4. The Slits Earthbeat (CBS)
  5. The Pop Group Thief Of Fire (Radar)
  6. Pigbag Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag (Y)
  7. Material Disappearing (Celluloid)
  8. 23 Skidoo Coup (Illuminated)
  9. Mark Stewart + Maffia Liberty City (On-U Sound)
  10. Maximum Joy Let It Take You There (Y)
  11. Holger Czukay/Jah Wobble/Jaki Liebezeit Hold On To Your Dreams (Island)
  12. Ashford & Simpson Babies (Dub Version) (Captiol)
  13. Material featuring Nona Hendryx Over And Over (Long Version) (Celluloid)
  14. Gwen Guthrie Peanut Butter (Special Mix By Larry Levan) (Garage)
  15. Kleeer Taste The Music (Atlantic)
  16. Melle Mel & Duke Bootee Message II (Survival) (Sugar Hill)
  17. Doug Wimbish featuring Fats Comet Don't Forget That Beat (World)
  18. Rip Rig & Panic Constant Drudgery Is Harmful To Soul, Spirit & Health (Virgin)
  19. Holger Czukay/Jah Wobble/Jaki Liebezeit How Much Are They? (Virgin)
  20. Public Image Ltd. Careering (Virgin)
  21. The Pop Group She Is Beyond Good And Evil (Radar)
  22. The Slits I Heard It Through The Grapevine (Island)

Garden Grooves 002

Posted on June 14, 2017 @ 11:48pm by Coqui

Picking up from last time (nearly a year ago!), here's another Garden Grooves session coming at your from the Heights. This outing was squarely in the roots 'n future neighborhood, where dub, house and trip hop all shuffle in the shadows, matching the mood as we cultivated the fern gardens in the shady glen of The Southwest Terrace. Spanning a weekend of work, here's the selection as it played out:

Rodriguez - Cold Fact

(Sussex: 1970)

Jumping off into our horticultural escapades with Rodriguez's debut, an unqualified masterpiece. Peerless folk coming from Detroit, masterfully produced and arranged by Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore, Rodriguez himself is never less than compelling. One of those records packed with potential hit singles (Hate Street Dialogue, Sugar Man, Jane S. Piddy, etc.) that the label nonetheless fumbled, not knowing how to market. Such a shame!

Grachan Moncur III - Aco Dei De Madrugada (One Morning I Waked Up Very Early)

(BYG: 1970)

Phenomenally lush chamber jazz on the BYG/Actuel imprint, rendered doubly fascinating in the context of that label's illustrious free jazz pedigree. I reckon this even tops New Africa, Moncur's free outing of the previous year on the same label. Utterly unique, this is one of my key Jazz Mosiac records. It always makes me think of walking around Balboa Park in the late afternoon, the Timkin, the Botanical Gardens, etc.

Harlem River Drive - Harlem River Drive

(Roulette: 1971)

Supreme latin funk masterminded by the late, great Eddie Palmieri and his brother Charlie. I've gone on record about Palmieri before, suffice it to say I think he's one of the great visionaries of salsa music, stretching it out in the same way Miles did jazz around the same time. You might call this dread, moody funk tile something of a sister record to The World Is A Ghetto. Carmello requested this and the next one when he rolled up for some digging time.

Derrick Harriott - Whip It

(Hawkeye: 1983)

Awesome discomix version of the Dazz Band's immortal Let It Whip, a key Blacklight Affair track that also gets regular play on Magic 92.5. The Dub Whip version on the flipside is utterly essential, drenching the track in reverb as every aspect trails off into deep space.

Bobby Konders - "All The Massive Hits" In A Rub A Dub Stylee

(Hot: 1995)

Which takes us into Señor Konders rootsical deep house vibes. This indispensable compilation (assembled by none other than Frankie Bones) was my introduction to the man's work after hearing the immortal Let There Be House in the mix. This pre-dates the (also excellent) A Lost Era In NYC 1987-1992 compilation on International Deejay Gigolo by a good seven years; I dig the focus on the early Massive Sounds sides during the latter half of this compilation, prefiguring as they do Konders' latter ragga-infused direction while remaining firmly grounded in New York house.

Carlton - The Call Is Strong

(FFRR: 1990)

The lone LP to result from Smith & Mighty's signing with FFRR, an ill-fated deal that promised to deliver a flurry of records before becoming bogged down in label politics. Paired with the Steppers Delight EP, it makes as excellent case for the duo's status as the godfathers of Bristol blues. Carlton himself is a revelation. It's a shame he didn't get to do more vocal work as the decade progressed... one could see him linking up with a UK garage crew and doing serious damage later in the decade.

Horace Andy - Living In The Flood

(Melankolic: 1999)

Roots reggae stalwart and frequent Massive Attack collaborator Horace Andy's LP on Massive's Melankolic setup. Just a great modern reggae record, with tracks like After All and Juggling offering up a shimmering take on roots music. Still, there's a definite modernist tilt to songs like the Johnny Too Bad cover and the awesome Doldrums (produced by 3D). A careening ragga track riding a beatbox rhythm, it's one of those tracks that remain impossible to date: it could have come out in 1989, 1999, 2009 or even two years from now.

Grace Jones - Nightclubbing

(Island: 1981)

Neuromancer post-disco blues. Makes an excellent case for giving supermodels record contracts. Jones cut through the decade like a bejewelled dagger, unfurling a swathe of superb records like Warm Leatherette, Slave To The Rhythm and this record, a Parallax favorite. I've gone on about this one many times before (and many times to come, no doubt), but today I'd like to single out I've Done It Again for praise, a lazy windswept chanson, gently swaying like Luquillo palms at sunset.

Sam Mangwana - Maria Tebbo

(Systeme Art Musique: 1979)

Excellent soukous from The Congo. There's not a great deal written about this record, although it does make Muzikifan's illustrious African Top 50. The title track is simply exquisite, those lilting guitars do their thing over a pulsing 4/4 beat as an ebullient Mangwana dances atop the whole thing like Fred Astaire. One of my favorite sleeves as well, evocative as it is of a particular time and place.

Thomas Leer - Contradictions

(Cherry Red: 1982)

Peak-era Thomas Leer, on the heels of his 4 Movements EP and basking in the same gulf stream vibes. Leer's bedroom sonics somehow manage to make the whole thing sound anachronistic by about fifteen years - pre-dating the likes of Jimi Tenor and Uwe Schmidt - and betraying unlikely similarities with prime Compass Point material like Wally Badarou's Chief Inspector.

Cheikh Lô - Lamp Fall

(World Circuit: 2006)

This was a huge record for me at the time. Indeed 2006 (over ten years ago!) was the last time I remember feeling overwhelmed by a surplus of great records (it's been diminishing returns since!). Cheikh Lô's third album finds him truly mastering his writing, with a rich, full bodied production (think Ali Farka Touré). World Circuit were tearing it up at this point, with the aforementioned Touré, Oumou Sangare and Orchestra Baobab releases all surfacing within months of each other. The awesome Kelle Magni (Encore) is an unacknowledged Balearic chestnut, just waiting for someone to pick up on it in the club. I remember hoping for a 12" release at the time.

No Smoke & The Mali Singers - International Smoke Signal

(Warriors Dance: 1990)

Quintessential Warriors Dance magic, this mutant house tile - like Bang The Party's Back To Prison - is utterly essential listening. Unlike the BTP record, this one never saw release on CD. Don't believe people who tell you there aren't great house albums! This is the next step down the road from Bobby Konders' Massai Women, creeping further yet into fourth world territory and all the better for it.

Bandulu - Guidance

(Infonet: 1993)

I've always been a huge Bandulu fan. This was the first thing of theirs I scooped up back in the day (oddly enough, it was the easiest to find, despite Cornerstone being a new release at the time). This is a dubbed-out, Detroit-inflected high desert head trip unlike anything else I've heard. There's plenty of widescreen epics like Earth 6 and Invaders, but a song like Gravity Pull - with its clanking percussion and droning sonics - is a surreal atmospheric missive not entirely removed from Basic Channel/Chain Reaction. I've always adored the bassline in Messenger (a distant cousin to Carl Craig's Psyche/BFC output), and speaking of Craig, the man surfaces here with the Innerzone Mix of Better Nation is, a spiky slab of street-level techno on the 21st century b-boy tip.

The Sabres Of Paradise - Haunted Dancehall

(Warp: 1994)

Similarily, I've always adored Andrew Weatherall's output, especially from this point up to just before Two Lone Swordsmen went post punk. Weatherall was a huge fan of The Clash, and damn if he didn't create a body of work that approximated what Joe Strummer and co. might have sounded like if they'd caught the vibes at Shoom and descended deeper into electronics. A superb album, hovering at the nexus between dub, breakbeat and techno, where the spirits dwell.

Smith & Mighty - Bass Is Maternal

(More Rockers: 1995)

The Revolver of the nineties. The culmination of everything the duo-turned-trio had been up to in their wilderness years, this is strictly rough cut bizzness. I liked the way Kevin Pearce invoked Sandinista! when discussing this album in A Cracked Jewel Case. It's a mess, but beautifully so. With vocal showcases like Drowning, Down In Rwanda and Higher Dub continuing the crew's tradition of first-rate vocal showcases, its the instrumentals like Yow He Koh, Maybe For Dub and Jungle Man Corner that manage to get to the heart of the matter and steal the show.

Various Artists - Dub Out West Volume 1: Roots Cultivatas

(Nubian: 1996)

Awesome digidub compilation on the Nubian setup, which I know next to nothing about. Featuring mostly (but not just) Bristol artists, this features the mind-blowing Peter D. showcase Jah Pure & Clean, which I first heard on Smith & Mighty's fiery DJ-Kicks outing back in 1998. The liner notes rather helpfully have bios on the crews involved, along with label contacts and other background information.

Bomb The Bass - Unknown Territory

(Rhythm King: 1991)

The midpoint between the breakout proto-big beat of Into The Dragon and Beat Dis-era and the breathtaking hip hop blues of Clear. You hear very little about this record but trust me, you want to check it out. Like John Saul Kane's Depth Charge output, it splits the difference between big beat and trip hop while submerging the results in murky waters. Unlike Kane, Tim Simenon works with vocalists like Loretta Heywood and carves out a peerless raw-edged sound (this the same year as Blue Lines!). The Air You Breathe, with its spine-tingling Tell me you were never one of them sample, is quite simply sublime.

Colourbox - Baby I Love You So

(4AD: 1986)

Post punk Jacob Miller cover version that predicts trip hop a whole year before Mark Stewart got around to it? Apocalyptic spaghetti western discomix showcase built around dialogue samples from Duck, You Sucker and Once Upon A Time In The West?? Cinematic fourth world dub breakdown straight out of William Gibson's Zion??? It's all here, baby.

Bushflange - Crossing Point

(Hard Hands: 1995)

Spiralling breakbeat magic on Leftfield's Hard Hands imprint. Bought on sight from the cheap bin (along with Anthony Shakir's Tracks For My Father, if memory serves) at the record store next to Club Elements back in the day, Snakes and I had no idea what was in store. Two sides of marathon wildstyle percussion freakouts, loping basslines and not much else - like Niagara getting down with an AKAI - it turns out. Moog In and Moog Out.

Leftfield - Leftism

(Hard Hands: 1995)

People can get pretty sniffy about this duo, and I've never understood it. This cinematic club music splits the difference between house and trip hop, the results shot through with both dub and techno vibes throughout. Songs like Afro-Left, Space Shanty and Black Flute sound like the lush, organic flipside to Bandulu's electronic dub equations, picking up the same thread laid out by Bobby Konders and Warriors Dance. Who could argue with gentle moments like the widescreen ambient of Melt and Original's downbeat splendor. Perhaps people disliked the Lydon guest spot, Open Up? Snobs! That track is phenomenal. At any rate, even the most hardened purist couldn't knock the wild breakbeat moves of Storm 3000.

Augustus Pablo - King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown

(Clocktower: 1976)

Awesome dub platter. I always think of this as the sister record to King Tubby's Dub From The Roots. Houses the epochal dub version of Jacob Miller's Baby I Love You So - in the form of the title track - which should be your first port of call if you've never heard a dub track.

Keith Hudson - Flesh Of My Skin Blood Of My Blood

(Mamba: 1975)

Bonkers dubbed-out roots reggae from the great Keith Hudson, whose sound isn't remotely like anyone else's. This LP quite simply is the sound of the jungle: lush, all-conquering vegetation creeping over everything in sight, from roads and buildings to stone heads and pyramids. There's also a sweet, lovers rock aspect to the record that seems to phase in and out of view before Hunting, Stabiliser and My Nocturne roll back in from the darkness.

And with twilight descending, that the next phase of the project was completed...


Prehistoric plant life in full effect: the verdant architecture of a tree fern, nestled in The Southwest Terrace of the Parallax Gardens.

Machinery

Posted on March 13, 2017 @ 9:28pm by Coqui

Woebot on the one with a couple essential mixes, first tackling Detroit techno's winding history before jumping into some Chicago house mayhem. With a little luck, we'll get a New York one - Nu Groove/Strictly Rhythm/Fourth Floor bizzness in full effect - in the near future. It being 3/13 I would have liked to jump into a Detroit selection myself - there's been plenty of the skewed electronic jazz of late-nineties Anthony Shakir, Carl Craig and Stacey Pullen bumping through the Parallax Room as of late - but the perfectionist in me is still tweaking that full-length feature at the moment. For now, check Woebot's mix for a true sonic journey...

There was also a bit of griping from the man himself about Pitchfork's 50 Best IDM Albums Of All Time list - with its Simon Reynolds-penned introduction - for the slapdash nature of the selections. Reynolds himself confused with the actual content of the list. Right on, I thought. I must confess that I was a bit mystified when I had seen the list in the first place. There were a whole bunch of startling omissions - where was Alter Ego/Sensorama, Luke Vibert/Wagon Christ, Susumu Yokota (indeed all of Japan for that matter), early Black Dog and Plaid's Mbuki Mvuki- and figures like Biosphere and Deep Space Network, whose absence wasn't necessarily surprising, but certainly disappointing. The list seemed to miss the point of the whole endeavor! But then Pitchfork never really got electronic music, did they?

I had a similar experience reading FACT Magazine's 50 Best Trip-Hop Albums Of All Time... sort of wow, this all meant something totally different to me back then. Now I love FACT - don't get me wrong - and it was a pleasure to read (plus I was thrilled with the #1 pick - one of my top 5 albums in any genre). But there were a couple things that started to get to me after awhile. The apologetic/embarrassed tone for one, like this music is somehow a guilty pleasure (we're talking about some of the most crucial records of the decade here). Embarrassment over the trip hop tag itself, which I do remember being a common gripe even at the time (and which I never quite understood),1 and apologetic that a bunch of corny chill out artists came riding its coattails into the mainstream and supposedly de-fanged the music in the process. I don't know that I've ever bought that narrative.

First off, when has the lackluster output of bandwagon artists ever truly discredited what made a sound exciting in the first place? Surely it gets tiresome in the moment, hearing all these lame immitations, but it's been twenty years now! There's been plenty of time to cleanse the palette and re-focus. Secondly, the chill out thing was a totally different project, distinct from trip hop's m/o... this was lifestyle music for young professionals and scenesters. That it started cropping up in Zach Braff movies is evidence enough. There was certainly some overlap between the two - no more than with reggae or dub though (far less, truth be told) - but the media ran with that narrative and suddenly there was no room for a record like Pre-Millenium Tension. Tricky had lost it. And yet the record was flush with a deeply strange, skewed b-boy blues that was anything but easy listening and remained true to the roots-n-future warped downbeat vision that lie at trip hop's beating heart ever since Smith & Mighty remixed Mark Stewart. In truth, the jagged underbelly of nineties hip hop and r&b's glistening phantasmagorias had always had more in common with trip hop than any of the chill out brigade ever could hope to.

My second big complaint was the creeping sense that there was just too much zaniness in the list... and a little goes a long way. Even at the time a lot of that stuff came to be as big a turn off as the chill out stuff, with a bad aftertaste to boot, like it was all some big inside joke between people who thought they were better than the music. A dead end if there ever was one.

The last thing that threw me was the approach of limiting the list to one record per artist. I think that's a mistake when talking genres/scenes, because certain artists nearly always manage to define the sound and transcend their surroundings. One couldn't imagine a sixties rock list that limited The Beatles to a single record. Then why trip hop, when there were some obvious movers and shakers in the mix from day one? I don't want to get bogged down in specifics at the moment - reason enough, I'd been planning to do an in-depth series on trip hop in the near future - but right off the bat I can say that the first three Massive Attack LPs put the whole scene in stark relief, signposting the whole project. Without them, you're missing something...

1. It always struck me as an apposite description of the music, which was the bastard offspring of hip hop and soundsystem culture. Trip as in staggering, the beat dragging along, also as in tripping out, psychedelic b-boy music for real.

Paradise

Posted on September 26, 2016 @ 5:46pm by Coqui

I'm talking about freedom in 3D, sonic technicolor laid out before you as far as the eye can see. This is a Paradise Garage type thing, liquid textures in sound glowing, twisting in psychedelic rhythm. Larry Levan behind the decks, pumping bass manoeuvres while the mirrorball casts reflections off each and every wall. Island disco at the Parallax Pier with the Compass Point All Stars in full effect, waves of sound shimmer and cascade over bedrock bass at twilight, bumping somewhere deep in the distance. Grace Jones and Gwen Guthrie shimmy on the mic over rock hard Sly & Robbie riddims, Wally Badarou's synths swirling magic all around.

Crashers take their Flight To Jamaica (Cool Runings) while The Beat do their thing, the shadow of Joe Gibbs sways steady in the sound booth, blessed bass and Uptown Top Ranking plays. Tiger Talking once again, decked out in a three-piece suit, while Big Audio Dynamite bang every beatbox and all the Fine Young Cannibals come out to play on the 12" tip, That Good Thing goes to Pull The Sucker Off, while Prince Paul and De La Soul are 3 Feet High And Rising... take it all in: the sounds, the shapes, the colors. Sister Monie Love missed her plane back to London, with those Bristol blues somewhere on another island, asking where have Smith & Mighty and Daddy G been Lately? Lowrell's Mellow Mellow Right On drift casual into the night, back into jazz and Eno's system - Another Green World played out again but in neon this time.

Take it back to Philly with Dexter Wansel rocking that 21st century blacklight soul, light lives in every groove, illuminating every shadow, every last nerve. Lounge slides back into disco with West End and Prelude, crossing Cloud One on a Heavenly Star, while Eddy Grant got that ICE straight Living On The Frontline sort of tweaked-out rhythm box thang. The Environ is in full effect, jungle vibes (Jungle Wonz) inna Metro Area upon a Virgo sign, starlight and chrome against strobes and a Blacklight Affair. Let's Go Swimming in Arthur Russell's World Of Echo, picking up that Nu Groove on the radio waves as we roll past 4th & Broadway toward Brookside Park and taste the cool air of the night.

Paradise, Paradise with Inner City: it's all there waiting for the touch. Silhouettes shake in rhythm on the cold grid of the dancefloor, While Others Cry we weep with joy, our Night Moves slowly (built to last). Neon dreams in the moonlight, vector traces roll like clockwork down from the top: landscapes on the mental, science just about to drop. This is freedom, this is beauty, this is love in three dimensions, transcribed from the cool of twilight onto the single page of an eight line poem. You can't read it - you just feel it - soaring over solemn organ played divine, a lone voice intones precisely...

"This poem is to be continued in your mind."

Post Punk In 10 CDs

Posted on August 12, 2016 @ 11:14pm by Coqui

Woebot with a stack of 10 post punk cds. As usual, the man nails it. Do it better, he says? Well, I'll take a stab at it... maybe not better, but here's the Parallax spin:

If we're talking post punk, I started out with CDs in the first place. This is turn of the century, late-nineties on the timeline. My vinyl stacks at this point were still largely populated 12" singles and EPs, the stuff you couldn't get on CD. A lot of Detroit, a lot of Chicago and a lot of Bristol. I actually got hooked up with post punk in the first place through the Bristol connection (Smith & Mighty and Tricky traced back to Mark Stewart via their mutual involvement) and PIL (Jah Wobble and John Lydon, traced backwards from their incursions into dance music at the time). I eventually tracked it all down on wax, but for me it started with the CDs.

First things first: the overlap between our lists. Well, there's just no getting around The Slits and PIL, is there? Dub vibes for miles. And I was delighted to see The Blue Orchids in Woebot's list as well. That's one of my most cherished post punk records. Indeed, when I get around to rolling out the next one-hundred of the Parallax hall of fame, it'll be lodged firmly within its ranks. In fact, there's a few spoilers for the Parallax 200 in this very stack of ten... it's like a sneak preview!

There were quite a few instances where we chose different records by the same artist: Pere Ubu (always liked this round up of their earliest singles), Joy Division (the debut is the one for me), Associates (I've already gone on record about Sulk) and then Wire... tough call between their first three albums. Pink Flag might be my favorite, but you could argue it's a straight punk record. So I've gone with the spaced out vibes of 154, as it's definitive post punk and a knockout slice of wax. Endless replays back in the day...

Then there's the stuff that I'd classify slightly differently. Woebot has the Talking Heads and Television in there, both firm favorites of mine no doubt, but I've always had them down as new wave. That's another feature I've had in the works for some time... 25 great new wave records (I'm planning to drop it as a back to school special). In truth I was hip to new wave long before I truly understood post punk. Similarily, I think of The Feelies as indie rock. They're right there at the junction.

Then there's the stuff I included on a variation: Come Away With ESG. Love the spooked out vibes, the spacious percussion: they definitely translated the Bronx onto wax here. There's Mark Stewart... that one's central to me, the midpoint between Y and Maxinquaye. I love it when late-period post punk starts cross-pollinating with electro and hip hop, and this just might be the apex. And of course Suicide. Not my absolute favorite of theirs (that would be the second album), but this is definitive post punk and a stone cold classic... just like the other nine pictured above.

Well there you have it, post punk in 10 CDs: The Parallax Edition.

Deep Space Music (Slight Return)

Posted on February 25, 2016 @ 5:55pm by Coqui

A few years back, I started a limited series in which I'd post a weekly tune that was locked into the celestial. I called it Deep Space Music. It was loosely inspired, as is much of what I do, by something a bunch of forward-thinking cats did in Detroit back in the day. In this case, it was Deep Space Radio, a series of transmissions made in the mid-nineties in which people like Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson would spin far out techno and house over the city's airwaves, culminating in Saunderson's masterful X-Mix: Transmission From Deep Space Radio mix.

My own excursion was a much more minimal affair, hosted on the old version of this very site, titled (rather unimaginatively) Deep Space Music. It involved simply tossing up one tune a week - for just under a year - from one summer to another, spanning between 2012 and 2013. The idea was that each song would flow into the next as one long suite, thematically speaking, the patchwork whole unfolding like the weekly sci-fi serials of old. At any rate, it proved to be an enjoyable exercise and hopefully tuned some people into some great music in the process.

In researching a monster piece I've been working on lately (and coming at you in the near future), I'd been digging through the interplanetary archives and - in the process - discovered a tracklist of all the tunes that featured in the series. I'd nearly forgotten about the whole enterprise, but seeing as it fits in thematically with the trip we've been on lately I thought it might be illuminating to beam the results back to earth, commenting on each selection in the process.

You'll notice that a lot of these tunes have continued to crop up in the intervening years, via mixes and even featured in The Parallax 100, which should highlight the centrality of this selection to my own musical tastes. All of these should be relatively easy to get your ears on nowadays, via Youtube or some other means (like picking up the record, perhaps), so if something sounds enticing you know what to do...

Engage!

  1. Ashford & Simpson Babies (Dub Version) (Capitol, 1984)

    2. The journey starts with rolling drums and guitars chiming off into the event horizon. Spacious pads with a graviational pull all their own drift through the mix, that gently chugging bassline seems to propel this ship through the vastness of space in ethereal slow-motion. Don't you know that I live for this sort of thing? This a François Kevorkian perpertrated dub of Ashford & Simpson's original (from their Solid LP), stretching it out across timespace with just a snatch of the original vocal. When Nickolas Ashford drops right into the mix, singing The love story's true, they didn't change me and you..., the track seems to stop and rebuild itself right before your eyes.

  2. Mtume The After 6 Mix (Juicy Fruit Part II) (Epic, 1983)

    3. Another flipside excursion, another featuring just a snatch of vocal input and another one of my favorite songs of all time. The original has one of the great synth progressions ever, pulling you in with a gliding futuristic optimism (think Tommorowland), but this second part - stripping the track to its essentials - is true space capsule music. You find yourself waiting for the synthesized bass sound that just oozes into the track every other bar. Hearing this for the first time was one of those pivotal moments in my life, like a parallel universe unfolding before me, and everything contained within was right up my alley. I remember rustling up the album and 12" within weeks!

    This tune and much of what follows are what I like to call Machine Soul, in essence a sonic strand stretching from Mtume through Model 500, into Timbaland and beyond.

  3. Kleeer Tonight (Atlantic, 1984)

    4. This one takes me back to sun-glazed days in late summer, playing video games on the Atari 2600 (truly ancient technology by that point in the mid-nineties), tripping out to Solaris and the sound of machine rhythms in the scorching heat. This track was the basis for DJ Quik's Tonite, its rubberband, synthetic bassline spreading deep into the DNA of g-funk. True machine soul, you can picture yourself listening in some perfectly-engineered alien vessel, gliding over a neon vector landscape in the night.

  4. Drexciya Running Out Of Space (Tresor, 1999)

    5. Perfection in just under two minutes, this would lend itself to a killer 7" single. That's a whole category unto itself. Sounding almost as if Tonight were fast-forwarded - all sonics twisted and filtered through fifteen years of electro boogie science - the track swoops and shudders on a nimble machine-funk rhythm before dissolving into a majestic, beatless coda. You could run a starship on that. Drexciya of course representing the life aquatic, they seem to be just as much at home in the deep black of space.

  5. Slam Visions (featuring Dot Allison) (Soma, 2001)

    6. Turn-of-the-century Glasgow. A killer pop song seemingly sprung from the subconscious. The atmosphere heavy like a black hole, that shrouded bassline rising from within, drawing you deeper and deeper into gravity's pull. At the center of it all is Dot Allison), serenading the night skies in a druggy murmur. The song explodes into some psychedelic vision of deep space r&b, glowing shards of funky synthetic sound spiralling off into the stratosphere, northern lights ablaze.

  6. Keni Stevens Night Moves (Ultra-Sensual Mix) (Elite, 1985)

    7. I've gone digital about this one before. You're gliding across the grid, vectors scrolling under a moonlit sky, landscapes parallaxing in the distance. Keni Stevens drapes his absolute smoothest, most delicate voice over an elegant neon-lit groove, all the parts moving in perfect unity. The vocal and instrumental versions of the Ultra-Sensual Mix run together on the vinyl, giving you eleven and a half minutes of supersonic pleasure.

  7. Sun Palace Rude Movements (Passion, 1983)

    8. I've noted before (another repeat!) how this record comes on like Carl Craig and Hall & Oates making music together in an elevator. I stand by that. Eighties smooth jazz isn't supposed to sound this exciting, but every element in this tune mixes together into the perfect palette and, against all odds, feels absolutely timeless. The perfect (quiet) storm.

  8. Yage Theme From Hot Burst (Jumpin' & Pumpin', 1992)

    9. An exclusive from the excellent Earthbeat compilation, an indispensable round-up of glistening techno produced by a pre-FSOL Dougans and Cobain. Crystalline synths drift whimsical over stuttering breakbeats, muted rave sounds trill just below the surface, with everything submerged in a deep, oceanic calm. Almost freeform in its construction, this track simply shimmers.

  9. The Isley Brothers Voyage To Atlantis (T-Neck, 1997)

    10. Why don't The Isley Brothers get more love? They're easily the equal of giants like Led Zeppelin or Stevie Wonder. What gives? They have loads of great records. This from their seventies 3 + 3 period - when the group's ranks swelled to six - in which they operated as purveyors of fine funk and peerless, sun-glazed soul. Voyage To Atlantis itself sways in stately slow-motion, exit music for a film. Cosmic, elegaic and beautiful.

  10. The Jimi Hendrix Experience 1983...(A Merman I Should Turn To Be) (Reprise, 1968)

    11. Aquatic, like Drexciya, but in tune with the cosmos. Hendrix got his start playing guitar with The Isleys before going down in history as arguably the greatest guitarist of all (the Forever riff in this song is one of the most inspiring things I've ever heard done with an electric guitar). This record finds him equally adept at using the studio as an instrument unto itself, rolling various movements and spaced out interludes into a nearly fourteen-minute sonic tapestry that works seamlessly as one long, flowing piece. The result is simply breathtaking.

  11. Fluke Kitten Moon (Astralwerks, 1997)

    12. The better part of this album, Risotto, is pretty spaced out as a rule, and I could have used anything from the blunted black hole trip Bermuda to the alien frequencies of Reeferendum to make the same point. However, Kitten Moon eclipses all other candidates with its relentless, chugging rhythm and a drop into pure atmosphere that leaves you standing on the edge of infinity.

  12. Kleeer Tonight (SA-RA Remix featuring The SA-RA All Stars & Me'Shell NdegéOcello) (Rhino, 2005)

    13. The original Kleeer classic (heard above) has a long history of affection among electronic funk connoisseurs. SA-RA turn in what is, in truth, more an outright cover than a remix. I love how they take the relatively minimal original - a tune that seems deeply influential to their own group's aesthetic - and go all out with it, stretching out in widescreen with a big band in tow (including the inimitable Me'Shell NdegéOcello), with no expense spared. Sparkling in the discotheque.

  13. Octave One Nicolette (430 West, 1991)

    14. Octave One embody a certain sonic perfection, working out the internal logic of techno and house to arrive at a streamlined form that sounds unlike anything else. This from their classic Octivation EP, following on the heels of their debut I Believe. Detuned bleeps spill out from a low slung rhythm, the fusion of shuffling 909 beats and a wandering analog bassline, synth washes flowing beneath it all in such a way that r&b stations should've been playing it. In a word, DEEP.

  14. Joe Gibbs & The Professionals Idlers Rest (Joe Gibbs, 1977)

    15. Intergalactic dub reggae, sounding not unlike SA-RA holed up at the Black Ark. Hard to believe it's from 1977. Rock hard beats and bottomless bass kick into gear with siren synths blazing high up above. This from the second volume in Joe Gibbs' excellent African Dub All-Mighty series, which I was lucky enough to snag at Reggae World some years back (and just in time to spin at a New Years Eve party later that night).

  15. Leon Ware Tamed To Be Wild (United Artists, 1972)

    16. Motorik machine soul from the first solo shot by this songwriter in the shadows. Think Suicide. Leon Ware growls over a chugging blues beat, rolling pianos and electronic bass that zig-zags beneath brooding verses before exploding into that near-gospel chorus. Ancient synths droning into infinity. It's all very Warp Records. Ware well-documented as a songwriting auteur, with Motown and Marvin Gaye, in particular (look no further than I Want You for the proof), benefiting from his way with the pen. Check those credits - from Quincy Jones to Minnie Riperton to The Jackson Five - he's everywhere!.

  16. Jackson And His Computer Band Utopia (Warp, 2005)

    17. I remember being stumped as to how to follow up the previous track - so doggedly singular was that grinding tronik soul stormer - but this convoluted electro/house burner from the French auteur Jackson Fourgeaud did the trick. Intricate and overloaded, this track is - simply put - a monster. The whole of it seems constructed from shards of sound - electronic glitches and vocal snatches - shattered into a million pieces only to be reconstructed into a skewed vision of disco, churning under waves of droning sonics before dropping out into that heavenly chorus. Have you ever thought about utopia? Utterly bizarre, yet I challenge anyone not to be hooked by the second listen.

  17. Beanfield Keep On Believing (Compost, 1997)

    18. My brother Matt and I used to be obsessed with this tune. Still are, truth be told. One of my go-to tracks in defense of the practice of sampling. This tune essentially mashes up Vangelis' Let It Happen and the batucada drums from Costa-Gavras' Z (Mikis Theodorakis in full effect), filtering them through deep space sonics and winding up with something utterly singular. But where did those blues vocals come from?

  18. Medeski Martin + Wood Midnight Birds (SA-RA Remix) (Main) (Blue Note, 2005)

    19. More SA-RA. They're all over the place in this break out! The MMM original is a swaying mirage of interstellar exotica, but the SA-RA version takes it on a wild, tangled trip into the unknown. Busting out wrongfooted on the 4/4 - like if J Dilla made a house track - this multi-part dancefloor burner seems fueled on unstable elements, kicking into a juke joint mid-section before it all collapses inna staggering machine rhythm that just disolves into stray synths in the moonlight. The life and death of a star.

  19. Jay Dee Think Twice (BBE, 2001)

    20. Speaking of J Dilla, this deep slab of downbeat bliss from Welcome 2 Detroit is the square root of all manner of twisted machine soul that's tumbled out of this blessed millennium so far. This could go on for hours and I wouldn't get bored. The Donald Byrd bit that goes Your love's like fire and ice, that's why we've got to think twice, followed by a little trumpet flourish, is catchier than most songs you hear on the radio. Then it flies off on a variation, the piano jukes then goes left, before once again drifting somewhere else entirely.

  20. Smith & Mighty DJ-Kicks/I Don't Know (featuring Alice Perera) (12" Mix 1) (Studio !K7, 1998)

    21. It's beginning to feel almost as if I subconsciously drew from this nearly forgotten list when mixing last year's Radio AG transmissions! I suppose that speaks to their closeness to my heart (aww!). This one's so tied up with my own memories and experiences that I don't know where to begin. You just want to curl up inside the warmth of this song. In the surrounding context, it plays like a companion piece to The Martian's Sex In Zero Gravity: a love from outer space.

  21. Me'Shell NdegéOcello Come Smoke My Herb (Maverick, 2003)

    22. Comfort Woman - the record from which this track springs - is on some serious Hendrix-level astral plane, its space rock dynamics swooping and shuddering in graceful slow-motion through the reggaematic machinery of dub. This is deep space as a return to the womb, and it's the swooning blur of Come Smoke My Herb that offers up the record's simplest, most exquisite pleasure: walking on air.

  22. Divine Styler In A World Of U (Maverick, 2003)

    23. In between Styler's old school debut and underground return lies Spiral Walls Containing Autumns Of Light, a record that draws on space rock, industrial and fusion as much as hip hop. This tune in particular is coming from somewhere else! There's that inevitable, descending chord progression - guitars running through sheets of chorus, trilling off into delicate metallic solos - rolling drums and Divine Styler's druggy murmur at the center of it all, cut adrift in wholly expansive innnerspace.

  23. The Police Walking On The Moon (A&M, 1979)

    24. Everybody knows this one, and for good reason. Andy Sumner's guitars chime into the endless deep while Stewart Copeland taps out a beat that seems to obey the laws of lunar gravity rather than the Earth's, and Sting sounds without a care in the world. I remember a particularly dark night back in the day when I listened to this song on repeat, non-stop until I eventually drifted off to sleep.

  24. Simple Minds Veldt (Arista, 1979)

    25. Early Simple Minds records are doubtless a treasure trove of weird new wave, but you'll also find some of the most atmospheric instrumentals of their era... or any other for that matter. Perfectly conjuring up visions of the titular African plains at dusk, strange shapes shifting in the darkness, this brings to mind Suburban Knight's The Art Of Stalking. I swear that you can hear mid-period FSOL in this densely articulated atmosphere. The first time I heard it, I thought What's going on now?! Today it might be my favorite thing on the album.

  25. Dexter Wansel Solutions (Philadelphia International, 1978)

    26. Philly soul craftsman gets loose in the studio, shearing into incandescent jazz funk. The song drifts in and out into radio transmissions - presumably picked up in deep space - chronicling the struggles of present-day Earth. Not much has changed! Wansel croons in silk over luminescent organs and a rubber-synth bassline, fragile and exquisite. A minor r&b hit at the time, it's a wonder this tune isn't more widely known.

  26. The Steve Miller Band Sacrifice (Capitol, 1977)

    27. Glorious tripped out pop-psychedelia from the original space cowboy. Crystalline rhodes shimmer in the moonlight over a downbeat rhythm, while Steve Miller pulls liquid shapes from his guitar and sings moody lines in the foreground. I've always been a sucker for that vibrato thing he tends to do with his voice: What a sacrifiyiyice.... This is, in essence, a jazz funk record. Which leads us into...

  27. Roy Ayers Ubiquity The Memory (Polydor, 1976)

    28. DEEP jazz funk. The deepest. Drawing you slow-motion tumbling into a black hole, shadows and sound swirling all around, it seems to have a gravity all its own. Feel Surreal. Those drums are rock hard, pounding a tripped-out beat while deep Moog bass textures curl beneath. Liquid keys shimmer and gamma ray ARPs stream like sunlight through the darkness. Innerspace music and subconscious soul, this track embodies the haunting words of its refrain.

  28. Marvin Gaye A Funky Space Reincarnation (Tamla, 1978)

    29. Taken from Gaye's exquisite kiss off Here, My Dear. I remember buying the record thinking, Well, it's supposed to be one of his weaker ones but I love What's Going On and then being completely blown away. A Funky Space Reincarnation has Gaye drifting through images of mental deep space travel over a downbeat disco rhythm - sort of half-singing/half-rapping - commenting on the sights he encounters along the way and putting the moves on Miss Birdsong. Strangely enough, this always makes me think of those rolling ambient house numbers by The Orb like Perpetual Dawn and Toxygene, gently unfurling on an astral plane.

  29. Bobby Lyle Inner Space (Capitol, 1978)

    30. I first heard this in a Kirk Degiorgio mix and couldn't believe my ears. This came out when? How?? It's the secret ancestor to Carl Craig's gaussian-blurred ambient excursions like Neurotic Behavior and A Wonderful Life, and a glorious track in its own right.

  30. Psyche Neurotic Behavior (Planet E, 1989)

    31. Which brings us to this, which strangely had the opposite effect: I couldn't believe it had come out so recently. Breathtakingly cinematic and vast in scope, it sounds simultaneously ancient and futuristic, like a sleek alien structure that the scientists can't seem to date. I remember compiling the Parallax 100 and originally planning to include 4 Jazz Funk Classics, but just couldn't resist this record's exquisite shades and absorbing timbres. Elements is in that grey area of compilations that pull from just one or two years - see also The Three EPs by The Beta Band - but it just works too well as an album in its own right. It gets the pass! And just because his first stuff is my absolute favorite doesn't mean I don't love the rest of it... the man has gone from strength to strength, one of the most consistently compelling producers around.

  31. The Martian Skypainter (Red Planet, 1995)

    32. Motorik deep space drive. I've been a big fan of Red Planet for ages, and if I'm not mistaken have everything the label put out (there might be a Somewhere In Detroit record lingering, I can't remember). At the time I just couldn't get ahold of the records, try as I might. I first heard this and Midnite Sunshine (and, come to think of it the very next track as well) on Submerge's Depth Charge 3, a round-up of tracks that from their extended crew. I was in heaven.

  32. Freq Waveaura (Matrix, 1995)

    33. This is the other one from that compilation, although its original home was a label compilation for Matrix Records (Sean Deason's label). As far as I know, this never had a release outside those two compilations. Deason was a rising star at this time, in what was called The Third Wave Of Detroit Techno, and I snapped up whatever I could by him. When he was on, he was really on. This spaced out organ jam, a sleek Martian cousin to Paperclip People's Steam, was one of those moments.

  33. E-Dancer World Of Deep (KMS, 1997)

    34. I can now recall that there was a bit of a Detroit rally going on at this point. I was feeling good! This tune was actually featured on Saunderson's X-Mix that I mentioned above. It was hot off the presses at the time. Simply put, this is superb machine disco. Deeply psychedelic and absorbing, that bassline just takes hold. Are those synths or are they voices? You just have to close your eyes to this one.

  34. Virgo Ride (Radical, 1989)

    35. More dazzling tronik house moves, this time by way of Chicago. Machine rhythms and a cascading bassline suck you into the pitch black, while blurred vocals invite you to take a ride. This is night drive music for a ride to Club Silencio.

  35. Dark Energy Midnite Sunshine (Underground Resistance, 1994)

    36. This one from the awesome Dark Energy double-pack on UR. Credited to Dark Energy AKA Suburban Knight AKA James Pennington, and offering up a flipside to the paranoid dread in earlier records like The Art Of Stalking and Nocturbulous Behavior: anything is possible and the future is wide open. Inspiring stuff. There was a later Dark Energy record that was quite good as well, this time on an electrofunk tip.

  36. Reload Ehn (Infonet, 1993)

    37. Taken from A Collection Of Short Stories, which is (if I'm not mistaken) Global Communication's auspicious debut. The record is a grab-bag of disparate styles - from ambient to breakbeat techno and grinding industrial - complete with an equally disjunctured set of accompanying science fiction texts. This beauty in this track lies in its sheer inevitability as it works out its own internal logic - the synth's progression and that throbbing bassline, low-key breaks rolling beneath - its off-kilter funk running like illogical clockwork.

  37. Plaid Spudink (Warp, 1997)

    38. I've always been quite fond of this one. Its casual futurism is like viewing the Earth through a tiny portal from within the compact close quarters of the international space station... a tin can floating through the vastness of space. There's also loads of stuff by The Black Dog that I could/should have used in this list, but it must have slipped my mind.

  38. China Crisis Jean Walks In Freshfields (Virgin, 1982)

    39. This unlikely jewel of space music in miniature lies nestled at the end of China Crisis' debut album, Difficult Shapes & Passive Rhythms. It drops you into the shadow of a nebula and is over in the blink of an eye.

  39. Double Helix Low Key (Rush Hour, 2002)

    40. I think this one first appeared on the All Access To Detroit's Music Festivals compilation, but it later got a 12" release. A clockwork rhythm taps beneath a glowing bassline as the deepest of synths roll out into casual infinity. Strangely, this often makes me think of the spaciest precincts of China Crisis' discography (particularily Red Sails and The Soul Awakening).

  40. Kraftwerk Spacelab (Kling Klang, 1978)

    41. These gentlemen from Cologne don't have an album dedicated to space, possibly because they already said everything they needed to within the shining six minutes of Spacelab. Partially inspired by the machine disco rhythms of Giorgio Moroder, this sounds like ambient house before house even happened.

  41. Queen In The Space Capsule (Love Theme) (Elektra, 1981)

    42. When Dr. Zarkov's space capsule disconnects from the rocket, that guitar strum etches itself into infinity. Queen in soundtrack mode here, this is beautiful like Tangerine Dream. It's the love theme for Dale and Flash, one one level, but on another it seems to gesture toward a universal love for all of humanity (and thus makes it Dr. Zarkov's theme as much as anyone else's). Perfect music for getting sucked into a vortex, I once made an abstract hip hop track that sampled those opening synths.

  42. Mr. Fingers Stars (Jack Trax, 1987)

    43. Glorious early deep house from Larry Heard (a legend doncha know?). You've got this gently chugging beat, a bassline that wanders all over the spectrum and shimmering synth sequences that rotate in slow-motion lunar orbit, always threatening to slip just behind the beat but staying in perfect time. Exquisitely psychedelic.

  43. Dâm-Funk Keep Lookin' 2 The Sky (Stones Throw, 2009)

    44. Uptempo bizzness from the ever-reliable Dâm-Funk. Seeing him live made me realize that he's something like the West Coast equivalent to Moodymann: operating with the same vital foot in the present, informed by deep crates and a musical lineage stretching deep into the past (just swap out West Coast electro and Solar Records for deep disco slates and Motown). This is one of those moments when you realize that he's making, for all intents and purposes, techno.

  44. Mýa Mýa (Interscope, 1998)

    45. Produced by Darryl Pearson, cohort of DeVante Swing (mentor to Timbaland), and the sound's rubbed off in this fragile orbital torch song. I remember Simon Reynolds, back in the day, describing how midway through the song everything seemed to rotate on its axis. There's loads of great r&b moments that happen to be built on Art Of Noise/ZTT tunes (a list in itself there), and this must surely be among the greatest.

  45. DJ Mitsu The Beats Negative Ion (featuring Ainjoy McWhorter) (SA-RA Remix) (Planetgroove, 2004)

    46. SA-RA at their most deliriously decomposed (think Smokeless Highs and Hangin' By A String), but working with such lush source material that it manages to become a great pop moment in and of itself. Shamefully, I don't know anything about DJ Mitsu The Beats, as I only grabbed this remix EP after hearing it played out on their Dark Matter & Pornography Mixtape.

  46. SA-RA Creative Partners Hollywood (Redux) (Babygrande, 2007)

    47. And the men themselves for the grand finale. I can't overstate how epochal this crew have been in my own musical life, like something on the level of Led Zeppelin. They managed to tie together so many strands of music that I cherish and then took them supernova. This is zero gravity r&b, and a perfect end to this unplanned excursion into deep space music.