MACHINE SOUL: A History Of Techno by Jon Savage

[This article originally appeared in The Village Voice Summer 1993 “Rock & Roll Quarterly” insert.]

Oooh oooh Techno city
Hope you enjoy your stay
Welcome to Techno city
You will never want to go away
–Cybotron, “Techno City” (1984)

“The ’soul’ of the machines has always been a part of our music. Trance always belongs to repetition, and everybody is looking for trance in life… in sex, in the emotional, in pleasure, in anything… so, the machines produce an absolutely perfec t trance.”
–Ralf Hütter , 1991, quoted in Kraftwerk: Man Machine and Music, Pascal Bussy

“It’s like a cry for survival,” a panicked male voice calls out. The beat pauses, but the dancers do not. Then Orbital throw us back into the maelstrom: into a blasting Terry Riley sample, into the relentless machine rhythm, into a total environment of light and sound. We forget about the fact that we’re tired, that the person in front of us is invading our space with his flailing arms. Then, suddenly, we’re there: locked into the trance, the higher energy. It does happen, just like everybody always says: along with thousands of others, we lift off.

The Brixton Academy is a 3500-capacity venue in South London. Built at the turn of the century in the style of a Moorish temple, it may look beautiful but it’s hard to enliven: groups as diverse as the Beastie Boys and Pavement have disappeared into its dark, grimy corners. Tonight, however, it is full of white light and movement: the whole stage is a mass of projections, strobes and dry ice, in front of which a raised dance floor has been put in. Above us is stretched white cloth: at the sides of the building, the alcoves are lit up and flanked by projections of pulsating globules.

The whole scene reminds me of the place I wanted to be when I was 18, the same age as most of this audience: the Avalon Ballroom. Never mind that most of the dancers were born long after the San Francisco scene had passed: they’re busy chasing that everlasting present. The sound is techno but psychedelic references abound: in the light shows, the fashions (everything ranging from beatnik to short-hair to late ’60s long-hair), the T-shirts that read “Feed Your Head” (that climactic line from Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”), the polydrug use that is going on all around us.

This event is called Midi Circus: an ambitious attempt by the London promoters Megadog to make dance music performance work. It’s obvious from the lightness of the atmosphere that time and energy have been spent on the staging. The acts selected –the Orb, Orbital, the Aphex Twin– are the most interesting working in the techno/psych crossover that has moved into areas formerly associated with rock: large public events, raves, festivals. It’s here you will find the millenarian subculture of techno primitives, half in electronic noise, half in earth-centered paganism.

Orbital’s name is taken from the M25 Orbital motorway that circles London; it comes from the period, three years ago, when huge raves were held around the capital’s outer limits. They’ve had a couple of hits, and have just released a fine second LP (due out in the U.S. next month). Tonight, they stand behind their synths wearing helmets with two beams roughly where their eyes would be. When the dry ice and the strobes are in full effect, they look like trolls from Star Wars, or, perhaps more unsettling, coal miners. And then, as machine noise swirls around us, it hits me. This is industrial displacement. Now that England has lost most of its heavy industry, its children are simulating an industrial experience for their entertainment and transcendence.

At first the art of music sought and achieved purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.
–Luigi Russolo: “The Art of Noises” (1913)

Punk rock, new wave, and soul
Pop music, salsa, rock & roll
Calypso, reggae, rhythm and blues
Master mix those number one blues.
–G.L.O.B.E. and Whiz Kid: “Play That Beat Mr. DJ” (1983)

Techno is everywhere in England this year. Beginning as a term applying to a specific form of dance music –the minimal, electronic cuts that Detroiters like Derrick May, Juan Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson were making in the mid ’80s– techno has become a catchall pop buzzword: this year’s grunge. When an unabashed Europop record like 2 Unlimited’s “No Limit” –think Snap, think Black Box– blithely includes a rap that goes “Techno techno techno techno,” you know that you’re living within a major pop phenomenon.
My experience of it has been colored by my recent circumstances: frequent travel, usually by car. Techno is the perfect travelling music, being all about speed: its repetitive rhythms, minimal melodies, and textural modulations are perfect for the constantly shifting perspectives offered by high-speed travel. Alternatively, the fizzing electronic sounds all too accurately reproduce the snap of synapses forced to process a relentless, swelling flood of electronic information. 
If there is one central idea in techno, it is of the harmony between man and machine. As Juan Atkins puts it: “You gotta look at it like, techno is technological. It’s an attitude to making music that sounds futuristic: something that hasn’t been done before.” This idea is commonplace throughout much of avant-garde 20th-century art –early musical examples include Russolo’s 1913 Art of Noises manifesto and ’20s ballets by Erik Satie (”Relâche”) and George Antheil (”Ballet méchanique”). Many of Russolo’s ideas prefigure today’s techno in everything but the available hardware, like the use of nonmusical instruments in his 1914 composition, Awakening of a City.

Postwar pop culture is predicated on technology, and its use in mass production and consumption. Today’s music technology inevitably favors unlimited mass reproduction, which is one of the reasons why the music industry, using the weapon of copyright, is always fighting a rearguard battle against its free availability. Just think of those “Home Taping Is Killing Music” stickers, the restrictive prices placed on every new Playback/Record facility (the twin tape deck, the DAT), the legal battles between samplers and copyright holders.

There are obviously ethical considerations here –it’s easy to understand James Brown’s outrage as his uncredited beats and screams underpin much of today’s black music– but at its best, today’s new digital, or integrated analog and digital, technology c an encourage a free interplay of ideas, a real exchange of information. Most recording studios in the U.S. and Europe will have a sampler and a rack of CDs: a basic electronic library of Kraftwerk, James Brown, Led Zeppelin –today’s Sound Bank.

Rap is where you first heard it –Grandmaster Flash’s 1981 “Wheels of Steel,” which scratched together Queen, Blondie, the Sugarhill Gang, the Furious Five, Sequence, and Spoonie Gee –but what is sampling if not digitized scratching? If rap is more an American phenomenon, techno is where it all comes together in Europe as producers and musicians engage in a dialogue of dazzling speed.

Synthetic electronic sounds
Industrial rhythms all around
Musique nonstop
Techno pop
–Kraftwerk: “Techno Pop” (1986)

Kraftwerk stand at the bridge between the old, European avant-garde and today’s Euro-American pop culture. Like many others of their generation, Florian Schneider and Ralf Hutter were presented with a blank slate in postwar Germany: as Hutter explains, “When we started, it was like shock, silence. Where do we stand? Nothing. We had no father figures, no continuous tradition of entertainment. Through the ’50s and ’60s, everything was Americanized, directed toward consumer behavior. We were part of this 1968 movement, where suddenly there were possibilities, then we started to establish some form of German industrial sound.”

In the late ’60s, there was a concerted attempt to create a distinctively German popular music. Liberated by the influence of Fluxus (LaMonte Young and Tony Conrad were frequent visitors to Germany during this period) and Anglo-American psychedelia, groups like Can and Amon Duul began to sing in German –the first step in countering pop’s Anglo-American centrism. Another element in the mix was particularly European: electronic composers like Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who, like Fluxus, continued Russolo’s fascination with the use of nonmusical instruments.

Classically trained, Hutter and Schneider avoided the excesses of their contemporaries, along with the guitar/bass/drums format. Their early records are full of long, moody electronic pieces, using noise and industrial elements –music being indivisible from everyday sounds. Allied to this was a strong sense of presentation (the group logo for their first three records was a traffic cone) which was part of a general move toward control over every aspect of the music and image-making process: in 1973-74, the group built their own studio in Dusseldorf, Kling Klang.

At the same time, Kraftwerk bought a Moog synthesizer, which enabled them to harness their long electronic pieces to a drum machine. The first fruit of this was “Autobahn,” a 22-minute motorway journey, from the noises of a car starting up to the hum of cooling machinery. In 1975, an edited version of “Autobahn” was a top 10 hit. It wasn’t the first synth hit –that honor belongs to Gershon Kingsley’s hissing “Popcorn,” performed by studio group Hot Butter– but it wasn’t a pure novelty either.

The breakthrough came with 1977’s Trans-Europe Express: again, the concentration on speed, travel, pan-Europeanism. The album’s center is the 13-minute sequence that simulates a rail journey: the click-clack of metal wheels on metal rails, the rise and fade of a whistle as the train passes, the creaking of coach bodies, the final screech of metal on metal as the train stops. If this wasn’t astounding enough, 1978’s Man Machine further developed ideas of an international language, of the synthesis between man and machine.

The influence of these two records –and 1981’s Computer World, with its concentration on emerging computer technology –was immense. In England, a new generation of synth groups emerged from the entrails of punk: Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, the Normal all began as brutalist noise groups, for whom entropy and destruction were as important a part of technology as progress, but all of them were moving toward industrial dance rhythms by 1976-79.

The idea of electronic dance music was in the air from 1977 on. Released as disco 12″ records in the U.S., cuts like “Trans-Europe Express” and “The Robots” coincided with Giorgio Moroder’s electronic productions for Donna Summer, especially “I Feel Love.” This in turn had a huge influence on Patrick Cowley’s late ’70s productions for Sylvester: synth cuts like “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real” and “Stars” were the start of gay disco. Before he died in 1982, Cowley made his own synthetic disco record, the dystopian “Mind Warp.”

More surprisingly, Kraftwerk had an immediate impact on black dance music: as Afrika Bambaataa says in David Toop’s Rap Attack, “I don’t think they even knew how big they were among the black masses back in ‘77 when they came out with ‘Trans-Europe Express.’ When that came out, I thought that was one of the best and weirdest records I ever heard in my life.” In 1981, Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, together with producer Arthur Baker, paid tribute with “Planet Rock,” which used the melody from “Trans-Europe Express” over the rhythm from “Numbers.” In the process they created electro and moved rap out of the Sugarhill age.

The Techno Rebels are, whether they recognize it or not, agents of the Third Wave. They will not vanish but multiply in the years ahead. For they are as much part of the advance to a new stage of civilisation as our missions to Venus, our amazing computers, our biological discoveries, or our explorations of the oceanic depths.
–Alvin Toffler: The Third Wave (1980)

Music is prophecy: its styles and economic organisation are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible.
–Jacques Atalli: Noise (1977)

In the inevitable movement of musical ideas from the avant-garde to pop, from black to white and back again, it’s easy to forget that blacks –who to many people in England must be the repository of qualities like soul and authenticity –are equally as capable, if not more, of being technological and futuristic as whites. A veiled racism is at work here. If you want black concepts and black futurism, you need go no further than the mid-’70s Parliafunkadelicment Thang, with its P-Funk language and extraterrestrial visitations.

Derrick May once described techno as “just like Detroit, a complete mistake. It’s like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator.” “I’ve always been a music lover,” says Juan Atkins. “Everything has a subconscious effect on what I do. In the 1970s I was into Parliament, Funkadelic; as far back as ‘69 they were making records like Maggot Brain, America Eats Its Young. But if you want the reason why that happened in Detroit, you have to look at a DJ called Electrifying Mojo: he had five hours every night, with no format restrictions. It was on his show that I first heard Kraftwerk.”

In 1981, Atkins teamed up with a fellow Washtenaw Community College student, Vietnam veteran Richard Davies, who had decided to simply call himself 3070. “He was very isolated,” Atkins says; “He had one of the first Roland sequencers, a Roland MSK-100. I was around when you had to get a bass player, a guitarist, a drummer to make records: you had all these egos flying around, it was hard to get a consistent thought. I wanted to make electronic music but thought you had to be a computer programmer to do it. I found out it wasn’t as complicated as I thought. Our first record was ‘Alleys of Your Mind.’ It sold about 15,000 locally.”

Atkins and 3070 called themselves Cybotron, a futuristic name in line with the ideas they had taken from science fiction, P-Funk, Kraftwerk, and Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. “We had always been into futurism. We had a whole load of concepts for Cybotron: a whole techno-speak dictionary, an overall idea which we called the Grid. It was like a video game which you entered on different levels.” By 1984-85, they had racked up some of the finest electronic records ever, produced in their home studio in Ypsilanti: tough, otherworldly yet warm cuts like “Clear,” “R-9″, and the song that launched the style, “Techno City.”

Like Kraftwerk, Cybotron celebrated the romance of technology, of the city, of speed, using purely electronic instruments and sounds. One of their last records, “Night Drive,” features a disembodied voice whispering details of rapid, nocturnal transit in an intimate, seductive tone –this set against a background of terminal industrial decay. After the riots of June 1967, Detroit went, as Ze’ev Chafets writes in Devil’s Night, “in one generation from a wealthy white industrial giant to a poverty- stricken black metropolis.” Starved of resources while the wealth remains in rich, white suburbs, the inner city has, largely, been left to rot.

Much has been made of Detroit’s blasted state –and indeed, analogous environments can be found in England, in parts of London, Manchester, Sheffield, which may well account for techno’s popularity there– but Atkins remains optimistic. “You can look at the state of Detroit as a plus,” says Atkins. “All right, you only take 15 minutes to get from one side of the city center to the other, and the main department store is boarded up, but we’re at the forefron here. When the new technology came in, Detroit collapsed as an industrial city, but Detroit is techno city. It’s getting better, it’s coming back around.”

By 1985, 3070 was gone, permanently damaged by Vietnam. Atkins hooked up with fellow Belleville High alumni Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. The three of them began recording together and separately, under various names: Model 500 (Atkins), Reese (Saunderson), Mayday, R-Tyme, and Rhythim is Rhythim (May). All shared an attitude toward making records –using the latest in computer technology without letting machines do everything– and a determination to overcome their environment; like May has said, ” We can do nothing but look forward.”

The trio put out a stream of records in the Detroit area on the Transmat and KMS labels: many of these, like “No UFO’s,” “Strings of Life,” “Rock to the Beat,” and “When He Used To Play,” have the same tempo, about 120 bpm, and feature blank, otherworldly voices –which, paradoxically, communicate intense emotion. These records –now rereleased in Europe on compilations like Retro Techno Detroit Definitive (Network U.K.) or Model 500: Classics (R&S Belgium)– were as good, if not better, as anything coming out of New York or even Chicago, but because of Detroit’s isolation few people in the U.S. heard them at the time. It took English entrepreneurs to give them their correct place in the mainstream of dance culture.

Like many others, Neil Rushton was galvanized by the electronic music coming out of Chicago mid-decade, which was successfully codified in the English market under the trade name “house.” A similar thing happened in Chicago as in Detroit: away from the musical mainstream on both coasts, DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Marshall Jefferson had revived a forgotten musical form, disco, and adapted it to the environment of gay clubs like the Warehouse. The result was a spacey, electronic sound, released on local labels like Trax and DJ International: funkier and more soulful than techno, but futuristic. As soon as it was marketed in the U.K. as house in early 1987, it because a national obsession with No. 1 hits like “Love Can’t Turn Around” and “Jack Your Body.”

House irrevocably turned around English pop music. After the successes of these early records by Steve “Silk” Hurley and Farley “Jackmaster” Funk (with disco diva Darryl Pandy), pop music was dance music, and, more often than not, futuristic black dance music at that. The apparent simplicity of these records coincided with the coming onstream of digital technology whereby, in Atkins’s words, “you have the capability of storing a vast amount of information in a smaller place.” The success of the original house records opened up more trends: acid house –featuring the Roland 303– was followed by Italian house, and later, Belgian New Beat’s slower, more industrial dance rhythms.

“The U.K. likes discovering trends,” Rushton says. “Because of the way that the media works, dance culture happens very quickly. It’s not hard to hype something up.” House slotted right into the mainstream English pop taste for fast, four-on-the-floor black dance music that began with Tamla in the early ’60s (for many English people the first black music they heard). In the ’70s, obscure mid-’60s Detroit area records had been turned into a way of life, a religion even, in the style called “Northern Soul” by dance writer Dave Godin.

“I was always a Northern Soul freak,” says Rushton. “When the first techno records came in, the early Model 500, Reese, and Derrick May material, I wanted to follow up the Detroit connection. I took a flyer and called up Transmat; I got Derrick May and we started to release his records in England. At that time, Derrick was recording on very primitive analog equipment: ‘Nude Photo,’ for instance, was done straight onto cassette, and that was the master. When you’re using that equipment, you must keep the mixes very simple. You can’t overdub, or drop too many things in; that’s why it’s so sparse.

“Derrick came over with a bag of tapes, some of which didn’t have any name: tracks which are now classics, like ‘Sinister’ and ‘Strings of Life.’ Derrick then introduced us to Kevin Saunderson, and we quickly realized that there was a cohesive sound of these records, and that we could do a really good compilation album. We got backing from Virgin Records and flew to Detroit. We met Derrick, Kevin, and Juan and went out to dinner, trying to think of a name.

“At the time, everything was house, house house. We thought of Motor City House Music, that kind of thing, but Derrick, Kevin, and Juan kept on using the word techno. They had it in their heads without articulating it; it was already part of their language.” Rushton’s team returned to England with 12 tracks, which were released on an album called Techno! The New Dance School of Detroit, with a picture of the Detroit waterfront at night. At the time, it seemed like just another hype, but within a couple of months Kevin Saunderson had a huge U.K. hit with Inner City’s pop oriented “Big Fun,” and techno entered the language.

In the future, all pop music will bring everyone a little closer together –gay or straight, black or white, one nation under a groove.
–LFO: “Intro” (1991)

The sheer exponential expansion of dance music in Europe since house is attributable to several factors. First, the sheer quality of the records coming out of the U.S., whether swingbeat, rap, New York garage, house or techno. Secondly acid house –acid being a Chicago term for the wobbly bassline and trancey sounds that started to come in from 1987 on– coincided with the widespread European use of the psychedelic Ecstasy. In Europe, acid house meant psychedelic house, and this drug-derived subculture has become the single largest fashion in England and across the continent; gatherings of up to 5000 people were common after 1988 and have become an important circuit for breaking hits.

Thirdly, the deceptively simple sound of the Detroit and Chicago records, together with the spread of digital technology like the Roland 808 sequencer [sic.], encouraged Europeans to make their own records cheaply, often in their own home studios, from the mid decade. The long delay between Kraftwerk’s 1981 Computer World and 1986 Electric Cafe occurred in part because the group was converting its Kling Klang studio from analog to digital. The result is greater flexibility, more storage space, and more sonic possibilities –vital in an area of music as fast-moving and competitive as the dance economy.

The big English breakthrough came in 1988 with S’Express’s no. 1 hit “Theme From S’Express” –a playful reworking of that old travel motif, with Karen Finley and hairspray samples for percussion. The acid sound development from the Roland 808 explorations of Phuture’s “Acid Tracks” –the sound of buzzing bees discovered by accident from a synthesizer straight out of the shop. Squeezed, bent, oscillated, this buzz became the staple of the 1988-89 acid boom; you can hear an early English version on Baby Ford’s proto-hardcore “Ooochy Koochy Fuck You Baby Yeah Yeah.”

By 1990, the relentless demand for new dance music was such that, in Neil Rushton’s words, “The Detroit innovators couldn’t take it to the next stage. What did was that kids in the U.K. and Europe started learning how to make those techno records. They weren’t as well-made, but they had the same energy. And, by 1990-91, things became more interesting, because instead of three people in Detroit, you suddenly had 23 people making techno, in Belgium, in Sheffield.”

Beltram’s “Energy Flash” released on the Belgian R&S Records in early 1991, defined the new mood. Inherent in the man/machine aesthetic is a certain brutality that goes right back to the macho posturings of the Futurist F.T. Marinetti: even in records as soulful as those made by Model 500, you’ll find titles like “Off to Battle.” With its in-your-face bass, speeded up industrial rhythms and whispered chants of “Ecstasy,” “Energy Flash” caught the transition from Detroit techno to today’s hardcore –the aesthetic laid out for all time on Human Resource’s “Dominator:” “I’m bigger and bolder and rougher and tougher / In other words, sucker, there is no other / I wanna kiss myself.”

“In Belgium we had all the influences,” says R&S label owner Renaat Vandepapeliere. “We had new beat, which was slowed-down industrial music. Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle were very big in Belgium. Detroit techno and acid house came in and everything got mixed up together.” Other Beltram cuts like “Sub-Bass Experience,” with its sensuous psychedelic textures and rock samples, pointed the way forward to other R&S releases like the Aphex Twin’s “Analogue Bubblebath,” which spun techno off into yet another direction.

In England, the techno take-up came not in London or Manchester (which by then was busy with rock/dance groups like the Happy Mondays), but in Sheffield, an industrial city about 200 miles away from London, on the other side of the Pennine Hills from Manchester, which in the late ’70s spawned its own electronic scene with Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League. “There are no live venues here in Sheffield,” says WARP Records co-owner Rob Mitchell. “The only way to be in a band and be successful is to make dance records.

“All these industrial places influence the music that you make. Electronic music is relevant because of the subliminal influence of industrial sounds. You go around Sheffield and it’s full of crap concrete architecture built in the ’60’s; you go down in to an area called the Canyon and you have these massive black factories belching out smoke, banging away. They don’t sound a lot different from the music.” You can hear this in early industrial cuts by Cabaret Voltaire, like 1978’s “The Set Up,” with its deep throbbing pulse.

In 1989, CV’s Richard Kirk was looking for a new way to operate. “Cabaret Voltaire had just finished a period on a major label, EMI, and we weren’t working together. I spent a lot of time going to clubs, and working in the studio with Parrot, a DJ who ran the city’s main club night, Jive Turkey. We made a record, as Sweet Exorcist, called ‘Test One,’ which we made to play in the club. It was very, very minimal. WARP was a shop where everyone bought American imports, and they put it out. We started to move seriously in that direction.”

WARP released “Test One” in mid 1990. By the end of the year they had two top 20 hits with LFO and Tricky Disco, both with eponymous dance cuts. The WARP material is less brutal than the Belgian techno: still using crunch industrial sounds, but more minimal, more playful. And then another change occurred as techno went hardcore in 1991. “I didn’t like the hardcore stuff,” says Mitchell. “It was too simplistic, crude and aggressive. We were getting sent lots of tracks that we couldn’t sell on singles, so we thought, ‘Let’s just do an LP.’ We got the title, Artificial Intelligence, and a concept: ‘Electronic music for the mind created by trans-global electronic innovators who prove music is the one true universal language.’”

The cover of Artificial Intelligence is a computer-generated image: a robot lies back in an armchair, relaxing after a Sapporo and what looks like a joint. On the floor surrounding him are album sleeves: the first WARP compilation, featuring LFO and Sweet Exorcist among others, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. The music inside has slower beats, and is a ways away from the minimal funkiness of Detroit techno; cuts by the Dice Man, the Orb, and Musicology are nothing other than a modern, dance-oriented psychedelia.

Featured on the album was the then 17-year-old Richard James, who, under his most familiar pseudonym Aphex Twin, has become the star of what most people now call ambient techno –although it doesn’t quite have a name yet. Coincidental to the Artificial Intelligence compilation, R&S released the Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, which developed a huge underground reputation at the end of last year. With its minimal, archetypal graphics –a mutated boomerang shape on the sleeve– the Ambient Works album trashed the boundaries between acid, techno, ambient, and psychedelic. It defined a new techno primitive romanticism.

When Richard James was finally found and interviewed, he came up with a story that has already become myth: how the by-now 19-year-old student from Cornwall (a remote part of the U.K.) recorded under a bewildering variety of pseudonyms –the Aphex Twin, Polygon Window, Dice Man, and Caustic Window, to name but a few– how he built his own electronic machines to make the speaker-shredding noises you hear on his records; how he already has 20 albums recorded and ready to go. WARP plans to release his next ambient collection as a triple-CD set with a graphic novel.

The Aphex Twin’s success comes at a moment when, in England and on the continent, one wing of techno is going toward ambience. The slowing pace is partly in response to the still-popular working class fashion of hardcore, which regularly throws up generic chart hits like those by Altern-8 and the Prodigy. At the same time as the drug supply in clubland has changed from Ecstasy to amphetamines, hardcore has gone far beyond the linear brutalities of “The Dominator” into a seamless dystopia of speeded up breakbeats, horror lyrics, and ur-punk vocal chants. Like gangsta rap, it’s scary, and it’s meant to be.

“Ninety per cent of the techno records you hear now are made for a fucked-up dance floor,” says Renaat Vandepapeliere. “That’s what I see now in a lot of clubs: no vibe, no motivation, aggression –the drugs have taken over. The majority don’t understand it yet, but most of the guys who are really good, like Derrick May, don’t take drugs. Techno was a sound but it is now an attitude, and that’s to make records for drug-oriented people. There is another category, where people are making music for you to pay attention with your full mind, and we’re trying to make something now that will last.”

“I believe that the ’70s are parallel for what’s going on in the ’90s,” says WARP’s Rob Mitchell. “Musical moods tend to be a reaction against what has just gone on; we’ve just had a very aggressive period. The original Detroit techno is very sophisticated. What we’re putting out now –Wild Planet, F.U.S.E.– has a similar level of sophistication. The real change for us since we started is the fact that this music is 99 per cent white, but the idea of raising techno to an artier level is really exciting.”

If the ’70s are back, then it’s the early part of the decade: you can see 1970-71 in the long hair and loose clothes of R&S/WARP acts like the Aphex Twin, Source, C.J. Bolland; you can read it in their titles (”Neuromancer,” “Aquadrive,” “Hedphelym”); you can hear the hints of Terry Riley, German romanticists Cluster and Klaus Schulze, even Jean-Michel Jarre. The very idea of boy keyboard wizards goes back to that moment in the early ’70s when Kraftwerk began their electronic experiments, when rock went progressive. Techno has moved into psychedelia with groups like Orbital; now it’s gone prog.

It’s hard to avoid the impression that ambient has come as a godsend to the music industry. The very success of the dance-music economy has thrown up problems, as Rob Mitchell explains: “There is virtually no artist loyalty in dance music; the record is more important than the artist. Dance is incredibly fast moving, which is good, but very difficult to build careers in.” With ambient acts like the Aphex Twin, the music industry has something it recognizes and knows how to promote: the definable white rock artists, as opposed to the anonymous, often black, record. And ambient techno also slots directly into the music industry’s most profitable form of hardware: the CD.

The term ambient was popularized by Brian Eno in the late ’70s. The percussionless, subtle tonalities of records like Music for Airports were perfect for the CD format when it came onstream in the mid ’80s. Ambient techno and its kitsch associate, New Age, are the modern equivalent of the exotic sound experience that developed to fit the technologies of the ’50s. Just as mass distribution of the LP and the home hi-fi gave us film soundtracks and Martin Denny, the CD and the Discman have given us ambient techno.

Ambient could go horribly wrong, but hasn’t yet. A cyberpunk/computer games aesthetic is always patched somewhere into the screen, but is not obtrusive. Inherent in the genre is a lightness of touch, and a rhythmic discipline that comes from its Detroit source. The best material, like Biosphere’s Microgravity and Sandoz’s Digital Lifeforms, also has a holistic spirituality that goes back to the Detroit records. As Sandoz’s Richard Kirk says, “I’ve been making music for a long time. Much of it has been very cold, very aggressive, very stark. It’s time to do something that makes you feel good, that makes you feel warm.”

Recorded by a 27-year-old from Norway, Geir Jennsen (a/k/a Biosphere), Microgravity stands at the apex of ambient. Its nine cuts (sample title: “Cloudwater II”) form a perfectly segued 45-minute whole that balances the utopian/dystopian pull inherent in the machine aesthetic. Their ebb and flow, between fast and slow, between playful and awful, between moon and sun, holds some of the queasy balance within which we live. At the end, a resolution: “Biosphere” merges the sound of technology –the thrum of heavy industry, an electric alarm– into a bass pulse and atmospheric effects, warning but enclosing. The last sound is wind.

There’s something in the air called objectivity.
There’s something in the air like electricity.
There’s something in the air, and it’s in the air, the air.
There’s something in the air that’s pure silliness.
There’s something in the air that you can’t resist.
There’s something in the air, and it’s in the air,
And you can’t get it out of the air.
–Theme song, Schiffer-Spoliansky revue: “Es Liegt in der Luft” (There’s something in the air) (1928)

Techno, how far can you go? “A lot of it was kind of as we planned,” says Juan Atkins, “but nobody knew it would be a global thing as it is now, from little Detroit.” “We have played and been understood in Detroit and Japan,” says Ralf Hutter; “That’s the most fascinating thing that could happen. Electronic music is a kind of world music. It may be a couple of generations yet, but I think that the global village is coming.”

The computer virus is loose. Right now, techno presents itself as a paradox of possibilities (and limitations, the most glaring being gender: where are the women in this boys’ world?). In its many forms, techno shows that within technology there is emotion, that within information access there is overload, that within speed lies entropy, that within progress lies destruction, that within the materiality of inanimate objects can lie spirituality.

These tensions have been programmed into our art and culture since the turn of the century, and it is fitting that at the century’s end, a form has come along which can synthesize the encroaching vortex of the millennium. You can do anything with techno, and people will. As our past, present, and future start to spin before our eyes, and our feet start to slip, the positivism inherent in techno remains a guide: like Juan Atkins says, “I’m very optimistic. This is a very good time to be alive right now.”

See also: Simon Reynold's 'Energy Flash'

In Madrid this Saturday?

(Click on image to enlarge)

ARTISTA :      SACE 2       
INVITADOS :  ELECTRONAUTAS, DOWNROCKS, JANINE, KOA, ...
FECHA :        28 NOVIEMBRE 2009 a las 22:00 CLUB TEMPO(c/ Duque de Osuna 8,Metro Pza.España)

Rolling Stones VS Susan Boyle? I don't think so...

Rolling Stones have re-released their song ‘Wild Horses’ after Susan Boyle’s rendition on The X-Factor was viewed by approximately 15 million viewers last night.
The track, originally featured on the Stones’ 1971 album ‘Sticky Fingers’, has been released as a digital package featuring the aforementioned album version and a live cut taken from their ‘Voodoo Lounge’ Tour in 1995.
‘Wild Horses’ is released today on all major download sites, whilst Boyle’s version appears on her debut ‘I Dreamed A Dream’, which became the most pre-ordered album of all time.

Say "No" to Bono (part...)

"U2 will be headlining Glastonbury for the first time next year, after being rumoured to appear many times in the past. Festival organiser Michael Eavis has said: "At last, the biggest band in the world are going to play the best festival in the world. Nothing could be better for our 40th anniversary party. And there are even more surprises in the pipeline..."

A good enough reason for me to give Glasto a miss next year...

Frida Hyvönen & Jenny Wilson - Shadow Of A Doubt (Live Kobra 2009)

A truly bizarre but brilliant cover of the Sonic Youth song!
Check out the SY video here.

Don Cherry / Krzysztof Penerecki - The New Rythm Orchestra - Actions (1971)

Wow! I had no idea that there was even such an album...featuring Don Cherry, Tomasz Stanko, Albert Mangelsdorff, Peter Brotzman, Han Bennink, Terje Rypdal, Kenny Wheeler, Willem Breuker & Gunter Hampel and if you don't know who they are...well!

@'Zamboni'

...and while you are there, do check out some of the other offerings. This is a really superb blog.

Kitty, Daisy & Lewis show us around

(Thanx Evan)

...moving at the sound of speed!

Trevor Brown's Black Eyed Madonna

Crystal Castles used this artwork without Trevor Brown's authorisation, which you can read about

HERE

Want

Found over at Trevor Brown's blog, this shizukuishi toilet paper.

As deaths in Afghanistan rise, so does the growth of opium

A US Marine secures an opium poppy field in southwest Afghanistan

Attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan are at record levels and threaten to derail efforts to rebuild the war-torn country, while an unholy alliance of Taliban drug dealers and corrupt government officials has made a mockery of coalition forces' attempts to stem the export of heroin.

The findings, from new reports looking at the current situation in Afghanistan, highlight key areas in which, contrary to the assurances of Western military leaders, the war is being lost.

A series of secret Government documents have also laid bare the "appalling" errors that contributed to Britain's failure in Iraq. On the eve of the Chilcot Inquiry into the operation to remove Saddam Hussein, The Sunday Telegraph claimed it had hundreds of pages of documents setting out "significant shortcomings" at all levels of the mission.

The papers are believed to reveal that Tony Blair was planning for an invasion more than a year before it took place, and detail supply problems which left some troops going into action with only five bullets each, while others had to travel to the war-zone on commercial airlines.

In Afghanistan, there were nearly 13,000 attacks between January and the end of August this year – more than two-and-a-half times the number experienced during the same period last year and a fivefold increase on the total in 2005. "The most recent data available, as of August 2009, showed the highest rate of enemy-initiated attacks since Afghanistan's security situation began to deteriorate," according to a new study published by the US Government Accountability Office this month.

The ferocity of the fighting has seen almost 100 British service personnel killed and more than 400 wounded since the start of this year. According to the report, distributed to the US Congress and senior Pentagon officials, security has "deteriorated significantly" since 2005, "affecting all aspects of US and allied reconstruction". A resurgent Taliban, weak Afghan security forces, a thriving drug trade and threats from safe havens in Pakistan are all cited as factors...

@'The Independent'

Irvine Welsh: ‘Let’s tackle Scotland’s cheap bevvy culture’

Trainspotting author backs alcohol minimum pricing

He is not normally associated with moderation, but Scots novelist and provocateur Irvine Welsh ­yesterday intervened in the politically charged debate over how to tackle Scotland’s drink problem.

On the eve of the SNP government’s bill on minimum prices for alcohol, the author of the drug and drink-fuelled excesses of Trainspotting and The Acid House called for an end to the nation’s “cheap bevvy” culture.

Welsh urged politicians to “stand up and be counted” on tackling the problem of alcohol abuse which costs Scotland an estimated £2.25 billion a year in healthcare, crime, the fall-out from social problems and days lost at work.

He also took a swipe at the drinks industry, which is fiercely opposed to minimum prices, as it fears other countries could copy the Scottish example.

Welsh said: “Scotland has a growing problem with alcohol abuse. More people, younger people and more women than ever before, are at risk from being encouraged to over-consume this drug.

“We know that the price and availability of alcohol products have a strong relationship to the amount of alcohol consumed.

“This is a major social issue and needs to be tackled as such by our politicians in a democracy, and this should transcend the concerns of those in the alcohol industry who feel their profitability will be compromised.

“Very few would want to go back to the days when the tobacco industry determined policy on smoking.

“Now politicians should stand up and be counted and move us on to a new era where how much we drink will not be determined by the alcohol industry lobby.”

The statement was issued on Welsh’s behalf by the advocacy group Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems (Shaap), which was set up by the royal medical colleges.

Although Welsh, who now lives in Ireland, did not explicitly mention minimum pricing, his comments were made with the current political debate in mind, a Shaap spokeswoman said...

@'The Herald'

What Earth Would Look Like With Rings Like Saturn

Foton's 'Instant Present' Mix

It´s not a big secret that without dub there would have been - amongst other things - no drum´n´bass, no remix culture and no techno music.
The last years saw the latter returning to production techniques of the first: the heavy usage of reverbs, echoes and phasers alongside four-on-the-floor beats even made a new sub-genre of techno, called dub techno, emerge.
The label pushing this sound the hardest probably is Thinner from Germany:

… select an available release from the extensive Thinner discography and there’s a very high probability that the sounds on that album can be broadly described as “dub-inspired” i.e. some permutation of a fusion of dub with house, techno, or even ambient music. it’s also quite possible that the album could be further redefined as belonging to the sound departments of either “dubby techhouse“ or “intelligent dub” …

One of Thinner´s artists is Das Kraftfuttermischwerk. Recently, they posted a link to a dope mix from Foton

01. Basic Channel – Round Four
02. Chet – Urban Dharma
03. Maurizio – M5
04. Quantec – Hidden Persuasion
05. Basic Channel – Round Three w/ Paul st Hilaire
06. Fluxion – Inductance
07. Deadbeat – Abu Ghraib
08. Jorge Gebauhr – Strange Fruits
09. Mildiou – De Natura Rerum
10. Substance – Relish Shed remix
11. Marko Fuerstenberg – Far Out
12. Lowtec Sound System – Stella Polaris
13. Marko Fuerstenberg– Site 312
14. Basic Channel – Phylysptrakit
15. Luke Hess
16. Cv313 – Dimensional Space

Download Foton´s “Instant Present” mix
@'Seen'

???

ORNAMENTS SYMPHONY mixed by youANDme

ORNAMENTS SYMPHONY
mixed by youANDme
This CD contains all songs of ORNAMENTS 001 - ORNAMENTS 010.
Limited to 333.

PLAYLIST:

01. Intro - Peak: Darksuite (youANDme Remix) / ORN008
02. Peak: Darksuite / ORN008
03. Dubsuite: "Eigenleben" (Marko Fürstenberg's Eigendub) / ORN001
04. Sven Tasnadi: "Our Destiny" (Weisemann's Shuffle On Mix) remix by Sven Weisemann / ORN005
05. Sven Tasnadi: "Our Destiny" / ORN005
06. Thabo: "Downstream" / ORN006
07. Martin Schulte: "Cold Heart" (Marko Fürstenberg Remix) / ORN001
08. Rhauder feat. Paul St. Hilaire: "No News" (Marko Fürstenberg Remix) / ORN009
09. Rhauder feat. Paul St. Hilaire: "No News" (Daniel Stefanik Remix) / ORN009
10. Rhauder feat. Paul St. Hilaire: "No News" / ORN009
11. Thabo: "Berlin" / ORN006
12. Mod.Civil: "Einfachheit gewinnt" / ORN004
13. Mod.Civil: "Einfachheit gewinnt" (Marko Fürstenberg Remix) / ORN004
14. Frank Biedermann: "Warrior_wasp" (Marko Fürstenberg Remix) / ORN001
15. I-Robots: "Perfect Logic Circle" (G.Digger Edit) / ORN002
16. I-Robots: "Perfect Logic Circle" (Club Edit) / ORN002
17. youANDme:  "Close to me" (Robert Hood Remix) / ORN010
18. Marko Fürstenberg: "Valentino" / ORN007
19. Peak: "Darksuite" (Soultourist Remix) / ORN008
20. Peak: "Darksuite" (youANDme Remix) / ORN008
21. Marko Fürstenberg: "Tiffany's Case" / ORN007
22. youANDme: "Close to me" / ORN010
23. Sascha Dive: “Deepest America” (Samuel Davis Dark Soul Mix) / ORN003
24. Sascha Dive: “Deepest America” (Moodymann Remix) / ORN003

Lou Reed: Photographer

 A walk on the wild side: Reed captures his wife, the performance artist Laurie Anderson, in the only image in 'Romanticism' featuring a human figure

 Lou Reed may be a rock legend, the founding member of the Velvet Underground, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a man so cool that fans keel over in the reflection of his mirrored shades. Yet he has an alter ego, a solitary figure, a man who retreats quietly into nature to observe the light and make elegant, romantic photographs, far removed from his life at the heart of New York City. The process could not be more different but there are parallels between his music and his photographs. Putting together a book of photographs is, says Reed, like sequencing a CD. It is intuitive, an indefinable way of working where things happen not through planning and preordained ideas, but because they feel right. He approaches photography with the qualities of a musician. "The response is emotional. That's all I want; they are taken with emotion and put together with emotion, equal emotion," he says.

Romanticism is Reed's third book of photographs. It is a series of landscapes, entirely in black and white. Inspiration for the title came from the 19th-century Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich. "We had lined up the photographs we liked and I was shown a painting, by him. I said that's it, that's Romanticism. That's not to say that I think I am him, but it was the impetus for the idea."

As in Friedrich's painting, there is an ethereal quality to Reed's work, a sense of the divine in nature. The light in Reed's photographs has a silvery tone, which creates a sense of fantasy. They do not seem to be of this world. "They are very three-dimensional images. I have them up on my wall. The silvery translucent quality, that makes me crazy. I really love it," he says.

Rarely is there a human mark on the scene; for the most part, his photographs are of nature untouched: woods leading down to the edge of the sea, a layer of thick mist covering the earth. The branches of a tree are abundant with fruit, another tree is dead; the trunk splinters as it disintegrates. "I have never seen a tree that is not graceful," he says.

Only one photograph, towards the end of the book, shows a human form. It is an androgynous grey figure, with short hair, facing away from the camera and outlined with light. Light ripples across the top of the scene, suggesting water, and the rest is a mass of grey. The figure is Reed's wife, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson. They married last year and the only line of text in the book is dedicated to her: "These are pictures from around the world dedicated to my love & passion for my wife, Laurie Anderson."

Reed will only give laconic explanations for his photographs. There is a single photograph of boats in the book; it is a striking anomaly. Why is it in the collection? "The boats. They were there because they were there. It doesn't matter. It's all the same. It was just the light and the moment. The light was perfect. There happened to be boats there; I wished they weren't there."

He won't give specific information about where or when the photographs were made. The book is purely images, no text, all of which were made over the last two years and in many different places: Scotland, Denmark, Spain, Rome, China. No image has a title or any kind of reference point. It is a brave decision that not every photographer would get away with – but, then, it is Lou Reed: a god can ignore the needs of mortals. And he has his reasons. "There's nothing to say. A picture is worth a thousand words, to quote a cliché. What am I meant to say: 'There's a tree in a storm in January'? The response is emotional. That's all I want."

Reed has been taking photographs since the 1960s, when he and Andy Warhol were close and Reed was performing with the Velvet Underground. He developed his photographic style and learnt by watching those around him. Over the years, he has been influenced by some of the most creative talents around, people he knew and used to hang out with.

"I like to reinvent the wheel. I like to discover something for myself as opposed to being told it. Wim Wenders, there's something he showed me that I found useful. Billy Linich, he also called himself Billy Name, was at Warhol's factory, his pictures were very high contrast. And there were things that Andy Warhol would do. And Larry Clark, I still remember when I first saw "Tulsa"," he says.

Outside of music, there is something of the gifted amateur about Reed and it's an endearing quality. He has not forgotten his roots and the people he knew as a child. He recently made a film about his cousin Shirley who is 100 years old. She lives in New York City, in the West 20s, where she has been for the past 70 years.

He explains: "She is a remarkable person. I wanted to talk to her on camera, about things that only she could know: what it was like being in Poland through World War One and World War Two, being smuggled out of Canada, or working as a seamstress in the union. What she had to say is remarkable. I made the soundtrack for it with my band, Metal Machine Trio." It's an interesting contrast – his centenarian cousin Shirley and Metal Machine Trio and it's a shame that he has yet to find a place to show it.

Last year, he was guest designer for the Winter 2008/2009 issue of All-Story, a literary magazine founded by Francis Ford Coppola. Contributors have included Rachel Cusk and Woody Allen, while Zaha Hadid and Guillermo del Toro have also designed an issue. For the cover, Reed used one of his landscape photographs, in colour. It is an image that he was unable to use in his book and it is utterly romantic: pale gold light falls across a summer woodland scene. The light has a particular quality that he captures using a technique which involves hacking up the camera, although he doesn't explain precisely how this is done.

"It is instinct tempered with technique. I have been photographing a long time. All my life, I was scouring around with it, playing with it. All my life I had wished for something; it turned out to be digital. That finally came out. I could take the picture 100 times. I got it with the light the right way, not just one or two shots. I loved it. I am not using photoshop. Everything is in the camera and that's because it's digital," he says.

He denies it, but Reed is a camera geek. He can quote camera names and models with an intimate knowledge: "I have a Leica medium format – just the body cost $24,000. I have been waiting around for the M9. I love this camera. I love it that they are digital. I love the Alpa, they're quite the little company, you should check out their website. I use it with a Schneider lens. And the medium format Hasselblad, and they went into Fuji lenses. Why are some lenses so much better than others? What is it about the way they polish glass?" It's difficult to get him off the subject. "I'm not an obsessive," he says. "It's just like guitars."

@'The Independent'

(Thanx Don)

HA! (Bondi Beach 14th November 09)

Free The Forgotten Bird of Paradise by John Pilger

After much sacrifice and showing strong resilience, East Timor became independent in 2002. The people of West Papua deserve nothing less. As veteran foreign affairs commentator and filmmaker John Pilger points out, on December 1, which West Papuans call their independence day, those exiled in Britain and their supporters will break the silence outside the Indonesian embassy in London.

When General Suharto, the west’s man, seized power in Indonesia in the mid-1960s, he offered “a gleam of light in Asia”, rejoiced Time magazine. That he had killed up to a million “communists” was of no account in the acquisition of what Richard Nixon called “the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in South-east Asia”.

In November 1967, the booty was handed out at an extraordinary conference in a lakeside hotel in Geneva. The participants included the most powerful capitalists in the world, the likes of David Rockefeller, and senior executives of the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, British American Tobacco, Imperial Chemical Industries, American Express, Siemens, Goodyear, US Steel.

The president of Time Incorporated, James Linen, opened the proceedings with this prophetic description of globalisation: “We are trying to create a new climate in which private enterprise and developing countries work together for the greater profit of the free world. The world of international enterprise is more than governments… It is a seamless web, which has been shaping the global environment at revolutionary speed.”

Suharto had sent a team of mostly US-groomed economists, known as the “Berkeley Boys”. On the first day, salutations were exchanged. On the second day, the Indonesian economy was carved up. This was done in a spectacular way: industry in one room, forests and fisheries in another, banking and finance in another. The ultimate prize was the mineral wealth of West Papua, almost half of a vast and remote island to the north of Australia. A US and European consortium was “awarded” the nickel and gold. The Freeport company of New Orleans got a mountain of copper. Forty-two years later, the gold and copper make more than a million dollars profit every day.

For the Indonesian elite, enrichment was assured. From 1992 to 2004, Freeport provided US$33 billion in direct and indirect “benefits”, much of it finding its way to the Indonesian military, the real power in the land, which “protects” foreign investments in the manner of a mafia. The reward for the people of West Papua has been a rate of impoverishment double that of the rest of Indonesia, says a World Bank report.

At Bintuni Bay, where BP is exploiting natural gas, 56 per cent of the people live in abject poverty. “More than 90 per cent of villages in Papua do not have basic health facilities,” the report noted. In 2005, famine swept the district of Yahukimo, where virgin forests and gas deposits deliver unerring profit. The suffering of West Papuans is seldom reported; the Indonesian government bans foreign journalists and human rights organisations such as Amnesty from the hauntingly beautiful territory known by its indigenous people as “the forgotten bird of paradise”.

The president of Time Incorporated, James Linen, opened the proceedings with this prophetic description of globalisation: “We are trying to create a new climate in which private enterprise and developing countries work together for the greater profit of the free world. The world of international enterprise is more than governments… It is a seamless web, which has been shaping the global environment at revolutionary speed.”

 When the carve-up of its natural wealth took place, West Papua was not part of but merely claimed by Indonesia, whose former colonial masters, the Dutch, recognised no historical or cultural ties to Jakarta and began to prepare the territory for independence. The Indonesians were having none of it; neither were the Americans, the British and the Australians, who invented a cold-war tale that the Russians were coming. In 1962, the Dutch handed the colony to the United Nations, which promptly gave it “on trust” to Indonesia on condition that the West Papuans would vote on their future.

In 1969, an “Act of Free Choice” took place. The Indonesians hand-picked 1,026 West Papuan men and ordered them to vote for integration with Jakarta. Guns were pointed at heads, literally. When two West Papuans escaped in a light aircraft, hoping to reach New York and alert the UN general assembly, they were detained by the Australian government after landing at nearby Manus Island, which Australia administered. West Papuan villages wanting a genuine “act of free choice” were strafed and bombed by Indonesia’s US-equipped air force.

West Papua would have slipped into oblivion had it not been for a resistance, the OPM, or Free Papua Movement, whose endurance has defied almost impossible odds. The Indonesians have been unsparing in their oppression, aided by British-made machine guns and Tactica water cannon vehicles. When Suharto was deposed in 1998, the people on the island of Biak celebrated by singing hymns of thanksgiving and raising West Papua’s Morning Star flag. For this, 150 of them were murdered by the Indonesian military.

In 2004, Filep Karma and Yusak Pakage were sentenced to 15 and ten years respectively for raising the flag, an immeasurable act of bravery in a country effectively controlled by a Gestapo-style force known as Kopassus, which conducted the genocide in East Timor. According to a study by Yale University, the destruction of West Papuan society is also genocide.

The post-Suharto regime in Jakarta likes to regard itself as a respectable democracy and is vulnerable to pressure on West Papua. In Britain, the mining giant Rio Tinto, formerly a shareholder in Freeport, retains a joint-venture interest that has earned fortunes for the company. On the rare occasions that the British Foreign Office is challenged about the behaviour of Jakarta in West Papua, officials drone about “respecting the territorial integrity of Indonesia”, echoing decades of Foreign Office mendacious apologies for the slaughter in East Timor. The US State Department’s response is the same.

And yet East Timor slipped Suharto’s leash and is now free, thanks to the resilience of its people and an international network. The people of West Papua deserve nothing less. On December 1, which West Papuans call their independence day, those exiled in Britain and their supporters will break the silence outside the Indonesian embassy in London.

@'JohnPilger.com'

Smoking # 38

Sasha Grey
Got a feeling that I am repeating myself here but bugger it...

Spiritualized - Ladies & Gentlemen... preorder available now through ATP Records

Label: ATP Recordings
Cat No: ATPRCD36
Format:  Collectors Edition CD Box set

Pre Sale Date: Monday 23rd November 2009

Release Date: Wednesday 16th December 2009

Label: ATP Recordings / Spaceman

Catalogue No: ATPRCD36

Format: Collectors Box Set / Strictly Limited Edition of 1000

Boxset Contains:
 . 12 x 3” Prescription Pack CD’s packaged in a foil tray
 . 2 x 5” CD’s containing 35 unreleased versions & outtakes
 . Digital Download Code for the original album
 . Individual Prescription Cards signed by J.Spaceman
 . Strictly Limited Edition of 1000
 . Brand New Artwork by the original designers Farrow & Spaceman

ATP Recordings / Spaceman are pleased to be able to offer the very limited collectors edition. This includes 12 x 3” Mini CD’s of the complete album track-by-track, a homage to the original release. This will be accompanied by 2 bonus discs.

For those who don’t wish to open the blister pack, each unit will come with a code to download the original album in MP3 format._

Limited to just 1000 units, each collectors edition will come with a prescription numbered out of 1000 and signed by J Spaceman.

Anyone who pre-orders the collectors edition before November 30th can have their own name, or name of their choosing printed on the prescription.

The Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space Collectors edition, will be sent out from the UK on December 16th. If you do not wish to pay postage and handling, there will be an option to pick it up from the Barbican shows on December 16th or 17th.

Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space Collectors edition is available for £125 + postage and handling.

AVAILABLE FROM 3PM GMT MONDAY NOVEMBER 23RD AT

www.lagwafis.com

I still have the blister pack of the original album but cannot afford $250 for this...

...but I look resplendant in the new 'T' shirt that came in a blister pack too LOL!

Can with Tim Hardin - Rare Rehearsal & Live Improvisation (1975)

A little known fact is that after Damo Suzuki left Can, there were a number of other vocalists who rehearsed and played live with them before they added Rosko Gee and Reebop to the core line up of Irmin Schmidt, Michael Karoli, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit. These included Thaiaga Raj Raja Ratnam from Indonesia and the Japanese vocalist Phew.

Tim Hardin was another singer who joined their ranks for a while at the tail end of 1975.

A couple of recordings survive from their time together. There is a rehearsal (the exact date of which is unknown) and a live improvised track from a gig at the Hatfield Polytechnic on the 21st of November 1975.

It may seem a strange combination but it sort of works...though I cannot imagine Can playing 'If I Were A Carpenter' as an encore!

UPDATED 2/16 with extra material HERE

Cranky croc finds new home in Texas

It has taken several planes, a crane and good dose of valium, but a giant Northern Territory crocodile named Errol has made it all the way to Texas Zoo. At 4.7 metres, 50-year-old Errol is so long that he could not fit into a crate that would meet airline requirements. He did not take kindly to being moved out of the pen at the Darwin Crocodile Farm where he has spent the past 28 years. But with the help of some sedatives, Errol was put in a specially built box with his tail wrapped round to make sure he fit within airline cargo limits. His owner Adam Britton told ABC TV's Stateline that once in the US, the croc had to be flown in a cargo plane. "The pilot said to us 'if you want to go and check on Errol, that's fine, but you probably need to take that oxygen cylinder with you because after about five minutes you'll start feeling really faint and you might collapse'," he said. "So we thought, 'nah I think he'll be fine, he'll be good'. And in reality, he was good." He says the trip went like a dream. "We were treated like royalty and so was the crocodile," he said. He says Errol's new enclosure at a Texas Zoo has specially heated water, which the croc shows every sign of liking.

Dr Britton says Errol should draw lots of visitors because he will be the largest saltwater crocodile in North America."He's got a pretty cushy life here now. He's got nice heated water. They're going to train him and so they're going to interact with him a lot more than he was down at the crocodile farm," he said."He's going to be on full view to all the visitors at the zoo and he's going to be the ambassador for saltwater crocodiles for the Northern Territory."Fort Worth Zoo spokeswoman Dianne Barber says they will to continue to call the croc Errol until he settles in.
@'ABC'
(Thanx Reinhard!)

Faust and 'Krautrock' by Andy Gill (Mojo)

WE CAN BE HEROES

Andy Gill (Mojo Magazine)

Born into Germany's economic miracle but cultural wasteland, World War II's children set about alchemising the 60's revolutionary spirit into sound and vision. Wildly radical then, highly influential now, Krautrock is back. Andy Gill recalls some of the most outlandish, other-worldly music in rock history, and meets the legends who made it.

It's sometime in the bleak widwinter of 1973-4, and Faust are playing Sheffield City Hall. The occasion is one those early Virgin Records package tours which attempted to revive the collective spirit of the Motown and Beat-boom era revues within the context of that label's sternly uncompromising -- some would say largely unlistenable -- roster of avant-garde art-rock acts. Gong may have played, or perhaps Henry Cow or Hatfield & The North, and there may have been a film of label whizzkid Mike Oldfield performing his celebrated Tubular Bells at somewhere like the Albert Hall; it's hard to be precise, recollections growing mercifully more cloudy with the passing years.

Faust, though, remain clear in my mind to this day -- quite an achievement, since they played in near-total darkness, save for the illumination furnished by a couple of TV sets facing the band, and a pinball table positioned off to one side. In front of the TV sets are a couple of comfy, overstuffed armchairs, and behind them a drum kit. A block of concrete is dimly visible centre-stage.

Like virtually every other British 'head' of unquenchable curiosity but limited means, I'd recently invested in the copper-bottomed uncertainties of The Faust Tapes, 49 penn'orth of musical madness decked out in the deceptively calming waves of Bridget Riley's op-art painting Crest, and I was prepared for -- well, just about anything, really. Even so, I got more than I bargained for.

Through the gloom, it's possible to make out a few reassuringly hairy figures lounging comfortably in the armchairs, cradling bass and guitars. A single-minded drummer appears, and sets up a rhythm of spare, minimalist efficiency. The loungers strike up a chord and plod along earnestly for awhile. And then some. There is none of the decorative embellishment or flashy musicianship of the most 'progressive' rock of the time: this is pure riff, and nothing but, as focused as anything by James Brown, if not as danceable. How could it be, without a second chord to play against? It's like a perpetual set-up with no pay-off.

Five or 10 minutes into the piece, one of the musicians puts aside his instrument, levers himself out of the armchair, and sidles over to the pinball machine where he plays awhile, the bleeps and sproings of the leisure machine offering welcome detail over the riff which churns on, unstoppable, like a golem. His game over, he turns his attention to one of the TV's, changing channels randomly. Then, bored with that, he moves over to the concrete block, picking up something which had until then been hidden behind it. It's a tool of some form, either a hydraulic drill or, more likely, an electric-powered Kango hammer, which, without more ado, he sets to work on the block.

The noise is deafening -- and dangerous, with fragments of concrete spitting out into the front rows of the audience, who shield their eyes behind their arms. But the shock is utterly exhilarating, prompting the same thrill of modernist liberation that early 20th century audiences must have experienced at Dada or Surrealist exhibitions, or at the performances of Futurist Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori noise machine, or Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring -- the feeling that some Rubicon has been irrevocably crossed, that taboo boundaries have been sundered. Jaws drop all around the hall. Even those who had been getting restless about the relentlessly static music are won over, gleeful smiles creasing faces at this majestic bout of art-terrorism. If they could be heard over the din, they'd be cheering.

Like all great aesthetic transgressions, it also draws the requisite outraged reaction, but from an unforeseen source. Suddenly, the drill is silenced, along with the TV's, the pinball machine, and the electric instruments. The stage power has been cut. The hall lights, conversely, fade up. Bemused, the musicians grin at each other as a neatly-dressed man -- the hall manager, or someone in suchlike authority -- strides to the front and addresses the audience.

"That's quite enough of this!" he shouts at us. "This is not music!" It's the perfect complement to the performance -- so perfect that, for a moment, I suspect it's part of the act. It isn't, of course. It's some sad Horatio, left to vainly guard the bridge of musical politeness against these barbarian hordes. Or, more prosaically, trying to save the polished wood of his stage from getting scratched to buggery by the shifting concrete block.

It's an unequal contest. Immediately, even those who had been bored by Faust's performance are seething with indignation at this suit's attempt to control their taste. Boos resound around the hall, and a slow handclap sets up. The suit departs, but the power stays off. One of the musicians comes to the front of the stage and says, sans microphone: "Hey, it's your gig. Are you gonna let this guy tell you what you can listen to?" The clapping gets louder, and the drummer takes up the beat again, while his colleagues bang along on whatever comes to hand. It's no more complex a rhythm than before, but it's a great deal louder, and there's a euphoric, collective spirit to it that wasn't present earlier. The fourth wall of performance has been shattered, and nobody who was present will forget it, or listen to music in the same way again. Who would have thought that one chord and the simplest of beats could be a life-changing experience? And what more could you want from a gig?

In the foyer, the city's avant-rock cognoscenti mingle earnestly during the intermission. Veteran improvisors AMM have just played a typically detailed, engrossing set, and hypothetical goatees are being figuratively stroked in contemplation of their work. It's a mixed crowd, though, not entirely composed of bedsit intellectuals. Over by the windows, a group of what appear to be filthy European bikers are laughing loudly and drunkenly. There are quite a few professiorial types d'un certain age, counterbalanced by a substantial complement of young, crusty hippy types. A curious Jarvis Cocker wanders around, making the most of a relative anonymity that will, within a matter of weeks, be but a distant memory.

There's a strange air of expectant, barely-suppressed violence quite at odds with the open-minded atmosphere of the Sheffield show two decades before. It's not like the audience doesn't know what to expect; on the contrary, for some in the audience, their expectations are every bit as pre-formed and rigidly demanding, in their own way, as those inflicted upon teen acts like Boyzone: if bourgeois conventions aren't given a damn good kicking tonight, well, they'll have something to say about it. No matter that such knee-jerk expectations are in themselves just as comfortable and bourgeois as those of more conservative types: in the '90s, even revolution has its own formal style.

A large curtain of scrim hides half the stage. In front of it, two men stand motionless, one a barefoot bassist, the other a balding drummer standing, Mo Tucker-style, behind a drum kit which, in the intervening 20 years, has shrunk to just one snare, one tom-tom and one cymbal. Behind the scrim, backlit so his shadow looms hugely, is Tony Conrad, the minimalist-violinist with whom Faust once recorded an album entitled Outside The Dream Syndicate. A cellist and another violinist sit alongside him, also motionless. Conrad plays a chord, then keeps on playing it, a piercing, mesmeric drone of immense, ear-endangering volume. Some time later -- about 10 minutes into the performance -- the other string players join in with similarly minimal intent, setting up a static harmonic drone which continues for another 10 or 15 minutes before the bassist and drummer suddenly launch into the kind of riff which Status Quo might have discarded as being too basic. The drummer bangs each drum alternately at regular tempo, looking for all the world as if he's jogging on the spot; the barefoot bassist, meanwhile, pummels his instrument with such single-minded fury that, shortly after he begins, one of the thick, well-wound strings has snapped. Have you ever tried to snap a bass string? It's not easy. Usually, you need pliers, but there are no tools available on-stage tonight.

The performance continues, with no discernible subsequent change, for another half-hour. But this time, no hall manager turns off the power or leaps on-stage to berate the audience's musical taste -- and the self-satisfied applause (not to mention a certain relief) which greets the piece's conclusion stands in stark, smug contrast to the sense of exhilaration felt two decades earlier. For an encore, the barefoot bassist gives the floor a desultory thump with a nearby hammer, almost like an abbreviated gestural signature, before the ensemble wade into another 10-minute piece. No-one, save maybe a few of the old-dear ushers, has been outraged, and it's my guess that no-one has been liberated, either. We all got exactly what we expected.

FAUST WERE, BY COMMON CONSENT, THE MOST EXTREME OF THOSE German bands of the early '70s that came to be regarded under the collective rubric of Krautrock -- a patronising British term (pointedly satirised in the track of that title on Faust IV) covering a multitude of disparate musical approaches spanning the entire spectrum of composition and improvisation.

At one end, Faust would be deconstructing the nuts, bolts and griders of rock music through relentlessly monotonous pieces like 'It's A Rainy Day Sunshine Girl', and laying the groundwork for today's sampler-collagists through the intricate cut-ups and splices of their astonishing debut, Faust Clear, which, as its name suggests, was released on clear vinyl in a clear plastic sleeve imprinted with an X-ray of a hand and sleevenotes in German by producer Uwe Nettelbeck. (The follow-up Faust So Far would be in contrastingly sombre none-more-black, packaged with a set of tasteful prints illustrating each of the song titles.) At the other end, Kraftwerk would labour over exquisite melodies and metronomically precise rhythms, taking the concept of machine-music to its logical conclusion, and ironically, providing the groundwork for the future development of black American music.

In between, all manner of musical endeavour was encouraged, from the trance-scapes of Tangerine Dream and the space-rock of Amon Düül II to the psychedelic proto-punk grooves of Neu! and the Eastern-tinged mysticism of Popol Vuh. What's extraordinary about virtually all these bands -- apart from the music itself, which was rarely less than that -- is that despite severely limited commercial returns, their influence was so wide-reaching that most are still working today; or if, like Can, they're no longer together as a band, the various members are still engaged on projects every bit as bonkers. Most Anglo-American bands of equivalent age and popularity, by contrast, have long since succumbed to the reaper, or totter as sad parodies of their former selves.

The difference is cultural, of course. For British and American bands, the hippy era represented mainly freedom from the utilitarian chains which post-war redevelopment had placed upon their parents. The '50s, the era of Ike and Mac, had been a time of parsimony perpetually passed off as a great bounty -- "You've never had it so good! -- and by the allegedly Swinging '60s the younger generation was determined that its surroundings and activities should reflect that supposed bounty. Despite the undercurrents of political unrest, the gaiety of the hippy era was primarily, for Brits and Yanks, a guilt-free indulgence in the wealth of new possibilities.

While German youth of the same era shared similar hopes and desires, there were other, much darker influences at work on their world view. As Can's Irmin Schmidt explains, "All the young revolutionaries of 1968 had parents who were either Nazis or had suffered under the Nazis, and the relationship of the parents to the Nazis, and of their children to them, was a special German thing, and had a big influence on the '68 troubles. And for 20 years, we had got rid of culture. It wasn't just towns that were bombed, culture was bombed too, and you can't rebuild culture."

Consequently, the iconoclasm of the times cut that much deeper with these German bands, and provided them with a more enduring cast of mind. When Faust took up their road-drills and attacked concrete blocks on-stage, it was with the same order of symbolic destruction that would fire the original punks a few years later: tear down the walls, cut out the cancer. Except that in their case, the cancer in question was more than just a vague feeling of generalised boredom or, as the Germans have it, Weltschmerz. And as with German performance artists of the '60s -- such as Otto Muehl, who would climb inside freshly-slaughtered animal carcasses, or the self-mutilator Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who eventually bled to death after severing his own penis (ExileEd - This is not true - see here) German musicians of the period applied fearsome standards to their work: it wasn't just a brief diversion, it was a whole-hearted attempt to find a new route to the future, by exorcising the past.

In doing so, they rediscovered their own national identity. As Kraftwerk's Ralf Hutter explained to Lester Bangs in 1975, "After the war, German entertainment was destroyed. The German people were robbed of their culture, putting an American head on it. I think we are the first generation born after the war to shake this off, and know where to feel American music and where to feel ourselves. We cannot deny we are from Germany."

TO THE BRITISH AUDIENCE STUMBLING UPON KRAUTROCK ALBUMS, they were like the proverbial mystery surrounded by an enigma.

The minimal cover designs of early Faust, Neu! and Kraftwerk albums promised something completely self-contained compared to the psychedelic fantasies of Roger Dean which dominated the home market's 'progressive' iconography. The brave mix of art, noise and strange beauty present in most Krautrock was also somewhat at odds with the lumbering traditionalism of Yes, Genesis and ELP, whose work always seemed to be apologising for not being classical music.

Just as revolutionary was the discomfiting blend of deep seriousness and mad humour that most Krautrock bands displayed as they pirouetted at the interface of new technology and new consciousness -- who else but a Krautrocker would dare pass off the same piece of music at different speeds as separate tracks, as Neu! did on their second album? Not least among Krautrock's attractions was the thrilling notion that somebody had entrusted all this expensive new machinery to such obvious headcases.

Aficionados sought out anything recorded at Conny Plank's legendary studio, where many of the great Krautrock epics were recorded. Meanwhile, alerted by the strange, exotic soundtracks to Werner Herzog's idiosyncratic films, the curious unearthed the mystical, mantra-like music of Florian Fricke's Popol Vuh, the most overtly religious of the Krautrock groups (Fricke himself appeared in some of the films, most notably as the deaf pianist in The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser). Others were more extreme in their interest: David Bowie, ever the intrepid explorer, went the whole hog and actually moved to Berlin, where he and Brian Eno would fashion two of pop's great leaps forward (Low and Heroes under the influence of Krautrock).

"I was a big fan of Kraftwerk, Cluster and Harmonia, and I thought the first Neu! album, in particular, was just gigantically wonderful," admits Bowie. "Looking at that against punk, I had absolutely no doubts where the future of music was going, and for me it was coming out Germany at that time. I also liked some of the later Can things, and there was an album that I loved by Edgar Froese, Epsilon In Malaysian Pale; it's the most beautiful, enchanting, poignant work, quite lovely. That used to be the background music to my life when I was living in Berlin. In a way, it was great that I found those bands, because I didn't feel any of the essence of punk at all in that period, I just totally by-passed it."

Bands proliferated in the wake of the pioneers featured here. Names like Guru Guru, Ash Ra Temple, Between, Agitation Free, Cosmic Jokers, Embryo, Wallenstein, Brainticket, Triumvirat, Novalis, Ramses, Kraan, Jane, Hoelderlin, Grobschnitt, Floh De Cologne and Achim Reichel fought for space in the limited Krautrock market. Meanwhile, older bands like Neu! split into their separate elements, adding names like La Düsseldorf and Harmonia to the fray. Before too long, the Krautrock section of the record racks was bulging with synth-twiddling weirdos and space-rock cadets, many of whom seemed to have little grasp of quality control. People like Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler released vast quantities of electronica, while the borders between true Krautrock and the more mundane German heavy rock bands started to blur as the '70s wore on.

Eventually, interest inevitably waned in the genre as a whole, save for the occasional boost such as that given when Johnny Rotten owned up to liking Can, or the ripple effect caused by Kraftwerk's hit singles. Through the '80's and '90's, the Krautrock light was kept aflame by such as the Freeman brothers, Steven and Alan, via their Audion magazine and Ultima Thule record shop; and, more recently, Julian Cope published his Krautrocksampler guide to the genre, re-igniting wider interest in the form.

As for the bands themselves, there are fresh stirrings from various quarters: Popol Vuh last year released City Raga, Florian Fricke's attempt to come to terms with current technology and musical style, and Amon Düül II have likewise put out Nada Moonshine and hauled themselves back into live performance. Tangerine Dream have never cut back on their recording schedule, augmenting their own releases with a constant stream of soundtrack work. And Kraftwerk... well, Kraftwerk proceed at their own pace, with scant regard for fashion.

IT'S DECEMBER 2, 1996, AND Faust are playing The Garage, at London's Highbury Corner.

On-stage there is a vast array of percussion -- metal pipes, tin things, drums, cymbals -- alongside an adapted keyboard with wires bristling from its back and sundry boxes piled on top of it. A cement mixer grinds out a rhythm, while the bassist hammers away at a minimal beat. Out front, an enormous oil-drum on wheels stands ready to be pummelled, while fenced off for our protection, a sculptress grinds away at a metal construction, sending showers of sparks across audience and band alike.

At one point, the bassist tears off his clothes, jumps into the audience and makes his way to the side, where he starts flinging paint at hundreds of album sleeves stapled to a board, smearing it liberally across them. (The sleeves, when dry, are then used as personalised covers for a numbered limited-edition of 300 12-inch singles, costing ? each -- mine's number 155). Later on in the proceedings, he again jumps into the crowd and makes his way to a tarpaulin-covered machine in the centre of the room. It's that most invaluable of musical instruments, a threshing-machine. Straddlind it as the crowd cheers, he dumps into its funnel sack after sack of dead leaves, which come blasting out across the assembled masses.

Compared to the monotonous Queen Elizabeth Hall show a year and a half earlier, it's an all-action show: action-painting, action-sculpting, action-playing. When the lights go up, the scene is one of devastation, a cross between factory, forest and artist's studio. No-one turned the power off, though. It's almost like a continuation of their shows from 1973-74, a belated picking-up of the baton they so noisily dropped back then, and a resumption of the spirit of Krautrock.

"We should have communicated with Kraftwerk and all those others back then," acknowledges Jean-Hervé Peron before the show. "We should have invited them to Wümme, because all these groups, in their different styles, were creating a movement. We didn't realise that at the time. Now, that movement is accepted and appreciated, but we didn't know then. We were spread all over, and nobody felt the urge to bring all these people together. Now people are talking about putting on Krautrock festivals."

Icon

Malcolm Mooney

"Bollox!"

Tsugi Podcast 106 : The Black Dog

Tracklisting :

01. Scanner - Sharewear Introduction - DS93
02. Louderbach - Sunspots - M_nus
03. Pig & Dan - Cubes - Yoshitoshi Recordings
04. Oliver Huntemann - Rikarda - Ideal Audio
05. The Black Dog - Long Walk Home - Dust Science
06. N/A - Variance (CH-Signal Edit) - Sandwell District
07. Harald Bjˆrk - Skvaltan - Kranglan Broadcast
08. Samuli Kemppi - Orbiter - Komisch
09. OVR - Interior - Blueprint
10. PWOG - True - KK Records
11. Cheap And Deep Productions - Darkroom Beats - Cheap And Deep
12. Xhin - Fixing The Error - Stroboscopic Artefacts
*Fragment. The Black Dog - Skin Clock - Soma Recordings
13. Cluster - F¸r Die Katz - Brain
14. Jamie Anderson & Deep Groove - Juggernaut - Cocoon Recordings
15. The Black Dog - Floods (Live Re-edit) - Soma Recordings

@'New TechnoID'

The Black Dog also have a Krautrock mix available
HERE

Ancients - Paeans & Odes

An 'Exile' exclusive today
very kindly supplied by
Michael Dustdevil (from the
excellent Young Moss Tongue blog)
You have to hear this album.
Get it
HERE
(dedicated to Paddy)