Finitribe - Noise, Lust and Fun (1988)

 

Advanced apologies for the spelling but I just can't see Finitribe as two words. Anyway, having had my nuts quite literally blown off by Electrolux, which was on one of those Funky Alternatives records, I immediately ran to my local high street record retailer and made purchase of Finitribe's Grossing 10K. Apparently this was the one I should have bought, which I didn't because I had no idea that it existed until fairly recently. Therefore D'oh!

While Grossing 10K is largely great, it sounds like the Art of Noise had they not been formed by members of Cambridge University's Important Music Faculty now that I've heard its predecessor. This one is a lot more free-range and bubbles with the sound of people trying things out to see what happens rather than trying what someone else already did to see if it sounds the same. The easiest and probably laziest comparison to make is with formative Tackhead, at least rhythmically, but with pseudo-classical touches and bits of cabaret contributing to a whole which sounds more tribal than anything. Annie Anxiety is on here, along with the legendary Jess Hopkins of the Iron Brotherhood and, so I presume, Chris Connelly before all that industrial metal stuff, so it seems a potent mix of talents which proves at least as weirdly fascinating as you would hope. There's plenty of sampling, but not enough to plant toes on common ground shared with the aforementioned Art of Noise, and a lot of it works very well as soundtrack music with tribal grooves rumbling on beneath some fucking beautiful and powerfully emotive piano. Another year later and everyone would be pulling on their combat boots and pretending to be futuristic robots, but this is an insight into what you could do with this kind of tech before the usual cultural feedback loops swamped all originality and sense of adventure.

VX - Minutes to Go-Go (2024)

I'm only familiar with VX as Peter Hope's pianist - figuratively speaking, the man who tickled the ivories on the excellent Kilo Price for Dead Shapes which you may possibly remember from here. His own, mostly instrumental, material - overlooking the possible absence of sounds deriving from anything much that might count as an instrument - while similarly raw and initially abrasive, is a whole different kettle of fish. It's noise in so much as there's little common ground shared with Herman's Hermits, but while my closest point of reference is probably the work of +DOG+, Minutes to Go-Go feels intensively sculptured, even structured without quite turning into an Art of Noise record. Amongst the electronic crunches, overdriven circuits, gated slabs of feedback and the like, we find remnants of what may once have been vocals, percussion instruments, and other sound sources warped and looped into shapes which seem to emerge and gain greater prominence with each listen, until you no longer notice quite what a racket it is, instead hearing something that might almost be - I don't know - a film soundtrack perhaps. It seems different to the involuntary admiration of fire extinguishers we sometimes experience at the end of an afternoon trudging around some gallery, because I don't think there's such a pronounced random element here. These patterns are surely more than shapes perceived in the ear of the beholder. Listen enough times and you'll find yourself transported to filthy truck stops in cyberspace, the medina in Marrakech, the inside of your own head, and other alien territories. Minutes to Go-Go is one hell of a trip.

Apply within.

The Art of Noise - Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise? (1984)

It was the timing which sucked me in, the timing combined with the novelty of a record made from replayed samples of existing sounds, something which then remained unknown outside the Fairlight CMI being put through its paces on an episode of Tomorrow's World. Back in 1984, I was obsessed with the Italian Futurists and felt they shared some sort of rebellious impulse in common with the music I tended to like; so when this lot turned up, openly acknowledging Luigi Russolo's Art of Noises manifesto and on a label named after one of Marinetti's concrete poems, it caught my attention; and yet something didn't quite sit right. It might have been some sort of misplaced proprietorial regard of Futurism on my part - these people were cashing in on the thing which only I knew about and only I really understood and they hadn't asked my permission; but also it was irritating how Trevor Horn, when asked about Zang Tumb Tumb, said only that it was an onomatopoeic percussive sound, adding I suppose it's rather Dada.

Next they seemed to be everywhere, and so much so that I heard every single track on this album long before I bought it, which was actually a couple of years later on a wet Saturday afternoon when I couldn't really find anything else in the record shop. By that point the thing had become so ingrained that it couldn't fail to sound good, as indeed it did, and as it still does. It's sharp, funny, and stupid, and it has all sorts of things going on, and it's beautifully produced as you would expect; but I don't know if it was ever important or even particularly ground breaking, as many have since claimed.

The samples were, so I am informed, mostly presets which came with the Fairlight CMI, so most of what Art of Noise did was in the arrangement, and presumably in Horn's ability to make it all sound as lush as a Ferrero Roche advert; because at best what we have here is what Throbbing Gristle would have been were they all nicely behaved Oxbridge graduates, which is why Paul Morley made for such a good fit. The clues are all over the place, not least in sampled bass lines playing what may as well have been Rock Around the Clock and so inadvertently foreshadowing Jive Bunny; and then more recently I rediscovered a tape of the Horn promoting the first Art of Noise record on the wireless, during which he opined:

I think the truth of it is that people don't learn how to play their instruments properly nowadays. They learn how to talk to the music press. They learn how to do their hair. They learn about what to wear and what to say, but the basic physical learning of - do you know of anybody in a group nowadays who is a good guitar player? Do you know if the guitar player in Duran Duran is a particularly good guitar player? In the old days you knew who was a good player, you knew that Eric Clapton [was a good guitar player].

Seriously, grandad, fuck the fuck off. Of course, Morley and Horn were only ever involved in the most negligible sense, at least according to J.J. Jeczalik, but it seems significant that they were able to hitch their wagons to the Art of Noise in the first place without anyone noticing a disparity. Morley dismissed later Art of Noise releases as novelty records, seemingly implying that this one should be considered high art, which doesn't really work. It's great pop music, but it was never art, which, considering how Art of Noise achieved a whole shitload of musical firsts, is quite shocking; but then you might also argue that Jive Bunny did a whole load of stuff no-one had done before.

Blank Banshee - Blank Banshee 0 (2012)

A couple of months ago, someone mentioned vapourwave to me, specifically wondering aloud whether it should be considered post-music in the sense of Lady Gaga and other ringtone artistes. Because I'm fat and fifty, and because I couldn't give a shit about computer games, incomprehensible Japanese cartoons, Instagram, most social media, or young people in general, I was embarrassed to admit I'd never heard of him, or it, or whatever gramophone records they may have recently sent scurrying to the top of the hit parade, there to dislodge Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. I was embarrassed because it turns out the thing had been around for at least five years without my having been aware of it even as a name.

Okay, so vapourwave was not only old news but also massive in context of its own self-contained microcosm of 4Chan types and people who post video clips of themselves talking about computer games on YouTube; so there's no reason why I should have heard of it, I suppose. Anyway, Wikipedia has this to say:

Vapourwave is a music genre and art movement that emerged in the early 2010s and spread over the next half of the decade among various internet communities. It is characterised by a nostalgic or surrealist fascination with retro cultural aesthetics (typically that of the late eighties and early nineties), entertainment technology, consumer culture and advertising, and styles of corporate and popular music such as lounge, smooth jazz and elevator music. Sampling is prevalent within the genre, with samples often pitched, layered or altered, sometimes in a classic chopped and screwed style. Central to the style is often a satirical but not necessarily critical preoccupation with consumer capitalism, popular culture, and new-age tropes.

I've also seen it claimed that vapourwave is over, and Blank Banshee is actually seapunk, but I don't care. I'm fifty. Fuck off.

Anyway, it's a file sharing, downloady thing, and I'm yet to sign up with the whole download culture because I much prefer physical objects and I've never owned an iPod - or equivalent device - that worked for longer than three months at a time; and like I say, I'm fat and fifty.

I had a root around on YouTube, it being a source of numerous vapourwave albums uploaded in their entirety. Most of what I heard sounded sort of interesting, if not startlingly unlike anything else I've ever encountered. As a genre it seemed to be making a virtue out of samples of unusually bland material - ringtones, game noises, television station idents, the little tune your computer plays when you boot it up. Some of it was kind of irritating, but some of it seemed to have something, and of all the stuff I browsed, Blank Banshee seemed to have enough of something to warrant a violation of my own personal code; so I threw dollars at the bandcamp page and bagged me some downloads, then immediately burned them to CDR so I could give them a proper listen.

Blank Banshee is supposedly a Canadian by name of Patrick Driscoll, beyond which I know nothing but for the music itself, which I guess is deliberate. It sounds very much like music composed entirely on audio editing software using samples of the general type described, so for the most part there's a weirdly smooth quality which actually makes me think of the blandly utopian seaside resort described by J.G. Ballard in Vermilion Sands. Some of it has the monged-out ambience of new-age motivational tapes, and is almost certainly sampled from something in that direction. Yet, as promised by the hype, there's something weirdly fascinating by this overpowering wash of airbrushed perfection, as though it's laid on so thick it becomes something new.

On the other hand, the music might not work so well were it purely as I've described, that also being more or less how Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus sounds to me, and which is why I didn't bother downloading it despite it apparently being the Never Mind the Bollocks of vapourwave. Blank Banshee works by taking the form somewhere else, bringing in material lifted from the crunkier end of southern rap - notably those crunchy handclaps and finger clicks - and this influence seems also to mold the music into something significantly funkier than whoever it was nicked from - possibly excepting Flash's The Message which is the only sample I've been able to identify. Regardless of sources, Blank Banshee 0 ends up as something new in its own right - nothing longer than your average television commercial and adding up to just over half an hour of what feels like a continuous piece, and one which definitely exerts a strange influence on the place you're in, cerebrally speaking. It invokes in passing certain quieter moments of Nine Inch Nails, Anne Dudley's Art of Noise, and Three-6-Mafia, but also a fairly substantial dose of Yellow Magic Orchestra.

I'm still not a fan of downloads, but this cost me a dollar and is pretty darned wonderful; and more than anything it's really nice to know that in terms of new things, music isn't quite over. This kind of thing may even be the first wave of whatever happens next.

Blank Banshee 1 from 2014 is also fucking great by the way, and apparently he has a new one out even as I write this.

Psychic TV - Beyond thee Infinite Beat (1990)

I've been somewhat down on the Porridge from time to time, although not in a sexual sense, obviously - that would be grotesque. This comes in part from having been a massive squeeing Throbbing Gristle devotee back when they were still an actual group, first time around. I couldn't get enough. I even had - and still have - those obscure bootleg tapes that were doing the rounds back then, the formative Death Factory studio stuff with Albrecht D and so on; so I was pretty serious about my dedication to the Gristle is what I'm saying. For me, they were not merely some name I encountered twenty years later whilst watching a documentary about Depeche fucking Mode, you smell me?

The appeal of Throbbing Gristle was the bizarre, alien sounds, not quite musical in the traditional sense and yet holding one's attention just the same; and the unsettling subject matter, usually tied in with the slightly sinister appeal of Porridge's monologue. He had a fascinating voice and - to break it down to something which would make sense in a pub - some of that was because we were listening just to see what he would come out with next. So when Throbbing Gristle split and Porridge took to believing his own hype, and it emerged that he'd actually wanted to be Lou Reed all along or at least just a fairly interesting pop star, I personally felt somewhat let down. It transpired that those once surreally absorbing monologues weren't so much inspired as simply because he'd never worked out how to shut it off, and those occasionally terrifying and always fascinating alien soundtracks had been largely dependent on who he'd been stood next to at the time. That's how it looked to me.

I bought the first two Psychic TV albums on the days they came out, and sold both of them within a year or so. Not even the customarily talented Alex Ferguson could save Psychic TV from their Jim Jones figurehead. There were a few things here and there which sounded sort of okay - Unclean and maybe some of Those Who Do Not - but the good stuff always seemed to be an exception to the rule.

Then in the late eighties, Porridge discovered acid house and somehow decided that it was sort of what he'd been doing along, and I laughed so much that I went out and bought one. Specifically I bought a couple on the grounds of the records having found their way into a bargain bin with surprising haste - first Jack the Tab, then the amusingly named Tekno Acid Beat, and finally this one. Jack the Tab is actually great - possibly thanks to the involvement of Richard Norris of the Grid - although it bears so little resemblance to house music that it might as well have been an Art of Noise album.

Tekno Acid Beat is the sound of people who've worked out how to programme a reasonable impersonation of the extended part of a Blow Monkeys 12" because acid house is just a drum machine going bum-bum-bum innit and you have some samples over the top like a bloke from off the telly saying far out a few times and stuff like that - piece of piss, mate; with Porridge and pals all giving themselves special kids on the street names like DJ Doktor Megatrip spelled with an industrial k, firmly stamping the whole clueless enterprise as someone's dad wearing a baseball cap turned backwards whilst declaring that everything is cool. Even the cover looked cheap and nasty, a ludicrous Psychic TV skull with a smiley acid face and all the class of a seventies Top of the Pops album. Somehow I wanted to like it. I really did; but every time I slapped the disc on, the music was the same - something which sounded as though it had been knocked off in about forty minutes, start to finish.

I gather this one involved a few of the same people, but somehow it seemed more promising, with a much better cover plus it was only a couple of quid and I was amused by Porridge having suddenly taken to claiming to have almost formed a band with Ian Curtis of Joy Division; and you know what - it ain't bad!

Of course this is a remix album, a remix album of ravemaster mixes; because when you go to one of those raves with the kids there's usually a ravemaster in charge, yeah?

Wicked.

Anyway, being a remix album it's mostly instrumental, so not much in the way of Porridge wailing the usual stuff about how he sees you and he thinks you're very nice; and given my theory - which I should make clear really is just a theory - that Porridge is musically only ever as interesting as who he's stood next to at the time - I guess this one is mostly a Fred Gianelli album, possibly with some bits of Dave Ball thrown in; and given that Fred Gianelli seems to know what he's doing and has actually heard house music, this does at least sound like what it's trying to be. The beats are a little obvious, predicated on the idea that all house music is bass-hi-hat-snare-hi-hat and repeat for ten minutes, but beyond that it's surprisingly good. The bass works as bass should, there's plenty of space, and very little of the bleeding obvious - that Italo house piano that turned up on fucking everything for a while, for one example. Additionally, much of this record has an oddly sombre tone, in contrast to much house music of the time, and by association enough original design to suggest some work and thought went into the composition, as opposed to a process amounting to that'll do because all it ever needed to be was a sound in the background of a Porridge monologue.

Of course, I could be wrong, and the man himself may have had a major hand in why this is a great record; although I've just listened to Towards thee Infinite Beat on YouTube - the album of which this is a remix - and it's mostly business as usual so I suspect possibly not.