Juan Velazquez is the guitarist in Abe Vigoda. His speech is peppered with gently self-deprecating tics; “like” and “I don’t know” and “it’s weird” and “that makes no sense” mark out staccato bursts of static in our communication. In response, and with a temperature of 101°, my thoughts cluster only nebulously around the questions that were intended to marshall them, swerve and disperse and gather, like bees. The transatlantic connection on which we are relying seems equally intent on disruption. Odd chirrups echo through vast spaces; at one point, I imagine birds, blossoms and vines issuing from the speakerphone. Over their cheeps, creaks and rustlings I will later pore for meaning, incongruous possibilities presenting themselves in fever both real and imagined, unavoidable lacunae appearing in my grasp of what happened.

“That’s kind of how we work,” Juan says, kindly. “Everyone starts playing their thing, then we take it apart, move this part from here to there, and repeat it until it’s almost meaningless, and then we try to make everything as flexible as it can be, until we have something that seems as it should organically be. And the way we used to practise was in our parents’ garage, with no mic, so no way of hearing what Michael [Vidal, vocals] was singing. I still don’t know what a lot of the lyrics are.”

So nothing is true, and everything is permitted?
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you..?”

I’ve never seen Abe Vigoda play live. Not yet. And you haven’t either, I’ll wager. If you have, please write and tell me about it, because I’ve rinsed every YouTube clip and I’m still thirsty. They’re currently touring the US with High Places and No Age.

“We’ve been playing in the South, the South West, Dallas, Austin, El Paso, Atlanta, and the response has been so amazing. We were nervous a lot of the time because we still see ourselves as a new band. But people already knew who we were and it’s been pretty awesome.”

I’m sure they do know who you are: your association with [LA all-ages venue] The Smell may have something to do with that. Are you reluctant to talk about what it means to be A Smell Band? There must be very different expectations attached to being involved in that scene now, for new bands.

“Well, we hear about it ad nauseam, but it’s cool. It’s awesome that people are paying attention, but the habits we’ve learned from our DIY, punk background means there’s a filter – we know that some things are not cool to do and not tempting to be offered. Yes, it’s flattering to be mentioned in certain circles, but it feels weird. No Age are on MTV! And that’s cool. But it’s also kind of absurd.”

Abe Vigoda’s beautiful new album, Skeleton, shares the celebratory quiver and hoot of its predecessor, Kid City, but is both more urgent and more muscular in its sound, recalling early Birthday Party, PiL and Black Sea-era XTC rather than the ‘tropical punk’ tag that has marked out almost all press interest thus far. It’s in part this tag that has bound Abe Vigoda up with Vampire Weekend and High Places in critical discourse around cultural appropriation, hybridisation and identity, though post-punk itself took an interest in co-opting different ethnomusicological traditions into its deconstruction of the rock idiom.

“Well, I don’t think anyone approaches it with the attitude ‘I’m gonna STEAL THIS’. If you hear something and it’s cool, you make it an influence on your life. Vampire Weekend are getting a lot of shit for that, but I think it’s more about the background that they’re from.”

Surely, though, it’s very different for LA Latino diaspora to play music that’s influenced by Mexican and Dominican traditions than it is for Vampire Weekend to use Afrobeat and highlife.

“I’ve heard lots of Mexican regional music growing up, around the house and at family parties. I never took it as being something that I could play automatically, though. The fact that I’m Mexican doesn’t give me an entitlement either. Touring with High Places, we’ve been watching how they use many different world music influences, and seeing that it’s not necessarily exploitative.”

There’s a generational aspect to it, too. For people in 15 years’ time, I suspect that it may just look like pre-Animal Collective indie and post-Animal Collective indie, the way there’s pre- and post-Talking Heads pop.

“Animal Collective were a totally influential band for us. And we love Cafe Tacuba and the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band, but honestly, we’re more influenced by rock music. We’re from the States, so what is our music? Is rock our music? What about the problems with that, with the Elvis issue, with black music being popularised by white people? If you practise that kind of purism it’s essentially a dead end.

“Reggie [Guerrero, drums] and I are both Mexican, and I’m gay. Maybe we wouldn’t be the band we are now if it weren’t for those cultural identities, but we’re not a didactic band. At all. That doesn’t mean we don’t understand the issues: there are issues for anyone who’s not a white middle-class dude in a rock band. There are issues of exclusion and invisibility for girls, gay guys, lesbians, black people, Mexican people, but it doesn’t have to have a direct relationship to the art they make. People can perceive difference in a lot of ways, in terms of where we play, who we play with, how we make our album art, and get the message that way.”

There are always layers of mystery between the band and the music, between the music
and the listener – layers that punk bands have historically attempted to penetrate by changing the relationship between artist and audience, struggling audibly to bring gesture closer to intention, a struggle markedly absent from Abe Vigoda’s work. But for some people those layers will be more transparent than others, codes and signals blipping through the mist. I remember my disappointment when I found out Kim Deal wasn’t gay, and my utter glee when I found out that Bob Mould was.

“Bob Mould is supposed to be coming to our show! I’m so psyched – I used to listen to Hüsker Dü a lot and it meant so much to me to find out he was gay. It just made things so much clearer. He’s my gay punk rock icon. Sometimes it is hard being part of this subculture – not that it isn’t accepting, because it is – but there just aren’t as many gay men doing this, and I really want to talk to him about this stuff.”

The band’s reluctance to pin down meaning is reflected in Skeleton, whose lyrics are a series of Poundian short phrases, progressing syllabically from one side to another of a constant dialectic. Broken branches, crown of leaves. Splash blood around. Rest forever. Frightened children hide in long grass, find comfort in tombs, in ghost-houses, the narrator slipping back and forth between perspectives as Juan and bassist David Reichart respond with ostinato chanting.

“For the most part we’re celebrating new experiences, moving out and into the city for the first time, absorbing the amazing new stuff that’s in our lives. But the lyrics are really not all that positive, and I like that the lyrics don’t respect the melodies too much in that way. I listened to a ton of English dreampop and goth when we were making the record – I love the reverb and the distance.”

Juan’s voice disappears once again into the digital chasm. All that’s left is the record, and it sounds different now, a steelier defence somehow against my fever dream, an invitation to measure the distance between excitement and trepidation, to rise and walk in the reverberant heat of life.

Photo by Sarah Cass

Mi-Amor has a generous stature and glassy eyes that he holds in steady contact. He smiles and reclines to reflect, leans in to clench his point. He’s spokesperson, vocalist, dancer and guitarist, for Congolese collective, Kasai All Stars, and seems mildly amused at my first enquiry, as to how the group was formed.

He opens his hands to explain. Kasai All Stars cannot be addressed as the group, in the singular.

“When the Belgian producers came to Kinshasa they were looking for folk bands. From about fifty, they chose six. Then they realised due to the size of the groups that they could not take them all for their project, nor could they choose one over the others. So they suggested that the best players merge to form the ‘all stars’.”

The project he is referring to is the third volume of Crammed Disc producer Vincent Kenis’ Congotronics series. Kinshasa seems burgeoning with traditional folk bands who turn to amplification to make themselves heard above the urban din. Young and old play side by side, each member fulfilling a specific role.

“If you don’t have a local music venue to play in, you move outside,” Mi-Amor says of the spirit of the streets of his city.

“What they didn’t understand was that merging the groups that belong to different communes and conflicting tribes would not be simple. Our final unification is a strong symbol of the force of music in diversity, but it did not come without controversy for us in Kinshasa. Now we are respected by our communities, but we were first seen as radicals.”

Comprising, then, 25 musicians originating from five different ethnic groups, Kasai All Stars are a plurality, a hybrid. Each group has its own instruments – amongst which likembés (thumb pianos), balafons (xylophones) and lokoles (deep-sounding slit log drums) which, according to their particular crafting, bring varying cadences of sound. Like their polyrhythms – weaves of mesmeric voices over streams of percussion; more wide-winged vocal interplay than that which showers Konono No 1, the first Congotronics release – they’re a dancing and diving, diverse and mutating whole of once separated parts.

If this is the first lesson, the second is such: however ‘authentic’ their sways of song are, the shape that reaches us here was created as a product for export. Western listening habits do not neatly tessellate with Congolese musical practice. Translating tradition to digital form across continents, imposing time on rhythms that defy it – skip generations and cultures, and flick between tongues – as well as overcoming linguistic and political frontiers back on home terrains, is a problematic feat, from whichever point of view.

Mi-Amor explains that for the album, In The 7th Moon, The Chief Turned Into A Swimming Fish And Ate The Head Of His Enemy By Magic, the songs recorded are in fact extracts; the result of structured practice to reduce pieces, evolved from improvisation, into tracks that fit a compact disc. The long-winding title of the album refers to the feast of the full moon re-enacted in their performances. Live, there is more freedom for rhythms to roll and dancing dynamics to dig deep.

In uncomfortable circularity, a century or so previously Christian missionaries entering the Congo had prohibited these same dances, considering them too erotic and ‘savage’.
Now if we celebrate the exuberance of the spectacle, it’s with these very adjectives, now positively charged. Or, equally problematically, we’ll say these musicians have the spirit of punks, instruments amplified like rock guitars; diachronic words which stand as flimsy references for a music planted between tribal folklore and the social stories of now. All this is rooted, too, in the practice that fabricates its instruments, which, Mi-Amor reminds, are as much works of art as the sounds they carry forth.

Friends who like electro hear Kasai All Stars in the living room and search to place their music between ‘tribal’ and ‘modern’. It’s the amplification of certain instruments that makes for a contemporary sound. The imprecise impressions of foreign ears bear witness to how at unexpected intersections – the meeting point of the age-old and the current, the far-flung and the close-to-home – conventional perceptions may be decentred.

Throughout our meeting, there’s the feeling we’re both at pains to understand and be understood, conscious of what could be lost across the gap in translation. Between dual systems of narrative, one conscious of the meaning of this music for listeners to whom its original context is abstract, one eager to explain this context and “transcend such arbitrary limits”. The Kasai’s music is the antithesis of miscommunication, a document of bridged gaps and broken boundaries.

I hope we understand each other.

myspace.com/kasaiallstars

New York-based DJ, writer and producer Jace Clayton, aka DJ/rupture, has been a leading figure in the documentation and celebration of “non-Western” music ever since his Gold Teeth Thief mix became a viral internet phenomenon in 2001. Indeed, through his mixes, parties, Dutty Artz label, WFMU radio show, and his popular Mudd Up! blog, he has helped widen dance music’s discursive parameters to include everything from autotuned rai pop to cumbia and reggaeton. He has just released his latest collection, the dubstep-focused Uproot.

This interview took place in preparation for a short feature about the role of the internet in the work of artists and labels who release “outernational” music.

Has the internet put a wider audience in touch with non-Western music over the last few years?
“Yes, of course. But the internet has put an even wider audience in touch with Western music over the same period.”

Was this an aim you had in mind for Mudd Up!?

“No, my inspiration for Mudd Up! was much simpler, actually - I was just excited about the blog as a format, viewing it as a open medium where I could post a vinyl rip one day and then have a totally unrelated piece the next day. I was shocked when I started looking at blogs, because all this African music was available and discussions were forming, and that was interesting to me since it can be hard to get access to that kind of stuff. But I knew from the beginning that I wasn’t in the least bit interested in a blog that reinforced ideas of, say, Western versus non-Western music. You can hear that approach in my mixes too, like Gold Teeth Thief.”

Has the internet connected you with people, places, sounds you weren’t connected with before?
“Yes, but those connections to non-Western people and places are just a tiny part of the connections the internet is fostering. There is still a strong digital divide between the comfortable middle-class and the poor. And if anything, the internet contributes to the spread of English-language hegemony, and keeps on broadcasting American culture full-blast.”

With your mixes - your recent cumbia one for example, or on Uproot - to what extent is the internet involved in the creative process? Exchanging ideas and music across continents, communicating with artists, distributing the final product…
“When I was living in Madrid I had very little internet access and did a mix called Gold Teeth Thief. I mailed the CD to a friend and asked him to put it online so that the contributors could hear it. That turned out to have a huge impact, it received enormous amounts of downloads, and everyone from Vibe to Wire reviewed the CD. So even though I didn’t have internet, the simple fact of putting out my sound on the internet in free form turned me from a relatively-unknown DJ to someone getting lots of international offers. This was back in 2000, 2001. My style was shocking and addictive to a lot of people and it spread like word-of-mouth wildfire, and having music for free like that was still relatively new. But that is internet for distribution…

“In terms of artistic collaboration, the internet has real limits. I can only really work with someone online if we’ve met in person first, or at least talked on the phone. You get a much richer batch of information by meeting someone in person. Even just organizing stuff for my label Soot, I tend not to work with artists I don’t personally know. Since most of the artists live in other counties internet is useful once we’ve had face to face contact and talked stuff over and gotten a better idea of what’s what. Internet is context-resistant, and context is critical in establishing meaning in music, from essential lyrical content to more subtle questions of audience and so on.”

There have been criticisms of the dynamics of this internet/Western/non-Western music relationship: some talk in terms of the “magic and mystery” surrounding non-Western music – with those qualities as a prime attraction – and the possibility of them being lost as music becomes available digitally over here for immediate consumption, sampling, influence and incorporation. What do you think of that idea?
“I’m not interested in magic or mystery. One of the reason I’m going deep into cumbia is because I love the span of the music and I understand the lyrics. I’m an avid Arabic and North African music fan, but I don’t speak Arabic or Tamazight, so there’s often unwelcome mystery around a song. I get context whenever I can. I’m always bothering my Arabic friends for translations and whatnot. ‘Magic and mystery’ seems like simple exoticism - deriving pleasure from ‘the sensual and mysterious Orient’. I believe that pleasure comes from intimacy rather than distance, to put it another way.”

People also talk of the “fetishization” of non-Western music by Western listeners…
“I don’t care what ‘Westerners’ fetishize. They’ve been fetishizing black people for centuries now, who cares? You simply exist in all your complexity and let them deal with it. Fetishism is so vague. I care a lot when Westerners rip off non-Western musicians, even by rendering them anonymous like Sublime Frequencies often does, but random concepts of fetishization don’t really mean much. It’s almost too abstract to matter.

“Musicians like getting paid to play, they like getting credited for their work, and if they’re singing or rapping, they want you listen to their words. It’s simple. I think Western fetishization is an awesome thing if it means, say, more African bands can travel and make a living outside of their home countries. Who’s to say what’s the difference between fetishization and interest? How many kids fetishize Bjork or Radiohead? Is use of the term “fetish” racist in and of itself, would you just be talking about ‘fans’ if it were Western bands?”

Another criticism sometimes aimed in the direction of this internet/Western/non-Western music relationship is that might there come a point where the internet stops becoming a means of documenting and celebrating sometimes intensely local scenes, and instead becomes something that swallows them up. Put another way, these critics might argue that the uniqueness we attribute to these sounds will become “tainted” or “watered down” by a return flow of musical ideas from the West, and also elsewhere in the non-West…
“The connections made possible or fostered by the internet are constantly making and unmaking themselves. ‘Taint’ implies a previous purity which implies isolation, sealed off against influence as if in a museum vitrine. ‘Watered down’? Music has always proceeded by theft and influence. ‘Taint’ and ‘watered down’ are value judgements. I love Berber pop music because it is so vocoder-intensive. Sometime everything else on a song will be acoustic, excerpt for the syrupy T-Pain vocals. It’s incredible. White people ’steal’ musical influences, non-Western music gets ‘watered-down’ or somehow contaminated - most of these categories and descriptions are weirdly essentialist at best.”

So are the above criticisms missing the point of it all, erecting their own barriers? Some might say: ‘What’s wrong with dancing to funk carioca, New Orleans bounce and Brooklynite indie rock on the same night anyway?’
“The main problem with the latter is one of audience. No matter how wired we get, it always boils down to the local dance - do you go to musical events with the ‘non-westerners’? If you play cumbia, do you go to actual cumbia parties with working-class Mexicans or do you want until the international hipster contigent comes through putting cumbia in quotes, or hyphenating it and playing their tasteful cumbia remixes in some swish club? Much of this turns into issues of what an audience says about the music being played.

“I see doing events in NYC as an amazing way to push social possibilities, to cut across traditional social borders for a night and suggest new ways of thinking about and making community, and it’s always in the context of a fun party. I just threw a label party in NYC - Fiesta Soot. Our audience in NYC is open-minded, but folks don’t come expecting to hear indie rock, as very little of the music we’re drawing on comes from that tradition; its a class thing as much as it is a racial thing, its not even Western or non-Western (although there was a strong African contingent at the party, mostly folks from West Africa).”

So do you think the internet has made “music without borders” an inexorable process?
“No, it wasn’t the internet that made ‘music without borders’ an inexorable process - it was the Silk Road and its predecessors. Music is precisely that which underscores the ridiculousness of borders, their porousness, their chimerical nature. Look at this insane fence the US is building between Texas and Mexico - you make a border real by policing it. Borders are about violence and fixedness and centralised authority (be it the state or the inner-circle of DJs in a musical scene who police its genre-name and monopolise bookings). Music is about pleasure and fluidity and endless waves of influence.”

Mudd Up!

Digital smoke and mirrors: it’s the great hoax of rock music circa now. The felt gloves of a dozen studio hands slam padlocks on the noise gates and over-compress recordings until the dynamic range is flattened and watered down to the level of summer festival beer. The kids can’t tell if they’re hearing a low kb/s rip, or if the moss has grown too far into their ears. It’s gotten so that when faced with the music of Times New Viking – three misfits from Columbus, Ohio who have stolen back the pure essence of garage band din from the two-chord archaeologists of this world, in order to sustain
their endless run of 90-second(1) infections that communicate the inherent absurdities of making
art in 2008 – they’ve forgotten their well-worn copies of Alien Lanes and Half Japanese records over there on the shelf. They’ve lost the joy of not making things out.

“You know, there’s nothing worse than hearing a band that sounds like they tried too hard,” says Jared Phillips (guitar) who formed the band when he and vocalist/drummer Adam Elliot met vocalist/keyboardist Beth Anderson at art school, tired of living in a town where you could only see “noise bands, like you’d go watch a friend do some weird stuff which was kinda exciting for a while but got old quick…or there were bar bands who just, you know, suck”. It wasn’t long until the band were spotted by Ohio native Tom Lax, whose legendary record label Siltbreeze(2) put out their first two albums Dig Yourself and Presents The Paisley Reich, in ‘05 and ‘07 respectively. Recorded on a reel-to-reel which was then transferred to cassette, the results were pleasing for lovers of the murky arts: four-track recorders, Bob Pollard’s schoolteacher days, Xeroxed ‘zines still warm out the copier. Late last year they signed to Matador for Rip It Off, the wider exposure bringing not only excited new bodies to the party, but also a vast increase in the number of critics and bloggers who want to ask them why their songs sound like they’ve been recorded in an upturned skip…underwater…at the end of a bad telephone line. Surely big label + max budget = TNV – obscuring audio scree?

“But that’s not really how we sound, it would feel kind of fake, you know?” says Phillips. “The thing with our sound is that we only have these three things, keys, guitar, and drums going on. We don’t have a bass, and there isn’t some guy with a hat in a darkened corner playing lead over it all. We fill up as much sound as possible with those three instruments, making it whole without having, like, five hundred sounds going on.”

So a big reason behind you not wanting to use contemporary recording technology is to keep the studio head count as low as possible?

“It’s a gang mentality, right, just the three of us because there’s no-one else that we would want
to be in the band. There doesn’t need to be some guy sitting there pushing buttons all day long.
No overdubs, that’s the aesthetic right there. That’s how we came about.

“Also that’s what we like about music and art, you know, the restrictions, only having so many options. Recording with Pro Tools, you have too many options. There’s too much choice. People,
you know, they need less choice! It’s such a huge American thing, you go to a grocery store and there’s 10 different kinds of milk, and I just want milk. I don’t care how many different kinds there are, just give me milk!”

I had this idea that Times New Viking were, along with No Age and others, the new inheritors of the power of DIY Band Life. My starting point was this quote from a Minutemen interview where Watt says that “the idea is to touch people. Convince them that their heart beats. Everything’s a device
to get that across”. I was on the wrong track. Of course, you don’t need idealist rhetoric or passionate manifestoes to survive life in the van. TNV are more interested in the simple pleasures that such a life yields, like designing yr own gig posters, or seeing yr first record pressed.

“Well, every single thing that you do is part of your aesthetic,” says Phillips. “From the van you have, the look of the T-shirts and your album covers, and how your record sounds. I mean playing music is fun, but when you start a band it’s like ‘We can make record covers!’ Doing it yourself means complete control.”

For consistency’s sake, though, there’d have to be some remove from the instinctual nature associated with a rock’n’roll. Given yr art school backgrounds, do you discuss Times New Viking in the language that you would an art project at all?

“Ha, I wish you’d asked me this four years earlier, I would have had a much better answer! You know, I haven’t thought about it so much recently – we started with The Idea, or with these ideas and we ran with them. It was set in place a while ago now.”

Can you remember what these ideas were?

“Uh, no shorts! Just, you know, cut‘n’paste from different things, influences, aesthetics…throwing them together, making a collage. We’re all really into Fluxus(3) art, Dada, I mean this was something the original punk bands were into too. A love of absurdity whilst kind of being a bit nihilist about things. Something like Fluxus, it was fun, it’s pretentious art that wasn’t pretentious. It was heavy with ideas but had a sense of humour.”

It’s interesting watching old Fluxus reels, or any Sixties performance art with that in mind, because you become aware that there is pretension there, but it’s in the crowd – young WASPish couples in tuxes and cocktail dresses clutching onto each other for fear of being approached by the nude cello player covered in paint(4).

“Right, you have a bunch of people getting dressed up to go see someone watch an apple rot!
I actually think that’s something that we’ve succeeded at, making a crowd, or some writer for Jimmy’s Blog seem more pretentious than us. ‘Oh, those guys are just a bunch of druggy fakes, making this irritating music’, yet they’re the ones with the false pretence, parading this set idea of how rock bands should look and act and sound. Those ladies in the Fluxus audiences thought they were gonna
be watching Kabuki theatre, or someone painting a landscape – they thought they’d be part of the art world, but are stood there watching someone smash televisions – ‘What the fuck is going on?!’”

Do you think that the artist at that point feels the performance slipping into confrontational realms?

“Well, you know, as much as we try to make it fun, have the audience be into it, it’s equally rewarding to have people gawp at you and turn their noses up. It’s not our goal, but, yeah, it is equally rewarding. Though hopefully one day all these online spaces will just evaporate into the air.”

So all we’ll be left with is the acrid digital smoke of Jimmy’s Blog?

“Right, the digital smoke. That’s a pretty good title right there.”
Yeah, I’ll try and stick it in somewhere.

Footnotes
1. Roughly the amount of time it takes for bubble gum to lose its flavour.
2. Started in 1989, Siltbreeze put out a stream of remarkable releases on the noisier end of the rock spectrum, with The Dead C, Harry Pussy, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments and dozens more items now considered must-haves for any experimental music fiend. TNV inspired Lax to end a lengthy hiatus, and now the label is yr one stop shop for the practice tape aesthetic, releasing Psychedelic Horseshit, Pink Reason and Eat Skull among others (a scene which the NME unfortunately tried to christen ‘shitgaze’, but if you’d just scrape that off on the kerb before you come in, thanks).
3. Global art movement birthed in the Sixties which focused, among other areas, on composed performances that experimented with the boundaries between artist and audience, high
and low culture, good and bad taste, deconstruction and defamiliarisation. More famous names include Nam June Paik, Phillip Corner and Yoko Ono.
4. That would be Fluxus artist/cellist Charlotte Moorman.

Originally published in Plan B #35: back issues available here.

“The first time I played it, it was on the piano, for all my girlfriends, and they were like, yeah, it’s so true, you know? Every girl has had that guy. It’s hard, you know, being young, and being into people, and maybe the girl is more into the guy – like it doesn’t mean as much for him as it does her – and they knew exactly what I was talking about because everybody had experienced that situation. The girls want a little more out of it, you know? And people keep asking me, so…I think it’s shocking that people find it shocking.” She laughs (a bit).

What shocks me most about her songs is how the gut-punch lyrics mesh with the collage-control of her composition.

“I don’t know, I just play around…I want stuff to be raw, but I also want it to be layered. For me commercial pop music, like r’n’b…what you hear is what you get. If you’ve heard, like, say, Rihanna…after you’ve heard that song five times, that’s it, you know? I want to make music that you can listen to over and over again. I can play it on the guitar to get one sound, but then add more of a vibe to it…”

She’s great at this. She writes songs with little black holes at their hearts. Hiccups, echoes like wind machines, piano washes that come out of nowhere, jerks of island guitar. These surprises suck you in to her songs, and you can’t escape because you need to hear them over and over for your neurons to find their bearing. I ask how much of her use of texture is deliberately crafted to do that.

“I don’t intend to do it, that’s just the way I work.”

The album is called Youth Novels. It’s apt, combining precocity and emotional confession with long-haul craft. She’s known she wanted to write and play songs forever, and went to New York, aged 18, where she played whatever gigs she could, pretending to be a huge star in Sweden – then her visa ran out, so she was sent back home. Around this time, her demos caught the attention of Björn Yttling of Peter, Björn, and John – but before he could produce her album, ‘Young Folks’ exploded, and Lykke Li had to wait it out, working in a care home, still writing through all the frustration. “It’s not perfect…it’s only the beginning so I wanted it to be…you know…I wanted the lyrics to be so good that you could just read them, and find them appealing, you know? This is my youth – there’s more to come.“

Do you feel like you’re not so young anymore?
“It feels like a hundred years since I was fifteen, so I’m not young at all! But I am young in my life, and hopefully I will learn more and get better. “

She’s chosen good aesthetic predecessors for inspiration, then. The choreography and sets of the video for ‘I’m Good, I’m Gone’ look like they come from a fellow Swede, the filmmaker Roy Andersson, who has spent the last four decades humanising everyday eccentricity in bureaucratic buildings and grey-green light. Lykke Li’s a fan, and explains, “I wanted to create a world of outsiders who have their own path…but maybe other people won’t understand them. It’s how I feel all the time.”

www.lykkeli.com

Bill Trevey, Mark Ringrose, Thomas Sadler, Christian Medgett and Alex Wealands claim that Throats gigs are, “A whirlwind of pain”. “I seriously hope people leave our gigs drained and confused,” continues guitarist Mark. “We destroy ourselves at every gig. On the last tour I was coming offstage and throwing up. Thom’s bass was covered in blood. I think as more people get to know the songs, they can go wild to them and enjoy them as much as we do.”

This summer sees Throats touring constantly, their itinerary a virtual map of England’s commuter-belt shitsvilles: Hitchin, Harlow, Milton Keynes. But Throats know dormitory towns are where the real fury festers.

“A few of us are from small towns, and some of the shows we witnessed in Spalding, for example, were ridiculous. Watching bands play in tiny rooms with full stacks, drenched in sweat, screaming at the top of their lungs, completely moulded our outlooks on DIY music. Bands who really stuck out like Backstabbers Inc, Battletorn, and other UK bands like Patient Zero, Stabbed In Autumn and Dead Sun Rising are partly the reason we’re here today.

“We’ve played quite a few small towns and kids generally seem to enjoy the music more. They seem more interested in having fun rather than seeing what shirts we wear.”

It’s a truism among some that UK metal is a in a sorry state at the moment – what do you think?

“I would agree – people need to look at bands like The Who and Black Sabbath who made our heritage so rich, and consider how progressive they were at the time. Look at what happened with Bring Me The Horizon and Gallows – both great bands, but the wave of shitty tag-along bands that follow are just clogging up what could be a vibrant, passionate scene.”

Whether Throats’ll kick-start a movement or get stymied in the shallows, we don’t get to discuss: it’s early days and they’re probably playing in Stevenage tomorrow, blasting ring-roads and new towns with sludge and ire.
www.myspace.com/throatsofgold

Originally published in Plan B #35: back issues available here. Plan B events presents Throats along with Holy State and Holy Roar DJs at the Oakford Social Club, Reading, on 24 January 2009. Check here for details.

]]> http://www.planbmag.com/features/throats/feed/ http://www.planbmag.com/features/sally-shapiro/ http://www.planbmag.com/features/sally-shapiro/#comments Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:18:32 +0000 Ben Mechen http://www.planbmag.com/?p=1160 Sally Shapiro makes my heart flutter. On the cover of her first record, Disco Romance, the snow is weighing down the leaves on the tree behind, collecting to form a bright white ski-run down her eyebrows. It’s perfect, a portrait of the artist doing nothing much at all…no layers to unravel, no hint of studied glare. Just someone shivering and laughing because it’s bloody cold out and they’re bloody well trying to take a picture of her for the cover of the bloody record again.

This is the whole thing about Sally – she’s more ‘like you’ than any pop singer you’ve been told is ‘like you’ before. She holds down a normal job – singing isn’t full-time, she reminds me, “it’s just a hobby.” You look everywhere for more information about her, and you come back with the same few titbits everyone else knows – there’s no barrage of press-packed arcana. This disorientating sensation of factual absence is much like Googling yourself – that Friday afternoon reminder of your crushing un-famousness.

Except Sally is famous. Sort of, anyway. She’s become a blog pin-up (“Flattering,” she says). Everyone from Pitchfork to nu-disco fellow travellers like Lindstrøm and Glass Candy is in love with her. Indeed, she and Johan (Agebjørn, friend first, producer and songwriter second) are so popular that they managed to enlist 20 producers to put together a collection of reinterpretations of their work, the recently released Remix Romance. Sally is Big News, and yet, it seems, we know hardly anything about her at all.

So, if it’s clear that most is meant to remain a mystery, what are we supposed to know? Well, that she’s in that long line of Swedish voices stretching from Agnetha Fältskog to Robyn, that her and Johan make gorgeously coy ice-rink Italo-pop, but most of all that she’s just really, really shy. Really shy. As Johan reveals, “I’m still not even allowed into the studio when she sings.”

It’s this fear of the limelight, of looking vain or making a mistake in front of other people, that brings her and her audience together (even though the only place she hears from them is “a bit through MySpace”). We like her because we’re all like that most of the time, and like her, sometimes we’re not and we want to go out and forget about being embarrassed, but still wake up in the morning shy again, back to normal. So when Sally lets her voice jump and glide over Johan’s lambent, primary-coloured synths she is the wallflower suddenly blooming right there in the middle of the dancefloor, stretching upwards to make shadow puppets with the lights, and we just know how she feels. Like she says, “Who doesn’t want to be told that you’re great” sometimes?

I ask Johan how he and Sally started working together. “I never intended to start a vocal Italo project,” he replies, “but Sally’s voice is so warm, tender and innocent.” When did he first hear it? “When we sang Christmas carols together in front of the piano.” That seems about right to me.

Finally, I ask a question she seems familiar with. She and Johan (as you might expect by now) never play live. Would success force her to reconsider? Money? “Sometimes Johan asks me if there’s something that would make me change my mind,” she ponders, “…and then I just say no, anyway.”

www.johanagebjorn.info

Photo by Frida Klingberg

Originally published in Plan B #34: back issues available here.

]]> http://www.planbmag.com/features/sally-shapiro/feed/ http://www.planbmag.com/features/fleet-foxes/ http://www.planbmag.com/features/fleet-foxes/#comments Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:22:53 +0000 Hayley Avron http://www.planbmag.com/?p=1151 “Everything is inspiring if you sit down and think about it long enough. Like when you say one word
over and over, and it starts to lose all meaning and just becomes sound.”

As if to prove Robin Pecknold wrong, his band Fleet Foxes’ music becomes more meaningful the more that you listen to it. Listen to their new, eponymously titled debut album for Bella Union over and over and it all makes sense. What begins as crystalline harmonies over simple guitar lines, burgeons upon a second listen into a complex dressing of a song: a thousand layers, keeping it warm, keeping it heartfelt.

What first attracted you all to each other?
“None of us take anything too seriously…the main compulsion in the band is to have a good time.”

Have you come from a musical community, or are you loner sailors?
“The Seattle music community is amazing! No sense of competition, just pure support from everyone for everybody (in my experience). It’s a really inspiring place to be – we’d hate to be loner sailors. Bands from Seattle like the Cave Singers, Past Lives, Throw Me The Statue and so many others inspire us as folks and musicians – I would recommend this place to anybody.”

How do the physical surroundings of where you come from affect your music?
“Speaking for myself – and probably everybody else in the band – for the longest time I was living in this fairly dark apartment. It was on the ground floor, so I always had to have all the blinds drawn,
and since it was right next to the garbage cans, I usually had to have the windows closed too.
So I guess that place inspired some feeling of escape that made it into the music. It’s nice to get out of town for a few days and write songs, but I think you can be creative anywhere. We don’t need 50 lit candles in the shape of a pentagram on a bear skin rug to eke out a melody.”

What scares you – and what do you think this says about you?
“As a big music geek kid, growing up, I came to the conclusion that once you hit a certain age you lose all your musical prowess; it’s all downhill after a certain point. When I was 14, I was thinking things like ‘Brian Wilson was 24 when he did Pet Sounds. If I don’t start now I’ll never beat that’ or stupid things like that. It all seems fairly silly now. I think the scariest (in a good way) thing I could imagine would be to be alone on a sailboat days away from land. I hope I get to do that someday.”

www.myspace.com/fleetfoxes

Originally published in Plan B #34: back issues available here.

]]> http://www.planbmag.com/features/fleet-foxes/feed/ http://www.planbmag.com/features/one-way-tomorrows-parties/ http://www.planbmag.com/features/one-way-tomorrows-parties/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:04:26 +0000 Lauren http://www.planbmag.com/?p=1125 Late Of The Pier are on a one-way trip to all tomorrows after-parties.

“There’s too much respect in music. You’ve got to stamp all over your influences to get the shards you can use to build new influences with the glue of instinct. Don’t have respect.”

You’ll know this lot. They’re the ones who released 2007’s weirdest single, ‘Bathroom Gurgle’: a behemoth of sound pretty much unprecedented in mainstream indie-pop with its threefold ability to be at once completely inexplicable, completely like Queen and a completely sensible thing to create.
I mean, why the hell not? If you cross gender-indeterminate wails of pleasure/pain with quadruped rhythms lifted from an aerobics programme as practised by NASA, then sure, people are gonna LOVE it. D’you really think the public wants to slouch around beneath a beige veneer, dribbling into Caffè Nero froth? Nah. It’s all pretence. What people actually want is their drums to sound like 20 heathens bashing Neolithic totems into the ground; their falsettos to be sung by asexual witches casting a hex on the chorus.

Listening now, ‘Bathroom Gurgle’ is still as ludicrous as it was several months ago – but the cynic in me eventually buckled when exposed to the physical impulses it seemed to generate in my friend Andrew. Anything that makes anyone move like that is definitely something. Their latest, a re-recorded ‘Space And The Woods’, dishes out the kind of guitar-hybrid sine waves that reduce – no, elevate – you to new levels of movement, while sounding kind of like everything the, erm, Bravery* so wanted to be, but failed so disgustingly at. For that, ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to give this foursome from Castle Donington, Nottingham, your time – and so we catch up with them via third-party email as luck serves them a backhander and dirty thieves nick their laptops in Amsterdam.

“It all began via a mutual dislike of the education system and a click of the fingers,” explains Unidentified Late Of The Pier Member #1 across electronic signals and many miles of wire. “The first gig I ever saw was Whirlwind Heat at the Liars Club in Nottingham and it totally inspired me,” remembers Sam (Eastgate, singer); “I used to want to be like Guy Picciotto from Fugazi – totally unpredictable and brilliant,” continues Sam Potter. And their collective intent? Their reason to make music? “It’s a life enhancer,” intones the Mystery Voice (by a process of elimination, either Andrew Faley or Ross Dawson). “It’s a drug without the hangover, and it’s not illegal. It’s also good for getting rid of the Blue Meanies.”

Late Of The Pier certainly achieved that for plenty of kidz while shaking ass at various festivals last summer; then scuttled away to nurture more glam slams towards adolescence in the studio, securing the musical investment of a fatherly Erol Alkan as producer in the process. His position at the helm of their upcoming LP marks the band out for fans of unpretentious, extroverted dance-jams (although their fun-punch beats and Disney synths hardly require endorsement, ‘cause your limbs judge for themselves.) “Our first contact with Erol came about when [Andrew] Faley freaked him out via MySpace. We started off along a misty curve; met Erol and blasted off at six times the speed. We’re now on top of a cliff looking out over a vast plateau. We constructed a long-handled net out of Erol’s analogue equipment and scooped up the mist. Sometimes we lie awake thinking about Erol’s eyes…he’s got murderous eyes.”

As a tangible aura of pre-release excitement emanates from the band’s virtual typescript, I ask
for snapshots of their worsts and their bests, their pasts and their futures. “Playing the 333 in London when the toilets were leaking. There was piss coming through the ceiling, through our amplifiers and out of our voices – and into the piss-soaked ears of the crowd” counts for the former, apparently.
For the latter, there’s the time they played “in London with Jack Peñate before everyone knew who he was. We finished and just decided to drive to Cornwall. We spent the next few days walking around forests and psychic fairs, sleeping in the car or on beaches and living on cider and sandwiches. Everything’s influenced by everything – things we’ve seen, things we’ve eaten, heard, thought, smelt, dreamed up. It’s life and it’s endless. There’s so much in the music, it’s impossible to say.”

*Author cannot assume responsibility for mental or physical trauma incurred by the inclusion of this reference.

lateofthepier.com

Originally published in Plan B #34: back issues available here.

]]> http://www.planbmag.com/features/one-way-tomorrows-parties/feed/ http://www.planbmag.com/features/somewhere-there/ http://www.planbmag.com/features/somewhere-there/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:12:24 +0000 Noel Gardner http://www.planbmag.com/?p=1111 Thousands of punk bands have used personal and political paranoia as a crutch for their songwriting. Others have channelled genuine delusionary states into musical creativity. It’s questionable if anyone has managed to marry these notions in the way Rudimentary Peni have – a ruthless twinning of the surreal and the satirical tempered only by a deft and near-unmatched-in-punk musicality.

The option of isolating one element of this Hertfordshire trio – Nick Blinko’s sociopathic lyrical volleys (dense, meta-referential rhymes seriously comparable to no-one save maybe Wu-Tang at their conspiratorial heights) from the elemental rush of their music from the visionary, mindrazingly intricate artwork drawn by vocalist/guitarist Blinko for each release – is simply unviable. From their formation in 1980, Rudimentary Peni have espoused an ethos where the marketing of rock music was held up as the tawdry parade it was, and in doing so made themselves The Complete Package. Sweet irony.

David Tibet of Current 93 has been one of the most vocal and important cheerleaders for Rudimentary Peni, and especially Nick’s auxiliary activities in art and literature. “I had long been a fan of authors like Lovecraft and Machen, and I saw in Nick Blinko honouring similar obsessions to the ones that mattered to me,” he explains. “Nick and RP were absolutely sui generis: neither band nor the individuals could be copied in any meaningful sense as they were so absolutely themselves, free of artifice and fashion.”

As pre-Peni experimental synth ensemble The Magits, featuring Nick and drummer Jon Greville, drifted apart, bassist Grant Matthews came in to complete the RP lineup. Their commitment to recording in favour of playing live, which they considered a trying trial, provided foundation for a cloudy enigma that surrounds the band to this day, and also ensured their eponymous 12-track debut EP was about as good as it could have been. As good as punk could be. Delivered at predominantly hurtling pace, clipped and sinewy, it’s a self-evident punk record, yet it’s hard to overstate how alarmingly Other an effect is achieved – peaking perhaps with ‘Teenage Time Killer’, which has an intro that sounds like something Sonic Youth spent 15 years tuning their guitars to lock into.

If Rudimentary Peni is an anarcho punk record it’s only by virtue of context. The politics in the words convey intense itches of dissatisfaction, but chiefly look inward, or shun direct protest song for knotty penmanship. However, the time of the single’s release found the band visiting Crass at their Dial House commune, playing an inaugural London show with The Subhumans and Flux Of Pink Indians and recording a second EP, ‘Farce’, for Crass Records. Although it’s dressed in sonic sackcloth
by the anarcho era’s generic clatter-fi production, there’s not a moment when the rage subsides, Nick’s vocal delivery perhaps its most intense ever.

“I suppose I first heard of RP quite a while after I became a fan of Crass,” recalls David Tibet. “Not long after moving to London I became friends with [Crass associate] Annie Anxiety, and moved into her squat in South London. Through her I got to know Crass as well as many other anarcho punk bands. RP were one of the bands who most moved me, perhaps because I admired the intensity of their vision, as well as the fact that their frame of reference wasn’t the fairly standard – and perfectly valid and admirable – communitarian/humanitarian one.”

Consider, then, the insert that came with 1983’s Death Church LP: alongside broadsides against vivisection and bloated punk icons, Grant tells a weary tale of the Autonomy Centre, an anarchist setup swiftly scuppered by glue-fucked punks under the impression that this was a green light to do and take anything for free. Death Church is an exemplary creation, but it was assembled by a band cast asunder by Grant’s battle with cancer (thankfully conquered) and cast into a scene whose ideals failed to mask shortcomings. Little wonder they didn’t release another record until 1989’s tribute to HP Lovecraft, Cacophony, and undertook another lengthy silence until 1995’s Pope Adrian The 37th Psychristiatric, based around an incarcerated Blinko’s delusions that he was in line to become Pope. Since then, up until the new No More Pain, the band have adhered to their most comfortable format – 15-20-minute EPs of compact, anthemic songs, lyrics condensed into three or four lines per song.

A constant backdrop to Peni activity has been Blinko’s art and prose, which has resulted in a series of exhibitions and two novels. David Tibet got back in contact with Nick in the Nineties when both were featured in an exhibition of ‘outsider art’; his print media wing, Durtro Press, publishes the second Blinko tome later this year. “There are 99 chapters, and it will be around 200 pages long,” informs Tibet. “It’s the verbal equivalent of Nick’s pictorial work. Claustrophobic, nightmarish, funny, perplexing, beautiful, and 93,000 other adjectives.”

Rudimentary Peni have been architects of some truly immersive music, immersion in which makes Tibet’s loving description of Nick Blinko’s art seem equally applicable to the records he’s helmed. “His usual absence of colour always makes me see it as colour, and when he works in colour it makes me think of how Klimt would paint the essential natures of germs and viruses. Apocalyptic hallucinatory horror? Children in a playground all possessed by the Pit simultaneously and screaming and laughing?”

Noel Gardner talks to Grant Matthews and Nick Blinko

I’m given to understand that despite continuing to make punk records, RP listen to little or no punk rock during the creative process. How come the band has more or less stayed within the understood boundaries of punk music?
Grant: “Our listening habits have varied over the decades. From Echoes Of Anguish onwards I came to the conclusion that I wanted to try to improve what we were doing within the understood boundaries of punk music. This notion comes from George Friedrich Handel; he wrote vast amounts of music during his lifetime, all of which was in a certain vein. By doing this, he would occasionally write something that was better than his earlier similar output. The influence of Indian classical music can be heard in the way in which some of our songs repeat while speeding up, a technique that can be heard in some Indian religious chanting.”

Are you uncomfortable by how much people are willing to buy (or at least sell!) your debut novel The Primal Screamer for these days? (Three figure sums aren’t uncommon.) Did you write it with an audience in mind?
Nick: “One-hundredth of such a purchase price could cause a difference elsewhere in the world.
Is there only one way to spend money – a hundred lottery tickets or a novel? I had no idea who might read The Primal Screamer, nor do I have any concept of the possible readership of a new book.”

Do the members of RP still adhere to the principles of anarchy and autonomy that were promoted on the sleeve of Death Church?
Grant: “I was the only one who was ever into that political thing, though I never defined myself
as an anarchist. When I helped out at the Autonomy Centre I noticed that in the absence of formal power structures, informal power structures take their place anyway. As far as compromising with society is concerned, society continues to exclude the likes of me anyway, so I’ve never really been faced with those kind of dilemmas.”

Originally published in Plan B #34: back issues available here.

]]> http://www.planbmag.com/features/somewhere-there/feed/