From ghostorchids@hotmail.com Mon Jun 10 17:18:25 2002
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2002 15:56:06 -0700
From: Ghost Orchids <ghostorchids@hotmail.com>
To: ghostorchids@hotmail.com
Subject: Fwd: contextx

GHOSTORCHIDS EXTENDED DEBRIEFING
monday, june 10, 2002.
scrambled codes, blistering precedents, sound sources for
current refraction, theivery, obsession.

1. P.i.L: Second Edition. We've been covering "careering" of late, might
record it at some point. rewrote the rhythm track, added some really
fucked "drums in the dark" to the beginning, kept lyrics and devastating
>bass. Saw this on TV as a 14 year old in Frederick County Virginia; had
it on a video tape with Kraftwerk's "radioactivity" and Sonic Youth
performing "I wanna be your dog" with the indigo girls on David Sanborn's
"Night Music"--the wierd shit on network TV in those days would just blow
your mind. I mean, we didn't have cable, because cable wouldn't reach to
where we were. In any case, the tape was lost in a fire, and I've not
seen it since; visions of levene just hitting the squalling delayed
keyboard laconically, and j.lydon's contorted face. that was something
else.

2. JJ Fad, "supersonic" brutal drum machine simplicity by circa NWA Dr.
Dre: beautiful, "ghetto-tech" 10 years early.

3. Cabaret Voltaire: The Original Sound of Sheffield '83-87.

Art funk, proto hiphop, beatbox insanity: relentless, creepy, wildly
incorporative, from 'tape music' to larry graham to fractured breakbeats.
CV's been unfairly discounted as "industrial"--in fact, the whole genre
known as industrial has been unfairly discounted, post 1990, and it's
prime time for a reevaluation. This "best of" is mostly tranced-out 12"
remixes that improve drastically on album versions... you simply MUST
HEAR.

4. newcleus: "jam on it" and "cyborg dance": got it for 99 cents at a
video store in Salt Lake City, which was otherwise devoid of a single
record worth even looking at. strangely virtuousic, melancholic hip-hop
tech-funk, by what sounds like one guy and a million vocoders flipping
out in a closed room. Amazingly
baroque arrangements underneath the writhing synthbass.

5. ACID HOUSE: there are about a million things to say about this genre,
simplest among them being that this is electronic music from when
electronic music was particular, ugly, corrosive, avant-garde, versus
classicist (X-Press 2, nu-jazz) suburban (trance, 1015 folsom), generic
(moby, chemical bros.) bland (k n'd), virtuousic and heavy metally (most
things on schematic seem pointlessly overarticulated to the point of
wankiness to me; see also most of squarepusher) or narcotic, introverted
and pointless (autechre "confield", brothomstates, "geogaddi", which
wasn't anything). i.e. acid house was about as fucking punk as you could
get in the late 80's; it was danceable, dark, fucked, alien, nasty, cold,
sexy, circular. in 1988 this was a new form, with all of the densities
and weirdnesses that that newness brings. and so technotronic and milli
vanilli end up on "house" compilations with the avant-garde of acid
techno: model 500 and babyford and dj pierre, along with belgian EBM and
industrial, and post punk-funk proto-rave. And in that context these
records all sound completely different, stranger, rawer.

Yes even--rather, especially--technotronic. Strange alliances are created
by history,
in the name of new and corrosive sounds. you cannot go wrong with any of
the following: anything on belgian label "new beat". anything on "hard
beat". v/a "house hallucinates".
v/a "classic acid." and as far as albums(these stretch the definition,
but who cares): 808 state, "newbuild" and ex:el, lots of the raved out
shit on pyschic tv's "Towards the infinite
beat" and coil's "love's secret domain". The recent Warp 2xCD
"Influences"
compilation is a fucking thrill, and includes lots of key figures and
songs--phuture, model 500, lfo, etc/ to start, and the Warp "Classics" is
almost as good.

6. The best reggae album of all time is The Congos: The Heart of the
Congos, on Blood and Fire. The music is, to my mind, the best shit that
Lee Perry ever had a hand in: it has the disassociated, hallucinogenic
repetition that everyone loves about dub, but with gorgeous and ghostly
mindfuck blissed-out vocals on top. dark and heavenly.

7. Speaking of blissed out: www.blissout.com. Simon Reynolds's web page,
full of frequently hilarious and idiosyncratic thoughts on the music of
the past 20 years, on the state of the dance nation; this guy's written
the book--literally--on acid and techno, and has written the most (only?)
cogent things I've read about the current punk-funk and electro revisions
of late.

 8. So Solid Crew: Fuck It: the mix compilation--this has not gotten good
reviews and i hesitated to buy it for months becuase I hate these "mix"
things. so shame on me, its fucking wonderful. joyous, twitchy, frenetic,
like busta and aaliyah singing a duet over a bizarro-world soundclash of
photek and ragga dancehall. a new form, and that's what we're after,
after all.

8. dopplereffect and drexciya, and green velvet. for their
rhythmic intelligence, their allusiveness, their blackness, their
conceptual consistency. for the deceptive simplicity of their beat
programming, for their submerged melodic genious.The sheer purity of
their
anger, and the unaffectedness of their poses.

10. neworder: technique, for being hands down the best pop album, bar
none, of the past 20 years. i would say since "revolver". and for being
so fucking vital that it still sounds perfect and rich and thrilling
today. for combining perfect guitar pop with synth house mayhem in a way
that has yet to be bettered by anyone.

11. i am spoonbender: shown actual size...coming soon on GSL.
their pop songs finally incorporate the strange aggression of their
"album
tracks"--the basic heart-throb of the eurythmics, with the weird,
isolated, punk brutality of gary numan. And I keep having the strange
impulse to compare the vocals to the congos, but that's just me: they are
expertly interwoven, weird, and ghostly in a similar way. The best song
is the third, which spins out slowly into a echo'd out space/zone in
which
words are objects and the synth drums sound like they've time warped from
some mid-80's space opera that never was (or did talk talk actually
make that album?)...and then, surprisingly, we're reeled back into "song"
again, though nothing looks quite the same anymore.

12. and now for the point at which i lose EVERYONE. Nitzer Ebb: That
Total Age, and Belief. now here is a band that absolutely blew any cachet
or truth they had going for them, and just basically lost the plot around
1988. Or maybe the plot could no longer include them or make sense of
them post lollapalooza and the influx of metal into electronic music (see
nine inch nails, ministry, kmfdm). But the first 2 full lengths are
great, and there is a blinding remix of "join in the chant" by derrick
may; speaking of cachet, felix the housecat loves them, and included that
song on one of his mix cd's ("Buggin' Out" or some such thing). thick,
heavy, "punk" production in the context of electronic music, with weird,
thuggy vocals that sound oh-so post-DAF; gradually though, other,
unexpected things emerge from the music. An odd and fascinating ear for
melody in the mangled vocals? The stiff, garbled funk in the synth lines?
NE are a moment in music that has become completely devalued and
invisible, almost utterly "obsolete". I find this sort of thing totally
irresistible. Things like this are just waiting to be re-evaluated,
revived, to reemerge in a new context and from new conditions of
possibility. Ditto late period psychic TV, "house" era coil, DAF
themselves, early skinny puppy's noise-electro incarnation, etc.  Dis it
if you will, you'll think its great/kitschily cool soon enough.

13: kylie minogue: can't get you out of my head, original and "blue 
monday" rmx. i don't know what the weird reggaefied trance of the song is
about, but its fucking great.

14: The "white album", and the charisma, melodic brilliance, and
experimentalism of paul mccartney. for that matter, "maybe I'm amazed"
and "band on the run" as well. Watching this guy perform is like sex or
good food or something. John Lennon was such an awkward and posey
performer--McCartney always just looks fucking THRILLED to be performing.
You can't take your eyes off him: sheer, irreducible charisma.

15: Can I add how much I hate the prefix "Nu" added to
anything? Particularly "nu-jazz", which without exception sucks
completely as a genre. Or worse, I hate the use of the prefix "Neu," as
in "Neu-wave" as if anything described under that rubric actually has
anything to do with "Krautrock".

16 Can I also add: "electroclash" is obviously the best rubric under
which the current revival of vocal electronic dance music is
happening--for me because it references, in one compound word, electro,
punk rock, and the notion of the reggae/dub "soundclash"...too right. 
"Disco Nouveau" is fucking ridiculous, like something Dimitri from Paris
does--gimme a fucking break. Yeuch.

17. one more thing and i'll stop. Has no one ever fucking HEARD the music
called "no-wave"? I.e. DNA, Mars, Contortions. what is up with so many
half-shitty bands deeming themselves "no-wave", when theyre clearly
post-metal amphetamine-reptile sounding shit. And whatever their merits,
erase errata sounds nothing at all like either "no-wave" or any rough
trade band ever. The only band that comes to mind that sounds remotely
"no wave" to me is Gogogoairheart.

18: fodder for current inter-orchid coversation, among others: The
Walkmen. Talking Heads. !!!. The Vanishing. Radio Berlin/ALunaRed. Grace
Jones. Sly and the Family Stone. Trans Am's video projections. The Sun,
The Vue. "Barbarism Begins at Home". Adult. Interpol. The yeah Yeah
Yeahs. The Rapture. Human Error. John Boorman, particularly the sci-fi
mindfucks of"Zardoz" and "Excalibur". THX-1138.

Oh and Yes, I did compare !!! to the Spin Doctors and circa 1992 Frat
Funk--ian agrees, chris vehemently disagrees.

thanks and kisses, Julian/Ghostorchids


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