Bloc Party

Thoughts on a Techno Festival in Norfolk.

1. Strange to think back to the days when a baggy T-shirt and baggier jeans seemed not just relatively cool, but imbued with an almost moral value, like it was a statement on consumerist lifestyles. Of course, the thing is with techno is that it's all in the mind- your thoughts are escaping, assuming new forms, rebelling, dreaming, willing. This buzz is what makes Techno seem life-changing. In some ways it did seem like it changed my life. I wonder.

2. Surgeon's DJ set was absolutely incredible. The rigour with which he re-tools other people's tracks is somehow pursued with intense joy; like an chess genius/obsessive luring his opponent in and then crushing him. The sense of control is thrilling. And the sounds- really, really lush.

3. Following on from (2), Techno seems to have renegotiated the organic/synthetic dichotomy that often seemed to haunt it. Technology is soft and seductive in the era of the mobile phone, I guess. I think Futurism seemed to be an end in itself for so long, but now the Future is actually here, Futurist ideas are mor fluid and intertextual. Techno is pop music remixed, purified.

"Bow E3 / 0-7-9-6-1 8-9-7-0-3-3"

One thing about Wiley's bunker style mentality is that he raises the stakes in a personal way, putting more and more personal details into his lyrics (see above?)- scratching off his own skin to provide material for his art. See also "Think I'm Going Mad". It's another reason why he can be such a potent battle MC- he digs deep and comes up with something more authentic and tougher.

Anyway, the set with that above lyric was Rinse FM Sunday 3rd December. Here's the chunk of it I caught. Wiley in practice mode, gathering strength, with Maxmimumm laying down a seriously abrasive set of tunes.

Been feeling cold this summer

As mentioned elsewhere, folk music has been an obsession this year, from Anne Briggs to Espers to Lammas Nights Laments etc. Part of this had to do with a distinct feeling of disconnection from much music I'd been feeling last year- folk music, which lacks a single psychological focus but instead aims to unfold and unfurl an age-old narrative, was part of this healing process. Something I learnt to read and helped to reconnect (where did grime fit into this? I think the deconstructionist impulse, the joy of misreadings always carries a certain frisson)

But music is never just about readings, its about the body, about embodiment (grime an exoskeleton, a meshing of beats and lyrics whose very structure always seems to aim at being toughter, stronger, quicker), and also about atmosphere, setting. Out walking the other day, I saw a large pool of water floating with grass and organic debris, triggering the same sort of yearning that folk music satisfies- for permanence, for the cycles of life, for an understanding of life outside your own (ie a yearning for sharing I guess). The kind of thing Henry David Thoreau writes about so well.

I've particularly loved wyrd folk's ability to express this deep sense of yearning and permanence, while also using the studio to transform and warp sense of time. It can be like an echo of the past, preserved in aspic. Waiting For Another Day by Water Into Wine Band- which contains the lyric above- is particularly incredible in this respect, with its extended melodic intro of glockenspiel and bass guitar- before launching into an extended nostalgic lament accompanied by cello and guitar. It's nostalgic to an astonishing level of emotional intensity, yet comes out the end with a major key section of "I can see the sun begin to rise, on a sea far away". It's a song which seems to feel time to an incredible degree, yet also tries to change it, to construct an idea of the future.

Perhaps this is why in many ways I can find the idea of hauntology somewhat depressing. The idea that ghosts-of-my-life could permanetly colour and warp musical expression.

Anyway, while at the railway station on the same day, the bing-bong next customer please melody followed the same two notes as that song. Uncanny.

"My T-shirts make more money than your mixtapes"

The ATP Festival this weekend featured, amongst a hundred or so guitar improv bands (highlights- Bark Haze, Blood Stereo; lowlights- Sunburnt Hand of The Man) three people wearing those Boy Better Know T Shirts including me, and one guy busting a Dirty Canvas one. It's only matter of time before Skepta headlines the main stage.

The whole festival I had Skepta's lyric "Boy better know it's money making season / book a flight out to New York for no reason" going round my head. Deplorable on envirnmental grounds, but that's the way that such lyrics work isn't it- often you express yourself through divergence from the norm, by stating the outrageous, the unthinkable.

Regarding the God's Gift / Wiley controversy discussed on Dissensus , Wiley seems to have been doing these long, soul-searching solo shows for a while now and from experience I reckon the times you fear Wiley has lost it are the times he's most potent. He goes into his shelter, goes bunker style, and fires off a load of war lyrics, and always comes back stronger. The way grime lyrics are so singularly focused seems to favour this boom or bust cycle- a one line flows need a focus, a locus, a target to aim at, something to play off, and these periods of insularity always end with Wiley eventually breaking out with explosive results. It's this which makes you feel grime, more than any other type of hip hop, is kind of a Darwinism in action- ideas are recycled, mutated, bettered, and it's always the toughest lyric which survive.

DJ Maximumm sounds great on some of these sets. He crossfades tracks into each other, notably a Roll Deep track into Wiley's "Pardon" track from Tunnel Vision 5, hitting all the "what"s of the latter into the end of each of Trim's lines from the former. He used to do this a while back, but six months ago, it was hard to find two tracks of sufficient quality to make it good. But with the level of current tracks, it's big!

grime stuff

"Sorry, sorry, pardon, what?". This is a new Wiley vocal on the Eskimo rhythm, which I think is on Tunnel Vision volume 5. The chorus, that phrase repeated again and again is as sharp and cute as anything Dizzee Rascal did. Just that phrase blows it up.

Wiley seems in a strange Jekyll and Hyde way at the moment. He's on Rinse at the moment sounding a bit drunk, slagging off various producers and MCs in a rambling style. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though, as some of his most random moments have been his most inspired; when you think he's run into writer's block, that's always the time he digs deep and finds something new. He has an alter-ego at the moment as a kind of ragga-MC, he's done tracks with Riko in this mode- it's utterly surreal and yet somehow a very effective mask. The effect is a little like Elephant Man- perversely awkward and for that reason compelling.

Heard a simply amazing Roll Deep show the other week. It's difficult to know if Roll Deep still exist as a crew, as there seems little cross-fertilisation between, say, Skepta and Wiley, they don't seem to appear together much. It's like the England's cricket team's test squad and one day international squad, no overlap, just a vague sense of collective effort.

But this show was indeed amazing. What's striking was the production- almost P-funk like in many places; everyone seems to be doing tunes on their laptops, using those soft synths, and the emphasis is phatness rather than toughness. That's what's running things, an almost futurist RnB thing. Slick, perhaps, but more fat freaky bursts rather than a sensuous glide. Its got everything.

We Don't Play Guitars

My top 10 of the year has no electric guitars in it. Something I'm quite glad about. There have been some rocking things I've liked in the last few years- Acid Mothers Temple etc- but really it's like flat-track bullying I think, thrashing a dead horse. The only guitar band I can remember really fucking with the rhythmic foundations of rock have been Lightening Bolt. But Comets Of Fire is essentially just rock psycedelia at a volume of eleven. And in this age of over-compression, that's not essentially a good thing.

Close Your Eyes

... listen to Garna on Rinse FM playing an amazing cut up of Acen's "Trip II The Moon". What an astonishing track that was (this relick is fantastic too). With rave, a large part of the fascination was how it doesn't fit together, but yet retains its momentuum- samples are detuned, timings misfire etc. It shouldn't function, yet it's awesomely powerful, like a massive killer robot concocted from scrap metal. "Anasthesia", "Night In Motion", all of these tracks encapsulate this sort of industrial-mechanical ruthlessness.

"Trip II The Moon", like "Charly", is almost a step beyond this however. They actually fit together really smoothly (despite Charly's subtly out of tune bass, it still rumbles forward like an eager beaver). These tracks are beautifully dextrous and agile, like clowns on stilts. "Charly" in those sparkling synth riffs which don't go anywhere but just dance on the keyboard like a fast-feet workout; "Trip ii The Moon" in those sliding synths like in line skaters. Sorry about the mixed metaphors, but that's the thing about rave- it was not nearly as compressed as much music these days (my ears are still ringing from Guns and Roses 2 exploding into my headphones just now, fr'instance), so there was so much space to to do these things....

"We're back... we're back..."

The Essentials are back! And were on Cameo's the other week. This time round, they're Remerdee, K-Dot (now "Dotamus"), Jendor and Bossman, with other producers stepping into the shoes of the absent Da Vinche.

You can't find them on Soulseek, but The Essentials were undoubtedly the biggest crew through late 2004 to early 2005 (despite being from South London, and despite only really having one great MC; these guys hunted in packs). Tracks like "Can't Bring It To Essentials" and "Shut Down Shop" and "K Dot" still send shivers down the spine. The genius wasn't simply down to one member- producer Da Vinche had great moments in his own right, but the impact of the tracks was down to the way every beat had a corresponding lyric, the MCs rotating like the barrels on minigun before any one can overheat. Their obvious predeccesor in this was Ruff Sqwad, but whereas Ruff Sqwad go for density, The Essentials opted for clarity- barked commands ("State Your Name"-"Shut Down Shop") that demanded submission. The three tunes names above are almost a three-note salvo, each one more terse and tense, built on close, hammering rhythms that knock the wind out of you, culminating in the astonishingly tough K-Dot which has a brass riff like a war cry.

The last thing I remember from them was "Pressure", a powerful, strung out lyric from Remerdee about "doctor tells me I gotta stop drinking" with an omnipresent buzz in the background, the kind of noise that can drive you mad without realising. Since then, no releases (merely "politics"), and now a return with at track entitled "So Much Better". What sounds like an RnB title conceals a manically euphoric reannouncement of the unit, with a declamatory chorus ("it's gonna be so much better / I'm gonna make so much cheddar"). The beat, produced by Virgo, is something between Low Deep's spare hip hoppy feel with a Terrah Danjah esque synth-shiver in the background. It's one of those tracks with so much metallic texture that it feels like your windows are rattling all the way through.

Jendor sounds amazing on this- "I'm back in the box like jack and when a boy yanks they're under attack ... WIND ME UP, BOO!". You can almost feel the SPROING in his voice. In contrast Remerdee's paradoxical strength is his lack-of-flow, the slightly hesitant quality which suggests that, for him, ever line matters. He can spit "make papers like Metro ... taking over like Tesco" and it feels serious business. In the same show, Cameo played a solo Remerdee track which was a slow hip hop tempo but frank and hard hitting, going on about his kids etc. It features a real stand-up-and-be-counted line- "when I pick up the mic and stand up, the whole of South London stands up".

Will be interesting to see what they do next. You wonder if they've got the MCs and producers on board to generate the incredible excitement of last time. But individual MCs were never the point of the Essentials, it was the combined force of the unit.

Junior Boys/Kode 9

Packed. Dubstep sounding amazing on the system there- playful, tough, pliable. Lots of squiggles and detail in the mix, little pockets of fun. "Stagger" by Skream sounding as much upfront fun as a classic ska track, but without the nostalgia that that might suggest. That big bassline sound of his is really his own, he can twist it and turn in any which way. Digital Mystix don't have that sense of fun for me. Junior Boys somewhat disappointing for me- not quite sure why, it was just like watching St Etienne or something. As if someone else had done all the hard work for you.

Dirty Canvas- D Double E, Frisco, Skepta

Once again good fun and good times down at the ICA, pleasantly hungover after too much beer, but the pint never felt heavy in my hand even when boogying, which is always a good sign. Couple of minus points though- Frisco only took to the stage around 12am, and only then seemingly being mentored by Skepta, who consequently overshadowed him a little. Frisco is probably the Cesc Fabregas of grime- big talent, getting the crowd hyper on the pre-drop bit of "Midnight Request Line", but he needed a bit of prodding from Skepta, his Thierry Henry, to keep him in the right direction. After some pretty hype MCing from this pair, D Double E came on and did but one track, "D Double Signal". It had taken some iron-pumping bars from Skepta to get the blood pumping in the venue, and I'm guessing D Double felt that sort of MCing wasn't his forte. When he drifted off stage, I said to him he should do more bars, people would have loved it. "Yeah, I know" he said. He sounded weighed down by it all.

Lots of house playing when we came in. Though house can be powerful and sexual, there's a kind of non-inclusive sensuality about it- get your groove on, keep up with these beats, survival of the fittest [both senses of the word]. Until it invents a bassline that seduces you in like reggae (or grime) I'm not terribly interested.

...

spent much of yesterday walking down the South side of the Thames on the way to Rotherhithe, seeking out tasty Finnish goods at the fair there. It's strange how, apart from the redeveloped bits, it's actually rather hard to get to the river- one can walk parallel to it, but not alongside. The light was fast disappearing behind buildings, and rven thought it was an amazing beautifulday, sunlight as clear as mountain water, you could only see the sun in reflected windows of massive tower blocks, of which there are many down there. You could see the sunset but not feel it, almost a kind of urban light pollution.

Triplets

Worth listening back to Kano's "Boys Love Girls" and the bit he goes "girls have gotta be- not lacking- big bum and- good looking- good lucking for an ugly duckling". How does he get those consonants in there? His tongue practically clicks as he says it.

Ruff Thoughts

Guns and Roses 2 has made a decent fist of redeeming an otherwise poor year for grime. As things stand, I suddenly feel optimistic about the genre. Partly it's cultural footprints like kids on the bus playing Logan Sama, amazing Lords of the Mics clashes on You Tube, and more frivalously yet most fun-ly, the Boy Better Know T-shirts in the window at Uptown. "My T-shirts make more money than your mixtapes" as Skepta says.

But the biggest clue that grime has Picked Itself Up is a Roll Deep set on Barefiles from 3rd September, as pointed out by some nice person on Dissensus. The goods tracks are by all the usual culprits, but gawd are they good. That "Hickory Dickory Dock" tune- is this new?- basically a similar take on "Heat Up", features a first line from Trim which flashes out like a rabbit punch- "I treat beef like a house and move in, Trim's in the house, who's in?". It also features- BREEZE [yeah] FLOW DAN [uh huh] and SCRATCHY [safe], a real roll call, all sounding like they'd never gone off the boil. Even more exciting is a Wiley track with Riko where Eskiboy take two verses, the first in a ragga style which is absolutely blazing. Skepta also has some killer tunes on this set, one notably with a production which is basically classical strings like IMP Batch's "Gyp" taken into real star-hopping territory. Adrenaline!

It seems some MCs are taking longer verses on some of these tunes. Perhaps influenced by Wiley's one man stand on "Crash Bandicoot", there are some really long ones- Skepta particularly, in fact he was doing this whole Roll Deep show on his own. It seems MCs are looking for more content.

Which brings us nicely to Ruff Sqwad- you explicitly hear a yearning for more content, for authenticity in Guns and Roses 2, where one of the MCs goes "I need more content, just like Nas". Most striking- and most encouragingly for grime- is how morally conflicted it is, vis a vis the ethics of getting that dough (notably, they don't say the title of the album hardly at all- a newcomer could be forgiven for asking why the hell it's called Guns and Roses). Some of the best hip hop ever has balanced atop a life of contradiction, as when Mobb Deep switch, bipolar style, from palpable self-loathing to robotic terminator-esque self-assestion in one verse. You can hear Ruff Sqwad negotiating these contradictions of money verses morality line by line, as if they're growing up with every verse (which hell maybe they are, Tinchy Stryder sounds like a man now, has got many more bars, and doesn't call himself Tinchy). There's a serious revaluation of their values going on, a realistation that this could possibly be already their zenith, that life has to be dealt with as well as dreams.

One track is based around the chant "if having money causes hate and and being broke ain't fun, which one do you want", and the verses somehow manage to spin out this dilemma in a emotional, non-didactic manner really rather alien to grime (although JME's semi-conscious tracks "Serious" and "Don't Chat" had some good lyrics, you didn't feel much pain or struggle). Stryder's talks about getting the paper, but twice he feels a reality check- "then again", "on the other hand"- and you get the briefest snatched moment of soulful reflection- "man ain't trying to get all rich and sad". One of the other MCs [sorry] attempts to skip the question by claiming juve status- "I'm only 19 years old for god's sake",

Another track ("How You Living") is simply a hard-headed, balance-sheet breakdown of life as the group counting their blessings. Almost a time-sheet of their day-to-day, it simply drips with real-life detail- "I'm not starving, I eat food, I'm still grafting"- "still living on the bacon sarnies" - "gambling on the bingo, trying to get the money for the single"- "the money's alright- I've got shows to do, so I'm flowing all night". This is what grime should feel like; the texture of life. Twice the track explicitly attempts to peel away the surfaces of Armani clothing and tinted windows and ask what substance (content, again) there is to this life- "tell me, how does it look from the outside?", "you might see me in the blacked-out punto ... and I guess it looks good through the window". Hidden in the track is an astonshing poetic gem, I think from Slicks- "I pay for my sins, don't own nothing else". What a line.

Even the next track, the "party tune", "Buy this f____ing rhythm", is, in all seriousness, a nutshell-analysis of grime's [non-]economics; with no grime fans willing to fork out for vinyl, it's a last ditch attempt to make a beat so tight that everyone will need to spend notes to get the instrumental on wax (and the beat is fat). This track is notable for a line so brilliant I can't believe Tinchy Strider doesn't give it a grandstand delivery (I would)- instead he subtly purrs "bootleggers will bring so much heat it'll make man look like Haagen-Dazs".

There's a fair bit more which could be said about this album (oo, freudian slip- it's officially just a "mixtape"), but this is what's giving it legs for me- the content, the detail, the counting of their scars and abttle-wounds.

Intertitle

Block Synapse was suffering Blocked Writing. Normal if intermittant service is now resumed.