90s Music Monday

Once, in art class at school, I tried to bluff past my suckiness at the aesthetic by claiming I was creating modern, abstract peices whereby my teacher primly told me that you have to be good before you can break the rules. I think I probably responded that I was TIRED of these philistines not appreciating my work and that their insistence in wallowing in their own moribund, bourgeois notions of the same tired art clichés was bringing on a attack of the vapours.

I spent a lot of time in detention at school. A lot. Those who know me are, at this very moment, failing to feign surprise.

Anyway ...

If you are not a fan of the Warp records oeuvre then most of the output by bands like Autechre can sound like so much white noise. Don't believe me? Check out this video for "Grantz Graf"- it sounds like a skipping record. I'm being serious.

And yet it's strangely mesmerising.

Now I'm not nearly hip enough to be one of the people who really gets Autechre but I do kind of appreciate it. I even, through an series of events, have a copy of Gescom on mini-disc.

I also have a soft spot for Tom "Squarepusher" Jenkinson, another Warp artist,  who is also an accomplished 'classical' musician who fuses jazz with more abstract breaks and fast cut-ups. It's more accessible than Autechre but still pretty challenging stuff  -yet the jazz heritage clearly shines through. Like jazz itself it takes the rules and creatively breaks them.

Like my teacher was trying to point out - if you know the rules well enough then you can take risks with them, skirt the boundaries. There are obvious echoes to this in the world of molecular gastronomy which, by going back to fundamentals axioms, Principia Mathematica style, has produced results from the sublime to the shocking.

In music, squatting menacingly on both ends of that spectrum is the malevolent grin of Richard D. James.

Richard D James

It's funny - some people strive to be cool, to be known. They blow huge amounts of money, the go to all the hip parties, they make the right friends. They try. But some people are just naturally cool and some people are cool because they don't want to be.

And some people end up with a mythos.

There are stories about Richard James. That he owns a tank and a Russian submarine (true, apparently). That he owns the silver structure in the middle of Elephant and Castle roundabout (false). That he was once woken up by a courier from a record label wanting a remix he'd promised so he ran upstairs and grabbed a random DAT tape and the record company didn't notice the difference. That at 11 he created sound from a ZX81(which has no sound hardware) by using it to retune the video signal and cause different pitched hums from the cathode ray tube in the TV it was connected to.

Some of these stories he starts, some of them are started about him. Some of them are true. Some of them aren't.

Who cares? This is man who encodes image in tracks so that they're only visible using a spectogram viewer. A man who produces practically unlistenable glitches, squelches and bleeps and yet also manages to get to number 16 in the charts.

With songs like these.

Readers of a nervous disposition should probably just go watch a Norah Jones video.

of which James said

'Come to Daddy' came about while I was just hanging around my house, getting pissed and doing this crappy death metal jingle. Then it got marketed, and a video was made, and this little idea that I had, which was a joke, turned into something huge. It wasn't right at all.

The video for Windowlicker fits in 44 uses of the word "fuck" in under four minutes, averaging out at about 1 every 3 seconds. Both it and Come to Daddy were directed by Chris Cunningham who got his start doing the puppets for Spitting Image and later, the sculpture and animatronics for Alien³ and followed up Come to Daddy with the rather more mainstream Frozen video for Madonna.

To put it another way, it's Not Safe for Work. You've been warned.  It's also 10 minutes long but worth every second.

 
If you're not the kind of anal retentive like me who actually counted all the windows on the limo - there are 38.

And the French sample half way through is James' then French girlfriend and roughly translates as "I like to shag my dog" albeit in mildly obscure slang.

...

I like to think of myself as sort of an educational service. Not a very good one mind you, but a service none the less.