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Dreaming Is A Form Of Astrotravel

"Easy Listening Space Jazz, the sound of underground cavern cafes on Pluto, the noise that the aliens should have been playing in the Star Wars bar. End of the century piss-taking and/or demented genius forging new styles from old. 1950s/60s views of the future, naive ideas that come on like Eagle comic asides. Dan Dare surfing on sine waves, the Mekon getting it on with a funky/phunky Martian. Doped teenagers in love, watching the skies for clues.

Weird, warped be-bop techno jazz for the Generation X-Files."

How many more reference points do you need? From a bunch of reviews from the early part of 1996. Those were the records that were exciting me the most in those times. Not a guitar amongst them, or if there was it had been warped and whipped into a noise stranger than paradise. I've been spinning that Alec Empire set again today and it really does still sound like all of those things.

Freaky Dancin'

"There is a certain type of guitar sound that leaves all others standing, and it's a specifically non-rock sound. It's sharp, jagged sparks of rhythm. You can hear it on Robert Quine's work with the Voidoids, and in Wilko Johnson's time with Doctor Feelgood. It's there on Keith Hudson's 'Pick A Dub' and the Crown Heights Affair's 'Dancin''. Yet its heyday was down with the epochal melting pot of punk / funk / art / jazz / dub / disco, and Pat Place led that field in the late '70s / early '80s."

Kevin Pearce on Bush Tetras, from way back in 1996.

Less Structure

" 1995 was a vintage year for LPs. We were spoilt for choice, what with the Sea & Cake, Raekwon, T-Power, Pram, Genius, Springheel Jack, Wagon Christ, Mobb Deep, Spain, Red Snapper, Patrick Pulsinger, LaBradford, Speedy J, and plenty more. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, I'd argue that the best of the bunch, in terms of durability and inventiveness, has to be Bedouin Ascent's 'Music For Particles', sadly one of the more neglected records of the year."

Kevin Pearce was right. 1995 was a vintage year for albums, and all of those stand up in their own ways still. Are people out there digging for those records or are they just scrabbling around for second rate guitar jangling chancers? Me, I just re-acquainted myself with the first two A Tribe Called Quest sets. '91s The Low End Theory in particular sounds marvelously refreshing.

Do You Know The Apple?

“I never seem to get stopped in the street by zealous market researchers, asking me my opinions on life, love, the lottery and football's youth policy, but I live in hope that one day someone will ask me to name one LP which defined the early '90s in the same way that 'Searching For The Young Soul Rebels' towered over the start of the '80s. Easy, I'd say; A Man Called Adam's 'The Apple'. A record which should have irrevocably altered the future of pop, but at least the possibilities are still there for another day. I guess it just wasn't made for its time.”

So begins Kevin’s case for The Apple, in this piece penned eleven years ago. Time has barely diminished his argument or the magnificence of the album in question. It remains a tragedy that the record has never been salvaged by a reissue programme, but then perhaps that only helps keep the mystery caged. At least we can shine a torch again on Kevin’s excellent article.

Thermonuclear Sweat

Robin Tomens was another of the first Tangents writing crew. I first came across Robin through his excellent EGO fanzine, which Daniel had alerted me to back in the day. EGO was one of the best fanzines I ever came across, and Robin was always entertaining (and occasionally deliciously downright scathing) in his writing. I was so pleased when he said he wanted to contribute to Tangents, and his take on contemporary music and culture was one of the things that I felt made Tangents so diverse, particularly in those early years. I find it intriguing that when people talk about my Young and Foolish book they inevitably focus on the ‘indie’ Pop parts. It’s almost as though the parts that talk about ‘dance’ and electronic music are ignored. Maybe the writing there is not so good, but I think it’s a shame, because the records I was writing about there are every bit as essential as anything else. Let’s not forget that those were the days of trading tapes of drum’n’bass 12”s and obscure electronica every bit as much as bootlegs of Belle And Sebastian concerts and demos. Robin didn’t care much for the B&S stuff of course, but his love and knowledge of Jazz and it’s cross-pollination with the worlds of hip hop and d’n’b was impressive and, more importantly, infectious. His own Points Of Departure: Essays on Modern Jazz book, also published by Rupert’s Stride imprint was a marvellous way in for anyone who ever felt intimidated by Jazz. It still is.

Anyway, here is Robin’s Popular Classics’ piece on Defunkt’s Thermonuclear Sweat set. Enjoy.

Dreamy

The salvage operation continues. This ended up in Young and Foolish of course, and there are parts of it that still make me quiver, shiver and smile. This re-post is almost neatly equidistant too: yet somehow the twelve years that have elapsed since I wrote it does not seem anything like the thirteen it had been between the summer of 1983 and that time of writing. Interestingly too some of the faces referred to in the piece have come back in the past year or so. If not exactly from the dead, then perhaps as near as damn it, and that is something to cherish. The ebb and flow of life, of time; not unlike the drifting tides of A Distant Shore itself. Or indeed, in any number of Tracey’s records since.

Mosquito Botticelli

The second instalment of the Tangents excavation exercise is this, again from 1996. I am glad to have been able to update this Ut piece with those three photos of the group, taken from the Debris magazine article that Kevin refers to in his text. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s rather exciting to be digging around in the crates, as it were. I love Kevin’s line in this piece that says “The Steve Albini produced Griller is everything Daydream Nation might have been.” Typically forthright and potently prickly, the way great music writing should be. And I really love Daydream Nation.

Blown Away

I tracked down a second hand copy of Wolfhounds' wonderful 1989 Blown Away set recently. It has long been one of my favourite Wolfhounds records and it sounds as magical now as it ever did, despite, or because of the fact that it is nineteen years old. It’s good to see that three of the complete Wolfhounds albums are available as downloads on eMusic. Sadly the Bright And Guilty set remains unavailable, but you could piece together most of it from selections on the Lost But Happy and Essential Wolfhounds compilations. Only ‘Progress Caff’ and ‘Public Footpath Blues’ seem to be unavailable at the moment.

Listening to Blown Away took my mind back to the start of Tangents too. When Tangents started we had a couple of categories called Modern Classics and Popular Classics, after the Penguin book series. The idea was that Modern Classics would have reviews of new releases, be they records, books, films or whatever. Popular Classics on the other hand was to be short pieces on what we felt were forgotten classics. The categorisation didn’t last very long, but it was a nice idea. Blown Away was one of those first Popular Classics, and this piece was written by Daniel in 1996, originally for the second paper edition which was shelved when I discovered how to write HTML. It’s the first in a series of salvage operations delving into the Tangents archive. An excuse to shine a light into those dark corners, as well as a chance for me to clean up some code and generally get the old house in order, metaphorically speaking.

Interestingly (well, it is to me) it is now several years longer since Daniel wrote the piece than it was from the album’s release to then. Time is a strange beast, and no mistake.