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Interview: Kode9

Interview
Pitchfork
November 23, 2009
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A lecturer in music culture at the University of East London, Scottish producer, DJ, and theorist Steve Goodman is anything but an ivory tower intellectual. How many of your professors have spun at Fabric? Under the name Kode9, he has immersed himself in the subject he writes about and discusses. His work as a producer and DJ and founder of Hyperdub, the enigmatic label that’s released seminal work by artists like Burial and Joker, has made him an avid participant in and catalyst for bass-driven electronic music in the UK.

His forthcoming book, Sonic Warfare, examines how sound systems are deployed in wars of mood, sensation and vibration. By analyzing the politics of sound and especially frequency while weaving together insights about Afro-Futurism, military sonic warfare, and the viral spread of music and musical culture, Goodman has laid out a philosophical analysis that links together bassbins and sound bombs. Before the release of the Hyperdub five-year anniversary compilation this month and his book, set to come out in November via MIT Press, Pitchfork emailed with Goodman about Hyperdub, the state of constant hype and the use of unsound.

Pitchfork: You’ve spoken about going to shows in Edinburgh in the early 1990s and hearing jungle, and how that was a transformational experience for you. When you think back to those nights, does the experience of hearing the music, the vibrations and the frequencies and such, match up with many of the theories you discuss in Sonic Warfare?
Kode9: Actually, those clubs I went to in Edinburgh the early 90s that were really influential on me were Chocolate City, a rare groove and 1970s funk club, and Pure, a hardcore techno club. Both were at a place called the Venue. I had only heard early jungle on mixtapes, pirate radio, and compilation tapes I picked up from 1993-94 onwards, before I used to travel down to London for the Metalheadz Sunday Session at the Blue Note in 1995. All of those experiences were just sonically really intense and really exciting and inspirational. Much of the book was formulated in bass bins since then.

Pitchfork: How did that initial passion grow beyond DJing and producing into philosophy and theory, or were those concurrent developments? Was the initial journalistic bent of the Hyperdub site a big part of that shift?
K9: They were concurrent. The book came from a synthesis of theoretical work I had been doing on information warfare in the second half of the 1990s, and the ideas behind Hyperdub when it was a webzine.
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Night Life: Photographer Michael Abramson captured the magic of 1970s South Side Chicago

Article
Wax Poetics
Issue #38
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A camera can be an annoyance or it can mean access. For Chicago photographer Michael Abramson, his 35mm Leica M3 was his way to penetrate the curtain of clubland and document a world both public and private.

“Nightlife is eternal,” says Abramson. “It went on 100 years ago, and it’ll go on 100 years from now. We’re not talking about palatial nightlife. We’re talking about the little conversations, people trying to have a good time, trying to score. I’m sure it’s happening now.”

His camera and curiosity helped propel him into South Side Chicago nightclubs in the mid-‘70s. Functioning as part participant and part documentarian, he created a striking body of black-and-white images collected in the new book Light: On the South Side. A cache of fleeting moments and forgotten nightclubs, Abramson’s work is the flipside of self-serious documentation. The people, from patrons to bartenders, are the focus, not the performers. Exuding sharpness, rich skin tones, grain and detail, the photography is lush, aided by the occasional use of extra lights. Subjects look back from the page, inviting readers to concoct the story of that evening’s events. The photos don’t just frame a scene from a culturally distant time. They heighten the electricity, small triumphs and hidden glamour of life after dark.
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Pylon: Chomp More

Music Review
Pitchfork
November 10, 2009
Link
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“Life is nothing but death and taxes/ And all the trees that get the axes,” Pylon singer Vanessa Briscoe Hay dryly coos on “K”, against a backdrop of prickly guitar tones and a taut bass line. “I’m tired of moving my jaw,” she also sneers, in case you didn’t pick up on her disinterest. The morose opening track on Chomp More reinforces the standard notion that the R.E.M. contemporaries were Athens, Georgia’s version of Gang of Four. But this reissue, another DFA-sanctioned dip into the band’s brief back catalog, highlights the unhinged spin the band put on post-punk, a joyous take on mechanized funk.

Recorded in 1982 after Pylon had already taken a U.S. road trip with Leeds’ most famous Marxist rock collective, Chomp sounds more assured and more open. Packaged in a record sleeve with a die-cut “bite” on the edge and filled with stripped-down dance rhythms and proto-indie guitar riffs, it telegraphs bigger ambitions than 1980’s Gyrate. Hay’s attitude and vocals, the flipside of the bright camp coming from her contemporaries in the B-52’s, swings from dry observations to passionate fury, further broadcasting the group’s desire to evolve. She’s slick yet airy on “Yo-Yo”, a taut take on a relationship’s heavy emotional swings, while she growls on the bright New Wave of “No Clocks”, a passionate song about the honeymoon period. “Crazy” finds her slowly becoming unhinged, escalating into possessed, shriek-laden crescendo. R.E.M.’s jangly cover, which appeared on Dead Letter Office, wisely dials back, since Stipe’s vocals lack Hay’s fury and sharp edge.

The creative guitar playing of the late Randy Bewley, who passed away earlier this year, highlights the stylistic crossroads the group never steered away from. Bewley pivoted a bit towards college rock riffs on Chomp, with the wry, surf-like playing on instrumental “Italian Movie Theme” and the crisp, cold runs on “Crazy” and “Gyrate”. But his wiry, pointillistic style, like the flinty tones that open “Beep”, dominate and helped drive Pylon’s dance floor rhythms. His scratched, staccato notes on “Yo-Yo” were a perfect counterpoint to the oozing bass of Michael Lachowski.

The expanded section of Chomp More — which includes three alternate mixes and “Four Minutes”, an echo-laden, slow-motion collage of samples and sounds — is mostly surplus reels of studio experimentation, intriguing considering the group disbanded shortly after album’s release. The 7″ mix of “Crazy” is more breezy and less interesting than the album cut, but the pitch-shifted vocals and faint echoes found on “Yo-Yo (Male Version)” suggest a faint dub feel, and the reworked “Gyrate” churns together sound effects, a vortex of rhythms that collapses on itself. It’s unlikely there will be additional Pylon releases in the future (the band had hinted at new recordings prior to Bewley’s death). In addition to getting more work from this pioneering band into wider circulation, Chomp More points to the upward trajectory they achieved after only a few years. Coming years after the post-punk revival strip mined the genre’s signifiers, this album still manages to sound unique.

Champagne and Plastic: Phoenix Mixes Experimentation, Perfectionism, and Distractions to Produce Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Feature
EQ Magazine
June 2009
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Somber French poets and friendly prostitutes sound like fitting inspirations for a raucous, balls-out rock album. While these characters were part of the neighborhood color near the studio where chic French foursome Phoenix—comprised of Thomas Mars, Laurent “Branco” Brancowitz, Christian Mazzalai, and Deck D’Arcy—recorded the bulk of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix [Loyaute/Glassnote], their album wasn’t the by-product of wicked indulgence, especially on the inflated rock-and-roll scale of indecent behavior.

A glittering slab of well-crafted electronic pop, the band’s follow-up to 2006’s It’s Never Been Like That is a result of the group’s perfectionist tendencies (they recorded over 14 hours of music in total), a long recording process, and an attempt to be more abstract. According to guitarist Brancowitz, the group even listened to a soundtrack of modern classical and ambient music to cleanse their auditory palette, and they used Eno’s famous Oblique Strategies cards to get through creative roadblocks.

“As a creator, you’re always frustrated by your limits,” he says. “You want to find strategies to go further. I actually learned Morse code at one point, and I tried to type words rhythmically to see what kind of patterns they would create.”

After a search for inspiration that took them to New York and back, the group asked friend Philippe Zdar to co-produce Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, camping out in his studio in Paris’ Montmartre district for nearly a year and a half. Designed in the early ’80s by audio guru Tom Hidley—a famed engineer and studio designer— Zdar’s studio was an ideal place for the band to challenge its creative process. Half of French house duo Cassius, the producer owns a cache of vintage gear, giving the group plenty of equipment to work with, and his helpful approach kept them focused.

“I think Phoenix has very good taste,” Zdar says. “The band members are great producers, and they just needed someone to guide them and keep them on track. It’s like directing Marlon Brando. I don’t think Brando needed help—he just needed a little guidance.”
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Self-Directed Shoegaze: Maps’ James Chapman Takes a DIY Approach for Gauzy, Dancefloor-Ready Pop

Feature
EQ Magazine
November 2009
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“Chameleon,” from the Maps album Turning the Mind, begins with flittering synths and syrupy layers of Roland Juno-G melodies, a common feature of James Chapman’s airy, escapist music. But the words sung by Chapman—those of Marsha M. Linehan, a professor and proponent of a cognitive therapy system called Mindfulness— are about embracing, not ignoring reality. The album’s title came from a book about the practice, which helped him cope with a “spot of trouble with certain mental states.”

That self-reliant slant could be a metaphor for the Northhampton producer’s current style, which takes his well-regarded bedroom-production aesthetic and adds a layer of polish. While his previous work earned comparisons to Spiritualized and My Bloody Valentine, as well as a Mercury Music Prize nomination (for debut We Can Create), he’s lately stepped away from shoegazer bands and more toward techno, blending ribbons of synthesizers (and no guitars) with driving rhythms.

“To be honest, I lost touch with the whole band thing,” he says. “I wanted to make an upbeat album, though some of it is quite dark. This album is more to the point where the first one was more abstract, especially lyrically.”

Tim Holmes, half of the ever-shifting Death in Vegas duo and a producer for acts like the Chemical Brothers, was an important collaborator on Turning the Mind [Mute], helping to streamline Chapman’s original bedroom demos with old analog gear in his Contino Rooms studio. Chapman isn’t one for unnecessary gear or self-aggrandizement; when he works at home in Northampton, he uses a Yamaha SU10 sampler and records his work to a Yamaha AW16G 16-track hard-disk recorder, as he has for most of his career. He freely admits he loves his Elektron Machinedrum SPS-1 drum machine because the operators on the helpline were quite useful and professional.

“I have an OCD way of doing things, and I’m not going to change,” he says. “If you get into music, start with something like a microKorg and just find your own path. Don’t be worried if it’s not what everyone else is doing.”
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Apocalypse How?: Chicago’s second-city status in monster-movie destruction

Article
A.V. Club Chicago
October 2009
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Despite the trauma of 9/11, it didn’t take long for Hollywood to revisit and ravage New York City. In just the last few years, monsters, mankind, aliens, and zombies have laid waste to Manhattan in countless post-apocalyptic thrillers and natural-disaster porn. L.A., admittedly subject to its own different disasters, also gets the cinematic send-off in style. The Capitol Records building usually gets gutted, or the letters of the iconic Hollywood sign get re-arranged hastily. But only a few (mostly campy) disaster movies, horror flicks, and post-apocalyptic films deign to threaten the Windy City. It doesn’t seem worth the trouble to destroy.

It’s doubtful screenwriters have a soft spot for the Midwest. Cheapie ’80s horror flick Alligator featured a Chi-town sewer gator named Rámon that splits a few suburbanites in half. The Relic tells the story of an Amazonian beast that comes alive and wrecks havoc at the Field Museum, but it was only filmed here because New York’s American Museum of History wasn’t available. The only thing that comes close to a post-apocalyptic Chicago movie is Streets Of Fire, a 1984 film set in an alternative future where the ’50s and ’80s (and their respective clichés) are mashed together. Despite our scenic skyline, large population—not to mention cool underground tunnels for the survivors—the city has rarely been threatened with wide-scale on-screen destruction. With that in mind, The A.V. Club presents this list of the handful of movies that get serious about wiping Chicago off the map.

Beginning Of The End (1957)
Plot: Grasshoppers, mutated after eating some radiated, weapons-grade wheat at a government lab, march toward Chicago in this nuclear-age monster flick. While the tagline touts stellar special effects—“So Big…we had to coin a new word for it…NEWMENDOUS!”—it’s a rote exercise in altered perspective and crappy acting. (No wonder it was lovingly ribbed by Mystery Science Theater 3000.) Stereotypically precocious reporter Audrey Aimes (Peggie Castle) and Dr. Ed Wainwright (Peter Graves) warn others while the military considers the Nuclear Orkin option: bombing Chicago to destroy the crazed critters.
Biggest insults to Chicago: Many obvious geographic errors mar this already terrible film: Michigan Avenue is called Michigan Boulevard, forests and trees are shown in scenes depicting the suburbs, and footage of crowds supposedly panicking on the South Side show people fleeing Grant Park. No actual South Side locations are used. Plus, the scenes of bedlam on city streets and abandoned intersections are amateurish. It’s also obvious a Chicagoan didn’t write this film; cicadas would be the local go-to apocalyptic insect.
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Matias Aguayo: Ay Ay Ay

Music Review
XLR8R
October 2009
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Chilean producer Matias Aguayo (formerly of Closer Musik) has created a dark carnival of an album on Ay Ay Ay, a restrained event with sustained creepiness underlying the celebration. Filled with thudding drums and melodies constructed from vocal tics, tones, whispers, and asides, it plumbs disorienting depths—imagine an Audion track where the corkscrew melodies have been replaced with a choir composed of the whispers from Lost. Lead single “Rollerskate” bobs and weaves with bubbling voices, a genius track never lacking for simplicity or propulsion, while “Koro Koro” brings a Ladysmith Black Mambazo vibe. As the party closes on “Juanita,” with revelers quietly clapping and accordions taking shallow breaths, Aguayo bows out on another singular album.

For those about to book rock: Bands with advice for Lincoln Hall

Article
A.V. Club Chicago
October 2009
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The Chicago History Museum recently put out a call, via its blog, for memorabilia related to the Lounge Ax, the legendary Lincoln Park rock club that closed in 2000. Venues come and go, and few last long enough or make enough of an impact to warrant any kind of canonization. The deceptively simple rules of running a good club—treat the crowd and talent with respect and book good music—aren’t always easy to follow. Lincoln Hall, a new venue run by the crew at Schubas, recently opened on the same block as Lounge Ax. In honor of its second weekend of operation, The A.V. Club asked a few musicians who are playing some of the earliest shows at Lincoln Hall to provide some advice to the owners, and recount their worst venue experiences.

Eddie Argos, Art Brut, playing Nov. 10
Advice: “As a touring band, I’d tell the people that run clubs that it’s a good idea to have a strong lock on the bar. It’s pretty straightforward. Hire a big room, get a PA, and make sure the backstage area isn’t next to the toilet.”
Worst show: “We played a club called Razzmatazz in Barcelona, which is actually a great club, but they were trying out a new PA system. That was quite embarrassing. They put it in wrong. They put the mixing desk behind the stage, so the sound engineer had to run around the stage to hear how things sounded. The sound was fucking awful. The guy was like a big drunk bear running backwards and forwards.”

Jamie Levinson, White Rabbits, playing Nov. 12
Advice: “Bands spend upwards of eight to nine hours a day in vans and vehicles that barely pass inspection just to get to shows. We wouldn’t be offended by any level of hospitality. There’s a club in Birmingham, Alabama, called the Bottle Tree, run by the drummer in Man Or Astro-Man?, that’s all about accommodation. There are Airstream trailers in the back of this humble club, along with massage chairs, great books, and DVDs. It feels like you’re being treated at arena level when you’re just playing a small club show. It’s really a psychological battle on the road. When someone reaches out with an olive branch, it sets the tone for the rest of the day.”
Worst show: “We’re like any other band. There are plenty of nightmare stories. We spent the bulk of our time on the road when we were starting out. You play for gas money, and those are trying times. I don’t think any band expects blue M&Ms in a glass bowl.”

Langhorne Slim, played Oct. 23
Advice: “It’s a pretty easy formula. One thing I’ve picked up on is clubs that are run by musicians tend to be the best in terms of treating touring musicians and sound. They know what makes you feel a little more at home.”
Worst show: “There are probably a few of them. When I first started, I was playing anywhere I could in New York. I would play in sports bars with a big screen above my head as people were trying to watch the Knicks. That was a disaster.”

Cullen Omori, The Smith Westerns, playing Oct. 27
Advice: “It would be great for a new rock club or a venue to be a loft or something free, because people our age don’t want to pay for [a show]. If anything, someone needs to open a space that’s cheap, a good venue and a place to party and hang out. Even the kids that aren’t into music at first can absorb it. We don’t have that right now.”
Worst show: “The worst place to play is probably the Beat Kitchen. The door people don’t care about music. They’re assholes. Our first time out of Chicago, we played at the Painted Lady in Detroit. We played with a band from Italy no one knows about. There was literally one kid headbanging. We got like $17 and we had driven four hours.”

Do Make Say Think: Other Truths

Music Review
Pitchfork
October 23, 2009
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When instrumental rock bands get tapped for soundtracks, it can be kind of a gut-check that tests how a wider audience may view their music. Sigur Rós’ folkloric melodrama and emotive language made sense as a backdrop for Vanilla Sky, itself a sort of sci-fi fairytale about misplaced and unrequited love starring someone prone to over-excitement. The charged music of Explosions in the Sky fit the open expanses and crushing blows of Friday Night Lights‘ take on Texas high school football culture (hell, guitarist Munaf Rayani sometimes bends over his instrument like a lineman crouching down into a three-point stance). So it seemed odd that a track by Canadians Do Make Say Think was chosen for the oil industry drama Syriana. Not to say the Toronto post-rock band doesn’t make the kind of mesmerizing music suitable for a film score (or that the more tense, overtly politicized music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor might have been a better fit). But DMST can sound so pastoral– the music was literally recorded in a barn, in some cases– it may seem to lack the bite for a blood-for-oil flick.

While Do Make Say Think can project a gentle, laid-back vibe– member Charles Spearin did just finish The Happiness Project– they’re far from spinning their wheels and rehashing post-rock clichés. Other Truths doesn’t roughen up the band’s jazz-steeped aesthetic. But it does add more dimensions and sharp textures to their songwriting, which continues to get tighter yet wider in scope. Spread across a suite of four lengthy tracks and titled with the same string of verbs as the band’s name, the album isn’t about momentum as much as it is about transitions. Opener “Do” starts with crisp, intertwined guitar lines playing off one another. As the track morphs and unfurls– cue the slow-build and crescendo– the themes reappear more charged, parrying with horns and descending into static. “Make” quietly delays the payoff, slowly ratcheting things up and marching toward a climax with a floor of tense bass, echoing chants, and sinewy, stretched string notes. When a warm motif of horns and fuzzed guitars begins to cut through the dread, the song’s color noticeably shifts. “Say” strikes a grandiose yet road-weary tone, as a lonely slide guitar melody gets echoed and expanded by trumpets and churning drums, while “Think” may be its companion and comedown, a slow trail set forth by a quivering, reverb-laden guitar line.

Compared to the group’s first few albums, filled with echoing melodies reflective of cavernous recording spaces, Other Truths shows Do Make Say Think more adept at sketching out and imagining their own widescreen landscapes. The interplay here is more complex than You, You’re a History in Rust, showcasing restraint and more subtle shifts. Calling instrumental rock “soundtrack music” might be stating the obvious. But when it manages to sound as composed and calculated as Other Truths, it isn’t meant as a slight.

Anti-Pop Consortium: Fluorescent Black

Music Review
XLR8R
October 14, 2009
Link

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Part of the millennial hip-hop avant garde that included groups like dälek and Company Flow, Anti-Pop Consortium paired Earl Blaze’s dystopian, mechanical beats with a trio of steely, free-associating MCs who crammed complex wordplay into three-minute tracks. It wasn’t always a formula for laughs, but on their last and best album, 2002’s Arrhythmia, they showed they weren’t too forward thinking to be self-aware and self-deprecating. On the skit “Tron Man Speaks,” a robot calls into Earl Blaze’s radio show to play a single from his album, Tron Man Stigmata—basically processed static from an old Victrola—then gets testy when he thinks Blaze would prefer something “more R&B… something more for the females.”

Now reunited after its 2002 breakup, the underground rap crew returns with Fluorescent Black, a set of anxious electronic rhythms, technospeak, and knotty boasts. But joking about experimental leanings might not be as funny, since the future may have caught up with the forward-thinking New Yorkers. By their own standards, they haven’t taken a great leap forward sonically, instead becoming a more self-conscious and focused unit. While it’s tempting to imagine what next-level bangers they could aspire to, it’s also somewhat refreshing to hear them develop their angular music past the beta stage. They’re ostensibly still looking ahead, but with a bit of a retro-futuristic tinge.

There’s still plenty of abstraction, including the minimal march of “Timpani,” the digitized sludge of “Dragunov,” and the title track, which makes a chorus of squeegee-sharp synth licks sound like a nest of chirping machines. But while Arrhythmia was marked by negative space and a sense of refined chill, the tracks on Fluorescent Blank are more crowded and busy. The anxious beat of “New Jack Exterminator” competes with various strains of mechanical noise, and “Reflections” runs through arpeggiated synths before dropping into swirling riffs and drums that recall The Roots.
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