High Tech Soul

Here's another reason why the internet is so great, I'm interested in Detroit techno and if you know anything about this kind of music, then you know there's a whole load of mystique built around it. But, a quick search on Google and I am watching a documentary about it. Here it is.



Detroit techno is not only the story of a particular blend of dance music, but it's also about the fabric of the city itself. The 'motorcity' at one point was home to four million, but the population has since dropped to a quarter of that - partly because of the collapse of the American motor industry and the GI Bill, which encouraged soldiers returning from the war to settle with their families in the suburbs. The city become home to a mostly black blue collar workforce for Ford and General Motors. These people would tell their kids about working with robots on the assembly line. Robots, comic books, a city that looked like the background of a science fiction film, it was all grist to the mill for some growing up in Detroit.

In their teens, Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson independently find local music shops flooded with analogue synths, TR909 and 808 drum machines – instruments rejected by most regular musicians for sounding 'too artificial'. And after listening to Kraftwerk (also from an equally industrial city: Düsseldorf), some soul, gospel, George Clinton and the local radio DJ, The Electrifying Mojo, they make the leap to create their own spiritual uplifting 'high tech soul'.

Reading books about music to write a book about music

Writing about music is hard. Whether you’re describing or reviewing, you inevitably fall into the trap of coupling disparate adjectives together to get the sounds from inside your head into others. And why bother when we live in a world of Spotify and lastFM. What can the world learn from your descriptions? Nothing really, especially if you talk to the musicians – who broadly fall into two camps: those who’d rather ‘let the music do the talking’ (boring), and those who can’t shut up about it.

In the book I’m writing The Hunt For The Tigerfen, the two main characters form a band that enjoys great critical and commercial success in a relatively short time. This happens because I’m really interested in writing not about music, but egos and how they bend people into wankers. And why, despite their behaviour, wankers still have friends.

But ‘music’ was always lurking around in the background when I was planning the book. Unless my characters formed a completely vacuous pop band, I would definitely have to talk about the music and the scene it exists in. I might have to even describe some of it. Jesus, who’d want to read that?

These two books were a great help. They both talk about a specific time and type of music without actually mentioning the music very much. With Please Kill Me, it’s all about the wankers of punk - of which there are many. And reading Our Band Can Be Your Life, it helps to know and like eighties American alternative music, but really both books are about how certain forward-thinking bands in the States helped create the structure of the ‘underground scene’ that would eventually propel Nirvana, Green Day to great success and the heady heights of being crudely rendered in Guitar Hero.

But then I felt, as I was writing about a band, I should read a few books just about bands. That was interesting, sort of. Aside from The Dirt (which, I’ve not read, but I’m assured is one of the best music books ever written), books about bands are a pretty dry read. Sure, Hammer of the Gods is spiced with gruesome tales from the road, but it’s also full of endless descriptions of set lists the band played. I definitely don’t want to write about my band like that or even describe the music. But I think I know how I’m going to write the last part of Tigerfen, but we’ll see when I get to that bit in a couple of months.

In the meantime, if you want to know who’s unfortunate mouth Lou Reed wanted to defecate into, along with a whole load of stuff about MC5, the Stooges, Television and how the Lower East Side became the birthplace for a particular brand of angular (here we go with the descriptions) punk, then Please Kill Me is your book.

And if you’ve read Get In The Van, but want to know what the rest of Black Flag thought of Henry Rollins and why nobody heard of Mission of Burma before Graham Coxon started banging on about them, then Our Band Could Be Your Life is the book for you.

I will post more Tigerfen soon.

Lush Life by Richard Price

This is not the cover of my book. Mine has the 'Wire' style typography, which is not surprising as Richard Price, like every other talented crime writer in the US, has at some point written for the show.

I was already a big fan. There were so many copies of Clockers in the Brixton Bookmongers it was inevitable I'd end up reading one. Lush Life picks up on Clocker's themes of poverty and crime in the suburbs and squashes them into Manhattan's Lower East Side.

New York is the only place I've ever been to in the US and I've visited the city twice. Once in 2000 and then again in 2007, and this novel perfectly captures what I saw first hand between those years- the rapid gentrification of a previously seedy era. And it's not just the buildings being tidied up and Starbucks on the corner. It's the people who move in.

This is a novel about sudden change. Main character, Eric Cash, after one tragic night, realises he's not a writer who happens to make ends meet by keeping bar. He's a bartender. Det Matty Clark witnesses first-hand the change crime makes on his life as it does on the people caught up in the cases he works. Young black men are seduced by the power they can wield.

Bits of this book reminded of a similar novel (this time set across the river in Brooklyn), The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. There's a memorable section in which the central character's friends realise the powerful fear they invoke by being young, black men from the ghetto.

In Lush Life, this idea is augmented by the sheer inability of the city to tackle its social issues. The Quality of Life roll around the narrow streets in their fake yellow taxi in a never ending patrol to try and stem the flow of crime. Detectives work murder scenes, question witnesses to tie street names to race. But there's always another mugging, another shooting and another chance to be hung out to dry by the NYPD brass when the media start demanding answers. Who'd be a cop in New York?

But between all this grimness, lies the glue that makes this such a great book. And it's not just the dialogue - which has rightly been praised - it's the way the characters behave around one another. The way they've been drawn.

This is a bleak ride, but it's full of amazing writing

Neurosonics

This is a nicely crafted bit of surreality and manages to prick the often pompous world of scratching and hip hop quite well. I mean, some of those guys can be so serious about it. The design reminds me of Alien oddly.

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Imagine if Charlie Kaufman wrote Jaws

I picked up this book, flicked through and decided to give it a go. But I didn't have high hopes. The blurb on the back is poor and the text illustrations are a bit gimmicky.

But, it is a great book. Usually, when you're presented with a man with no memory, there's lots of tedious shuffling around while he tries to sort himself out. Not here, because although the book tackles some pretty weighty concepts, the pacing is tuned just right. Cliff hangers, reveals, it's all there and used to tell a story well.

If you do a bit research on the internet, you'll find all sorts of bollocks about 'unchapters' and dual meaning. These and the illustrations and installed texts around the country are a bit 'so what' IMHO. Don't let it detract you from the quality of this novel.

Steven Hall is a good writer who has an uncanny ability to choose the one action that best describes whatever his characters are up to. Doesn't sound much does it? But it's laser guided writing and something I'm always trying to get into my own stuff.

It's going to be made into a film too.

Lost Tribes of New York

So it's been done before, but the people telling the story and the stop-frame photography make it for me

Stone Junction

As books go this is one joy dropping ride straight from page one. Following the mysterious death of his mother, Daniel Pearse is thrown straight into the ranks of the super secret AMO. There he learns to pick locks, smuggle, the art of disguise and finally to manipulate his body at a sub-atomic level. Golly, it has all the hallmarks of being some awful cheesy fantasy romp. But fret not, Jim Dodge is a great writer. Every paragraph is tuned to a steady rhythm and there's real substance to the book's ideas.

If I have one complaint, it was too easy to read quickly. And it's not like Jim's written a whole load of books to get lost in.

Shellac ATP

When I was sixteen my girlfriend gave me Shellac's first single, Uranus. The picture doesn't do it justice. It's a proper thing of beauty; lovely cream card cover that could be hand printed, with a seven inch as thick as a dinner plate inside. Playing it for the first time, I didn't know what to make of the music. It spoke of a whole new universe; tin foil guitars, caveman drums, songs about miners and wing walkers. And for me anyway, the whole thing sounded like a spinning record. It was cyclic, abrasive and raw. These people were clearly not to be messed with. There would be drugs, irresponsible driving, crossbows.

But the reality is completely different. Shellac is just three people who have jobs and tour and record when they can find the time. True, much is made about the fact this stripped down rock n roll band is fronted by Steve Albini the outspoken recording engineer behind countless classic records. And in all likelihood, most people only know about Shellac because he's in it. But this shouldn't detract from the fact that three talented guys have not stopped playing music simply because they've grown old and have to get up in the morning to go to work.

If you do anything creative, there's a great urge to 'make it from your work', because then you'll have the creative freedom to 'do what you want'. This is, at best, incredibly hard and for most people, impossible. As soon as you do anything creative for money, you can expect to compromise. But this is no bad thing, just as long as you walk into the arrangement with your eyes open. Shellac is a great example of three people doing something for the sheer love of it. I'm sure they could be signed to be a bigger label for more money - perhaps Domino or Warp, who seem to sign anyone with any alternative cred. But then they'll have to tour regularly, play rubbish festivals and do radio promos. Sounds too much like hard work.

According to Albini, all their songs are about baseball and Canada. And if it sounds like they're playing sheet metal guitars, it's because they are, in a way.

They're pretty amazing live.



Here's how they finished their set last Sunday at the Breeders' ATP.

End of Shellac from James Scott on Vimeo.

Some day all festivals will be as good as ATP; no more than six thousand people, self catering chalets with proper beds, showers and flushing toilets (I'm showing my age here).

Christine

Bad to the bone