I’ve been spending time tied down by my sequencer this weekend in the vain hope of being able to actually create a breakbeat of some sort that’s not uniformly shite. This is mainly in response to this post by Alex Buga describing the new Maschine by Native Instruments. Ever since Guitar Rig 2 allowed me to plug my guitar into my mac without any latency problems, I’ve been a big fan of NI, not least because Guitar Rig has meant I can throw away the 20 or so odd bits of guitar paraphenalia I’ve had cluttering up the front room and replace them with one nifty foot control. It even makes my guitar sound good.

Anyway, Maschine is a really cool looking ‘groove production studio’, which means it handles samples, sequencing and a bunch of other stuff, but I figured before I simply splashed out, a decision based solely on the ‘new and shiney’ qualities Maschine possesses, I really should actually try creating some beats or sequences using the stuff I already have. If only so I know that Maschine will make it all better later.

So I smash out some distorted concrete guitar noise and spend a bit of time getting to know Logic by putting a nice bassline on it. The bassline being inspired by John Carpenter’s music for Assault on Precinct 13, which aside from being a great ’70s movie (think crazed ASBO gang attack police station, no survivors) is featured on the back of the 7-inch sleeve of Killing Joke’s excellent Pssyche single. However the bassline isn’t quite right, so I have to mash it up with a certain amount (a lot) of Bitcrushing.

The result -‘John Carpenter Noise’

But that wasn’t really doing much on a sequencing level. So I started playing around on the built in Ultrabeat drum/sampler sequencer that’s built into Logic. The great thing here is that it comes with a whole load of rhythms and kits built in and a nifty little sequencer that’s really simple to use. And I’m playing around with this and I discover that you can drag the sequences from Ultrabeat on to ANY other midi controlled instrument. So a pattern that was originally for a hip hop kit can be dragged onto a saxophone instrument and the saxophone plays that pattern. This is great not just because the Ultrabeat sequencer is easier to manipulate than the normal Logic one, but because the rhythm patterns don’t bear any resemblance to melodies. And the most bizarre thing is that they actually end up sounding really neat, kind of like early 808 State.

I’m calling the result – ‘After Cubik by 808 State’

Now after an entire weekend of sequencing, I still don’t think I can entirely justify the £600 plus for Maschine quite yet. But a few more weeks and I may just have to get one….

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I’ve been frantically reviewing and relistening to loads of old albums since Christmas. Seeking out tracks like Mongoloid by Devo (the first song my first band ever attempted to learn – with catastrophic effects), the first Dexy’s Midnight Runners album, classic Kraftwerk and a pile of others. Why? You ask. Because of this outstanding doorstop of a book.

When I originally saw it I just thought it was a useful sort of anthology present thing that at £4 was an easy win, but on reading it I just got sucked in. Not just because Mulholland’s initial choices for albums pretty much matched my musical indoctrination, but because the writing was just so damn good. It not only gives you a sense of what each album’s like, but the conditions under which it was made and puts it into some sort of historical and musical context. That way I’m genuinely intrigued about albums I really haven’t been bothered with, like the Dexy’s Midnight Runners one or Kate Bush’s The Dreaming.

It’s not simply this, but it’s the appearance of some pretty obscure records that I can remember listening to a lot while I was growing up, like the first Roxy Music Greatest Hits album or Christina’s version of ‘Is That All That There Is’, which in the aftermath of punk were something of a revelation for me. It’s a selection that gives you that strange internal wink that says, ‘Yes I was there and even though only 3 people liked this record, it was one of my favourites’, the shared secrecy of musical obsession. And it’s Mulholland’s understanding of the year zero effect of punk on people’s musical tastes that is so impressive. His thesis that punk was about the elevation of the guitar and the intoxication of the live experience and that the mid 80′s saw a corresponding elevation of bass and rhythm hadn’t occurred to me, but seems patently obvious once you consider it.

The great thing about books like this is that you can see trends slowly appearing through time as punk collapses, pop emerges and rap and dance music evolve. It reminds us in retrospect what a divergent time the mid 80′s was, with UK indie music going all jangly and arpeggio, rap just beginning to find its feet and American guitar music preparing the way for the grunge revolution of Nirvana.

As with all these books, your own journey and the author’s start to diverge as Mulholland gets engrossed by rap. As a result he misses out of a pile of my personal favourites, The Young Gods album, Underworld’s ‘Dubnobasswithmyheadman’, Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’, The Stone Roses’ debut and others, classics all and certainly head and shoulders above some of the later inclusions.

Even so, as a whole Fear of Music does the most incredible thing, it makes you genuinely excited by music and, at a time when the shuffle button of your mp3 player has competely changed the way we listen to music, it makes the concept of the album as a coherent entity, rather than as a series of discrete tracks, viable again.

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Somehow art and houses just seem to go together now. There was Rachel Whiteread’s inverted housespace sculptures, the recent Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, and then there was Seizure, the Copper Sulphate house in Elephant and Castle.

Roger Hiorns’ crystal house is probably the maddest of them all, a entire council flat flooded with copper sulphate solution, which is left to crystalise before being drained. It’s a very weird experience, a bit like entering Narnia through the wardrobe. First you wander down from Elephant and Castle, home to the most un-shopping centery shopping centre, along the New Kent Road, whose council blocks now appear to be little more than facades for this year’s incarnation of futuristic local authority bruto-chic, until you find the most boarded up two storey horseshoe shaped set of flats you can. You then stand there for an hour waiting for your turn to try on a set of some old geezer’s gumboots, before joining another queue to actually get into the flat. If you didn’t know better you’d think that there was some kind of secret stalinist indoctrination going on, an artistic linkage of the queuing process and the rotten environment you’re locked into.

Finally you go in and it’s a complete transformation. You enter the flat, turn left and the grime and festeridge of the estate is obliviated by walls of massive, compellingly blue copper sulphate crystals. It’s like someone has been pebbledashing with some poor child’s science project, but on an industrial scale. The walls aren’t just covered in the crystals, they’re caked in them, like a ship’s hull that’s been overwhelmed with barnacles. And they’re everywhere. And they’re all blue. As gobsmackingly blue as the diva in The Fifth Element.

It’s like a twisted Santa’s Grotto, all sparkley and gem-like and bloody cold too the day I went to see it. You stumble around in what could either be Blue Santa’s elves’ urine or more likely undrained copper sulphate runoff (hence the gumboots), while indiscriminate shapes of other visitors fade in and out of view. And you find yourself gazing into individual hunks of fist sized crystal mummuring ‘mmmm, my precious’ over an over like a demented Gollum. The overall effect is a bit like being entombed in one of Joseph Beuys’ huge felt installations, where all sound and sensation have been damped out of existance. Standing inside a Beuys installation was the nearest thing to being down a mine, said Arthur Scargill in possibly his only genuinely coherent moment. Standing here is even closer, because unlike a wall-full of felt, it actually looks like you could mine something here.

It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder why there isn’t more of this stuff, or indeed, why they’re demolishing this at the end of the month. It’s the exact opposite of Whiteread’s internal spaces, which solidified the spaces inside a building, but prevented you from entering them. This concretises the surroundings (or more accurately, copper sulphatises them), allowing you to move around, but at the same time shows you a barren, poisonous, thoroughly alien landscape within that forces your mind to think about the nature of the space. Awesome.

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I’m just curious as to where TB came from. But now I know, it’s from the text message Euro 2008 conversation between me and the Brother.

This is a little word picture of the blog as ‘interpretated’ by Wordle. It’s a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. You can see more 1930s style word art at wordle.net

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