Various Failures

Such a sad list: a top 10 of records I should have bought in 2007 ... but failed to.

Miles Davis - The Complete On The Corner Sessions
Various Artists - Box Of Dub: Dubstep and Future Dub
Bergraven - Dödsvisioner
Aluk Todolo - Descension
Haswell & Hecker - Blackest Ever Black
Stephen O'Malley & Z'ev - Magisterial
Elegi - Sistereis
Grails - Burning Off Impurities
Yellow Swans - At All Ends
Tenhornedbeast - The Sacred Truth

Various Artists - "Jazz Satellites Vol. 1 - Electrification" (pt. 2)

In the coming weeks I'll post YouTube videos by some of the artists featured on Kevin Martin's excellent compilation album "Jazz Satellites Vol. 1 - Electrification"; I'll post two or three videos at a time. The videos are not the same tracks as featured on the compilation; furthermore, I was not able to find appropriate videos for all artists featured on "Jazz Satellites Vol. 1 - Electrification". Nonetheless, I feel they convey adequately the 'taste' of Kevin Martin's compilation and are satisfying to watch in the own right.


Divine Styler - Ain't Sayin' Nothin'




Jan Garbarek - "Entering"




23 Skidoo - "Urban Gamelan"

Black Metal Satellites

In the previous post, I sang the praise of Kevin Martin for creating some epoch-defining compilation double cd's in the Virgin Ambient Series: "Isolationism", "Macro Dub Infection Vol. 1 and 2", and "Jazz Satellites Vol.1".

Martin seems to have given up curatorship, so chances are slim he'll ever create a compilation of "Black Metal Satellites" or "Macro Black Metal Infections". Besides, if Martin has ever been into any sort of Metal it was Grindcore, not Metal's Norwegian variety. Furthermore, Martin's sympathetically staunch multiculturalism makes it unlikely he'll ever develop much affinity with Black Metal, alas an rather ethnocentric music genre.

So a compilation of the almost-Black-Metal and the not-anymore-Black-Metal, curated by Kevin Martin, will never see the light of day. What's there to do but to imagine it ourselves?

Which musicians or bands would be featured on the first cd of the double album?

1.Kevin Drumm
2. Wolfmangler or Dead Raven Choir
3. JazKamer (something from the 'Metal Music Machine' album)
4. Prurient
5. MZ.412
6. Abruptum
7. Aluk Todolo
8. Silvester Anfang
9. Leviathan (something from "A Silhouette In Splinters"?)
10. Spektr
11. Stalaggh
12. Velvet Cacoon
13. Wraiths
14. Furze

And what would the second cd of this compilation contain? I leave it up to you, dear readers: please do use the comments box!

Various Artists - "Jazz Satellites Vol. 1 - Electrification"

In J.G. Ballards 1968 short science fiction story "The Dead Astronaut", relic hunters scavenge for the remnants of crashed space capsules after a dozen spacefarers died in orbital accidents:

"Already too, the relic hunters were at Cape Kennedy, scouring the burning grass for instrument panels and flying suits and - most valuable of all - the mummified corpses of the dead astronauts. These blackened fragments of collar-bone and shin, kneecap and rib, were the unique relics of the space age, as treasured as the saintly bones of medieval shrines".

Kevin Martin's 1996 compilation "Jazz Satellites Vol. 1 - Electrification" collected musical capsules orbiting Jazz in that music's exosphere - that layer of Jazz's atmosphere where it borders on the vast emptiness of space... The double album presented liminal music: Post Rock, Free Jazz, Electronica and Post Punk, even Industrial and Kraut Rock, all hovering on the threshold of Afro-Classical Music.

The compilation's context was the Virgin ambient series, in which series four compilations were curated by Kevin Martin: two 2cd albums of electronic dub ("Macro dub Infection Vols. 1 and 2") and an album of experimental ambient ("Isolationism"; a compilation whose doomed ambition was to found a new musical genre).

The earliest track collected on the album is Teo Macero's 1963 "Equals", and the most recent track is Post Rock band Ui's 1996 track "Drive Towards The Smoke"; but the vast majority of tracks date from the 1970-1976 period: Alice Coltrane, Miles Davis, Eddie Henderson, Jan Garbarek, Gil Melle, Sun Ra, Norman Connors, Stu Martin and John Surman, Roland Rahsaan Kirk, Joe Henderson, Headhunters, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman and Herbie Hancock.

Coming back to that compilation of the almost-Jazz and the not-anymore-Jazz more than eleven years (!) after it came out, one feels a little like the relic hunters in Ballard's short story. Listening to the music and perusing the liner notes, one feels one is not only scavenging the album for relics of space age Jazz but also for the remnants of a mid-nineties aesthetic that has now become mummified.

That aesthetic is that period's Mondo2000 cyberpunk optimism of limitless faith in technology, internet, psychedelia and smart drugs; it is that era's discourse which presented studio technology as a musical instrument in it's own right (while what is or is not a classified as a musical instrument is a semiological question); it is that era's discourse which reappraised Miles Davis's electrified psychedelic music, presenting that reappraisal as a return of the repressed and as a revolt against Jazz critic's orthodoxy; it is that time's particular music critic's writing style, a style which would find it's culmination in Kodwo Eshun's cult book "More Brilliant Than The Sun".

Though the aesthetic may have become mummified, the album is no less potent for that. All tracks are surging with electrical power - not the electricity of Enlightenment and comfort, mind you, but rather the unholy energy that reanimated the dead body of Frankenstein's monster. There is one artists whose shadow falls over the compilation like the reanimated monster's shadow fell over Little Maria, the girl at the lakeside killed by the monster: Miles Davis. Listening to "Jazz Satellites" it is obvious how powerful Davis's hold over Kevin Martin's curatorial work is.

There is no mistaking "Jazz Satellites" for any other compilation of space age Jazz, such as Soul Jazz Records' "New Thing!" or the "JazzActuel" compilation. Neither as tinged by exoticism and funk as the former nor as informed by Black Power politics as the latter, "Jazz Satellites" is another "...collar-bone and shin, kneecap and rib..." out of astronaut Kevin Martin's saintly body.

Metal Folk Culture

The following citation, from a 1953 issue of American Anthropologist, reminded me strongly of the Sunn 0))) phenomenon - though it also would do nicely on Transpontine's excellent "History Is Made At Night" blog:

"The symbiotic relationship between folk (i.e., "peasant" (...)) and non-folk (i.e. "gentry") here postulated as the key concept of folk culture implies that the direction of culture flow is not alone outward and downward, from city to country and from upper to lower classes. Rather, we are facing a circular phenomenon in which folk culture draws on and is continually replenished by contact with the products of intellectual and scientific strata, but in which folk culture continually, though perhaps in a lesser degree, contributes to these non-folk societies.

The dance is illustrative of this process. In the 17th and 18th centuries the Western European dance masters introduced folk dances to social dancing, adapting them to the needs of the courts. English country square dances played a role in the development of the French quadrille, which was then introduced back into London. These folk dances then became the forms around which composers, then and now, created important works. Folk dances, now become court dances, spread from Spain and France to Latin America, and the process began anew whereby little by little they became the property of the folk. The current American rage for square dancing also reflects this process: after a suitable time the folk entertainment of yesteryear becomes the pastime of the artistic avant-garde".

G.F. Foster, "What is folk culture?" American Anthropologist, Vol. 55, No. 2, 1953, pp. 159-173; quoted in Clifford Geertz "The Religion Of Java" (The University Of Chicago Press, 1960).


PS: I bought the shirt!

Dead Raven Choir - My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind (pt. 3)

Here are some YouTube videos of the songs Dead Raven Choir covered for his album "My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind".



Neko Case performing her song "Favorite".




"Bluenose" by Stan Rogers.




Cole Porter's "It's All Right With Me", covered by Tom Waits.




"Genesis Hall" by the Fairport Convention's Richard Thompson.




"The Trees They Do Grow High" covered by Andy Clark.