Sunday, March 17, 2019

This week

Its a busy week coming up with some excellent events on in Manchester.

On Thursday its the new Castlefield Gallery exhibition launch, Ever since CUBE gallery was closed there's been a gap in terms of design-led exhibitions, so its good to see this new show, UnDoing, a collaboration with Manchester School of Architecture. 

Also on Thursday, Brighter Sound have a cross-border collaboration, Both Sides Now, featuring emerging musicians from Liverpool and Helsinki, with mentoring from Manchester's LoneLady. A panel discussion will be followed by a one-off performance of new work. 

Then on Friday I'm looking forward to a talk from Kaye Mitchell, whose new book Avant-garde fiction of the 1960s, coincides with the reissue of Ann Quin's "Berg".  Its £3 to attend and on at the Anthony Burgess Foundation

It's also the launch of the Viva Spanish Film Festival at HOME all evening. 

Then on Saturday, I'm performing poetry at a night of DJs, music and words as a benefit for the male suicide prevention charity C.A.L.M. King Kenton's Greedy Band Selection costs £5 and takes place at Gulliver's on Saturday. Doors from 6pm, it all starts at 6.30pm, and I'll be on around 7.30pn. 


Tuesday, March 05, 2019

All Our Pasts and Futures

When David Bowie came back with his "The Next Day" album it was knowingly an album that mined the various stages of his career. Not because that was all he could do (as the future-gazing "Blackstar" would prove) but because it was some of the things he could do. The cover of that album was a pop art collage recreation of "Heroes", belatedly (since it didn't sell that well), one of his most iconic records.

He is not alone. Zappa's first three albums were cut up collage affairs that mined a multifaceted musical past and pasted them together. In the years to come he would separate out these instincts - so "Hot Rats" was his funky jazz album, "Cruisin' with Ruben and the Jets" his doo wop album etc. There are artists who have a thin seam they mine - maybe Dylan is like this, but he mines it deep. In retrospect the reviled double album "Self Portrait" is the most emblematic of this. Here is Dylan explicitly as magpie. Mark E. Smith was similar: always sounding like the Fall whether he took in garage rock, rockabilly, disco, cheesy '70s pop. British Beat, Krautrock or even Zappa.

I like to think musicians as they get older are able to pull in a wider palette than their forbears. As someone who has only ever used synthesizers in my music I've been always a bit in denial about those forbears - trying (in my own head at least) to emulate non-synth musicians. But I had a bit of a revelation before Christmas when I listened to my albums from '85 onwards in order. I saw that I was working my way through the various archetypes of electronic music - on the way to my own version of this. In 1985 it wasn't very fashionable to sound like early 1970s Tangerine Dream, but that was clearly what I sounded like; but a year later I was stumbling through early electronic new wave like the Normal and Cabaret Voltaire, and onto to electronic pop like Human League, before heading into New Order, house music and maybe rave. Yet my first house track was a few months before I'd heard Jack Your Body, so I went from being an imitator of past styles to being an unconscious designer of future ones.

Listening to my music over the last few years, this mix of the retro and futuristic is something that is at the heart of my musical project. I am past, present and future, but then I always was. Imitators often become the thing they tried to imitate - so Dylan is our examplar of Greenwich folk, or Depeche Mode quickly became the biggest electronic band in the world. I can't pretend any such power for my own music of course, but I think there's a sense that a steady sticking to the same electronica means that its possible to step outside of time somehow and just become part of the historical narrative you were initially imitating.