The Worst General in the World

Its not at all difficult to find. I found it yesterday so much that I'm sitting here now typing out this blog. That's how much it has animated me. I can immediately think of at least 4 or 5 examples just from conversations I happened to stray across or take part in yesterday just watching my Twitter timeline scroll by. The subjects weren't necessarily remotely related and yet they were by having a common bond, a poisonous thread, running through them. Its a thread that is insidious and, to my mind, dangerous. Its a way of thinking, a lazy way, a closed-minded way. But what has this to do with generals? A lot when the worst general in the world is generalization.

Think about it and I'm sure you'll very easily be able to come across these generalizations in your own conversations too. Maybe it is someone asserting that ALL the people from this country or that are dangerous. A favourite one right now in my part of the world is Syria. Maybe you take part in gender debates. In that world lots of statements are made, and beliefs held, about men and women. It often seems that activists hold many generalizing statements to be true. They even have hashtags for it #notallmen, #allmen, etc. I find it somewhat enraging. Another area where the generalizations occur is black/white race relations. Here generalizations are held on both sides. To some whites all blacks are crooks, thieves and criminals. To some blacks all whites are racist descendants of slave owners who want to kill them. The point to me is not which side you take but how you think.

So let me be clear. Wherever you come across the generalizations and whatever debate you are watching, reading or taking part in, I'm not here to take sides in any of them. Of course, I will have my opinions just like everyone else. Having opinions is something people do. And people also decide which things in their world they think are important enough to have opinions about. It is true that something some other person thinks is vitally important you may find to be barely important enough to think about. That's allowed. Each person has their own set of attitudes and beliefs and, as far as I can tell, this is how it should be. Mandating people to believe the things that you happen to believe is called fascism and is generally thought to be a bad thing.

But human beings are also persuasive beings, social beings, communicative beings. And one aspect of belief, and holding beliefs, is that they can (or, should be) able to change. I'm not sure how many people in the real world have views about beliefs and how they work or have mused on patterns of thought. But, as one who is interested in philosophical discussions, I have. In my thinking about that I have come to be persuaded by a pragmatic view of beliefs. This view, briefly, is that human beings cannot help holding beliefs in normal circumstances and that this is just something they do. In order to hold beliefs they would normally be able to give some kind of justification for why they believe something and how it fits into their overall scheme of things. And a current belief, or a new one, must have some way of attaching itself to other things you believe. But it is also the case that over time these beliefs can change. There is a sort of mysterious open-endedness to holding beliefs. They modify over time. Beliefs are things we feel justified in believing and can provide reasons and evidence for. It may not satisfy someone else but it satisfies us in some way that we can explain.

But there is another aspect to beliefs. And this is that they can be questioned. Beliefs are not absolutes. That is why they are called beliefs. But the problem with many of these generalizations I see every day, generalizations that make a lie of the world and demonize people by treating them as a member of some (negative) class rather than as individuals in their own right, is that they are beliefs that are unquestionable. They are shibboleths for their holders. ("Shibboleth" is from a story in the Bible where one side used "shibboleth" as a password because their enemies could not pronounce the word correctly. "Shibboleth" thus served as a way to detect their enemies much as some beliefs do today for various social groupings.) I do not believe that ANY belief should be beyond question. Beliefs are not things that are beyond question. Beliefs, on the contrary, are things which should always be in question, in doubt, up for debate, things to be further refined, things that can change.

This is why closed-minded people really frustrate me so much. It is not that they hold beliefs and find certain things to be true that I don't agree with. I expect that. People's views of the world are molded, at least to some degree, by their own experiences of life. But I'm not sure the generalizers think that. They seem to think that all people should think what they think and that it is some moral failing to think otherwise. But this cannot be true. Its simplistic and, worse, closed-minded to think that way. I really do see it as a new anti-intellectualism at work today in, it must be said, first world societies. In these societies debate is not driven by justifying your beliefs, conversation with those who take a different point of view (which may well influence yours) and the simple act of persuasion by giving good reasons for why you think what you think. Instead, we see ranting and raving, generalizing hashtags and the splitting of societies into a million subcultures, each with their own beliefs, attitudes and shibboleths. Beliefs are much less likely to be open to question, able to last a meaningful debate or withstand good natured questioning if you hold on to them tightly as badges of identity in your cosseted ivory tower. But it seems that that is what some want to do. They are, incidentally, probably not very good beliefs if they can't be questioned either.

So what do I want? I want people to be viewed as individuals and not members of some class be that men, women, black, white, arab, jew, etc, etc, etc. Call me naive if you must but I think we are all people first and foremost. I think our humanity is much more fundamental than any of the differences we can make up, and the generalizations that are made of them. I think that what we share is much greater, and always will be much greater, than what divides us. But I also think that in many first world places today people have become masturbatory and inward-looking. They care more about their own identity, which may be based on a few cherished and unchallengeable beliefs, than the mass of humanity and the good of all. There are Twitter accounts, Tumblrs and Facebook pages dedicated to the stupid, unchallengeable beliefs of others. Feel free to go and read some to educate yourself about the anti-intellectual corners that people will willingly back themselves into.

For myself, I find myself always wanting to challenge those who put their own identity first. Not only does it seem egotistical on their part but it also always seems based on silly generalizations, ones damaging to human polity and social cohesion. I tend to do this generally but if you're reading this already trying to work out which side I take in various debates then you've probably missed the point. The point is that yes we all have views. But they should be open and debatable. There is no place for shibboleths, not when people's lives depend on it. And in many of these debates they ultimately do. When presidential candidates judge people based on their country of origin, when races judge and condemn other races based on skin colour and when one gender categorizes another gender based on lazy sloganizing these are not issues we can just pass over as "the way of the world" or with some such other lazy epithet. How we think matters and we have a duty to ourselves, for the health of our own beliefs, but also to everyone else, as fellow human beings, not merely to believe whatever we want to but to do it in ways that make sense of others too. A private belief is a contradiction in terms and, in my view, a terrible belief. The more light you can shine on it, the better it becomes. 

In closing, I'd like to mention one last conversation I took part in last night. It was with a shepherd on Twitter that I follow who tweets his daily shepherd's life. He put up a picture of his three beautiful sheepdogs. They sleep in pens in his barn and the picture was of the dogs in their pens which looked somewhat like cages or prison bars. This ruffled the feathers of a few of his followers who (I generalized!) seemed like town dwellers not used to the outdoors and country ways. For them, dogs are pets who live in the house. The shepherd seemed a bit exasperated with this response and pointed out, as calmly as he could manage, that these are not pets but working dogs. He explained that two of them don't even like being petted and stroked that much. So they work outdoors all day and then go back to the barn at night. 

What struck me about this little exchange was that, for most people, the limits of their world is the limits of their own experience. And they never look any further than this. This is where the beliefs are fostered - within the safe world of "my experience". My point is that we need to make an effort to understand the experience of others too. We also need to be able to explain ourselves and our beliefs to these people too. This benefits not only us but them as well and, by extension, everyone. I hope you would agree with me that a community that can discuss its beliefs and experiences one with another is much better than one in which everyone believes what they like and keeps it to themselves. The first would seem to me to be a much better, and safer, world to live in. And that's what we want, right? You will never foster peace and harmony based on division and difference. The nasty generalizations I see in discussions online every day are based on the latter and not the former. They are based on keeping to your own version of the world and refusing to interact with others. Identity trumps the multiplicity of reality. 

The best thing I ever did in my life (from an admittedly small selection of things) is live in another country. It opened me up to so many new people, new views and new attitudes. Perhaps that's why I'm writing this now. But the experience has stayed with me. And the conviction that what we see is only skin deep. But we are so much more than what we can see. Let's have a little understanding, the ability to share and the vulnerability of having to accommodate others in our beliefs.

Music and Meaning

Today I am... empty. Worthless. Meaningless. Irrelevant. Invisible. I knew this would happen. Some weeks ago on this blog I even predicted it and spoke of "Fall" and how, for some, this season is literally that. But knowing something intellectually or as a fact is not to feel it or to experience it with emotion. I also said at that time that I expected my music to become... worse. And it has. Its not anything I'm doing. I'm not trying to be worse. Or to not be worse. Its like an internal collapse that renders me irritable. The pathways that once poured forth of their bounty have run dry and only a viscous poison now leaks out. Putridly. And so now to make music is to sow poison or to administer my own death by a thousand infected cuts.

I was on a walk one day this week, one of my semi-regular attempts to give my mind time, space and fresh air. Suddenly, it occurred to me, quite by itself, that all my music is as nothing. Rubbish, empty, meaningless waste. This was a shocking but somewhat unsurprising thought. It was unsurprising because, as you will know if you have read some of my previous blogs, I am not one of those people who sees meaning in the universe, at least not the kind which is fixed, inscribed in the heavens and stable. Temporary, contingent, here-today-gone-tomorrow meaning I will grant you. But what use is that? In that moment, none at all. I felt adrift, in the void.

My music, I came to realize as I continued on my walk, the thoughts racing and the connections being made with every step, had become a place where I located meaning. Everything I release has some kind of personal meaning and some kind of internal sense and reason for its existence in my mind. It is the only way I can make anything at all. If I listen back to something I can tell you what it means and, often, what I was feeling at the time and why. But so what? My own personal monologue in sounds is neither profound, worthy nor meaningful in the end, right?

This week I have also started reading a book by Jacques Attali. The book is called Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Within the book, Attali attempts to set music and its uses within a historical and political context, showing first where it came from (ritual murder) and in its various places throughout history from the ecstatic cult of Dionysus as something wild, inspirational and dangerous, through its use by Jongleurs to the privilege and patronage of courts and kings, the liturgy of churches, the means of asserting wealth and power and to the present day as a marketable commodity. My description there is not quite complete but, if you're interested in music, you should get hold of the book and read it in any case. 

I have to date only read the first chapter of the book but Attali uses this first chapter to set out his total thesis in any case and then uses the remaining chapters to flesh out the fuller details which give his final points the substance to go with their sharpness. Now the book itself is not without its difficulties and its vocabulary, one which you need to tune yourself into. The book was first published in 1985 and was written originally in French by a French academic of the economy. I am finding it to be a fertile land for my own thoughts to grow into - without necessarily having to swallow the whole of what Attali says. But he is certainly suggestive. Incidentally, I became aware of this book earlier in the year when there was a BBC report about music and its current crisis as something becoming increasingly worthless in monetary terms. Attali, in this very book, had, it was said, predicted this crisis in 1985, a crisis of proliferation. Basically, he had said we'd get to a point at which there would be so much music it would become a worthless commodity.

And, indeed, even in his first chapter, Attali is talking about music "as commodity". This quote stands out from the first chapter:

Fetishized as a commodity, music is illustrative of the evolution of our entire society: deritualize a social form, repress an activity of the body, specialize its practice, sell it as a spectacle, generalize its consumption, then see to it that it is stockpiled until it loses its meaning.

Now you need to know his full thesis to get all the sense of that quote for it is a miniature history of music in his argument. But the final phrase is the key one here. Music stockpiled until it is literally meaningless. And is that not the case today? Is there not so much music that it literally becomes as nothing? Maybe you will reply that there is lots of music that means a lot to you. I wouldn't dream of denying it. But the music you personally are aware of is but a drop in a very large ocean. And think of all the music that means literally nothing to you. If you think about it I think you will find yourself agreeing with me and with Attali. Music, says Attali elsewhere in chapter 1, "goes anonymous in the commodity". Get a social media account and become friends with lots of other musical people, as seems to happen quite a lot for reasons I'm not quite sure of, and you will soon find yourself thrust onto the horns of a dilemma as each one of them produces music you are invited to listen to. Some you will like, some you won't. Some you will hate. But the overall picture will be one of music constantly being churned out, factory-like on a continuous conveyor belt of production. It is neither an appealing nor an appetizing image. 

The "industry" metaphor is picked up on by Attali as well. Of course, many people hate the title "The Music Industry". It bespeaks of commerce and business and factories and production. But are these negative or positive connotations? Well when music is a reflection of the society that makes it and an instrument of power for those who publish it (both themes Attali takes up) it is something that cannot be ignored either way. Attali talks of music as "a play of mirrors in which every activity is reflected, defined, recorded, and distorted". For him listening to music "is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political." Of course, Attali wouldn't be the first person to think that all music is political. Music has been political at least since the first jesters and jongleurs wrote ballads mocking the powerful. Today we have the notion of the protest song. But music's political nature is much more insidious than that. What music you listen to, purchase or give your support to says something about your society and your place in it, about what sort of society you want there to be. Do you want it to be edgy, questioning, democratic or do you want it to be conservative, supportive of the status quo, stable, secure? Do you want music to be the tool of those who control it on a business model or a medium for vitality, revolution and freedom from authority?

Attali attacks this latter point when he speaks of sound generally. We have only been able to record sound at all for about 100 years. Before this point music as a commodity was a physical impossibility so the idea that it could be is equally new. But with this new technical ability comes the ability to eavesdrop, to record, to censor - and to use these things as weapons of power. But equally recorded sound and recorded music could also be used by these same powers to enforce their message (in sound) upon the people. The Nazis, for example, had a favourite type of music, folksy songs called Schlager which, incidentally, still exists as a style of music in Germany today. It was thought by the Nazis that this kind of music inculcated the ideas, values and beliefs that they wanted to propagate, wholesome, family music. After the Second World war, at the end of the 60s, it was this kind of music, as well as American rock and blues, that German musicians such as Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream wanted to get away from. Thus, they produced a new electronic music that sounded nothing like any of those kinds of music which, for them, spoke from and to another kind of people and a different set of ideas. But the thinking is clear: music contains a message. In its very sound and style it can act very clearly as a megaphone for a set of values, attitudes and beliefs.

So when you listen to your Saturday night TV show such as The X Factor do not think this is a meaningless act. By doing so you are taking part in a political game. You are giving legitimation to a form of music and to its message. Most obviously you are supporting commercialism as an idea and the idea that music is about "stardom". This is, as Attali notes, an agenda in which "Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector." But is that what music is - just one more thing to be packaged and sold, a device to make a few thousand people much richer than you? That's certainly what Simon Cowell would like you to think. By listening to such music and such shows you are literally rubber stamping the idea that Cowell deserves to be where he is socio-politically and you where you are in turn. Needless to say, I've never watched the show and never would. This is because I neither stand for nor want to promote the kind of society that this music promotes and evangelizes for. "Art bears the mark of its time" is another quote from Attali. We should have the insight to see what the music we listen to, the music our society promotes, says about us individually and as a group.

But there's one more point there before I wrap this blog up. And that is that there is only so much time in the world. To listen to one thing is not to listen to another. To accept the commercialized, packaged music that those at the top of the socio-political order want to spoon-feed you, the kind which is unthreatening, is to reject other kinds. If its true that music is political then its true that your choices are political too. You can support or not support society as it is right now in the music you listen to and promote, in the form of society you legitimate by your listening choices. Attali points out that political power has always had to ban subversive noise "because it betokens demands for cultural autonomy, support for differences or marginality". This is a musical as well as a political argument. What kind of music do you make? What kind do you listen to? It is a very straight three minute pop song? Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, repeat to fade? Does it have words? Is it unchallenging? Primarily about melody? Maybe its in a strange time signature, non-chromatic, abnormal? You will never hear the latter on TV or in film either. And whilst there is the odd radio station that plays non-standard music it is a minuscule proportion of the overall total and to a tiny audience. As Attali puts this "They are direct translations of the political importance of cultural repression and noise control."

And so, as Attali sees it, "What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power". And he is right. People want to be stars. They see music as a way to make money and take their proper place in the pantheon of capitalist commercialists, winners in a society of "richest is best". As such, music is but a reflection of the society it finds itself in where even the losers can only dream of being richer. For that is how you win. Am I the only one who sees this as a trap and a great big empty void?

In the last few months I've been searching Bandcamp for modular synth music. Now, besides the gripe that a number of people seem to list their music on Bandcamp as "modular synth" when it is anything but (false tagging is a bugbear of mine), I have noticed that maybe 80% of the people who do have modular synth music on Bandcamp have charged money for their albums. One direct repercussion of this choice of theirs is that I will never hear it. I can't buy things online since I don't have a bank account and so I don't even bother to listen. But I do wonder why so many people, none of whom I, or the world as far as I'm aware, have ever heard of, feel the need to charge money for their music. And its here that we see the insidiousness of the politics. All of these people live in a commercial world. They have been taught, with their mother's milk, that work comes at a price. It would be betraying their modern, commercialist society to "give stuff away". Perhaps it also makes them "feel like a pro" to charge money too? I think so. Isn't that just self-deceptive ego?

Now don't get me wrong here. I fully agree that anyone can charge anything they like for their music. One album I saw was $999. I wonder how many takers they had? All I'm saying, in line with some thoughts that Attali helped foster in my mind, is that giving your music a price is a political act. It endorses and encourages a capitalist society and all the necessary thinking that goes with that. "A worker is worth their pay", right? Maybe. But first of all you have to take the step of thinking that work is something you should be doing and that music is work at all. These are two steps that I don't accept at all but they are steps that a capitalist, commercialist society would love to encourage, not least those who think that music is a product you sell, a most modern thought.

Given all this context maybe its not so surprising that I felt empty, worthless, meaningless, irrelevant, invisible, after all. For I make music that is free and in a way that I hope no one would ever mistake it as a "product" that you pay for. My music is not just an expression of my own personality but also of a different politics and a different set of values from those of the society I find myself in. It encourages its listeners to think differently and not merely be dragged along with the stream of history, a stream always directed by others for their benefit. It asks its listeners to think for themselves and act in their interests.

But maybe its just easier and more convenient to listen to The X Factor. But what of the question I asked back near the beginning of this blog? "My own personal monologue in sounds is neither profound, worthy or meaningful in the end, right?" Well, maybe it is. Maybe all those "personal monologues in sound" are. Maybe the strength of music is not its popularity, its sales figures or how rich its makers are. Maybe its in its diversity, difference and relationship with other musics and its makers. Maybe we here alone on this rock in space only have each other for company to make sense of the void. But what will you value? Commerce, which homogenizes due to market forces in support of "the way things are", or diversity and difference which brings the chance for an encounter and a chance to open your mind to new and other ways of being and understanding?

This is the final article written in support of my latest music, Industrial Sounds For The Working Class, which is available now at elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com

Spectre: fact or fiction?

A new James Bond film has been released recently called Spectre and I have seen it since I am a fan of these films. As I was watching Spectre I began to muse on the world that this film series has presented to us. Of course, James Bond films are a fictional world and we should take note of that. But it remains true that even in fictional worlds things can be said about our own world that are true or should be taken note of. For even in fiction a point of view is presented and a side is taken. In the case of James Bond films the view presented is that James Bond, and by extension his employers, are basically good guys, guys we should trust with our safety and in terms of their actions. Indeed, in the plot of Spectre James Bond explicitly asks people to trust him a number of times.

We live in a time of mass surveillance (which becomes a plot point of the film, incidentally). We also live in a time of public anxiety about this. But this is not uniform public anxiety. Indeed, in recent days here in the UK where the so-called "Snoopers Charter" has been brought forward by the British Government, it is being remarked that the mass of the British population are somewhat apathetic about being spied on. Perhaps, I suggest, it is because we are now so used to it? 

The UK is pretty much the most spied on nation in the world, not least because it does not have constitutional protection such as in the USA. It has more CCTV cameras than almost any other nation. Thanks to Edward Snowden (my mention of him here and your reading this have almost certainly put us all on a list I'm afraid) we know that the UK has been engaged in spying to capture and retain all online activity of the mass of the population. Are these people, the notional employers of James Bond, people we should trust? If you watched a James Bond film the suggestion would be yes. And, indeed, the Snoopers Charter is presented as mass surveillance but we shouldn't worry because the people collecting the information are the good guys. So we shouldn't worry, right? 

Never mind, then, that anything done online you are doing for all time. At some future point some agent of The State may link an action you did quite innocently some years ago to the fact you were at the wrong place at the wrong time 10 years from now. In the UK people have been arrested because their vehicle registration plate had been spotted at scenes of social unrest. (We have a number plate recognition system in the UK, facilitated by one of the largest CCTV networks in the world.) But cameras and hard disks don't record the why of our actions but only the fact of them. And facts need contexts and relationships to other facts to make sense. If a camera records me speeding through a red light in my car, for example, it doesn't tell you anything at all about why I did it. It tells you only that I did. Perhaps I was driving a getaway car after robbing somewhere. Perhaps the throttle of my car is stuck open. Perhaps I am drunk. Perhaps my pregnant wife has gone into labour and I need to get to the hospital fast. Knowledge is power. But its not always to know anything. And its prey to misinterpretation or, worse, deliberate misinterpretation.

There was a British politician, now sadly deceased, called Tony Benn. Benn was born the son of a Viscount but was a committed socialist. A member of the British Parliament for 47 of the years between 1950 and 2001 and a noted supporter of both social causes and working people, Benn was forced to give up his seat in the House of Commons upon the death of his father, Viscount Stansgate, because he automatically inherited the title and, now as a Viscount, qualified for the House of Lords instead. At this time it was not possible to renounce your title in Great Britain and so Benn campaigned for the ability to do so. He won his fight in 1963 and gave up being a Viscount to once again win an election and be returned to the House of Commons. Benn is the sort of character that certain US commentators would call a "communist" from their neoliberal perspective. But he saw himself as a democratic socialist and the democracy was as important as the socialism in his view. I mention him here because there is a very important quote of his I want to bring into my discussion today and it relates to democracy, that form of government under which most surveillance and spying takes place. Benn said:

In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person--Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates--ask them five questions: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?” If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.

That last question, "How can we get rid of you?" is very pertinent here to my blog today because even though individual governments come and go the apparatus of "The State" remains. Is there any difference in the actions of the governments of George W. Bush and Barack Obama? Can we tell the difference between the security actions of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron? Whose actions do the security and surveillance of The State represent and where does the power actually reside? How can we check or remove it? If political power can change but the same activities go on then this strongly suggests that politics alone might not be enough. What if there is consensus among politicians of different sides that a certain activity is required and necessary? What, indeed, if both sides serve the same, higher master? Politics would then be revealed as a tame sop to the people, something to blind their eyes to a greater truth.

And we know this can be true from the world of James Bond. Typically, the James Bond villain is some industrialist or corporatist who wants to dominate the world. This is easy to lambast and laugh at as Mike Myers has successfully done with Dr Evil in his Austin Powers films. But there remains the grain of truth in the fiction. Corporations don't serve the people and are not democratic organisations. We are meant to believe that the people who run them and own them, their boards and shareholders, are regular people like us who share our values. But companies exist just for one purpose: to become as successful and dominant as they can. 

We know, for example, that in our very real world global companies are pushing for trade agreements that would make prosecuting them impossible because they wish, in certain circumstances, to do business outside of the law. They also want their liabilities for when things go wrong removed. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), for example, has been described by one person as "an assault on European and US societies by transnational corporations". These trade talks, which are aimed at making business easier for these corporations by bypassing democratic regulation and process, if they were in a James Bond film and being carried out by Spectre, you would find incredible. But they are happening right now, in secret, and we only know about it because of leaks. (The secrecy, of course, is quite deliberate on their part and even democratically elected members of parliaments have not had access to details of the talks.) Companies don't operate for the common good. They operate for their good and for the good of their owners.

Think, for example, of one particular area of business which, if we reasonably extrapolate, can get very "James Bond" in a hurry. This area of business is biotech. We already know that a company like Monsanto has aggressively tried to market its genetically modified crops around the world. In a number of countries democracy has fought back, though, and they have not been allowed either to sell them or to sell them by mixing them in with the non-genetically modified kind by stealth. Often they have also been forced to label them adequately as well. It seems they do not always want you to know what you might be eating. The genetic modification of things that grow doesn't stop there though. 

The other day I was reading an article that was about the genetic modification and patenting of genes, the very things that make up the living tissue of animals and, indeed, of us. Imagine that in future, and this is a genuine if still a somewhat far-fetched prospect, companies could actually own the genes that living beings are made of. Let's take it one more James Bond supervillian step further. Imagine that a biotech company in future could grow and own human beings, owning them because it owns their very genetic code that makes them up. Does our world have the necessary ethical framework and democratic and legal processes to handle this kind of future? Where will we be if governments, our elected representatives, barter the rights of the people away on the altar of commerce that benefits such companies?

It seems to me that the world of James Bond and the world we all live in is not so far apart. Fact and fiction intertwine, the far-fetched and the scarily possible hide together in the shadows. Maybe it will turn out that someone, somewhere, lives in a hollowed out volcano. But from my point of view it makes me think about the big picture and how this world is organized - the system in total, in other words. This world is based on economic and commercial lines. In many places you would be regarded as a mad fool for renouncing commerce or not looking at things from an economic point of view. This view is totally dominant in public life and those who do not have or stick to this agenda are completely disregarded. The only worth is commercial worth.

But the societies that this mentality plays out in are not equal. Commerce does not make everyone equally happy or equally wealthy. Indeed, the world today has more of two things than it has had at any other time in its history: millionaires and the dirt poor. And the inequality between these groups grows every day as those at the top come to own more and more of the resources of the world. Its like the plot of a James Bond film but its not far-fetched. Its happening in front of your eyes. And so the questions that we, the people, need to ask is who holds the power in this world? Where is the influence? You don't need to be the most analytic person in the world to start thinking that so many resources and so much power concentrated in so few hands starts to give such people influence that the regular person just doesn't have, by him or herself, at least. The spectre of corruption rises. When politicians leave office to take seats on the boards of transnational companies that they gave deals to whilst in power we should take such things very seriously. To be blunt: political power can be bought, and often is. The democratic process is somewhat of a sham.

I've spoken long enough and I need to start wrapping this blog up for now. Mostly, my blogs are written for the thoughtful. I don't have time to go into all the details or explore where every thread I pull leads. But I hope that some of my readers might. My blogs are the beginning of things, not the end. Here I have really been writing about the system that we all live in, our world. In the end, this world is all about preserving the status quo, keeping those at the top at the top and those at the bottom at the bottom. Of course, a few people are allowed to pass from the bottom to the top and occasionally this happens. But those at the top see this as a good thing. It preserves the illusion that anyone could do it. It is a carrot for the aspiring have-nots. But make no mistake that those at the top are happy that most of us are at the bottom. Only in that situation can their vast wealth be turned to influence, influence which shapes our world and conditions all of our lives. But who do you want to have power in this world: CEO's and shareholders who stand for their own wealth and advancement or elected representatives who are meant to stand for yours?

So what I'm saying here is open your eyes. Be active in your own interests and those of your family and friends. Don't assume that a good James Bond watches over you because "we are the good guys". That is very naive, dangerously naive. Better to have the attitude of Tony Benn and ask his five questions of power, especially "How can we take your power away from you?" If it turns out that, in actuality, you can't then the world may not be quite as democratic as you once thought it was. And let's not forget that the real James Bonds are the ones who are noting and recording your every online action, they are the ones who spirit people away to black ops sites in unknown places around the world in the dead of night. They too, like Bond, will ask you to trust them, even when doing bad things. But you should ask yourself if such people really act in your interest or in your name and, if not, then in whose.

And you should also remember this. The State, and those in power (which is not always just politicians) fears most of all the ideological, those who think. For those who think can see other ways forward, ways which locate power elsewhere than with those who have the most power and most money and most influence right now. The State, whichever political side is in power, (its often irrelevant anyway) is nervously suspicious of those who think. This is why it wants to record every search you make online, every message you send to anyone else and everything you browse. It wants a record of your thoughts much like Orwell said. Doesn't that sound very sinister to you? It's like having a spectre looking over your shoulder.

This blog is another written for my project #IndustrialSoundsForTheWorkingClass which can be followed on Twitter using that hashtag. My album of the same name will be released in January 2016.

Where Do You Stand?

As a Twitter user I am able to sit and watch my timeline scroll away as all those I have followed (a few hundred) tweet and retweet things into it. Quite often these things are political things as people share their own interests or, sometimes, positions that they find dangerous, wrong or even laughable. These are not always things I agree with but they are things I can put up with. I guess like most users of social media I am very self-selective in the choice of those I choose to follow. I could not follow someone tweeting race hate into my timeline on a constant basis, for example. But then neither could I follow someone constantly tweeting either feminist dogma or other single agenda issues either such as climate change. Last year in Scotland there was a referendum of the Scottish people to determine if that country should leave the UK and become independent. The eventual vote was 55/45 in favour of no. It was a very active debate online and I found that I couldn't follow people from either side because it was a constant barrage of one-sided views. I was looking for information though not opinion.

When it comes to politics, then, I have my beliefs and sometimes they are moderate and sometimes they are quite extreme. But, by and large, I keep them to myself. I avoid overtly political accounts (or getting into political discussions) no matter in what direction their politics tends. This is because politics very quickly descends into a shouting match and a pit of contention. Nothing is to be achieved by shouting across the Twitter void at people. Some feminists laud the ability to shout at all of course and they feel that a regular dose of "shouting at the devil" is good for the soul. I disagree because, in my pragmatic way, I want to ask what it achieves. I think it achieves nothing beyond maybe making the shouter feel better. But feminist goals are about more than making individual women feel better and so I look for progress on social goals rather than women who feel better.

All of us live in political situations and are affected by a whole host of political decisions, processes and jurisdictions. So a quietism like mine cannot be the end of the story. If you can live with most things that are going on in the world then it might start to be suggested that you don't actually care what happens to it. Some political decision somewhere must be affecting you and, as one who wants to know what goes on, that gives me more ability to find out what those things are. Of course, it is often the easy way out to then say that you can't do anything about it. You are small and the forces of political power are big and strong. But this is defeatism. Politics has always been a numbers game. But the relevant numbers here are not economic ones. They are the numbers of people prepared to stand up and say "No!" to something or "Yes!" to something. No political policy of any government anywhere would pass if 10 million people were stood in the streets. Activism counts and activism works. Ask the Suffragettes, for example. So often, it seems to me, politicians are happy to sneak things by a population that is snoozing or misdirected so that their attention is elsewhere. Politics is the practice of stealth as much as anything else.

But there are occasions when I feel that I must tweet about political things. This is not because I am a political animal or any kind of activist. As with most things, this is a more instinctive thing with me. Its also probably because the things I tweet about in this way I feel I have some connection to. Politics is partly a reaction to the world around us and we can only act or react in relation to things we see or become aware of. (This is one reason why politicians often try to hide things. You can't have a view on something you aren't aware of.) Now I lived in Germany for a number of years in the recent past and my eyes became open to a number of things, living in a different kind of society and culture to the one I was used to. Travel broadens the mind they say and its very true. Whilst there I worked with people from pretty much every country of Europe and was exposed to completely new views and outlooks on the world. 

And so yesterday many of my tweets could have been regarded as of a political nature. Why was this? Its because yesterday was November 9th. A number of things happened in Germany on November 9th in years gone by. Two of the biggest things that happened were the fall of The Berlin Wall in 1989 and Kristallnacht, the pogrom (coordinated violent attacks) of 1938 carried out by the Sturmabteilung (who were literally "Stormtroopers"), which left over 1,000 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish businesses damaged or destroyed by fire. In addition 30,000 Jews were rounded up and taken to concentration camps. Around 2,000 of these people never left them, the rest being released on condition that they left Germany and Austria. (These two countries were at that time joined together in what was called "Anschluss".) And so you can see that these are pretty big events, events which I think bear out being remembered. So yesterday morning I tweeted a number of factual things about the fall of the Berlin Wall and last night I tweeted about Kristallnacht. I wanted it to be remembered and, for those of thoughtful mind, to be thought about. One of the uses of history, after all, is to remind us not to repeat ourselves. This is especially relevant when world powers even today profile people by race and presidential candidates talk about building walls between people.

I thought about this and my own political quietism and my reasons for it. I see political strength as being found in unity. This is not a new belief or an uncommon one. Many workers' rights movements or unions have similar mottos and beliefs. The workers' rights movement from Poland led by Lech Walesa and started in 1980 as the first trade union not run by The Communist Party was known as "Solidarity", for example. 

The belief common to all these groups of people is that strength is in their togetherness and that against the will of the mass of people private or individual or even corporate or state interests cannot stand. I think that, in the end, this is surely right. But it then becomes a question of where you stand and who you support. You can, of course, be quiet and stand idly by. But then you merely abdicate responsibility and play no part in the result. You get whatever the outcome is whether you want it or not. I do think that at the end of the day even quietists like me have to plant their flag somewhere. For to be a quietist is to let things happen. No one should be so naive as to think that things happen all by themselves though. Things happen because people do them and because other people let them. There is no truer saying in the political sphere than that which says "All it takes for bad men to flourish is that good men do nothing". That applies to good and bad women too.

So political quietism is all well and good and I very much understand it. But it cannot be enough in a world with so many bad things happening, where people need a food bank to feed them and worry about being able to pay for health care if they get sick. (The list is endless. I noted just two basic things.) It is a struggle and people will, in general, do what they are allowed to get away with. In a world in which many are motivated primarily by the private acquisition of wealth, people are not top of the agenda and some become blinded to the facts of their lives. We should remember that it is only by action that things can change. They will never change all by themselves. You won't wake up tomorrow to find a political utopia. But you can try to build one. In truth, only action will ever move us nearer to one, whatever you think that looks like. So the question is Where Do You Stand? and What Are You Prepared To Do About It? You can be sure that those with different values, aims and goals will be doing things about it even if you aren't.

So where do I stand? I've thought about it and tried to pin it down. I think back to those standing at the Berlin Wall in 1989 shouting "Tor auf!" (open the gate!) at the East German border guards. I think back to the night of horror in 1938 when Jews going about their business were suddenly attacked, killed and incarcerated. And then I know where I stand: 

I stand with the underdog. I stand with the innocent victim.

This blog is one of a series in my new project #IndustrialSoundsForTheWorkingClass which you can also follow under that hashtag on Twitter.

Individual or Community?

I am working on a new project for about the next 2 months and that project is called INDUSTRIAL SOUNDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS. It is an overtly political project with things political, cultural and social to say about our world and our species. It has been borne in on me this year more than ever that we humans are all human beings together on this planet. We are the same but we devise bureaucratic, cultural and social ways to divide us one from another. This, to me, seems like self-defeating craziness. Others will say that it is only the state of nature and will then go on to delineate some "nature red in tooth and claw" ideas about how all life progresses only by antagonism and by setting one being against another. But all of these ideas, whichever side of the notional divides we invent you find yourself on, are just ideas. And ideas are not compulsory. We can swap the ideas we have now for other ones. We can change the way we live now and live other ways. It would be a very foolish person who said there is only one way to live and this is it. 

Today, as part of a series of articles that will build up to the release of INDUSTRIAL SOUNDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS, I want to showcase and somewhat discuss two ways of looking at people, human beings, our species. These I have called "individual" and "community" in an attempt to not use partisan language of any kind. For some the use of partisan terms will be a stumbling block to actually reading what I say, so locked up in various kinds of rhetoric will they be. Political partisanship is a great problem today as many people only ever hear the viewpoints they approve of and feel to be right. There is a general lack of willingness to see that every way of doing things is in some sense a compromise and that other ways are always possible. People get caught up in their own fantasies of personal identity and put this before the actual lives of people with disastrous results. I, however, hope that I am aware enough to recognize the fallibility of all human thinking and the need to have an appropriate humility in all things.

But there is a further point to be made here. Society, that thing which Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s said does not exist, does not operate with equal benefit to all. Structures of power do not favour everyone equally either. There will be winners and losers. And there will be ideology in operation. For some, their ideology will be that there should be winners and losers and this will have consequences for other people. The point I'm trying to make here is that in political, social and cultural contexts we are required to take a stand here and take a stance towards all the other people that are around us. This is what newspaper owners do when they brand unemployed people "scroungers". This is what politicians do when they describe refugees as a "swarm". This is what presidential candidates do when they say they want to build walls along their borders. They are making their personal position in regard to everyone else known.

The two attitudes I want to showcase today, then, are that way of looking at us which regards us as individuals all responsible for ourselves as men and women alone in the world and another way which regards us all as people, members of the same species with far more in common than will ever divide us. For avoidance of doubt and to make clear where I'm coming from I choose the second one. Of course, I do have to choose because in life we all have to choose. And we all do choose, if not in a ballot box then in the regular decisions of our daily lives and in our habitual practice. You cannot be politically neutral. If you refuse to share your beliefs then you act them out every day anyway in every choice that you make. To take part in society is to make choices that affect the lives of others. To go along with a system is to give it the support of your practice.

It was Ayn Rand who said "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask for another man to live for mine". Rand is a poster girl for a politically right of centre individualism which lauds the individual as the basic unit of life itself. You should rely only on yourself and to rely on others is an abdication of this responsibility. You are nothing more than a lazy burden if you need things from other people. This creed is quite powerful and thorough-going in today's world, not least in political circles. There is also a very common political rhetoric which really springs from this kind of original thought. This is the rhetoric which lambasts those without a job, immigrants, the poor, the sick and generally anyone who is, for reasons of their own making or not, economically unproductive. For this mentality if you cannot look after yourself then there is something wrong with you. You fall into a kind of sub-human category and need to reclaim your dignity by looking after yourself. 

Of course, this ideology has problems. Have you ever noticed how all these private individuals with their Ayn Rand beliefs who run companies are more than happy to take government money to help their business or subsidies to provide this and that service? They don't believe in society, especially when it is giving money to other people, but they will happily take any benefits that come their way and use facilities built with public money. But I thought life was all about looking after yourself and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps? Not so, it seems, if the money is being put into THEIR pockets! Of course, in business it was always this way. Business, as we now know, and especially in terms of manufacturing things, began when wealthy people needed the mass of common people to move into towns and cities and work in their factories. This social upheaval from about 1750 onwards changed the way of the world. From the beginning, workers were always exploited and had to fight for their rights. 

Now I don't mean to deny it is very true to say that those on each side of the divide see things their own way. In researching my project yesterday, for example, I came across the following meme:

The first thing I noted about this meme is that it uses a certain rhetoric. The bad guys here are "socialists" and the good guys are "capitalists". Those familiar with political argument will be well aware of these terms. This argument is reduced to a discussion about nice houses. I picked this meme out because I am familiar with pretty much the same point being restated in almost the opposite way. There was a famous football manager in England called Brain Clough (manager of my home town team, incidentally) who was also famously a socialist. He once stated that the difference between the two parties this meme addresses was that the capitalists wanted something nice to keep it for themselves and that the socialist was the one who believed that everyone should be able to have nice things equally. Remarkable how the two positions can be swapped around, isn't it? My own view here is that the meme writer has swallowed his own rhetoric a little bit too much. I've never met a "socialist" who thinks no one should be allowed to live in a nice house. (Clough himself had a very nice house.) But I have seen many who do actually live in nice houses and get criticized for doing so! Often this is by very rich individualists who have a confused understanding of what it is their opponents are meant to believe. But it  is also true that I don't know of many "capitalists" who think that everyone should have a nice, big house. Of course, they believe in this theoretically and they sell things like the so-called "American Dream" as a support of the idea that one day they might. But, as has been said, "Its called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Opposed to the individualist view is the community view. This is that view which looks at people all together as the same, members of a common species, having a common dignity and worthy of equal treatment. For people who hold this view a person's worth is not measured in Pounds Sterling, Dollars or Euros. It is measured in a simple human dignity it is believed we all have just by being here. Rather than imagining that any station in life is achieved by you and you alone, this mentality accepts that we are all in some sense related and stand or fall together. Such people would tend to believe that "An injury to one is an injury to all" which is a far cry from the ethics and philosophies of Ayn Rand. Such people might smile to themselves approvingly when hearing the French motto "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" - Liberty, equality, fraternity.

Of course, the main difference between the two views I'm talking about here would be, from my point of view, that the first takes a "devil take the hindmost" view of life whereas the second thinks that since we are all linked together as inhabitants of the same planet then, in some sense, our fates are linked too. Therefore, we should help our neighbour because, in doing so, we are helping ourselves. The individualist seems in some way scared that by helping others he somehow lessens his own position or disadvantages himself. The community person I describe does not. The individualist sits in his home oblivious to the world outside his front door, hoping that it will not invade his peace. The community person recognizes that for the world inside his house to be ok then the world outside it needs to be somewhat ok as well. The individualist thinks about his advantage, the community person everyone's advantage.

You can see where I am going with this and maybe extrapolate in different ways what this might mean. Where you stand changes the game and each position leads to consequences. I write this blog only to point up this basic difference in outlook. Of course, I'd be the first to admit that its much more complicated than this. No doubt people on many political sides are already calling me all names under the sun and thinking that I have misunderstood them. Well, I wasn't trying to understand them. I was putting forward my view. If you have Twitter you will be finding more of my views on this as I tweet under the hashtag #IndustrialSoundsForThe WorkingClass as part of my current creative project.

We live in a world of the extremely rich who live in gated mansions and the extremely poor who live in boxes or under bridges. This did not happen because it is nature's way or because some principle decreed it must be so. Neither is it the case that things must be this way. It is also true that fairness and equality are not principles that operate all by themselves. They only operate by the actions of human beings, human beings who can also choose to act neither fairly or equally. Similarly, what we value - money, principles, wealth, power or people - are also our choices. And choices always have consequences - and never just for us. The last word here goes to Dr Martin Luther King who criticizes individualist thinking:

The project INDUSTRIAL SOUNDS FOR THE WORKING CLASS will be published in January 2016. Further blogs will follow this one in the lead up to its release.

New Musical Directions: Facing The Boundaries of Reality

It is the case for most people that life is fairly static and stable. Many human beings like this fact and I am certainly one of them. Too much change and changing circumstances can be disorientating and it seems as if there is nothing solid and secure to hold on to. This is also the case musically from the point of view of musical creation. For the last few years I have basically had the same resources to hand. For a time before that I had much more available but reduced circumstances and life choices have now taken me down to a bare minimum which is what the music of the last 2 years from me has been made with. I'm somewhat shy these days of speaking too much about musical setups because I have found, in this world of egotistical opinions spewed out for general consumption on blogs, forums and social media sites, that knowing too much about an artist's "how" colours people's views on the product. Check any music forum for plenty of examples of this, often from people who should know better. So the view I hold these days is that you don't need to know how I did what I did. I also hope this will push your need to hold an opinion onto what I actually made and what you think of it. Because, after all, having something at the end of the process is the point, right?

In the much reduced circumstances I now find myself in, however, there are still two hardware synths that I have managed to somehow retain. They have been tucked away in the shed since last time I used them over a year ago. Before that I hadn't used them for maybe 3 years before that. They are the Korg Electribe EMX-1 and the Korg Electribe ESX-1. (The first is a virtual analog synth and the second a sampling synth with reduced synthesis capabilities in comparison with the first.) These are the original 2003 models with the Smartmedia card slots, Smartmedia being a format that no one ever really bothered with. I'm not sure if you can even buy these cards anymore. 

I mention these machines because for the last 2 or 3 weeks I have been thinking, very casually, about how I change things up. This, for good or ill, is a part of the make up of my personality. I'm unable, and unwilling, to go on repeating myself and doing things for a long period of time. I get bored and want a new direction, reason or goal. This is the history of my life story. There is really hardly anything I've ever done or any situation I have kept which got much past 2 or 3 years. The music I have made in the last 2 years using my old process is great, the best I've ever done. If I look back on my music-making history I see an upward curve in terms of ability, the musical interest it creates and the roundedness of the final product. But this isn't enough and, crucially, I think its only true because I don't sit in the rut happy to make the same thing but with a different tune.

Now the Electribe EMX-1 is an instrument I know well. Of all the things I've ever owned, and this includes expensive keyboard synths, samplers, DJ equipment, Elektron grooveboxes and software, it is probably the instrument I took most time to use and know best. Seven years ago I would habitually get up in the morning, switch it on and in 20 minutes jam out a tune which I recorded to video and stuck up on You Tube. These videos got a bit of a following and not simply for the music (although I hope some of it was for that) but also because, having just got out of bed, often my fat gut was on display in the video as the EMX-1 was resting on my knees. A man needs to be comfortable as he works! By the way, in case you're wondering, that You Tube account is long deleted and none of the videos survive. Sad, I know. You get deprived of those performances and I consigned some good tunes to the void. But that must be. I find it better to be defined by the next thing than by the last thing. So occasionally a total wipe of the past is necessary. Its all about reinvention. I couldn't be sure, but David Bowie's career seems to suggest he has something of a similar mentality.

So in thinking how I move forward from my old way to a new way these devices came to the forefront  of my mind. Sitting and jamming with them, though, is out. Its been done before and, these days, every 13 year old has a You Tube account with 50 videos showcasing the 10 beatboxes and ipads his parents bought him. They can do that and they can do it better than me. An old man and his gut isn't music news going into 2016. But a project I have recently completed does suggest a different approach to that. Recently I made the album "A Noise Archive of Science Fiction" and to make that I scoured the internet for free sound libraries of analog and other synths that I could download and manipulate in ways I found interesting. I managed to make 81 tracks doing that in a feverish 8 days of activity in which I barely did anything but make music. 

So what about if I took the EMX-1 (and maybe the ESX-1 too) and used it to generate the sounds myself this time? Its a progression from my last idea but this time everything is mine from creating the sounds themselves by messing with the synth until something I like pops out to putting the sound in a manipulative environment and changing it into something else that combines and works with other sounds to make something bigger. Not very revolutionary you may be thinking. This is true but for me its different and that might be enough. To understand why this is new and exciting to me you need to understand my musical mentality though.

The one thing that I have never employed in making my music is time. Taking time to me always equated to making hard work of music and music should not be work. It also shouldn't be an industry but it is often called one. To me music is fun and its about having fun with the plus that at the end of the fun maybe you have recorded something of worth. I know for many, and perhaps as an "industry" standard, music is supposed to be deliberately arranged, recorded and produced with a pre-determined idea of what you want at the end. But it has never been this for me as, intuitively, it seemed to me as if the moment, the inspiration, the muse, was much more important than making a job of work of it. So I never, ever took time. What I did was think of the next big idea and then record the moment of its execution. 

So that is where I come from musically (and philosophically but thats another story) and I want to preserve that into my next work. I think I can do that in using the electribes to find snippets of sound, make loops and record one shots. These can then be thrown somewhere else to be changed, effected, combined and chained to form greater works. The electribes are somewhat perfect for this kind of thing as they have no voice memories at all. This means that if you want to preserve a sound you make you must record it as it can't be saved on the machine. It forces creativity and makes it certain that no sound will ever be the same twice. Indeed, reading back some reviews from when these original 2003 models came out I'm reminded just what great machines these were with their motion sequencing (which records knob tweaks on the fly) and, at least on the EMX-1, quite comprehensive synthesis controls. The analog vacuum tubes also give it an analog saturation that goes from warmth to total distortion. Perfect for making noises. Or just noise.

So for the next 2 months I want to take time. I want to take time to make sounds. I want to take time to manipulate those sounds. I want to take time to combine those sounds. Rather than putting out the next set of tracks I made as if on a conveyor belt I want to be more choosy. I doubt I will be any less prolific but what gets put up in public will be the cream that rose to the top rather than simply the next set of moments I recorded. I don't know if I will like this way of working or if I will abandon it after an hour. I don't like the idea that the past can bind the future so I'm not laying down any rules here only intentions as I write as a musician who needs to keep things fresh. If I stick to my plan expect to hear a new album from me on my birthday which is in January 2016.

You can hear the best of this year's work right now at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/ 

EDIT! 14 days later and this album is published. It is now available at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/album/industrial-sounds-for-the-working-class 

Electronica: The Time Machine

Two weeks ago French electronic pioneer, Jean-Michel Jarre, released his first album in 7 years. If you follow electronic music, synthesizer websites or the music press you may have noticed this fact as Jarre has undertaken extensive PR to promote the album. The album is unique in his catalogue of work in at least one respect: every song is a collaboration with someone else in electronic music who he regards as having influenced him or as an influence in general. And so he has worked with people such as Tangerine Dream (including Edgar Froese shortly before he sadly died at the start of this year), Vince Clarke, John Carpenter, Moby, Pete Townshend, Air and many others. In fact, he has worked with so many people there will be a second album of collaboration coming in spring next year to complete the project in which people like Gary Numan and Hans Zimmer will feature.

But this blog today is NOT about that album. Rather, its about an idea that this album inspires. I have been listening to Jarre's album - which has been impressively made in a custom studio using a vast swathe of instruments from the beginning right up to the present day of electronic music - with interest and it makes me ask myself a question: What would be my selection of artists who "have influenced me or who I regard as influences?" This is one of those pub type questions then where you argue with friends over who is better or which is the more important artist. Of course, its necessarily a personal list because each of our musical journeys is different. So I feel no urge to agree with people. Each journey has its own validity. What follows is my list of electronic musicians who have been important way markers in electronic music and with a few words as to why. I've also put the songs I chose into a You Tube playlist which is linked at the end.


1. Depeche Mode (New Life)

Depeche Mode is where it really all starts for me. They emerged just as I did from boyhood and, as I think about it, they really are the one electronic band that was there at the start and is still there now in relation to my own musical interests. At the beginning it was Vince Clarke (latterly of Yazoo and Erasure) who was the main song writer as in the song I choose here, their first proper hit, New Life. Of course, this sounds nothing like what Depeche Mode would become. But more about that later.

2. The Human League (The Things That Dreams Are Made of)

The Human League came just after Depeche Mode in my fledgling awareness. This is the revamped League and not the dour three man setup the trendies will prefer that made Travelogue and Reproduction. The album that made me aware of The Human League was Dare. Dare has a very distinct sound, one of the first records to ever use the Linn Drum, one of the first proper electronic drum machines. Indeed, I understand the machine had only just made it into the country when the album's producer, Martin Rushent, got hold of it and rapidly began programming it for the album. This was a momentous decision as to think of that instrument now is to think of Dare as an album. Dare and its lead single, Don't You Want Me, went down well in America too.

3. Cluster (James)

Cluster (formerly Kluster) were an electronic duo of Germans, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius (RIP). They started out as abstract sound artists as can be heard on their first two albums from 1971 and 1972. If you want to know where ambient came from then listen to those records. If you think that Brian Eno invented ambient then note that Eno worked with these two guys throughout the Seventies and in the "supergroup" Harmonia with Michael Rother of Neu! But not only did Cluster invent ambient noise they also invented synthpop on their pioneering 1973 album, Zuckerzeit (Sugartime). A listen to this album reveals that someone got there before Kraftwerk. The only thing lacking was that Cluster didn't sing. The song James from this album is like a crazy ambient remix version of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" seventeen years before it existed. If you like electronic music then your education isn't complete without listening to Cluster.

4. Kraftwerk (Tour de France)

As with most things, I came to Kraftwerk late. Prior to the song I chose here, which to my mind is their best, I was only aware of "The Model". I had liked that but this one was much more 80s (which is what it was at the time). The Model had famously been tacked on to a single release from the 1981 album Computer Love as a B side but British DJs preferred to play The Model and so it went to number 1. Tour de France wasn't as popular but it showcased perfectly Kraftwerk's love of rhythmic patterns as well as their electronic sound, a sound that helped create Techno in Europe and America. No one will challenge my choice of Kraftwerk as an influence because anyone and everyone acknowledges that they are.

5. Jean-Michel Jarre (Fourth Rendez-Vous)

I became aware of Jean-Michel Jarre openly in 1986. This was the time of his world record breaking concert to 1.3 million people in Houston, Texas, in which the city was used as a gigantic backdrop for his music. There was a report about it on British TV and how the concert was being set up and organised and this caught my attention. I remember asking myself what kind of music could possibly be the soundtrack for a whole city? The concept seemed quite ambitious to me and the answer was his album Rendez-Vous. Subsequently, of course, I became aware of his previous work, particularly the sublime and enduring Oxygene which is one of the most atmospheric electronic records ever made. I recommend the "new master recording" from 2007 whole heartedly. If anyone has made electronic music widely known to masses of people then it is Jarre. Who else has repeatedly performed to crowds of over 1 million people with playing synthesizers as the attraction?

6. Man Parrish (Hip Hop Be Bop)

This is an artist I don't actually know that much about. But I know this tune and I know that he pioneered the electro sound of the 80s, a sound that took up the electronic dance music torch but was subsequently outshone by Techno and House. We can hear in records like Hip Hop Be Bop that even by 1983 Kraftwerk were being surpassed and left behind by those they had influenced and newer, younger, more American kids had got to grips with new, mass marketed, programmable instruments to make a sound that had never been heard before. Hip Hop Be Bop packs as much of a punch today as it did in '83. Its a seminal track.

7. Autechre (Basscadet)

Many people have never heard of Autechre, now a couple of middle-aged blokes from near Manchester, England. To describe the kind of music they make is complicated. They were, and still are, fans of electro music such as that from Man Parrish I just showcased. But they are also some of those who grew up just as home computing got off the ground and this love for computers has become integral to their music-making process. Its easiest to say that they developed into people who make music that no one could ever play in conventional, human ways and they have fully embraced the possibilities of making a music that only machines could ever make. As such, they are pioneers and standard-bearers for all the kids who ever got a computer and made music with it.

8. Boards of Canada (Amo Bishop Roden)

Boards of Canada are not so much a musical act or a style as they are a huge dose of nostalgia injected straight into the main vein. They do things with electronic music that no one else, I think, has ever done before and no one has yet surpassed. To listen to their tracks is to be taken away into a past, safe world of childhood where the sun always shines and familiar things are always to hand. Their music is like being wrapped in a soft blanket and snuggled. This is a group about which you don't care how they do it. You just enjoy the fact that they do.

9. Nine Inch Nails (Corona Radiata)

Trent Reznor is another guy I became aware of a long time after everyone else probably did. Almost 20 years after probably. But that's because, to me, Reznor has got more interesting the longer he has been active. By around 2010 he had become a film score composer and was also dabbling in working in different ways. The loud, depressed, alternative rock guy who had passed me by had become the mature, reflective thinker whose words on things musical I always like to think about myself. We need more people like Reznor who view sound itself as a communicative language. The Nine Inch Nails of Ghosts or The Slip or Hesitation Marks are, to me, infinitely more interesting than the one of The Downward Spiral, an album I can never listen through to the end of. But the latter came from the former and Reznor's musical journey keeps on getting more and more interesting. And influential.

10. Gary Numan (Are Friends Electric?)

One of those who influenced Reznor (because, as in everything, its all about networks of relations here) was Gary Numan, the London punk who popped up in 1979 and stole the electronic thunder from all the arty college boys who thought that they were the vanguard of British electronic music. The story goes that Numan one day found a Minimoog Model D in the studio he was in and, never having heard of it before, played it and liked it. The rest is history. Numan is an influence because so many 90s and and 00s electronic musicians say he is. He got in there first with a slightly punky, slightly alternative take on synths and had a few big hits. And people tend to remember stuff like that. His music was ripe to be mined and built upon by alternative rockers in the 90s and beyond. And it was. (Check out the video to this that I linked to. Its a live performance that features Billie Currie of Ultravox on an Arp Odyssey.)

11. Throbbing Gristle (Hot On The Heels of Love)

Not really a record very representative of Throbbing Gristle's output in the main, this track is, nevertheless, a standout one and representative of the fact that when Throbbing Gristle weren't making art to make a point (and they always were) they were actually musically very interesting. I've seen this track described elsewhere as one that deconstructs Moroder's "I Feel Love" riff and then smacks him back in the face with a stripped down version of it. But that's just pretentious music press bollocks and you won't find any of that here. The Gristles have an enduring appeal not just for their sound experiments (and everything they did was often an experiment, indeed, that was kind of the point of anything they did) but also for their attitude. Why make music if you have nothing to say?

12. Howard Jones (Hide and Seek)

It would have been easy for me to try and sublimate this choice and hide it away. There are trendier acts I could have chosen. But that would be to falsify the past. I was indeed a Howard Jones fan in the early 80s. Yes, time has not been kind to him and history doesn't make him one of the great names of the electronic past. But he was there and a few of his songs informed my teenage mind. So that counts as an influence on me. Jones was thoroughly conventional in pretty much every way but he did play synths - the Jupiter 8 being his signature instrument. When you're 13 or 14 just seeing someone playing a Jupiter 8 and wondering how it works and what it does is enough.

13. Daft Punk (Prime Time of Your Life)

Yes, they smacked it out of the park now with Random Access Memories. But I was there before that. Of course, I'd noted Da Funk. But the album of theirs that's really in my heart is the one everyone else passes over - Human After All. This is electronic music with a message. This music IS the message. The track I've chosen is an example in point. Listen to it and think. Because that's what they want you to do.

14. Underworld (Cowgirl)

Somehow Underworld seem to have emerged from the 90s dance craze and matured into electronic musicians par excellence. They largely got under my radar although Born Slippy was a track no one could ignore in 1996. Yet by 2012 they were working on projects like doing the music for the Olympics opening ceremony. They have a definitely British sound and are largely guys who get their heads down and just make music. A listen to their back catalogue is more than rewarding.

15. Leftfield (Open Up)

Leftfield's album Leftism is maybe the best album of the 1990s, a decade I often think of as a black hole in musical terms. For me the 70s and 80s is where all the invention comes from and everyone else after is just footnotes to what these people did. But some things from later still stand out and Leftism is one such thing. Its a masterpiece album of morphing electronic genres, always with a danceability that can't be shaken off. Open Up, which features the vocals of butter-selling ex punk, John Lydon, (ex The Sex Pistols) tears into your soul with its pounding rhythms and Lydon's unmistakable vocal tone.

16. Goldfrapp (Train)

Goldfrapp are a British delight. Formed by a blonde singer and the ex-saxophonist from Tears for Fears, they embarked with this century on a career of creating sonic masterpieces. On their first three albums this was expressly electronic and synthesized (the two had made an agreement that guitars could not be used at that time). What we got was the delicate album, Felt Mountain, and two glamrock, dancehall stompers, Black Cherry and Supernature. The Goldfrapp of these albums is by far my favourite. Later they would mellow and diversify but throughout they remained dedicated and skillful artistes who work with sound.

17. Depeche Mode (Enjoy the Silence)

There are, of course, at least two (and probably three or four) Depeche Modes. The first was Vince Clarke Depeche Mode. Now I pay homage to Martin Gore Depeche Mode. Violator is their highpoint as a band. Its the album that made them artists of worldwide renown. Personal Jesus and Enjoy the Silence are probably tied equally as my favourite singles of all time. As electronic musicians I can't actually think of another band who have stayed as popular and as at the forefront of music as Depeche Mode have. Most of the rest (including all the pioneers) faded away and died or retreated to some sonic backwater. And Depeche Mode have sold more albums than pretty much any other electronic artist too. That alone would make them "influencers". And so it is highly appropriate that perhaps the pre-eminent electronic band of my musical lifetime should bookend my choices.


You can listen to the songs I chose for my "time machine" HERE!!!