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!!!

A Change is As Good As A Rest

This week has been a reinvigorating and refreshing one for me in a creative sense. I predicted some weeks ago that my creativity would inevitably break down and that what I had been doing for 9 months would quite organically collapse. And so it has proved to be. A combination of being constitutionally unable to continue repeating myself and the dreaded month of October, in which my world always seems once more to descend into the depths, with the vanishing light and the increase of night, have made my premonition come true.

And so the Berlin School-influenced music has now vanished. This week, in its place, came experiments with noise and sound. In a strange way I'm still locked into the same German influences that I have been following all year though. Listen to the first album by Tangerine Dream from 1969 (Electronic Meditation) or to the first couple of albums by Cluster (who were then called Kluster) or Popol Vuh's first album (Affenstunde) and what you hear is musical experimentations with sound. Nothing more and nothing less. There is no song structure here. Its merely playing with sound until you decide to stop. Fast forward into the 80s, 90s and 00s and people like Coil, Autechre and Aphex Twin are found doing pretty much the same thing but with different tools.

                Kluster (later Cluster) - Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius

I have this notion in my head, thats been growing for some time now, that a fixation with making a tune is a great deceiver in making music. There is, of course, a mainstream bias towards it. No piece of noise art would get into a popular chart. Even the great names of noise genres were never popular in a mainstream sense. Tangerine Dream only did one album playing with sounds before developing into the makers of evolving electronic music that they came to be with their many TV and film soundtracks to keep them going. Industrial acts like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire or Test Dept, who similarly wanted to play with sound, are niche bands with artistic or political things to say. They are not mainstream acts. Even the aforementioned Aphex Twin, the hero these days of fanboys everywhere, is not a popular artist in a mainstream sense. Most people would not know who he is. But people do know who any number of artists are who will knock out the lamest of tunes. Its music you can hum. Arcade Fire and Coldplay are popular. IDM artists and old German noise experimenters are not.

Aphex Twin

Autechre

And yet it quickly becomes clear to any musician with any sense of adventure whatsoever that the world is full of sounds both imaginable and unimaginable. And, as I've said over and over again, there are no rules in music. And you cannot "go wrong". "A mistake" only exists if you conceive of the idea that there is something you should have done instead of what you actually did do. But what if you forget the idea of having an antecedent plan for where you want to go and, instead, you just throw things together? What if you made up some arbitrary rules and just followed them? What if pitch and tune became completely irrelevant to the process? What if the only thing that matters in music is not that you can save it and repeat it (my current pet hate) but that you can manipulate it, twist it and mangle it into insensibility right now in this moment which is all that matters? No two performances of music (even when its meant to be the same piece) will ever be the same anyway. So why keep trying to replicate?

None of this is new of course. The musical avantgarde of the 40s, 50s and 60s were already embracing such ideas 60 or even 70 years ago. My favourite of these people is John Cage with his chance operations in which he would arbitrarily follow some rules or ideas he had made up or that the I Ching (an ancient Chinese divination text utilizing cleromancy) had ordained he must follow. This was music at random. Brian Eno is famous for his "oblique strategies" which are his own way of following a random rule or idea and just seeing where it takes you. David Bowie has always utilized random ways of writing lyrics for his songs, either with paper and scissors or in electronic ways. Throbbing Gristle often seemingly had no guide at all other than choosing an instrument and then playing it exactly the way you were not intended to. Cosey Fanni Tutti, the guitar player, would often play the electric guitar sitting down by hitting it with something or bowing it rather than strumming the strings or playing recognizable chords. (She still does this today together with fellow former TG member and her partner, Chris Carter, in their current musical endeavours.) She also had a cornet she couldn't play, not that it mattered. Autechre's increasing uses of software to make music has often resulted in outcomes that were not predictable to the musicians themselves and has given much of their work the flavour of sound abstraction.

                                             Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter

So why do this? In my own mind its because not doing things "properly", not being able (or wanting) "to play" or just saying "fuck the rules and expectations" is actually a very freeing thing to do. There is no bigger boundary to artistic freedom than being told there is a way that you should  do something or that there is an expectation it needs to have a certain structure, style or expected outcome. I don't think that people who play up to these standards are being particularly artistic nor are they really doing anything other than joining the dots. It is relatively easy to write "a song". Anyone, even if they don't know it, can write a simple repeating pattern of notes. Repeat it for three minutes and you have a song. Easy. But why do it? There are, of course, many who have long and enduring commercial careers based on their ability to bash out the same thing for years. But who said that commerce or getting rich were the goals of musical art? All things must pass, including your incredible wealth and lame, mainstream and very popular music. But what did you stand for?

Let's get to what I've been doing this week. I have this notion that ideas are the currency of artists. It is then for the artist to use whatever skill he or she has to bring the ideas they have to fruition. But the idea is key. My idea this week has been relatively simple: take a number of sounds or pieces of music or noises and just juxtapose them on a sequencer timeline. Do this unconsciously and in no way deliberately (that means often not even knowing what the music or sound or noise is) almost like throwing playing cards on to a table and letting them fall where they may. Then, once you have given each sound a track, play with them. Change their speed, reverse them, chop them up, add effects to some but not others (reverbs, distortion and delays are favourites here). None of this is new. Its all been done before. But its freeing because no one, especially not you, even knows what you will get at the end. Often I didn't even listen to what I had got at the end. I just made sure the sound level was tolerably OK and recorded what was there. Listening back to the album was the first time I heard the whole piece. Its amazing and interesting that often what you get is a strange kind of preternatural beauty as sounds combine and contrast in unexpected ways.

You, of course, may be sitting there thinking this is all noise with no redeeming features and that art is deliberation, a product of an artist using their talents to create something on purpose that conforms to rules. But consider this: no one made the countryside but I bet you find it beautiful to look at. The universe itself is random in the most radical way it could be. And isn't it full of wonder! What I've done this week is the same principle applied to sounds as I juxtaposed things without any real care for what they were or how I did it. And my attitude in making it was to allow the random sounds to reveal their inner beauty in the process of simply placing noises into a relationship with each other. And for that to happen you have to be open to it and not bounded in by notions of the "right" way to do things or what in the end are themselves completely arbitrary notions of right and wrong in any case. So what I did this week was part therapy, a break from the norm, part philosophy, an opening of my mind to possibilities, and part music, a creative playing with sound.

I've made 7 albums of this stuff so far because its relatively quick and easy to do. A couple of hours can easily produce 8 tracks and 30-40 minutes of music. In vinyl days that was a whole album. Of course, there will be a further bias at play here and that is the bias towards the thing that is difficult and takes effort over the thing that that is easy and quick and takes little effort. "It can't be worth much if it was so easy to do" will be the thought of some. And yet many of us humans are the result of a 2 minute fumble in the back of a car. Are we worth nothing either because of the easy circumstances of our creation?

In music and in life it might often be beneficial to think differently - just to see what could be rather than meekly accepting, in the most conservative way possible, what "is".

The Value of Music

ZaNorte is the latest album from a friend of mine who goes by the musical name of Iceman Bob. If you have read a number of articles on this blog you may notice that earlier in the year we were discussing matters of mind and consciousness together. Over the couple of years I have known Bob I have found him to be a friendly, gracious and insightful man who often gives a different point of view than the expected or mainstream one. And I have more often than not welcomed this about him. Bob also makes music though when he is not discussing such things and he goes about it very much in his own way. I go about my music in my own way too and so I feel a certain kinship with him  - even though these ways are not always the same.

People listen to music for many differing reasons. Often, of course, it is simply for entertainment and what is required is a sugary hit of something sweet, non-challenging and expected. It would be easy for me to be snobbish about this and decry it and, if that's all there is to your music listening, then I probably would. From the very beginning of my blogging I have spoken about music being something that fulfills many roles and that is multi-faceted in its use. One role I see for music is that of something that challenges our preconceptions and ideas about what music itself is as well as more mundane matters of what good and bad taste are for you. One reason I have always liked Bob's music is that it can, at times, be a challenge to listen to. Bob seems very set on doing things a certain way with the set up that he has (a couple of laptops, some synths and guitars) and it would be very easy to define an "Iceman Bob sound". You can take this two ways of course. You could decry the lack of variety or you could explore the sound that Bob makes and see what you could make of it. Of course, to do either you'd need to interact with his work first. And you should.

Bob's latest album, in a growing list of work available on his Bandcamp page, is called ZaNorte which is short for Zamboanga del Norte, a region of the Philippines from which he has just returned to his native Montana. The music and the titles of the tracks (which are mostly in a native Filipino language with the English in parenthesis beside it) bear witness to this trip and this has had an effect on the sound that Bob makes. Let me make it clear at this point that this is not to be a whitewash review of the album as Bob is my friend. On the contrary, whilst being a fan and supporter of his work for a while now I have not been so uncritically. In the past I have especially taken issue with Bob's guitar sound (which I think would benefit from more variety). In ZaNorte, however, we find that the guitar is often absent and on the one track where it notably takes the lead, Dalugdug ug Kilat (Thunder and Lightning), we find Bob at his most melodious.

So what then is ZaNorte? First of all, its a huge piece of work. Whilst most of the track lengths are down on Bob at his most prolific (tracks in the 15 minute range are not unusual) here the 8-10 minute range is par for the course. But there are 20 tracks to the album which is nigh on 3 hours in length. I have already listened to it through completely 3 times though and it didn't feel like it was dragging in any way at all. The album then, in its entirety, is an absolute pleasure to listen to. This is Iceman Bob at his chilled and relaxed best. There is also a mellowness to some of the tracks. The harshness and unfamiliarity that can sometimes be there in some of his work is here almost completely absent. (There is, though, one track, Maya (white beak sparrow), which I find completely unlistenable. It sounds to me like the rhythm from one track and the tune from another spliced together in a way that doesn't fit.) This album felt to me as I listened like a warm day on a beach in the shade of palm trees and the music was a gentle breeze wafting over me.

One reason for this is that I think due to the circumstances of the recording (I understand this was recorded away from Bob's main studio with a reduced setup) Bob had to tailor his music to his new circumstances. I would say that this has made the music more amenable. This is the most listenable Iceman Bob album I have yet heard. However, that is by Bob's own standards and to those coming to it for the first time it may still sound challenging. But this is always the reason I have been attracted to Bob's work. Bob has the gift of making music that is not beholden to formulaic rules or mainstream ideas. He does what he wants and has a free attitude to what is possible. Often things will not be in time or seemingly at odds with other sections of the same song. Things will sound unfamiliar and challenging in a way that can easily be disturbing. The challenge is to stay onside with the course that is being plotted and see it through to the end. ZaNorte makes it even more possible than usual that you will be able to do this as a listener. I'm particularly in awe of the way that Bob has been able to do this over the course of an album with so many tracks. As most musicians would realize, the more tracks you do, the more chance there is that you dilute the overall quality. Not so here. The quality has been kept up throughout.

So ZaNorte is a chilled and relaxing trip to the Philippines and many of the sounds used evoke an "ethnic" vibe and Bob has done that thing which all musicians should strive to do above all else: keep things interesting. The album is not boring or in any way stale and has the ability to evoke emotions and stimulate thought. (It did both for me.) As I like 19 of the 20 songs unreservedly I would give this album 19/20 as a review score. Its an album you should certainly download. You maybe won't play it on repeat every single day for the rest of your life. But there will be a time when it is the exact thing that you need. Its a great album to have in your collection. And its also a testament to the value of music, something which can soothe, challenge, encourage and entertain all at the same time.

You can download ZaNorte at https://icemanbob.bandcamp.com/album/zanorte and Iceman Bob is on Twitter at @iceman_bob

Evaluating Music

It comes to the last quarter of the year. So it goes the Earth, round and round. Its easy to feel that we are going in circles. We are. But its ever spiraling ones. Maybe those of us who make music are doing that too. Ever on and on we go, pushed by some urge we cannot offset. We must make more. We get frustrated because its just more of the same. We want to create but we don't know what. We make something and then hate it. Then we love it. Then we hate it again. Circles, circles, spirals.

I suffer from various maladies many of which come into their full effect as the days draw in, as they do at this time of year for us Northern Hemisphere folk round about now. So its never a time I look forward to. I've probably had at least 2 major breakdowns in the month of October. (Why am I telling you this? Not sure. Its not really relevant.) For this reason I thought I would scale back the music (which, on past history, is always the worst I produce from October to December) anticipating some sort of personal crisis and concentrate on what I had done in the first nine months of the year. (Its not working out that way. I keep feeling a Dionysian ecstasy come over me and I head into... The Void to make more!)

And so I looked back at the over 20 volumes of stuff I had done in those nine months. I officially started making music this year on January the 12th. At the time I was reading about Nazi concentration camps and wanting to watch sci fi films. One such film I watched was Under The Skin, starring Scarlett Johansson, a tale of an alien who disguises herself as a tasty temptress to lure unsuspecting Scotsmen to their untimely deaths. Now the soundtrack to that film was already outstanding (and must by now be surely award winning) but as I started to make music I conceived of what I was doing as an alternate soundtrack for that film - all mixed in with a soundtrack to concentration camps too. Harsh and serious stuff. What came out was soundtrack, music for film, something dramatic.

So that was the beginning. But I wanted to do more than just re-trace my steps over. I wanted to rank or grade or judge the music I had made. What was better and what was worse? I don't really have any quality control on the music I make. What happens at the time is what you get. I don't start off with any idea and try to realize it. The idea forms in the Dionysian ecstasy and that is what remains when the switches are flicked to the off position. I'm relieved to find that that approach works, more often than not. Actually, MUCH more often than not. So the idea of then judging it (implicitly by some kind of standard that I don't actually have when I make it) is a very strange one. Its been made more strange by my reading of John Cage (about which much more at the start of my blog if you go searching). Cage thinks music should not be about subjective judgments at all. And that is not how 99% of the world thinks. Most people value subjective judgment and deliberation. But Cage does not. He thinks it is a problem to be got over and not a solution to anything. And like a good contrarian I'm happy to go along with the guy who takes the lesser trod path.

But how do you judge music? You might be staring at this now and thinking I am mad. It's easy, after all. We just all do it instinctively. Judging, that is. This is good. This is bad. This sounds great. That is terrible. I have a problem with all this. Its true of course and it can't be avoided. But its not at all..... rational! Of course, its not even true that we are consistent in our judgments. And this is because we don't use hard and fast rules to do it. We may hate all Country music. I would say that I do. But I like Johnny Cash singing about the Tennessee Stud! I don't like Thrash Metal but if I listen to enough of it there'd be one I got into. Our judgments are there to make fools of us it seems.

It doesn't change when you judge your own work. Now some music people are very fastidious (read: slow) in going about their work. Fine, its their business. But this lends them a certain quality control that I don't have the luxury of. I work on instinct and inspiration so there is not months of time in which I tell myself to stop and not do something and go in a different direction like those other people. For me its all about NOW. And now is only ever a moment grasped... that slips away. And what you are left with is the memory. And hopefully a recording of what happened during it. This means that so much decision time and thinking time is just not there. And so I have to look back on a retrospective collection of moments I had throughout my year when I listen back to my music.

In judging I was very conscious of what I was doing. Its totally subjective and arbitrary, of course. All matters of taste are these things. There is no rational way of saying A is better than B. You are only ever giving a subjective, gut view on things. Often you might not even know why. You just know you FEEL this way. And feelings can't always be explained.

I determined to pick out the best track of each project I had done, in my very subjective view, and then collect these together. From these I would make a top 20 tracks of the year. Then I would whittle it down to 10, 5, 3 and, finally, my best song of the year. I want to count down the top 10 below and say why. It explains my process and my views on music - which is what this blog is about!



10. Eschatology (from Human/Being X) This is from the last album of my Human/Being project which lasted ten albums and a number of blog articles in the first half of the year. The style of much of the music in these albums, and in this track, was mostly Berlin School style evolving synth patterns with some synth pad wash on the side. Eschatology is a perfect example of this style of music which I have been studying closely for about a year now. Its thoughtful, progressive and analog sounding.

9. String Theory (from The Existenz Equation) Another Berlin School style track. I've only moved away from the style in the last couple of months as it inevitably broke down under its own creative weight and turned into something else (another consequence of a high turnover of music). Here the sequences overlap and repeat and there's a kick drum setting tempo which gets some percussive help later on. This track is showing how I progress using the Berlin School style.

8. Infinity (from Zeitlos) More Berlin School but this time slower and atmospheric, a song of textures. I'm so very glad when songs like this come out because I like to think they are in there somewhere.

7. Dionysos (from Trickster) A Berlin School tour de force. Slow, evolving, a repeating bass squelch all over it. But with great chord pads and spacey sound FX to go with it. Its not a matter of progress though (this track is much more recent). It just happens in the moment.

6. Eight (from The Void is an Oszillator!) A song from only the last couple of weeks. The Berlin School model has been taken and played with. What we have here is still a long, evolving track but the sounds are much more dynamic and generally more has been done with it. Note also the rhythms. And those sounds! Very lush. Luxury music in my eyes.

5. Weak Nuclear Force (from Forces of Nature) This one is more electronic instrumental than recognizably Berlin School. Of course, the first is a development of the latter which basically wrote the book on long, evolving electronic music. Incidentally, only one of these top 10 tracks is under 10 minutes long. The longest is almost 18 minutes.  Music this year has been about building a mood or riding a wave. The challenge is not to fall off. This track is one where I play a bit more than just arranging sequences to play off each other.

4. Refugee (from Intoxication) Another recent track and I have no idea how to describe it. The main "riff", if that's what it is, was just there in some synthesizer when I played it a certain way and I started to build around that using the techniques I'd employed for 8 months before. It sounds kind of glorious and hopeful to me. Its not a sad song about refugees. Its about their struggle for life!

3. Zeit (from Existenz²) This is peak Berlin School for me - but my adapted version of it. I love this song primarily for the sounds which seem raw and real. Its 17 minutes long but I never want it to stop. The metallic base and the way it churns and grinds leaves me always wanting more. Its kind of appropriate its called "Zeit" (German for "time") because I see both the idea and the song as all-encompassing things. If songs are there to express and communicate moods or ideas then this does to me.

2. Crisis Moment (from Doktor Existenz) The stand out track from my super hero spoof album. This is the shortest track here at 8 minutes. Its like a mini, condensed popular version of the longer songs. Again, its about the sounds - which stand out. And how all the elements just work together. Again, there is keyboard playing here - such as I am capable of. It feels good to know I can make a song like this and it is within my capabilities. I especially love the beat which has been hip-hopped up (including my characteristic deliberate mis-timings and missteps). It makes this song more modern.

1. Fünf (from Within The Void) And so this is the track I judge my best of the year. And it only happened a few days ago. But I'm sure it will stand the test of time. It marries that Berlin School sensibility I had all year with more great sound choices and an electro beat. I'd claim credit for it but, you know, shit just happened!


But then that's music. Its not rational. Its just moments. Enjoy the ones you can.

PLEASE NOTE THAT SINCE THIS BLOG WAS WRITTEN MY BANDCAMP ACCOUNT HAS BEEN REORDERED. THE WHOLE LIST OF TOP 20 TRACKS IS NOW AVAILABLE IN ONE COLLECTION AT BERLIN GESCHICHTE TEIL I.