Say / my god / I say something

And so this is Christmas, and what have you done……..and all that nonsense of course.

Here in our corner of the world you’d be hard pressed to work out that you were slap bang in the middle of the most populous Muslim country on the lord’s (whichever one is yours) planet. Java is perhaps different (although the malls are all decked with fake holly and bells there too), but in Bali they certainly do the holidays well..all of them, be they Christian (bearing in mind there are more Christians in Indonesia than there are people in Australia), Muslim, or, naturally, Hindu.

The serving staff and shops and restaurants are all beaming underneath their Santa hats and fake snow…oh yes. In Ace Hardware, in the always oddly deserted Kuta Istana Mall (right next to the giant fake snow and ice fantasy pavilion that the locals queue year round to enter) the almost life-size nativity diorama (a snip at Rp3,000,000…about US$320) and the 5 metre high fake Chrissie trees (only Rp5million) seem absolutely illogical, but as someone recently said, Indonesia would not be Indonesia if you threw logic into the national mix.

Indonesians are very, very good at celebrating just about anything.

And the Chinese restaurant we went to tonight had all the trimmings including a much better class of fake Santa hats than I’ve ever seen in New Zealand.

When we had The Box and Cause Celebre we enforced a strict no Santa hats policy at this time of the year. We could, of course, have been accused of being grumpy old men. But more likely we just didn’t want the roaming meat-head, office party factor coming down the stairs. A no-Santa hats policy was easier than explaining repeatedly to people: you are drunk and you look like a twat so you are not welcome.....

None of this has anything to do with the main purpose of this post which was to pop up a couple of Kevin Saunderson tracks that have been sitting on my server for about six months waiting for me to remember, and the Box / Santa hat thing twigged my memory, as both of these were monstrous at said club. I’ve a soft spot for Saunderson’s Inner City, what with the soaring Paris Grey vocals, and the happy line they drew between the pure Detroit techno that Kevin was instrumental in pioneering (legend has it he coined the term) and dancefloor anthems. IC are well served by compilations and track appearances here and there, but usually in their OG form, with the raft of rather exceptional remixes generally being MIA. So with that in mind I thought I’d post a couple here:

Firstly, the Dave Clarke mix of Ahnonghay, which may or may not be my favourite single in any genre from the 90s (this came out in 1995) depending on the day. The DC mix is good old fashioned, rush to the floor almost banging tech-house (before there was such a thing) but pretty much manages to hint at the searingly beautiful original, tucked away on the flip, next to an equally lovely, though quite different, very purist, Carl Craig mix…..

Inner City- Ahnonghay (Dave Clarke Mix) (6 X 6, 1995).

And then, as is to provide a contrast, from further back, 1989, to be exact, come the rather legendary Def Mix of Whatcha Gonna Do With My Lovin', which was extraordinarily hard to find new until the recent Defected Def Mix collection came out. Sadly, that collection has it only as part of a rather patchy mixed triple CD (such a wasted opportunity), and it’s still hard to find on its own. So to rectify that, here you go, complete with the classic lush Knuckles / Morales rolling groove and the lovely drop down to a downtempo Move Your Body riff at 4.55.

Inner City - Whatcha Gonna Do With My Lovin' (Def Mix)(Ten 1989)

Technorati Tags: Inner City,Keven Saunderson,Xmas

music / with that r'n'b flavour to get it across

I arrived back in Bali last week rather laden down with luggage. I’d managed to exceed my weight limit quite substantially both in check-in and carry-on. The woman at the Malaysian Airlines counter at Auckland Airport looked at my excessively heavy bag, paused and then smilingly said, it’s not a very full flight, you’ll be fine.

The next hurdle was the journey through the immigration area and past those ladies in their red frocks and funny hats who insist on weighing your carry-on, and writing down offenders’ names on a sheet. I guess you go into a database and may end up as a serial over-7kg offender, and ones name passed on to the Department of Homeland Security, or its Wellington equivalent.

From experience, there are reliable ways to slip excess (we are always way above that dreaded 7kg…our bag along is almost 5kg..toss in a copy of The NZ Herald and a toothbrush and you are stuffed) weight past these people but even applying those sneaky fixes, I was worried that my main carry on was going to be a problem.

Fortunately as I tried to merge into a much larger group of Japanese tourists somebody caused a kerfuffle elsewhere (one too many tubes of toothpaste or some other affront to the War on Terror) and I was able to use the distraction to rush past.

Of course once past the carry-on Nazis, carry -on is not a problem…nobody else in the world beyond Auckland gives a toss and you won’t find your carry-on weighed again.

Yep, as said, we always push the weight boundaries and Brigid has been seen extracting large steel cooking pots and printers from a bag at check-in to keep them happy.

This time, however, it wasn’t computers (although I had two laptops…in my carry-on) or kitchen hardware, or glassware that offended, but simple round plastic laser-read audio discs…CDs.

I’m happy enough with my digital bits and pieces but weaning myself from the physical format is hard. If I’d had the space there would have been several thousand bits of black plastic in there as well.

I’d had to put my CDs (a wall of them no less, but you get that I guess) into storage as we moved out of our NZ studio space and felt driven, nay obsessed, to go through them one by one. I ended up with some 200 I felt I could no longer live without, and looked longingly at these. I knew my 20kgs wouldn’t stretch quite this far. So I edited again, and then I edited again…into must-take, must-take if-there-is-any-room and, finally into next-time.

And so it was I ended up with a large red suitcase with six shirts, a few socks, a book or three, and a mass of compact discs.

I staggered across three borders with this and had nightmares about burst bags. I also looked at the Indonesian customs forms. Whilst the kids are absolutely on to it here, the generation before and those that write many of these bits of paper and the regulations that they attempt to enforce, seem to be in a no-mans land circa 1988. So, the form asks whether I have any records…no I don’t. And any laser discs? Good god…now that’s a format living somewhere in DCC and 8 track hell. So, no I don’t…and I hope that the technology that peruses all bags arriving in Bali hasn’t led to a big white chalk X on my bag. The guys at customs, hands out waiting, love those.

But no, no chalk, and as with Auckland, someone called out, distracting the guy, as I rushed past the green desk and I tossed my form at him. They always seem bemused that I don’t smoke..what male doesn’t smoke, or at least try and smuggle cigarettes. It’s a point of much bemusement here in Bali….

Hence I managed to get almost 100 bits of my musical past to Sanur.

It’s funny how you crave these things when you don’t have access to them. There are things here I probably will only play once or twice, but at leaset can now if I do want to. Not that its enough, but I do have my Nuggets box, and my Joy Division box (which I’ll likely not play but at least I can look at it), and my various impenetrable live Miles Davis albums from the early seventies, which I can listen to forever but no-one else gets..they’re not friend friendly; and my much loved Dr. Alimantado album; a Carl Craig set that I listened to over and over for at least a year; an LKJ anthology; Joey Jay’s fab old school Trojan selection; Coltrane’s Crescent; the Andy Weatherall Fabric mix; a killer double Fatback and god knows how many more.

I was like a kid in a lolly shop..touching, looking, shuffling..all that…

And playing too of course. I played the Miles things several times until Isabella opined that I had shocking taste in music, and had likely lost touch. I sat and thought about the generation gap for a moment or two and they decided, firstly, to scoff at her, and then, thinking better of it, let it go and delved into the rather good Ricardo Villalobos Fabric 36 mix which in its minimal, stuttering and almost, dare I say it, world music-ish way, is maybe my album of the year..this week anyway. Not, of course that I’ve heard them all, but in my year. And then there is the Nomumbah album, Love Moves, which a current daytime repeat, and is very much that lovely thing that we used to call deep house in those slightly messy Calibre 98 days, the sort of thing labels like the once great Guidance used to toss out with such ease. Warm, a little bit slight, moody and quite cosy.

Technorati Tags: travel,CDs,customs,Ricardo Villalobos

Maybe that’s my album of the year right now, since it’s on as I type.

It’s all about the now anyway.

life is very different / when you are in a crowd

Its exhilarating being back in Asia again after almost a month in Auckland and simply getting off the aircraft at KL International was enough to feel the rush…the faces, the languages, the mass of it all.

A month in New Zealand is almost enough to dull my senses but you never lose the feeling there that something is missing. I love Auckland, and had a total ball, of which more sometime soon, but all it feels so damned mono-cultural. Not as mono-cultural as Australia, a land in which the non-whites seem only to be allowed entry so the elite can proclaim, self righteously, how cosmopolitan they all are, forgetting that there is an ongoing reason why it’s indigenous souls are in such a sorry state…you, as a people, suffer two centuries of murder, displacement, abuse, and the wholesale theft of virtually everything you sit on of value (or have given birth to) and see how dysfunctional your society would be. A couple of us mused recently that if John Howard announced compulsory protective camps for all Aboriginals “for their own good”, there would be an overwhelming murmur of ascent in the great southern land.

But NZ feels mono-cultural only a little less. For all its Pacifica and Te Reo, New Zealand is a very white, and increasingly so, if not in skin colour but attitude, society, with the common target for almost all races being that perfect white ideal as portrayed by the magazines and the TV. And for all the derisive comments made about the average (who does, of course, not exist) American’s global ignorance, many “kiwis” are, despite still having some way to go, aspiring to the same level of ill-informed xenophobia. Listen to any talkback, or watch TV news and tell me it ain’t so.

Try telling folks you live in Bali and watch the reaction. The world view is perceivably getting narrower in these TV2 times. After a brief, rather exhilarating burst of global curiosity a few years back, the retreat is obvious when you jump back in for short bursts.

All the fuss about terrorism in the Bay of Plenty, whatever the substance of the charges (and lets be real, NZ’s police force has not had a terrifically good record in recent years for being open and even handed..that mono-cultural focus mentioned above often is even more focused, and coupled with narrow bigotry in a force like that, by it’s very nature) was an eye opener, if I needed one.

The swathe of Maori-phobic comments I encountered from middle class New Zealanders, of all races, really shocked me when I arrived a few days after the arrests. The only recent parallel I could draw on was the aftermath of Don Brash’s speech in Orewa, a ramble that could really have been distilled down to two words, for the same effect: “Fucking Maoris”. And of course as a mass, many New Zealanders, good keen men and women all, rose up and screamed “Yeah! Fucking Maoris”. Of course for Mr Brash to couch his rallying cry in the cloak of a “political” speech gave it some mass legitimacy, especially from the media.

But, all that ranting aside, It’s quite a buzz to step back into the world again.

KLs a funny place..caught somewhere between it’s past and trying to figure out what it’s future is. On one hand there are monster malls, hi-tech parks, hi-speed trains and swathes of free hi-speed internet connections; and on the other it’s tear gassing its citizens for daring to have an opinion and actively discriminating against its racially Chinese citizens (many of whom have been there longer than time is able to record) because they control the nation’s wealth. And just to confuse matters more, it now offers its youth, completely free, income assisted education anywhere in the world. It can't quite decide what it wants to be.

And the technology..cheap, even free, cutting edge and absolutely everywhere…which brings me back to Auckland again.

What seems increasingly obvious though is that the pace the planet is changing at is increasing. You can apply Moore’s law to far more than processing power these days. And what is also hits you when one returns is that NZ, as buffeted as it is by its enormous established wealth (only four million people, almost no natural resources and you are moaning about that standard of living???) is slowly but obliviously slipping behind the rest of the developed world (and make no mistake, many of those so-called “3^rd World” nations define developed now) as they gallop along doing the Moore multiplication every 18 months or so. You have to ask how Singapore and Malaysia can both offer free public access Wi-Fi almost everywhere when you can't even pay for a decent connection in much of Auckland. New Zealand has gone from decidedly first world to being a technological backwater in less than decade, and it’s quite noticeable…slow internet, no hotspots, ludicrously expensive 3G and GPRS, a real lack of tech retailers, etc.

Lots of nice expensive cars though…..

Technorati Tags: New Zealand internet,mono-culturalism

nai nai / hip nai

As hard as I tried to get The Battles, I couldn’t. I know it’s critically adjudged as the thing right now, their album that is. But try as I might it sounded like the bad end of ugly mainstream pre-77 prog. We fought running battles in the streets to allow, eventually, labels like Warp to release their edge of the boundary stuff over the years, as they have done (it’s one of the great British labels innit), and then they do this to us.

Ok, they weren’t running battles…more like cozy, smug fireside chats pretending we were staunch, but the point and the end result was the same

But now I get it, almost…I get the snarling DJ Koze mix of Atlas very very big time…very Warp, very bass tugging, favourite record right now.

I just thought I’d mention it.

Oh, and Tiger Stripes' Hooked, and Rekorder 8.1...

I'm allowed to plug oldish records...I'm in Bali, ok.

Technorati Tags: techno, house, Warp Records, Battles, Tiger Stripes, Rekorder

sing any song you want me to

Two things I found today that which pushed my button....firstly over at Headphone Sex is this rather good remix of Unique 3's glorious The Theme, (it's about 2/3 of the way down the page) which I was totally besotted with back in nineteen something. I had a big early bleep phase and it ran counter to my obvious nightclub owner's urge to fill the dancefloor. We used drop into serious northern bleep mode about 2am. To be honest it scared the bejesus out of many of our patrons, but persevere we did and eventually Rhythmatic's Take Me Back became something of a Box anthem, having the perfect bass bins to handle to subsonic throb. Having a fairly highly regarded sound engineer as a business partner had it's advantages. I love my bleep..... Secondly, my brother Alister fired this over ...its not obscure, its not underground, but fuck me its cool...still.... after all these years:

the sun can't compare / to your light

After a week or three wallowing around in musical nostalgia, some of it albeit fresh, but nostalgia nevertheless, its time to move on…..2007 calls…

One of the disadvantages of living on the far side of the world, in a third world nation is the endless waiting for mail to arrive….and wait I did for the Dixon Body Language mix I’d been promised…waiting, whilst I read others getting all hot and bothered about this…the track listing was enough to make me go a little weak…..I love the drift towards a folkier, deeper sound in techno-ish house in the past year or two. The boundaries between deep house and techno are blurring quite nicely again. I have to be honest though…after all these years I still don’t understand what a techno record is and what a house record is, and, more to the point, where the line lies, not that it matters. It's all jazz, it's all soul, it's all disco....

But three days ago Ketut from the Denpasar post office rang to say a parcel had arrived. It’s a nice touch…when did the Wellesley Street PO ever ring me to say a parcel had arrived. Then again he often asks, in a strictly non-official way, what is in the parcel. I smile and show him the CD or book and he looks puzzled and we go our ways until the next parcel arrives.

And I’ve played it over and over again since then, in a way I haven’t done with a mix since last year’s Henrick’s DJ Kicks set. I can live without the last track, a remix of Matthew Herbert’s Moving Like a Train, which is far too sub Derrick Carter bad flapper jazz bompity for my liking, but that aside, this is nearly perfect. Stefan Goldman’s mix of the unfortunately named Women in Toilet by It is minimal and pluckingly lovely and the mix from it into one of the best singles of the last year, Larry Heard’s sublime The Sun Can’t Compare, and then into the still-works-for me Where We At (the more subtle, pianoy Pt. 2 mix which I’ve not heard before) is quite something.

I never get sick of this stuff…

A few tracks I’ve also been playing a lot include (for a change) Carl Craig’s mid paced dubby remix of the Brazilian Girl’s no-wave-ish Last Call; Andres Trentemoller’s very bluesy, noodley, almost early Doors-ish (think Break On Through) An Evening With Bobi Bros; Stardivers’ Moroder-ish techno-by-numbers-but-it-works-especially-when-it-gets-all-rocky Another Moment of Silence; & Trusme’s Nard’s, a throwaway few minutes of inspired disco re-editing, all swirling and all, which I love to bits right now but have no doubt I’ll hate in a few weeks, that being the nature of these things. Kathy Diamond’s Over has just come my way too…almost (and I meant almost) Dusty-esque in it’s feel with a wonderful Hammond (?) solo that dominates the soft centre, quite incredible organic electro pop from the unerring hand of Maurice Fulton. Oh, and I’ve been going through another Mint Chicks phase, as you do….

Just thought I’d mention it….

like a rat in a cage / pulling minimum wage

Here are some more songs, (almost) as they played today:

LCD Soundsystem – New York I Love You (DFA) …in which Murphy and Goldsworthy issue the first truly great song for the ages for 2007. And if these is any doubt that they are the best rock’n’roll band in the US of A right now, this, and the accompanying album, should, by all rights put that to rest. It’s staring them in the face, as they moan about collapsing sales (22% down on last year now…sheeeit), and the Americans don’t even know it. The song, the lyrics, the performance, and that fucking great bounce back ¾ of the way through, bellow classic.

Isaac Hayes – I Can’t Turn Around (Hot Buttered Soul)….one of those songs you need to revisit every now and then, if only to re-iterate to ones self how much house / techno are a bigger part of the grand tradition of black rhythmic music going back to Leadbelly and W.C Handy. It’s a bloody great song too…

Echo & The Bunnymen – All That Jazz (Korova)…I like E&TBM when they are at their most strident…and this is strident on steroids….slicing guitar over staccato toms

Human Resource – Dominator (Joey Betram mix…of course) (R&S)..I’m bigger and bolder and rougher and tougher…..I didn’t really think I’d be smiling in a Balinese garden to the sound of wailing rave fifteen years later, but here I am. And I can’t even find my glow-stick….there is nothing like a roaring hoover loop in the sunshine….wanna kiss myself / wanna kiss myself

Eric B & Rakim – My Melody (Marley Marl 808 Remix) (mp3)…I found this on the net somewhere a few weeks ago, it being a mutant radio only remix, with the kitchen sink thrown in, done by Marley a couple of decades ago (somebody suggested that this may be on the extended version of the Paid in Full album (which I don’t have), but I don’t think so, as this is a good thirty seconds longer).

Arthur Russell – See My Brother He’s Jumpin’ Out (let’s go Swimming #1) (Audika)….from the album of unreleased material released in 2006, a dubbed out re-working of the classic Lets Go Swimming, sounding for all the world like Arthur working out with The Junkyard Band. Its well cool….

Faze Action – In The Trees (Carl Craig C2 Remix #1) …..yes it sounds like Carl, very Angola (the second half), in that measured mid tempo way, almost a slow grind, that also feels like parts of The Detroit Experiment album (now that was a masterpiece), with the melancholy moodiness of the original strings laid over the top and climbing into the mix very subtly, and organically. How does this man do it?

Blue Magic – Look Me Up (Atco)….I like the cute intro on this poppy Norman Harris production from one of Philly’s finest seventies vocal groups, although for a moment it begins to feel like one of the lesser Spinners' hits from the same era. It is pop after all, and slightly more lightweight than many of the other tracks from this group but it completely redeems itself towards the middle when it breaks down to a percussion fest, and then the swelling MFSB strings come rotating into the mix, layered with soft brass and a little, I think, electric piano. Bliss.

Mike Clarke – Let Your Love (Charles Spencer mix) (Third Ear)…..the line between house and techno is not only a hard one to define, it’s also a pointless one. As this record so neatly illustrates…I don’t know if this track could be exclusively claimed by either genre. I found this tucked towards the end of the Detroit Beatdown Remixed album, which I’ve played a lot over the past months. I’d never really heard much Mike Clark apart from an EP of disco re-edits I’d bought somewhere a while back. He’s one of a swag of lesser players from motor city and this song really crept up on me which surprised as it’s, on first listen, a little faceless, and sounds like the sound formless looping sub disco that has plagued Chi-town in recent years. But that’s the joy of music….it's the one you least expect…

Big Youth – Hit The Road Jack (Trojan)…..with a killer bass line that poor old Ray Charles could never have imagined in his most inventive (or indeed chemically induced) moments. Twisted Jamaican versions of things like this are a particular fetish of mine, and I dig the way he drops into What The World . I can thank Paul Weller for this, I found it on his Under The Influence collection

Catherine Miller – Hunchin’ All Night (Heavenly Star …via Sussed)….I’d never heard this until I found it on the recent Ian Dewhirst complied Deep Disco Culture Vol 1, a fabulous (you can use words like that for disco) collection of obscure as phuck tracks from the golden era of humanoid dancefloor anthems (before the machines truly kicked in). This is one odd record, it really is….addictive & dirty (hunchin’ being a by-word for, you know, with lines like hard times / so sore / baby, ain’t gonna give you no more); and mixed (I think) by Patrick Adams (the credits are vague on this) in a spacey (both in terms of the space in the mix and the actual cosmic-ness of the sound produced) way, albeit with addictively haunting real strings, and a mid tempo, almost post Disco, groove.

Wire – Mannequin (Harvest)…tell me / why don’t you tell me…perhaps the perfect punk single, from the perfect punk album, from the perfect punk band. In the spirit of Pink Flag, I’ll keep this brief.

Ain't nothin' holdin' me back nothin' / I'm truckin'

Ten songs for today, old, new, and not quite so new…this is the way it flowed on the iPod at the gym today…hard to fault really and nothing to do with me….blame providence or something like that…

1. Claude Vonstroke – Who’s Afraid of Detroit (Paul Woolford mix)…I have to admit I’ve had this for a month or three but not really listened to it as it really got lost in a rush of new things around that time….which is surprising because the original is such a big record for me. Dirty, punky, wobbly, layered techno that drags you around for over twelve minutes taking you on quite a journey, especially when the treadmill is seemingly dragging you forward ever faster…which goes absolutely perfectly with…
2. Siouxsie & The Banshees – The Staircase (mystery) (Polydor 1979)….an almost prototypical techno record in my ever so humble opinion…the way the almost unreal electric guitar slithers violently from speaker to speaker, with the double handclaps accentuating the collision is pure rave. It just needed a siren….
3. The Ronettes – Paradise (recorded 1965, released 1975)…one of a bunch of lost Spector / Ronettes tunes that have turned up over the decades on various collections, this was originally an unreleased acetate, and fits squarely into the River Deep era PS sound (it was recorded shortly before that epic). Ronnie’s plaintiff, entrancing I’ll wait for a day when he takes me to Paradise is unfortunately ironic considering the pain she was experiencing in her marriage to Spector, but nevertheless absolutely devastating (isn’t she always). What is less ironic is the later repeated phrase I’ll Die for Him…by all accounts she was lucky not to do so; luckier it seems than that poor girl forty odd years later. A genius Spector might well be, and I absolutely crave his productions, but if it wasn’t for the liberal in me, I’d say fry the bastard….
4. Metro Area – Soft Hoop (Environ 2002)…a record that evokes, more than anything else, the ghost of the late, very, very great Nu Groove label…a simple groove; a very tight but tough snare; a subtle blue, understated percussive lead; a live bass player and the vague aura of NYC circa 1990…
5. Iggy & The Stooges – Gimme Danger (CBS 1973)…and that is nothing like this…I think Raw Power is Iggy’s least dangerous sounding record, at least until the bad Arista, and A&M ones a few years later. The snarls are all cartoonish, the threat so obviously contrived…but, hell I love it, and my signed copy is a treasure. The cowbells that open it are funky as phuck and I love the way it explodes half a minute later, although, unlike, say anything on Funhouse, it’s a perfectly controlled explosion. This was Mainman after all…
6. The Jam – Ghosts (Polydor 1980)….perhaps the prettiest song ever recorded by Weller with The Jam, and from the wonderful, and underrated The Gift, when it was screamingly obvious that Weller had outgrown the band. Sadly, to my mind, despite an extended series of killer Style Council singles, and a few tracks as a solo act, he never fulfilled the promise he showed on those last four Jam albums, and on tracks like this.
7. Eddie Kendricks - Body Talk (Motown 1975)…not the Imagination song of the same name, although I love that, but the even better track from the ex-Temptation’s album The Hit Man. I used to have this song going around in my head, not knowing who it was, until my friend, Murray Cammick put me right. Absolutely perfect in both arrangement and performance…..I weaken at the part where Eddie’s voice rises to a falsetto on the third chorus, and falls into a loose scat…vocal genius…and then…
8. Bobby Womack - An American Dream (Beverley Glen 1984)….the first song to sample MLK’s Dream speech..slow, sultry and utterly gorgeous, with that towering Womack voice expressing what is both a disarming love song, and a work of pure optimism that never comes close to cloying patriotism. The Poets, both Volume I & II were, and still are, huge records for me.
9. Roxy Music -Three and Nine (Island 1974)…what perplexes me about Roxy Music is how quickly and badly it all went wrong. The first four albums (this comes from the 4^th) have varying degrees of brilliance about them. The crucial input they had in what was to dominate the rock’n’roll planet for the next two decades is indisputable. From album six (the fifth had its moments, albeit few) it all turned increasingly to MOR mush. Three and Nine, on the other hand, is disarmingly charming without the slightness of their latter catalogue…it still carries the hint of decadence that their best records still evoke…..damn that sounds pretentious, but I don’t know another way to put it…
10. Magik Johnson – Scanning For Viruses (Claude Vonstroke mix) (Made to Play 2006)…and so we go full circle….I really like the low down grunty bits on this..pure, simple but effective dancefloor, but works well on a treadmill, as I discovered (now that sounds sad). Oh, and I really like Dick Johnson’s radio show on George FM, on the rare occasions I get to hear it…

Searchin' for a note / pure and easy

Simply put, what a great year for music. The repeated obituaries for the music industry were clearly erroneous, clearly overstated. In real terms the record industry is in big big trouble, especially the old guard record companies and the world they know and live in. If any evidence of that beyond falling sales was needed, witness the thrashing around of Doug Morris, the head of Universal Music, in his attempts to blame the impending demise of the system as they know it on anyone but themselves.

Right now the ploughs are out digging up the playing field. What and where we will end up, I don’t know, but the likes of iTunes is only a way station on the way there. Ask me if five years and I may have a clue…

So, 2006, a vintage year for contemporary music, I think, but aren’t they all. That I still get excited at my ripe old age about new music makes me happy, but I think I would shrivel up and die without it. And it’s easier and easier to get hold of, courtesy of our electronic world, something that must seem like a cruel irony to the record companies who monopolised for so long by controlling the means of distribution. There is more music everywhere than there has ever been in my lifetime and more people are listening.

So to my personal picks for 2006 (and thats all they are..nothing definitive, just the things I've liked)…..

Firstly singles…and there were a few. There are singles by acts that I’ve included in the albums but will avoid here to prevent a double up.

• Chateau Flight – Baroque
• Delia Gonzalez & Gaivin Russom – Relevee (Carl Craig mix)
• Rhythm and Sound – Poor People Must Work (Carl Craig mix)
• Goldfrapp – Fly Me Away (Carl Craig mixes, esp C2 mix 4)
• Coldcut – Walk a Mile in My Shoes (Henrik Schwarz mixes)
• Rob Mello vs Robert Owens – The Energy
• Marc Romboy vs Robert Owens – I Need (Martin Landsky mix)
• Martin Buttrich – Full Clip / Programmer
• Joi Cardwell – What It Feels Like (Quentin Harris mix)
• Stefan Goldman & Ame – Sleepy Hollow
• Dennis Ferrer – Underground is my Home
• Chelonis R Jones – Deer in the Headlights (Hell mix)
• Dennis Ferrer – Transitions
• I: Cube – Acid Tablet
• Kerri Chandler – June 23^rd EP
• Ferrer & Sydenham Inc.- Timbuktu (Ame mixes)
• Kerri Chandler & Monique Bingham – In the Morning
• Dennis Ferrer & Jerome Sydenham – The Undertow
• Dennis Ferrer & Jerome Sydenham – The Back Door
• Ame / Schwarz/ Dixon – Where We At
• Chicken Lips - Motion Sickness (Rekid Mix)
• Claude Vonstroke - Who’s afraid of Detroit
• Arthur Russell – Springfield (DFA mix)
• Capracara - Opal Rush / Flashback 86
• Simian Mobile Disco – Hustler
• Cobblestone Jazz – Dump Truck
• Justin Timberlake – My Love (DFA mix)
• Tiga – Good as Gold (Morgan Geist mix)
• Tiga –Far From Home (DFA mix)
• DJ Mehdi – I Am Somebody (Kenny Dope mixes)
• Goldfrapp – Slide Away (DFA mix)
• Depeche Mode – Sinner In Me (Villalobos mix)
• DT vs Booka Shade – Played Runner
• Henrik Schwarz - Leave My Head Alone Brain (mix4 by Osunlade)
• Hiltmeyer Inc – Final Ah (Nicky Mix)
• Brennan Green - Little Ease
• Loco Dice - Seeing Through Shadows
• Radio Slave - Secret Base
• Larry Heard - The Sun Can't Compare
• Junior Boys – In The Morning (Alex Smoke mix) / The Equalizer (Morgan Geist mix)
• Salif Keita – Yamore (Luciano mix)
• Claude Vonstroke – 7 Deady Strokes (Patrick Chardronnet mix)

Albums....actually not that many, partially because I’ve found myself listening to a lt of older albums, but partially because my focus is very clearly less albums than singles these days. A few of these acts released a few singles that would’ve made my above list (especially Anders Trentemoller) but are either on the album or, in his case, come as a bonus disc. Lucky…

• Fuckpony – Children of Love
• Rekid – Made In Menjorca
• Booka Shade – Movements
• The Beatles – Love
• The Others – as yet unnamed
• Guido Schneider - Focus On
• Trentemoller – The Last Resort
• Fujiya & Miyagi - Transparent Things
• Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury

Mixed albums….

• Henrik Schwarz…DJ Kicks
• Laurent Garnier & Carl Craig - Kings of Techno
• Steve Bug – Bugnology 2

Reissues and comps

• Laurent Garnier - Retrospective
• Wire - 154
• The Clash - Singles Box
• Deep Disco Culture Vol 1
• Destination Boogie
• Gilles Peterson & Patrick Forge – Sunday Afternoon At Dingwalls
• Rip It Up And Start Again
• Groove On Down Vol 2
• Brian Eno & David Byrne – My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
• Confuzed Disco
• North by Northwest
• A Tom Moulton Mix
• You better believe It Vol.2

Nah Nah Nah Nah

I can’t help feeling that my last post was unduly harsh. You get that when you try to post when terribly jetlagged. I’m not good for at least 24 hours after a long flight, as those close to me will attest.

Not unduly rough on Soto, it deserved every word I wrote, not that they care as they seemed to be printing money if our last visit was evidence.

But a little harsh on Metro Magazine, which has its moments, usually towards the back of the magazine. In particular I’ve always enjoyed Gary Steel’s music reviews. He’s one of that extraordinarily rare breed: a reviewer that looks past the accompanying press release and actually writes about the record. Rare indeed, in fact I can only think of a couple or three others in NZ of whom the same can be said, not least of whom is the affable but very very readable Grant Smithies (most great critics, from experience have a surly, often unpleasant demeanour, Grant runs against the grain, as indeed does Gary, and, another NZ writer of worth, John Russell). I suspect that living in an isolated place such as Nelson, as does Grant; or Whangarei, as does John, gives one a more reasonable, less pressured, perspective on a records style or impact.

Simon Reynolds, he of the essential Rip It Up and Fade Away post punk analysis, wrote quite an interesting piece on the death of the music critic a few months back. There is no direct link, but you can find it here if you dig a little.

I’m a little sad that the era of the great rock’n’roll critics, the likes of Lester Bangs and Nick Kent (whose Dark Stuff is also absolutely essential, even if it only had the Brian Wilson story) is past, but to be honest they were always thin on the ground and for every Charles Shaar Murray there were always a dozen churn em out hacks like Christigau or Marsh, or, for that matter, self absorbed scribblers of pointless verbiage like Paul Morley. The demise of the album (and I mean “the album” as in records deemed to be of great social and artistic import) has, of course, hastened the end. The sixties and seventies were dotted with important “albums” as such, records that still sit on store shelves and crossed all boundaries, defying any sub genre. Indeed sub genres and the sub sub genres are a relatively modern phenomena. The CD and the in the increasing niche-ification of popular music killed any possibility that a record could attain such mass acclaim or esteem. I’m having trouble thinking of the last genre crossing important record in those terms..Thriller maybe? The new Dylan album was hailed as such by a few crusty old souls but you have to have your head stuck in the sand to think that Modern Times has any real presence beyond an aging audience and a bunch of lost critics living twenty years ago. That’s not to say it’s a bad record, but in Blood on the Tracks terms, it ain’t important.

But still, we can all play the critic when we want. I’m no Nick Kent, I know that, but I like to toodle on about the odd record (and I recognise that my taste an be a little odder than most, not many people listen to German minimal techno, British bubblegum or NZ guitar noise within the breadth of three songs but that’s not an unusal mix for me I’m happy to say). So, a toodle we will go…this is what I’m liking a lot this week, both old and new:

Guido Schnieder….Focus On (Poker Flat)….I didn’t pay for this, it arrived in the mail a few weeks back unannounced and got put to one side as I travelled here and there (I’ve done Bali, Bangkok, Auckland and Jakarta this month and it takes it out of you so a little German minimal doesn’t get a look in), so it took a while, but good things etc etc. I love the dense (in a minimal way) dark throbbiness of this a lot. It slips and slides all over the place like the bastard lovechild of Holgar Czukay and Arthur Russell, in his nuttier moments. It’s all disco anyway….

I:Cube ….Acid Tablet…acid lives, still, in the heart of a few French veterans…playing this one over and over and over and over..is that sad?

Various…You Better Believe It Soul Vol2…(Warner)…I find it mind boggling just how many obscure, not just good, but phenomenal soul and disco records from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, exist in the vaults of the major labels. Warners UK have issued, in the past five years or so, some twenty compilations like this, under various titles with almost no crossover, and almost all are essential purchases. This, like the first in the series, is just a beautifully packaged and annotated collection of sweet soul classics that you’ve probably never heard before. That’s all.

Laurent Garnier…Retrospective…(F Comm)…I love just about everything Laurent has done, so its rather special to get a swag of it all tied together rather neatly on one double album, with a bunch of new recordings and unreleased stuff, although it would’ve been rather nice to have had the original recording of Acid Eiffel as well as the new live take, which is nice, but, yknow, its not quite the same..fussy bastard I am. Well wicked….

Giles Peterson and Patrick Forge….Sunday Afternoon at Dingwalls..(Ether)…CD 1 is the wonderfully crazy jazz and CD 2 is the soul….Sunday Afternoons in Bali more like….love the packaging too. Although I wasn’t a part of this scene, I feel an affinity as we were trying to do similar things on the other side of the world at the same time.

when the heat gets so tropical / and the talk gets so topical

Just A few things that tick my box right now

• Ice cream….some years ago, whilst in London town, a few English friends offered to drag me across the north of the city, to what I was told, was without question the best ice cream I would ever have, tasted. I don’t know why I bothered. As a New Zealander I should’ve instinctively known that nothing dairy, be it ice cream, or the most expensive cheese in the UK can hold torch to even the cheapest cheddar or Tip Top found in a New Zealand corner dairy. Apart, of course from butter, the NZ variety comparing very unfavourably with those almost white and far more subtle Danish and French varieties. I was happy in my belief in our dairy supremacy until I came to Bali and discovered the multitude of places that serve, on the street, magnificent Italian gelatos and sorbets that demolish anything else I’ve found anywhere in the world, even in New Zealand’s dairies. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the something else that Bali seems to put in virtually anything, but I’ve had to resort to an extra half an hour daily at the gym to counter cravings for a half and half Tim Tam / Bitter Yoghurt & Strawberry from the little taverna on the corner of Jalan Double Six and Jalan Blue Ocean. However, waving the patriotic banner (see below) just a tad, New Zealand still has, absolutely beyond any question, the finest fish and chips on the planet. In Kawhia actually, oh and the Herne Bay Fish Ship, and Ahipara, and about 400 other wonderfully unique little shops. And the scallops……damn I miss the scallops….All this brings me to…
• Double Six Beach… about where Kuta Beach loses the Australian enforced ugliness of its better known southern strip and mutates firstly into the more graceful Pantai Legian, and thence into Pantai Seminyak, it briefly becomes the Sunday afternoon haven that is Pantai Blue Ocean, or, more commonly, after the legendary club at its northern end, Double Six Beach. After a set breakfast at Ku De Ta, a few hours on a hired lounger, under an umbrella, with the kids in the surf is the bomb. Followed of course, by an ice cream from that taverna. Decadent, hell yes, but do I bloody care…you’re just jealous. On the iPod I’ll likely this week have…
• Booka Shade – Movements…. I’ve been living with this for a month or two now, and, simply put, I love it big time. I’m sitting outside right now, as I write, in the office with the gorgeous Take A Ride slipping out of the laptop’s speakers. I love minimal German techno and I guess I have long before the twists of fashion bought it into our faces so completely in the past couple of years. There is so much understated, simple grace in a track like Body Language. There was a passage in a very funny late Victorian book, Three Men in A Boat, which described the German and French attitudes to streams (the water kind you find in forests and the like). The Frenchman will admire the beauty of the bouncing, uneven flow and enjoy its place in nature; whilst the German will think it’s offensively untidy and rebuild the sides to redirect it in a more orderly way. So it is with techno, the Germans extract beauty from the order of it, in a way that no-one else can. And it also sounds so perfect in our car, which is a new…
• Toyota Avanza…whoa, oh dear, I never thought I’d say that. You see, I’ve driven a variety of German cars for over twenty years. They build cars as they make techno; elegantly, with supreme precision and extract a beauty from that precision that no-one else can approach. The BMW three series is still the finest production car bar none and a beautifully kept late eighties 325 is a thing of much wonder. It has an atheistic that something like a Lexus can’t ever aspire too. And so it is a very strange place to be in, in mid 2006, writing with joy about a cheap faceless Japanese box, with such pleasure. But, if being in Bali has done one thing, it’s removed the material urges a little and replaced them with a new sense of reality. And that reality is also reinforced by the fact that for the past twelve months I’ve been driving the Indonesian equivalent of the Ford Model T, the ubiquitous and necessarily rugged, Toyota Kijang. As I taught myself to drive all over again, as one needs to if you are to navigate the unregulated mayhem on the roads, I understood what it was like to exist on appalling roads in a car with at best rudimentary suspension. And no bloody sound system. No bloody sound system. I endured it because it made sense to do so. But no longer. I have suspension and a reasonably good car stereo and I’m happy, happy, happy and I love the soulless little beast, although, in a perverse way now I miss the blue Kijang. My bum had become so accustomed to the way it ricocheted off every corner of a pothole, it felt like family. I hope whoever has it now, gets the same education from it I did. As an aside this is also the first time I’ve experienced the decidedly un-western feeling of selling a car for the same as I paid for it a year earlier.
• Kites….the last real drive I took DK1690XY (for that was the Kijang) on was down to the northern end of our rather beautiful Sanur Beach. Its a place I see far too rarely…is a funny thing, you move to paradise and yet sometimes you get so very complacent and let it slip right past you. But here we were, for the semi final of the annual kite completions. A defining feature of this island during the dry season are the literally hundreds of kites, from the small ones flown by local boys, to the massive, perhaps fifty metre long ones, flown by villages and banjars. These dominate our skies and they come together in July and August for a competition, the semi final of which was on our beach. There were, I was told, about 50,000 people present, but it felt like more, all gathered in community groups, complete with catering, taking turns to take their particular creation into the blue against others in their category. And there were flags and colour and banners and more flags and immense waving swathes of cloth in the wind. The Indonesians love flags….
• Flags…and they have quite a good one too. The simple red and white one is such a recognisably strong banner, and right now its everywhere. I didn’t know (and why would I) until I came here that the flag was symbolically created as a defiant gesture of independence when someone tore the blue stripe off the oppressing Dutch flag in 1945. And so it is that on the anniversary of that hard won independence, every August 17, for a couple of weeks before, this country is almost literally covered in red and white fabric. Cars, buildings, trees, businesses and just about everything that moves or doesn’t gets the patriotic sash or flag. I’m a New Zealander, and try as we might, we don’t have a massive flag bound patriotic thing going on. Our flag is a nothing for a start, But we also don’t like the exhibitionism thing that such blatant national pride demands. And yet when I hear Andrew White’s quite dramatic and very moving That Lange Track, I get a patriotic shiver, I can’t help. But that said, I have a problem with patriotism. The line between it and nationalism is too thin to make me comfortable. However, there is something about the national pride that you see here in Indonesia that works. This isn’t the ugly patriotism of the USA, a pride that has long since passed its use by date and has a rotten aura about it. This instead is a pride, like that of the US a long, long time ago, about what the nation was created from and how that creation came about. It’s a benign patriotism, and I’m enjoying the fluttering everywhere, quite a lot.

Just like Pagliacci did...* *its the obvious line to use ok?

The second part of the album thing I started here……

Smokey Robinson and The Miracles - Make It Happen (Tamla 1967)…the great Motown myth is that Stevie and Marvin took the company into the era of great albums, with the label fighting all the way. That’s not strictly true, but, yes, I guess it adds to the mythology somewhat. Those wondrous Norman Whitfield albums from The Temptations predate the era of Music of My Mind and What’s Going On and so do the two finest albums from Motown’s greatest songwriter, William “Smokey” Robinson. One of those, Sings Smokey is another Temptations album from 1964, complete with My Girl. The other is this record is this glorious album from 1967. Reissued in 1970 with the last track, the now iconic Tears of a Clown as the new title after it was a massive hit. But this record stands squarely on its own as one of Motown’s finest releases, ever. We all know Dylan’s famous line about Smokey, it’s over quoted but still stands as the gospel truth and the evidence is herein. Ever the most, superficially, facile, intent seems to flow like some of divine moment But the magic of this record is not just the majesty of the songs it’s the execution, and more that, its Smokey’s astounding production. His arrangements and mix absolutely redefine the use of space in a song and his instinct as to what to use and what to lose at precisely the right moment is pure genius….on My Love For You, for example, the strings are used with such economy, drifting around the hint of a piano and the simple snare. Not one song here has an element that is unneeded or overstays its welcome. Put it one, turn the lights off and float away…

Mantronix-The Album (Sleeping Bag 1985)…oh, yeah I guess it sounds a bit dated now but this is another album that, in its own humble way (ok, its hip hop…its not that humble) changed the face of popular music. And toss any track from this album on within the earshot of any old B boy and watch the involuntary tears of joy. When this first hit the streets back in ’85 nobody had heard, or for that matter expected anything like it. This was electronic rhythmic mastery from the end of the universe and with it half a dozen sub genres were invented, or at least a doorway was opened to, not least of which were the big beat boom and drum’ n’ bass. If this album had only included Bassline and Needle to the Groove it would’ve been enough to nail its place. It confused the fuck out of the hardcore hip-hoppers at the time (and lets face, they’ve often been the more conservative element in the post funk / disco universe and most resistant to change) but it signposted a clear path forward. Oh, and it rocks…still.

E-Dancer – Heavenly (Planet E 1998)..I said in the first part of this listing that house music is a genre that has produced few classic albums, and so it is. But not so its mutant cousin from Detroit. On the contrary Techno as a genre has produced dozens of great long players, but a few stand out, in particular this killer collection from Kevin Saunderson’s alter ego. Heavenly, many of the tracks from which, appeared as singles too, of course, comfortably bridges the gap between where techno had come from and where it was going. It has elements of the early rough core of Detroit’s rough machine soul and yet it also points to the more mellow direction the music was going to and works as well on a big dancefloor as it does on the headphones. The album drags in the likes of Carl Craig, Juan Atkins and Kenny Larkin, all big guns in the techno universe, and all of whom provide worthy contributions, but its Saunderson’s trademark keyboard sounds and moody swirls and dives, oh and his subtlety which are the real stars here. Techno was never, despite its reputation amongst non believers about being loud and banging. There are hints of Inner City but this record is far deeper than anything recorded under that name. A bunch of us played this album incessantly for god knows how long and I still grab it at least once a fortnight. Hard to find now, but if any album lives up to its title…

Various Artists – AK79 (Ripper 1980)..this about the vinyl release of this record, not the CD which I compiled a decade ago and stands on its own as a documentary of the Auckland Punk scene. No, they may contain many of the same tracks but they sound and feel a million miles from each other. No CD can ever re-capture the raw snarl of the thick PolyGram pressing plant dinner plate vinyl complete with sub standard mastering that was a feature of both NZ plants in the late seventies (PolyGram mastered stereo for months with only one speaker working and the other under a desk). But for all that, it sounded as shitty as it should and was just right, especially thru a battered Sony 3 in 1 system after having been walked over at a dozen parties by gatecrashers with Doc Martens’ finest on as they threw bottles at the confused and protesting host. No, that was the way AK79 was meant to sound and the way we listened to it. From the opening bars of the Zwines anthem, Mysterex (about ex Scavengers singer Mike Lesbian, who was proudly proclaimed by the wall at the club to be a C**t) to the last notes of The Toy Love Song, we knew every bloody word of every song (ok maybe not The Swingers who were the odd ones out and never that cool) many many months before this came out. This was our record and we fucking loved it…And you know what, that battered old vinyl copy still sounds better than the CD all these years later. Nothing to do with nostalgia, ok…

Blaze – 25 Years Later (Motown 1990)…once again, it’s about the vinyl which is a different beast to the CD, released simultaneously. The CD was reordered and had these annoying little talking bits between the songs. To be fair, the CD order and the story it told was as Blaze originally wanted but the label said no and talking bits between songs are always annoying, let’s face it. So the big black version works best. But with this album, Blaze, who had made some of the seminal early East Coast Deep House singles, gave us what may be the finest Motown album of its decade (if you place it in the last year of the eighties), and let’s not forget, the label still mattered then, in the years before it became just another Universal label. This is the most soulful, most delicate urban music ever produced by a house act, from the sensual, post Curtis of Lover Man to the yearning, Wonder-ish Missing You to the shuffling, reggae-ish We All Must Live Together, the best version of which is the remix on the 12” from co-producer Timmy Regisford. This album has an enormous, and much deserved reputation amongst those that know it but somehow got lost in an America which was awash with swingbeat and chicken dancing in harem pants at the time. That it is, and has been, unavailable for 15 odd years is a crime.

Lil Louis and The World – From the Mind of Lil Louis (Diamond 1989)..my favourite Lil Louis record is the US Epic EP of I Called U which I’ve mentioned before, but its hard to go pass either of his early albums, both of which still sound like the masterwerks they are, a decade and a half later. What I particularly love about this, the first of them, is the way it so successfully veers between the rather, at the time, off the wall almost nightmarish twisted oddness (but house had so much oddness in its first decade that it didn’t seem quite so odd then if you get the drift) of French Kiss, and I Called U, to the sweetly soulful Nyce & Slow and Insecure, all of which feel connected by the inherent jazzness (god, another word that definitely doesn’t exist, I guess it does now...its better than the god awful “jazzy”) of it all. What I’m trying to say in a very clumsy way, is that, for me, great jazz albums veer almost unpredictably all over the place, sometimes into uncomfortable zones, sometimes into easy warmth (think Coltrane at the Village Vanguard or Saxophone Colossus), and this album does all that, and seems part of that tradition. The uneasy noise of Blackout, complete with Biblical quotes into Tuch Me , co-produced by Larry Heard really sums that up. Once again, this album is, these days, predictably unavailable.

Interrupting my line of thought / altitutude and attitude

Before I move on I feel the need to make a comment about the scenario I have just been unfortunate enough to witness on ABC Asia Pacific. I mean the mutual masturbation session from the two least attractive leaders the gratuitously named “free world” (its free as long as you play the game as Chavez has found) has to offer, Bush and Howard, two men with more blood on their grubby little hands since, well since, Saddam, a man with whom they have more than a little in common (all have, amongst other things, knowingly taken life, innocent life, to perpetuate and enhance a power elite of which they are members).

I felt a little nauseous watching Howard proclaim Bush a good and decent man, and felt it was rather like watching Himmler proclaim Hitler as a good friend to the Jewish people.

And then there is this…the latest move in the NZ Government’s unfortunate drive to bring people home. It makes one rather embarrassed to be a New Zealander and certainly removes any inclination one might have to move. I know I give Australia and Australians a bit of a slap sometimes but this makes me grimace.

But I wasn’t going to write about things like that today. So…moving on…Tom Moulton. I think I said sometime ago how much I was dying to get my hands on the Soul Jazz Moulton collection and get my hands on it I did, but it had to sit on a shelf in Bali for three weeks whilst I was in Auckland. Thirty years after he started doing mind boggling things with twelve inch vinyl, a double CD was never going to do him justice, and this doesn’t but, damn, it comes close. The term genius is bandied around, over-used to the point of pointlessness and generally devalued in popular music but nothing else really suffices here. The greatest (and it’s another word I don’t want to use as its so completely misunderstood) disco records are flights of imagination, swirling, climbing, soaring and taking the listener (or dancer) off in a direction before dragging he or she back to the central point again.

Phil Spector used to talk about “little symphonies for the kids”, and his productions were just that, but the founding fathers of disco (the black urban variety), Norman Whitfield and Gamble & Huff took the concept to places that Phil, in even his wackiest moments couldn’t even visualise. Tom Moulton, and others, took that vision and ran with it and its fitting that one of the key tracks on this impeccable (and impeccably mastered) album is an incredible (previously unreleased!!) 11 minute remix of Eddie Kendricks’ masterpiece, Keep on Running, a song usually regarded as the first disco record, from the former Temptations’ vocalist on all those Whitfield epics. Understated in its subtle attack, it slips and slides in and out of its key refrains and dwarfs the better known original (which is itself eight minutes long). The Gamble and Huff track herein is the take of MFSB’s TSOP on the Moulton remixed, and essential, Philadelphia International Classics collection from1979 with the extended electric piano break from Leon Huff at the end. Myself I would’ve picked The Intruders’ I’ll Always Love My Mama from the same album because a) it’s the killer track on the album and b) the Moulton remix of MFSB didn’t come into its own until Danny Krivit re-edited it about 1981.

I finally discovered, via this album, Andrea True Connection’s infectious and rubbery More More More. I resisted this song for years. When I was working in record shop years ago it sat on the shelf opposite the counter and the cover annoyed the fuck out of me. I never gave it a chance and I was wrong, but it illustrates the impact a shitty sleeve can have on a worthy record. Assembled at Studio One, it perfectly illustrates the debt that disco owes to dub (and indeed listen to Patti Jo’s seminal Make Me Believe In You (also here) to hear how much Jamaica owes to disco in return).

The 12” promo only take of Grace Jones’ cover of La Vien En Rose has appeared here and there over the years but it’s the definitive version of what my be her finest moment until Larry Levan, and then, Trevor Horn took her in hand (I’ve never really been a fan of much of her flabby Compass Point material), with its lovely sidewalk acoustic guitars and rich, almost cartoon-ish piano that have never sounded as sensual as they do on this compilation.

Moonboots by Orlando Riva Sound first appeared on Moulton’s own label, and feels like the point where disco, funk and house meet. It’s the grinding past, present and future all at once.

Clara Lewis’ Needing You, one of my favourite seventies soul tracks, (and like the Patti Jo track, originally from the Moulton mixed Disco Gold album from 75) if it wasn’t for the post Philly strings, sounds like all those lovely old non-hits that the best British Motown collections are full of, albeit stretched a little.

Unlike the likes of Walter Gibbons (who used a more shock’n’awe approach to the remix) Moulton was (and is) more subtle in his approach, teasing and stretching, emphasising parts of a song that would otherwise be missed.

So..Genius? Fuck it…yes…

I’ve been listening to lots of electro-poppy things like the quaintly named Fuckpony, and their intriguingly infectious Ride The Pony, and the new Trentmoller, Nam Nam (which got my daughter doing Peter Sellers impressions…think about it), but then, last week I re-discovered the granddaddy of it all, Wire’s effortlessly timeless 159, one of my favourite records of around the turn of the decade (and I mean from 1979 to 1980), and of all time truth be known I guess.

Listen to A Touching Display and try and convince me that it wouldn’t sit comfortably on Kompact…..

My vinyl copy walked years ago and I’ve had a burn from a friend rather than pay the silly prices demanded of original copies online but it wasn’t good and there were a couple of tracks that were un-listenably bad dubs (from vinyl), so I’m more than a little please to see the remastered edition out via EMI in the UK, beautifully packaged and annotated, but, for some odd reason missing the original four track EP that came with it (not that it’s a loss to me as that wasn’t “borrowed” and I still have it, and its less than earth shattering, being four, seemingly throwaway, solo pieces).

But, damn, doesn’t it sound as fresh and as forward looking as it did all those years back, revolutionary in fact. Map Ref. 41ºn 93ºw is that great lost UK pop song with a title that ensured it would never make the radio; 40 Versions is a beautifully intriguing paean to self doubt and The Other Window is perhaps the greatest train song ever (ok, second greatest after Trans Europe Express).

I’m a happy aging post punker today….

Ok that’ll do…..