Actress
What is house? What is techno?
These are questions that could send far braver and wiser men than I completely doolally, and it’s for my sanity as much as yours that I generally give them a wide berth. The dancefloor abhors ontology, etc.
I might better reduce my question to this: is house/techno (let’s conflate the two for now, a contentious act in itself, I know) a starting point or a destination? Arguably the most tedious producers, the genre-monkeys, are those for whom it is both; where the house-ness or techno-ness of a tune is a foregone conclusion – a stated intention and an efficiently achieved result. The more interesting producers – those who are artists, not just engineers – take a more uncertain path. The artists under inspection in this month’s column differ wildly in approach: some begin with house/techno, or at least an idea of what house/techno is, before unravelling it, finding within it unexpected potentials and phenomena, and building on these. Others begin with chaos, energy, pure impulse, and house/techno is what they arrive at, sometimes without even realising it themselves.
Actress, you may already know, has a new album due out next month via Honest Jon’s. Entitled Splazsh, it’s a formidable record; as dense and introverted as his debut, Hazyville, but also more expansive, more ambitious. Whereas Hazyville felt like a lean, tantalising collection of short stories, Splazsh is more of a doorstop novel. Accordingly, it requires more concentration than its predecessor, and its pace is liable to slacken at certain points, but overall its impact is deeper, and one suspects it will be more lasting. Hazyville‘s defining quality was its fitfulness, its impish stop-start quality, but Splazsh‘s tone and aesthetic is more sustained; the tracks adhere largely to house/techno form – in the sense that 4/4 rhythm, however sloppy or lopsided, presides over much of what we hear. But these beats aren’t tied to a larger structural orthodoxy – whether through design or innocence on the part of Actress (real name Darren Cunningham) I can’t be sure. None of these tracks adhere to the received “rules” and measures of house and techno, they’re structured intuitively and fluidly, and are sometimes exasperatingly unpredictable; they’re certainly not made with DJs in mind. As far as I’m concerned this is an unequivocally good thing.
Is this the first truly British-sounding techno album of the 21st century?
Of course, all this can frustrate as well. Sometimes Cunningham’s healthy anti-conservatism can sometimes mask a lack of craftmanship; not in terms of the music itself, which is gorgeously granular and tactile throughout, but in terms of narrative. On the few occasions he falls down it’s not as a stylist but as a storyteller; there are several tracks that seam to sag halfway through or meander on insensibly; the album as a whole is just a little bit overlong.
Actress’s deconstructionist approach to groove and form inevitably recalls Theo Parrish, but only so far. Actress’s production aren’t as earthy as Theo’s; they have a shiny digital-age patina, which, far from being a bad thing, actually gives them their own identity and place in time (there’s absolutely no doubting that Splazsh is a product of 2009-10). Also, for all the talk of exploration and intuition, there’s nothing at all jazzy about this album. Cunningham seems less inspired by the liquidity of jazz and more by the rigidity, and opacity, of electro; in that sense there’s definitely more of Juan and Shake in there than there is of Theo or Kenny. Though Actress has spoken before about his love of electro (from Kraftwerk to Drexciya to Daft Punk), there wasn’t much evidence of that on Hazyville; it definitely comes across on Splazsh, particularly ‘Maze’, the album’s ominous centrepiece. One thing Cunningham definitely does get from Theo is sheer crunch: the beats on ‘Bubble Butts And Equations’ and ‘Always Human’ sound like they were made with the bags of wet gravel.
If I was feeling generous I’d say that the juddering ‘Supreme Cunnilingus’ reminds me of Sun Electric or the opalescent off-funk of SND’s Atavism, but it’s nowhere near as focussed or textured as that; rather it feels a little bit, “Look! I’m mad, me!”. It’s an unnecessary show of perversity: Splazsh‘s best tracks are actually more weird than that, just in a more concealed and therefore more affecting way. One of my personal favourites is the simple but devastating ‘Futureproofing’, a short, beatless piece wherein haunted, trippy synth-arpeggios are underscored with spasms of gut-whumping sub-bass. Now that works.
Rather than being a cold-blooded enactment of “techno”, Splazsh is a beautiful, highly personal misinterpretation, or mishearing, of its tropes.
Throughout Splazsh it feels like we’re listening to an artist for whom techno is an inspiration, but not something that he wishes to imitate; indeed, techno is to Splazsh what garage was to Burial’s debut LP; ever-present, a foundation even, but somehow also a ghost, an impression, something only half-perceived – through a fug of blunted memory and YouTube overload and serotonin-depletion. Crucially, though, there’s a flamboyance, and wit, to proceedings; it’s not all rain-grey melancholy, nightbus paranoia and makeshift Pot Noodle ashtrays. There’s life and colour everwhere: see the Model 500-meets-Todd Edwards ‘Always Human’, the sinewy Metroplexisms of ‘Let’s Fly’ or the overloaded dubstep-not-dubstep of ‘Wrong Potion’. Rather than being a cold-blooded enactment of “techno”, one of those wet-ink facsimiles churned out by Motor City Drum Ensemble or whoever, Splazsh is a beautiful, highly personal misinterpretation, or mishearing, of its tropes. Hauntological house, anyone? Or simply the first truly British-sounding techno album of the 21st century?
Splazsh raises more questions than it answers, and anyone interested in the continued evolution and involution of house/techno needs to hear it.
Carlos Giffoni
Recently I’ve found that the music coming out of America’s underground electronic scene has been satisfying my “techno” craving than most of the dancefloor gear that’s been knocking about. There’s a lot of amateurish and self-regarding crap that one has to wade through in order to find the gems, and indeed, without the recommendations of friends and a lot of luck, I might never have found them at all. This scene, or rather constellation of related scenes, exists totally independently of the Euro-centric techno and electronica community and its 12″ ‘n download means of dissemination and distribution; most artists involved come from noise backgrounds, and they stay true to its time-honoured methods and media, favouring short-run CD-Rs, cassettes and often beautifully packaged LP sets. These largely limited edition records feel vital but also transient, fleeting; it feels like a genuine privilege to capture any one in physical form.
A great entry-point disc, showcasing all that’s good, and bad, about this rapidly proliferating scene, is the Radio Scenic Glow Vol.1 compilation, released in summer 2009 on the must-check Upstairs label. It features one of the more acerbic offerings from Carlos Giffoni’s No Fun Acid (of which more later), the most forthright Oneohtrix Point Never track I’ve ever heard (‘Heavy Water’/’I’d Rather Be Creeping’, with crunching chords that sound like Coil-gone-properly-rave), and a bunch of blissfully innocent synthesizer pieces like Driphouse’s ‘Raja’ and Alice Cohen’s impossibly dainty ‘The Lacemakers’.
This music reconnects with an era when visions of the future were all about the macro, not the micro; the big picture rather than the precision-tooled niche.
Of course there’s a lot of more conventionally droning – but still affable – neo-kosmische fare like Stellar Om’s ‘Victory’, but its offset by genuine curveballs like the abstract, super-saturated G-funk of Mecanick Preachers’ ‘And build a new people…’, which sounds something like Dam-Funk or John Davis produced by Frank Bretschneider (it also reminded me a bit of the Taggart theme, but the less said about that the better). It goes without saying that none of these tracks are primed for the dancefloor; to the casual ear, they’re noise, or ambient, or simply (ugh) electronica. But as far as I’m concerned they possess the true spirit of techno, one which you won’t find in any of the 300 ultra-polished tech-house trifles released this week: that of people dreaming through machines. Very gauche of me, I know, but…
In the case of Radio Scenic Glow, the spectres of “hypnagogic pop” and hauntology also hover over proceedings: in most cases these artists are working, therapy-like, through the sonic and televisual influences that they absorbed half-consciously in their 1980s and early 90s childhoods; they’re remembering their own “forgotten futures”. But they’re also reconnecting, in an entirely straightforward way, with that era’s unabashed (and very naive) machine-optimism; when electronic exploration was, to some degree at least, a part of pop culture and when visions of the future were all about the macro than the micro; the big picture rather than the precision-tooled niche.
Bring acid back!
All of this is building up to me telling you how much Carlos Giffoni has been nailing it recently and, to go back to my opening patter, how he’s been destabilising my ideas of what house/techno is and whether it’s a starting-point or destination. I was fortunate enough to catch his live show at The Grovesnor in South London last week, where he was supporting Oneohtrix Point Never. I knew that his “No Fun Acid” project – house music filtered through the perspective of a noise artist – would be interesting, but I hadn’t banked on how visceral and volatile it would be. Nor had I expected it to be so arrestingly rhythmic, with ultra-dry jacked-out rhythms recalling Pierre, Marshall Jefferson and the original acid dons. To hear acid house music presented in this context – as an early evening performance in a packed pub, rather than at a rave in the middle of the night – was disorienting and life-affirming. Whereas oftentimes the setting in which we enjoy acid – the club, the festival, the rave – demands that we judge it mainly on its danceability, in this more sober setting we were able to give in to its more deviant, psychedelic properties. But what am I saying? When was the last time you or I actually heard a proper acid set in a club? Though clipped 303 licks and squiggles were rife in noughties house/techno, actual tear-out, unrelenting acid was, and remains, doggedly unfashionable – more the preserve of the blokeish Braindance crew than the trendy post-minimal set. How have we allowed this to happen? Bring acid back!
For now I’m happy to enjoy acid out of either of these gurners’ contexts. Watching Giffoni’s set, augmented by amazing Wipeout-style visuals (a million times better than most of the “proper” techno visuals I’ve endured recently – did anyone see what they had for Carl Craig and Moritz’s recent show at the Royal Festival Hall – what the fuck?), I was reminded of Marshall Jefferson’s complaint that the second wave of acid producers were using the 303 not to create moods but “disrupt thought patterns”. That’s exactly what No Fun Acid is about. If Giffoni dropped a set of this at peaktime in Fabric or Berghain, everyone would go nuts – I mean, actually go nuts. And it would be beautiful. But it would just never be allowed.
There’s a punkish innocence and freedom to what he’s doing, the result of not being plugged-in to the tedious web-community-driven house/techno “culture” as we unfortunately are.
Whereas, say, Actress’s deconstruction of techno comes across as spontaneous and (in the best possible sense) untheorized, Giffoni’s feels like a formal dismantling or detournement; he takes acid house as a starting point and coaxes previously untapped reserves of energy out of it. He explained the origins of No Fun Acid in a fine interview with The Quietus‘s Louis Pattison last week, saying, “I always loved the sound of those lines, the Roland machines, and the filter sweeping. I’d been playing with analogue synths for a while and I decided that instead of making this very complicated, layered stuff, I wanted to step back and do something rhythmic. And then the idea of the Acid bassline, the Acid synth line, seemed like a natural progression to inject in there. I kept some of the drone structures and Noise things that I have been investigating on synths…”
Though Giffoni is tackling acid conceptually, there’s also a punkish innocence and freedom to what he’s doing, a result of not being plugged-in to the tedious web-community-driven house/techno “culture” as we unfortunately are. This is more of about the transformational power of electronic sound.
“This project was born from both my interest in synthetic sound and from growing up surrounded by electronic music at clubs, raves, on the radio, birthday parties, in the supermarket… there’s electronic music everywhere. The acid synthetic line is something that came naturally to me when I started to do more experiments with sequencers in modulars – probably it was engraved in my brain somewhere – so from there I got a few drum machines, a 303 clone, and No Fun Acid was born.”
Whatever its musical merits, I fully approve of its appropriation, and questioning, of what “techno” actually means.
No Fun Acid is not the only outlet through which Giffoni is messing with our norms and givens: his contibution to a recent split with Keith Fullerton Whitman, the provocatively named Techno, frightened me half to death; it’s not techno in any sense that you or I might understand, but a set of searing power electronics that is by turns compelling and grating. Whatever its musical merits, I fully approve of its appropriation, and questioning, of what “techno” actually means. Far more satisfying, though, is Giffoni’s recent solo outing, Severance. A work of fierce electronic minimalism, at times it sounds like a more expansive and evolved take on some of the cold wave gear everyone’s been vibing on recently, and its heavily synthetic, low-end undulations are by turns seductive and terrifying; listening to this record is like bring trapped in Videodrome. ‘The Hermit’ is shark-eyed synth-pop shorn of all the pop; ‘Shaved Arms’ is like a nightmare rendering of early Human League or The Future.
“There is a variety of modular synths that I am using on [Severance], Giffoni told The Quietus. “Mostly some Eurorack format, but also some Modcan and MOTM modular synths. I don’t use any board effects or digital editing tricks – only what’s available to me on the modular synths, and I use the standard EQ in my mixer. I wanted to keep expanding the use of pure synthetic textures that produce interesting results when you blend them together, but also play around a little more freely with some structures until the piece felt right. In some cases I added some bass-y synth lines, and an even more beat/analogue clock division-locked piece, which was ‘Knife’.”
Severance is out now and really worth your attention; if you’re feeling that, I also strongly recommend Keith Fullerton Whitman‘s recent collaboration with Geoff Mullen, November 28, 2009, recently released on the aforementioned Upstairs CD-R label. Offsetting sharper industrial noise with twinkling, Klaus Schulze-style atmospherics, it’s by far the most “techno” thing I’ve heard this month. You’ll be able to sample the delights of No Fun Acid on record when Giffoni releases the This Is No Fun Acid 2×12″ next month. It’s no comparison to hearing him in the flesh, but it will do, and also boasts a remix from Gavin Russom, a figure who perhaps more than anyone links the techno/house community with the current US retro-avant-garde and its new age/kosmische preoccupations. Last year Russom released the incredible Black Meteoric Star 12″ series (subsequently collected on CD), a conceptual take on acid that was less purist than Giffoni’s. This month he kicks of a new 12″ series for DFA made under the name The Crystal Ark, purportedly inspired by carioca funk, atabaque drumming, tropicalia and South American club styles, as well as the lysergic Belgian rave of Praga Khan and Nikki Van Lierop.
Gavin Russom
Earlier this week I asked Russom, himself an artist whose moorings are in more “experimental”, beatless electronics, if he felt his own rhythmic dance music “interventions” accorded with those of Giffoni. Though their backgrounds and approaches are clearly different, I felt that they both seemed to disinter, and draw attention to, the stranger rituals and energies lurking in familiar dance music forms and methodologies. He wasn’t so sure.
“It’s not as if I’m trying to dismantle dance music to be something more energetic or experimental, I’m more anchoring something which has an extremely chaotic and intense energy by using certain musical devices, and not anchoring it so much that it becomes completely defined by those devices, but rather that there is a tension between the raw energy and the structure. My sense from listening to Carlos’ work is that he is perhaps working from almost the opposite direction; inhabiting the structures and systems of dance music and dismantling them from inside to push them towards noise and chaos.”
“I think music is way more powerful than people realize” – Gavin Russom
So for Russom house/techno is the result rather than the root?
“For me things start with energy and move towards a focus that might be interpreted as a musical idiom or genre,” he said. “For example, when I’m working in a way that eventually results in a dancefloor-friendly track, it’s because that’s the path which that particular track has taken me on.
“With ‘The City Never Sleeps’ I started by doing a live take on a 606 through parallel sets of EQs. That was the original idea that the track grew out of. It wasn’t particularly dancefloor-friendly despite being made on a drum machine but that’s where the energy was coming from at that moment. Then I had the idea to add each layer one by one and it grew into the instrumental track, then Viva came on board and the vocal element was added, and the structure of the track changed again from there. But there isn’t really a moment where I say ‘I want to make a track like this’ or ‘I want this to be this kind of music’. It’s more like there’s a mass of energy that gets first channeled into certain machines or instruments, then into certain sounds.”
But surely ideas of “house” and “techno” must be there, even if at the periphery of your vision, from quite an early point?
“In my own work I’m really coming from the approach of sound and its energy,” Russom answers, “Its ability to channel energy. Dance music is an obvious choice, an obvious idiom to work in to, as I say above, anchor some of this energy into a ‘usable’ form. Because there’s already all these ideas floating around in the dance music scene about what music can do for you. I think music is way more powerful than people realize, that’s my experience of music, that it is incredibly powerful and can do a lot for a person. When I make music, that is primarily what I want to share. I use references, again, as a way of anchoring this energy and translating it into form where it becomes communication.
“Undoubtedly a lot of the newer technology that exists for making dance music is focussed more on imitation than it is on invention.”
There’s an undeniable sense that electronic dance music is no longer plausibly ‘futurist’ – the idea that every successive techno or house record is a giant leap forward for sound/music is no longer a credible one, if it ever was. Genuinely new sounds seem increasingly hard to come by. It seems that more and more, the most interesting records in the electronic music realm are those that enter into conceptual dialogue with dance music past. I think not just of Russom and Giffoni but, say, Atom TM’s Liedgut LP; the most adventurous artists around right now seem to be consciously and formally invoking the past. Er, right?
“Is this just a function of the fact that there is so much more dance music being produced and released then there was at the time when, as you say, each new record was a giant leap forward? Undoubtedly a lot of the newer technology that exists for making dance music is focussed more on imitation than it is on invention, but there are still lots of new tools that could be used. For example, I was speaking to Paul Schreiber (of Synthesis Technology/MOTM) the other day and he was describing two new synth modules he’s designed. Both are completely radical and unlike anything out there. There’s lots of stuff out there but I rarely hear it on records. [But] we have Omar S., Gemmy, Traxx, Levon Vincent… All those guys have put things out that I consider pretty radical recently, that come out of specific genres but then blow the defining characteristics of those genres to pieces.
“I can’t think of a moment where dance music was not in a conceptual dialogue with the past, as all music is.”
“I can’t think of a moment where dance music was not in a conceptual dialogue with the past, as all music is – because of the fact that it is continually evolving and changing and growing from where it is to where it is going to be. The first wave of Detroit techno is obviously in dialogue with the music of the late 70’s, Kraftwerk and OMD etc, also with Motown and late 70s funk and soul, just as those musics were in a conceptual dialogue with rock, blues and jazz before them. I consider continuing that dialogue to be part of my responsibility as a composer and producer, to participate in the evolution of music as a whole.”
“I think that part of the way the modernist impulse has been interpreted historically has to do with massive movements, inventions or individuals that have been so radical that they have changed everything, destroying what came before and creating an entirely new thing in its place. I think this is largely a historical fiction that is based around marketplace necessity rather than creative development. The Futurists themselves, perhaps the most modernist of the modernists, were guided by an impulse to destroy current ideas about art so that it could return to a more authentic place which they saw manifested in so-called primitive cultures. So were the Abstract Expressionists. I suspect that creativity that has engaged the past has always been more interesting.”
Kiran Sande
Special thanks to Gavin Russom and Benedict Bull
Recommended listening:
1. Actress – Splazsh [forthcoming Honest Jon’s CD/LP]
2. Actress – Loomin [forthcoming Nonplus 12″]
3. Various Artists – Radio Scenic Glow Vol.1 [Upstairs CD-R]
4. No Fun Acid – This Is No Fun Acid [forthcoming No Fun Productions 2×12″]
5. Carlos Giffoni – Severance [Hospital Productions CD]
6. Geoff Mullen & Keith Fullerton Whitman – November 28, 2009 [Upstairs CD-R]
7. The Crystal Ark – The City Never Sleeps (Instrumental) [DFA 12″]
8. T++ – Wireless [forthcoming Honest Jon’s 12″]
9. The Panamax Project – Maximum Height [Subsolo 12″]
10. Addison Groove – Footcrab [Swamp 81 12″]
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