State of the Arts

Weak

miguel — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:00:51 +0000

I feel deadly weak.
The day has nipped
Holes in me
Like a little moth.

My body is a spangled
Net of pores
Bound
By the splayed hands
Of the nerve

Night extends into
Vacancies of colour.

DOOM

miguel — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:10:38 +0000

As I tamped out my cigarette and jumped into the Addison Lee, a cartoon DOOM mask, the grim one he wears on the Madvillainy cover, appeared among the clouds, scowling at my attempts to root him out at his secret HQ. The publicist spoke hushed into my BlackBerry as we cruised down King William Street under the Monument: “DOOM hasn’t spoken to a UK journalist in four years, but I’m sure it’ll be ok…” The taxi ground to a halt. I was led into a building by the publicist, and sat down on my own in a room. Presently Jneiro Jarel walks in, who I recognized from the press shots, DOOM’s producer for this album. Jarel’s smiles, eager to please, telling me about a shoot DOOM and he had just been doing. He prefaces comments with “I wish DOOM was here to hear me say this”, seem a little uneasy on his own. Time passes. The irrepressible publicist arrives some Guinnesses. I remember people talking about DOOM’s drinking, the wasteland era; before he put on a stocking cap to rip mics in the Nuyoricans Poets Cafe, on East 3rd Street, NY 10009; after his brother died crossing the Long Island Expressway in 1993. We sip our beers and I wonder how long it’s going to be for DOOM to come. Momentarily the door opens and someone, an intern maybe enters and sits down and starts to talk to Jarel. “This is DOOM” says Jarel. I suppress a double-take. DOOM!
How does a face you see only through a brushed-steel visor come across with the maskless and cordial meet-and-greets? Very fucking different – relievingly friendly – and subliminally disappointing. The visual gravitas of DOOM is totally reversed by goofy friendliness of this guy. He a tufty, sparse black beard, a pair of small rectangular black glasses, with a sticky-out lower lip which is always bobbing when he’s talking, or splayed out wide when he smiles, which is a lot. He is very friendly, and it is harder than ever to equate the two personas, the artist, spewing out his dense, beautiful bars, and the lovely and more run-of-the-mill Daniel Dumile.
DOOM has a new collaborative name, JJ DOOM, which incorporates Jarel, and they have been working on a new album, which is called Key To The Kuffs, out in May. The album contains some brilliant new DOOM material, alongside enough references to DOOM’s motherland to convince us that he’s been worrying Homeland Security more than a few times with his metal stow-on allowance. The standout track is ‘Winter Blues’, ostensibly a love song, with living proof that DOOM is in rare fettle: “Need a handful of melanin/ feeling of a lambswool beard on your tender skin / might give you a shock initially/ as we reconnect up the flow electricity / the phenomenal melanin biopolymer/ followed by a glass of merlot I could swallow her”
DOOM veers into his artist persona at one point, when he describes the process that engenders bars like the above: “I’m thinking about people, about how that [rhyme] is going to accept into their patterns of thinking, their psyche. I could do just the set style, or I could get the strangest beat. I know how Jarel works, I can see his patterns. I can see it, I can hear it, it’s an audiovisual thing. I can find his patterns. I can see him in the room flippin’ that shit when he sends me a beat in the email.”
JJ DOOM as a conjunctive could have been expected to sound like the disco’d, bossa-nova-LA-beat-scene music that Jneiro Jarel has been known for of late, with links drawn between him and the Brainfeeder label. However the music he has created for Key To The Kuffs has an altogether darker edge than Jarel’s abstract excursions. The album style varies within itself, with ‘Wash Your Hands’ featuring DOOM speculating whether a girl “applies itch cream to her cameltoe” and Jarel dropping a Tinie Tempah-ish siren on the beat. Another track, ‘Guv’nor’, has DOOM talking about his native cockneys again, over a lighter, textured beat that alternates between loose dice rolling percussives and agglomerating snare rolls. “Vocals spilling over like the rolling hills of Dover.”
Jarel tells me: “It made complete sense that eventually we would hook up – we came from the same school of hip hop – both of us make the effort to keep things fresh. DOOM told me he was really happy about this project, because it wasn’t just him putting out (DOOM produced) Special Herb stuff. This is completely new, fresh – the first new DOOM in a long time.”
After the esoterica of his collaboration with Madlib, the more conservative yet excellent album and remix album with Danger Mouse, the classic yet untamed creativity of his Vaudeville Villain, to the more mixed 2009 long cut Born Like This, [as DOOM], there have been a number of projects in the pipeline. One of them was a collaboration project with Ghostface Killah, which was showcased at a somewhat lacklustre performance at the Roundhouse in north London. Complaining about all the white people in the audience was never going to be a clever demographic play for someone like DOOM, who falls prey to the funny little problem that left-field artists suffer from – that unless you’re at a Best Of British night in Vauxhall or at a Beres Hammond concert in the Brixton Academy, you’re going to be surrounded by students trying to capture the special moment on their i-Phone. At the last Best Of British we remember, a student attempted that and got his phone swiped by the hoodies behind him. Maybe DOOM would have appreciated this.
DOOM’s associative thought provokes the question – what does he look at to keep inspired? “I don’t really draw from other art. Mainly I’m mining into my own mind, I’m digging into that, places that only I can see, and I’m trying to bring that out so people can see.” Sounds a little frea-ky from DOOM, I probe further: “I’m making music the whole time, wherever I’m at I’m absorbing things to put Into my music. Anything can trigger off an idea. When we get to an idea is one stage, and then we sketch it out later. It’s a 24-hour a day job, it never goes off. Even when I’m half asleep, I’m thinking about the next line, like ‘damn!’
“We gon’ be making beats in Costa Rica soon though! One of my good friends is a biologist. We going there next month, I’m really into all that geeky biological stuff. Organisms, the ecliptic, the stars, you get all different types of stars you don’t get here.”
Our chat was over, and we all headed out into the morning, certifiably “cold as a witch tit” to borrow from DOOM’s unrivalled powers of description. As I listened back on what we said on the tape, it can be concluded, that despite the friendly bobbing lip and the reassuringly patchy beard, DOOM’s point of view is as fragmented, mad and unique as his raps. The mask just reminds you.

WONDERLAND MAGAZINE – DOOM # 2

miguel — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:20:37 +0000

DOOM and his producer Jneiro Jarel are fighting on a small patch of grass behind the arched tunnels off London Bridge station. The photographer clicks away. What looks like a man in a tacky silver mask sets his feet and delivers slow-mo kung fu chops and kicks at Jarel, hampered by low-crotch black jeans and a bit of a paunch under the camo jacket.
Minutes earlier we were chatting, out of costume [mask] in Red Bull Music Academy’s HQ. What does he look like without his mask? Well he has glasses for one. His head is really small compared to his body, and he has a protuberant and pink lower lip, that wags comically and cheekily as he talks, energetically and happily.
Sipping a coke, DOOM’s disappointed because I’m not the “good-looking Middle Eastern chick” Jarel had promised would doing the interview. They both – despite DOOM’s birth in London, speak in a deep New York brogue, putting the accent on the ‘u’ of ‘influenced’, stuff like that. “Public Enemy influ-enced me,” says Jarel. “‘Welcome to the Terrordome’, ‘Night of the Living Baseheads.’”
JJ DOOM is the name for Jarel [Massive Attack, Damon Albarn] and DOOM’s forthcoming album, out in May, called Key To The Kuffs. Tracks available from the LP so far are ‘Banished’, and ‘Rhyming Slang’ the former with beautifully complex production from Jarel and an uncharacteristically rapid flow from DOOM. “I always got one in the bag – fast rhymes, to let motherfuckers know.”
I question DOOM about the mid-1990s, when he spent time wandering Manhattan, sleeping on park benches. “Was that era traumatic? I’m not sure – I’m not sure what your sources are. It came at a hectic time, but just as hectic as now.”
The new album sees DOOM move into more uncharted musical space – Jarel’s production has an IDM tilt that incites more intricate and more humorous rhyme play from DOOM, [with couplets about cockney rhyming slang and Charlie Sheen] pattering over the soundscapes that lurch from psychedelic excursions to compact electro. The tension between Brainfeeder-type production and DOOM’s new lyrical style will make this a good album for this non-summer.

FOURTH & MAIN – Other Lives

miguel — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:36:00 +0000

Other Lives are a band which emerged out of the Oklahoma dustbowl in 2004. They reflect a myriad of styles, from the country of Woody Guthrie to the rich instrumentation of Sigur Ros, both inhabitants of wild open spaces. When we meet in an out-of-place, old man’s pub in the smart part of residential Kensington, Other Lives are polite but tired out. They have just had a fry-up (it is 7pm on a Sunday night) and on the back end of a seven month tour which has included most of Europe and the UK.In February and in March they supported Radiohead on the first leg of their US tour.
The last time they played music in a pub was the Jericho Tavern in Oxford, and just as they were walking onstage they saw Radiohead standing there, in the 20-strong crowd. “Did you look up at them?” I ask. “Oh no…I think I stared at the floor the whole time. Our manager lied to us and said ‘Oh they’re not coming’ and we were kind of relieved” says Jesse, laughing.
Jesse Tabish is the big arranger. He is the group (who have also supported Bon Iver)’s orchestrator, writing the lush instrumentation of the first album, often scoring with sheet music. He is keen to speak of classical theory – he tells me about the country influence in his music: “It’s the minor pentatonic scale – some of the melodies are derived from that. A lot of the Americana music comes from that – it derives from Native American music, and Irish music, and Black Gospel music, those three are primaries in American music and they all use that scale. There are three types of music that use that scale.”
Jesse speaks with greasy black hair drawn horizontally across his forehead and falling long on either side of his head, drinking a Guinness. There is Josh Onstott, who does some of the talking, and looks a bit like McManus in the Usual Suspects. Jonathon Mooney plays piano, violin, organ and electric harpsichord, Jenny Hsu performs the cello and backing vocals and Colby Owens is on drums.
The similarities with Radiohead continue beyond stage-sharing. Among others, ‘End of the Year’, from their first eponymous album contains a guitar chord borrowing from Radiohead’s ‘Lucky’. However for any idea of the band’s quality can refer themselves to ‘For 12’ another song which includes Radiohead snips, that also contains a Western soundtrack-resembling swerving bass note, a country-inspired thrumming guitar over vocal.
“That was something we wanted to create, that kind of cinematic music, to kind of recreate a mental image of the Westerns” says Jesse. “The thing about Morricone’s music is that you don’t even have to see the picture – you don’t even have to see the film, when you hear the music you instantly get a sense – and I think that with even great cinematic music, it can be left on its own, without even the picture, and you can still get the sense, and even imagine it in your head.”
Their favourite Westerns of all time are: Once Upon A Time in the West (with particular reference to the soundtrack song Man With a Harmonica, A Fistful of Dollars, Hang ‘Em High and Lonesome Town.
“Everybody knows about Westerns in Okie, we grew up with it. I don’t think any of us are fanatic about Westerns, but Enio Morricone is what kind of brought us to those Western. His music represents that Western, you know, the plains. For us his composition opened us up to that scenery.”
Fans of the Middle East, also inhabitants of the dustbowl, this time in the industrial Australian north-east, will find much to compare with Other Lives’ sound. There is an oddness to the Middle East’s music which will elude some. I question Jesse about being middle-of-the-road. “I’ve heard that. That we are ‘safe’. I think that at the end of the day we make the music that we want, and I feel very ‘safe’ doing that.”
Jesse continues: “I kind of look at John Cage as a kind of Woody Guthrie figure, as this independent musician who chose to play by his own rules, and who wasn’t accepted by the institutions right away.”
But John Cage was. He was a media darling in his own time. Perhaps Other Lives didn’t know that, or else they are comfortable with living in the wider flow of the mainstream. However while we may yearn for a Guthrie figure, ascetic of the prairie, the truth is that the dustbowl is blowing with digital breezes these days, and as global as Tokyo, Paris or London. The result of this is that Other Lives are as at home in an iTunes library next to Reading’s Laura Marling or Reykjavik’s Jonsi. Sync it up.

HERZOG – Into the Abyss

miguel — Thu, 03 May 2012 14:04:38 +0000

Into The Abyss sees Werner Herzog, the acclaimed German director and documentary-maker embark on new ground. Death Row, the subject of his new film, is fertile territory for exploration into themes such as the closeness of death, the idea of human retribution, and the toll that inflicting this causes to executioners. The film has come alongside a four-part documentary for Channel Four, called Death Row, where he also looks at those condemned to the ‘gurney’; a narrow bed which awaits convicts when they receive the lethal injection.
The documentary, filmed in 2010, traces the story of a triple homicide, committed by two men, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett ten years previously. Michael Perry is facing the death sentence in eight days. Jason Burkett received only a life sentence for his crimes. Herzog interviews the victims’ families, police, former executioners and the drifters who associated with the killers in the backwater of Texas in which the crimes took place.
The film begins with an interview with the Reverend Richard Lopez, an hour before Michael Perry is to be executed. The day is sunny, and he stands behind the cemetery where many of those killed by the state lie. He is talking about the animals he encounters on his rounds of golf.
“Please describe an encounter with a squirrel” asks Herzog, in a line of questioning that fans will find pleasingly familiar. “Well, one morning, I saw two squirrels, and they were chasing each other – running across the cart path, and I stopped: ‘How about that!’ I thought. ‘If I hadn’t stopped I would have killed these squirrels and their life would have been ended.’ And that reminds me of the many people I have been with on their last breath of life. I sometimes meditate on that experience, and make a little noise, and the squirrels will take off. But I cannot do that for someone on the gurney. I cannot stop the process for them. But I wish I could…” ends Reverend Lopez, breaking down in tears.
Into The Abyss is relatively unusual for a Herzog documentary, in that the natural world plays a very small part. Herzog is a master at giving a strange tilt to nature footage, whether relaying the subterranean bleeps emitted by seals in the Antarctic over scenes of the tundra in Encounters At The End of the World, or playing tango music over shots of Vietnam war napalm explosions in Little Dieter Needs To Fly. Into The Abyss focuses on people, the victims, the perpetrators, the families of both, and the unwilling executioners.
We speak to the latter, namely Fred Allen ‘Former Captain of the Death House Team’, who suffered from panic attacks executing over 100 people. We speak to Charles Richardson, an incredibly moving subject, ostensibly a tough guy, with numerous jailhouse tattoos and stints inside, who breaks down when framed between two upheld pictures of his dead brother.
The most arresting face onscreen is the condemned Michael Perry’s. The condemned man has large, dark, marsupial eyes, protruding front teeth and looks about 17, despite being 28. He appears upbeat and professional in his answers to Herzog’s questions. He ducks his wider questions about his impending death well. In an interview on the film, Herzog said “Of all the death row inmates I have seen, he, according to my knowledge of the human heart, was the most dangerous of them all. He would be the last of all of them I would like to meet in a murky situation in a dark alley.”
Herzog is famous for his philosophies of film, like ‘the ecstatic truth’, which involved recreating surreal events in real-scale in his films. One famous example is from his film Fitzcarraldo, in which he literally hauled a 320-tonne steamer over a hill in the remote Peruvian jungle. He said the iron cables would “break like a thin thread”.
Another philosophy is the ‘voodoo of location’, in which the weight of the film’s setting transmits an innate power to the picture. Into The Abyss does not have this voodoo. The setting is banal – suburban houses and green lawns, and sterile jail cells. Only one image – which is used, somewhat disingenuously, on the film’s poster – is of nature (it’s of a flock of birds circling a field being harvested). The poverty of imagery makes for a somewhat disappointing Herzog picture.
It could be argued that the wealth of the film resides in its issues, which are tackled with a Herzog-style approach. The film closes with a monologue from the former executioner about “watching what the birds do, what the ducks do, the hummingbirds… Why are there so many of them?” Perry is also allowed to expand on a trip he took to the Everglades where he was surrounded by infected monkeys – typical Herzog territory. And yet, perhaps because Herzog cut the 90-minute film with only eight hours of footage, or perhaps because of the film’s dreary setting, these excursions – and the issues that underlie them – fail to take root.

Bass Clef album review

miguel — Thu, 03 May 2012 14:15:22 +0000

Bass Clef used to be best known for being the face of instrumental dubstep, an artist who brought his trombone to a scene dominated by laptop producers. He had a mature outlook in other senses, being older than most of the artists; with a training background in classical music and in Bristol-based jungle and dubstep. He counts South-Western left-fielders like Peverelist and Pinch as friends and collaborators. Peverelist was indeed central in the creation of Bass Clef’s latest release, Reeling Skullways; the first to suggest that a long player could be accumulated out of the stacks of singles that Clef was sending him for opinions. The album itself takes its title from Barefoot in the Head, a novel of science fiction author Brian Aldiss.
In between his major releases Bass Clef has again been indulging his literary side by renaming himself Coseph Jonrad and remixing cheesy driving compilations from the 1980s, including remixes of Bowie, Abba and Eurythmics. Recently it’s been all go for the bulky brassist as he ramps up the hype for Reeling Skullways, playing Boiler Room and shooting videos (for album track ‘Stenalin Menalin Solar Flare’) dressed as an astronaut.
Bass Clef creates all his albums on analogue equipment, yet is reverting to more synthesized sound this time and leaving the trombone in the cupboard. Thank god for that! The album begins with ‘Keep the Hoping Machine Running’, an track which sounds like grand-scale dub techno, piano stabs replaced by plangent walls of synth sounding like striking bells. It ends abruptly, a tantalising introduction. Next up is ‘Walworth Road Acid Trap Door’ (yes complicated titles are a staple for Bass Clef) which has a banging grime bass line with some cheap ethereal washes which sound like classic jungle.
‘Electricity Comes From Other Places’ is a great track, seeing the best of Bass Clef’s new simpler style emerge. We see nice spare synth over a drawn African drum beat twinned with the sinewy techno bleep.
‘Hackney – Chicago – Jupiter’ is also a strong track, featuring more 1990s air-bubble bleeps which circle in and out of solvency over a breakbeat which gives way to a jungle bass line. A weaker track on the selection is ‘Embrace Disaster’ an ethno track which features dodgy Eastern chill-out pianos and ends up sounding like an all-too-knowing pastiche.
The album has excellent structure to it, with the final track’s thick electric chords chiming with the digital bells from the first and the minimalist ones placed in sequence. All in all, a stronger, cleaner release than previous staple, with a dub techno clarity betraying its roots in analogue Yamaha MT4X.

Lonely Londoners

miguel — Fri, 04 May 2012 16:08:26 +0000

Taking the Victoria line south with Jason Burfitt, with his chin bladed open with herpes or crack lesions, sitting next to each other on the mouthwash-colour carriage, him talking, out of anxiety, maybe the crack gives him panic attacks when he’s underground. The heat down here reminds me of Magaluf, when my mum asked me to come, it’s like 120 degrees there, it’s not Spain, that’s what people forget.
We take Vauxhall Bridge over north again, and he’s talking about the M15 building, about how it’s not as precise as the pyramids of Egypt, that all pointed up to Sirius, the Dogstar.
He lived in Goa, picking up giros, until his brother came and brought him back. He lived with his girlfriend, and got sick of her so he went to buy a newspaper and a Calippo and came back ten days later. Whenever he wanted to scare her he would ask her if she wanted a Calippo. In prison he would play dominos with Blackjacks and Fruit Salads, people were tight in prison, you’d make a cigarette with a third of what I’m giving you there.
He has two coats and a warren of pockets in each one. He fishes out a melted cola Mr Freeze from somewhere and starts to suck it.
He went to Spain, to Morocco, to the Atlas mountains, in a big bus all with a group of friends. He used to hate driving, all those hills. Swoosh, Swoosh, making fins with his hands.
His brother had to bring him back at the end of that too. I was nine stone – what I weigh now. One time we picked up a bloke on the border and he had four bottles of Volvic on him, I think he’s lying now, lying through his gummy yellow teeth, through the halitosis on his breath, he had four bottles of Volvic on him, they turned out to be liquid Ketamine. I poured water in one of them and nicked a litre off the cunt. It’s funny we went to the top of the Atlas mountains and they’re fish in the water there. Fish! How did they get up there?
My mate Colin got murdered out there. We had a wood stove in the bus, for cooking and stuff, and an axe. My mate Dave killed him with the axe on a beach and chopped up the body. You know they’ve got cameras at cash points? Well they filmed Dave using Phil’s card to take all his money. I had to go to court and give evidence. We think they were gay.
You know Napoleon, that black bloke with all the chains who deals shit charlie outside there on the Hackney road? Nig nog. Lend me a tenner mate. Otherwise I won’t be able to sleep, I owe Napoleon for my phone. I haven’t slept since Monday.

Inside-out

miguel — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:19:15 +0000

I’m coming to get you
The green hills
Roll like a drum
And the yellow of the grain
Is flashing in my eyes
Bad man
Is coming to get you
I’ll threaten you
With the barbed wire
Of the fences
And the thorns will be my weapons
I’ll fly at you with the feathers of the pigeons
Drive to you with the roads
And depress you with the emptiness of the air

Pampa color sabana de holanda vista a travez de una gota de lluvia

miguel — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:46:16 +0000

Los dos gansos
Con sus pichones de plumaje
-Interior-de-buzo
Cambian de color cuando
Rotan
Me hacen acordar a los
Patos de feria
Aire comprimido pff pff
Que se me occurian
En mi crisis bocho bocho
Debajo del cedro verde
Y los olmos enfermos

Decentemente en mi cama
Con las sabanas de Holanda

Me castigaban
Los indios
Unidos a le creacion
Por la baba del Diablo
Y yo llanero Sevilla.
Me regalaron un
Ternero lindo
Que despues se revelo
En demón
Y unas plumas llamativas
De pajaro cantor.

Cross-Country Running

miguel — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 12:04:21 +0000

Spring appeared in the thin avenues
Running from your house to mine
The ink-dart magnolias and lemon-coloured
Leaves lined the villas.
Low England, leaving a considerate space
For her injured sun

The day passed choppily
The ten miles from one bridge
To another, the mix of yellow
And brown,
Light on the sallow water.

Your contents are too
Definite to combine
The wire, cement
The liquid, beached river
The red traffic light
Flushing the pink blossom

My last four summers have
Been like this
The aperture for beauty
Narrows;
The crowns of bees,
The green currents,
Shrink back
On the dark Nile
And the silt crabs
Carve lines on the corners of my eyes