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Editor's Idea: February 1997
ISSUE 156, February 1997
Editor: Tony Herrington
Back in the office after the Xmas and New Year break, and the first executive decision of 97: get a haircut or take up an invitation to apply for £100,000 of lottery money to fund some ridiculously ambitious extracurricular Wire initiative. A tough one. I'm still pondering it several days later on the tube-ride to London's Spitalfields and the first Scratch of 97. Cornershop are headlining, but I've never really connected with their peculiar blend of bruised polemic and ramshackle raga rock, and like many in the capacity crowd I am here to witness a potentially incendiary, possibly revelatory, maybe disastrous soundclash between improvising guitar hero Derek Bailey and two DJs from London's Rumpus Room rollin' with the drum 'n' bass selection.
I don't know Derek personally, we've never been introduced and now I think about it I'm not sure we've even talked on the phone, a fact which might disappoint at least one reader who writes on this month's Letters page. If I had to cite just one musician who embodied what I will reluctantly refer to as 'the spirit of The Wire', however, then Derek would be it.
No doubt he will recoil in horror from the award of such a glittering prize, but right or wrong, I have always thought of Derek as a musician whose work has been based on the consistent belief that music is a constantly evolving and mutating language, an open form able to accommodate all life that surrounds it. And sure enough, watching him 'duet' with the Rumpus Room DJs I am struck by the sensation of witnessing a new vocabulary emerging from the overlapping vernaculars of free improvisation and breakbeat culture.
For an hour Derek interjects switchblade-lethal guitar responses as the breakbeat mix peaks and troughs, shifts the mood and breaks the flow. Aside from the fact that it sounds hair-raising, drop-dead fantastic, the performance is a small triumph for those who believe that not everything that can be said via music has been, underlining the fact that cultural border-crossings, and the kind of sonic fictions which they give rise to, have a deep-rooted social dimension as well as a purely aesthetic one. What started out as a mediated event ended up as a genuine dialogue between two worlds, both of which became a little less circumscribed as a result.
Coincidentally, that morning I had received a package in the post containing a CD reissue of Derek's Music And Dance. It has been all the way from Nashville, Tennessee by Dean Blackwood, manager of another great guitar maverick, John Fahey. The CD features a previously obscure recording of Derek's 1980 Paris performance with the remarkable Butoh dancer Min Tanaka. It is the first release on Fahey's new Nashville-based Revenant label, and even before I listen to it, the notion of a CD which combines the ugly beauty of free improvisation with arcane Japanese performance rites being reissued out of the home of Country & Western is irresistible. Luckily, the music is extraordinary also.
Arriving home from Scratch at one in the morning knackered but still high on the adrenalin generated by the night's events, I put the CD on and am transported into a netherworld of microcosmic events suspended in riveting tension. On paper, if you break the music down to its component parts it can appear comical: Derek's snapping strings, rustling note flurries, bell-like harmonics and sudden intervals; Tanaka shuffling mysteriously to one side, sounding like he is hauling bodies across the stage one moment, tap dancing in flippers the next; the unforeseen contribution of an elemental third party, a rainstorm of monsoon proportions lashing the roof of the performance space, a disused forge, and sounding on tape like the background fizz of heavy radio static Yet it's another spellbinding performance, not diminished one iota by the passage of time or the transfer to a new medium. In fact, the music's unutterably alien qualities are enhanced by the abstraction of home listening. But once again, what comes across most strongly is the feeling of advanced intelligences searching for a common language in which to communicate across the vast distances of time, space, culture and geography. Forgive me if I sound like I'm coming over all utopian on you, and extrapolate that the two performances mentioned here, both undertaken it seems to me in climates of mutual expansion and exchange, can illuminate a world beyond the actual music, suggesting a model for how we might better live our lives. But if there is a point to all the genre-capsizing multi-dimensional hybrids which define much of the music featured in these pages, then surely that is it.
Editor: Tony Herrington
Back in the office after the Xmas and New Year break, and the first executive decision of 97: get a haircut or take up an invitation to apply for £100,000 of lottery money to fund some ridiculously ambitious extracurricular Wire initiative. A tough one. I'm still pondering it several days later on the tube-ride to London's Spitalfields and the first Scratch of 97. Cornershop are headlining, but I've never really connected with their peculiar blend of bruised polemic and ramshackle raga rock, and like many in the capacity crowd I am here to witness a potentially incendiary, possibly revelatory, maybe disastrous soundclash between improvising guitar hero Derek Bailey and two DJs from London's Rumpus Room rollin' with the drum 'n' bass selection.
I don't know Derek personally, we've never been introduced and now I think about it I'm not sure we've even talked on the phone, a fact which might disappoint at least one reader who writes on this month's Letters page. If I had to cite just one musician who embodied what I will reluctantly refer to as 'the spirit of The Wire', however, then Derek would be it.
No doubt he will recoil in horror from the award of such a glittering prize, but right or wrong, I have always thought of Derek as a musician whose work has been based on the consistent belief that music is a constantly evolving and mutating language, an open form able to accommodate all life that surrounds it. And sure enough, watching him 'duet' with the Rumpus Room DJs I am struck by the sensation of witnessing a new vocabulary emerging from the overlapping vernaculars of free improvisation and breakbeat culture.
For an hour Derek interjects switchblade-lethal guitar responses as the breakbeat mix peaks and troughs, shifts the mood and breaks the flow. Aside from the fact that it sounds hair-raising, drop-dead fantastic, the performance is a small triumph for those who believe that not everything that can be said via music has been, underlining the fact that cultural border-crossings, and the kind of sonic fictions which they give rise to, have a deep-rooted social dimension as well as a purely aesthetic one. What started out as a mediated event ended up as a genuine dialogue between two worlds, both of which became a little less circumscribed as a result.
Coincidentally, that morning I had received a package in the post containing a CD reissue of Derek's Music And Dance. It has been all the way from Nashville, Tennessee by Dean Blackwood, manager of another great guitar maverick, John Fahey. The CD features a previously obscure recording of Derek's 1980 Paris performance with the remarkable Butoh dancer Min Tanaka. It is the first release on Fahey's new Nashville-based Revenant label, and even before I listen to it, the notion of a CD which combines the ugly beauty of free improvisation with arcane Japanese performance rites being reissued out of the home of Country & Western is irresistible. Luckily, the music is extraordinary also.
Arriving home from Scratch at one in the morning knackered but still high on the adrenalin generated by the night's events, I put the CD on and am transported into a netherworld of microcosmic events suspended in riveting tension. On paper, if you break the music down to its component parts it can appear comical: Derek's snapping strings, rustling note flurries, bell-like harmonics and sudden intervals; Tanaka shuffling mysteriously to one side, sounding like he is hauling bodies across the stage one moment, tap dancing in flippers the next; the unforeseen contribution of an elemental third party, a rainstorm of monsoon proportions lashing the roof of the performance space, a disused forge, and sounding on tape like the background fizz of heavy radio static Yet it's another spellbinding performance, not diminished one iota by the passage of time or the transfer to a new medium. In fact, the music's unutterably alien qualities are enhanced by the abstraction of home listening. But once again, what comes across most strongly is the feeling of advanced intelligences searching for a common language in which to communicate across the vast distances of time, space, culture and geography. Forgive me if I sound like I'm coming over all utopian on you, and extrapolate that the two performances mentioned here, both undertaken it seems to me in climates of mutual expansion and exchange, can illuminate a world beyond the actual music, suggesting a model for how we might better live our lives. But if there is a point to all the genre-capsizing multi-dimensional hybrids which define much of the music featured in these pages, then surely that is it.
Posted 27/03/08
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