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william_kent

Well-known member
ravedave-jpg.1870

Back in my raving days some friends of mine were in the Paradise Factory in Manchester - one goes "tune!!!", and the other had to gently inform it that it was actually the fire alarm going off...
 

woops

is not like other people
i've been seeing the same reaction to the new floating pints record, that it can't be a good track cos it stands for something
 

boxedjoy

Well-known member
well yeah, I wouldn't expect you to have any joy of criticism in itself, your idea of engagement is non-sequitur leaps to irrelevant material with maybe some oblique references to football and women you failed to finger ten years ago
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Back in my raving days some friends of mine were in the Paradise Factory in Manchester - one goes "tune!!!", and the other had to gently inform it that it was actually the fire alarm going off...
Your mate is Tyres, and I claim my five pounds.

 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
good article:

MANTRONIX





Forget 'The Song'



Mantronik does not write Good Songs. He is not an author, but an engineer, an architect. His music is not the expression of his soul, but a product of his expertise. What Mantronik does is construct a terrain, a dance-space in which we can move, float free. Unlike the Rock Song, there's no atmosphere, no nuances, no resonance, here: instead, simply a shifting of forces, torques, pressures, gradients. Mantronik's work (and it is work) is neither expressionist nor impressionist -- it's cubist, a matter of geometry, space, speed, primary colours (not the infinite shades and subtle tones of meaning). Populist avant-gardism.

The song is the primary object of Rock Criticism -- the work of art as a coherent, whole expression of a whole human being's vision. Most rock criticism is poor Lit Crit, forever trying to pin down pop to What's Being Said (whether that's nuggets of 'human truth' or blasts of 'social commitment'), forever failing to engage with the materiality of music. A Mantronix track isn't a song, a finished work, but a process, a space capable of endless extension and adaption; a collection of resources to be rearranged and restructured. Hence the six different mixes of 'Who is It?'; hence the closing 'Edit' on the last LP Music Madness, in which the whole album is compressed into a volatile six-minute reprise; hence the 'Primal Scream Dub' of 'Scream', the fantabulous new single, virtually an entirely new piece of music altogether ...

Forget the Human



Pop is drowning itself (and in the process drowning us) with 'humanity' -- from the sickening, hyperbolic 'care' of 'Let it Be' and 'We Are the World' to the firm, all too firm flesh throbbing in 'I Want Your Sex'. Swamped by this benign, beige environment, this all-pervading warmth, it's scarcely possible to feel the shiver down the spine, the sharp shudder of ecstasy: modern pop just massages you all over, comforts and reassures. Practically every waking minute of our lives we're condemned to be human, to care for people, to be polite, to be socially concerned. Shouldn't our leisure (at the very least; for a start) be a place we can escape our humanity? A place to chill?

Mantronix make perhaps the most nihilistic music on the planet today; only house could claim to be more blank. Unlike rock nihilism, this is nihilistic without any drama, without an iconic figure like Michael Gira or Steve Albini -- the creator simply, silently, absconds; creates an environment in which nothing of himself resides.

Unlike the first LP, which shared with hip hop a boastful, 'deffer than the rest' rapping style, on Music Madness the megalomania is vested in the whole expanse of sound, the inhuman perfection of the dance environment, rather than a charismatic protagonist. Poor MC Tee! This last token of the human seems to be fading fast. It's as though someone has taken an eraser and all but rubbed him out of the picture: a little lost voice wandering in a vast, intimidating Futurist adventure playground. And the words uttered, in that fey, fragile voice are little more than psychedelic gibberish, a vestigial anchor for us to centre our attention, otherwise dispersed and fractured across the jags and fissures of the mix. Mantronik is candid about the relative importance of text and material: 'the words don't mean shit, there's no lyrical structure, but the music pumps!'

You're horrified, but after all, isn't pop all about the desire to transcend or step sideways from the cage of one's humanity? To be more, less or other than simply, naturally human: to become angel, demon, ghost, animal (butterfly or invertebrate). Mantronik's desire is to be superhuman; he envies the prowess, the infallibility of the machine. He loves all the sci-fi films (the techno-heroic strand in science fiction that buffs call 'hard sci-fi', rather than New Wave s.f.'s odysseys into 'inner space'). There are links between Electro's space age imagery and the sword 'n' sorcery/superhero comic book elements in heavy metal, speed metal ... similar male fantasies of omnipotence and invulnerability.

For Mantronik, sampling is his 'special power', the key to demigodhead. 'You can take a sound, any sound, and you can tamper with it. Add other sounds to it. Look at its wave formations on a screen, and change the patterns around. And you don't have to take sounds off records, you can get them from the environment, from hitting things against the wall, anything. And with my set-up, I can record music right up to the point of doing vocals, in my bedroom. Then I go into a studio. With samplers, I never read the instructions. I like to learn from my mistakes and incorporate blunders.'

Forget Soul



For Mantronik, the history of Black Dance Music doesn't begin with James Brown, Sly Stone, George Clinton, even Van McCoy or Chic; it begins with Kraftwerk and flowers with Trevor Horn's Art of Noise. It was the krafty krauts' glistening plastic vistas and stainless girders, plus Art of Noise's fleshless, faceless, sense-less and soul-less techno-symphonic sky's-the-limit mastery that first made him want to make dance music. Indeed, Mantronik seems to take Trevor Horn as a kind of guardian spirit or touchstone, talking of how he's 'now working on stuff that would blow Trevor's mind. I'm working on things Trevor wouldn't even understand.'

Mantronik's attitude to the past is strictly utilitarian, postmodern pagan; there's no veneration, no allegiance to outmoded beats. His reprocessing of the past is in accordance with functionalist criteria, not nostalgia. 'All those old seventies percussion lines were recorded real rough, real shitty, using dirt cheap reverbs. There's a certain old, gritty sound you just can't achieve in a modern studio. What I do is take that old sound and bring it back, into the future.'

There's nothing in the way of the rockthink cult of the origin, of roots here, but rather an insatiable pursuit of the fresh, the ultramodern. 'The old music bores me.' Styles and beats have a rapid turnover, are produced in factory conditions. Mantronix are simply the latest stage in a long history of black music; the largely unwritten history of corporate design, brand names, backroom technicians, rather than sacred cow artists or communities struggling to be heard.

What troubles critics about Mantronix, about house, is that they're illegible. You can't read anything into them. There's no text, just texture, and those who endeavour to wrap meanings around the music are always shown up, the failed despots of discourse. The sheer opaque, arbitrary force of the music slips the net of meaning, again and again.

Instead, for those who listen, there's the fascination of details, a seduction in the endless intermittence of dub. 'The new stuff? A whole mix of things. Not play-it-safe. Kind of teasing, flirtatious. I'm not gonna give it to the listener all at once. It's like if you're going out with a girl, and she gives it you straightaway, you lose interest.' Mantronix never lose you, even as you lose yourself.





Melody Maker, 1 August 1987

'Good songs' was a bugbear of mine in those days. Not good songs per se (I like a shapely melody, who doesn't?), but the critical fixation on the Song as the be-all and end-all of music. Apart from the fact that there's hardly a shortage of well-crafted, heart-felt tunes in the world, what irked me was this way of treating music as surrogate literature (the song as short story or mini-screenplay), in the process totally ignoring sound-in-itself: the insistence of riffs, the sensuousness of timbre, the sorcery of production, the marvel of groove, the mystery of melodic beauty itself. So this piece is a sort of manifesto-in-advance for electronic dance music (compare with the later piece 'Historia Electronica': a sort of manifesto-after-the-fact for rave). Having said that, it's quite hard to put back on the head that thought 'human' was a bad thing for music to be. The polemic against Soul reprises the savage critique of the 'totalitarianism of passion' written with David Stubbs (another Monitor alumnus) earlier in 1987 and titled 'All Souled Out'. As for 'cubist' -- well, I rather think I must have been thinking of Mondrian, whose style is strictly speaking Neoplasticism.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
instead, simply a shifting of forces, torques, pressures, gradients.

Absolutely love this Mark Broom production for exactly this reason. Dub as process not echo. I'm sure me and @john eden have spoken about this, dub revolutionised music, but not just in the sense of stripping back the instruments and adding echo, but a whole new way of composition that uses negative space as a constitutive element in the filling up of the soundfield. There is simultaneously nothing there, and also everything. The innovation of dub was to take the forward momentum of a song and make it sheer magnetic forcefield, which is different to the visual arts of conceptronica which sacrifices the tactility of development to abstract sculpturism. Dub is a concrete avant-garde, no longer in the head but in space.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
another one which pursues the vision I am speaking of, though this time much more grainy electro. Industrial full metal jacket rastas in space, shrapnel whizzing past your head.

 
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