When it comes down to it, while I can respect the huge influence that Cabaret Voltaire had on the growth of New Wave-y type sounds, the one CV album I still really enjoy listening to is The Conversation. Yup, their ambient techno double album, alternately ignored or hated by fans of their earlier work. While I do like some of their earlier stuff (see below), it’s usually overly long and poorly edited. As a general rule, the vocals are great for the first four minutes and increasingly less-great for the four minutes that follow.

What I like about The Conversation is that it is richly thematic, and the form actually lends itself to being too long and far too stingy with the edit button.

Anyway, things change, stay the same, etc etc and so forth:

Blacworld is one of the many names under which Richard H. Kirk records. The unifying theme of this recording, beyond the aesthetic reliance upon vague hints of panopticonic paranoia, is a muddy darkness. But structurally it shares that same tendency to avoid paring down that seems to run through everything the man touches.

If you travel back twenty years earlier:

It remains a thing, though Kirk’s more recent work isn’t quite as repetitive. I like “Crackdown”, mind you, but it’s really long.

I like this particular work because it is repetitive and minimal enough in both construction and tone to serve as a perfect landscape soundtrack. Numb trips by train on a dreary Sunday morning are colored with an epic weirdness. While it manages to be both memorable and forgettable – you’d not hum any of these while walking along, but you’d instantly remember any song after a few seconds of play – Subduing Demons in Southern Yorkshire is an interesting signpost in an impressively long career.

There’s retro and then there’s frozen in time.

There’s a revivalist techno thing going on with labels like Dust Science and Soma, and specifically the resurgence of B12 and these guys.

A bit of history – back in the day, The Black Dog was the two dudes from Plaid (before they were Plaid) and Ken Downie. The two dudes left to go do their Plaid thing and Ken kinda fucked around for a while before hitting a new stride in the mid-00s. Beyond all the reissues there was some new material.

Now, if you did the whole “desert island discs” thing becuase you’re old enough to remember when such a postulation was a fun parlour game for music nerds, I would have put 1995’s Spanners album on that list. Very high on that list, in fact, as it is the essential IDM-sounding release. Warp Records + mid-90s + these guys = classic. It’s held up quite well as one long, flowing piece. Neither techno nor braindance, it can cut a rug but it’s a bit more meaty than beaty. And it just sounds so lush, so…like a hair care commercial talking about the wonders of thick, shiny hair, but with sounds that hit your ears.

Gushing apart, let’s fast forward 13 years, to 2008. The Black Dog of 1994 is not The Black Dog of 2008; the newer version is techno-minded in the extreme. The hooks are very glassy and nearly brittle. The beats are very basic, a skeleton that the bass (which sounds truly awesome) and little acid bits are meant to fill out. And it mostly works. I’m not entirely sold on the whole back to Detroit thing – it was definitely before my time, for starters – but the bell peals of “Train by the Autobahn (part 2)” and “Digital Poacher” make a nice sandwich for the acid workouts and electro framework that fills out the reset of Radio Scarecrow.

It’s worth a taste, especially for fans of the old BD who perhaps never got too into Plaid. I wish they’d remained together, but life brings us places and tears us apart because that’s what living does.

theblackdogma.com

Higher Intelligence Agency kinda sucked. That’s being a bit harsh, as they did help shape the concept of “ambient dub” but on the other hand, it’s also an information-free concept.

Silly terms are what they are – silly – but Colourforms is almost ok for what it is, though I’d recommend Global Communication first (and last, really). They had the snap and the style, whereas HIA always had a bit too much cheese. Like Shpongle.

Preemptive disclaimer: I know you did a lot of DMT and Shpongle is very important to you but sometimes the truth hurts. They’re mediocre at best and you damn well know it.

However, when we pair HIA with Biosphere for Polar Sequences and Birmingham Frequencies, things get almost-kinda-sorta-nearly funky, and definitely enjoyable. Polar was the first collaboration, and it’s interesting but not nearly as good as Biosphere’s solo work from that era. This record, however? Aw man! It’s hot!

By “hot” I mean “hot in the sense that it captures the tones of the imagined future so distinct to that time period and builds an accessible-yet-deep bridge between the desire for the beat and the desire to eradicate the beat.” No barns were burned in the making of this recording from the year 2000, reportedly constructed from the sounds of urban Birmingham but lacking in that “found sound” stamp that many find delightful and I find somewhat lazy.

There’s a term that folks used in the way back when, and that term was “chill” – a word engaged to describe a wide range of music that’s largely unconnected. A lot of really talentless shit got pushed out under that nearly useless term, stuff that you’d find in compilations at a $12 martini joint or in the record collections* of the hopelessly blurred and permanently burnt. But yeah, this is chill. It’s very much like sitting on a frozen playground in the middle of the night and watching your breath condense in the air and not caring that your hands cannot be felt any more.

This is the sound of simple, unhurried pleasure.

*CD sleeve album on the passenger seat of their car

The slickest night at the cleanest Thai fusion restaurant with the most abstract menus (all the dishes are represented by gradiated circles comprised of gradiated circles) and the most beautiful clientele. The lights are just right (also circles), both too bright and too dark. Hypermediated semi-ethnic food eaten by impossibly tall, semi-ethnic models. Expensive cigarettes and cocaine, minus all the hairy old rich dudes who supply these things in the quest to divest clothing from those very same models.

No lines, no scratches, no imperfections. Nobody dies and nobody grows old.

Smooth as silk and compulsively cinematic, like driving in the rain on a very long Saturday night. SCSI-9 are a Russian duo who have been refining the microhouse thing down into a small wash of dreamy riffs and gentle clicks with a some degree of pop sensiblity. Though it could be argued that “pop sensibilty” in this context just refers to having recognizable hooks and a gentle sense of place. Easy as Down moves along the same continuum as Digital Russian and The Line of Nine – I’ve only listened to the CD collections rather than the many 12″ releases – but is just a teeny bit smoother, while still largely avoiding the unpleasant “soulful singer” thing that seems to be the final step on the “pop sensibility” ladder. (Ignoring for a moment the third track, which isn’t terrible but is indeed into the whole female singer talking about feelings or something like that in a way that will not interrupt your dining on curry puffs and spring rolls.)

Kompakt is a label that took up the general concept of ambient house a decade after the fact and floated away with it. I like the Ulf Lohmann and related Orb ambienty projects and The Modernist, and I like these guys too. And anything out on Kompakt will be a hell of a lot easier to find, if not necessarily more reasonably priced. (Dear Bleep.com…)

Such are the mysterious ways of the god of ForEx and Demand Kurve, I suppose.

www.myspace.com/scsi9

“Satellite…Baby”

“Satellite…Baby”

Unless you’re willing to pay 30 bucks or more, you’re not going to find a physical copy of Microgravity. Since no one buys music anymore, this isn’t really an issue. But read on, and we shall explore why the damn thing is worth $8.91 from the iTunes store or an even ten bucks from bleep.com, to keep it truly, really and really truly real.

These days Biosphere is all about the ambient; an icy ambient that’s filled with coldness and ice cubes and other words that mean “weird and somewhat spooky.” Dude even climbs mountains in his spare time and samples the mountain sounds after he’s done climbing it – the musical equivalent of screwing a supermodel and then tattooing your name on her neck in your own blood.

Drifting beyond the “the arctic sound” of recent albums (though Autour de la Lune is so minimal as to be nearly inaudible) is a past when Geir Jenssen was an ambient techno badass. Seriously! If The Orb were a drug-addled maniac, Biosphere was the methodical cop who would burst into the interview room, kick over a chair and pin Alex Patterson into the corner all in one fell swoop.

Do not fuck with Biosphere.

That may be nonsense, but a world where one man wanted to stop making acid house, ambient techno was a way to stay true to the thrust and flow of kicks and hats without having to find an entirely new way of working. I may be a pushover for this era – though at the time all this actually dropped I was listening to Slayer and playing football, and regarded raver types as moral lepers at best – but quality is pretty easy to judge here. For every Basic Channel classic there’s oodles of terrible “ambient dub techno” or “dubby ambient house” from the early 90s. As a handy guide, the more buzzwords you need to describe something in a press release, the more fucked the tracks are.

Microgravity is an exercise in using space, the exact opposite of a dense and tension-filled acid house anthem. It is ambient techno done so correctly that the dancefloor aspects exist only to highlight the hypnotic textures that lie between the beats. Even the little snippets of television and movie samples don’t seem like a quaint throwback so much as a glue. The album begins and ends with soundscape pieces that hint at the future – most fully realized in Substrata – of Biosphere as creator of perfect snapshots of space. Neither tense nor relaxing, it is a compelling document that showcases the very best of an era now long gone. (The efforts of labels like Kompakt aside; it’s just not the same thing, really.)

Patashnik is not as good as its predecessor. Not to say that it’s not a great continuation of this melding of techno and anti-techno, but it can’t quite compare. Great tracks abound – the opener “Phantasm” features a catchy vocal loop that’s just creepy enough – but it’s a missing link between Biosphere’s technoid past and the weightless future.

What does make it most interesting is that it hints at what was to come, and when you listen to Microgravity, Patashnik and Substrata in sequence (and once you’re hooked, in reverse order) you hear the sounds of a man who was working out what kind of moods and sounds could be invoked by not cutting the midrange and dropping the bass, as it were. In that context, it is an exciting placeholder between the soft muscle of Microgravity and the unerring precision of Substrata, which I will get to shortly.

One of the most charming things about Geir Jenssen is that every album cover lets you know exactly what is going to happen. The invocation of the male seed on the cover of Microgravity is a sign from an earlier era; this cover is equal parts Eno and fantasy landscape, which isn’t an unfair description of the music. One exception would be “Novelty Waves” – the last gasp of his dance past that was picked up by advertisers and remixers who were looking for something fresh. It’s a compelling track, no doubt, but this brush with commercial success seems to have pushed him in the direction of abandoning the beat.

His changing course was a great thing.

To say that Substrata is a classic is to admit that “ambient” is not a subset of modern classical or formal music, but an aim of a recording to create something that can be listened to in several settings. The Eno Made Flesh – since that seems to have been his intention – and it appears the old curmudgeon was right about some things (not so much Roxy Music, though). There is plenty of background noise to choose from, and plenty of lazy, shiftless hosers creating sound installations that aren’t worth the time it takes to pronounce “sound installation” – I’m looking at you, Francisco Lopez, or I would be if i could keep my eyes open and focus on shaking my finger at your wankitude instead of drifting off into sleepytime. The musical equivalent of vaporware, I tells ya.

Cheap insults aside, there’s a genre called “ambient” and it’s not necessarily the mechanical classical or formal minimalist music nor is it the lazy loops and semi-racist ethno flourishes of New Age, though there’s plenty of that to go around. It usually starts with Brian Eno, a fair place to begin in any modern consideration; it can be cold and loveless or bright and airy – if you’re Coil you melt minds and erase the distinctions of time with it. It is many things and like any grouping has exceptions and a ridiculous amount of dreck. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, start with two albums – Music For Airports and Substrata. A little bit of the past, a little bit of the future.

“Poa Alpina,” is one of those songs that can be listened to on repeat for three or four ours without destroying anyone’s patience or passion; similar to the texture invoked by “Spirits Abandoned” by Six Organs of Admittance (off of Dark Noontide) or, hell, all of Music For Airports. Why do some songs work so well in insane repetition, especially when I would be the first to complain about commercial overplay were I unfortunate enough to have cable or own a radio? Maybe they’re perfect, the result of an alien experiment or a hybrid of god and man like those pesky Nephilim; perhaps manage to carve out an existence between textured wallpaper and “active listening” because they’re perfectly balanced.

Some aphorisms:

Substrata is an all-natural cupful of a bathtub of gin and barbituates.

Substrata is a Sunday morning mainstay that goes equally well with Tai Chi or silent porno loops.

Substrata is a desert island disc to help you forget you’re going to starve to death, sunburned, alone and thirsty, on an isolated strip of beach.

Screw the beat.

www.biosphere.no