Category: General

Fantastic beginner’s guide to Coil piece over at Worlds of Possibility. Who’d have thought there’d be a Coil revival?

Who are playing on Sunday — peak Dog Days action, people…

The only comment I want to make on this is that I have great respect for both Matt and Soul Jazz. I regret the intemperate language and the weak, ill-considered argument I used two and half years ago when commenting on the Woebot piece (is it really that long ago? I was young and stupid — well, younger, and hopefully stupider, then…). I still think Soul Jazz are good people and I note and value the effort they make to ensure that artists get paid. Meanwhile Matt has been one of the great proponents of reggae in all its forms in the UK for some years.

Waaaay back in May, I did the online mp3 “release” of Grievous Angel Vs Niney The Observer: Blood and Fire (Twist-Up Dub Mix). The idea was to produce some banging jungle to bounce about to in the summer nights, and more especially to worship at the shrine of Niney. I’d wanted to do a jungle version of this tune for years: it’s something of an icon for me and John Eden (as no doubt it is for most reggae fans). It was a labour of love as these mash-up tracks always are — though not a po-faced one. My Grievous Angel persona is, well, stooooopid but fun.

Anyway, here we are on July 23rd — traditionally the day when the Dog Days start, when Sirius rises, as pre-celebrated with the last breakbeat mix — and I get a call from a somewhat excited John Eden. Leafing through his freshly delivered copy of the August edition of the Wire — which is as we all know virtually the house magazine of this parish, among the other bloggers at least — he finds, on the Steve Barker’s Dub review page, a surprising entry.

For there, in all its newsprint finery, was — indeed is — a whole, quivering, pulsating paragraph of text dedicated to this very track! And it’s, like, a GOOD REVIEW!!! There I am, sandwiched between reviews of Mikey Dread’s “African Anthem” album — which is personally significant, since it was largely Dread’s inspiration of and production of The Clash which originally brought me to that dark spiritual contentment which is reggae — and King Tubby’s “In Fine Style”, whose influence on me is as great as for any white boy dub fan. Great company!

And of course the review is by Steve Barker, On-U associate, famous for his “On The Wire” radio show, and by virtue of his involvement with Sherwood, a figure of huge significance to me, On-U being the very touchstone of my music. Needless to say I’ve always regarded his judgement as impeccable, so to get a thumbs-up from him leaves me positively luminous with pride.

Other signifiers of import on the page include reviews of DJ Spooky, who IIRC did a cracking version of Throbbing Gristle’s “Persuasion” on that old Trance Europe Express CD-book compilation, and of Manasseh’s new LP. I don’t know if he’s involved in this release, but I’ve met Nick Manasseh and his sound played at my mate Dan’s “leaving Brixton and moving to Hackney” party. He’s a nice man. I helped load the system back into the van in the morning.

Pleasingly Barker gets the way I tried to feed the momentum of the late arrivals of post-Ardkore continuum (Garage etc.) back into the jungle blueprint. Better, he describes the result as “a frenetic shower of shots to Babylon’s head”. DJ Aphasic would be proud of me! Listening back to the track now, I’m pleased that it captures the stop-start urgency of Niney’s original while giving it a good solid slug of bass malevolence.

How Barker obtained the track I don’t know. I do zero promotion of these things other than writing them up on this blog and telling a couple of online forums. But just to know that he’d heard the track would have been a buzz. To know he liked it enough to review it in The Wire leaves me positively vibrating with happiness. All my adult life I’ve read record reviews and wondered what it would feel like to read one of my own music in the national press. Now I know and all I can say is it fucking rocks. Thanks Steve!

You can buy the original track here and lots of other places. Respect the originator.

The original track is here, with the related blog post here.

Meanwhile, here’s the “More Fire Remix” which I knocked out a couple of months back. Seems a good time to get it out there!

For those of you trying to find this corking bit of summer jungle, here’s the relevant links to save you googling.

The music is at:
http://www.grievousangel.net/Grievous_Angel_Vs_Niney_Blood_&_Fire.mp3

The blog entry and a scan of JA 7″ label:
https://blog.grievousangel.net/index.php?p=188

More details on this story when I get hold of a bit more info.

All I’m saying is, today is traditionally the beginning of the Dog Days, when Sirius rises. I wonder if this is a slight return from what we did on 23rd July 1994?

The Guardian has picked up a compelling study on mp3 filesharing that came out in March and which I covered at the time.

“Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Associate Professor in the strategy unit at Harvard Business School (i.e. this guy is no fool and is coming from a straight business-centric perspective), and Koleman Strumpf, Associate Professor in the economics department at the University of North Carolina, have analysed sales and download data, say ina new report, “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales” that “Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero,” and for popular albums, “the impact of file sharing on sales is likely to be positive”.

During the last quarter of 2002, the pair gathered data from two peer-to-peer file sharing servers on the OpenNap network and matched individual downloads to the weekly sales figures of 680 chart albums.

“Our hypothesis was that if downloads are killing music, then albums that are downloaded more intensively should sell less,” says Strumpf. But, after adjusting for the effects of popularity, they discovered that file sharing has “no statistically significant effect” on sales.

Prior to Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf’s report, there were no empirical studies based on actual file sharing behaviour, and the music industries in the US and the UK have based their policies on, at best, incomplete research. At worst, the surveys and analyses they quote are misleading and inaccurate.

Some even question whether the fall in sales the RIAA quotes is real, or a product of a creative redefinition of the word “sale”. Even if it is real, there is one final fly in the ointment that can’t easily be explained away: during the past nine months, CD sales in America have increased by 7%, despite continued growth in file sharing.

As Strumpf says: “If file sharing is killing record sales, why are records starting to sell better?” ”

From the Guardian

You can get the pdf of the study here.

His home page: http://pine.hbs.edu/external/facPersonalShow.do?pid=251462

A Harvard Business Review interview with him is here — I missed this when it came out on the Solstice — I was busy, as you can imagine, and I don’t subscribe to the HBR any more.

Oh, and there’s a Phd thesis from a Princeton student saying the same thing but with a slightly less compelling argument here. Oh, and if you go to the Princeton home page, you get a picture of Andre from Outkast goofing around with some professors. Seriously.

I once said I could make a blogging career out of commenting on TWANBOC and one could say the same about K-Punk, whose blog has already become one of the most interesting communities on the web. The comments boxes have almost as much traffic as UK-Dance. His iron discipline — or is it an obsessive glossolalia — was an existential challenge to any suggestion of a Lull. But Mark, don’t forget that it was a just that — a Lull — not a termination. Summer innit. People should be dancing, camping, shagging, gardening, not stuck in front of a monitor.

However — Stelfox shuffling off the coil is still hurting. It’s bad enough that he stopped writing — almost as if following too seriously my imprecation to do it for love, or don’t do it at all, him being desirious of retaining his professional status — but what really stings is that he DELETED ALL THE OLD POSTS. Never, I suspect, to be resuscitated. That’s so wasteful it’s almost criminal, but ye gods, it’s hardcore. ‘Course, it’s his game and he can take his toys away, but that’s a ROUGH way to make an exit. Though I guess it’s legend-making and rather admirably committed, in its own way.

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

Not me — him. I imagine.

We can only hope we get a taste of his taste and a sample of his selections in the future. There’s no guarantees though.

And on the subject of the welcome return of Luka — Mark gets THIS close to nailing Luka’s genius with the term industrial sublime. I suspect Luka himself doesn’t understand it entirely, since he’s so un-self-conscious in his writing, but he’s a psychogeographer of the old (early 90s) school. His writing is highly redolent of the urban paganism encoded in industrial culture which I showcased in my industrial mix. He captures the transcendence of secret London, of abandoned urban places, the shadowlands of Heathen London, in a way of which Sinclair would approve, and which (IoT initiate) Burroughs would have understood, and more importantly which (Burroughs associate) Phil Hine would doubtless find inspirational. (Something I plan to ask Hine about specifically when I next interview him.)

I prefer the description — or invocation — more satisfying than the poetry, but there’s little doubt he’s blogdom’s pre-eminent prose stylist.

But would it work on paper?

Woebotnik’s on the trail of celebrity chefdom. I’m so chuffed it’s completely changed my mood — we were going to the monthly continental market in town but can’t make it cos Felix is ill. Hope he’s better for Shrek 2 this afternoon. Anyway, as regular readers, will know, I’ve been hoping Matt would fulfil his manifest destiny and start writing restaurant reviews for a long time now so his exegesis on celebrity chefs is a step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned.

Stubbs is of course rapidly becoming a victim of his own irony with his Mr Agreeable / Mr Disagreeable schtick; slagging off Jamie Oliver is redundant, otiose, and above all ill-considered. Never mind the tongue. On telly he entertains, but more importantly, his puddings ae highly edible. (Does Stubbs actually cook? Probably does, actualy.) There are a lot of favourite dishes round here that started out in a Jamie Oliver cookbook. One morsel to fuel your appetite: cook a strong-tasting organic sirloin (yes the Oliver-branded, hung-for-21-days ones from Sainsbury’s are great but go to a proper butcher if you can), and serve with lemon. It’s a revelation, trust me. Jamie is the Norman Cook of cuisine: lambasted, dreadfully unhip, somewhat naff, but wonderful nevertheless.