Grievous Angel

I’m now running this blog on a new server: it’s here: https://blog.grievousangel.net

Please tell ten friends The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on it daily to meet their quota of >donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman .

It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on “donating a mammogram” for free (pink window in the middle). This doesn’t cost you a thing. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate mammogram in exchange for advertising.

Here’s the web site! Pass it along to people you know.

www.thebreastcancersite.com

>AGAIN, PLEASE TELL 10 FRIENDS TO TELL 10 TODAY

WOEBOT: “If Grime came to be understood as UK Hip-Hop it’d be a disaster. Why? Because, put simply, Brit-Hop has never managed to get over being a inferior version of American Hip-Hop (Grime on the other hand seems mercifully oblivious of America).”

Excellent, excellent piece on this topic from Matt. Excellent because he’s not just commenting on articles in the mainstream press, he’s actually engaging with the authors. Excellent because he develops his point through detailed examination of specific, key records. Excellent because of an almost anthropological reportage on Mr Bongo. His argument is in essence that Grime shouldn’t be tarred with the UK Hip-Hop / UK-Rap brush because those genres do, basically, suck.

And quite right too.

However I feel that Grime can fruitfully be seen as being, at last, a decent British response to US Rap. As he was kind enough to point out, my view is that Grime and US hip hop are structurally similar — emphasis on the vocal rather than the backing, Black urban culture as the source, all that stuff. And, while Matt undoubtedly knows more than I do about Grime, it seems to me that Grime people do have US rap reference points. This is scarcely new. Plus uk garage crews went r&b as soon as they got popular — So Solid, obviously. Champagne garage and US R&B have always gone together.

The music doesn’t sound like US Rap though. It’ll get closer though. As I think I mentioned here before, Cameo is dropping grime tracks with girly choruses already — I preferred this to a lot of the more banging stuff FWIW.

* Cha Cha Slide looked great on the telly too.

* Oh, and great to see the Gothic Futurist article coming out, it’s fantastic. Essential post punk too.

WOEBOT: “A surprise and a delight, here.” Getting bigged up on Woebot is like getting an Oscar. Certainly more valuable than getting a bloggy or whatever BS award is being invented.

“Here’s one for fans of my discomfort.” Shit, that must be irritating. I guess a demanding fan can be pretty critical. For a fan of woebot is what I am — it’s the best blog out there, certainly the best music blog, even if he doesn’t like Jurassic 5 (what is he LIKE?). He’s one of a select group of blogs I try to check every day while feverishly checking UK-Dance. The rest of my blogroll:

1. Uncarved, for the crispest writing: Woebot can be fast and loose — and is all the better for it. More importantly, Uncarved does two things: he writes about more than just music, and he goes off and digs stuff out that you simply will not read about ANYWHERE ELSE. Because “Real Life” still has a thousand times as many stories as you will find on the Internet.

2. K-Punk. I don’t always agree with him — he’s far too much of a hipster-intellectual for my views to always chime with his — but he’s essential reading.

3. Reynolds for the same reasons as anyone else — i.e. his obsession with 80s scratch’n’sniff cards, the endless JPEG self-portraits of his red-white-and-blue mohican, and of course the engagingly-written recipes for rollmop herring.

Other than these three I just surf around the link side bars like everyone else.

“Nice to see so much going up big feller.” Yeah well there’d be a lot more if I wasn’;t spening every spare hour trying and failing to get this FAAAAAAARRRRRRRKING blog system working. Otherwise you’d have a series of articles about leylines in Dore (Sheffield suburb on the edge of the Peaks). Seriously.

Yeah.

PS – the gutters here have just filled with hail, but there’s blazing sunshine. Must be symbolic.

shards, fragments and totems:: “So I’m looking at the moveable type faq, and I’m thinking, this looks like a nightmare. “

And of course, my host doesn’t do movable type.

But it does appear to like word press — so why won’t it damned work?

Bloody computers.

movabletype.org : Requirements

So, I’ve got this spiffy new webspace to host my trax and mixes and stuff. And of course to host the blog, with photos etc. So I d/led WordPress, cos it’s the updated version of Eden’s blog software. And can I get it to work?

Can I fuck.

So I’m looking at the moveable type faq, and I’m thinking, this looks like a nightmare.

Surely there’s a simple to install system that’ll let you do modest blogging, with pix, on your own webspace, that’s free, or at least cheap? I don’t fancy spending more on blogging services than I do on my hosting…

Keith: gwan nice’tup wit ma bredren…: “nothing is better than Nasty Crew’s live sets. If you haven’t yet, do yourself a favour and listen to that one I linked to down below, it’s better than Boy in da Corner, which is album of the year”

I went back to this page — which I’ve blogged before — just to remind myself how good roll deep were. And none of the mixes work anymore — I guess the server is maxed out. Which implies the live tapes will come back, but then again they may not.

FWIW, I thought the MCing was pretty good, but not mind-blowing. However the Dizzy Vs Asher D clash was fabulous — I think because it was all acapella spittin’, undisturbed by plinky-plonk grime backing. Fortunately, I wiretapped that one. I have a techno-ragga instrumental to get out the way first, then I’ll be using that in a track…

WOEBOT: “like this recent contibution to an old post by Rolo who used to be in The Woodentops.”

I just want to point out that the Woodentops were according to my memory both a fantastic band and an important one, absolutely crucial in describing the cross-over from rock to dance.

Absolutely KILLER live — I would very much like the 12″ of Well Well Well.

Amazon.co.uk: Music: Coughing Up Fire: “Occult roots of grime”

Just got this as a present off John Eden and it’s an absolutely magnificent record of eighties Brit dancehall reggae done live. Saxon were arguably the greatest British sound system ofthe 80s and on this CD you can hear why. It’s all about the DJs so the backing tracks scarcely get a look in. You get fragments of famous rhythms (Armagideon etc), mainly with the bass cut and constantly spun back, so don’t buy this to hear the tunes themselves. You also get massive amounts of crowd noise :-). But if you want to hear the apotheosis of the Brit chatting art, this is it. The biggest name on here is Tippa Irie, who gets a HUGE response, but all the MCs are on top form. If you want to know where grime (the most recent, and most MC-heavy, variant of garage) and the rest of UK rave MC culture came from, this is what you need to hear — and it’s a lot better than most yard tapes you’ll buy in Brixton market. Absolutely killer, and this is where jungle and breakbeat artists get a lot of their vocal samples from, so it’s spotter heaven…

I’ve decided to use this blog to release my music. This is slightly ironic in view ofthe current mp3-hosting debate (how often do producers release tracks through bloigs? All the time probably). In any event, most of these tracks start from loving a tune, but having a different mix of it running in my mind, often for weeks at a time. The same thing happens with DJ mixes, so there’ll be some of them up here, including some refugees from Marc Dauncey’s excellent but (hopefully temporarily) late and lamented bassnation.net.uk. Plus there’ll be some new ones, mainly dirty UK Garage and reggae.

I’ve used the Grievous Angel moniker for years. I think thought about it first in 1989 — it was a chemical weapon in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which seemed to make terribly exciting at the time. I didn’t find out til years later that it was the title of a Gram Parsons LP — which is great iconography as far as I’m concerned, even though the music is a mile away from his. I’ve never listened to the album in case I don’t like it — I’m just glad he looks good in the photos.

People I’ve sent tapes to often think they’re getting heavy metal, which amuses me a great deal: there’s a lot of metal’s deliberately dumb attitude here, a cartoon feel. This is something I’ve noticed in a lot of my favourite music — Funkadelic, Congo Natty, Tackhead, Lady Saw — and I reckon the best bands start off wiith a “this’ll be a laugh” attitude and find their soul by accident. Certainly all good dance music has some of this attitude. Beats being po-faced anyway.

The tunes I make tend to fall into two categories: jungle, usually re-edits of reggae tracks; and ragga techno, which is usually acidic, dubby ragga running at techno speeds. But I’ll be posting a couple of different things here as well. If I was smart, I suppose I’d stick to one genre, but the ideas keep coming in different shapes and sizes. (Well, I say ideas, but I mean completely obsessional ear-worms I have to exorcize or risk going mad.) And anyway, even if these tracks aren’t all at the same speed, they all recognisably have the same personality: brash, pushy and dumb.

Styllistically, it’s all about squeezing reggae through dance music’s funky sphincter. There’s nothing I like more than a good dancehall tune that’s had an amen break shoved up it and I’d really like to do more stuff like that.

Grievous Angel Vs Admiral Tibet, Anthony B & Tafari: Rise Up (Vocal Mix)
7Mb

Grievous Angel Vs Anthony B & Tafari: Rise Up (Hard Dub)
7Mb

I’m obsessed with taking John Eden’s DJ mixes and turning sections of them into new tracks, and that’s exactly what I’ve done here. For one thing it saves me the hassle of buying choosing, buying and digitisng great reggae records and for another there’s a fantastic sense of multiple versioning creating multiple layers of meaning which can really lift the engagement of the listener compared to an average club track or boot. (In other words — I like vocals.) Incestous? So what?

Having said all that, this one is actually quite gentle in its Vocal Mix form. Full vocal selections, a tight beat and a big, soft, rolling bassline mean you just ride the lyrics, which is what dancehall is all about. This one’s about the songs, not the beats. They’re twisted, but subtle.

Whereas the Dub is all about funk noise at jungle tempo. The vocals are reduced to a fragment cyclng over over dirty breaks. But the groove is wide open and swinging. This isn’t smart at all but it is fun and very punk. And yes it does go rolling half way through.

Grievous Angel Vs Primal Scream: Come Together
(6.1Mb)

I’ve always wanted to do this. It’s just a big, smiley, big room tune, and it deserves to be heard in drum’n’bass sets as well as old-school house ones. It was done in the run-up to seeing Weatherall do his amazing set at Dust – away of psyching myself up for it. Not that he played any drum’n’bass, nor would I particularly want him to, but if I heard Come Together playing in a jungle club, this is how I’d like it to sound. Ecstatic. Turn it up.