Ikons - Ikons

Variety is a tricky term. I think I can pretty confidently state that our concentration and our patience has slowly eroded in the past decades. This means that apparently we cannot focus on one and the same thing anymore, as long as we once did. We expect, perhaps even subconsciously demand, that something will happen. A film like 1974′s The Conversation would probably bomb horribly today (even though arguably the subject matter is as nu as it was then). The same essentially goes for music, especially in a musical environment which has so changed in the 21st century. When I interviewed  Dayve Hawk of Memory Tapes he said that listeners tend to skim more (not you, obviously), resulting in the need to have a signature sound that people can immediately recognise in orrder to avoid being shooed away in favour of the next one that ticks that box. So in essence, if Bowie had done Station to Station in the current musical environment, people would’ve glanced at it, would say, “hey, this is not Ziggy Stardust and what I like”, and gone to the next artist who did resemble that kind of sound. From this standpoint the new Ikons album, a self-titled one, does raise some interesting questions.

The idea of recognition for example is omnipresent in the album of the Swedes. Every song seems throwback, reminiscent of a certain decade. This recognition, however, is not done in terms of a particular signature sound concerning the band itself, but is from a signature sound of a certain period or genre in a certain time. The album has so much variety in terms of sound and feel that individual songs are more likely to be linked to other movements and bands – it foregoes the concept of Ikons birthing their own distinctive sound.

The first song on the album is ‘Slow Light’, an eight-minute instrumental behemoth that has a harder sounding bass and guitars over which lighter sounds can be heard. It’s a fabulous mixture of a tougher sound, with bursts of contrasting aural sunlight. It took me back to ’80s artists like Romanelli, who also produced the beats juxtaposed with lighter synths.

By the time track four, ‘Imperiet’, arrives, the album’s moved from 80s Italo into the Factory era and namely, Joy Division. Throbbing bass, baritone vocals, a hard sound with some fuzziness to it; every characteristic we now link to that band and to that musical genre is present in the song. Sure, the first track does have its rougher and darker edges, but the juxtaposition with the lighter sounds – sounds out of our current definition of a post-punk sound – make that track sound vastly different from this seemingly Factory-influenced song. Something which might be construed as a problem is that this kind of sound has been done so much by so many bands over the last decade; only the romanticised past suffices.

The other songs on the album similarly defy being grouped together. ‘Guns’, as the name implies, builds on the more Joy Division sound of ‘Imperiet’, with a darker vibe, scorching guitars and less central vocals making it sound pretty rough. ‘Domine’ perhaps is the spoke to which the rest are all hubs. It starts almost ambient-electronic, with the vocals in the background and entirely spoken word – the heavy bass sounds do, however, link it to the somewhat heavier outings on the album.

‘Hawk’, like ‘Guns’, is a rougher and harder-sounding instrumental piece. ‘Seconds’, like the first track, mixes the somewhat heavier sounds with occasional light synths.  ‘Bye’ sounds like Crystal Stilts with its fuzziness and distorted vocals. The first and last track without a name, ‘Untitled’, closes the album on a sort of ambient note.

The question remains, to steal a line from the Jarvis’ BBC6 Radio show: “are they any good?” The variety they show indicates their musicianship, but to make a cohesive album they need to distill and mix their qualities, and add precision. If there’s any consistency on this album it’s the heavy bass, but the way this consistent element is utilised is indicative of this album. In this ‘Slow Light’ it’s a sort of hypnotic beat, but in ‘Imperiet’ it’s by way of that much-emulated Peter Hook bass sound. I do like the variety, and I do like, for example, the mixture of something like ‘Slow Light’ with ‘Domine’, the spoken word one. Though vastly different, they do seem to connect with one another.

Songs evoke a plethora genres to be picked and chosen from as favourites, inevitably meaning that there’ll be elements and songs to become anachronistic about. I see two people talking about Ikons and saying, “oh yeah, I love that one sounding a bit like such and such”, instead of them saying, “I love Ikons, period.” Though on the plus side I think a lot of people will be able to find a track on this they think is very well done, so if only to add to a playlist for shuffle purposes this might prove to be a fruitful listen.

Who's the winner going to be? Stay tuned to find out!

Is it hypocritical to write an end-of-year list comprising ranked opinions gathered and analysed from a large pool of writers if you’re a website sat so staunchly against ratings-out-of-whatever? Or is it more a case of prized reflections, paeans to our favourite albums – the chance to step back from just how much music is at our disposal and do a critical evaluation, if you will, of what we’ve been listening to this year?

Perhaps arbitrarily, it seems fairer to rank them now as they’re being approached at the same time. Perhaps, even more arbitarily, it seems less so; the albums after all are being ranked separately by people with different experiences of them, different amounts of time with them, different personalities. But that we’ve come up with a top 50 receiving multiply high-placed rankings from our pool of writers means that our point of intersection has finally hit the spot.

See, I can’t just look back at the albums that got 9s – there are no 9s, there are no scores! But this is a great thing, as lists require this distance. And so to re-start by asking the writers to send me their top 20s…

Now how did we get to the stage of holding in our precious hands The List? Was it via a magical formula, albums pulled out of a massive hat, did they come from above? Let me hand you over to our very own Excel Guru, a mysterious character who lurks behind spreadsheets in a mysterious way:

“We asked all of our writers for their top 20 albums of 2009. Their number one got 20 points. Using the formula (Max*(1+(NB/Max)))/(Pos+(NB/Max)) where NB is number of ballots (38), Pos is the place from 1-20 in the list and Max is the largest possible list-size (20), the points were assigned. The more points you got, the higher up the final list you finished.

Essentially it’s a more refined version of 1st =20 points, 2nd =19…. 20th =1, which is too clunky because the difference between 19 and 20 is as heavily weighted as the top two.”

There’s more? Why, yes…

“With all the formula in place the points distribution worked as -

1       20.00
2       14.87
3       11.84
4       9.83
5       8.41
6       7.34
7       6.52
8       5.86
9       5.32
10      4.87
11      4.50
12      4.17
13      3.89
14      3.65
15      3.43
16      3.24
17      3.07
18      2.91
19      2.78
20      2.65

- with a few more numbers after the dp in each case of course. 1st place got 20 points and the number of points awarded to 2,3… 20 was in ratio to the descending position and the number of ballots cast.”

We’re Musos alright! And here’s a fact: some 277 albums received nominations! We’re a knowledgeable bunch.

50-41 revealed…

Blank canvases, a.k.a. CDs for mixology.

As Rob Flemming’s character says in High Fidelity (or Rob Gordon if you’ve never read the book):

“To me, making a mix tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do.”

So without further ado, welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the inaugural Muso’s Guide Mix CD event!

Here’s how it’s gonna go down:

Send an email to me, Peter Harris (I’m on podge9<at>gmail<dot>com), including the following information:

1. Your name
2. Your home address (or where you would like the CD sent)
3. Whether you are going to the Summer social* (’cause CDs can be exchanged there)
4. Up to three of your favourite all time bands
5. Up to three of your most liked albums
6. Up to three of your least liked bands/music genres
7. A link to your Last.fm page (if you have one) – ours is here, in case you didn’t know

I will try and match people up accordingly.

*[Ed: The summer meet-up is a special day in celebration of Muso's Guide's sixth anniversary, and you're all invited. We're having an all-day picnic - more details are available on the page in the link]

I do realise that one of the reasons for a mix CD is to try new stuff but at the same time, you don’t want it to be full of stuff you know will make you sick up your ears.

If we have an even amount of takers, I’ll pair people up so A makes CD for B and B makes for A, uneven numbers and we’ll make a jaggy snake, A makes for B, B makes for C, C makes for A etc.

Rules:

1. It must be a CD – no Spotify lists or MP3 CDs.
2. Pretty obvious but make sure you write down the artist/track name and the album it’s taken from.
3. If you want to set a theme or decorate the CD, go for it.

E-mails in by the end of this week please (June 21) and I’ll send out details of who you’re mixing for next week.

Jeremy Warmsley

Jeremy Warmsley is a bit of a Muso’s Guide favourite, at least round these parts. How We Became is such an inviting record, so full of sonic variation yet with this very real, wholesome core of honesty. So it was our pleasure to speak with its purveyor on the phone for this very interesting conversation on opinion and such like. It went a little like this:

What are your favourite albums?
The Dreaming by Kate Bush. It’s a great example of someone who’s moulded as a key pop artist, someone who’s really tried to make something completely confrontational and difficult, and in fact very beautiful. A lot of people would’ve written Kate Bush off. Another one would be Richard D. James by Aphex Twin. People got used to the idea that Aphex Twin was difficult, but then he came up with this album which is really melodically good. It’s just so simple and beautiful. Recently I’ve been playing the Fanfarlo record a lot – it’s produced by Peter Katis, one of my favourite producers, it’s got great songs, great arrangements. And I’m going to be joining them on guitar on the tour coming up. Another is John Martyn’s Grace and Danger.

When you’re trying to convince people to listen to your favourite music, how do you go about it?
Sometimes music is good not just because of the music, but because of the context. So for instance, take The Dreaming – it must’ve been incredibly exciting when it came out, because you thought you knew what to expect but then she came out with something so all over the place. It made it more exciting. I’m quite sad so I like to look at Wikipedia quite a lot and talk about that. It’s funny, because it should just be about music, shouldn’t it?

Do you think there’s a place for reviews, then?
People don’t read reviews and say “I want to know if it’s any good” so I’m going to see if it’s any good, it’s more like “I wonder what’s been reviewed this week”. Be Here Now by Oasis got great reviews… I think it’s strange but not a bad thing. It promotes awareness of new music and that’s the main point, it’s just a shame that this way of getting to the music comes with the whole “this is good” and “this is bad”. That’s the way a lot reviewers write, they’re really laying down the law about things, and that’s a shame.

And press releases?
Again, you need a reason to want to check out this band – you’ve got to have some way to be able to quickly judge it. You need to see things that’ll make you interested. Bands that get noticed often have a really interesting story behind them.

What’s your take on the long term – do artists need to broaden their sound to succeed or is the best way forward to stick with what you’re good at?
It depends on the artist, really. If someone really can only be one thing, then they should just do that. It’s strange that it makes more difference than the actual artistry. People say “ooh have you heard the new album, they’ve gone really prog”. But it’s not really important. Or “it’s not as good as the last one so I’m not going to bother”.

If we go back to when say, Leonard Cohen first started out… do you think people are now more impatient?
The difference between now and 40 years ago is the amount of time artists take between albums. But does it make it harder to progress? Maybe not, maybe it makes it easier to progress. When you take The Beatles’ first few albums, they’re all identical. They didn’t have any time to develop. But now you’ve got a lot more time to test songs, to get them out there. With my last record, I’d written all of the songs around two and a half years before it came out.

How and why did that happen?
Well I wrote all the songs before the first record came out, and then recorded and mixed them at the beginning of the year. Problems with the label meant that it took another nine months after the initial six for the album to come out. It’s quite common really. Look at Animal Collective – every time they release an album they then tour with the songs from the next album. That’s one of the biggest problems with the music industry at the moment.

What’s your favourite way to listen to music?
On headphones in the dark is the ultimate way.

Do you think the levels of accessibility would have changed your musical influences if you’d have grown up in 2009? What did you listen to in your younger years?
I didn’t really get into music until I was 16 or 17. And it was the standard “hey, have a listen to this music it’s amazing” way that I found about things. It’s a lot easier to get hold of music, but…

You still have to know what you’re looking for?
Exactly. Someone has to tell you. You still have to develop an ability. If it doesn’t sound different and raw, you can’t appreciate it.

Let’s get personal. Do you ever second-guess yourself lyrically? Do you worry that you aren’t going to get across what you want to say? That is, if you want to make people understand something…
You do always worry about people misinterpreting your lyrics, though I actually really enjoy it. It’s one of the joys of being a songwriter, giving your thoughts to the world.

Visit the MySpace now or forever live a lesser life.

The debate about ‘the meaningless and the meaningful’ has a political and an economic slant. Consider hiphop: the great (racist) accusation is invariably that it ‘just isn’t music’.

James Brown

You don’t often hear anyone calling hiphop ‘meaningless’, which is a neat rhetorical trick – steering the debate away from the pivotal function: to demonstrate ‘lyrical skills’ even in the absence of a band, musicianship, or originality. Hiphop is profoundly democratic in its most basic (and affordable) formula: not even two turntables and a microphone, but one. Effectively, Hiphop is supremely meaningful in its central gesture: to assert the validity and audibility of its underprivileged, under-represented voices, which is why the main line of attack for critics must be on the musical front, where old soul records are recycled. (Arguably, there are complex semiotics here, too: using the records themselves suggests a knowledge of cultural history, unlike white musicians passing off black music as their own.)

Public Enemy

Music aside, to be meaningful is threatening: Public Enemy‘s snapshots of black history made them targets for FBI phonetaps, although NWA‘s exhortations to comparatively random violence (albeit in response to police brutality) made them inadvertent agents of normativity. Admittedly, Hiphop shades into meaningless (or inaudibility) when it adds to the chorus of black and white voices normalising consumer-capitalism. In the 1960s, black-owned record labels were at the vanguard of black businesses (see Peter Doggett, There’s a Riot Going On), but the current commodity fetishism of mainstream hiphop is a massive debasement of the (already problematic) ‘Big Payback’ demanded by James Brown, referencing Martin Luther King. Is it subversive to make ‘art’ that’s so openly about making money? Or is it defeatist?

WEB DuBois

Still, there’s an underlying urge toward significance (or ‘being taken seriously as public speakers rather than entertainers’) that can be traced back to figures like Booker T. Washington, WEB DuBois, and MLK. White mainstream pop music has no qualms about meaninglessness in lyrics… although try telling that (as an adult or parent) to a teen or pre-teen who then complains “you just don’t understand”. I’d argue that the inanities of manufactured pop music are strangely comforting to parents who actually shell out for the stuff – contra David Cameron and others, there aren’t really all that many exhortations to flaunt your teen sexuality, spend lots of money, let alone challenge the values of your parents: just irritate them, which you’re bound to do anyway. (The day after writing that, I dug up a quote from Mick Jagger – in Doggett, 2008 – claiming that rock’n'roll was never about protest, just winding up your parents, and even that’s pointless when they listen to the same music as you; it’s possible, of course, that he wasn’t being cynical, but despairing of the failure of the counter-culture.)

Finally, what about the pseudo-meaningful? Take the post-Radiohead generation of bands, who intersperse their morbid or self-regarding lyrics with the odd high-register word, and reference to modern technology – little signifiers of sophistication. Risking similar charges of pretension are the bands aping Bowie in their surrealism-lite without any real interest in psychedelic exploration, subversive sexuality, or the difficulty of navigating the modern world; it takes a certain amount of imagination to throw together all those images on records by Placebo, Bush, Pavement but a distinct lack of reflection on why they came about. Personally, I don’t buy the argument that ‘it’s only rock’n'roll – now that’s meaningless.

For about as long as I’ve been writing about music, I’ve argued that there are so many literate, intelligent, profound lyricists out there – should you care to look – that no-one who truly loves music need ever waste their time listening to the trite, empty sentiments of lazy lyricists who happen to knock out good tunes, or be paired with a decent guitarist, say.

Does Definitely Maybe (1993) really give you more of a visceral rush than Never Mind the Bollocks (1977), with its endlessly resonant social criticism? The same goes for creative arrangers, and so on. In this series of columns, I’ll be looking at those artists who act as conduits for the avant-garde – not so much (or not often) presenting their experiments as ends in themselves, and sometimes pushing music forward by collaboration rather than personal experimentation (the Bjorks and Bowies), but in any case proving there’s no real separation. I’m specifically interested, here, in the occurrence of “meaningless sounds and words” in avant-garde music; just why do singers (and musicians armed with samplers) record sounds and lyrics that are openly gibberish, beyond what we might recognize as surrealism’s slow release of hidden meanings?

Meaningless As Avant-Garde Strategy

Sigur Ros - ( )

With its intuitive soundings and lack of “real” words, the parenthesis album by Sigur Ros – ( ) – stands out as an extraordinarily democratic gesture; its dozen (or fewer) distinct vocables sound like innumerable phrases in Western European languages. Doubtless it has emotional resonance for listeners from many other cultures, however guttural their consonants. If you want to get technical, it exploits our innate “pattern recognition” faculty the same as a Rorschach test; we’re more inclined to see meaning than meaninglessness, and in doing so, we learn about our needs and desires.

Mogwai - Young Team

This kind of ironic “meaninglessness” is also important to another post-rock band, Mogwai. Opening their debut album (Young Team, 1997) with the translation of a foreign language review, Mogwai demonstrate colossal hubris by implying they’re ever after going to live up to the claim: “If the stars had a sound, it would sound like this…” The significance of that phrase has been overloaded, with time: Yes, Mogwai strive to evoke natural forces, something beyond the human, but it’s in the use of other translations and transformations that they foreground the textural qualities of a voice, and the paralanguage that is tone and rhythm; check out the Japanese vocals on ‘I Need Horses’ (Mr Beast, 2006), the words vocodered to unintelligibility on ‘Hunted by a Freak’ (Happy Songs, 2003), the numerous backward vocals and partly submerged narratives (Young Team, 1997), and – most provocatively? – the sample of the voice saying “please hold the line” (CODY, 1999) that is a kind of metonym for failed, or endlessly thwarted communication.

Mogwai - Ten Rapid

Sometimes this is playful – see the decontextualized conversation about Marvel comic villains (Ten Rapid, 1996) that makes you wonder why someone’s laughing about “killing millions of people…!” Elsewhere – ‘Dial:Revenge’ (from Rock Action, 2000) is an endorsement of Gruff Rhys of SFA’s own project to reclaim languages that are considered beyond the purview of popular music; and by extension, the dominant Anglocentric culture. If Welsh is “un-pop”, and “exotic” (e.g. sub-Saharan) languages only titillate our ears for connoting great distance and difference, how much are we limiting ourselves?

Is “post-rock” avant-garde? Most people would say not, knowing how quickly its crowd-pleasing formula became stale. Are these strategies avant-garde?

Mogwai - Rock Action

Well, they’re not new – if that’s what you find yourself objecting to – but it’s still at the outer limits of normal practice, and I’d argue that any artist makes the choice to push themselves to re-discover old things as much as they push themselves to discover genuinely new things; whether you then consider those artists (e.g. Mogwai) avant-garde in themselves (rather than avant-garde sounding, on occasion) may simply be down to how enthusiastically they explore the legacy available to them, and/or recombine those old strategies… even if they haven’t gone so far as to devise an entirely new tonal system, or exploit the possibilities of new instruments in new ways. (There’s another potential tangent here, about what’s meant by “dated” – presumably, when a musician takes new instruments or techniques and uses them like the old ones, rather than experimenting to discover which tones fit which part of the composition…)

Faust - The Faust Tapes

From The Beatles’ White Album (under the influence of Yoko Ono), through The Faust Tapes, to DJ Shadow and then a whole generation armed with samplers, “meaninglessness” often takes the form of “decontextualized” snippets. ‘Revolution No. 9’ is composed of fragments too small to construct much of a narrative, but it’s a lullaby compared to the deliberately irritating or abrasive sonic collage by Faust. Somewhat less random, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing (1996) presents samples of varying degrees of obscurity, or various shades of meaning, diving on some putative graph towards pure sensation: the movie character protesting about his arrest… to the sample of “the clock on the wall says a quarter past midnight…” later looped and distended into a DJ’s battlecry, “a quarter past midnight… midnight… muh-muh-muh-MIDNIGHT!”, which acquires an almost mythic resonance, referring to some mysterious witching hour neither today nor tomorrow, but between the days. Other artists have made this gradual shading into meaninglessness the closest thing you’ll find to a narrative arc on their “difficult” / Wire-friendly albums: Scott Walker’s The Drift (2004) provides historical notes as clues for some of its lyrics, and other quotes on the sleeve hint at a free-association of ideas around “silver”, “horses”, and so on, but as the clues become more scarce we’re plunged into a turbulent subconscious not our own. With deep irony, Walker credits only one line to another artist (in spite of the lines marked as dialogue), ‘JA-DA / JA-DA / JA-DA, JA-DA, JING-JING-JING’ sung with a jauntiness and smoothness that suggests it’s meant to be seductive. To what species?!

To close our informative, eye-opening, enlightening series, we’ve got something in non-word form. We reckon if you’ve been following the series on a day-to-day basis, you’ll have learned a fair shot more on what you think soul is – and you may have discovered a few new artists as a result of not only their music but their opinions. How novel.

So here’s our final word on the meaning of soul, coming at you via this here link. It’s a link to download ‘Duk Koo Kim’ from iTunes – a track by Sun Kil Moon which for me, defines soul more than any words ever could.

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading the columns as much as us! And feel free to drop us a line at musosguide AT googlemail DOT com if you feel you’ve got something to add to the breadth of opinions we’ve thrown at you.

Tomorrow’s final meaning of soul comes at you at 12 pm – in the form of a definitive mp3!

The Welcome To The Welcome Wagon album - by The Welcome Wagon - was famously produced by Sufjan Stevens. It’s arguably the only contemporary liturgical album that the masses got to hear about in 2008. And The Welcome Wagon, equally famously, comprises the Reverend Thomas Vito Aiuto and his wife Monique; born in Michigan, the former agnostic studied Theology at Princeton and is now senior pastor of Resurrection Presbyterian Church. Not quite your usual background, then – and to continue, Monique was raised on a farm and has been previously employed as a craftmaker for Martha Stewart.

It’s a different spin then that the Reverend Vito Aiuto offers to our soul series… and here’s what he had to offer:

“The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language when it affirms that “then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” Man, whole and entire, is therefore willed by God.

“In Sacred Scripture the term “soul” often refers to human life or the entire human person. But “soul” also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God’s image: “soul” signifies the spiritual principle in man.

“The human body shares in the dignity of “the image of God”: it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit:

“Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honour since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.

- from The Catechism of the Catholic Church

Tomorrow’s meaning of soul comes from Laura Izibor.

We rather like Vessels, go have a listen to them here - their snappy insights on soul proved weightier than imaginable. We hope this inspires you to have a read of our review of White Fields And Open Devices, and then perhaps even go and purchase some of their music. Here’s what they gave us:

Lee Malcolm: “The meaning of soul: listening to ‘Hurt’ by Johnny Cash and remembering you have one.”

Martin Teff: “”Soul is the where science, philosophy and death all converge.  It is the water between the meals of existence.”

Tomorrow’s meaning of soul comes from Rev. Vito Aiuto of The Welcome Wagon, whose Welcome To The Welcome Wagon album was produced by Sufjan Stevens.