blog of funk - Part 4

Caribou

DW on 18 March, 2010

I’ve discovered this great band, Caribou, nine years late. Well, I’ve been busy so I have plenty of excuses – although the Residents once famously said, “Ignorance of your culture is not cool”, and it does make me wonder what happened to my once unbridled enthusiasm to seek all things new and excellent.

It didn’t help me that Caribou, aka Dan Snaith, had a fight with a mean-spirited rocker over their original choice of name, Manitoba, which they lost. It doesn’t seem to have had any detrimental effect on the music, which is full of variety, abounding with modern sonics, surprising arrangements, time-honoured musical narrative and sweet, original melody. I was so taken with the music, I called several friends and insisted they open their emails NOW and follow the links I had sent them. I haven’t done that “I-insist-you-listen” routine for twenty years.

Kids: that is what happens as you get old. Everything reminds you of something else. The freshness doesn’t last. So, when something shows up that’s as fresh as a Canadian spring daisy, go crazy, in a rock-electro-psychedelic-shaman kind of way.

I’ve bought everything I can get hold of, and I’m definitely checking them out live when they come to the UK in April.

Here are two of my favourite tracks, Barnowl from The Pink Room live sessions, and Skunks which has a rather lovely animated video. It was the latter track which pricked my ears up, and caused me to recognise Mr Snaith’s truly unique talent.

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Satisfaction

DW on 12 March, 2010

Relentless rasping saw-wave with a robotic call to pleasure makes Benassi’s ‘Satisfaction’ peerlessly effective. If you don’t get it, don’t worry. It makes a lot of sense on the dancefloor.

Despite my natural writing mode being a more traditional, instrument-based practise, I have enjoyed electronic music since I first heard sounds which I knew weren’t acoustic in 1960s psychedelia. I first played a synthesiser at art school in 1981 – an old but gold Arp Odyssey. It had two oscillators and no midi, but it was capable of marvellous resonant filtering and a deep bass frequencies. Along came electro, bridging between Berlin and New York as I constructed art sound installations and cobbled together audio samplers with a ZX Spectrum and a biscuit tin. Nobody suspected that just around the corner lay ACEEEED, ecstasy and the illegal and highly popular underground rave movement.

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Underworld – Jumbo

DW on 19 February, 2010

Some electronic music vastly exceeds its space-you-out-and-dance remit. Underworld were a rock band before they ventured into their celebrated and highly individual take on the genre and they remain (alongside Orbital) my favourite of the post-rave electronic artists. Their compositional sense elevates dance music to a sophisticated level, but their rave roots touch upon worlds beyond this one.

Don’t quite know what it is about this that makes me feel so very emotional.. I’ve yet to work it out. It’s something to do with the uplifting optimism of the music with the intimacy and banal delivery of the vocal, and the “found” collaged speech.. it opens up a crack in reality, into which I fall.

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Wisdom in the Face of Mortality

DW on 9 January, 2010

I’ve loved Warren Zevon since Werewolves of London first came out of the radio in the 1970s. Much later in his life, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and wrote this reflective, self-aware, poignant masterpiece, My Shit’s Fucked Up. Warren manages to deal with the subject of his imminent death – remarkable in itself – with great diginity and using simple language which anyone can acknowledge. It’s emotional without being sentimental. This is a truly great performance.

If I can be as sanguine about my own fate, should it come to that, I will have achieved something of great merit.

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Stewie Griffin Writes a Song

DW on 1 January, 2010

A striking and consistently brilliant feature of Family Guy, a superb popular animation which breaks taboos and flies in the face of American conservatism as it pokes fun in all directions, is the music. Seth MacFarlane the writer / producer is musically very gifted and it’s no surprise this emerges.

In this episode, impossibly precocious child, Stewie, meets another baby and writes her a love song. In the event it turns into a screamingly funny version of “Everything I Do, I Do It For You” which totally sends up the hit. But at first, he strums away and sings about the music he is writing. It’s the most wonderful self-awareness, and in the middle of this hilarious comedy, manages to be genuinely educational.

Take it away, Stewie:

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