I Feel Love

This is my favourite “indie” song ever. Sonically, there’s nothing very remarkable about it at least as far as instrumentation goes. It’s your stock-standard guitar/bass/drums. The guitars are chimey and sweet, a bit Johnny Marr-ish but with some post-punk angularity as well. What you notice first is of course the “unusual” vocals of Sue Tompkins, and you will know within about half a minute whether or not they’re going to be your cup of tea. The closest thing to Sue’s vocal style in my knowledge of musical history is the Sprechstimme of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, so 20th century classical buffs should in theory be lapping it up from the saucer. (That’s a clumsy attempt to extend the “cup of tea” conceit, in case you didn’t notice.) The lyrics, though, are like nothing else; they come across as the stream of consciousness of someone with OCD, hammering home the same rather obscure motifs over and over again. It’s good to hear indie music harnessing the power of repetition. One of the fun things you can do is make up your own substitutes for the lyrics, for instance at the beginning I always pretend Sue is singing “Fallujah, Fallujah, Fallujah, Fallujah” instead of “If I Lose Ya, If I Lose Ya, If I Lose Ya, If I Lose Ya”. There’s another bit which sounds a bit like “MP3, MP3, MP3, MP3 (etc.)”. Both of these substitutions are rather unlikely given that the song came out in 2000, but it seems natural to want to engage with and personalise this music on that kind of dream-logic level.

Some facts. Life Without Buildings were from Scotland, a country which, on a per capita basis, is better at indie music than any other country except New Zealand. They released only one (perfect) album, Any Other City, then they broke up. I think this is fantastic. More bands should follow their example. Last year they posthumously released an album called Live at the Annandale Hotel which as the name suggests was recorded in Sydney. They were harbingers of the post-punk revival, which may or may not be a good thing; in any case I would rather have Any Other City than the entire combined works of Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party etc. What they have in common with best of the original post-punk, and what makes them different from their successors (we are now out of facts and back into opinions), is an absolute confidence in and commitment to their own vision, a complete lack of pandering or ironic/apologetic self-consciousness, and not least, real originality.

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Since Any Other City is currently deleted (boo!), I’ve made both streaming and download versions available. There’s a noticeable blip at one point; apologies for that, this is the only version I have (I confess I don’t actually own a CD copy).

Stream:

Download

You can also listen to some tracks from Live at the Annandale Hotel (including “The Leanover”) here, and download it at eMusic.

Just two quick notes:

1. Some of you may have this blog bookmarked as “[www.]angusgordon.com”. Well, within the next couple of weeks I’m planning to use that domain for something different–something that actually puts the “com” into “dot com”, of which more shortly–so if you can change your bookmark now to “angusg.typepad.com” that will save any confusion. Many thanks.
2. I realised the main blog page was loading very slowly because of all those embedded songs–the standard TypePad solution for streaming music, which if you ask me kind of sucks, being to use QuickTime players that load the whole song as the page loads. As a result I’ve moved to a Flash-based solution hosted elsewhere that seems to work a lot better and also looks prettier, and I’ve updated the existing posts. So I hope none of you have Flash disabled or you will have to live without ever hearing Narcotic Syntax–although I don’t know if you can really call that living.

Yoko, you know I love you–for one thing, you broke up the Beatles, and just think how tiresome it would be if they were still together–but things have come to a pretty pass when you appear to think that someone whose name is Lennon shouldn’t be allowed to record under the name Lennon.

I remember the LRB writer Thomas Jones making the excellent point, when some writer–I think it was Louis de Bernieres–made similar noises about “protecting his brand”, that the best way to disabuse yourself of the precious notion that you own your own name is to have a name like Tom Jones.

Anyway, if Mrs Lennon can sue Lennon, what’s stopping Donna Summer from suing Donna Summer?

[Update: Sorry for doubting you, Yoko.

As many of my readers will know, Perlon is one of the most prominent labels in the broad subgenre of dance music that for a while we were calling “microhouse”, although nowadays everyone calls it “minimal”. That’s just “minimal”, noun, as in “I like minimal”. Still sounds pretty awkward coming out of my mouth at least, but there it is.

People who know about these things think there is an identifiable “Perlon sound”…I’ve even seen MP3s tagged with “Perlon” as their genre. (This is quite different from a bigger, more eclectic label like Kompakt, which puts out everything from hard techno to ambient…arguably all infused with a certain personality, for sure, but nobody would say “I know a Kompakt record when I hear it”.) The “Perlon sound” generally refers either to ultra-choppy, oddly funky techno a la Pantytec, or streamlined minimalism as heard on something like Melchior Productions’ No Disco Future LP, cerebral and introverted but still very much dancefloor-oriented. Both of which styles are absolutely wonderful–indeed Perlon in all its guises might be my favourite label ever–but they can make the label appear to have a chronic case of the self-seriousness and chin-strokingness that infects the minimal scene as a whole. What’s sometimes forgotten is the more whimsical, playful, loose-limbed side of Perlon, as heard in the odd loungey interludes of Markus Nikolai’s Back (the first long-player they ever released) or the Prince inflections of Morane’s Trick EP.

Nikolai is a third of Morane, and has also been involved with Narcotic Syntax, so I guess he might be the magic ingredient in this side of the label. Narcotic Syntax, a collective revolving around James Dean Brown and yapacc, has always been my favourite Perlon “project”. The titles of their releases, like the “Calculated Extravagant Licentiousess” and “Reptile Sweat Accelerator” EPs, and their eagerly awaited (by me at least) debut album “The Creed of the Eternal Narcoverse” (worthy of the KLF that one) make it clear that they’re following their own rather odd path. If you have a taste for that particularly Germanic kind of whimsy, you’ll really go for them. (They’ve never come up with a title quite as brilliant as Pantytec’s “Pony Slaystation”, admittedly…)

Selecting dance tracks for this project was not the easiest thing. Post-1990 dance music in general is underrepresented compared to what I actually listen to, because it’s often an overall sound that I love; picking out particular tracks as “the best” can seem arbitrary. Not this one, though; there was never any question about “Electronic Liquid” making the 52. When I first downloaded it I just couldn’t stop listening. The beats start off simple by Perlon standards, but beautifully balanced. The smooth keyboards puncuated by staccato stabs and little bass farts combine to produce an irresistable mix of slickness and funk. But (rather unusually for a dance track) it’s the lyrics that really make this track addictive for me. I won’t attempt to describe the bizarre stream-of-consciousness spoken-word ramble that lasts virtually the entire seven minutes, except to say that it includes perhaps the best deployment ever of the word “blimey”, and displays a delight in wordplay that is, again, very German (future blog post: a defense of the German sense of humour). And then there’s the fact that, like other Narcotic Syntax tracks, you never quite know where this is going: it’s not one of those dance tracks that establishes a groove and sticks to it; it has U-turns that are unexpected and quite delightful.

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Listen:

This was only ever released on vinyl, and even that is no longer available, so here’s the full 256kbps version for you to download.

I’ve been feeling nostalgic for the heady days of 2003-04, those more innocent days when a loose collective of bloggers, congregating around a few nodes like ILM, Freaky Trigger and Blissblog, created a kind of worldwide symposium of pop music, if that doesn’t sound too pompous. This blog was always on the fringes of that phenomenon–I always felt like I was faking it a bit, and it was with as much embarrassment as pleasure that I would find myself suddenly being linked to by the likes of Simon Reynolds and Ian Penman (I wish I could say I had grown up poring over their every word but in actual fact before I started reading their blogs I didn’t know who they were. That’s for anyone who thinks I’m being falsely modest when I say I’m a dilettante!)

A couple of artists are emblematic of that time. They produced music that everybody seemed to like, that seemed obligingly to have been conjured up by our own fantasies of the ideal pop synthesis. So in those pre-MySpace days we did what we could create a vibe around them. The first of these was Dizzee Rascal, although if Dizzee is now something of a household name (at least for the hipper brand of household), it’s hard to see whether the blogs had much of a hand in that…there was always a kind of irony (much remarked on at the time) about our collective enthusiasm for someone we doubted had ever read a blog, who certainly didn’t write one, and who was perhaps only dimly aware that he had this obsessive, geeky international fanbase. (These days, incidentally, that kind of presumed ironic distance between artist and consumer seems to have disappeared completely; someone like Dizzee would have a blog now, or at any rate a MySpace page.)

Things were different, though, with the Junior Boys. Not only did Jeremy Greenspan have a blog, not only was their (original) label run (if memory serves) by someone who participated actively in ILM, the JBs might have been the first artists ever to have included an acknowledgement to the blogosphere in their liner notes. They were “ours”. It’s that sense of personal connection that’s made me choose for this project something from that era, the title track of their first album, rather than a track from their follow-up So This Is Goodbye, even though in many ways I prefer the latter. But then after two albums the JBs’ catalogue is already an embarrassment of riches.

As for the music itself, it’s obviously inspired its share of wordage already: here, for old times’ sake, is k-punk (check out the post title, ha ha), the late great tufluv (including an interview, but no permalinks so you need to scroll down), and, well, me (complete with cringe-inducing use of the phrase “bigged up”). To say a bit more about “Last Exit” (the song) in particular, it’s the slowness that hits you first. The space between the beats, then the sudden bursts of frenetic activity. Then the skeletal bassline that seems like a series of suggestions, leaving you to fill in the rest for yourself. The patented “vulnerable” singing. My very favourite things about the track, though, are the beautiful, sparing keyboards and spectral backing vocals, swirling as they disappear into the distance, like something you hear out of a car window as you’re driving past (to borrow someone’s description of this–who was it?–as a driving-home-in-a-taxi-after-a-night-out type of song). Then there’s the gorgeous Fennesz remix that bathes the whole thing in an echoey lagoon before drowning it in a tsunami of static (you can have a tsunami in a lagoon, right?). In fact I don’t think I’ve heard a single remix of a JBs track that hasn’t been great in its own way.

Reading back over those old blog posts, one is struck and perhaps a bit saddened that the JBs haven’t yet become the major (as in charting) artists that some of us wanted them to: as far as I know the nearest they have come to a mass audience so far has been the use of “In the Morning” for a hip-hop routine on the US edition of So You Think You Can Dance (nice that it was a hip-hop routine, actually). Still, they’re doing fine on the indie scale of things, and they’re only two albums into their career, they are part of the so-called “long tail” and that’s enough to be going on with.

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For your delectation:

Download:
iTunes, Beatport (both DRM-free!)

Well, this choice will hardly be a shock to anyone. The trouble is, what’s left to say about it? You already know that it’s an astonshing masterpiece, Brian Eno called it “the sound of the future”, it invented the sixteenth-note synth bassline thereby spawning whole genres, etc. etc.

But maybe a few things are worth repeating. Firstly, the strangeness. How completely alien this must have seemed in 1977, unless you happen to have picked up a copy of Autobahn…but even then, to hear music that was completely synthetic yet inescapably hedonistic must have been amazing (with all due respect to Ralf and Florian, it was to be several years before they would set dancefloors alight). One of the nice things about “I Feel Love” is that anyone who sets out to account for its greatness must account for it as disco; unlike other disco masterpieces (Chic, Salsoul, etc.) it can’t be assimilated to older, more chinstroker-approved genres like funk and soul. It’s therefore a track that causes a bit of a problem for the hardline irredentist wing of the “disco sucks” movement (yes, these people still exist!), which might account for the fact that it is still chronically underrated and its influence underestimated; Rolling Stone for instance thinks it’s only the 411th best song ever (#407: R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly”). In more belligerent moods I’ve also been known to point out that “I Feel Love” is several thousand times more revolutionary than certain other offerings of its day, but let’s not press the point.

Enough has been said about Giorgio Moroder’s extraodinary production, perhaps not enough about Donna Summer’s contribution. (This is another Trans-Atlantic collaboration, incidentally.) One of the interesting things about Summer’s vocals in “I Feel Love” is that they give you no idea of what her voice is actually capable of. The whole track is sung in a high, dreamy head voice, the antithesis of the patented disco diva style, whereas we know from several of Donna’s other hits that she’s more than capable of belting it out with the best of them (she even matches decibels with the queen of screech, Barbra Streisand, on the rather awful “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)”). But it’s this particular, almost regally restrained style, beginning with “Love to Love You, Baby” and developing here and in many songs of her later career (such as the sublime “Sunset People”), that I, and I suspect others, think of as “Donna Summer’s voice”.

One of the things this voice does most conspicuously is withhold the direct expression of emotion. When you hear Donna singing “I feel love”, you kind of have to take her word for it. To see this as a flaw, though, is to fail to grasp what this song is doing: its function is not to represent an emotion but to induce it. The “love” that Donna is singing about is not something she’s narrating as in conventional romantic balladry; it’s something that’s coming into being all around her through the trancelike motion and ecstatic communion of the dancefloor. Part of that, let’s be honest, is to do with being “loved up”, and one of the genres being invented here is that of “music for people taking drugs” (as opposed to music about taking drugs, e.g. 60s psychelic rock). But saying that is another way of saying that this is music that depends on its audience, perhaps the hallmark of all great dance music and the key reason for its resistance to interpretation.

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And here it is, with a bonus snippet of Giorgio’s “The Chase” (from Midnight Express) at the beginning. “Disco Vision SF”, now there is a show I wish I’d seen…:

The 12″ version is available at iTunes, but you could do worse than hunt around for a CD copy of The Dance Collection, which pretty much defines “essential”. I got mine at JB’s for a tenner. (Make sure you don’t buy any compilation with less than the full 12″ mix, naturally. Also, for an extra treat seek out the 15 minute Patrick Cowley version.)