BLASTS, FROM THE PAST
....connecting the posts on nu-New Age and on No. 1 Astronaut (and yes I did get the name back to front)...
... the group Emeralds are at the forefront of the post-noise underground’s reactivation of ideas from that interzone between late Krautrock/Analogue Synth Epics(think Sky Records, Klaus Schulze, Michael Hoenig, Vangelis ) and New Age/space music (Steve Roach, Michael Stearns)...
... in addition to putting out some excellent CDs by Emeralds and by the group’s Mark McGuire, the Austrian experimental electronic label Mego is hosting a sub-label called Spectrum Spools “curated” by John Elliott from the band... one of the best releases so far is Canzoni dal Laboratorio del Silenzio Cosmico by Bee Mask, a/k/a Chris Madak. And there is a new Bee Mask record just out on Spectrum Spools called Elegy for Beach Friday, a double LP of remixed/reedited material from the last seven year spoor of Madak’s short-run cassettes and CD-Rs...
After reading the No. 1 Astronaut “Instant Digest” blog, Madak contacted me to ask whether I’d been aware of “the phenomenon of 'blasting' that was around the Emeralds circle a few years ago? ‘Blasts’ were edits, mainly of mainstream 1990s rock, intended to show the artists in the least flattering light possible. Some of them are up on youtube, some were traded privately, and some are audio-only and on tapes and cdrs released under the name Hot Air Balloon Ride by Ryan Kuehn and John Elliott, who have described the whole thing as an act of intergenerational revenge and proactive myth deflation... I think it's a nice corrective to the emphasis on misty-eyed nostalgia/aesthetic transubstantiation/whatever in discussions of what contemporary artists are up to when they revisit the past.”
Here’s some examples:
These “alternablasts” remind me in spirit if not approach of Culturcide’s Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-Revolutionary America, where they took mainstream rock songs of the 1980s and almost complete defaced them with daubed and gouged noise – not so much cover versions, as cover-over versions – with the original jutting out here and there through the din. And then over that they did a kind of Weird-Al-Jankovic-except-more-meanspirited-and-mordantly-satirical rewrite of the lyrics sung to the original melody... my fave was 'We're An Industrial Band', their update of Grand Funk’s “We’re An American Band”
Emeralds’s friend and fellow-traveler in nu-New Age, Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never, has his own counterpart to “blasts” in the form of “echo jams”, credited to alter-egos like Sunsetcorp and KGB man. But here the motivation is not malice/mischief, but a kind of alchemical or extractive procedure, finding slivers of the sublime inside schlocky/schmaltzy/cheesy/saccharine mainstream pop, and isolating them, looping, distending them through DJ Screw-style deceleration, and otherwise dilating a magic moment. Not blasting, but blissing, then.
The most famous example is “Nobody Here” vis-à-vis Chris DeBurgh’s “Lady In Red”:
Here’s some Eighties Fleetwood Mac (not actually needing much alchemy/salvage in my opinion, but “Only Over You” from 1982’s Mirage is gorgeously reworked here)
Michael Jackson, already pretty ethereal, gets will-o-wisped here:
Not sure who’s the source here:
Or here
Lopatin’s echo jams and other work are discussed in more depth in my book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction To Its Own Past (US edition out on around July 20) but for now here’s Geeta Dayal’s piece for Frieze
http://www.frieze.com/comment/article/sunsetcorp/
and my own profile of Lopatin for Village Voice
And finally a couple of jams from Bee Mask
(the latter from Elegy for Beach Friday)
