Pleased to see (via Emerald Daze) that a new compilation of “early 80s German proto-electro” features a track from Grauzone, sadly neglected post-Factory Swiss gloomsters who are probably riper for a revival now than they were (I’m sensing a theme here) when their discography reissue on PIAS Germany under the title Die Sunrise-Tapes, back in 1998, received virtually zero attention from the US/UK press (I didn’t even know until tonight that it existed). Some of the tracks on their one s/t album (issued in UK by EMI, amazingly enough) are strongly reminiscent of Cure ca. Seventeen Seconds (perhaps surpassing it), but then there’s “Marmelade und Himbeereis” which wraps their sound around a waltz-time schlagerisch tune you could imagine singing drunkenly in unison down the lokal ... or the menacing stomp of “Wuetendes Glas” that kicks off the second side ... or “Kalte Kriecht” which really opens up like a lost track from Twenty Jazz-Funk Greats with Carteresque synthschmears wiping around back behind the sequencer and drums and whispers ...
And with all of that it’s pleasant to listen to — I mean, pleasant, it wraps itself around you like a warm sweater, or really what it feels like is being at home on a winter night — a few feet away it might be dark and wet and cold, but this right here is ... comfortable. It’s weird namechecking TG or the Cabs talking about a record that goes down this smoothly — rueful but not tortured, dark but not black ... they can’t quite restrain their innate ability to write real tunes, and they can’t quite not swing.
Some links for the europhones:
How odd that I've seen no mention of how much many of the bits on the newish Goldfrapp album sounds like pop-era Danielle Dax ... the flatulent bass synth thrashing round a motorik beat with cooing I'd-be-seductive-were-I-not-taking-the-piss kittenvox slithering antiphonically overtop1 ... the over-the-top For A Few Gucciones More hair/makeup/pose visual appeal with disturborealist layerings (dog heads?) ... the totally synthetic quality of it the inverse somehow of the totally synthetic pop sound it shadows, revelling in the plasticity of its production but the voice a human core, a ridge of warm thigh flesh emerging from the surface of the block of ice its torso is encased in ... Yeah, it's great that people are digging this sound, but I can't help but feel, again, deja-vu of deja-vu of deja-vu, that I've been here before and to be “forward” I have to step back a decade ...
So much retro ... looking at twenty-somethings responding to sounds resurrected from twenty years ago, I can't help but want to poke a bit at this strange nostalgia for a time one didn't live through; I think about my fascination, as a 12-year-old in the late 60s, with the discarded pulp culture of the thirties and forties — those stacks of Tarzan and Doc Savage and H.P. Lovecraft paperbacks, the reprints of Golden-age superhero comix, the old-time radio programs — there was a sense in which I felt more deeply about Depression-era NYC than about anything patchouli-scented ... but when I think about 1981, it just doesn't seem different enough to fetishize, it just makes me feel like I'm living a rerun (meet the new crypto-fascist, same as the old crypto-fascist). But I guess it's kinda cool to have my personal cultural apex hip again, if only for a minute; beats being the mouldy fig, even if I'm still “Who's the old guy?”.
I miss Dax. Admittedly, I miss the Dax of We Buy a Hammer for Daddy more than the Dax of Blast the Human Flower (the former's confused little girl lost in Ernst landscape having a bit more dramatic oomph than later years' cyborg ingenue lost at the disco), but I'd take either version really. One has the sense that all that success she was pushing for might actually be possible now (viz. the discussion on some listserv recently1 about the mistiming of the Gang of Four reunion — if only they'd waited another 5 years they'd have played to packed theatres instead of half-filled clubs).
That is, the Santa Clarita Valley, if you like, or perhaps the cabbage patch south of Salinas the Amtrak train sat in for 6 hours last night.
One of the hazards of wearing all black as a matter of course (well, I don't own much else) is the undesirable interpretability of the choice, especially when the intended interpretation would be, no interpretation. This is especially the case when one is, in a public place, reading a lapsized biography of Aleister Crowley, with bald old Master Therion hisself glaring balefully from the cover. After a few hours, one wishes to have chosen a t-shirt with the slogan “No, I’m not a Thelemite, why do you ask?” (actually thinking about what they saw would make the question pretty redundant, obviously) ... it’s funny, twenty years or so ago I used to enjoy reading John Rechy novels on crowded N trains, it was a great way to keep the adjacent seat empty, but now it’s just kinda embarassing, feeling like your normal behavior is being interpreted as living parody (or threat, or curiosity) by half the people walking past you. At least I don’t have a mohawk, I guess.
Reading the section of the A.C. bio dealing with the Cefalu “abbey,”, it struck me how much the households in Stranger in a Strange Land — both Jubal’s and the nest — read like an idealized version of Crowley’s attempts at community ... Jubal’s philosopher-king-with-harem schtick like a well-funded idea of what Crowley had in the mid-twenties, and the nest what Crowley might have meant to have. (God, I can just hear the folks on rasfw sharpening their cleavers now.) Figuring I’ve never had a random thought that somebody hasn’t thought seriously about, I googled around and came up with just that here, which talks about the relations between Heinlein and Jack Parsons’ circle in the forties (the article seems to have originated from within the Church of All Worlds, a (what shall I call it?) church based in part on Stranger from California; caveat emptor).
But it’s not quite accurate to say that the novel seemed like an idealized version. What it really felt like was, the actual events felt like a brutal reductio ad absurdum parody of Stranger, a demonstration of what all those fine ideal folks would actually be like, if they weren’t in a novel. Sort of like we have all those beautiful descriptions of what an anarchist society would look like, all sharing and consensus-driven, and when we get one in real life, it’s <oops> pre-Taliban Afghanistan.
Think I better stop now.
