PLAYLIST

And Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment, and an hissing, without an inhabitant
Jeremiah 51:37

Visions of imminent doom come in many flavours: floods, flu pandemics, meteors, irradiated  reptilia… On this tape alone we’ve Nevil Shute-ish paranoia from Cabaret Voltaire and Kate Bush (‘chips of plutonium / are twinkling in every lung’), prophecies of civil disobedience in Hampshire from L.D. 40 and Luca Miti and advice not to fuck with the Three 6 Mafia from the Three 6 Mafia (from their rollin’ with Lucifer period rather than their winnin’ Academy Awards period). Even the chipper-sounding Can’t Come In turns out to be based on a Biblical parable about being barred from salvation.

Also on a scriptural tip are White Magic, Diamanda Galas and the prophet Jeremiah, perhaps the bleakest of all the Old Testament seers – so bleak, in fact, that he was cited on the sleeve of a Godspeed You Black Emperor! record. Godspeed offshoot The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band & Choir figure here with their own stab at prognostication, as do Lift to Experience, whose frontman Josh T. Pearson has just emerged, John the Baptist-like, from a decade in the cultural wilderness. Their idiosyncratic spin on the Judaeo-Christian myth system involves Texas being the real Zion (after all, as they point out, ‘the USA is the centre of JerUSAlem’).  Round this out with some wordless but pretty nihilism from Tim Hecker and Camryn Rothenbury, and that’s your lot. Try not to let Babylon fall on you on the way out eh?

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Our tape, this time, is all about mishaps, willful perversities and the use of technology to manipulate the flow of time – as in OooOo’s chopping and screwing of Gaga, The Boredoms’ obtrusive fast forwardings, or Antipop Consortium’s beats built around backwards samples.

As for contrary gestures, we’ve got Zeena Parkins forsaking the beguiling fretwork of which she’s capable (ask Bjork) for a squally offering from Nightmare Alley, the Monks bucking their epoch’s trend for songs about love to sing about how much they hate the girl they nevertheless/thus want to call them up and Cock Safari, who – not content with being called Cock Safari – undertake to bury Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere in a shallow, staticky grave. Where Psychemagick’s recent edit of the same tune ruthlessly strips away all impediments to danceability, this version is pretty tough to cut a rug to.

There’s some unintended feedback and interference too, as Joy Division are spectacularly failed by their kit halfway through a gig in Preston. If Ian Curtis intoning ‘I think everything’s falling apart’ seems retrospectively ominous, the tannoy girl requesting that anyone intending to catch the coach to Burnley come outside in the next five minutes is just retrospectively fucking wizard.

A couple of cuts are about getting the wrong end of the stick, including the BBC’s stunningly determined de-ironisation of Perfect Day, and MF Doom’s crossbreeding of Whodini’s cagey Friends with the octuple-filtered smoothness of Ronnie Laws’ Friends and Strangers, for a track that elaborates on the old ‘enemies > friends like these’ equation.

Lastly there’s Nature Makes a Mistake (here by virtue of the sleeve’s amazingly expressive translation of that title, and that same title’s eminent applicability to, like, Man as a species if you want to look at things holistically) and The Fall’s Clasp Hands, a song that Mark E. Smith would doubtless be appalled to hear described as a reflection on the importance to his practice of honouring thy error as hidden intention, embracing contingency, generating difference from similitude and repeatedly sacking one’s whole band. ‘Chaos’, he sagely affirms ‘is a lustrous jewel’ – a philosophy which also inspired the image on the left, a collaboration with chance that entailed collaging the first five jpegs I have filed under the letters c, h, a, o and s.

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Incentivisation and instruction are this issue’s leitmotifs. If there’s one thing we’d like you to take away from this mixtape, it’s that A*s don’t attain themselves – as even the least dedicated record breaker will tell you. Jay-Z, for example, is only too happy to elaborate on his punishing training regime, as detailed on one of the secret tracks off the end of The Blueprint. Still mogul rap’s apogee, that LP dates from an era when there were secret tracks because there were CDs because people bought music.  Things, of course, are rather different now – as JME, vexed at his seemingly inability to translate popularity into paper, is all too aware. Like Clams Casino (whose newfound, mixtape-catalysed blogfame has also proven difficult to remunerate thus far), he’s proof that money is only one metric for success, and is, moreover, often incompatible with most of the other ones: the spectacular Stryderman might once’ve enjoyed pretending to have a Lil’ Wayne-size bank balance he’s gotten less listenable the closer he’s come to it.

Touchingly, both Jamie and Tinch use the tracks represented here to announce their ambition to (as a newly-appointed Premiership manager might put it) ‘break into the top 4’ MCwise. Until someone does a thorough, Google Analytics-based quantitative analysis of mid-00s Myspace pages we’ll only have subjective gauges of how they did, but their mixture of modesty and ambition remains exemplary. Of course, such quasi-sportsmanly sass is exactly what Glaswegian indie has ever defined itself in opposition to. Who’d want a real man, after all, when you could have Edwyn Collins in a dress? (Answers on a postcard). In these times of cuts it’s sobering, though, to think that from the lil’ acorn of Belle & Sebastian’s debut (of which Expectations is a characteristically school-centric high point) grew the doubtless pretty profitable concern that the band now is.

Extracurricular education is the subject of Black Box Recorder’s May Queen, another song about learning to do gender properly from a band whose lyrics often take the form of lists, manuals or manifesta. Similarly instructive is the Migraine Skank, heir to a rich tradition of tracks that set out what your body’s supposed to do with them (a tradition, incidentally, to which JME’s kinsman and cohort Skepta has made a noteworthy contribution of his own). While you’re waiting for the drop you may wish to ponder the principle of delayed gratification, a concept central as central to DJing as it is to any form of medium-term projection. Aaliyah, whose rejigging at the hands of Sticky we’ve saved til last, no doubt agreed. In these post-Xtina times, we’re use to pop divas telling us to keep our chins up. Eschewing any concern with nourishing our self-concepts, Aaliyah simply suggests that if you really stick at it, you might get a shot with her. And isn’t that a far healthier message to send out to youngsters contending with an economic climate as cutthroat as ours?

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The other weekend Murdofleur had the privilege of watching a 5yr old acquaintance concocting a new and ingenious beverage whose chief constituents were fruit juice, sparkling water, warm gravy and particles of butternut squash. As all present will affirm, agitating the mixture by venting air into it via a telescopic plastic straw caused it to froth and gurgle in a way that was both musical and highly fascinating. In honour of this experiment, the main criterion for inclusion on our zzzap playlist is being able to imagine the track’s producers giggling to themselves in the manner of that cocktail’s precocious author.

In the case of the first track – a snippet from a DJ Spyro set – we don’t even need to imagine: Spyro (who, named for a purple dragon from a PS1 game, has one of grime’s naffest aliases) is so delighted with himself for having dropped a riddim from Sonic the Hedgehog 2’s OST that he cracks up. Other artists flags up the link between videogames and electronic music either with music from (Yuzo Koshiro’s Vehelit) or with music inspired by (I-F’s Space Invaders are Smoking Grass) arcade and console classics of yore.

Even where there’s not a direct debt to electronic games, there’s occasional methodological parallels. An (albeit pretty inspired) collage of early 00s Fruityloops presets, putting together Tingz in Boots must’ve been a bit like playing a game – after all, as Paul Ward points out, playing digital games is a matter of ‘the combination of pre-rendered animated fragments’, not unlike the process of composing with a palette of samples and percussion loops.

The creative potential of mucking about also comes through in a bunch of proto-/post-/para-dubstep tracks which, rather than attempt to outdo one another in the ominous wobble stakes, are content to joyously derange rhythms and melodies by stretching, syncopating or embroidering them. Where Rustie and Mochipet transform others’ music, Matthew Herbert makes a sample of lasers zapping cataracts the basis for a vocal house track addressed to its singer’s own eyes. Meanwhile Terror Danjah – whose career has seen him repeatedly redeploying and tweaking a body of signature effects, tropes, and rhythms (numerous tracks of his exist in multiple alternative versions, all feature that weird cackling gremlin sound) – tries to tease out every last latent musical possibility from a morse coded distress signal.

This childlike, quasi-autistic love of repetition and (often minute) variation also characterises the mantric babbling of Black Dice (who frequently sound like they’re playing at being zoo animals) and the drum machine experiments of Ikue Mori’s Garden, an album which explores the capacity of percussion to ‘do’ melody, texture, emotion, harmony and misc.  other things ordinarily left to voices or other instruments.

Those tracks, like many on the list, refuse words in favour of squelches, rattles, clangs and pre-verbal wailing. CocoRosie get one step closer to full linguistic competency with the kiddily eerie Butterscotch, while Ears’ rhymes underscore the gulf between the ‘happy days’ of prepubescent yore and the ‘crapp[ier] days’ of more recent date, even as their scatological bent hints he that might not quite have grown up – but then – as I-F’s yen for Atari games and pot or Aphex’s pranksterish collabos with Chris Cunningham would suggest – it’s very important to keep in touch with one’s inner child.

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Addiction, corruption, cowardice and orientalism are the main ingredients of this issue’s playlist – hence the strong showing by some of the canon’s foremost opiate abusers. As if Nico and Iggy weren’t enough to make anyone think twice, Tara Cross and Johnny Thunders both make  strong arguments for Just Saying No, with Tara shrilly refusing to ingest a single line more while Johnny demonstrates the enduring tendency to associate chemical overindulgence with the Orient.

He’s in exalted company here: precedents include Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, wherein the hero regularly skulks off to East London to indulgence his drug habit in the company of the area’s immigrant Chinese population. The none-more-flamboyant figurehead of the ‘Yellow’ 1890s, Wilde finds a place on our playlist by way of a Smiths track that makes up for its lack of droll couplets (or, indeed, any lyrics at all) with its witty title (albeit not quite so witty as that of Sonic Youth’s Brave Men Run (In My Family)). The clean-living Morrissey, it should be noted was a fan of both Oscar and Johnny Thunders – evidence that whether or not art can corrupt us (as Wilde’s opponents argued Dorian was likely to do) it can certainly help us live out our decadent fantasies at a healthy, vicarious remove. Rounding out the orientalist contingent is Wiley’s ‘sinogrime’ classic Shanghai, which proves that while London’s Chinatown has long since migrated west, East London, Orientalism and tales from the criminal underworld remain a potent cocktail.

Then there’s all the stuff that makes the list for being about cowardice and/or courage. While Mogwai opt to traumatize their listeners with a quiet/loud rollercoaster ride (I still, after all these years, jump at Like Herod’s sudden spikes in volume) Easy Going offer the terminally yellow bellied a sort arpeggiated self-help manual. Adult. – whose previous works include Anxiety Always, Scare Up the Birds and Plagued by Fear – continue their quest to determine what fright sounds like (apparently the answer is tinny, churning and a lot like old Minimal Wave records) and Goblin – a band capable of making the idea of a ballet school run by witches seem terrifying rather than just outright ludicrous – play us out. Slap bang in the middle we have T2, whose Heartbroken always moves me because, rather than pretend to be just fine thx, Jodi Aysha has courage to tell the the no-good heel who’s spurned her that she’s hurting. Would that we were all as valiantly candid.

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Pretty NSFW, this one, in parts – though not Pink Priest’s lovely instrumental Field of Orgasms, whatever its title might suggest. Even on the tracks with vox, blushes are likelier to stem from bracing honesty than outright vulgarity: Bjork’s serene Cocoon, for example, contains the awkwardly candid line “When I wake up / A second time, in his arms / Gorgeousness! / He’s still inside me” – audibly delivered, on this live version, to an adoring audience. Then there’s Bluish, the slightly creepier of the two songs about conjugal love on the last Animal Collective LP, trumping Guys Eyes by virtue of its fetish-y wardrobe requests (“keep your stockings on for a while”) and (probably intentional) twee/sinister Beach Boys doing Charles Manson* vibe. Another habitual oversharer, Antony Hegarty is represented by two tracks. With Shake that Devil he just about snatches victory from the jaws of histrionics, while on Semen Song his vox float over an accompaniment that sounds innocuous enough until you learn that the percussion is, in part, constituted of half of Matmos ejaculating onto a tissue.

Speaking of dirty secrets, your correspondent is subject – as we’ve previously confessed on the site –to an unnatural passion for La Roux’s La Roux. Here the guilty pleasure is compounded by Quicksand’s having been ‘rerubbed’ by dancehall-fandom’s pre-eminent douchebag, Diplo. Something of a tonal car crash, the result sees Amanda Blank’s gynocentric opening bars making a mockery of Elly Jackson’s chastely fraught original lyric, in which some awkward handholding is about as racy as it gets. Quicksand, in this context, seems less like a metaphor for affective entrapment than an ideal to which discerning crotches should aspire (see also: Pussycat, which is basically Missy Elliott giving a pep talk to her genitals).

If dancehall, with its keen eye for texture, saturation and friction, is one of the few areas of music interested in describing what sex actually feels like, then the bedroom stuff also rings true in Arab Strap’s (albeit altogether less daggerable-to) ouevre. Packs of Three (also here in its live form, to heighten the savour of aired dirty laundry) would warrant inclusion on the basis of its first line alone. Not everything’s so demonstrative however: Brandy complains about gossips on an unauthorised remix while Neu! positively whisper about a seaside climax and Arthur Russel uses amplification and delay to accentuate the obliquely oral-erotic dimension of mumbling. We never find out what the present Arthur’s got us is. Or where it’s hidden. Nor do we find out what the one thing Amerie can’t stop thinking about is – if anyone ever administers extreme unction to her, do please be so good as to ask, would you?

*which, lest we forget, is not an idle simile but something that happened

Homophony is also at work in the title of Franz Schubert, a Trans-Europe Express cut whose pun on its parent LP’s title always reminds me of the strange bilingual logic Freud discovered at the root of fetishism (Exhibit A, you’ll recall, was the glance/glanz slippage of a patient who’d forgotten he once knew English).

If Kraftwerk took their sonic cues from a locomotive, Björk, on the two tracks here, looks to the seas instead: Hunter Vessel, from the OST for the Japanophilic Drawing Restraint 9, premieres the fog horn motif she later used to try and tie together Volta, her globetrotting curate’s egg of a last LP (you may recall the misapplication of Konono no.1’s talents on Earth Intruders; I personally wish to forget it).

Speaking of African influences, the cut from DJ Vielo et al is off a recent Radioclit comp, representing the fruits of their researches into ‘worldwide ghetto culture’. Born out of a frustration with the supposed creative bankruptcy of dance music and hip hop – which have, since the late ‘90s, vampirically siphoned off aspects of everything from bhangra to taiko to kwaito to trance in the bid for eternal relevance – the selection isn’t totally immune to charges of cultural imperialism* on its own account.

This goes double for Gang Gang Dance’s highly schizo-ethnic (and highly listenable) Saint Dymphna, a record whose apex, awkwardnesswise, has to be Lizzi Bougastos keening Brooklynishly re: India being despoiled by Porsche dealerships  and fast food restaurants.

Elsewhere, High Places’ Late Bloomer spends the better part of a dozen minutes in the leisurely pursuit of its own tail, spooling out lyrical rivers and railways over a loping, mantric beat, while we end with a ramble to the very outskirts of the multiverse, courtesy of Space Dimension Controller – living proof that musical precocity, however prodigious, is never harmed by some meta-conceptual sci-fi trimmings. Enjoy the trip!

* for brows furrowed to somewhat thought-provoking effect on this topic, go here

PLAYLIST

• Holger Czukay – Persian Love
• Brian Eno – Burning Airlines Give You So Much More
• Ghost – Live With Me
• High Places – Late Bloomer
• Björk – Hunter Vessel / Wanderlust
• DJ Vielo, DJ Anielson & Patcho Debenq – Decale Mon Afrique
• Gang Gang Dance – Afoot
• Fennesz – Got to Move On
• Kraftwerk – Franz Schubert
• Space Dimension Controller – The Love Quadrant

On the more tasteful end of the b-line continuum Wolf Cub, a co-production from Burial and Four Tet, tempts the listener to reverse engineer it by opening with a distinctly Four Tet-y intro then dropping the sort of off-kilter 2-step percussion Burial can probably neglect to quantize in his sleep at this point. Speaking of 2-step, we’ve also got a garage remix of Brandy’s Angel in Disguise that isn’t the X-Men garage remix of Brandy’s Angel in Disguise. It’s one of a seemingly infinite list of turn of the century R’n’B bangers that got retooled for garage raves by anonymous producers – almost as if brought forth ex nihilo because DJs simply needed them to exist.

Sonic Youth have attributed their own ability to transcend generic conventions to their basically being clean living, matrimonially inclined young people – acording to Thurston all the genuine degenerates on the New York scene were way less stylistically schizophrenic, presumably not having had the motivation to read up on Modern Composition etc. Despite being named for MPD, Schizophrenia is them at their most agreeably conventional. Elsewhere, Electrelane get choral on one of their collaborations with a Chicago Acapella choir, Oh Astro mingle Lionel Richie, Fujiya& Miyagi and Hot Chip, and Evelyn Glennie demonstrates the multiple senses’ interimplication with a version of Steve Reich’s clapping music. Things wrap up with Alice Coltrane’s rendition of Stravinsy’s Rite of Spring – an African America jazz artist influenced by Indian music covering the orchestral soundtrack to a Russian ballet premiered in France. Globalized!

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• Dinosaur - Kiss Me Again
• Alec Wizz – Drummin’ (Louis Bendetti Drumminpella)/Nubian Mindz – Bossa Boogie
• Evelyn Glennie – Clapping Music
• Brandy – Angel in Disguise (anonymous UK garage remix)
• Burial & Four Tet – Wolf Cub
• Sonic Youth – Schizophrenia
• Oh Astro – Hello Fuji Boy
• Slimzee, Dizzee Rascal, Wiley – Rinse FM set 200?
• Electrelane – I Keep Losing Heart
• Alice Coltrane – Spring Rounds from Rite of Spring

A couple of the songs deal with both sides of the equation; Kate Bush’s Truffaut-inspired murder/matrimony fantasy The Wedding List spins a tale of blood-bespattered crinoline while Siouxsie makes fruity gothic hay with the sorts of sex/death metaphors so beloved of syphilitic C19th aesthetes. Melt!, released just as the media was starting to get paranoid and misinformative about AIDs, also figures on the (shortish) list of UK Top 50 singles which contain the word ’sperm’, as fans of trivia and protein alike will doubtless be thrilled  to learn.

Death, sex and the scandal of the Catholic church’s response to AIDs are kind of  Diamanda Galas’ specialist subjects. One of her many retoolings of traditional sorrow songs, the version of See That My Grave is Kept Clean below closes her album Defixiones/Will & Testament, a dense, literate and beautiful (if predictably punishing) double concept LP about exile and genocide. Luckily for the faint of heart, her grandstanding, vaudevillian tendencies are to the fore here.The Biblical thread also means an excerpt from and a song about Song of Songs – aka the book of the Bible that all those scriptural exegetes have gotten their knickers in  twist attempting to desexify. So there is, like, some stuff about undying love included. And if you don’t well up at the bit in The Tammys’ Gypsy when she lifts the veil and “buddy it’s me!” then you’ve  atrophied emotionally to a point no one should have to (ditto if the picture of Bonnie playfully goading Clyde with a sawn-off shottie does nothing for you).

PLAYLIST

• Outkast – Pre-Nump
• Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood – Jackson
• The Tammys – Gypsy
• Health – Death + (Delivery Remix)
• Alexander Scourby – Songs of Songs (Ch. 5)
• Diamanda Galas – See That My Grave is Kept Clean
• Kate Bush – The Wedding List
• Siouxsie & the Banshees – Melt!
• The Shangri-Las – So Much in Love
• Double Leopards – Chemical Wedding
• Twilight Ritual – Tears on the Wall
• White Magic – Song of Solomon

More alarming is Matmos’ California Rhinoplasty, which is built, like all of their A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure LP, around sounds sourced from medical procedures – in this case nose jobs. Those drums (the duo maintain) are cracking cartilage. The piping is Tibetan nose flutes though. Lolz.Throbbing Gristle might sound like they’re sampling surgery, but that’s just them being industrial. The track’s scrambled pronouns and mangled limbs do, however, anticipate the surgically-facilitated genderfuck project Genesis P-Orridge later embarked on.

If it often falls to surgeons to tackle gender dysphoria (maybe all the jilted trans in Scott Walker’s gorgeously maudlin Big Louise needs is a penectomy and a lil’ tummy tuck?) then it’s up to DJs to solve genre dysphoria, coaxing out the beautiful 4/4 banger trapped inside that gangling power ballad’s body, pinning back those unsightly middle eights. Not for nothing is the DJ/medic metaphor so hoary.Here The xx confirm their reputation for immaculate taste by pretty much excising Florence Welch from her own track, Terror Danjah samples the melody that Planet Rock transplanted from Trans Europe Express, Adult. ‘restructure’ their own musical tummy ache and Modeselektor chop up Sasha Perera’s bitchy vocal about surgically augmented trophy wives. Given how gauche the lyric is, you kind of wish they’d constrained her to sub-referential snippets, like the anonymous divas whose vox are grated all over so much amazing bass music (feel free to discuss implicitly misognystic production tropes in the comments, obvs.).

Elsewhere, Tom Waits delivers a typical Waitsian lyric ( i.e. basically growls a list of antiquated flotsam), The Fall’s M.E.S. does some D.I.Y. (presumably the pre-Gok Brix Smith had some sway over the decor in this new house) and Talking Heads meditate on the human face, while the Upsetters soundtrack what must have been the jauntiest session in an operating theatre ever. Do the scalpel skank.

PLAYLIST

• Einsturzernde Neubaten – Drauben Ist Fiendlich
• Tom Waits – The Part You Throw Away
• The Fall – My New House
• Talking Heads – Seen & Not Seen
• The xx – You’ve Got The Love (xx Remix)
• Terror Danjah – Planet Shock
• Adult. – Nausea (Restructured)
• Modeselektor – Silikon (feat. Sasha Perera)
• Matmos – California Rhinoplasty
• Matthew Herbert – Empire of Coffee
• The Upsetters – Medical Operation
• Throbbing Gristle – His Arm was Her Leg (Live)
• Scott Walker – Big Louise