No two ways about it, indoctrinating your kids isn’t cool. Using your parental authority to shape the psychological makeup of your offspring in a very specific direction is, some would argue, an abuse of that authority. If you truly have the courage of your political convictions then you should also have the confidence that if you instil values and basic decency into your offspring they’ll come around on their own without specific prompting from yourself.
There’s also the possibility that they’ll have picked up your bolshie streak and if you lay it on too thick they’ll become reactionary little bastards just to spite you. Just look at Ralph Milliband FFS. It's natural that teenagers lash out against their parents and they will at times do things just because it’s the very thing in the whole world that would piss you off the most. Drinking, doing hard drugs, becoming Emos or joining the BNP (or Fainna Fail or even the SDLP), nothing should be considered beneath them.
So, politically indoctrinating your offspring, morally dubious and liable to backfire. That said, there is nothing wrong with some gentle nudging in the right direction. This is where the Cartoons come in. As we know, all cultural artefacts are loaded with layers of meaning and the cumulative effect is a subtle form of programming that inputs the cultural and social mores into the individual. If this process is a part of socialisation and going to happen anyway, one might as well have a bit of a hand in it.
It is to this end that I direct friends and comrades towards this occasional series on this Blog relating to some of the animated features and TV shows that I feel will have a positive impact on their young minds and as well as being good entertainment in their own right, the sort of thing that any adults reading this might actually enjoy watching along with their brood, because lets face it, some of the stuff you are going to be obliged to watch is going to be pure gack. Also, it is important that these are good shows from the kids POV because if you melt their little heads with a cartoon diet of hard East-German Socialist realism or those weird depressing Soviet Russian cartoons that used to show up on TV every now and again they will grow up to hate you and your politics, become reactionary enemies of the movement and the people in general and will certainly have to be shot, and we don't want to see that happen now do we?
For each cartoon I will be have a little section explaining what it is about and why it's good before delving into the meaning and messages of the show.
With this in mind we'll start with a personal favourite from not too long ago, or at least recent enough that I was in my 20s when I saw it and managed to really enjoy it.
Avatar: The Legend of Aang The Last Airbender (TV Series, Nickelodeon 2006-8)
What it’s about:
Aang is an adolescent boy, gifted with the power of Air-Bending and destined to become the Avatar, master of the 4 elements (Earth, Air, Fire and Water). After spending 100 years encased in an iceberg, he finds that a war has been launched by the imperialistic Fire Nation to conquer the whole world, and that his own people, the Air Nomads, have been wiped out. He and his small band of companions travel the length and breath of their world (based very loosely on mythic China) so he can learn the ways of the other 3 elements and hopefully stop the Lord of the Fire Nation’s plans for world domination.
Why it's good:
Its works very well in its own right as a cartoon. The animation is extremely well done, it’s a perfect fusion of the expertise of American and Asian animators. The world of Avatar is well constructed, the attention to detail in every aspect of which makes the complete whole something marvellous. A good example would be the different elemental magics which are based on real-world Chinese martial arts which the series writers feel capture the essence of the elements, the smooth flowing Tai Chi style is water bending, the sharp and explosive Northern Shaolin style represents fire bending and so on. It’s obvious that the animators have spent a lot of time studying how the human body moves when performing the various moves.
The story is well told too. There is a good mixture of personal stories relating to each of the well constructed, believable characters and the epic quest with a huge back story in the best traditions of fantasy against a background of war that makes up the story arc. The stories can be by turns, funny, heroic, emotional, exciting, human and in a couple of episodes, really really dark (the story from the third season about the Water-Bender who could use her power over water to control people by manipulating the water in their body seriously creeped me out). The voice cast (mostly quite young themselves, no middle aged women playing adolescent boys here which is usually the case in animation) do a fantastic job, particular props have to go to the, sadly deceased, Asian-American actor Mako for his turn as Uncle Iroh who in some ways provides the emotional and philosophica; heart of the show.
What the young ’uns will hopefully take from it:
Well, the basic thing of exposing small children to concepts and ideas from different culture is, I believe, always generally beneficial to creating open minded and well rounded individuals. The story setting has a definite anti-war theme to it, the degradation of war and the effects on civilian populations are well handled. The main character is the last survivor of what is essentially a holocaust.
There are also a lot of strong female roles in it. For example, the Earth-Bender Toph (pictured), who joins the show in the second season, is both female and disabled (blind) and manages to be a very strong role-model for both in a nicely un-forced way.
So it’s a popular American TV show that is well made and enjoyable, has some good action, well drawn characters (in all senses of the term) and some nice anti-war, pro-diversity and feminist themes that are all handled with a deft touch, i.e. they don’t beat you round the head with “the message”. The only mild criticism I have is that the humour is sometimes a little forced and it doesn’t quite go far enough, but I think that that’s a reasonable trade off.
Next blog I'll be doing at least a small report back from this weekends up coming Revolution 2012 conference in the QUB Student Union. There will be more of these to follow over the coming months and theres a lot happening in and around Belfast.
With reference to my previous post, read it now if you haven't already.
Well, he's since done another talk at Imperial college London and gone a lot further than he did in Belfast, including this interview where he gets stuck into the BDS movement in a way that he didn't in Belfast. He's saying the same thing but he's removing any ambiguity or nuance about tactics and strategy. 2-state solution is the only way to go and that way lies through the enforcement of international law.
I would go for a lengthy rebuttal now myself but Richard Seymour has actually done the job already. I can't help but get my 2 cents in now about one thing he said though.
I notice at the end how he mentions coming to Northern Ireland but not any of the things that were said to him by any of us. And for gods sake, this constant trotting out of the "peace process" / Good Friday Agreement as a model for Israel / Palestine. We're just as dysfunctional and messed up as we ever were, sectarianism has gotten worse since 1998, none of the paramilitary groups have ever actually gone away, some of them have just shifted gears into organised crime and are thriving. They don't go to war with each other but theres still plenty of violence and intimidation in their own communities (which was mostly the case in the troubles anyway) and the murder rate hasn't even really changed that much since the early 90s, or at least nothing to far out of line with the rest of the UK. Nothing is being done about poverty, in fact the neo-liberal line of the Assembly, which even Sinn Fein have colluded in, is just making things on the ground worse. Could people please stop making us the poster child of their descent into capitulation-ism? Even Chomsky's known to do it on occasion.
Tonight I did an introduction for the branch meeting of the Socialist Workers Party on the subject of Mark Fishers book Capitalist realism. I had intended to use the talk as the basis for a blog post about extending Mark Fishers analysis of 21st century capitalist ideology, possibly extending the general thrust of the book by looking at the peculiarities of Capitalist Realism in the context of Northern Ireland. Unfortunately I got a bit over enthusiastic and lent my copy of the book out to someone after the meeting forgetting that i had this in mind to do so I no longer have a copy of the book to quote from and without it my loose notes don't make much sense. I will do this when I get the book back so for now I'm going to repost a note I posted to my facebook ages ago which should probably have been a blog entry anyway.
Are the Lannisters the real goodies in A Song Of Ice and Fire?
Yes, that might sound a bit strange. They are incestuous, they kill people and start wars and the fact that one of them is Charles Dance is a bit of a give-away, but hear me out. In the context of Westeros, the Lannisters are on the side of history and progress, which is supposed to be a good thing, isn't it?
According to all available sources and GRRM himself, the events of ASOIAF are the product of the years he spent researching the 'Early Modern' period (historians term meaning roughly 1500s to the late 18th century, late modernism being occasioned by industrialisation, the enlightenment etc.) and the Wars of the Roses in Britain in particular. Speaking as someone who has had the pleasure of studying the economic and social history of Britain at undergraduate level I can say that the research was time well spent. The world of Westeros is well thought out and feels real enough. As a social historian I get the same thrill from the series as a natural scientist must feel when she reads a good bit of well thought out hard sci-fi where the science element is real and no-one contradicts the laws of physics. Looking for a moment at this time period as a historian of the long dureé what is it that characterises this period in history of kings, Royal successions and wars just before the reformation and the first wave of European imperialism? It is the crisis of feudalism and the shift to a mercantile capitalist economy.
Essentially, Feudalism was the organising principle of societies across Europe since European civilisation re-emerged from the Dark ages (which weren’t actually that dark tbh, but that’s a discussion for another time). Under Feudalism wealth in society was expressed in terms of land and social status and class largely depended on how much land you had, the resources it could produce and the number of people on it you could compel to fight for you. Lords, Barons, knights, kings etc, these titles were all measures of what level you were at under this system. Co-existing within this system was the nascent form of Capitalism, i.e. wealth expressed as an abstract in terms of gold and coin. This wasn’t the whole of the economy, it started out small but as the years progressed this form of wealth holding would prove more productive and eventually it would draw more power towards the social classes that were associated with it, who at the time were called by some “the middling sort of people” . Eventually this class would come to surpass then absorb and replace the land-holding ruling classes of the previous epoch.
Historical change like this does not happen without a fight. The first stage of this fight was the transformation from early feudalism into Market feudalism. This change wasn’t necessarily a revolutionary change that would bring about an immediate improvement to peoples lives. Anyone who really studies history should know better than to see everything as a unstoppable chain of progress and improvement. What happened in practice was that the cannier lords and kings began to consolidate power into a centralised state with themselves at the top. It is in this period that many of the nation-states that we know today first began to take form, Britain, France and Spain being some of the more prominent examples. With this period of consolidation came political absolutism and repression. But it was also the period of the renaissance, the rise of humanism as an alternative to Christianity and it was a necessary stage that society would have to go through to get to where we are today.
Which brings us to Game of Thrones.
Game of thrones and the Song Of ice and fire series of books it’s based on are, I believe, the imaginative recreation of this historical process against a background of a different biosphere to the one we know. The Baratheon and Stark dynasties represent the early feudal order. They are land owner – War lords whose personal power is built on military prowess and whose moral code is based on the feudal notions of tradition and fealty. The Lannisters in the other hand represent the passage into Feudal Capitalism. They are known for their wealth and their outlook is distinctly more modern. They prefer realpolitik to airy notions of duty and honour. Tyrion Lannister, in his own way, represents the progressive intellectual revolution that was as much a part of that process as the political repression that came with it, this time period in our world gave us the foundations of modern philosophy and the beginnings of the sciences. As such, the Lannisters are the ones on the side of history. They aren’t exactly nice, Joeffry is obviously a little shit and there’s the whole incest thing, but George RR Martin seems to have the historians’ eye for these things. We may personally prefer the Starks or even the Baratheons but they were warriors, paternalistic savages who maybe aren’t the best people to be running Westeros. The point is made in the series and books, Robert was running the kingdom into the ground and the state would fall apart without the Lannisters money holding it together. They put a lot of their own capital into the state coffers, do they not in some sense deserve to run things, or are they not at least more deserving than those who are merely good at beating other people up?
Well, my answer is no. The other plot line in the concerning Dothraki is a mirror to the events that unfolded in our world around the Mongols. These Barbarian societies were the chaotic yin to the yang of civilisation. It’s also here that you get the strongest fantasy element in GOT, the dragons. Yes, there will be Dragons.
That is why I for one welcome our new Dothraki overlords and wish the one true ruler of Westeros, Daenerys Targaryen a long and fruitful reign as god-empress.
Unless a John Ball type leader emerges later in the series who decides to agitate for turning the War of 5 Kings into a revolutionary war. I haven’t read the books yet so here’s hoping.
Only two months in and already resorting to filler and reposts. Next time it should be something more interesting.
For those of you reading this blog who don’t know who Norman Finklestein is exactly it is worth saying a few things by way of introduction.
The son of two Holocaust Survivors, a thorough academic debunker of the Zionist creation myths, someone who has been described by his enemies as a “self hating jew” and who lost his tenured position at a top American university because of his principled stance on the Palestinian issue, Prof. Norman Finklestien is one of the most important critics of Israel and the Zionist project working today. He is a fiery and fearless public speaker who doesn’t take any shit from his critics on the right (as you will see from this clip) who utterly hate him for his work against their favoured beat stick against their critics, the conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. When Alan Dershowitz lies about your mother being a Nazi collaborator, you must be doing something right.
So, when I heard he was speaking in Belfast I was naturally quite excited and managed to score a ticket to what was a packed event, the best attended political lecture I’ve seen since Chomsky spoke at the Belfast festival. You can imagine my surprise then when I left the lecture feeling somewhat disgruntled at what I’d just heard.
The subject of the talk was that of solving the conflict. This was somewhat off the topic of Prof. Finklestiens’ usual public speeches about the nature of Zionism and the Zionist state, assuming (quite correctly) that since the talk was co-hosted by the Queens PSC he would be speaking to a crowd of pro-Palestinian activists and therefore preaching the converted. So instead of that what he did was make a really hard argument for the tactical necessity of the international Palestinian solidarity movement adopting a two state solution as the stated aim and end goal of the Palestinian liberation struggle in order to win popular support from the masses.
He did this in two ways. The first was to make a legalist argument, that if you are going to argue against Israel based on the illegality of the settlements and their complete disregard for international law in their numerous military escapades one the one hand, then on the other hand you can’t deny the legitimacy of some sort of Israeli state on the other hand, which means that some sort of two-state solution is the only option. To support this he pointed out, quite correctly, that the two state solution is what has come out of the process of negotiations between the Palestinian leadership and the Israelis, that it is the solution officially supported by every country in the world except Israel and America when it gets put to the vote in the UN (including Iran and the other Arab states) and cited the very detailed and hard-fought land swap deal as the basis for an honourable settlement, which would mean that 63% the Israeli settlers could stay on the west bank, in exchange for the same amount of land in Israel to be given to the Palestinian Authority on the west bank and the settlement block system (i.e the way the roads and highways between the settlements are used to control the movements of Palestinians) would be dismantled.
Secondly, the way in which he did this, the theoretical justification for the specific arguments, was by evoking the spectre of Ghandi and using the parallels between the life and political practice of the Ghandi’s INC and the Palestinian liberation struggle to drive each of his points home. Again in all fairness to Prof. Finklestein he goes beyond the usual bourgeois liberal stock use of Ghandi to criticise proponents of armed liberation struggles and he does defend the right of an oppressed people to take up arms, as you’d expect from someone both of whose parents fought in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis, and he’s actually quite critical of that sort of nonsense.
In my opinion the main point of this was where he drew a distinction between the two lives of Ghandi, as a leader of the Indian national liberation movement and as the head of an Ashram. As the leader of the Ashram, Ghandi was a hard core ascetic, no drugs, no alcohol, no idle joking and no sex even between married couples. As the head of the national liberation movement on the other hand he was happy to work alongside Muslims, Sikhs, other Hindus who weren’t quite as hard core as himself etc. In doing so I think we reach the crux of the argument he was trying to make, that he is equating support for a one state solution, with personal morality, i.e. it may be a deeply held personal conviction and you may even be right, for whatever that’s worth, but since the legalistic argument against Israel seems to be making headway in the international community you need to put it aside and for tactical reasons go with what will appeal to the broadest mass of people as your stated end for the Palestinian struggle.
As I see it there are two major things wrong with the whole argument. One of these things he actually hit on himself at one point in the talk. When he was making the point about Ghandi he said that Ghandi was always against the partition of India, but he eventually came round to accepting the existence of Pakistan as a fact, even if he didn’t accept its legitimacy. The thing about that is, wasn’t Ghandi quite correct in not accepting partition. The partition of India was a catastrophe in human and political terms. Surely the fact that Ghandi, against his better judgement, was forced to accept the existence of the Pakistani state is something we should be mourning rather than replicating?
The other point is the unproblematized appeal to a legalistic argument. There is a very important question here about what the law actually is and how international law operates. China Mieville, when he’s not being a multi award winning Fantasy fiction author, is an expert on the subject of international law and in his book he makes the point that the reason why the law functions in the context of a bourgeois democratic state is that the state exists as the final arbiter of the law. It’s not necessarily a good arbiter or an unbiased one (far from it) but because it exists as a higher power to be appealed to between competing interests the law works to the extent to which it does. In the context of international law there exists no such final arbiter. What international law amounts to is, to put it as crudely as it actually is, “might makes right”.
There are few examples of this more blatant than the Israel Palestine conflict. Frankly, I think that this is where Finklesteins argument for the two state solution, even as a tactical position, falls down. Israel uses international law and uses these negotiations with whatever section of the Palestinian leadership it fancies talking to at any given time in a cynical way to prop up its own legitimacy. It’s a game that only one side are playing for real. It’s a game that the Palestinians are winning in its own limited terms, to the extent that all those votes going through the UN and being blocked only by Israel the US and whoever they can corral into their side count for anything. He seems to believe that this game can through international public pressure be transubstantiated into something real that the Israelis will have to abide by.
Contrary to this I would posit the old Marxist theoretical position on treaties and settlements (which I believe may come from Lenin but I’m happy to be corrected) that any negotiated settlement only represents the balance of forces as they exist on the day the treaty is signed and by extension that they only matter as long as the facts on the ground remain. Within the context of the current balance of forces between the Zionist project and its supporters and the Palestinians a two state solution may well be the limit of what is achievable in the immediate short term. But that doesn’t mean that the balance of forces will remain as they are forever or that we should abandon hope in a single secular democratic state.
Basically this is the old argument that has existed forever on the left between ‘Reform’ (i.e. achieving what is ostensibly theoretically possible through the current system) and ‘Revolution’ (i.e. realising that the current system is temporal and temporary and looking beyond it towards what should be rather than what is). Not out of some sense of moral or theoretical absolutism either, but because we know and we have seen countless times across a myriad of issues that the system of bourgeois parliamentary democracy relies on the myth of its own fairness in order to survive and in actuality many things that are theoretically achievable under this system are actually impossible for reasons that are deeply rooted in the nature of the system. Most of those involved in the Palestinian solidarity movement are various shades of radical Left and it is in our nature to look to what should be rather than to just go for whatever bad compromise can be extracted from the current system. It is for this reason that asking us to abandon the idea of the only good solution to the Palestinian issue is never going to work.
At the end of the talk I went up to Professor Finklestien and tried to put some of this to him in a nice way while I was getting my copy of his book signed. I made the point about international law that in Irish history we had a situation with regards to our national question where by the middle of the nineteenth century the case for an Irish home rule parliament had been won in Ireland and to a large extent in Britain too. It was a contentious issue among the imperial ruling class but the majority of polite society were on the side of what was called “home rule” with the first bill being put to the British parliament in 1886 and while it was narrowly defeated most people knew that some form of self government for Ireland was an inevitability. And yet Ireland did not achieve any form of self government until four decades later and that was after a revolution and the entire world being turned upside down by the First World War. I asked him that considering that we are living through a time when the entire edifice of American capitalism is hitting the wall to the extent that they may well no longer be able to afford to keep subsidising Israel and the middle east is being turned upside down by the Arab Spring, why accept a deal based on yesterdays realities when who knows where we’ll be in six months time?
He smiled sadly and said that he thought that even to get a two state solution would take a revolution.
Personally I’m not so hopeless for the situation in Palestine. I believe that there is a future where Israel goes the way of other racist imperialist colonies, from the first Crusader kingdom in the holy lands in the middle ages to the European colonies in Africa and be wiped off the map, its institutions dismantled and replaced with something not based on racism and the god given right of some of its citizens to the land. To paraphrase Haile Selasie (via Bob Marley), until that philosophy that holds one people superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned then everywhere is war. Until there are no longer first or second class citizens, until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed this is a war. And until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a dream, a fleeting illusion to be pursued but never achieved.
This isn’t an ideological shibboleth, it’s just a self evident fact. A state based on Zionist principles will never be a good home for its Muslim and Christian Arab populations and conflict will be inevitable. As an activist though, if ending Zionism means working alongside people who are for a two state solution either as a short term solution or a final settlement then I am happy enough to do so and organise on the basis of mutual respect. I will be prepared to argue the case for a one state solution with them but it should not be a pre condition for joint action. It is sad that in Palestine itself there are few looking towards that future but things are tough out there. That debate has to take place somewhere though and if it is here among the international solidarity movement that it has to happen then so be it, maybe that’s what our job is now, to be the imagination of the struggle and to hang onto the idea that another world is possible and maybe the road to it lies through Tahir Square, through the occupy movement and whatever may come out of that.
Welcome to part 4 where in the best traditions of story telling I've saved the best material for last.
Flourescent Grey – Chicken Hypnotism
This is a track from my album of the year.
The whole album was put together from old pieces of electronic music from the history of electronica, every sample is taken from something between the years 1955-1984. It’s all put together into techno. Its great stuff, I like it because I find you can dance to it or have it on as some classy sounding background music or its quite rewarding if you sit and listen to it. Because it uses all old samples it has a kind of oldish sound but it sounds quite fresh in the way it’s put together, actually timeless. It’s my default thing to put on if i just want something nice to listen to and its one that I like introducing other people to. I remember the night of the election this year, me and our candidates’ brother went out partying to celebrate and we ended up back in the kitchen in our house listening to this just the two of us. Good times.
The other really nice thing about it is that it’s available for free. I heard about it because it’s from an online label called Acroplane run by a friend of mine, local electronic music legend Paul Moore (who also DJs under that name). The label he runs has a really interesting selection of stuff through many different electronic genres; Breakcore, Hip Hop, IDM, through to this sort of thing which you could kind of class as techno and beyond into stuff that defies traditional categorisation.
To me this is emblematic of the full potential of the internet being realised, a lot of time and dedication has built a respected platform for artists who the major labels wouldn’t look at and all of it available either for free or at least for a reasonable price. It’s stuff like this that is slowly breaking down the hold of the big multinationals on music. You ever wonder why nearly all the music in the charts has been shit for about the last decade? It’s because thanks to file sharing the profitability of mainstream chart music has been decreasing so they’ve been pulling out all the stops to make their money back. It’s the same process that has been going on in the film industry. Small labels like Acroplane that are realistic about the current state of our entertainment industry are also part of that process and point towards the possibilities of how things could be.
Loops haunt – Joplin
One of the nice things about being into a particular music scene is the people that you meet. Having a shared passion can be a great bridge to connecting with other people. When you have an appreciation for a genre just seeing someone’s iTunes selection can tell you a lot about them. When me and my sister were over in Manchester one of the girls we were staying with let me use her laptop. While on it I couldn’t help but have a wee nosey at her music collection. The first thing i noticed was that it was all in good order and properly labelled, full albums and EPs., no wee individual rouge tracks janking the place up. What also struck me though was the quality of the music, it was all either proper classics, like Billie Holiday, good hip hop, or quality IDM, Boards of Canada, Boxcutter etc. I was impressed, this was clearly the music collection of someone who really knew their stuff so when I came across a small selection of tracks by an artist I hadn’t heard of I knew it was going to be good so I had a listen and it was absolutely mind blowing. And that is the story of how I discovered Loops Haunt.
This is some fairly experimental stuff from the outer fringes of what I would like and consider listenable, but for all that it is absolutely genius stuff and completely worth checking out. Each track is completely unique, a wee journey in its own right. The production is really sharp and all the different sounds have their own complete texture. The tunes are so precise and seemingly effortless in the way it all comes together that you can only imagine the hours days and weeks of fine tuning that it must have actually taken to put it all together. This is real sonic artistry and I feel privileged to have heard it. The rave at The Warehouse Project proved to be somewhat disappointing but the crack and the company of the people we met over there more than made up for it.
Adi Sharma – Shifting Patterns
I had the pleasure of meeting Adi at a friend’s house after a rave that never happened that they were supposed to be playing at hit the wall and they ended up just bringing the equipment back to hers and setting up for a wee private one there with the promoter and some of their mates. I found Adi to be quiet, personable and like anyone with any real talent, quite disingenuous about it, but obviously quite smart. He lives down in Dublin where he’s studying music and in between studying, DJing Psy and D&B and constructing this sort of thing which apparently is a physical representation of how music works) makes this stuff. This is some very deep interestingly dark down tempo dub that brings in aspects of Adis’ Indian heritage and some really nicely produced breaks and other sounds. This is quality stuff and really deserves to get a hearing, so I’m glad to see that he’s been getting some airplay on Bobby Frictions on BBC radio’s Asian network, which hopefully means that he’ll get picked up by some label and will be getting his stuff out there to a wider audience.
Kiani – Hippocampus Hippocampus by Kiani
This is some more of me plugging music by people I know (which was always a bit of a tradition on my old mix CDs for the Warseer Mixtape projects of old so it’s nice that i can continue to keep it up now). Katrina is a one of the most interesting people in Belfast at the minute. Over the time I’ve known her, about a year and a half now I think, she’s been making a few waves locally, notably playing a brilliant set at the New Years Eve gig in Mynt last year and winning the Lap Off at the menagerie last summer. This track is an example of the sort of well put together techno that has a really rich sound. It’s very chilled and like the Loops Haunt tracks it takes you on a wee journey. Another thing I like about it is the nice subtle use of the Nina Simone sample. It’s just sophisticated elegant music for people who are capable of appreciating it and I hope that at some point in the future it will get the sort of exposure and audience it deserves.
Orphx - Your Blood my Blood
I’ve said earlier among these blog entries that i’d kind of gone off industrial. This was sort of true, listening to other better made dance music had sort of convinced me that a lot of the stuff that i had previously enjoyed, with the flush of newness off it, just wasn’t that great. Some people do refer to a lot of the stuff that gets played in the sort of industrial nights I would go to disparagingly as cheesey Hard-Style, in other words slightly inferior dance music for a different social scene. Personally I would say that there is an element of truth to that but that’s scenes for you.
That said, the core notion at the heart of industrial, making music from the sounds of heavy industry and, these days, the static and computer sounds of the information age, is still something that appeals to me. Actually, finding a really obscure piece of Yugoslav Futurist industrial from the 1980s called Nehaj by a collective called SAT Stoicizimo renewed my faith in the genre early last year just as it was flagging. But, then I had new worlds to explore and finding the good industrial could wait until later.
Later came in the autumn. I was stuck in bed sick for a couple of weeks with only my laptop and web connection for company, but generally speaking that’s all I need so it was sweet. For some odd reason despite having a banging head ache all I wanted to listen to was really heavy abrasive music. So, taking a band called Heimostat Yipotash I had heard at infest doing some really interesting experimental stuff (with a lot of bass in it) as a starting point I took a wander through the industrial and dark electronic i could find and came up with a whole raft of music that was extremely good that I had never heard before.
Orphx were a group that I came across relatively early in that little phase of exploration. It was exactly what i was looking for, dark, atmospheric, complex, sophisticated and fucking harsh when it got going. I was in love, I downloaded what I could find for free, loved every single track, then felt a little guilty for doing so (which isn’t like me) so I found their website and bought some of their merch and I intend to just buy any new releases they come out with.
I remember playing this for a few mates and their German friend chimed in that “it has the sounds that make me want to kill myself”, to which I replied, “too right it does, that’s what I like about it”. I’m not actually sure what parts of the music he was referring to, maybe the distorted voices that sound like they might be coming from some sort of tannoy, the siren like oscillations or the harsh white noise-y stuff, or indeed all of it, but I appreciate the sentiment and I know what he means. One thing he couldn’t have been talking about was the Bass, if you blast this track somewhere with a good sound system, bass amplifier and /or sub woofer it brings out all that richly textured stuff going on in the lows (something you get a lot of with Orphx ). This is music that is composed from the sonic elements of late capitalist civilisation, as authentic an expression of our modernity in art as you’re going to find, as real and true to our experience of day to day life as folk music was to pre-industrial generations, or as tribal music is to people living out in the jungles. It doesn’t seek to mystify or provide escapism or hark back to a different place or time, it just reflects. That’s why I love it.
Iszoloscope – In the Other Mind of Us
This, if i was making music myself this is what I would be making. Out of all the groups I came across on my little journey of re-discovery Iszoloscope was the group that I could most identify with in terms of my own musical tastes as they have developed thus far. It should be obvious from the above how much I like industrial, if you’ve been paying attention so far you’ll have picked up that I do have a wee thing for Breakcore and Iszoloscope are an extremely happy marriage of the two.
This track has all the elements that I like about Iszoloscopes’ music. They do also do some stuff that is just straight-ahead 4/4 time banging Powernoise, the sort of thing that wouldn’t sound out of place alongside some Asche or Converter, which all sounds absolutely class, but it’s this breaky stuff that I like because to my mind there needs to be someone doing this. From the atmospheric build up over the Terrance McKenna-esque sample at the start into the distortion and percussion it all sits together really well. This is obviously clever, deep music that does some very interesting things in terms of building a soundscape and you can rave to it. Immense.
Noisia - Could This Be
This is my track of the year. It was one of those ones that crept up on me until it became an obsession and I just had to keep rinsing it out repeatedly and it currently stands as the most played track in my iTunes. I think now that in hindsight I understand why.
2011 was a strange year for me, in some ways it was the best year on my life and yet it saw some of the hardest times that I’ve had over the last couple of years. It was intensely up or down with very little in between and one shift up or down didn’t wait on the other. The most extreme example of this was over the summer when one of our friends died under extremely tragic circumstances, then not two days after the funeral got news that my mate who had been in jail as a political prisoner for two and a half years (including a lengthy spell in solitary confinement) in Iran had been randomly released from custody. As i say that was the most extreme example but that was the pattern pretty much all year, in my working life, social life, personal relationships and things in general.
I think that is the reason why when I heard this tune for the first time near the end of the year (which I think was when Kris Kodine dropped it in his set at the DSNT Belfast Electronic Festival in November) that something in it spoke to me. At the start of the track when the tune seems to be training forwards, almost like its being restrained, then it gets up a bit and sort of comes together but not quite, then the beats come in and it gets going, then the drop comes and its all flowing and pumping along nicely, then it slows down again an limps home kind of awkwardly. I don’t know if it’s just me but there’s a strange sense of loss and sadness at the end as it fades out, yet its quite a beautiful song, well as beautiful as drum and bass gets.
Even aside from my personal affinity with this song there is a lot to like about it. Just on a technical and aesthetic level, I’ve worked this song into Drum and Bass sets when I’ve been practicing and it is interesting what it does to the flow and pace of a set without breaking tempo too much. The production on it is really good, the drop in particular I’ve heard described by Kris as “just so commercial D&B, but it works”. The tensions and dissonance that make the song what it is themselves contrast with the clean clear sound of it, quite unlike the murky darkness of the D&B I usually like.
In short, it’s an interesting wee tune that for various reasons will probably be the song that I remember when I look back on this period of my life.
Well that concludes our musical jaunt through my 2011. I’m not sure where I’m going next with this blog now but I have a few things in mind to do and there’s so much going on politically that the next thing I write for it I’ll probably be going all Lenin’s Tomb on you, which will hopefully be very soon.
Welcome to part three, wherein i take a tour through some of the electronic music that has defined my 2011. This is an exciting time for electronic music and I’ve been lucky enough to have been around people who make the local electronic music scene. When you’re lucky enough count promoters and producers among your friends it gives you a good insight into the genre and this list reflects taste of the people i’ve been knocking about with as much as my own.
Noisia - Machine gun (16 Bit remix)
This in one I always like to stick on at parties, particularly when theres a good bass amp or sub woofer on the houses sound system. This is just all about that drop. The song is called Machine Gun and this out of all the various remixes of the track this one lives up the name the most. When I hear it i have visions of the Terminator films. The start is a dark menacing build, a circling Hunter-Killer against a black red sky looking for its target, stalking it down, growing in intensity up to the drop. The drop is amazing, hard as fuck and heavier than metal. If you want to know what the term “Drop” means in the context of electronic music this song should tell you exactly what it is. To me is sounds like a whip made of shards of broken metal being cracked over and over, or a metal terminator skeleton unleashing a clip from a ridiculously elaborate sci-fi machine gun. Then after the brutal assault of the first drop it fades out back to the stalking brooding feel of the into, circles one and goes back in for the kill again.
Huoratron - $$ Troopers
2011 marked a bit of a break for me in a lot of ways. One of the things was a move away from some of the electronic music I’d been listening to for the last couple of years. The sort of industrial, EBM and aggrotech that I had been into has become to seem a bit crap to me, like I’ve outgrown a lot of it. That said I still like the notion of the industrial sound, i.e. compiling music out of harsh metallic sounds, the sort of thing that runs counter to melody and smoothness. That’s one of the things i like about Machine Gun and it’s a sound I like to hear in the sort of dubstep, D&B and Hardcore stuff I listen to. This track is another that I think sounds very “Industrial” and wouldn’t sound out of place in a set with a lot of noise (in fact it was my intention to play this in my training set for my friend Tracey’s Goth club night Cornucopia). I like the use of the harsh distortion, white noise and grinding bass and the way they contrast with the chip music-y stuff going on in the highs and its got a good wee beat to it. Oh and the video is excellent too.
Dirtyloud (feat. Sirreal) – Needle
I came across the above track when i was looking at who was playing the Bangface Weekender music festival that I went to last year. Unfortunately as much as I loved that track I missed Houratrons set as he was on at the same time as Otto Von Shirac. One set I did see that I wasn’t expecting much from but ended up really liking was Jackal and Hyde. They did well coming straight on after Kanji Kinetic and keeping the general energy level up. They kicked off with this track and as soon as the vocal came in (particularly the “lickin’ the floor / kick in the door” rhyme) I was loving it.
This hard electro stuff is sometimes hated because people that don’t know what they’re talking about call this dubstep just because it has a drop, I think it sounds more like bassline (which we’ll get into in a minute) but however you define it, it’s fun party music with a bit of a bang to it. I remember dancing to it in a fairly excited way and actually going straight over on my arse. Good times.
Kanji Kinetic + Submerse – NERV
Bassline has featured a lot in my musical intake over the last year. Belfast was fairly quick to get onboard the whole bassline thing with Kris Kodine booking Squire of Gothos for Bad Taste about two years ago and Kanji kinetic playing Pressure at about the same time. The whole bassline / Mutant Bass seems to be taking off now the way Dubstep did about 5 years ago. What it is essentially, is a distillation of all the fun party music of the last twenty odd years into a bouncy distorted whole. It is unpretentious fun music to rave to. I like this song (which is available to download for free from the record label’s own website with many other EPs full of good stuff) because it shows one extreme of the music with its soaring strings and general epic feel before it sinks into something more ravey with bass and chip music elements coming in, then integrating the two aspects of the music.
Tempa T - Next Hype (2 Bit Thugs re-rub)
From the loftyness of the last track this bassline track takes us down into the very grime of the streets with some actual grime. This is a remix of the Tempa T track is unusual in that for once the hyperactive wobbly bassline has to compete with something that’s at least as interesting going on right on top of it for your attention, a sick nasty bit of Grime spitting about being a hood and running around robbing people. Actually you could equally say that this is a solid dirty bit of road rap that for once has to compete with the sick, wobbly bassline and breaks that are at least as interesting as Tempa T’s abrasive flow. As much as they compete the two things just go together so well. I heard this for the first time at the Belfast Electronic Festival in January last year, and I remember loving it then and loving it again when the boys from Pressure played it in the dance music tent at the Jigs and Rigs festival on Rathlin. Then I was really happy when they posted a recording of that set to their mixcloud complete with the tracklist so i could get the name of the song and the specific remix (t here are quite a few but this one is definitely the best). I’m not the only one out of my crowd that remembers this, when I had the name of the song I found it online and posted it to my mate Chris’s facebook, his exact words I think were, “that track saved my life on Rathlin”. I don’t know exactly what he meant by that but its an absolute banger and i could well believe it.
Techdiff – Eat Drink Fuck
In 2011 there were a few things that were a part of my life that I decided to put behind me. Some i just put behind me one day without thinking about it and didn’t realise I had until later, some I struggled to get shot of and some I thrust away with ease and great relief. One thing, possibly the first thing, was my account on the web forum Warseer.com. This was a site I was on for about 5 years, has a paid subscription for because i wanted to support it, made numerous friends on and was a valued member of that community. My account was suspended due to some overzealous banning by a site moderator called t-tauri. I was given warnings and points on my account for really silly minor infractions by that same moderator. I suspected there was some sort of agenda there, that he had something personal against me, but I never got to the bottom of it. The thing he finally got me on was posting a link to this track that contravened the forum rules because it had the word fuck in the title, even though I had the word fuck partially obscured in the title of the link on the web forum and the word fuck doesn’t appear in the song. I challenged him to explain himself but he never did.
Anyway this is a cracking tune and I stand by it. It’s one of the first pieces of breakcore I came across when I started getting interested in it, It kicks off with an anti capitalist sample (well something to do with corporations anyway) and goes into some breaky ragga-core and keeps hitting hard. I liked it as soon as I heard it and it cemented my interest in the whole sub-genre.
Aaron spectre – You Don’t Know
Breakcore, the sound that brings joy to my heart. If you listen to this and the last track you can hear the essential elements that make Breakcore what it is. All that hyperactive percussion going on in and around the basic beats, that’s breakcore. All those drum loops and cracks and beats around a central rhythm or some sort of more traditional tune structure. Although this genre started off as a progression from Jungle and most of the tracks were based around old tunes with a Jamaican sound to them you can do this with just about any form of music by putting beats in the space between the notes. Venetain Snares does it with Classical music and old Jazz, Igorrr does it with Baroque chamber music, the Teknoist does it just around aggressive bass and Aaron Spectre does it around Heavy Metal on his side project ‘Drumcorp’ and here around an (absolutely banging) old Punk track. There are many more examples of what you can do, stuff like Otto Von Shirach that transcends any previous notions of what music is supposed to be.
It is this music along with Hardcore, dubstep and bassline that are the living practice of post modernism in music. This is the destruction and recreation of the elements of music, detachment from notions of rhythm, consistency and tune. This is something that has been going on in electronic music since the Black Ark studios on Jamaica created dub and all through the history of hip hop, rave and all forms of electronica. It’s the perfect expression in musical form of the post modern condition and the fractured nature of our lives, labour and consciousness under the conditions of late capitalism. Maybe it’s because of my own revolutionary politics but I genuinely feel that this is revolutionary music, if not the actual music of revolution. Its taking the things from popular culture and showing how false they are by recreating them harder and spikier. If its not the actual process of liberation itself then it is at least the necessary destruction that must occur before the process of rebuilding can begin.
Well, that was part 3. The fourth and final part will see some of the hard experimental down tempo stuff I have come to like, me plugging some of my mates stuff, the sort of music i would be making if I knew the first thing about how to produce and the track which to me sums up my year.
This is Part 2 where i look at some of the folky and rocky stuff i've been listening to over the last year, for part one and a general explanation of what this is about see:
Alison Kraus and Union Station - Dust Bowl Children
This is some proper ye-ha music. Bluegrass and the sort of pan European folk tradition that this music harks back to is the original dance music. Back in the day before raves they had barn dances, ceilis or whatever it was called in the native language and they got fucked on homemade drink and raved to the fastest danciest shit they could beat out on their acoustic instruments. I actually think that this track and the one following has more in common with the stuff in the next two parts than anything in the first two. I like this track particularly because it has a bit of soul to it and the vocals from Dan “I actually sang all that stuff in O Brother Whereart Thou” Tyminski give it a real bit of depth. I also find it interesting that in the midst of a global economic crisis we’re getting a revival in the musical aesthetic of the great Depression years, something that is explicitly referenced in the lyrics of the verse from the original version of this song that wasn’t used in this one.
Cave Singers – Dancing on Our Graves
A nice stompy marching beat around which everything else builds, then drops and builds again then the lows drop out and come back in etc. You see, this shit was the techno of its day. Hmm, maybe this year i’ll teach myself how to use Ableton just so I can make a whole album of electronic remixes of this stuff just to prove the point. Anyway, I don’t know much about the band, just found this on a random spotify adventure (which is what i call it when i surf through spotify using the related artists tabs in the right hand corner) loved it and a few of their other tracks and its stuck since.
Lightning Dust – Listened On
Ah, what can I say about this lovely smooth bit of psychedelic rock. It’s just so chilled and easy, makes me wish I could still get stoned so I could just spark up, bang this on in a loop and mellow out. It’s so sweet and warm it just takes you away. I love the vocals too, they have a kind of strength to them and carry a lot of emotion very easily. It’s so hazy and evocative I feel like i’m living someone else’s life for a few minutes when I’m listening to it, a strange nostalgia for things that never happened.
Keli Ali – The Savages
Apparently this girl is at the forefront of a gothic neo-folk revival. I should hope so, this is absolutely amazing. Reminds me of pre-modern folk music, but also a little bit of Forever Autumn from The War of the Worlds (which I love btw. I used to rinse it out after I stopped toking and dedicate it to the hashish I could no longer smoke). I know that this is girly as hell but its all so lyrical and dark, there’s a real intelligence in the lyrics and that wee girl has some pipes on her to carry so much in the precise and controlled way she sings. I just like the dissonance between how old it sounds and how modern its sensibilities are. It has the chilled out-edness of the trip hop that Keli Ali comes from (she used to be in Sneaker Pimps) and that dark gothic sound. Nice.
Sebadoh – On Fire (acoustic)
Ah the wonders of the internet, you can catch up with half remembered obscure shit you heard about when you were a kid but never had the connections or the money to pursue back before you had access to literally everything. I vaguely recall reading about Sebadoh in a magazine that my cousin Roisin left in our house when she was a student and I was a mere first or second year at Lagan which was a student’s special and was sort of my awakening to the adult world. More on that issue of DV8 another time maybe, but I recall reading about this band and thinking they sounded class way back in the early 90s when they were going. Something put this into my head recently and I started looking for them online. I found a lot of their stuff and it seems like my nascent musical instincts were right, they were actually quite good, sort of came up through the same rock scene as REM and Dinosaur Jr. but were not quite as big, and definitely didn’t make much of an impact on this side of the Atlantic. I don’t listen to a lot of indie anymore, actually finding these guys and listening to Pulp doing the festivals again this year and still sounding awesome made me wonder if i wasn’t missing out so I went on a trawl through the 90s indie scene on Spotify and I concluded that with the exception of Mercury Rev and a few individual tracks here and there, I was quite right to dismiss the whole thing as shit and that actually Oasis were damn lucky to do as well as they did.
All the rest of it notwithstanding, these guys were genuinely special and this track in particular is fucking cool. They could go from really nice stuff like this to harsh experimental tracks like monochrome set at their most artsy and obtuse. Great stuff but i don’t know why they were never bigger over here but there you go.
RSAG – Stick To Your line 1-02 Stick To Your Line by Rarely Seen Above Ground
I did make it to a few good festivals this year but i didn’t go to any of the big ones. I generally don’t go to any of those ones, I’m way to much of a closet hipster for that shit and it’s expensive as fuck. I probably ought to have gone to Electric Picnic though, from what I saw of this years it looked class, not even for the headliners but for all the other stuff and the small up-coming acts playing you could have had a blast without even seeing any of the big names. I was torturing myself by looking at the line up for this years when it was just about to happen and when i had no hope of getting a ticket when I saw these guys, a new band from down south that happen to sound like Joy Division, Pere Ubu and all that other post-punk new wave-y shit that I like. I actually think I did a double take when I heard this track, it just sounds so much like something from that era. It sounds fresh too, like as I’ve said a few times I don’t listen to a lot of indie but this sounds different to anything else at the minute, as much as it’s a little derivative of some earlier stuff, its all good stuff that he’s riffing off and nobody else right now seems to be tapping that particular seem.
Ice Age – Collapse
I heard about these guys in an article from the magazine of the rouge IS section over in the states. Basically the jist was that all the stuff coming up and being bigged up by Pitchfork was politically suspect and wouldn’t it be nicer if the new music that was emerging during the crisis had a more overtly lefty political content. Personally as a member of the Irish SWP i found the whole thing cringe inducing. You can’t just damn music based on its perceived political content, i hate people on the left getting on like that about music, the first thing I did when i read the article was listen to the two acts they were criticising on Spotify. And as it turns out they were actually quite wrong about Iceage. I can see why they were worried about the band possibly having some far right affiliation, but there is nothing in the actual music or the lyrics of the songs that actually supports such the idea. The worst you could say is that they’re a-political. The lyrics have no real reason to them, they’re just evocative words that frame and support the music with no meaning of their own. The music itself is really good though, it’s all done in a raspy raucous style, kind of libertines rough with harsher stuff coming in and most of the songs come in at under two and a half minutes, as it should be. It has a real energy to it too. No filler, not even on individual tracks, how often can you say that? Really good accomplished stuff considering how young these lads are. As for their political affiliation, one ill advised Death In June tattoo notwithstanding (though i find all that 3rd position queerism stuff too idiosyncratic to be taken seriously), they have toured with some quite serious antifa affiliated punk bands who wouldn’t have them anywhere near them if they truly believed they were crypto-fascists. It’s that sort of detail you want to actually look at when you’re talking about a musical acts politics rather than sifting through their actually meaningless lyrics looking for clues.
Foetus – Time Marches On
Apparently Foetus are supposed to be an industrial band. I dunno, they neither look nor sound that industrial-y to me (depending on how you define what industrial is, which is probably a topic for a different blog) I mean this has pianos, swooping orchestral violins and shit in it. And yet, they get remixed by Ambassador 21 (this actual track come to think of it) and I’ve heard Matt ‘Caustic’ Fanale refer to them as an industrial band and he should know since he’s been near single handedly redefining what industrial is for the last couple of years. It’s really idiosyncratic industrial at least.
Whatever it is this is the very definition of pumpin’. It has so much life and fun in it and it bangs like a shithouse door in a hurricane. You can dance your wee dick off to it. I have done, frequently. Class tune.
Anyway, on that note I’m going to leave it. join me next time when I look at some of the electronic I was listening to this year, seven absolute bangers from a couple of different styles of electronica.
