Wednesday, March 3, 2010

"self-copulation, record collection"



Involuntary posts by Tarwater #5

AC is proud to bring you another installment of involuntary posts by Tarwater, in which our accidental scribe addresses the new LP "Hidden" by These New Puritans. AC would like to give a shout out to DJ Slow for first pioneering the idea of disseminating Tarwater's funny, insightful commentary wholly without his consent.

"Most of the time, "English band receives mad critical love in England" = "enlarge your penis safely and naturally", as meaning and as news, but once in a while weird science makes a breakthrough I guess -- like with the 2nd record from These New Puritans. The first one was a quite good Fall/Wire/beats amalgam, but just-released Hidden is something else entirely. It's so singular in fact that in trying to describe it you(I) end up resorting to cumbersome critical portmanteaus like "if Liars listened to late-period Talk Talk and then found residence inside the PA at Brixton* basement party..." -- well, you still wouldn't really be there. What I can say: by song #2 you've heard a children's choir, a 13-piece woodwind orchestra and Japanese taiko drums**; the drums consequently, are HUGE - they sound like they wanna be scoring North Korean mass games; and in a interview before the record came out, the leader claimed he wanted something like "Steve Reich meets dancehall", paused, and then said "I've been writing a lot of music for the bassoon." Anyway.

*My London geography is practically non-existent - I'm taking this reference from the Clash and 80's British crime dramas (for all I know, Brixton could be Fort Greene by now) - so feel free to substitute any neighborhood where you'd hear a lot of dubstep/grime/dancehall.

Oh: subject heading is from The Fall's 'New Puritan': "I curse the self-copulation of your record collection."

3 comments:

dj slow said...

the saga of Tarwater's under-appreciated written works on sound continues.....

(PS: What happend to post # 4?)

William said...

Among Tarwater's effects one can find a space marked for a fourth post, in which nothing has been written. Some scholars argue that this is an intentional lapse, designed to mark the impossibility of all language, others claim that a grocery list written around the same time is really a draft for the post in coded form. Still others assert that he wrote the post but accidentally hit the 'delete' button.

the saucer people said...

What are word's worth....greetings from England and the ABC of ghetto psycho-geography.
Since the early & mid eighties riots, Brixton has become (like most of the inner London boroughs) quite gentrified as the middle classes moved in before the smoke had even settled & snapped up the then cheap housing and basked in the glow of a thousand government grants to open chic boutiques and continental style cafes.
Fast forward twenty years and its now a heavily stratified zone with the white middle-class and the black urban poor living uncomfortably in the same territory (of course I am generalising, there are affluent black families and poor white trash living there also along with a variety of races and cultures)
but you can still buy crack outside the tube station so some things remain the same.
If you want to conjure up the landscape of gritty urban decay against a dubstep/grime/dancehall soundtrack, "Hackney" is the place to drop, without a tube station, it has resisted the affluent influx that has invaded previously working class strongholds and is still a place of hard drugs, squats, dodgy clubs and general all round "badness"...having said that and on a "Fall" related theme, parts of Manchester such as "Hulme" (pronounced whum as in whom) or "Moss Side" piss on London for ghetto chic...
Actually, I keep forgetting, I live in one of the worst areas of the country apparently, "Hyson Green" in Nottingham (or Shottingham as its known by the locals for the amount of gun crime)
so thats another name to drop.

Funny, I am always fascinated by the ghetto areas of America, the Lower East Side in the seventies and eighties is a particular favourite as is Baltimore via "The Corner" & "The Wire"...I guess the grass is always greener or rather the ghetto is always meaner on the other side...