As a fellow writer, I'm intrigued by the fact that Mr. Echlin is getting
pieces such as this published in Village Voice. I think it's good to see
high-brow electronic music getting coverage in such a recognized
publication.
Furthermore, I like the fact that he raises the bar on how far he takes his
style, now that he doesn't have to dumb his thoughts down for
Mixer's.........pedestrian(?) demographic. Of course, I walk away from this
article thinking more about his writing style than his content -- could be
because of my role as a writer though.
Anyone have any other thoughts? Like him or hate him (sometimes I'm unsure
which side I prefer), I think Echlin is worthy of comment. Is he all talk,
style, and flowers? Or is he someone with something to say?
Jason Birchmeier
quoted 147 lines -----Original Message-----
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott boy [mailto:mckeating23@hotmail.com]
> Sent: Friday, August 04, 2000 8:35 AM
> To: idm@hyperreal.org
> Subject: [idm] Interesting article
>
>
>
> Rephlex Records Knocks Techno Off Its High Horse
> This Ain't No Disco
> by Hobey Echlin
>
>
>
> ith last year's swan-song-cum-video "Windowlicker," Richard "Aphex Twin"
> James retired from music-making, which was just as well. As electronic
> music's resident funnyman, he hadbecome more its Rich Little than
> its Andy
> Kaufman, shtickishly pantomiming his role in the usually humorless scene.
> First there was 1996's"Girl Boy Song," its spazzy breakbeat dry-humping a
> classical interlude, as much a punchline as an ersatz "Swan
> Lake." Then came
> his remix of Beck's "Devil's Haircut," rechristened "Richard's Hairpiece"
> after he stripped the low-end off and sped up the vocal to a
> grating ping of
> hi-hats. But "Windowlicker" was the crowning glory, its spare, rubbery
> rhythm serving up as good an excuse as any for a pimp-playing James and
> director Chris Cunningham to ride around in a block-long stretch limo,
> indulging and subverting T&A imagery like gender-challenging director
> Matthew Barney making a 2 Live Crew video: Teases of string-bikini-clad
> curves end up belonging to women that all have James's grinning, bearded
> mug. As the old Chas and Dave song put it, "Nice legs, shame about the
> face."
>
> But if James has moved into pop culture proper with his megabudget videos
> making fun of other megabudget videos, his Rephlex label carries on the
> Aphex Twin aesthetic on the underground techno front. Founded in
> Cornwall in
> 1991 by James and partner Grant Wilson Claridge, Rephlex
> (www.rephlex.com)
> has in the last few years shifted from its initial rave-era renaissance,
> when it boasted releases by Squarepusher and µ-Ziq, into its current
> post-rave, post-everything mannerist jag, putting out music by
> artists who
> sound as if their only contact with electronic music is from listening to
> squelchy ham-radio broadcasts in remote parts of the world: Ovuca in
> Finland, proudly representing North of the Arctic Circle with his chilly,
> scattered, free-range tundra-jungle version of soul music;
> Lektrogirl in her
> native Tasmania making infantilistic electro, from the sounds of
> it, while
> reading the software manual on her lap; Bogdan Raczynski in
> Poland or Japan
> or (judging from his album Thinking of You's poster insert) wherever he's
> wearing that flowered dress and pushing that shopping cart, with his
> battered laptop full of stream-of-consciousness bleeps and broken
> beats over
> which to rant about DJs and Ibiza, buoyed by the oddly
> sentimental segue of
> embittered lost love to lull him to sleep, those Brit bastards be damned.
>
> Then there's DMX Krew, who evidently have never heard music made
> after 1984,
> at least any made with guitar. This has yielded an alarmingly consistent
> string of albums-that-time-forgot that sound like the Monkees
> trying to be
> Kraftwerk: obliviously, and-your-point-would-be-edly reactionary,
> blissfully
> free of all that herky-jerky future-retro irony that fuels smirky
> neo-electroids like Add N To (X).
>
> Likewise, compared to the running commentary of IDM (so-called
> Intelligent
> Dance Music) about other, one infers, less-intelligent music (current IDM
> poster boy Kid 606's new offering scrambles N.W.A.'s "Fuck tha Police"),
> Like A Tim's Rephlex release Red and Blue Boxing seems beamed in
> from some
> parallel universe where laws of 4/4 tempo, melody, even simple coherence,
> sometimes brilliantly, usually annoyingly, don't apply.
>
> But as wildly varying as Rephlex releases are, they all share the naïve
> eccentricity of their label founder, so uncannily that if all these folks
> were really just elaborate aliases for James's own schizophrenic output,
> nobody would be shocked. But if it is all a joke, dance music,
> and music in
> general, is finally getting it. As lines blur between "good" and
> "bad" with
> the emergence of the so-bad-it's-good category of "amazing,"
> usually favored
> by brainy critics to excuse guilty-pleasure love of dumb rock,
> Raczynski is
> indeed amazing, fueled by a brave (everybody has those weird minutes
> squinting in the bathroom mirror half-singing embarrassing songs; only
> Raczynski makes albums of them) and occasionally shocking confidence (his
> misogynistic hate-rants against British consumerism have gotten
> him banned
> from England). Though inspired by dance music, he's free from its
> shackled-to-club-play tunnel vision, even if, for now, he's defined by
> itnot unlike the insanely un-punk Butthole Surfers playing hardcore-punk
> clubs in the mid '80s.
>
> James and Claridge themselves prefer to call their post-dance aesthetic
> "braindance." But as a recent spate of dance records exhibiting
> Rephlex-ian
> eccentricities shows, this post-dance "amazing"-ness is converging with
> dance music's need to find the funk in new ways. The best Detroit techno
> single in 10 years, the helium electro sex-up "Sandwiches" by
> Detroit Grand
> Pubahs, owes more to Dr. Demento than Derrick May, while techno
> granddaddy
> Sven Väth and France's Mr. Oizo have both released records of
> no-it's-not-a-joke kindergarten techno more kindred to Lektrogirl
> than Jeff
> Mills. Even house homeboy Armand Van Helden's new Killing Puritans album,
> with its street-person conspiracy theories, human beat-boxing,
> and rampant
> middle fingers to the dance status quo (in between requisite
> jiggy tracks,
> of course), sounds more like Bogdan Raczynski's Thinking of You,
> itself full
> of noisy beats and hilarious "Fuck you DJ" lines ("lazyass DJ
> shit . . . my
> dog could make better beats than you . . . and I don't even have a dog")
> than, say, the last Basement Jaxx record.
>
> Dance music more and more lets us down with tracky albums that bounce
> between ever more hermetically sealed genres. (Question for house
> producers:
> Is disco the only thing worth sampling in the last 25 years?) So
> when, after
> an afternoon of braindancing to Raczynski, a colleague of mine commented,
> "This is what your parents hear when you play them techno . . . a
> bunch of
> noise," all I could respond with was, "And your point would be?"
>
> Tell us what you think. editor@villagevoice.com
>
>
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