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H a r r i s o n & T r o x e l l
Aran M. Parillo------aran@hnt.com
# 2 Faneuil Hall Marketplace
Boston, MA 02109 (617) 523-7356
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 06 Jan 1997 15:26:19 -0400 (EDT)
From: Steve Hoey <HOEYST@hugse2.harvard.edu>
To: boston-raves@ccs.neu.edu
Subject: [Boston-Raves] "Blech" at Vinyl in the New York Times (long)
Hi everyone. I'm sending along a full review of Blech at Vinyl from the New
York Times. I was staggered to read a review of an event like this in "the
paper of record" for the USA...but I guess New York's media should be expected
to be way ahead of the rest of the nation's... At any rate, if anyone's
interested feel free to forward this to NE-Raves or anywhere else... Maybe
someone who knows more about hyperreal than I do might find an appropriate home
for this there as well.
This is reprinted without permission but with respect and attribution, so
please be kind :)
From the New York _Times_, Monday, January 6, 1997, Page C12, Column 3
pop review
AT VINYL, FAST-PACED TECHNO FOR DANCERS ONLY
by Ben Ratliff
The new electronics-based club music is all about liquidity, and
journalism is about solid blocks of text. So every clumsy attempt to affix
labels to the music's subgenres (Is electronica the correct umbrella term, or
techno? Is ambient techno related to trip-hop? What makes "intelligent dance
music"?) produces howling complaints from the figureheads of the scene, who
prize the movement's amoebic culture.
But only a dummy can't recognize intelligence. Blech, an
electronic-music party that takes place every other week in Sheffield, England,
was transplanted to New York for a one-shot evening on Friday night from 10 to
6 am at Vinyl. Warp Records, a leading imprimatur of what has been quite
rightly called intelligent dance music, sponsored the evening, and most of the
composers, performers and disk jockeys (some writers have taken to describing
them gingerly as "sound artists") were associated with the British label.
The blunt economic truth governing the evening was that Vinyl is a
dance club, not a salon for experimentation, and some of the regulars like
their techno straight: presumably, they couldn't have cared less about Warp's
crew of genre-stretchers.
So the music in the club's large room often approached the brutish,
thudding simplicity of the popular club music known as trance.
Autechre, an English electronica duo, performed a live set behind DAT
machines; there was some artful cross-fading and effects, but for the most part
it was fast, evenly paced, single-minded techno for dancers only. The large
floor was full, its occupants only visible by strobe-light and red, pinpointed
beams.
In a smaller room, after D.J. Frank O's turntable set of cocktail
exotica accompanied by a seminude dancer, Jimi Tenor began an act that was much
more personal. He is a small, slight Finn with oversized plastic-framed
glasses, and he wore a woman's pink bolero jacket over his bare torso while
performing a kind of smooth internationalist 1960's soul music.
There was Georgie Fame in his sound, and Sun Ra, too: as he sang the
melody in tandem with his organ and lingered over mantras like "Can't stay with
you, baby," he would periodically turn the echo control on his rhythm machine
to full, slamming a wrench in the groove and achieving an outer-space shock
effect.
There were no announcements and nothing like a schedule; attending an
electronica party is like swimming through a sea of rumor. It was known that
the Aphex Twin, whose real name is Richard D. James -- the brilliant rascal of
electronica, and one of its true artists -- would head the bill with a
disk-jockey set, but nobody had a clue when he would start. Gossip had it that
he came on at 3:30, and was stopped after 15 minutes by management because
regular patrons started to flee from his tortured, skewered beats.
At 5 A.M., Mr. James finally appeared behind the dark glass of the
raised D.J. booth, signaling his arrival with the sounds of a Ping-Pong game,
and produced music utterly different from what had come before. The dancing
mostly stopped as the floor reoriented itself; in his work there are so many
textures within a four-beat sequence that it stretches the brain and dancing
becomes an afterthought. An earth-shaking bass and a sampled siren copmpeted
over beats that sounded like spawning locusts; each measure of the music had
humor and personality, and a fading minority heard the best hour of the
morning.
[end of review]
Well I'm not sure how much in agreement I am with Mr. Ratliff, but I know he
got one thing *dead-on*:
"attending an electronica party is like swimming through a sea of rumor"
Cheers!
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Steve Hoey Internet: hoey@noiselabs.com
Chief Safety Inspector, n o i s e l a b o r a t o r i e s , i n c .
http://www.noiselabs.com
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