On Wed, 5 Jul 1995, Pete Ashdown wrote:
quoted 25 lines deepforest-- some 1 PLEAZ review thee new album.> >>deepforest-- some 1 PLEAZ review thee new album.
>
> >a statement of fact:
> >I own a (very small) record store where it is our policy to let people
> >listen to an album before purchasing it. I have yet to sell one copy of the
> >new Deep Forest. I sold plenty of the first one. Draw your own conclusions...
>
> My short review:
>
> TELL THOSE DAMN BULGARIANS TO SHUT UP! Yabble yabble yabble. This album has
> some of the most annoying singing I've ever heard. The only relief is when
> they bring back the pygmies for a short period on one track. I've been a big
> fan of the Bulgarian Women's Choir for a long time, but the Deep Forest guys
> must have been bothering the wrong people on "Boheme" because they only
> succeed in making music that literally causes you to cringe. I believe that
> the only sample subjects they were able to find in the region were either
> vagrants, senior citizens, and/or victims of severe indigestion. 1/10
>
> Track in the spotlight: "Ya Ya Ya Ya" with some geezer screaming "Yayayayayaya"
> for what seems like an eternity.
>
> Suggestion for Deep Forest III: Sample streetwalkers and loonies from the good
> ol' US of A. Construct a song centered around a "Coca chiva, what u want?"
> sample.
>
I refuse to get the album because I think the whole project is a really
explioitive neo-colonialist hunk of shit. The idea of taking all these
voices and decontextualizing them and then placing them within a feel
good "multi-cultural" context is really problematic, especially since the
perpetrators are French and in no way make reference to the very real
relations of power that france has and in many ways still has to North
Africa and the continent in general. Further, because there is a real
attempt I think
not to place these people in their own very contemporary moment but to
"primativize" them and through them, I think I'm safe in saying, that
we're supposed to have some experience of immediacy or connectedness to
our tribal roots. I bet there's even quotes from Carl Jung on the liner.
I think that if ambient techno want to discriminate itself from new-age
music it should seperate itself from new-age ideology- as far as I'm
concewrned I'd shelve Deep Forest in the bin with Kitaro and Yanni.
In general, one of the reasons why I'm interested in new techno is its
utopianism and also its lack of sentimentality. In reaction to the dismal
years of grunge rock which was supposed to be the voice of my generation.
Grunge it seems participated in a sort of nihilist parody of Punk which
at least took its despair as a sort of political statement where grunge
thought that it had enough distance from politics that it didn't have to
worry (which I think it did- i.e. it was a marketing invention based on
"local culture" of the Seattle area, whereas punk was a problematic
consequence of real cultural reactions (both progressive and reactionary)
to class violence. But just in general, I think recent techno in general,
and in its relation to technology has a generally hopeful outlook, which
I don't embrace as universally good, but at this moment when there is so
much cultural cache to despair and hip ambivalence, I think that it is a
really important resource... even the repeated references to ufo's etc
particiapte less for me as part of that quasi-mysticism and more as a
general urge to see some possibilities in what we simply can't explain
for the moment, but may with some work understand in the future.
I really can's stop laughing at the samples on the black dog "spanners"
for instance which really show a sort of everydayness to this whole
phenomenon and at the same time capitalize on its fascination.
Again, in relattion to Techno-pop, which I still have a certain relation
to (I believe the term is eighties-damage), the new work seems to lack a
sort of sentimentality which sort of bled of "new romanticism". I see a
sort of criticality in Terre Thaemlitz (even if there is a sort of
pessimism as well) but also a sort of critcal position in the choice of
samples on the last three (or four if you count colours) CV albums- which
I think by the way are the best work they've done in a long long time
(especially conversation and International Language). The KLF (and
related projects) has also
made a sort of politcal statement out of their samples but I think it is
really more facil than what I see happening in CV. Actually, I wonder if
anyone else has some thoughts on where I might find more material to back
up some of my ideas on this.
Sorry this is a long post, but I'm rather excited to have somewhere to
put these thoughts which have been brewing a while. It seems like a lot
of traffic on this list is just footnoting new material and I've been
getting a lot of good suggestions, but I think this music, being
intelligent gives a lot to think about so I'm hoping some of you will be
amenable to pursuing some of this. I guess I still haven't really posted
an introduction to the list, but I guess you get a better idea of what
I'm thinking about and who I am from this than from my vitals and top ten
CD's anyway.
Seamus Malone
redye@amanda.dorsai.org
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