the Analogue Hour no. 53

The Analogue Hour on 2XM
Wed 7 - 8pm, repeated Sunday 12 - 1pm

16/12/09 Show no. 53 Playlist

1. Norway - Beach House - Teen Dream
2. Islands - The XX - The XX
3. Chase the Tear - Portishead
4. Cryptograms - Deerhunter - Cryptograms
5. Left For Dead - Hunter-Gatherer - I dreamed I was a footstep in the trail of a murderer
6. Fostercare - Burial - 5:5 years of Hyperdub
7. The Splendour - Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise
8. Down is Up - Moondog - The Viking of Sixth Avenue
9. Stick to my side (ft. Panda Bear) - Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise
10. Love Cry - Four Tet - There is Love in You
11. Hyph Mngo - Joy Orbison

Second Square to None

Ed Devane and Fionn Wallace by Melissa Conlon

The number of venues for experimental music in Dublin has always been limited, and with the demise of what once were regular Lazybird events in the International it became more limited still. Celebrating their first birthday on the 20th of December, the Second Square to None collective - who run monthly events in Twisted Pepper - aim to plug that gap by providing a forum for experimental and noise music - as well as ambient, downbeat, and electronica - in the city. To my mind, probably SSTN’s most exciting function lies in its offering a space for genres of sound that would otherwise languish unheard on the Dublin scene - one of those being noise.

Noise music’s first manifesto came from Luigi Russolo in 1913, who argued that ‘The limited circle of pure sounds [as produced by orchestral and other traditional instruments] must be broken, and the infinite variety of ‘noise-sound’ conquered’. This ‘infinite variety’ was explored in the twentieth century by artists from John Cage to Lou Reed to Merzbow (and many many more inbetween), but as the twentieth century bled into the twenty-first, and computers became ubiquitous, the ‘infinite variety’ has morphed into something more like ‘infinity squared’. Not that the genre was growing tired, in need of a shot in the arm, as it were, but the ubiquity of both the hard and software needed to mangle and mash audio meant that more and more artists began to play around at the boundaries of pure sound.

‘Noise music’ is a term that, while not quite defying explanation, certainly makes it difficult. The frequent ducking into parantheses and juxtaposition of binaries in essays on the subject suggests that the same inability to describe the sublime that has plagued theorists for decades (not that that’s ever stopped them) inheres to theories of noise too. As an example: ‘If noise is process, is always a becoming-noise - or, alternatively, (not) coming into (not) being as noise, this exclusion (what we take to be in the exclusion) is undone when noise ‘is’ as noise is the coming undone of noise/organised sound’. Which is a terribly erudite way of saying ‘Jezzus, I dunno’.

This difficulty in describing, or explaining, in a broad sense, what noise artists do was apparent when I sat down with noise duo FYED last week and made the mistake of opening the interview with the question ‘So what is it that ye do?’. The pause that follows is fully fifteen seconds long, according to my iTunes, and then Ed, in answering the question, elides it entirely.

FYED are Ed Devane (founder member of the Second Square to None collective) and Fyodor, or Fionn Wallace, militant noise merchant and one time drummer with the now defunct John and Mary Trilogy. As Ed Devane, Ed makes ‘a lot of dancefloor music’, but for Second Square to None, and as half of FYED, he welcomes the chance to play with abstract, noisey (sic) improvisation: ‘To improvise droney noisescape stuff is a welcome change from that, ‘cos that stuff is very unspontaneous’.

Noise music need not necessarily be improvised, but improvisation lies at the heart of much of it. There is a sense that, in rehearsing and recording, the anarchic, experimental impulse that lies behind it is lost, or at the very least tamed. For this reason, the flowering of noise music throughout the noughties can be seen both as a function of hardware ubiquity, as aforementioned, and the power of the internet to allow links between local scenes to expand exponentially, meaning the potential for live collaboration, and the experimentation that goes with that, has mushroomed. As Marc Masters writes on Pitchfork: ‘Often improvisational and rarely repeatable, noise depends on live performance, and local venues and communities remain its most fertile audio labs’.

Which is where Second Square to None comes in. It offers both the venue (The Twisted Pepper) and the social hub (both online at secondsquaretonone.com and in the real world) for experimental/noise artists to come together. There’s no such thing as a ‘typical’ noise artist, but Ed’s comment that, ‘We’re using machines in a way that they’re not really meant to be used’ is instructive. From Sonic Youth through My Bloody Valentine through Merzbow right up to Animal Collective, a fundamental guiding premise of noise music is that, first, anything can be an ‘instrument’, and second, any ‘instrument’ can be used any damn well way you please. This can have its pitfalls, as Fionn says, ‘With the noisier stuff it’s hard to know who’s making what sounds…sometimes we don’t know’. Ed continues: ‘Yeah, sometimes like there’ll be feedback noise and I’ll be like (to Fionn) ‘Make it stop!’ and then I’ll realise it’s me who’s making the sound’. Fionn: ‘He’s always quick to blame me’. Ed: ‘That’s cos it usually is you’.

Similarly, the boys go on, ‘(At our first gig) There was this buzz that was going all the way through that was a dodgy cable going ‘bzzzzzz”. ‘And nobody could tell we weren’t making it like’. Says Ed, ‘They were like ‘that’s good I guess”. Which leads to a possible charge against noise music: only the initiated could possibly understand it, and, equally, if not even the artists know what’s going on, then what’s the point?

To which charges I would point to what some writers have called the ‘ecstatic’ effect of noise music. All music has an ‘effect’, or, rather, is affecting (if we can rescue that word from its nineteenth century rosemantic connotations). We need not be connoiseurs to be moved by (some would say manipulated by) a John Williams piece. Similarly, one need not be a conoisseur to be moved by a noisescape. The difference, perhaps, is that the movement may be toward the commonly understood form of ecstasy (joyous, literally ecstatic) or toward a darker, more unsettling kind, or even some combination of the two. Use of the word ’sublime’ is dangerous (not least because it makes one think of a campy woman describing a cocktail), but we’ll take our chances here and quote Torben Sangild: ‘One of the reasons for the ecstatic effect of noise is its sublime character. The sublime is that which exceeds the limits of the senses, perceived as chaos or vastness. Despite our ability to put these words to it, the sublime goes beyond making sense - we never really understand it. The complexity of noise (in the acoustic sense) overloads the ears and the nervous system and is perceived as an amorphous mass, incomprehensible yet stirring. The delight of the sublime is the satisfaction of confronting the unfathomable’.

The magic of noise music is that it does not dictate a direction for our feelings - it doesn’t seek to make us happy, or sad, or excited, or anything else. It’s non-manipulative of our emotions. Because of this open ended nature, you don’t need to ‘understand’ what’s going on; to clock that there’s a broken cable creating a buzzy noise is fine if you do, but if you’re busily getting lost in the noisescape and don’t notice, that’s fair enough.

Many people hear the phrase ‘noise music’ and shy away (I know I certainly did, for a long time). Its Greek root is the word ‘nausea’, after all. But there’s nothing in the noise handbook that says it has to make you sick, or uncomfortable; nor does it have to break your ears. Ed points out something that did indeed put me off noise music for a long time: ‘That’s something that I’ve actually read a good few times, that noise..it’s this big macho thing, y’know, ‘I’m so hard I’m gonna go deaf in the next year or so”. He goes on, ‘That’s a load of bollocks really…that’s pointless’.

Which probably explains why I’ve yet to be to a Second Square to None event (all of which are in part curated by Ed) that makes my ears and nose bleed. Post-gig tinnitus has been thin on the ground. The noise - by artists like Ventolyn & Becotyde, Push Move Click, Keith Lindsay, Fyed, Boys of Summer, Uninerves, Magnetize and more - may be noisy, it may be loud, but it’s not macho posturing or undifferentiated aggression. And it does take you off to wide open spaces in your head. Plans are afoot to fill the dancefloor of Twisted Pepper with Buddha Bags for the next Second Square to None in mid-December so people can sit back, close their eyes, and float away, transported to (or at least near) that place, the sublime.

Second Square to None runs monthly, on Sunday afternoons, in the Twisted Pepper. The next event is Sunday 20th December; 3-7pm. The live stage will feature Legion of Two, Cignol and Ilex while the DJ room will see Fran Hartnett, Thatboytim and Swarm Intelligence doing their various things. Admission is always free. For more details, and to hear live-sets from previous SSTN events check secondsquaretonone.com

FEEDBACK Festival 2009 - This weekend in Whelans

8 bands and 2 DJs for €10 with all proceeds going to the Peter McVerry Trust, sounds good to me! As per the PMV website. “The Peter McVerry Trust supports young homeless people to break the cycle of homelessness and move towards independent living through the provision of a continuum of care services.” So needless to say, it’s a very worthwhile cause.

I’m particularly looking forward to catching Cap Pas Cap as hopefully they’ll be playing some new material from their as yet unreleased album, which is due out early next year I think. So pop along this saturday, enjoy some great music and support a worthy cause.

Grizzly Bear at Vicar Street November 1st

Analogue managed to blag the wonderful Cáit Fahey a photopass to Grizzly Bear at Vicar Street a few weeks ago. A little of the magic of that gig is bottled below… Highlights of the night for me included ‘Ready, Able’ and ‘He Hit Me’.

Analogue Episode 1

Analogue Episode 1 from Analogue on Vimeo.

Analogue is proud to announce the launch of Episode 1 of a new bi-monthly web series featuring interviews, music videos, short documentaries and live performances.
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Episode 1 running order:
Kronos Quartet & Wu Man interview
Interlude: Music vid for ‘Finds you’ by Patrick Kelleher
So Cow interview and performance of ‘Bat Toes’
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Directed by Graham Seely & Tim Gannon and produced by Brendan McGuirk
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All feedback welcome.

Hipster Youth

Nope this isn’t another blog post obsessed with laughing at or glorifying hipster kids. Hipster Youth is the re-incarnation of Porn.exe, a gameboy infused one man electronic outfit. Dubliner Aidan Wall is on a mission to reinvent the way in which we think about the modern 8 bit aesthetic. Crystal Castles it ain’t but there are some parts that I could see Timbaland potentially shoplifting for his next producer gig. Hipster youth is fun, intricate and at times emotive music. Hearse Road Trip is a free 6 track Ep that’s well worth checking out.

Download Hearse Road Trip

Launch of Analogue Episode 1

Analogue presents…
HUNTER-GATHERER

THE GREAT LAKES MYSTERY

ANGKORWAT

Screening of Analogue episode 1

Dj Karluss

@ the Joy Gallery, Rutland Place, Dublin 1
Thursday November 5th
Doors 7.30pm
Entry €5

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Analogue is proud to present of a screening of Episode 1, a brand new online music tv show featuring the Kronos Quartet & Wu Man, Patrick Kelleher and So Cow.

Following the screening Angkorwat, the Great Lakes Mystery and Hunter-Gatherer will perform.

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You can check out the pilot episode featuring Adrian Crowley, Jimmy the Hideous Penguin and Final Fantasy here.

Atlas Sound to play Whelans Nov 21st

Foggy Notions have just announced that Atlas Sound will be playing Whelans on November 21st with support from Hulk.

The last time I saw Bradford Cox play Whelans with Deerhunter was a bit weird. The setlist and performance was great, much better than their previous Andrews Lane show. What was weird eh? Just Bradfords between song banter, he seemed to be tripping balls. “Mellow yellow… I feel like I’m floating down a waterfall of pink candy floss” or something to that effect was proclaimed from the stage at one point. Then at another point Bradford seemed to get pretty irate when the audience wouldn’t describe their bedroom walls to him. It was a sunday gig, I wouldn’t have expected much in terms of crowd participation. Still a brilliant gig all in all.

I’m looking forward to hearing material from his new album ‘Logos’ live. I haven’t got the album yet but I have heard two or three songs from it. The title track and the track with Laetitia Sadier, Quick Canal are both perfect specimens of lush laid back indie. Oh and his collaboration with Panda Bear on Walkabout ain’t half bad either. You can download Walkabout over at the 4AD website.

Tickets for the Whelans gig are €13.50 plus booking fee from WAV Box-Office, Tickets.ie, City Discs, Road records, Sound Cellar, and Ticketmaster outlets nationwide. Logos is out on 4AD / Kranky now.

Win tickets to Heineken Expressions in Tripod tonight

Heineken Expression Dublin kicks off in Tripod at 8pm tonigh with In Flagranti, The Field, Sarsparilla, Donal Dineen and The Juan MacLean (DJ Set) all providing quality music. Visuals on the night come from TADO, Serge Seidlitz, Phil Dunne, Steve Simpson, Chris Judge, Gaetan Billault, BRENB and danleo. (You might remember Phil Dunne from the excellent Animal Collective illustration he did for Analogue at the beginning of the year.)

The event is free and you can register for tickets here. Heineken also gave Analogue 2 pairs of ticket to giveaway, so to avoid the hassle of registering and printing out tickets. The first two people to mail info at analoguemagazine.com with Heineken Expressions in the subject line will have to their names on the guestlist plus one for tonight. Winners announced by 5pm.

Analogue Hour no. 42

Here’s the playlist from last night’s show on 2XM. If you missed it you can tune in to the repeat on Sunday at noon. Heading off to Health now in the Village, should be earbleedingly good.

The Analogue Hour no. 42
Rain (live) - Woods - Play the Live Woods
Society Jam - Lovvers - Society Jam 7″
You’re a Target mp3 - No Age - Losing Feeling EP
Swords - Leftfield - Rhythm and Stealth
Die Slow - Health - Get Color
Deadbeat Summer - Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms
Psychic City (classixx remix) - YACHT - See Mystery Lights
Let the Right One in - Becoming Real
Saga (ft. Santigold) - Basement Jaxx - Scars
This New Technology - Midnight Juggernauts
Black & Blue - Miike Snow - Miike Snow
Ghostwriter - RJD2 - Dead Ringer
Rome (Neighbours ft. Devandra Banhart remix ) - Phoenix
Where is my mind - Pixies - Surfer Rosa

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