Crank

bass = discipline

two very different tracks, but the bass has the same kind of propulsive quality in each

Love Divine, All Loves Excelling

The Secret Life Of Arabia

Gothic architecture history can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire and the height of the Arab reign over the East. Christopher Wren (1632 - 1723), a multidisciplinary scholar and renowned architect, discussed these early origins and addressed the Muslim influence on its beautiful and intricate designs. Imprints of these Muslim designs later came to influence European and Western architectural ideas.



The origins of many structures can be found in mosques and palaces built during the Ottoman empire. Arabs of that time translated past Greek architectural influence into their own distinct style, a style that remains the origin of Gothic designs found in Europe, Africa and other countries. France was one of the first European countries to utilize the unique design, and it is said to be the place of origin for European medieval design. Stemming from France, the style developed and grew in new directions with the building of cathedrals and other Christian structures.



The origin of Gothic architectural design in the Arabian world began with a desire to create buildings and mosques that were different from churches and other western-inspired structures. Their ideas and inspirations produced excessive boldness, distinct sections of inordinate detail, and into designs with extreme delicacy and fancy patterns. Moreover, much like the beauty and passion the Arabs put into their poetry and literature, their architectural designs originated from a delicate taste of superfluous ornaments, extravagant detail and a desire to communicate to their audience a love for art and detail.



Meticulous detail and a dedicated attention to what would normally be missed at a quick glance was also, and still is, a trademark of the Gothic design that originated from the Arab world. Interestingly, today there is a heavy emphasis put on cathedrals and churches when referring to this specific design type. However; the distinctive detail and intricate nature is explicit and dominant in many of the mosques and palaces that were created during the Ottoman empire, and also during the reign of the Muslim empire in the east.

Malcolm In The Middle

Despite its bad press these days, through a perspective that binds it so closely to the ravages of neoliberalism, at the time I could feel the appeal of postmodernism. With youth and receptive innocence being so important to how we respond to pop music, the records below may represent the best examples of its overtly self-conscious, postmodern 80s variety. High-concept po-mo pop (including short-lived sensations like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, but mainly miserable failures like Sigue Sigue Sputnik) reached saturation point around mid-decade, with a plethora of acts borrowing their template for marketing gimmickry from Malcolm McLaren. The British music press between 1983-87 was full of talentless chancers armed with nothing more than a slogan, a haircut and gaudy graphic design. McLaren's role in the great punk swindle has been over-documented to death elsewhere (not least by himself), so perhaps it's time to view his entire career for what it actually was: a risky celebration of play for its own sake; the basic lesson any clever art school kid learns. It was all a game to McLaren and it was obvious that, unlike more famous contemporaries, he thoroughly enjoyed playing the overgrown child. The staged battles over his little pranks, the cod-situationist aphorisms, his many daft interviews, and his somewhat unsavory fixations (namely, a recurring focus on pubescent girls' sexuality) didn't take away from his cunning pop smarts. He acted as role model to all kinds of of zeitgeist-chasing wannabes, the vast majority of whom fell flat on their faces trying to emulate him. Maybe it was because they lacked enough conviction in their silliness.

Although already familiar with rap, watching the video for 'Buffalo Gals' on kid's TV or Top of the Pops brought home the (then) disconcertingly alien aspects of hiphop as a subculture. For everyone who saw it as a particularly annoying novelty hit, there just as many who saw it as heralding an important cultural shift. It paid more attention to hiphop's more avant-garde aspects than earlier attempts at appropriation by trad-bands like Blondie or The Clash, who couldn't escape obedience to the 'rock band' superego. With so many different voices moving in and out of his solo records, McLaren didn't feel as much need to constantly claim centre stage. He presented himself as just another character, leading the dance. True to the historical mix-n-match of late capitalism, the rhythmic juxtapositions and lyrics of 'Buffalo Gals' placed it in a continuum of earlier American folk-forms - pop culture as rest and recreation from matters of manifest destiny (the inherent violence of which played as much a role in hiphop's later development as it did in country and western decades earlier). To UK audiences at least, it briefly 'made strange' American popular culture; something that's rarely happened in the charts since the 80s. To many a young ear, it piqued our curiosity. It's still as oddly compelling as it was three decades ago.

Of course, a true postmodernist like McLaren didn't just use history for his box of Lego. He did similar with geography too. 'Double Dutch' brought together strands of the Black Atlantic diaspora, from the urban playgrounds of New York to the brutally oppressed townships of Soweto (the colonial allusions to both places are in the title). It used South African styles with less morose vanity than Paul Simon's more celebrated Gracelands, and with arguably more sensitivity to the political struggles at stake. Unlike more pompous 80s performers (some of whom are sadly still with us), it didn't wave these struggles around as flags of convenience. That would have been too redolent of grown-ups too self-important or pretentious to be 'in' on his big punk prank (I liked to imagine him using a hand-buzzer to shake hands with Richard Branson). He simply acknowledged that those struggles took place in a world we all shared. Despite the horrors of this world, there was still fun to be had in the most unlikely of locations. After all, kids can be skipping in South Africa as much they can in North America. In contrast to the 80s, we're now less likely to accept what po-mo sometimes justified its own existence with: The (perhaps vain) attempt to s(t)imulate empathy via the use of play between divergent cultures and time periods, that may otherwise have seemed distant from - or opposed to - each other. However limited this approach may have ultimately been, it was certainly less offensive than stadium pop turning clear and present political emergencies into promotional pieties, and much less pseudo-aristocratic as a creative space. Not so much we are the world as you are the world. It was a respite from cultural and historical context into something less antagonistic, stratified or burdensome. 

This was the stated purpose of McLaren's concept album Fans. It attempted that most po-mo of tricks; dated in the obviousness of its concept, yet an approach now commonplace beyond all novelty: Harmonizing the highbrow and lowbrow, by applying pop R'n'B production to opera classics. A gimmicky move, sure, and perhaps distasteful to more devoted fans of either. However, it managed to serve up one of the most sublimely ridiculous, memorable and weirdly touching confections to grace the 80s pop charts; while doing it on the safe side of embarrassment or pretension. It granted opera more dignity than FIFA ever did, anyway. When I hear 'Nessun Dorma' nowadays, images of a drunken Paul Gasgoine wearing plastic tits to entertain the lads are sadly unavoidable. McLaren's 'Madame Butterfly' conjured up something altogether more beguiling and evocative; fusing high'n'low with more panache than so many other 80s attempts. The knowing world-weariness of the lyrics worked well, emerging as they do from the cheeky innocence of its conceit. For all of McLaren's unashamedly gauche childishness, moving on from the confrontational aspects of his earlier projects was his way of growing up in public. He learned the basic lesson that so many of us do past a certain age: Pop music should be fun, it should be inclusive, and all the rest is propaganda. It's not there to feed the world, but it shouldn't heave-ho its partners either. What the listener takes from it is what matters. McLaren just wanted to play, and anyone was invited to join in if they so wished. You'd have to be a pretty sour old punk to object to that, really.

From Russia With Love

The Tupolev Tu-95 "Bear" was for much of the post-war period the symbol of the Cold War. These sinister, silvery machines were regular visitors to British airspace in the 1970's and 1980's, and would often be pictured in British newspapers being gently shooed away by Royal Air Force jets. The missions that these planes undertook were nominally reconnaissances, but their real purpose was intimidatory, and it was intimidation that worked.

The "Bear" was a nuclear bomber, and its appearance was a constant reminder that the UK was easily within range of even the most basic Soviet nuclear capabilities. But what the Tupolev delivered was not bombs or missiles, but small, pearlescent balls of dread that would fall to earth and roll into the national nervous system. This submerged dread was never at the forefront of public consciousness, but always seemed to tick away in the background, a kind of ultimate nightmare that hid behind the more pressing social issues of the day.

It was another form of dread, immersed in the sounds imported from Jamaica that was to allow its expression - a hesitant, febrile leaking of psychic poison. The sound of screams suppressed by social convention.

The Silver Tanks Of The Refinery Gleam Under The Desert Sun

If ever anyone tells you that they're interested in politics, ask them if they know what "Ghawar" is. If they've never heard of it, their opinions are not worth listening to.

The same rule applies to rock bands. Here's pretty much the only one that would have given you the correct answer.

Dancehall Dialectic: Between Babylon And Jerusalem

Mother’s Little Helper

Ludus are perhaps the most unfairly overlooked band of the post-punk era. The brainchild of artist Linder Sterling, their daring, imaginative music is less known than the outrages they performed in their stage shows - Linder having worn a meat dress long before Lady Gaga.

Ludus’s music is like a doll’s house with doors that open into the cosmos - at one moment intricate, precise and formal, and then suddenly giving way to vast currents of sound. Linder is forever presenting domestic constrictions taken to the most absurd limits, such as being trapped inside a refridgerator, or dutifully cooking herself for an imagined husband.



The drug that seemed to inspire Ludus was Valium, a prescription drug that was sold over the counter to millions of housewives in the Sixties and Seventies, a sleeping tablet that was used overwhelmingly to stifle the neuroses that resulted from the contradictions of a political culture that told women they were liberated, while at the same time a media culture expected them to achieve a submissive domestic perfection. Ludus suggested that domesticity consisted of an almost limitless profusion of exquisitely delicate traps, a torture chamber where though the body may have been reduced to meat, it was tender and succulent.



In this honeytrap world, escape can only be by daydream, and this is where Ludus’s sound opens up to reveal yearning vistas, like Priit Pärn’s "Hotel E", where the grey, fly-ridden Easterners find a door into the soporific, paradisical West. It’s a heartbreaking vision of the impossibility of fulfilling relationship roles that are dictated by nebulous social pressures. As easy to fall into, and as difficult to escape from, as Valium itself.

Suck Out My Insides

A Certain Ratio were perhaps the most overtly occultish of all the punk-funk groups. Although they made pictorial play of their interest in flight, with their sleeve pictures of old aeroplanes and aviators, their real interest was in the dark, draining, winged spirits of nightmare - incubi, succubi, vampires and demon angels. Just as they drained the mana, or life-force, from African-American funk music, so their own mana was drained by their record company, and their subordinate position to its priority band Joy Division. In their dealings with demons however, the two bands could not have been more different. If Joy Division were an external dramatisation of the internal battle of the shaman to conquer and re-shape chthonic spirits, A Certain Ratio invited them in through the window to drink their bodies dry.

Their obsession with spirit-possession and blood-loss first overtly manifested itself on the early single "Do The Du", a bleakly sado-masochistic depiction of a claustrophobic relationship in which flesh is flayed and blood is drawn. Their most celebrated single "Flight" is creepier still, a Blakean hive of blind, incorporeal spirits spiraling upward to the light of Revelation, the soundscape whistling with their ectoplasmic trails. The sleeve art openly contrasts images of human aviation with parasitic spirits. Were our efforts to construct flying machines inspired by birds, or by malign angels?



Their first album proper, 1981’s "To Each….." immersed itself deeper in the theme, with tracks such as "Felch" and "My Spirit" chronicling the loss of vital fluids. For ACR, the decline of the industrial north was itself a kind of voodoo that manifested itself in a physically palpable despondency. You could feel the general decay leeching mana from your own body. Their new singer, Martha Tilson added her bloodless vocals to "Back To The Start", a call to the night-spirits that is reminiscent of the open-window scene in "Salem’s Lot".



Their masterpiece, "Sextet" was released in 1982, and featured a lush, exotic sound that brought to mind J.G. Ballard’s "Crystal World". The deep, aquatic bass shone refractive waves on the other instruments like ripples on the walls of a nocturnal swimming pool. The opening track "Lucinda" was the clearest expression yet of their aesthetic, a pulsating account of obsession and possession, sexual desire provoking the winged spirits of decay to leave their gremlin-work on the factories and attack the body-personal. "Knife Slits Water" with its sub-aquatic bass rumbles and murderous, disembodied vocals recalls Roeg’s "Don’t Look Now", with its grotesque demon stalking the canals of Venice.



Their last great album, "I’d Like To See You Again" was a kind of ambient-funk that featured a shimmering rain-washed penumbra that anticipated The Blue Nile. Like most post-punkers, they then spent the remainder of the decade gradually losing touch with the dark impulses that originally propelled them, engaging in that strangely universal phenomenon in which every attempt to make themselves more "accessible" only increased the level of indifference with which they were regarded. At their best though, there was no-one who could match their ability to invoke the vampire spirits that were feeding on the national psyche.

Tech Noir Sex

Sexuality as the mediated, oppressive, conscious contagion attacking personal agency, biology and ontology. Subject to deception, technology, ideology and social stratification (The Law being as un/dead as Bela Lugosi). Subcultural neuroses that would eventually become common parlance, and then repackaged accordingly. AIDS was beginning to be diagnosed around the same time, but wasn't a mainstream panic until the middle of the decade. If sci-fi/horror's nightmares don't exist at its time of writing, it may be necessary to invent them shortly after.

All the above are cult classics, highly influential in their respective (sub)genres. 'Sleeper' hits that took years to grow an audience (or canonization for Blade Runner), their motifs moving across fashion, adverts, pop videos, and product design, ie. everywhere. A virus of the pleasure principle. Away from the peer pressures of cinema viewing, the lonely - guilty? - space of home video gave these films room to gestate. The lifestyles, behaviour and economic conditions of their characters now appear far less alien than they did in 1982/83. We may be more alienated than these doom-mongers could forecast. Consider the shape Cafe Videodrome has taken since, and your statistical likelihood of surveying either (a) a corporate-led social network, or (b) pornography shortly after looking at this blog. All those immaterial encounters... like tears in the rain...