Where my head is at musically in the year of the future: twenty oh eight.
Right now I’m really looking forward to the 100th anniversary of Olivier Messiaen. The Southbank Centre has a bunch of concerts this year showcasing his work and I’m definitely going to at least Des Canyons aux etoiles and Turangalila-symphonie which the Southbank describes as “requiring an orchestra of colossal dimensions and a large array of tuned percussion”. I’ve got no idea who goes to modern-classical concerts but I guess I’ll find out.
On a similar-ish tip I’ve been listening to some Terry Riley recently and marvelling at how much he worked like a Hiphop producer in the 1960s. Ten years later Miles Davis was busy being a Hiphop producer too and that period has just been covered by an exhaustive box-set “The Complete on the Corner Sessions”. Covering sessions for the phenomenal “On The Corner” and “Get Up With It” (and also “Big Fun”) the six discs mark an unbelievable stretching of musical boundaries for the early 70s. Heavy looping psychedelic funk but with personel capable of soloing some profound and beautiful shit on top.
I read a crazy rant by Julian Cope the other week about how Miles retired for five years after completing these sessions, not because he’d hit a dead end (as the Jazz critics would have you believe) but rather because he’d reached some kind of musical nirvana. It kind of works for me. Being any more ahead of his time would have had him making music from a time after his own death, which is some Marty McFly shit I’m sure the world couldn’t have coped with.
For me this box represents the greatest achievement of Miles The Bandleader. Nothing else sounds like it and best of all when you pull the book/cd wallet out of the metal case you can see all drawing and that on the INSIDE of the box!
Another thing that’s in my head is the prospect of Goodie Mob reforming and recording together. They were interviewed at an Atlanta radio station together last November, laughing and joking with their international superstar Cee-Lo.
This isn’t that exciting to the world at large. They’d probably rather have another Gnarles Barkley album. It ought to be though. Goodie Mob are the best. Outkast are the best but Goodie Mob are the best too. They’re the Gospel and Soul to Outkast’s Blues and Rhythm. What those two bands have created in the last fifteen years, with direction from Organized Noize and with help from the extended Dungeon Family, is the most important modern music to me. The finest direction for music to be travelling in.
I love me some “Hey Ya” as much as the next guy, and “Crazy” is cool and all but the world needs some “Distant Wilderness”, some “Hootie Hoo” and some “I Didn’t Ask to Come”. I’m forever finding myself on discogs, correcting little things on Dungeon Fam releases and adding obscure Organoid 12″s that I pick up along the way.
This is where my head is at. Actually another section of it is lost in Harcore/Jungle right now as I copy my 12″s onto iTunes. “Ruffige” by MA1 (DJ SS), “Boyz” by A Bedroom In Hackney, “Let’s Go (Remix)” by Potential Bad Boy and “In Effect” by DJ Red Alert & Mike Slammer. These mind-blowing experiments in rhythm are fifteen years old and fifty years in the future. Maybe it’s not even our future but the future of some never-happened West-African global empire that colonised East London.
I’m trying to equip myself with the means and knowledge/understanding/ignorance to make some futuremusic of my own. Something I can be proud of, or at least something to free me from the torment of not having tried. All these musics are in mind as I try and get closer to that music. Cross fingers.
