(no subject)
christ a'mighty, what a time. i've discovered a new love, or more accurately have stumbled upon a fresh interpretation of an old love. today i spent more or less sitting about reading and fucking about hour after hour and finally come nightfall i decided i must get out and use my legs or i would cease up forever. i took my big jacket and ipod out for a spin, walking thru the neighboorhood and such in the dark as the rain fell. i jumped between a few artists until i settled on a record that i had never really given the close listen i knew it deserved. i figured what with the dark and the rain and such that squarepusher's music is rotted one note would be a good bet. i needed to get my head around it, had always meant to give it good attention and now was the time. what a good decision. squarepusher is a real genius, this much is clear. but music is rotted one note is a different breed of squarepusher record altogether.
my favorite record of late has been miles davis' on the corner. it's a thick, groovey chunk of funk-fusion. it came well into miles' electric period, after he had dropped real mean, sublime heavy hitters like in a silent way, bitches brew and tribute to jack johnson. these records where the first time that jazz music had been melded with rock guitar and rhythms and the results were pure voodoo. long, sprawling jazz-rock workouts that built layer upon layer upon layer of complex polyrhythms and post-hendrix guitar lines, wah-wahed, electricfied and phased out jagged trumpet squelches and purrs that drizzled around the mix like slabs of slow melting butter with three different watery piano/keyboard/organ/synth textures working alternatively and in concert. truly exciting, challenging, virtuoso music. these records also used a very forward-looking mode of composition and production:
miles would assemble the cream of the crop of musical talent to jam for hours together in sessions that would span days. the tapes of those hours of ensemble jamming would then get chopped up, fucked with in post-production, spliced, looped and taped back together in totally new, winding complex franken-compositions. normally this would be a bad thing, but with these records it simply works. the results are just mind-benders of awesome, confusing and intense music and spirit.
anyway, on the corner was one of the most controversial of all of these records in that it brought pure rhythm to the forefront of the record, leaving melody and solos - what would usually be the heart and soul of jazz music - to wander around in the dense multi-layered background, occasionally surfacing and receding on the ebb and flow of the composition. the result is amazing. the music is based on these rich beds of percussion that sit like hot coals for the rest of the musicians to just riff on top of and against. i can hardly get the music out of my head.
music is rotted one note is a record firmly in the tradition of this jazz-fusion and it sounds an aweful lot like those miles davis records, except that it is composed and performed by a single man, the genius tom jenkinson, the sole individual behind the mighty squarepusher. this music is like fusion as composed by frustrated robots. where the soprano sax or the guitar might have colored the pot in 1972, now it's complex but gentle drum beats and rhythms and what sounds like echoing computer gliches all riding atop that same jazzy, glacial bed of waterey piano + keyboards. walking in a dark overcoat, hair plastered to my forehead in the rain with nothing but blurry headlights and the reflections of same on the wet pavement all around, looking up at towering apartment buildings, i felt like i was in some sci-fi espianage flick. roaming soaking wet city streets with this music in my ears made me so happy to be alive that i wish someone else could have shared the experience with me.