Cover Versions: Between Birdy and Andy Rehfeldt

What makes a good cover version? What is even the point of a cover version? When, in 2011, I first saw bill posters proclaiming the three simple words, ‘Birdy Skinny Love’ I brushed them off as a weird coincidence – not believing anyone would dare to cover Bon Iver’s beautiful elegy to anorexia of the same name. I imagined some factory-assembled R ‘n B song called ‘Skinny Love’ instead, and sneered to myself smugly.

To my surprise then, I discovered that the ‘Skinny Love’ I saw advertised was what I had feared – a cover version of the song which appears on Bon Iver’s 2007 album ‘For Emma…Forever Ago’. Furthermore, the mysterious ‘Birdy’ is none other than a 17-year-old English girl called Jasmine van den Bogaerde. (She was 14 when she released ‘Skinny Love).

I have long been of the opinion that with ‘Skinny Love’, Vernon managed to tap into something special about music – how a few chords and lyrics delivered with conviction can be utterly devastating. Birdy’s version then, was always bound to fail. I don’t mean to criticise Ms. van den Bogaerde who, as it happens, has a precociously good voice, but I can’t help feeling that her pleasant version of ‘Skinny Love’ is redundant and unwittingly undermines the song’s power. More constructively, it also shows how important supposedly ineffable factors such as ‘soul’ and ‘feel’ are in music.

The original version of ‘Skinny Love’ by Bon Iver aka Justin Vernon is a spare hymn; the open-tuned guitar sounding as raw as the lyrics which quiveringly reference the horrifying image of a “sink of blood and crushed veneer”. Birdy’s, whilst starting in a self-consciously plaintive falsetto, quickly descends into Brit School-style pop soul, amputating the intensity of the subject matter.

The success of the original ‘Skinny Love’ is contingent on a few important factors, none of which Birdy has managed to pull off. At the song’s essence is a three chord verse, with a fourth thrown in at the end of each cycle, then a three chord chorus. These seven chords are not particularly stunning alone, and neither is their arrangement, but the open tuning of the guitar (CGEGCC, for the record) adds harmonic interest and a chiming drone – courtesy of the top two strings being tuned to C – which makes the song build in insistent intensity. The guitar itself sounds loose and almost out of tune, and somewhere in the strings’ hollow pealing, you can hear the resonance of the very wood used to carve the guitar itself.

The real import of these small tweaks in the harmonics of the song is emphasised when listening to Birdy’s attempt. She plays her version on the piano, and has transposed rough estimates of the original chords without the same voicings Vernon uses, resulting in the song sounding plain and tired. Instead of the slightly febrile dissonances and ringing strings in the original, Birdy’s is harmonically tame; resolving in a series of obvious, predictable patterns.

The melody of ‘Skinny Love’ is again simple, but affecting. However it is the delivery which really makes it stand out. Vernon’s trademark use of falsetto lends a fragility to his words, and lets unintended cracks of emotion break into the song. His voice is almost ethereal, and racked with pleading, whilst what sounds like a double-tracked second voice thrusts the emotion home. Vernon sounds like he might be on the verge of tears, and his exposed falsetto emphasises this; forcing him into an uncomfortable, unflinching honesty. While Birdy has a strong voice, its trained vibrato and trills don’t suit the melody, and instead dilute it; leaving it without much meaning. Along with the neutralised chords, her performance turns ‘Skinny Love’ into an average ballad, with none of the aching, prickly beauty of the original.

With music the barrier between contrived and powerful is often blurred. Two genres which couldn’t be further from each other in terms of aesthetics, ideas, or meaning can nonetheless be used to interpret a particular song, but the results and success of this can be wildly different. This lends great credence to the idea that it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. Musicians are limited by the laws of melody, rhythm, and harmony, and certain patterns of these have become standards in modern music to the point of predictability. But just when you begin to despair of music, someone like Justin Vernon comes along and does things a little differently to incredible effect – baring that elusive ‘soul’ which so much music lacks.

On the other hand, I was introduced last year to a YouTube personality named Andy Rehfeldt, who arranges, plays, and produces hilarious and often excellent alternate versions of famous genre-songs. His Radio Disney takes on Slayer and Immortal are fantastic, especially the ridiculous lyrics rendered into an all-American croon. More interesting though, is when he makes what you thought were horrible songs compulsively listenable.

His melodic metal mutations of Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’ (note: the version with the original vocals has unfortunately disappeared from YouTube) and Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ transforms the songs from annoying saccharine nonsense to not so guilty pleasures. Let’s face it. Both these songs were successful for a reason, though the aesthetics were not ones which appealed to everyone. But when done in a grittier style, the quality of the songs somehow begins to shine through for the rest of us. Well, at least for me. I’m not embarrassed to say they are both great pop songs, though you will certainly not find them in my CD collection. And hey, most people will admit that ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ by Britney Spears was, at its core, a brilliant pop song. So what Rehfeldt does for modern pop is more than welcome for its sharp pinpointing of what makes a song good, as well as its humour. As for Birdy, well, as it turns out, her debut album was comprised mostly of cover versions, but she has gone on to contribute music to the soundtracks for blockbuster movies Brave and The Hunger Games, the latter for which she collaborated with Mumford & Sons. So apparently the fact that her cover versions lack that elusive something doesn't seem to matter anyway...

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Irony and Pop Culture

It probably shouldn’t be surprising that social networks have exploded as a major player in music during 2012. The way music is consumed, the way it becomes successful and the extent of that success are all becoming increasingly governed by exposure on social networks. It's not like we haven't been expecting this. It has been building up for more than a decade. The ‘traditional’ vehicles such as radio, TV, and actual records have all waned in influence while the internet has taken a much more prominent role in all parts of the music world. Though sales have generally been falling for a decade – a fact often blamed on the internet’s fostering of sites like YouTube and activities like free file-sharing – in 2012 we also saw that the internet can act as an echo chamber, a positive feedback loop, for massive viral exposure of music on social networks. The implications of this are interesting to say the least. 

Inevitably in the fractured music industry, songs, as opposed to albums, were always going to be the place where large shifts in the industry manifested. Accordingly, the songs most exemplary of huge social network success were also, by definition, the most popular and pervasive to be released in 2012 – ‘Gangnam Style’ by PSY and ‘Call Me Maybe’ by Carly Rae Jepsen. In fact it seems misguided to just call them songs. They’re more than that – they’re phenomenons. Both have gotten astronomical success and global exposure, most impressive in PSY’s case since the lyrics are in Korean. 

But uniquely, both songs’ success was in a large part down to the effects of social networks. As users of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr have rocketed, more traditional organisations with websites such as national newspapers and record companies have begun to utilise these social networks too, not only for marketing purposes, but also to have their brands/news linked to an even broader market/readership via social networks. That’s why you always see a social network toolbar next to pretty much everything you look at online, whether it be a newspaper comment piece or a pair of trainers - you can share it with your social network buddies. This could be considered a top-down approach to social networking – large organisations helping users share their material, hoping it will spread around the internet, or in other words, go ‘viral’. 

The opposite is a bottom-up approach, and this often results in what might be termed ‘viral memes’. Interestingly, the concept of a ‘meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’ to describe, through evolutionary principles, the spreading of ideas and cultural tics. Applied to the internet, it is generally something – from a soundbyte to a catchphrase to a picture to a video – which finds itself shared through social networks by a significant amount of people, generally in the tens of thousands, but often more. This is where ‘Call Me Maybe’ and ‘Gangnam Style’ come in. Through going viral, the songs (and more importantly, the videos) have been turned into memes. 

Consider that both songs have also spawned dozens of extremely popular cover versions, in the form of tribute and/or parody videos. (They could also be called ‘pastiche’ but from my reading of Frederic Jameson, this is debatable). In the case of ‘Gangnam Style’, which musically speaking, is an average K-pop (Korean pop) song with a four-to-the-floor beat and a jarring electro melody, it’s safe to say that the video is the main attraction, exhibiting the now world-famous horse-riding dance, which is hysterically silly. ‘Call Me Maybe’ is actually a great pop song, despite its saccharine production, and the video wasn’t as critical in its success as it was for ‘Gangnam Style’, the only attraction being a guy with an emasculatingly ripped body. 

As a result, the approaches to covering ‘Call Me Maybe’ have been more inventive than for ‘Gangnam Style’, including a hilarious/disturbing Chatroulette video, and numerous synchronised dances from – among many, many, others – US soldiers in Afghanistan, various university sports teams, Crystal Palace football club, Barack Obama (edited, but still funny), and Justin Bieber. This last one is interesting because it was a big factor in bringing the song to the mainstream. It was originally released in 2011, but didn’t get much more exposure than Jepsen’s native Canada until Bieber posted his goofy miming cover video. She is now signed to the same label as Bieber – Scooter Braun’s almost farcically successful Schoolboy Records (who PSY is also incidentally signed with). 

‘Gangnam Style’ has spawned numerous imitation videos with most of the participants copying the original almost frame-for-frame, and if not, at least its spirit of self-mockery. Of particular note, there has been a version by MIT which featured a surprise cameo by 84 year old Noam Chomsky (his section goes like this: *sudden silence* *long sip of tea*, then he says calmly, “Oppan Chomsky Style”), along with dozens of others by various universities, students at Eton College, NASA (an astronaut in space took part), and both US and Chinese military personnel. The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon claimed the song was a “force for world peace” and did the dance with PSY in UN HQ, New York. In short, the song is astonishingly pervasive. It has gained over a billion views on YouTube – the world’s most watched video of all time. It has united people in collective humor across the globe, been the focus of massive flashmobs from Korea to Italy, and been heard by leaders of the world and the world’s poorest alike. In some sense it is a unifying force, fulfilling one of music’s most wonderful virtues, which is to create a collective experience. (Transcendence is another virtue, but one ‘Gangnam Style’, for obvious reasons, cannot be said to achieve). 

It is well-known that pop music has never just been about music. There is an image, a style, a lifestyle surrounding it which contributes hugely to its success. But with ‘Gangnam Style’ it’s not necessarily any of these things which are the focus, it is rather the X-Factor/America’s Funniest Home Videos/You’ve Been Framed responses to the original that created a larger buzz for it. It seems that instead of armchair/dancefloor enjoyment, or even buying into the ideas the song is promoting, to engage with music we now need to imitate it, then imitate the imitations. It is not enough to be passive, we have to be active – commenting, responding, constantly engaging. Not that this is all bad. Some of the responses are an art form in themselves. But it is also indicative of a culture high on information and obsessed with itself and its opinions. 

The very fact that a song like ‘Gangnam Style’ where the video is as important, if not more so than the actual music, was the biggest single of the year says a lot about how the approach to music, particularly pop music, is changing. Success on social networks is becoming paramount and music for music’s sake – a romantic and naïve notion, I know – is being squeezed out. Everyone wants a piece of a song’s success, to be a part of the buzz, and in doing so, their versions pull the song/video by ever further degrees away from its original point, leading to continued reproduction and dilution – a simulacra – but also more perversely, to the dangers of deep irony and pastiche. It is not a bad thing that many of these videos seem to have been made in order to take part in the video-making, rather than any ‘higher’ calling. It is actually refreshing that pop music can still produce collective euphoria around a song and unite people around the world. The worry is the aforementioned danger of irony in memes, along with the related ephemerality of the whole collective experience due both to irony and to the fleeting nature of success on the internet. 

Though the focus is more on the song than the video, ‘Call Me Maybe’ nonetheless also united people in a common experience, often ironic, always in the name of fun. The previously mentioned Chatroulette video exemplified this, where dozens of people on the other end of a call to a particular bearded individual wearing a bikini sang along to the song regardless of any other distance between them, geographic, linguistic, or cultural. Similarly, the other response videos featured people doing their own choreographed silly dances to the song, some of which received tens of millions of views on YouTube themselves, becoming as popular (though perhaps not as commercially successful) as a regular chart hit, and gaining their own imitation videos – a leveling of fame’s plateau which the internet has been systematically battering for years. 

Of course, the Andy Warhol “fifteen minutes of fame” idea has been worn out with commenters waxing intellectual about how the internet has utterly changed the way humans can use and respond to various media. But it hasn’t lost any truth. Along with the rise of reality TV, YouTube has put (potential) power into the hands of anyone with a computer, a webcam and an internet connection. The interesting thing is how some of the supposed ‘consumers’ so swiftly become as famous as the stars they were imitating. At least for fifteen minutes. (Or more likely a couple of weeks). And it’s true that this fame is rarely lasting. Ultimately mass attention is too unfocused, disparate, and fidgety to ever remain on one thing for too long. 

We saw this with the Kony 2012 viral video, which is, for now at least, the fastest spreading video of all time, with a total of 95 million views, 35 million of which came on the first day of it being uploaded to YouTube. Despite the massive wave of support it got, the follow-up, Kony 2012 Part 2, which came out only a month or so after the original has received only 2 million views. In fact, some of the more popular responses to the original video got more views than that. This is a pretty disturbing insight into viral/meme culture – how everything, including charity (whether it is convincing or not) is utterly disposable, fuelling temporary indignation or delight, then suddenly as it came, falling into the abyss of the web. This is sort of akin to one-hit-wonders, only now the effect is magnified millions of times as the initial exposure is so astonishing that the eventual crash is hard to comprehend. 

In relation to ‘Call Me Maybe’ and ‘Gangnam Style’, interestingly both songs have become more meme than music. They spread virally through the internet and social networks, leading inevitably to ‘meme-ification’. This involved a strange collective repossession of the songs where catchphrases (generally funny/memorable lyrics) and dances were reproduced en masse to create in-jokes and cultural signifiers. In a sense, these actions all reassert mass ownership over music. They remind the artists and the record labels who makes them successful. 

In another way, though, they also entrench the poison of irony in (at least) capitalist culture. ‘Gangnam Style’ is itself an ironic satire of life in the wealthy Gangnam neighborhood in Seoul, so its huge success is at least in part due to people’s recognition of the habits of the rich and enjoying their silly portrayal. But it has also become an “it’s so bad it’s good” song, embraced by people as some sort of indicator of outré cool. Similarly with “Call Me Maybe”. The song, in essence, is good, but its overproduced, synthetic pop sound is typically garish. Despite this, many of the popular cover videos gently mock the girlish cuteness of the song, reveling not only in the enjoyment of being silly together but also the perceived naivety of the lyrics. This is where it gets a little nasty. 

Irony is dangerous because it detracts from sincerity. One of the most attractive aspects of ‘Call Me Maybe’ is its wide-eyed earnestness. It is a straight-up honest pop song, and for that conviction, it has a certain innocence, especially due to the “call me maybe” chorus, evoking awkward and shy teen courtings rather than the typical grotesquerie of most pop songs today. But it is this which is often targeted by the cover videos. The case of ‘Gangnam Style’ is different, because PSY has done all the work for us. It’s almost as if the joke is on us – in imitating the video, we’re doing the stupid things that PSY is mocking. Just because it’s all tongue-in-cheek, doesn’t make the people look any less stupid. 

Of course there is some value in idiotic abandon. We can’t take life too seriously. But at the same time, we have to do this honestly. We can’t let our collective experiences become branded (this time by memes rather than corporations), nor can we let them become pervaded by sarcasm and irony. The ‘Eton Style’ video was so self-aware and self-mocking that it was impossible to know whether the lives the makers live are serious or not if they truly believe they are so farcical. But then, though living in a postmodern sphere somewhere between reality and a movie is a bizarre and sad existential state to inhabit, it is a place more and more of us find ourselves every year, now with extra thanks to the instant meme-branding and ironic championing of pop culture and collective experience. Sincerity and honesty are the only worthwhile responses to the stimuli around us as they reflect our true desires and emotions, or their closest approximations. If we let irony, sarcasm, and postmodernism dictate our behavior further, we will lose grasp of whatever reality exists, drifting off into a world where real experiences are described more and more in terms of how they resembled a movie, engaging emotionally in nothing. 

As the last preserve of collective euphoria is churned through the ironic meme machine, does it make it all less valid; less real? Perhaps not. Perhaps this is just an argument based on principles, reading too much into it. Or perhaps we really are losing something, bit by bit, as we allow irony further into our lives. Who can really tell? What I do know is that we will be hearing more K-pop in 2013.

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Monolake: Interview with Robert Henke

The night before my interview with Robert Henke aka Berlin-based electronic artist and Ableton co-founder Monolake, I went to his ‘Ghosts in Surround’ live set at Fabric. Within days of releasing the new album 'Ghosts' via his own label Imbalance Computer Music, Henke was touring it with the help of longtime collaborator and visual artist Tarik Barri. The two performed from behind a large screen across which Barri’s generative images flickered, and together transformed the club into a gloomy, broiling jungle, swooning with deep pulses of bass and blasts of white noise.

Immediately evident is that the new tracks create an unsettling aura of fear which is sometimes frantic and intense, as with the pummelling ‘Foreign Object’, and at other times eerie and brooding, as with the glowering ambience of ‘Unstable Matter’. ‘Taku’ is the terrifying sound of a restless poltergeist in your kitchen, and the title track’s sudden introduction of a frayed, mechanical voice hissing “You do not exist”, surrounded by waspish crackles and pounding beats is absurdly scary. 

'Ghosts' is quite a departure from any of Henke’s other work. He has been releasing music as Monolake, as well as under his own name, since the mid ‘90s, encompassing sounds from across the electronic spectrum. 'Layering Buddha' from 2006 is a lush and looming piece of ambient soundscaping, created by manipulating loops from the FM3 Buddha Machine, while 2009’s 'Silence' is a glacially metronomic meditation on the relationship between man, technology, and nature. 'Ghosts' though, is something else entirely: a rapid descent through darkness. 

Still reeling from the set, I met Henke in a swish hotel in Farringdon the morning after. Everything inside seemed to be made of leather, and the colour-scheme was practically gothic: all black, grey, and red. As we talked, Henke was in the middle of breakfast – mixed berries and a milky coffee. He wasn’t too tired, he claimed, and proceeded to chat thoughtfully about technological progress, art, beauty, and the future of music. 

What were your inspirations for ‘Ghosts’? 

There was not one single inspiration. Usually when I do an album I try to come up with an internal story for myself which gives me a bit of a framework for where I can go. There are so many possibilities, so many things you can do that I find it harder and harder to find what to keep out. I also like writing stories, it’s just something I occasionally do. I made one track – the title track ‘Ghosts’ – and it kind of set the pace for everything else. I wrote it out of personal frustration, so I felt this was going to be a really dark album. Then I wrote a story, and it kind of set the pace a little differently itself. It’s not that I have something in mind and then write it, while writing and things unfold. So I had this text fragment, which was a little different to how it is on the album now, and I had the first track, and I also found some photos I took which to me fit perfectly in. 

This was a year ago, and from then onwards I thought “ok ‘ghosts’ is the topic.” Then I started reading up on ghosts – Googling ‘ghosts’, simple stuff – reading and trying to find different angles, making notes. And whenever I made music I thought “would this track fit this topic, and if so, how?” What would I need to change to make sense of the concept. All kinds of little details came together. There’s one track which became to me a strange jungle world, in comparison with the other tracks it’s not very dangerous at all, it’s very friendly, and I imagine immediately these kinds of little ghostly creatures there from a Japanese manga; you can’t touch them but they are there and they observe you, but they don’t do any harm. So for every single track on the album I tried to make a connection between the text and the music, and if I felt it didn’t meet the criteria I left it out. 

So it’s very conceptual? 

I try to be conceptual, but I also try and make something people can enjoy without knowing anything about the concept. So the concept is more for me than the listener. But if the listener is interested in the concept there is something to find. If you like you can find something from the text in every track from the album. 

How did you take the album to the live platform? 

Again this is a mixture between things that just happened, and things which were planned to work in the context. First of all, the visual component simply exists because I’ve been working with Tarik Barri for three years, and this just happened as collaborations come to life – you meet someone, you get along, and you like what they are doing, and then you come up with something together. For ‘Ghosts’, we looked at what we can do with his software. He wrote the software for everything he does, and we tried it on the basis of these applications, which can work with the visuals in the connection to the sounds. We’re not really finished there - it’s version 1.0. 

We’re pretty confident that the visual side will evolve over the next few months. There are a few pieces where it’s exactly where we want it to be, and there are others where we like the aesthetics but there are details to be made more clear. The process of getting the album on stage is something I never did like this – an attempt to really create a concert situation which is like a classic rock concert situation. The main difference with the rock scenario is that the album has never been played in the first place, so actually playing it is a strange process. What I did was I made screenshots of the arrangement of each song so I could see how many tracks I had – what the elements are, and compare them all. Then I needed to boil all the tracks down to a common format. 

When I work I usually have, maybe 15 – 30 audio tracks, and I group them into 12 groups and create 12 audio tracks out of these 12 groups, so if I take these 12 tracks and mix them together with no further treatment it plays like the original song. That’s a classic way of providing material for remixes, they’re called stems, the concept is you mix them and you have the original song, and you take material out of them and do something else. In a way what I do is live remixing of my own music. I cut those 12 stems into parts and live onstage I reassemble those parts which means if I’m lazy I can press return, return, return and play more or less the original song. If I feel like doing more, I can play a high-hat where there was no high hat before, or I can leave out the bass line – things like this. 

You’ve mentioned things like repetition, chaos, and bass, but I was wondering how much you use improvisation onstage? 

I find it really important to be able to improvise. Every evening every audience is different and in my experience if you do the same thing on two nights it has a completely different effect. Being spontaneously able to decide is completely necessary onstage, I’d go nuts if I couldn’t. 

Actually what I found very interesting from a musician’s perspective is that even if the audience doesn’t see me at all like in the current concert, they do notice when I improvise. There’s a significant correlation between the moments where I’m really working hard, and I can hear the audience reacting, and that implies there’s some quality to the spontaneous moments which are transmitted by the music itself, and these are for me some of the most precious and beautiful moments, and this is why pressing ‘play’ would never be an option for me. I’d be so bored! I’d rather something goes wrong than being too clean and too perfect because I believe a perfect concert would be really boring. The moments as an audience member where I become interested is always the edges. When you think “What’s going on now, that’s kind of strange…?! Wow!” This is the tension that makes things fall apart, then suddenly things come to life again and you think “This is interesting, how that came out.” And if it’s perfect, it’s just background. 

What is the value of multimedia for you? 

I have a property which is either a problem or a good thing depending on how you look at it – I’m just interested in everything. Electronic music and digital media is a perfect playground for me. It’s all data, it’s all connected, everything can be transformed to everything else. There’s a very low level entry step into combining music and visuals, sound and light, because it’s all running on a computer anyway. And since the entry level is so low, it’s so easy to experiment. This is one reason I started trying out these things in the first place. If I had to buy a really expensive camera to start taking photos I never would have got into it. Most of the photos I took were on normal consumer cameras you’d have in your pocket. And to me part of the big cultural revolution of our time is that there are all kinds of artistic expression, all kinds of media, available for free, or at least a very reasonable amount of money. Doing something in multimedia is just not a big thing anymore. It just happens. People take photos, people edit their videos. In a way the iLife, iPhoto, iMovie, iWhatever, Apple vision in a way is true. It’s just not true for a lot of people because the fact you can do it technically does not mean you have the time or inspiration to do it artistically. But for me as an artist it’s a perfect playground, it’s all there, I just have to use it. 

What part does Berlin as a city play in your vision and development as an artist? 

I guess for me, I’m blessed with the fact that I was able to be in Berlin in the early 90s. This certainly shaped what I am now. Without me being in the city then, meeting the right guys, I would not be here now. Therefore the city is very vital to what I’m doing, it still is. I meet a lot of people who I met in the early 90s, a lot of careers around me started then. The city offered a cultural freedom which allowed people to experiment. For me the biggest challenge is to create an interesting culture in an environment where there are no non-commercial spaces. People need spaces where it doesn’t matter if a musician attracts 10 or 200 people. A musician making strange new noises at the beginning simply will not attract any more than 5 people, but in order to at some point attract 500 000 those people need to experiment. I always felt Berlin in the early 90s was such an amazing playground in this regard - all the absurd freedom that was found with reunifying the two parts of the city into one.

Do you feel it’s changing now? 

Absolutely. It was such a unique moment in history. When you wanted to open a club or a bar in the early to mid 90s, you walked through the streets of East Berlin, you looked at all these empty industrial buildings and you thought, “Ok this one looks nice”, the door was kind of locked, kind of not locked because the ownership was not clear anymore, so the Government kind of locked them but not really. You walked in and you immediately thought “Hm, here on the left is room for the bar, and here on the right is the DJ, and the chillout area is upstairs”. You just had a party there, and if the party went well, afterwards you’d go to the city government and say “Hi we’re a group of art students, and we’re working on a project, and we were wondering if it’s possible to use this room?” and there were a few people in the city Government at this time who I don’t know the names of, who I don’t know what they’re doing at this time, who were extremely instrumental in this culture. People who were sat at their desks – ladies in their early 50s looking at these punky-looking students saying “Hm, an art project, and you want to use that building there…? I see. Well you have to pay for the electricity, and you have to pay for the water. And we have to ask for a little rent.” And she’d say a number like, 50 Euros, and you were like…! And so this is how all these clubs came to life. And of course if your total costs for a big club in the centre of the city is something like 70 Euros a month, you can do whatever you like. You can open it for one day, whatever, and that’s how it worked out. And of course this is completely impossible nowadays. 

What influence has your association with Ableton had on your artistic development? 

Well first of all it successfully kept me from making more music! Creating software and making music are two very different sides of thinking. Creating software is something I sometimes prefer over making music because there’s kind of always a solution. Music making, sometimes if you work too hard the magic is gone. Therefore making software was always a nice escape. 

One thing that’s very clear, being at Ableton, being surrounded by people who are extremely structured, certainly helped me in changing the way I think. This was a helpful experience for me as an artist. The other thing is that I wouldn’t know how to make my music without Live. It became the centrepiece of my work environment, it’s kind of my instrument, and I live in it. 

What do you look for when you’re creating a sound? 

What constitutes sonic beauty for you? First it is highly dependent on the context. There is certainly ‘inherent beauty’, but it’s hard to nail down. And I think this is because the relation between something which is perceived as really beautiful and something which is perceived as ugly is not a linear connection. This is, I think, the magic of art. 

The longer you work with electronics, the more you know your tools, but there are always things which can happen which are not anticipated, and to me a lot of times this is where the fun starts. There’s so much room for surprise. Even if you know your tools very well, you change a few things and you suddenly achieve new structures, new sounds. Randomness becomes your special creativity agent because things show up which you would never have programmed before. 

What is the difference between what you do, which feels much more like ‘sound design’, and traditional song writing? 

I think the boundaries are very fluid, but I perceive a song as working from the outside towards the inside – you have to structure, you have the chorus and verse, then you fill it up with meaning. Very often I work from the inside towards the outside, which is a cultural heritage from the early ‘90s techno days – the concept of rhythm as an endless state – and this is still something I find very intriguing. Firstly you craft something which is just a beautiful machine which has a groove, and once the machine is running, the next step is to create a larger form. This is what is for me a ‘sculpturing’ process. 

What do you think of music today as regards the whole ‘retromania’ idea? 

I believe that contemporary art – music, dance, theatre – is based on everything which was done before and it’s all a slow evolution. The fact that people sometimes perceive things as a revolution is only to do with the fact that they don’t see the small steps leading up to it. I don’t think there’s a specific retro thinking happening these days. Not more than it always was. 

What’s very frustrating for a lot of more ‘academic’ classical music thinkers is that the development of 20th and 21st century music didn’t take the direction they were assuming it would take. It’s 2012 and we’re listening to harmonically the most boring diatonic music on the planet. The chord structures are deadly simple. Everyone in the 20th century, all the serious composers – all the people who tried to expand the musical universe in terms of tonality – trying to find new ways of dealing with harmonics – all those promises about the new musical world fell apart. So we’re still listening to four-to-the-floor, we’re still listening to B major, G minor, F major, whatever. So in a way the music we’re listening to is super old 19th century music. There’s nothing new at all, but at the same time, there are a lot of new things, but the novelty is in the way of working the dynamics, the way of working the spectrum, the way of working with contrasts. If you perceive music as rhythm, harmony, and melody, yes, we are still living in the past. If you think about contrast and dynamics, we’re living in the now – there are so many amazing new things coming out. 

(This was originally commissioned by The Quietus, but for some inexplicable reason it never ended up on the site. Ah well.)

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Chaos and Cleansing: Wolves in the Throne Room

With a storm of noise, Wolves In The Throne Room rekindled my faith in music last year. ‘Celestial Lineage’ was the only album of 2011 which I not only listened to repeatedly, but which drew me fully into its world. It is an abrasive and intense listen, but also a deeply emotive one; twisting brutality to ecstasy with magisterial riffs, arrangements, and sonics. Though Wolves… are not an easy band to get into (they play extreme metal - black metal, some might say), a coherence is brought to the chaos by the loose concepts each album is built on. Refreshingly, they are a band who care deeply about what they do and how they do it. 

I stepped into Wolves’ music for their second album (and the first part of a trilogy), released in 2007 and entitled ‘Two Hunters’. It is a dark sprawl of beauty and ugliness, meshed together by a magnificent swirl of ambience and noise. It is perhaps one of the greatest so-called black metal albums ever. The following album, 2009’s ‘Black Cascade’ is more focused and fierce, but suffers from a lack of dynamics and the soundscapes of either the previous record, or ‘Celestial Lineage’. Nonetheless, it showcases the group’s Romantic tendencies – one track is called ‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’ after Casper David Friedrich’s painting – and it maintains a link with the bands’ blackened musical roots; a reminder that despite showing a variety of sounds and influences, they are still essentially a metal band. 

This last point is important as Wolves… have enjoyed considerable crossover appeal, with favourable reviews in the mainstream music press, and a diverse group of fans. This is due certainly in part to the sonic link Wolves… make between the explosions of noise in black metal and the more ambient washes of post-rock or shoegaze. Though these sounds are aesthetically disparate, they are sonically close. Consider that black metal has long revelled in lo-fi production values, and utilised intense techniques such as blast beats, tremolo picking, and screeched vocals. This combination often forces the individual instruments to sound as if they are melting into one continuous drone; the resultant swirling clamour of noise, when fiddled with, leading logically to the realms of shoegaze and post-rock, where more serene textures and sonics are built up by circling layers of instrumentation. That Wolves… have adopted such sounds and thereby bridged a gap between Burzum and Talk Talk explains their wide appeal, not to mention the ensuing debates as to whether they are ‘true kvlt’ black metal or not. 

The first thing anyone will notice about Wolves… is the unusually vivid name. It evokes imperial decay – the crumbled end of a civilisation as nature slithers and tangles over its remains. Wolves circling inside the cold throne room, embers on the stone floor, the wind screeching through empty windows. The theme of nature is a strong one throughout black metal history, and Wolves… are clearly similarly in awe of its indifferent power. Despite also taking a more traditional quasi-pagan view of nature, Wolves’ use of it is also characterised by environmentalist concerns, exemplified by their support of Cascadianism – a political and environmental movement based around the bioregion of ‘Cascadia’ in the Pacific Northwest of America which spans, according to some conceptions, from northern California to southern Alaska. The band themselves live on a farmstead in Olympia, Washington named Calliope (the daughter of Zeus and the muse of Homer for his epics the Iliad and the Odyssey), which is described on their website as being “intrinsically linked” to the development of Wolves’ music. This association with Cascadianism and sustainable farming is also a manifestation of Wolves' concern with the struggle between man and nature in an ever more industrialised world. 

This link between choosing a life on a sustainable Washington farm and playing extreme metal music is an interesting one. Despite their sound, Wolves… do not like to describe themselves as ‘black metal’ because they realise that they cannot conform to the specific ideology founded in Scandinavia during the 80s, and because they do not adhere wholly to the black metal sonic aesthetic. However, they have knowingly taken two important and interlinked ‘ideological’ strands of black metal and twisted them to fit their own conceptions. The first is their relationship with nature, the second is their concurrent view on the established black metal tenet of negativity. 

Black metal’s iconic obsession with nature originally focused on the bleak, wintry mountains of Norway, leaving many bands from across the world to continue to try and co-opt this imagery, but not quite channel its spirit. America though, has its own relationship with nature, which in turn informs its own style of black metal, as evidenced by the new wave of bands it has produced including Liturgy, Krallice, and Wolves. As a frontier country which still retains vast expanses of wilderness, America has inspired numerous poets, artists, and musicians such as James Abbott Whistler, Henry David Thoreau, and Robert Frost, providing a thread for bands like Wolves… to follow and explore their own particular relationship with nature as individuals and as Americans. Interestingly, Americans have only recently attempted to work with the mostly European concept of the Sublime in art. Before the 19th century the Sublime was of little concern to American artists since nature surrounded them, and was seen as an obstacle rather than an object of passion. It represented a savage void that had to be colonised and domesticated by law, civility, and Christianity. However, once it had been tamed (or as tamed as it could be), American artists turned to their forests and mountains as a source of inspiration and pride. With their self-professed ‘transcendent’ sound, Wolves… bring an American conception of nature and the Sublime to black metal’s traditionally Scandinavian character, and perhaps like the American wilderness and the American character, it is a less bleak and disturbing one. 

What follows is that the particular nastiness and even ‘evil’ of the original black metal movement – which seems to have come from the twisted minds of a few key figures in the genre during the ‘80s and early ‘90s – is turned upside down by newer bands like Wolves. The primordial power of black metal has thus far largely been used for the negative ends of Satanism and racism, but Wolves… (and also Liturgy) have attempted to purify and transform the genre by using its austere power for transcendence rather than transgression. This is evident in the bright imagery contained in their song titles; ‘shimmering radiance’, ‘crystal’, ‘rainbow’ and ‘stars’, along with ideas of ‘cleansing’ and ‘transformation’. The lyrics too deal with themes such as rebirth, dawn, and renewal - the opposite of most other black metal bands. Rather than confirming to the accepted formula of black metal, Wolves… reinterpret it, and use its leitmotifs of repetition, layering, and intensity to formulate something spiritual – almost meditative – in its swooning squall, even the screeched vocals becoming a part of the overall tide of sound. 

To see the band live is to truly appreciate what they are doing with the genre of black metal. While the aesthetics of the genre are clear – from the band’s long hair and dark clothes, to the spidery logo, to the extreme sonics, to the excess of dry ice – the long swathes of ambient glow and the spine-tingling ecstasy of the most intense sections blow down an obstructive wall in black metal’s sound, pushing it forwards, rather than keeping it darkly stagnant as it has been for so long. Sadly, the requirement of being a ‘true kvlt’ black metal band is to conform to a set of parameters outlined in the ‘80s, so Wolves… are shunned by many listeners who don’t think they are authentic enough. For the rest of us, though, they are an explosive knell for the future of a genre which has for too long been choked with lack of vision.

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Sex, Satire, and Steel Panther

In late March I went to see Steel Panther play at the Brixton Academy. While I enjoyed the whole experience - complete with audience members glammed-up in wigs and leopardskin lycra trousers - it also raised a few uncomfortable issues I'd rather not have been thinking about while I was air guitaring. Despite the glorious stupidity of Steel Panther, their performance ended up making me wonder about where the line between satire and harm lies, and how easy it is to establish in differing cases. Steel Panther, you see, are the kind of band whose profane lyrics and banter can make a person like me, who has a very high tolerance for filth, cringe. 

Steel Panther are a parody band from LA, whose fantastically accurate pastiches of overblown '80s hair metal have gained them a huge fanbase and sell-out tours in the UK and the USA. The band members are technically proficient on their respective instruments, and much of the hilarity (for me at least) comes from the stark incongruity between their excellent songwriting/musicianship and the disgusting/dumb lyrics. 

It's pretty clear that Steel Panther are not serious. Their personas are exaggerations based on the worst excesses of '80s hair metal, and even their stage names are hilarious - Michael Starr (vocals), Satchel (guitar), Lexxi Foxxx (bass), and Stix Zadinia (drums). Their outfits are perfectly garish, their hair is outrageous, and is, in all but Michael Starr's case, not real. They have an 'official' biography filmed in a mockumentary style reminiscent of Spinal Tap or The Office where real legends of hard rock and metal profess their love of Steel Panther, including Scott Ian of Anthrax, Dave Navarro of Jane's Addiction, and Slash of Guns N' Roses. The story goes that the band has been active since 1985, and formed because they wanted sex. Lots of sex. After some success, they hired a manager to help them out, and he arranged for all the top labels to send their A&R people to a Steel Panther gig. The band never showed up (confusing the command to go to a 'showcase' for one to get 'shitfaced'), and disappeared from the scene. Twenty years later they returned, with an album entitled 'Feel The Steel'. It rocked. My favourite song from it is 'Community Property' - an obscene but excellent power ballad.

  

Incidentally, I don't listen to power ballads. For one reason or another, I tend to find them cheesy, overwrought, and silly. But I do listen to them when they are written by Steel Panther. Does the irony make them ok to like? Or am I myself enjoying them ironically? Convoluted and contrived this may sound, but it is an important issue in aesthetics. Since when could otherwise objectionable music be acceptable and even enjoyed just because the delivery was as sneering as the listener? If the majority of popular music is made up of melody, rhythm and harmony, why is delivery and attitude so important in dictating our impressions towards it; especially abstract sentiments such as irony? This could be likened to knowing that Neil Young is not a great singer, but that his delivery is passionate. He really means it. And it is affecting as a result. But that's an aesthetic judgement, whereas irony is something else - generally a tool of humour. How does it make music better? Does it just make supposedly embarrassing music easier to listen to because it has a veil of deflective irony over the top? Whatever the reason, it makes enjoying Steel Panther a bit uncomfortable. 

As with the music, so with the live experience. Fun it may be, but one thing - the inevitable flashing girls - began to confuse me. Were they doing it ironically? Surely they know the band is a joke. If so, why would they flash? Were they really flashing ironically? That would seem truly absurd. The band's reaction though, was disturbing. They encouraged the girls to flash, and on one occassion, picked out a random girl from the audience and asked her to flash. Clearly unwilling, they got the crowd to encourage her too, which mostly involved thousands of drunk men yelling at her. To put it plainly, it was not cool. I felt horribly uncomfortable, and was terrified for the girl. Who could predict what an unruly crowd might do if egged on a bit by the band on stage? They obviously realised this fact, and quickly put an end to it by saying she might get gang raped and then blame them. It was a pretty horrendous and depressing way of stopping things, but it worked all the same. The salivating, moronic herd was distracted. The worst moment of the gig was over. The rest was bearable for those of us with a high threshold for smut and a lax view on objectifying women. 

The scary thing was that the whole thing was ironic. At least from the band's perspective. They don't mean any of the things they say. When they came back onstage after a 2 or 3 minute break between the set and the encore, Michael Starr claimed that they had screwed fourteen "chicks". Everyone laughed. Everyone knew it was ridiculous. But when the crowd take things so seriously - flashing, or trying to get girls naked - it seems that the joke is on us. Sure, the band are being idiots too, but we're playing along - to ever more absurd lengths. It's like they're seeing how far they can push people before they snap. As a sociological experiment, it's compelling. As entertainment, it's pretty scary. 

So where does satire become harmful? Is it when the performers begin exploiting the audience? Or is it when the audience doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between reality and fiction? In some way the onus is on both parties to be aware of what's going on in order to enjoy the experience. But the layers of irony and the meta-jokes doubtless become confusing. I think some people want to believe the band is real, and to re-live the idiocy of the '80s. Others enjoy the irony of it all. Everyone likes the music. To an extent you have to play along to enjoy yourself. You also have to know about the outrageous antics of bands like Mötley Crüe, Guns N' Roses, Led Zeppelin (who wrote the rule book of rock excess), or Poison. But all this insider knowledge should technically keep you from overstepping the mark. Clearly it doesn't. So does the satire and irony somehow legitimise behaving like obnoxious chauvinists because it's all a bit of fun? Are Steel Panther trying to update the Milgram experiment? It's unlikely we'll ever know. The only thing to do is rely on our own humanity to see where the line between fun and offense, irony and harm, is drawn.

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