35. Kate Bush

A re-appreciation of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, first published in The Boar.

Kate Bush Hounds of Love (EMI, 1985)

This isn't about us. The greatest pop reconfigures yr nervous system, implants false memories, but always exceeds you: it gives us other narratives, other untold-of possibilities, other worlds, that remain inside us like ghosts. The expression Kate Bush achieved on Hounds Of Love (1985) is intensely personal, even esoteric, and the listener's response – this listener's, anyway – is no less so, but both still spiral out into constellations of experience; it is precisely the depth of this journey into the personal that allows it to expand into the universal. Its fractured narratives – the two sides, titled 'Hounds of Love' and 'The Ninth Wave' , the latter of which itself forms a kind of conceptual sequence narrated by the half-consciousness of a drowning woman, a gloriously strange counterpart to the hit parade of the first – together form an oblique totality more comparable to a feminist Waste Land than most pop.

It represents, indeed, a point where the language of pop exceeds its prosaic, everyday use and enters the realm of poetry. The syn-drums, throbbing electronics, borderline-OTT guitar solos and soaring vocals that marred so many mid-80s power-ballads reappear throughout – made alien, as if heard for the first time. So it is that opener and No. 1 single 'Running Up That Hill', beginning from a synth-tone like cold dawn breaking and processional drum-machine, spirals into ecstatic throes like the universe opening up overhead, just as does the euphoric 'Big Sky'. The title-track feeds Angela Carter through New Pop, accessing a feminine sexuality at once assertive and naïve, afraid of its own power, seemingly excavated from folk-memory; Bush bursts, at the whiplash of strings and percussion, into glossolalia – “a Dadaist postscript to 'Reynard The Fox'”, as Marcello Carlin puts it. The album plunges further into Freudian psychodrama with the disturbing 'Mother Stands For Comfort' (Joy Division's 'I Remember Nothing' remade as a domestic drama), and the graceful, controlled surge of 'Cloudbusting'.

'The Ninth Wave' follows like a long plunge in icy water, a disappearance into the other world promised by the first side, anticipating all of pop's future potential languages in one glorious conglomeration – and, indeed, outdoing most 'experimental' music of the next twenty years in daring and strangeness. Bush had received, through Peter Gabriel, a Fairlight sampler, then the technological cutting-edge, used the previous year to disorientating effect on Art of Noise's 'Close (To The Edit)' - resulting in the sampled voices, Morse code bleeps, cut-up vocals and breakbeats threaded throughout 'The Ninth Wave', anticipating, by a number of years, the sampledelic hip-hop of Paul's Boutique and the Bomb Squad's Public Enemy productions. 'Waking The Witch' feeds disco and electro through the cut-up of William Burroughs and John Cage; 'Watching You Without Me' presages both the scarred and skipping melodies of Fennesz' Endless Summer and the R&Bollywood trend of the early 00s. But there's nothing drily technical about its jouissance: this purgatorial drama yielding to the undeniable blood-rush of 'Jig of Life' and the summer-morning spryness of 'The Morning Fog' feels like rebirth, like the beginning of a future – for her, for us all.

There is far more here than can be encapsulated in this space – and this is, perhaps, exactly what has allowed the album to stand alone, outstripping all of Bush's progeny in advance. The media has finally opened up to female artists – but only a certain kind, yr Florences and Marinas, 'eccentric', 'passionate', still happy to play the enigmatic (and ultimately subordinate) female Other, all bastardising the language coined here 25 years ago. Michael Bracewell's condescending description of Bush as “pop's... mad girl in the attic” makes clear the problem she presents: a female artist so excessively, effortlessly inventive, so brazenly open and complex in her explorations of dream, memory and sexuality, so ruthlessly ahead of the game, can only make the prissy little boys of critic-land afraid. This album is everything we still need, and so much more.

34. Decade's End

Director's cut version of a piece written for the final issue of The Boar of 2009, and hence the decade, listing our top ten records of the 00s. It is, as acknowledged, both incomplete and over-complete, for the obvious reasons. To get a little perspective: the main list, devised by Dave Toulson, had Manic Street Preachers' Journal For Plague Lovers as its number one. This list was the only one to include any albums by hip-hop artists, or indeed any non-white artists. Aside from Jess Colman's inclusion of Belle & Sebastian's Dear Catastrophe Waitress in a number one slot, this was the only one to include any work by female musicians. That gives you an idea what students listen to these days.

To get everything upfront: this list is redundant. Not enough dust has settled even since the beginning of the decade to make sense of ten years marked by perhaps the most fevered processes of cultural expansion and proliferation the world has yet seen. The increasingly obvious collapse of Britain's old pop media – radio, newspapers, magazines and the monoliths of the corporate pop industry – in the face of the internet has eroded the old models of how we listen, how we consume and love records. Even the CD format, except for small pockets of bloody-minded opposition, manifested as lavish packaging, seems to have its days numbered. There is now far too much music being released every year for anyone, fan or professional critic, to get a handle on it all. Looking at an entire decade, you can fucking forget it - I haven't even heard the most of the records that made most other critics' top 10s, the readymade elect. Lists, ranking and comprehension are for the Nick Hornbys of this world now. Consensus, in a universe of listeners atomised onto their own islands of taste, must be manufactured.

Perhaps the closest thing to a genuinely popular, zeitgeist-reflecting – and, not coincidentally, avant-garde – music was the astonishing renaissance of hip-hop and R&B that accompanied the end millennium: ruthlessly capitalist, relentlessly neophilic, rhizomatically spawning new and alien forms. There were Timbaland's productions, of which his collaborations with Missy Elliot on 'Get Yr Freak On' and the accompanying album Miss E... So Addictive, were the pinnacle; Outkast's psychedelic masterpiece Stankonia, the most feverishly inventive product of the Dirty South; the stoned high-low art absurdism of Madvillain's Madvillainy (Tristan Tzara in a hustler get-up); Cannibal Ox's book of revelations, The Cold Vein; the long-awaited Hell Hath No Fury, on which The Neptunes' production and Pusha T and Malice's oiled and vicious flows meshed like V8 innards; the genesis of grime in London, bent into extraordinary shapes by the artistic will of Dizzee Rascal on Boy In Da Corner; the purest flowering of Kanye West's pop talent in the form of Late Registration.

No surprise that indie simply couldn't compete with this overcharged germination, going, for the most part, into an ever-worsening slough of aesthetic conservatism and emotional infantilism. Where it chose to engage with these artificial intoxications, it produced the shimmering, Platonic dream-pop ideal of Panda Bear's Person Pitch, and Richard Youngs' suite of digital incantations The Naive Shaman – ecstatic accesses to the heart of nature, through the dreamworld of technology.

Shadowing this excitement, in a decade riven by disaster – 9/11, the Iraq War, the market crash – has been a sense of grief, dissolution and trauma, exemplified by Burial's Untrue – the rave burnt out into a world of shadows haunted by the memories of love, the spectral jungle of his first album hollowed-out to a translucent perfection. Coil's ...And The Ambulance Died In His Arms, recorded at their 2003 ATP performance, shortly before the death of frontman Jhonn Balance, was the aching, haunting, end to one of the most brilliant bodies of work of the 20^th century. Forbidding, but gripping this listener like barbed wire: the apocalyptic wasteland of Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven sprawled over the first half of the decade, while The Drift, Scott Walker's first album in more than 10 years, appeared as the most fully-formed, profound and insurmountable artefact of this decade.

What of all this will last? Try me again in 2020.

33. Evangelista

Originally published in the university newspaper, The Boar.

Evangelista – Prince of Truth (Constellation)

Carla Bozulich's muse is deadly: with every release since 2006's disturbing, fractured Evangelista, the record that gave its name to the project she's since piloted, it's assumed a more ferocious, more sulphurous presence. Last year's Hello Voyager intensified its electrified slow-burn into a penetratingly brilliant, fraught record – art-punk cowed with the quietness of exhausted desperation, in ragged structures fringed with noise, finally collapsing into the existential crisis of the long closing title track. Prince of Truth opens with just as stunning a tremor: minutes of crunching concréte noise congeals into an atmosphere electric with dread, Bozulich's desperate and distorted vocal burning in the air.

It comes as no surprise that former Godspeed You Black Emperor! guitarist Efrim Menuck was responsible for the record's production, at the band's Hotel2Tango studio in Montreal: each of these seven songs possesses the ambition, the sense of charged liminality, the ambivalent relationship with melody and structure, and the Gothic light and dark of that band's best work, without the 20-minutes passages of nothing-very-much. Funnelled into each is Bozulich's own 25-year background in art-punk projects like Geraldine Fibbers and Ethel Meatplow and the talents of a host of experimental-rock players, including Xiu Xiu drummer Ches Smith, the brilliantly responsive bass of Tara Barnes, and guitarist Nels Cline, last heard providing the kick to the last few Wilco albums.

That the band should be so utterly congruent with the thrust of Bozulich's singular and intense performances, on an album of such strange contrasts, is itself remarkable. They seem to work as one emotional entity, whether on 'I Lay There In Front of Me Covered In Ice' – a ballad that's also a Gothic story, where organ and piano barely disturb its frozen-pond stasis – or 'You Are A Jaguar', an emotional detonation-zone covered with sheets of cratered noise, a maelstrom of smashing drums, Bozulich's vocal jumping from fragile whispers to a strangled scream. The record's end balances its opening: 10-minute closer 'On The Captain's Side' slowly closes in on you in a drift of accordion and quietly lowering electronic noise like a black fog at sea. The demonic persona Bozulich has channelled throughout – the Baphomet-horned ouroboros of a woman that adorns the inner sleeve – cedes to a kind of peace: “with bitter tears, I float in mourning / I float in the sea alone”. Drift with her.

32. Flaming Lips

Published in The Boar, Warwick University's student newspaper, Vol. 33 Iss. 3.

The Flaming Lips - Embryonic (Warner Brothers)

As they should, they did it different. The Flaming Lips' latest is a turn away from the increasingly glossy symphonic-pop of their post-Soft Bulletin work, but neither is it a turn back to their previous identity as acid-punks. Their least conventional work since 1997's 4CD Zaireeka! – a sprawling, 70-minute panoply of (largely successful) experiments, an unashamedly ambitious prog splurge, even down to its Hipgnosis-goes-photomontage cover-art – but also, undoubtedly, a full-burn hit to the pleasure-centres. It is that now-rare, marvellous thing – a Flaming Lips album you actually remember after it finishes.

From the first spurts of tearing feedback and metallic synths that open 'Convinced of the Hex', immediately underpinned by a Bonham-via-Mantronix drum-pattern from Kliph Scurlock, you know this is something very different. The huge virtuosity that marked the rococo layer-cake productions of their last few albums is fed into making bewildering sprays of psychedelic fireworks, more achieved, if with perhaps less ragged verve, than their coarse and brilliant early work. Scattered throughout are irresistible thrash-out moments – instrumental freak-outs 'Aquarius Sabotage', 'Worm Mountain', like a burial mound of fuzz-boxes landing on top of you – but also strange, narcotic drifts – the suspended longing of 'Evil', 'I Can Be A Frog's whimsical jaunt, Karen O cackling unsettlingly in the background, 'Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast' like a gathering of Eno's Music For Airports choirs in the crackling aether. But in none of these explorations does their pop touch ever disappear: even the most mind-burning sonic pile-ups are arranged with the care of a gardener. Wayne Coyne's vocodered whisper on combination space-fable/love-song (the best kind) 'The Impulse' might as well be Jeff Lynne on 'Mr. Blue Sky'; the weirdness of his intergalactic evangelist turn on 'Sagittarius Silver Announcement' is only underscored by the conventionally ascending chorus, bathed in white light from the synths. And even this, as with so many of these songs, is refracted through a production haze quite unlike most rock albums – part-in-the-red studio-jam, part-interstellar-transmission, swimming in FX. When they finally hit spirally-ascending closer 'Watch The Planets', you've no choice but to take them at their word: it's cosmic.

The critics had it that The Soft Bulletin marked the moment the Lips passed into maturity. They may have, now, to think again. Coyne may croon “I wish I could go back/Go back in time”, but this will leave you with the tang of the future on yr tongue.

30. One Poem

Found Poem

(After R.F. Langley, Journals)

The eleventh tree is the ivy, then

on down through the guelder into the elder,

if Graves is at all to be trusted. Ivy

this morning, in sunlight, at Footherley,

umbels of pale green clubs. Slow wasps crawl there

with folded wings. One

__________________falls backwards and drops

onto a lower leaf. In the track, so

cold that dew is like seawater, and there

is the chilly smell of sweet

____________________rotting.

29. One Poem

Watching Nosferatu

It was the beginning, the purest map
of this cursed land, pock-marked in black-and-white,
scrying-field for a century severed

with gashes, drunk on blood. Schreck, starkly
carved as a hieroglyph, stone death's-head,
face of unnature, fingers teeming stalks.

I know well enough his blasted country:
gnarled passes, huddled villages, wind
whistling with a rattle of Schoenberg,

a land of phantoms, up to the castle
meeting the slate-grey sky alone. The eyes
of the Count, riven with hunger, drawing,

draining, ever-dark singularity.
The gesture - the sleeping flesh beneath him,
a dream-geometry of curves outlined

in linen, of curls framing kohl eyes, sweep,
pulse and yield of a neck, traced with the touch
of an exile. And, waiting to finish

the starved years, stone-hemmed days. Pooling crimson,
obsidian. The final acquisition.
I know
********that cold-sweating wish far too well.

28. Light of Glory

A 'spiritual autobiography' of Olivier Messiaen's oratorio La Transfiguration Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ, written as an assessed piece for my second creative-writing unit last year.

I didn’t know quite what to think, afterwards. It was as if another kind of knowledge – insubstantial, impossible to formulate – barged out what I felt I knew. It all came back, but that feeling, with all the strangeness of a photograph’s caught time, framed and hanging in a corner of my head, remained with me, however much suspicion with which I regarded that moment of emptiness. It was a summer evening much like any other; the curtains were drawn, the radio on, as if I’d returned to the habits of my adolescence, a look of earnest concentration on my face as I listened.

The next morning, as I was cycling the usual route to work, cresting the hill that descends towards the town centre, I was struck, as if lanced, by the sun moving out from behind the church clocktower. I remembered, then, how I should have formulated last night’s thoughts: that I knew, now, what revelation was.

***

On the other end of the broadcast were the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales, two further choirs, and seven soloists, at the leviathan carcass of the Albert Hall, playing Olivier Messiaen’s La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. Given the continued public distrust of funding for ‘experimental’ music, this was a vast mobilisation of forces: the BBC were seemingly prepared to shell out for the public service commitment of celebrating Messiaen’s centenary year. Performances and recordings of La Transfiguration are rare as snow leopards; I was left with only this first, astonished listening, onto which ideas and memories fixed themselves, barnacle-like.

It came, of course, with its own history. By the time it was first performed, at the Coliseu dos Recreios, Lisbon, on 7 June 1969, it had given its composer more trouble than any other work he had written, vastly delayed – taking four years to complete, instead of the initially-agreed nine months – constantly expanding – it was originally intended to run a mere forty-five minutes, consist of nine movements, as opposed to the final fourteen, and utilise smaller forces – and plagued by structural problems. At the premiere, the renowned Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, stricken with fever, had to be firmly coaxed from his hotel room to play his solo part, shivering in a cold sweat, to a crowd who had already been kept waiting. The struggles, it seems, were in proportion to the cumulative power of the final product.

The biblical narrative of the Transfiguration takes place at the peak of a mountain, the disciples looking on, catching their breath, as Jesus ascends into the air to converse with the apparitions of Moses and Elijah. Messiaen, a keen mountaineer, was partially drawn to the subject by the thought of “the awesomeness of the place of Transfiguration”. We can almost hear him, gasping, overwhelmed, on the summit.

***

La Transfiguration is a strange piece of work: though closest in form to oratorios such as Handel’s Messiah or Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, it is still not simply ‘Transfiguration: The Musical’. It is framed as a series of ‘meditations’ on the event, an extreme musical gloss on the Latin texts – selected from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, the Old Testament and Aquinas’ Summa Theologica – declaimed by the vast choir, illuminating and extending it into the aural dimension. The structure is cyclical: the opening Récit Évangélique – a cavern of sonorous percussion textures, punctuated by the ping of temple blocks – is followed by two movements from the Gospel narrative, another Récit, two Gospel episodes, and a chorale; this structure of seven movements, or ‘septenary’, is repeated. The number itself is emblematic of Messiaen’s programming of religious symbolism into every aspect of the work, rhyming with the seven Spirits of God seen in Revelation, the Seven Virtues, and the Seven Joys of Mary; three, associated with the Trinity, manifests in the triple blasts of the horns. This is an eternal return: just as the text weaves back and forth through the chronology of the Transfiguration, it re-presents variations on the same musical material. In Messiaen’s music time is strange, pliable: the Almighty never stoops to mere linearity. In Quator de la Fin de Temps, the whimsically flitting melodies seem to defy any progress; the vast chromatic blocks of his organ works are like immovable ziggurats. Every sound is no longer a mere pinprick in space-time; it resonates out into the metaphysical. Instead of seeking to explain, it actively amplifies the impenetrable mystery of His transformation, and the appearance of the Trinity – the three distinct beings in one.

Listening, I’m struck by the mounting power and strangeness of the music, as it cycles back, again and again, towards these moments, when the Divine made itself plain: its oscillations between serene plainchant, slowly arcing strings, and the woodwinds’ birdsong cacophonies, the brass’s apocalyptic blurts, the choir’s soaring shouts; its swaying movements between dissonance and collective tonal amalgamation. Then, in the calm of the mountain-peak, resonating with the foggy harmonics of tam-tam and cymbal, a voice, announced by alien chorales on the violins, trilling metallics, and an explosion from the timpani, issues from the cloud. “He is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him”.

There is nothing here without meaning: La Transfiguration is remarkable for the mirroring of its grand arc in the microcosmic details of its sound-world. Messiaen made frequent use of a signature technique: the seemingly random melodies emanating from the soloists are in fact lovingly-notated birdsongs; by now an expert ornithologist, he could pick favourite birds for each occasion. Thus, the ‘Song of the Eternal Church’ is accompanied by birds from Europe, Brazil, Africa and Canada, and the appearance of the Trinity is precipitated by the staccato rasp of the noble peregrine falcon. Now, I stop at intervals whilst walking to catch these details, part of our everyday sonic fabric – wagtails, blackbirds, finches, wrens. They summon with them the air, light and colours of the open field – in abundance in the countryside around his birthplace of Avignon – which Messiaen saw as one with the Light of God.

This is not figurative. Debussy’s influence made Messiaen a primarily chromatic composer. Whilst loving melody, he revelled in the timbre of strings and horns, thickening and layering harmonies, like paint squirted and trowelled onto canvas. In conversation with Claude Samuel, he spoke of the work in synaesthetic terms: “Gold and violet, red and violet purple, bluish-grey studded with gold and deep blue…” Its fabric can be better compared with visual art – Gauguin’s exotic visions, the unearthly radiance of Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, the light-flooded hallucinations of filmmaker Stan Brakhage – than most music. As the church organist, for sixty years, of the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, he thought of the blinding light of revelation in terms of the sonic white-out of its thundering pipes.

He was first drawn to the subject after hearing a sermon, at his summer home of Petichet in the French Alps, on the Transfiguration as the encapsulation of Christ as the True Light – the image of Jesus as “his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light”, joined in the wholeness of the divine Trinity suddenly invading our world; an illumination of the beyond. The enormous thirteenth-movement climax of La Transfiguration comes with three minor crescendos, announcing the members of the Trinity; with a sudden dip, the music seems to gather like a tidal force, rushing in to a blazing, sustained E-Major – the traditional chord of paradise – the entire ensemble lighting up like a nocturnal city. The final movement, ‘Chorale of the Light of Glory’, entirely defying musical common sense, is one last sighing love song to the Saviour – tender, joyful. As Christopher Dingle puts it, “We are beyond the restrictions of reason and are now in eternity.”

***

I was fifteen when I stopped believing in God. Becoming haltingly aware that the constant, stifling pain my peers spent their days inflicting on me was, in fact, a general condition, I resolved that no God could sanction such an existence. Reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline and listening to the scourging wrath of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible, I conceived formulations of God’s essential absence, a sucking void at the heart of life. When, during my last months at secondary school, I slashed my wrists so deeply I left a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, it seemed merely a confirmation.

Three years later, in a cold March classroom, halfway through my second year of Sixth Form, I was reading, under the table, an article about the singer Joanna Newsom. The writer, Frances Morgan, was being almost frighteningly candid about the almost supernatural effect of her work, its dreamlike resonances, vibrating towards – what? The metaphysical?

It was a thought, at first ridiculous, that wouldn’t leave me. Already listening to explicitly religious recordings – John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Beethoven, Buddhist ceremonial music, Qawwali – it was perhaps inevitable that La Transfiguration would leave a mark on me. Before this consideration, of course, were other reasons: its sprawling fecundity of ideas, almost unrivalled in 20^th century music, the eclecticism of one who loves too much of the world; its natural confidence; its total modernism, allied to the most plain and sincere of belief in the truth of a two-thousand year-old religion. Perhaps most of all, the fact that its at-times-overwhelming beauty is not in spite of its religious purpose, but directly because of it. Like the medieval and Renaissance piétas and crucifixions which so fascinated me, its strange transmutations – rendering the most arcane of theological events into the two dimensions of a picture, or the sound of a choir – seemed to radiate something all the more significant for being inexplicable. Whatever else becomes of it – whether the unknowable truths at the heart of La Transfiguration are, in fact, the ‘truth’, whatever that might mean – it will have done what Messiaen purposed: to touch and shake a life.