Foreign countries
My contribution for 9 for the 90s.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” -L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
I was seventeen in 1990, probably the primest age for personal discovery and the age to feel most excited about those discoveries.
I love the internet (it is my main gig after all), but before the internet, discovering and acquiring new music was more of a personal story in itself because it was difficult. There were no discovery engines or rare music blogs to help music enthusiasts. Looking back, the way that music was made, consumed, and marketed was completely different than it is now. It can be mysterious how music was received and discovered then. Where relevant, in discussing these selections, I’m hopeful I can provide some context for why they were important to me at the time. Further, it is my desire not to descend into nostalgia or assert that things were better back in the good old days, but rather to offer some insight into music discovery pre-internet which may not make immediate sense to those under a certain age.
“After the Flood“— Talk Talk from Laughing Stock, 1991 (Verve)
Spirit of Eden was Talk Talk’s last album of the 80s and it felt like a secret album that only a few people knew about; I only knew about it via a friend a year ahead of me in high school. Compared to their earlier work, its at-moments challenging revision of what pop music could be (I mean, what pop band would hire Hugh Davies as a session musician?) was a commercial failure and so the follow up Laughing Stock didn’t receive much press or marketing. If you didn’t remember to look for a new Talk Talk album in the record bins, you didn’t really know it existed. I didn’t hear Laughing Stock when it was released in 1991 and only heard it first at the end of 1993.
Laughing Stock took what I loved in Spirit of Eden to greater heights: the aesthetics of free improvisation, modernist composition, and pop all merged together. “After the Flood” is the longest, densest track on the album and is filled with a surprising number of shifts given the relative simplicity of the song’s structure. The highlight of the track is Mark Hollis’s two minute feedback solo that arrives in the midst of a tranquil chord progression.
This might be one of the greatest moments in the history of music.
As an aside, it’s interesting that Slint is singled out for originating the LOUD-quiet-LOUD dynamic. They did it amazingly well, but Talk Talk on tracks like “Eden” on Spirit of Eden may have beat them to it.
“Super Electric” — Stereolab from Super Electric, 1991 (Too Pure)
Availability was the challenge to hearing music before the Internet: if you didn’t have the cash to buy a record or know someone who owned it, then you simply didn’t hear it.
“Super Electric” is a perfect summation of the early Stereolab sound, a sound that is a bricolage of their influences that yield their own unique vision. In 1991 when it was released, most of Stereolab’s influences were not available for consumption. All the now-canonized krautrock classics (NEU!, Faust, Can, Cluster) that inspired the early Stereolab sound disappeared from shelves throughout the 80s, went out of print, and were unknown to many music enthusiasts. For those of us coming of age in the early 90s, for all practical purposes, those records were non-existent (and wouldn’t exist until around 1994 when CD bootlegs started appearing). No one I knew knew who NEU! or Faust were, so for me at the time, this sounded like radically minimal pop music with no ancestry. Even though I know now what spawned this music, I haven’t lost the memory of its shocking newness to me.
“Tiger Trap” — Beat Happening from You Turn Me On, 1992 (Sub Pop)
US indie rock minimalism in concentrate. This was my first foray into more “underground” music and while a good deal of that music lost interest for me relatively quickly, Beat Happening still remains strongly essential to me for its less-is-more approach.Beat Happening was associated strongly with (some might say founded) twee. Twee has a bit of a bad rep at this point in time for its privileged, white middle class association. However, there was always something more adult (including the uncomfortable truths and contradictions inherent in adulthood) about Beat Happening’s music. By the time of their last album though, their approach become more focused, serious, and dark.
Make no mistake though: this track is a descendent of minimalism. To me, the closest thing matching the majestic simplicity of this music is Young Marble Giants (which shouldn’t be a coincidence since Stuart Moxham produced it) but even their music might be too complex. I’d almost say this makes me think of classical hindustani music, but I don’t know if they’d ever make that connection.
“Climatic Phase #3" — Seefeel from Quique, 1993 (Too Pure)
Too Pure had a brilliant run for the first half of the 90s. A good deal of the deliberately genre-defying music that they released has been subsumed into the fabric of rock at this point, but I recommend exploring most the bands they released at the time including Pram, Moonshake, Long Fin Killie, and Th Faith Healers. All that music still sounds relevant, but maybe not as revelatory as it sounded then with its emphasis of integrating the forgotten corners of rock and popular music with technology and a healthy dose of CAN.
Rockism is something vaguely chuckled at now, but in the early 90s, many of us were expected to take sides. Seefeel’s earliest releases askew genre in a way that allowed me to accept electronic music. Certainly, Cocteau Twins and MBV started breaking down this boundary by making rock more electronic, but Seefeel took that notion to its logical end. Mark Clifford (a hugely underrated innovator) went to great lengths make his guitar sound like anything but a guitar. Even today I’m baffled at how he made some of the sounds on their records just with a guitar and some effects. Employing the track-based, repetitive approach of techno production in the context of rock made their composition even more un-rock. It’s easy to forget that this is a live band playing using guitar, bass, and drums (and drum machine). Forgetting can make you question what you aren’t supposed to like.
“Dowhile” — Oval from 94Diskont, 1994 (Mille Plateaux)
Mille Plateaux had an amazing run in the late 90s (as evidenced also by the inclusion of GAS below). They managed to release both intellectually rigorous and relevant music. The idea of emphasizing intellectually rigorous music seems quaint to me at this point but it felt like an immense statement at the time.
I recall reading about Oval in the Wire which at the time was the lifeblood of new music discovery for me (magazines and zines were the primary way one discovered new music). Maybe part of the mystique was that this music was hard to find. . I felt so lucky when on a trip to Kim’s Underground (RIP), I stumbled across a copy of the Mille Plateaux CD in the used bin. Not sure how it ended up there, but I remember it being basically the same price as a new CD.
What most people thought about music from Germany in the 90s was either Kraftwerk or Einstürzende Neubauten (sadly, that probably hasn’t changed that much). It’s impossible to describe how different and organic Oval sounded on first listen not just from the expectations of a “German” project, but in general. Doubly so since most of the technology they used to make this record as a form of critique is now itself obsolete.
What is wonderful is that even if you’ve never used a CD player, Dowhile is timeless in its seasick sound. While structurally simple, it’s the timbral subtlety that allows for utter absorption. Listen to how the sound changes and evolves over each iteration and how a simple pitch bend can grab you. Immersive and deserves to be canonized.
“Gamera/Cliff Dweller Society “— Tortoise from Gamera/Cliff Dweller Society, 1994 (Duophonic)
I was fortunate to live in Chicago at the peak of the post-rock bubble. I saw some amazing shows at the Empty Bottle and Lounge Ax. (In fact, if there were a live recording of Jim O’Rourke’s hour long solo performance of “Women of the World” I saw at the Empty Bottle from 1997, it would be here instead.) Amazing music seemed to be happening many nights of the week and given the more constrained capacity for information to travel then, it felt like you could actually keep track of it all. Local scenes and live shows were often how you heard new music because you couldn’t preview new music on soundcloud or bandcamp and many record stores in the US didn’t let you listen to music before you bought it.
This track is a musical tour of the city at the time: Jim O’Rourke/Gastr del sol’s Tony Conrad and John Fahey-inspired avant-gardeism, jazz, dance music, the tradition of free improvised music, and the bass guitar and rhythm section-led math rock all held together by Teo Macero-style edits. “DJed” gets the props, but this EP (which I think of as one track) takes more risks. Also, the playing is so much more alive here as witnessed by the horn-led section recorded in an open room on the B Side.
“Aus” — Fennesz, from Hotel Paral.lel, 1997 (Mego)
This was from the wave of the new computer and “difficult” electronic music coming from Europe. I had discovered early electronic music in college, but what the Mego artists were doing was stripping the practice of that music of its academic pretensions. Hotel Paral.lel was my entrance into this world and it made the idea that the tools of electronic music production were accessible to anyone with a computer. Obviously, one quickly realized in 1997 that just owning a computer isn’t going to make your work sound as good as Fennesz here, but that’s beside the point. (Also, most of this album was recorded on an Ensoniq sampler.)
The aesthetic coherence of Hotel Paral.lel driven by drone, musique concrete-style edits, and extreme timbres makes it feels like one long piece. Except for Aus. With its song-like structure, what makes Aus interesting is how Fennesz inserts the more difficult parts of his work into a pop context. I’m happy that the whole album isn’t like Aus. I quite like the challenging parts of the album, but Aus is an amazing beer at the end of productive day.
“Zauberberg #3 “— GAS, from Zauberberg, 1997 (Mille Plateaux)
I admit to being a bit of a Germanophile. While at the time, this music was accused of being vaguely fascistic, I disagree. It takes the principles of German romanticism and modernism and vaporizes them into a dense fog of memory and possibility. This was hauntology ten years ahead of that critical concept.
Wolfgang Voigt’s productions have always been smart. The rhythmic complexity of the Studio 1 records make them perfect for home listening but mostly because they are completely unmixable by most DJs. Beyond Voigt’s clever recontextualization, what is smart here is the shifting patterns that emerge as the different length loops overlap and are filtered for maximum surface noise. But really it’s the bass and the 60Hz kick that gets me every time.
“Kohde “— Vladislav Delay, from Ele, 1999 (Sigma Editions)
Even in the late 90s, I still traded cassette compilations. While the internet connected me via mailing lists like droneon and idm-list with my friend Paul Gough (aka Pimmon) in Australia, it was still much faster to hear new music via international post than by transfering mp3s over 56k dial-up. Paul introduced me to all the cool outre music happening in the southern hemisphere (and some in Europe and Japan) while I gave him a samplers of what was happening in N. America.
This track took up one side of a cassette and was originally released on an Australian label run by Rosy Parlane (now an artist on Touch Records). It was silly how this was labeled as “glitch” at the time. For me, Sasu Ripatti’s background as a jazz drummer is the big giveaway. His earliest work as Vladislav Delay is more akin to free improvisation but filtered through dub’s studio-as-instrument philosophy. He pulls out all the gear here, sets up a few sequences and sounds sees where those sounds guide him. What’s remarkable is the density of the sounds and their interactions. In lesser hands, there is so much danger for all of this real-time complexity to fall apart into incoherence. I especially love his use of off rhythms as hooks and anchors for all the activity happening around them. For me personally, this is music that remains strongly influential to my own music.
Some of the tracks on this album were edited and later rereleased on a Mille Plateaux album, but these versions plus “Pisa” (which sounds just like the tower) are superior.
