Vinyl Records, A Weekly Journey, April 5th, 2021.
I’ve been collecting vinyl records for 34 years. As a teenager, I would spend hours in records stores, flipping through dusty old records, reading liner notes, and grilling the shopkeepers for knowledge. It’s still one of my favorite things to do, but there are fewer record stores to visit now. The pandemic made this situation even worse, but thanks to online sellers, the show goes on.
I’ve been kicking around the idea of documenting additions to my collection for a while. I started with a radio show on Mixcloud where I play a mix of new and old records, but it doesn’t feel like enough. The thing about records is that, for me, every one of them has a bit of a story to them. It might be a review, a memory, or something that seems completely unrelated. Records make me feel and remember things, so here are some thoughts and three records that recently landed in my collection.
Róisín Murphy — Róisín Machine, Skint, 2020.
I think of Róisín Murphy as an aesthete or a curator. Like David Bowie, Bjork, or, dare I say, Kanye West, Murphy has always surrounded herself with the day’s finest creative talents. On Róisín Machine, her collaborations with producer Richard Barratt and graphic designer Bráulio Amado set the scene for an excellent album. Barratt was half of Sheffield’s Sweet Exorcist and responsible for one of Warp Records’ most anthemic bleep tracks, “Testone.” His production on these tracks feels like a mature take on Manchester and Sheffield’s Acid House roots. It’s musically more elaborate but still raw and straightforward. Amado echoes these themes in the graphic design of the album. Over the past several years, Bráulio has become a key figure in capturing the visual identity of modern life. He emerged at the moment when it felt like we were collectively about to sacrifice our humanity for the sake of operational efficiency. His work celebrates the beauty in the imperfect and often inefficient human touch.
Murphy’s work has always revolved around synthetic and natural interplay as she pushes and pulls her voice over machined beats. It’s that carefully curated mix of warmth over cold that seems to be a consistent theme in northern England’s music. As Murphy did here, when you get the mix right, you get that funk that makes a top-shelf dance record.
Roisin Machine is a solid dance album that closely resembles 2007’s “Overpowered.” Songs like “Murphy’s Law,” “Incapable” and, “Simulation” echo the brilliance of “You Know Me Better” and “Let Me Know.” The disco vibe is still there, but there are also strong tones of acid house, mainly due to the heavy use of analog synths. It’s hard not to think back on those pre-Covid days of late nights in the club when you listen to these songs. Murphy’s nightclub roots add a layer of nostalgia that makes the pandemic grind just a bit more bearable.
Machinedrum — A View of U, Ninjatune, 2020.
It’s hard to make an electronic dance record that can live beyond its promotional cycle. I’m talking about records like Massive Attack’s “Blue Lines” or Boards of Canada’s “Music has a right to children.” The kind of record that sat just high enough above the trend line not to get flushed away when we were bored of it. Or, in the case of Daft Punk’s “Homework,” Was there a trend, or were we captivated by their ability to crystalize everything that we thought was cool at that time? In my opinion, “A View of U” is one of these records.
I first met Travis, AKA Machinedrum, 20 years ago in Miami. He had recently released a record that got the IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) community excited. In New York City, that community was predominantly people working in Silicon Alley, a strip of Broadway where many web-design agencies set up shop. The late ’90s were the height of the Dotcom boom, and Silicon Alley was a 24-hour-a-day operation with designers and programmers churning out the early websites that got everyone hooked on the internet. I was one of those people. I worked as an “Information Architect” at a design company located on the corner of Broadway and Bleeker. On my lunch breaks and after work, I would often head to the many record stores in the area. Other Music, Kims, Etherea, Temple, and Sounds, to name a few. The Tower Records megastore was just down the street, and it wasn’t much of a walk to end up browsing the record shops in the West Village. I worked long hours on things that had not existed before. Everyone I knew was involved in making something that was essentially new. We came from various disciplines. I was a former architect; everyone was a former something else. Music was the common ground for many of us that helped us bond with each other before jumping into the trenches. IDM felt custom-made for what we were doing. It was computer-based, innovative, and, like our work, completely new. The people making this music didn’t grow up thinking they were going to make this kind of music. It didn’t exist until that moment. Travis was one of those people.
Travis found himself making music at a moment when software made it possible to create the impossible, and the internet opened up connections to other people doing similar things. There were communities on IRC and messageboards for fans and producers. As fans, we were nerds. Nerds who cataloged and documented everything. Nerds that built websites to share nerdy information with other nerds. Nerds with a ravenous appetite for new music. We liked a good mystery too, and Machinedrum’s first release was a bit of an IDM mystery. “Now You Know” was in the cutup Hip Hop style that Prefuse 73 and Push Button Objects had introduced a few years earlier. It sounded seasoned. Whoever made this knew what they were doing. Back then, anonymity was a trendy thing. Figuring out if a track was by Aphex Twin or Autechre or some rando using Fruity Loops was a popular topic in the forums. Who was this mysterious Machinedrum person? Machinedrum was playing the Infiltrate festival in Miami, and I needed to be there.
Infiltrate was intense. It was not the Miami of boutique hotels and fancy cars. It was “Miami bro!” and things could turn at any moment. Being from Queens, New York, I was used to shady situations. Still, the volatility of Miami freaked me out a bit. People were on edge, and as the sun went down each night, things would get more and more uncertain.
Infiltrate held parties all over Miami. It was a response festival to Miami’s Winter Music Conference (WMC). WMC was big and mainstream. No matter who you were, there was always someone on the WMC bill that you’d want to see. Infiltrate was underground, low budget, and a place for those of us that didn’t feel like they fit in with the mainstream crowd of WMC. Travis played at a club called I/O Lounge. The vibe was conscious Hip Hop meets electronics. I don’t remember much of that night, to be honest. Eggfooyoung (Adrian Michna) DJ’d right before Travis went on, and it was a mindblowing mix of Hip Hop and IDM. As Eggfooyoung faded out his last song, you could see Travis in the glow of his laptop screen. Pale, sandy blonde hair and young. Travis was a lot younger than the other musicians I had met in the scene. I think he was 18 at the time. Soon the club started to rattle as sub-bass shook everything. Rap verses that sound like they went through a paper shredder, crushed in a vice, and then stretched like taffy speckled his set. The beats were proper Hip Hop. Every MC in the place wanted to grab a mic.
Since then, Travis has released countless records. There’s always a new Machinedrum project or collaboration out. Over the years, he’s released music on many labels, with the most recent one being the legendary Ninjatune. His output for Ninjatune has been more refined and mature than anything previous. It’s not music with Hip Hop or Footwork influences; it is Hip Hop and Footwork. The leap Travis made in the past decade takes him from being inspired by music to becoming the inspiration. He owns this sound now. The mystery is gone, and that’s a good thing. We’re not left guessing who it might be because it’s now unmistakably Machinedrum.
“A View of U” feels like the beginning of Machinedrum’s second act. The recent A$AP Ferg remix of “Star” and Freddie Gibbs on “Kane Train” makes me think that things will only get bigger.
Miles Davis — Double Image // Rare Miles From The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, Columbia, 2020.
This record was one of those Record Store Day releases that I believed would slip past me but thankfully, a friend of mine secure a copy. Similarly, a college friend introduced me to Davis’ “Bitches Brew” in the first place. It was the early ’90s. We explored collage and composition in Architecture school. At the same time, groups like the Beastie Boys and Massive Attack sampled old Jazz and Soul records. “Discovering” overlooked passages in old Jazz vinyl was a thing to do back then.
I was familiar with Miles but only from pictures and TV show appearances. He was this mysterious man that played his trumpet with his back facing the audience, and when he spoke, he made a rough and scary sound. As a boy, Miles seemed more like a Sci-Fi character than anything else. “Bitches Brew,” released in 1970, several years before I was born, still sounds like
Over the past few decades, “Bitches Brew” became a record I would revisit regularly. Each spin almost always feels like the first. The deep layers of sounds and compositions paired with the intentional unpredictability make it hard to locate oneself in space and time. The music is as mysterious as the man. Unsolved and unresolved.
“Double Image” was initially released in 1998 as part of an expanded “Bitches Brew.” This release marks the first time these recordings are available on vinyl, and in this case, it’s a gorgeous red. The title is misleading. These songs were not recorded at the same time as “Brew” and should exist as a separate release that lives between “Bitches Brew” and “Jack Johnson.” What I realized is that this isn’t the story of “Bitches Brew”; it’s the story of “Electric Miles” and “Double Image” is an essential document to that evolutionary journey. Davis’s electric period is fascinating but also his most challenging. The songs of this period range from beautiful and serene to nightmarish and chaotic. Sometimes it feels like someone is mixing paint colors, and there are moments of pink neon that swirl into intense reds, shocking blues, darkest and richest black, and then back to a life-giving streak of bright green. “Double Image” dabbles in the darkness and the messiness of too many complicated things happening at once but, for the most part, remains lucid and listenable.
Miles remains Sci-Fi and alien. These records contain terabytes of otherworldly information that we will never fully decipher.
