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Tom Jenkinson: The new Chris Morris? (edit: Or the new Derrida?)

Started by 9, May 09, 2004, 03:07:23 PM

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9

For anyone who hasn't seen it, Jenkinson aka Squarepusher produced this list of his ten favourite records for dazed and confused in March. Its quite funny.

QuoteFeature from Dazed and Confused magazine, March 2004.




"Ten records" by Tom Jenkinson.

"Under the weather report" by Chilli Zawinul
"Death disco for rent" by Dildo Rotten
"The Style Council" by Chris Rear
"Temptation in the family" by Level Heaven 17:42
"The dark side of public floyd" by Pink Enemy
"Moby intrusion" by Richie Hawtin
"Sing when you're being run over by a mescherschmitt bubble car" by Sly and the family Throbbie
"What's the modern story ,life is rubbish glory (morning!)" by Dr. Noel Allbran
"Rebel without a dustbin" by Madonna
"20-something schizoid man" by The Jamie Sabbath Principle






"Under the weather report" by Chilli Zawinul
Chilli Zawinul were a talented beat combo of the early 80's ,principally known for their seminal smash "blood sugar sex birdshit". However ,it is litlle known that in between composing such easily digestible rich tea biscuits, they dabbled in esoteric activities such as trying to repair founder member Josef Edge's damaged sideburns by gobbling up voluminous quantities of red hot wire wool. In the wake of the depression caused by the disastrous consequences of this experiment, Josef Edge composed this minor masterpiece, his final baffled attempt to come to terms with his obsession with UK weatherman ,Micheal Fish.

"Death disco for rent" by Dildo Rotten
Many people have complained about Dildo Rotten being too controversial. Other people have complained that she is not controversial enough. Others have complained that the amount of contraversy generated is not commensurate with the inherent contraversiality of Dildo Rotten. Still others have complained that the contraversy generated by Dildo Rotten is a smokescreen for real contraversy generated by genuinely contraversial types such as Sid Nasty .Of course a personality such as Dildo Rotten finds it hard not to generate contaversy - I simply say "Death disco for rent " and dance about like a chicken on fire.

"The Style Council" by Chris Rear
Despite what his self-imposed pseudonym might suggest, Chris Rear is far from anal. In fact Chris Rear is what we might call an "oral" personality. As well as the immense payload of rubbish that constitutes his "vocals", Chris Rear has been known to produce prodigous quantities of anything from bird baths to full size replicas of Nelsons Column via his mouth. This record commemorates the time when Chris Rear started producing hundreds of titanium alloy 1/72 scale models of the "The Style Council". The poignant climax, when Chris Rear can no longer tolerate the abrasive effect of Paul Wellers "skinhead" on his epiglottis and in tears of frustration tries to bite his scalp off, is "Rear-ly Good"!

"Temptation in the family" by Level Heaven 17:42
Level Heaven 17:42 established themselves with the underground hit ,"Gay in China" in the fourteenth century. While much of England and Europe were in the grip of the black death, Level Heaven 17:42 were safely composing in a high security mud hut hovering approximately fifty furlongs above the feudal court of Ethelred the bubonic. Their ability to effect these seemingly impossible gravity-defying feats earned them the reputation of fearsome magicians, to which the alchemy of their song-writing is a lasting testament. This particular song is an epic meditation on the thrills and spills of incest. It ends with timeless words of advice :"Ye fpunketh upon thy fifter at ye peril"

"The dark side of public floyd" by Pink Enemy
In the '60's, there was much talk of a soldier gone AWOL named private Floyd. Rumour had it that this soldier learned how to grow marijuana in his armpits ,distill LSD in his bladder and harvest opium in his nostrils. This resulted in a state of intoxication so intense that individual parts of his body would suddenly detach and launch themselves into orbit around the sun. One night Pink Enemy, avid astronomers that they are, noticed a new binary system consisting of two kneecaps orbiting what appeared to be an imploded human brain. Having devined that these were indeed the mortal remnants of legendary private Floyd ,they wittily decided to name the system "public floyd", and in tribute composed this touching elegy.

"Moby intrusion" by Richie Hawtin
Richie Hawtin named this track after a potentially life-threatening episode which he recalls in his auto-biography, "the Celestine prophecy" ...."it was a late session one night, when I heard a dull, but very intense screaming sound. I looked up from the copy of "Music Technology" that I was masturbating onto, and saw ,faintly at first, the outline of Moby's contorted face appearing on the studio wall ! I had heard about this guy, lately he had been publicly arrested for trying to push a Missisippi steamboat up his arse - now he was obviously trying to escape from jail using an illegal anus dimension5>8 transporter. All of a sudden, Moby fell stumbling
wildly into the room, and after a fit of rage exploded, showering the room in cheap air fresheners !".

"Sing when you're being run over by a mescherschmitt bubble car" by Sly and the family Throbbie
Like all little brothers, the family Throbbie was often teased by his elder siblings. This took a rather more sinister turn when one day, Sly decided to set his brother in the tarmac surface of the replica Silverstone Grand Prix track he had just built in his studio control room. As Sly's nuclear powered bubble car roared over the family Throbbie's head at mach18, his keen musical ear noticed that the family Throbbie had just emitted the highest note ever sung by a human being. The family Throbbie was subsequently shown to be capable of producing the wildest array of superhuman singing tones, when run over by various vehicles. Particularly of note was the time when Sly and a group of friends drove a convoy of juggernauts over his head for 4 days continuously. This is where the now famous technique of "Throbdulation" comes from.

"What's the modern story ,life is rubbish glory (morning!)" by Professor Noel Allbran
The embittered stance of Professor Noel Allbran is exemplified by this work on the "look no hands!" label. Noel: "I think it is high time that musicians with no hands should be given a fair crack at the whip - all of these instruments that require hands to play them are tantamount to a worldwide insult to legitimately no-handed people." Fortunately, Professor Noel Allbran is on hand to demonstrate that hands are not only unnecessary, they are actually a handicap to the genuinely creative artist. Coupled with such profoundities as "world ,she ought hands t'expel, but only finger'd time s'll tell....", Professor Noel Allbran treats us to a prodiguous display of ingenuity such as playing a banjo by swallowing it, then manipulating pitch and tonal colour by moving the instrument in various directions around his lower intestine.

"Rebel without a dustbin" by Madonna
Everybody loves Madonna. Or at least that's the way she would have it. At the inception of her career as an important member of ecclesiastical mythology in the first century AD, she was reputed to have written to the pope asking him to proclaim a decree requiring that everybody in the world should love her, else they be put to death by being detonated by a 100ft wide bass bin playing "like a borderline virgin on holiday". The pope promptly refused, ostensibly on grounds of expense. She was so angry that her breath incinerated herself, yet it is known that her ghost stalks the ages, endlessly wanting to be loved. As in life, ever possesed of a lyrical imagination, in death she produced (in collaboration with other dead person James Dean) this charming ode to her favourite dustbin which went missing 2000 years ago.

"20-something schizoid man" by The Jamie Sabbath Principle
This landmark recording is the first instance of a piece of music being recorded by an idea, with no human intervention whatsoever. In the 1967 Jamie Sabbath completed his doctoral thesis on the luminescent properties of OAPs when given radioactive sweets. Of such repute was his work that the ideas embodied within were referred to as "The Jamie Sabbath Principle". Proud of his work and about to take a well-deserved rest, his ears pricked up when he heard an ethereally beautiful sound eminating from the neighboring sound studio. He peeked round the corner and saw the pages of his thesis quietly singing into a microphone, whilst recording equipment was operated by his book of preparatory notes. On seeing such a bizzarre sight, the author of said pages instantly went insane. This recording is a touching tribute to their auth



edit: ok seeing as everyone thought that was shit here's something he wrote about machines. Its quite interesting. (famous last words).

Quote"Collaborating with machines" by Tom Jenkinson.

The old preconceptions of machines (ie: drum machines, samplers, software) as inhibitive to "genuine" creativity/ "soulless" etc. are now quickly evaporating. The machine facilitates creativity, yes, but a specific kind of creativity that has undermined the idea of a composer who is master of and indifferent to his tools - the machine has begun to participate. Any die-hard instumentalists that still struggle to retain their notion of human sovereignty are exemplifying a peculiarly (western) human stupidity - resistance to the inevitable. What is also clear, though certainly undesirable by any retaining an anthropocentric view of composition is that
this process proceeds regardless of any ideal point of human-machine collaboration (ie one where the human retains any degree of importance.) One might say that music is imploding in preparation for a time when there is no longer any need for it.

As is commonly percieved, the relationship between a human operator and a machine is such that the machine is a tool, an instrument of the composers desires. Implicit in this, and generally unquestioned until recently, is the sovereignty of the composer. What is now becoming clear is that the composer is as much a tool as the tool itself, or even a tool for the machine to manifest its desires. I do not mean this in the sense that machines are in possesion of a mind capable of subtly directing human behaviour, but in the sense that the attributes of the machine are just as prominent an influence in the resulting artefact as the user is; through his work, a human operator brings as much about the machine to light as he does about himself. However, this is not to say that prior to electronic mechanisation, composers were free and unfettered in their creations. As a verbal langauge facilitates and constricts our thoughts, the musical tradition, language and the factors of its realisation(ie instrumentation, limits of physical ability) were just as active participants in the compositional process as the "composer" was.

Idealists who believed such constraints were simply obstacles in the composer's way have laboured to relieve us of them, only to reveal that music is in fact contingent on the very existence of these restrictions, and was never a pre-eminent "form". The "modern" composer, robbed of his constraints, finds himself in a wasteland of desolate freedom. The inconsequentiality of new classical music serves to illustrate this point.

However, for those who don't seek eternal freedom, help is at hand. Whatever may remain of the older constraints is of little consequence as music is now in the grip of a new restriction, the machine.

The machine can be a respite from the meaninglessness of musical freedom. Yet the old tendency to try to unfetter ourselves surfaces: instead of a collaboration, the machine is put at our service. Some of us still flatter ourselves with a certain sort of delusion whereby it is solely our conscious, rational thinking that directs our creations, and is manifest in them. Trying to force a machine to manifest a conscious purpose brings about a stifling and deadening process that only in our time could pass for "creativity". It imposes that the didactic "collaboration" with a machine is a strictly one-way energy channel, from the user to the machine. In this situation, the machine cannot constitute a genuine "oppositional factor" in a dialectical equation as it offers not the antithesis of the conscious human will but rather the negation of it. When being forced to "purpose", all the machine seems to be capable of is resistance. It is not that the machine is a lifeless vacuum that continually absorbs inspiration and ideas from its user, but that the user hinders the collaboration by assuming he is the progenitor of these things in the first place. It is in this trick of perspective, from the humble "it happened" to the questionable "I made it happen" to the disastrous "I can make it happen" that lies the labarynth of paradoxes that is our "modern" world.

The problematic relationship between humans and machines stems from the abject remnants of the modernist idea that we can control our fates, perfect ourselves and our surroundings, postpone or eventually eradicate death. (Anyone who is afraid of dying needs salvation, but not as they might say, from death, but in fact from life, and of course a retreat into dogma suits this purpose very well). This view holds that anything can ultimately be made a subject of our conscious will. However, bending something to our conscious will, whether that is a person, a machine, or a situation always manifests a compensatory and contradictory aspect. Something crops up which subverts our will. Yet it is never admitted that such subvertions are simply the corollary of our obsession with conscious direction of our surroundings and thus the idiocy continues. It is in this attitude of blind hectoring that the machine user-artist limits the possibility of transcendence. In this situation, it therefore makes little sense to the user to do anything with the machine other than to try to utterly dominate it, or risk being dictated to by a sterile lump of plastic. Unfortunately, working with any material in a violent and dictatorial way simply produces artefacts of human stupidity, not art. Inevitably, the violence commited by the artist returns
to its source. This is why many artists have gone insane, died young, or commited suicide. Although they are viewed as heroic, they are simply the people who have most consistently sensed the fundamentally ambiguous nature of all action and died fundamentally not from suicide or illness, but from despair.

One might say that the western tradition simultaneously holds
anthropocentric views and yet makes scientific discoveries that continually point out that we are the center of nothing at all. (In that sense, we are all schizoid - we are all irreperably split, it is simply a matter of how you deal with it.) The use of machines has completed the abolition of anthopocentricity in a radical manner - that we are no longer even the centers of ourselves. Creativity does not seem to be an exclusively human activity anymore, but that begs the question, was it ever? Our actions may not come from our "thinking centre" that we hold dear, but rather from opaque rivers full of uncanny riches that we may have been lucky (or unlucky) enough to fall into, and strong enough to keep afloat in. (This river is only opaque in relation to the relentless "clarity" of our scientific orthodoxy.) It is clear when someone's actions come from here, all else is pattern, habit and self deception. It is only our habitual obssesion with knowledge and control that keeps us from this river, and maybe, for now, it is for the best.

It might be said that we can be possesed by ideas, inspiration, but
ultimately they escape our control and our impulse to retain them. To attempt to possess anything always brings about problems, particularly these high minded conceits, and is a poignant reaction to our dread of death, the ultimate negation of posession. We try to hide behind ideas of usefulness, the future, success, but all takes us further from the one thing we do posess - this moment.

In an era saturated with "activity" and devoid of prospects of personal transcendance, death becomes more and more imposing - no action, no transcendence, just dimensionless intangible void. This leads artists (people who admit their fear) to try to encode themselves into their work, so that the work can act as an ambassador, and ultimately as a concrete (ie: not organic) substitute for the self, and thereby escape the problem of bodily death. We hide behind our work to reveal an immortalized self. Our "creative process" is thus an attempt to simultaneously hide, and invite discovery. But as the emphasis (and significance in the creative process) slowly shifts from the human to the machine, artefacts that are more the product of machines than of human beings are put forth as immortalized ambassadors of the self. Like it or not, we are coming to be represented by machines. Thus we conclude that artists, predominantly musicians, are the first people to tacitly admit their deference to machines. Yet this is revealed in other ways elsewhere in society. We are losing our reticence to relinquish control or mediation of many aspects of everyday life lives to machines. Yet not only do we feel inferior to machines, but we are jealous of them, and thus the machine becomes the ultimate social currency: who owns the latest sports car/computer/trainers/software. It is not simply the implication of monetary superfluity that makes ownership of these things significant, it is deeper than that. It is because we have come to believe in machines, perhaps more profoundly than we believe in ourselves. Their perverse lack of self-knowledge renders them eminently more capable of transcendence. We are significant only in conjunction with machines; anyone who is technologically illiterate is becoming the modern day equivalent of a village idiot or a heretic, by way of a corresponding lack of intelligence or faith. It is actually advantageous to have simply the appearance of a musician, because the tasks of the music making can be delegated to what is eminently more trustworthy: the machine. The last attempt to retain human sovereignty over machines is to don them as a fashion accessory, symptomatic of a moronic cultural environment saturated with sloganeering and "attitude", synonomous with the commodity oriented marketing strategies that underpin it, empty as the thinking behind it.



monkhouse terror

He's a mad one, our Tom. He should stick to his music making though.

mr rou-rou

if you are a celebrity you can get any old shite in print.

Maybe he went to a performing arts school and graduated under the misconception he was a well rounded performer who could turn his hand at any form of entertainment...stick to twiddling your knobs in your bedroom.

Funnily (or cruelly) enough I found myself wanting to post Leslie Grantham's sexy webcam shots on http://www.hotornot.com/ but instead I used the keyword search to find 'chris morris' fans, I don't think Mr Squarepusher turned up, but I think I recognise a whore. Have we had the celebrity fans of Chris Morris conversation before?

Remember that dodgy email site where you could register just for the purposes of having a shady email address for taking the piss, could someone please PM me it? Cheers

<<thanks for the PM, I've got the site now, cheers>>

Darrell

Speaking of Hot Or Not, the first one that came up when I just went on it (to look for the 'chris morris' people at rou rou's demand) was this:
http://www.hotornot.com/r/?eid=OSOSKZO&key=CAS

Which is probably the funniest thing I have ever seen.

monkhouse terror

Quote from: "mr rou-rou"Have we had the celebrity fans of Chris Morris conversation before?

I remember ages ago on the old board reading one, when I was just a wee lurker. I only remember that the mighty Doves were mentioned, since they thank Chris Morris in the album sleeve of 'Lost Souls' and there's an old NME interview with Jimi Goodwin where he cites Chris Morris and Jimi Hendrix as his two personal jesuses or something.

mr rou-rou

oh dear, Chris Morris has a new fan

it's awaiting the moderator's authorization, I wonder if he will survive :)

9

Quote from: "everyone"that wasn't funny

oh. it made me laugh. maybe i'm losing it.

re; hotornot has anyone ever replied to any of the people on there or ever had things written to them? I'm genuinely intrigued by that site...

Johnny Yesno

The machine article was better, although it seems like a bit of a long-winded way of saying that not all genius is intentional, which is something Eno was saying in the late 70s. For him, creating systems which automatically generated sequences of sound of varying quality and then recording and presenting only the good bits was art. The artist was someone who was able to recognise the wheat from the chaff, if you like.

Pilf

Tom Jenkinson: Someone who makes some good music, but I wouldn't ever want to meet the bearded sod though ;)