The Trouble with Tribbles

on over-productive artists

la jeune école voyage à la recherche de la nouvelle vague

“She needs to take seven years off.”

~ Courtney Love, on Lana Del Rey


How many is too many? It depends, I suppose. I’m happy to listen to Bob Dylan’s albums as they come out, but even then I’d rather someone combined another “best of”. I like Bob, what he does (or, can do) and what he means, but I don’t want to hear every live version or alternate take of every song, and there’s a fan out there who does. In Bob’s case, the recording industry responsibly collates his more finished work onto “proper” albums and makes more copies of and fuss about these than the detritus. But even I know that Bob sometimes leaves what (I think) are his best songs or versions off the albums proper. I know of “Please Crawl Out Your Window” (1966), my ultimate Dylan song, from one of Bob Sutton’s pig-stamped (“trademark of quality”) bootlegs back in the day, and if not for that I wouldn’t have heard it till this century. Chaos, long before streaming made chaos the rule.¹

Over the course of a lifetime, even an artist who releases an album a year will leave a daunting volume of work for a fan to deal with. But what are we to make of artists, good songwriters, interesting and reasonably unique singers and musicians, not fools, not especially deluded about their talents, who stream song after song, album after album, week after week, overtaken by the joy of creation and expression, with no attempt to curate any particular subset of it? I’m going to discuss a few such problems here. But first, consider the opposite.

Peter Gutteridge, mainly in the band, or under the name, Snapper, created a relatively small body of work. A brace of Singles with The Great Unwashed (1984), Snapper’s eponymous EP (1988), an album Shotgun Blossom (1990), and the CD-only album A.D.M. (1996). (Note: this is an error, see comments, there was a vinyl release but I still have no memory of it, make of that what you will). Three singles, one of these (Alive, 2000) a live recording of two previously released songs, the highlight a scorching ‘Dry Spot’. A few solo songs, most notably the version of Toy Love’s ‘Don’t Catch Fire’ on the Chris Knox tribute album Stroke, a couple more piano-and-vocal improvisations like ‘Universe of Love’ (1998) released to radio this century, and the Xpressway cassette release Pure (1989), re-issued as a double vinyl LP a few years before his death. I’ve said a bit about Pete’s commitment to sound and texture and the mysticism of music - imagine an electronics-loving, drug-warmed Pythagoras in the Deep South - in a recent interview in Richard Langston’s Garage compilation, and I may well say more at a future date, but for now I want to draw your attention to “Painting on Tape”, a review of Pure by Michael McClelland kindly sent to me by Matthew Plunkett (of Cuticles)

I don’t have the qualifications to understand all that McLelland’s saying, though I recognize some traits - particularly the exhaustive listing of attributes, in this case those of cassette tape recording, in the style Michel Foucault developed from reading Raymond Roussel’s surrealist prose poems, Impressions of Africa (1910) and Locus Solus (1914). This section’s both studious and poetic, and probably very informative if you’re too young to have worked with sound-on-sound tape recorders, familiarity with which will come in handy later in this column. And the discussion of what Pete meant by “pure” is thought-provoking, and also relevant to my theme, suggesting as it does the paradoxical inference that unfiltered expression, unlike unfiltered water, is the purest. Because the question I have is, why has Pure been re-issued on vinyl, but not A.D.M.?

A.D.M. is a fully realized recording, developed obsessively with producer Brendan “Deadman” Hoffman, with Mike Dooley on skins and guest vocal spots from Demarnia Lloyd and Celia Mancini. Pure has all the lo-fi qualities of multitracking with the great Tascam Portstudio (reasonable fidelity until you start the overdubbing process), while A.D.M. is as perfect a reproduction as was possible in 1996. Yet no-one would call it “pure”; Pure has a hippy-dippy charm derived from the familiarity of its (Casio?) drum machine and keys, its jangly guitars, natural vocals, its variety of invention, and song titles like ‘Planet Phrom’. A.D.M. stands for Atomic Demolition Munition (look it up), its metallic, spring-loaded music is built to sound like a killing machine (Pete cherished weaponry and loved the Terminator films - his look borrowed more from Schwarzenegger’s T-800 than Lou Reed), and the songs have titles like ‘Killzone 44’ and ‘Hotchkiss’. It’s as unique an achievement as Pure, the dark jewel in the crown of Dunedin sound, and its neglect needs some explaining.

McLelland, in “Painting on Tape”, quotes the Hungarian Marxist historian György Lukács and asks “How does Pure express the contradictory character of a society in crisis?” In A Thousand Apologies, Lias Saoudi and Adele Stripe briefly explain The Fat White Family’s lack of interest in lo-fi recording - it’s a middle-class affectation, a way of laundering Mum and Dad’s money. Working-class bands still want to sound as good as they can, and working-class fans want value for money, not fake-povvo shit.² Of course in the days of Pure lo-fi was usually all artists like Peter or myself could afford - we never thought it was intrinsically cool, we just put up with it when there wasn’t a clear path into a perfect studio. Academic theorists (and parodists) like the Dead C were early adopters and polemicists of the “intrinsic cool” value of lo-fi, explaining why Pure was an Xpressway release. And to be fair, Pete and I weren’t AC/DC, obviously the Dunedin Sound appealed to people with a little education, even if we were, and would remain, incorrigibly self-taught in all aspects of art and life.³ Still, whatever compromises we found ourselves making, and however lacking in music management we were, and however often we wasted what little money we had on other distractions, our ideal was the Proper Record that would turn out to be the Hit.

The artist proposes, society, in its everlasting crisis, disposes. It’s an experience I’ve had a few times now, finding myself in communication with people with the power or influence to get me a vinyl release, and watching them ignore the well-produced and finished songs I’d like you to hear in favour of the poorly recorded contents of old cassettes, sometimes cool ones I’m happy to have out, but sometimes such more-or-less rubbish that I have to give up.

The classic exemplar of a band that make too much music has to be Guided by Voices. Ian sent me a cassette of Bee Thousand back in the day and I thrashed it. Genius move to reductively extract and refine what was great about The Who into the US indie rock sound, but in the end I could only take so much. A little bit now and then, yup they’ve still got it, and it’s nice to know that. Yet there seem to be enough people out there who’ll take the lot.

Another example I discovered only recently is The Cleaners from Venus. Good again, indie pop this time - check it out, there’s lots of it, here are 55 of their albums. And a song chosen at random, well it’s the latest, and it’s really excellent. In fact, if you played it like The Who, and rearranged the structure arbitrarily, and made the lyrics more surreal, it could easily be a Guided By Voices song.

My own favourite over-productive musician is the Scottish musician Momus. The story begins around 1991-ish when I pick up a copy of The Poison Boyfriend (1987) in Records Records. The final track, ‘Closer to You’, is the ideal; I’ve been listening to a few singers who deal with sexuality and sex in grown-up and sometimes consequential ways - Prince, Alex Chilton, Morrissey, Happy Mondays - but this is something else again, it’s properly literate in its own right, this man sings like a highbrow dirty book.

“Or maybe you're the Spanish girl, playing with your hair as you wait for your friend in that wild octagon of mirrors the Tate calls a coffee shop ..... And oh, I can smell that hair from here, and I can see from eight different angles the way your nipples look through that thin black cotton top, reflected to infinity ..... And oh God it's places like that and purple-tipped prose like this, that's going to haemorrhage me girl .....”

The liner notes say of this song, “In which Momus does not merely drop the fourth wall, but dismisses his own work–including the opening track of this very album–as inhibiting the connection he wishes to make”

Referring to this verse

”But some of those are bitter records, records which accuse women, girls like you, of using your attractiveness wantonly and willfully to trap and to paralyse men who want them and can never have them, men who sometimes feel the perverse urge to trash the women they desire the most, who imagine they despise all those immaculate visions ..... what adolescent crap, what kind of idiot would sing that? Oh, not me ..”

And this song:

Which, as beautiful a work of misogyny as any male artist ever created, also works as a feminist critique of marriage, as if Momus has inverted a chapter of The Female Eunuch.

I will buy a ring of gold
And you will practise birth control
Sweet Fanny Adams
Like a puppet on a string
Of oestrogen and progesterone
Sweet Fanny Adams
This is where your misery starts
This is where your mystery stops
We'll rent a television
To replace Pandora's Box

In my pipe and slippers
Do I look like Jack The Ripper?⁴

Momus released a series of albums at decent intervals for a while, while also writing books and other works. At some point his musical output began to accelerate, and, as with that of the others here, became hard to keep up with. Over the years I’ve caught the odd track that I return to. ‘Cat from the Future’ revisits the theme of ‘I Am A Kitten’ from the first Momus album 20 Vodka Jellies, only now the cat, not the narrator, is the woman. I’d forgotten that this is one of the songs that reliably makes me cry - it’s the lines, which make sense within the song’s sad, muddled premise,
“Don't be afraid if I seem supernatural
One of us died long ago”
which do it.

‘Precocious Young Miss Calloway’ from the 2011 EP Thunderclown includes an updated self-portrait, with music written around samples from the archives of the Swedish limited edition record label it was released on.

Perhaps I lack a sense of humour but your interesting rumour
Sketches me a stature quite impossible to match
Where your baroque imagination sees adulterous Casanova
In reality I'm just an unadulterated wretch

One great thing about such musically incontinent genius is that we can usually ask “what are you working on right now?” and get an answer. “The Enshittification of Everything” is 8 days old as I write. The sound is bang up to date, distorted plug ‘n’ b, but, as one YouTube commentor, notes also harks back to the synth and drum machine grooves of 90’s tracks like “Closer to You”.

”We fetishize what we can no longer take for granted”. I’ve quoted Dr Freud a few times in this blog, because modern music doesn’t make sense without his insight. The tape hiss, phasing, distortion and other effects of cassette recording Michael McLennan waxed poetic over in reviewing Pure are common elements being replicated digitally in much of the new music that I like to write about. Less common is tape wobble and stretching, which undermines pitch or tuning; detuned effects are something that I think only occurs in these pages in the music of Mona Evie, a little, in a linear way, and Frog Power, a lot, cyclically. Frog Power has been an over-productive artist this year, batting out albums almost faster than I can listen, which this pitch-scrambling effect can disrupt, especially, for some reason, when it’s been applied to the organ (plangent notes, such as guitar sounds, are a bit easier on the ear because they contain this element naturally).

Pitch was the final frontier.

But now, on the new Frog Power album Morpheus, My Son, this element’s been mastered, we can hear how it’s meant to work. A cleaner production with better recorded bass, less use of organ sounds, and a more controlled application of the technique, and lo, we have a new 2024 sound! A Kiwi did this first, whoever does it next. Here’s ‘micro penis support dog (and a liscence to smoke Medical marijuana)’ in which cyclical modulation of the bass line produces an effect able to take music beyond the 808 sine wave bass and into fresh, uncertain depths.

Or take the opening track, ‘top ten celebrities rotting in a prison cell Tonight’ (brought to you by our top inventor of song titles, the man who brought you ‘incel is the loneliest word’). It may start with woozy modulation and the threat of unlistenability, but you’re going to hear guitar solos and melodies of considerable grandeur, and eventually identify a funky groove that reminds me of Shuggie Otis at his best.

‘ambulance’ has the feel of a Butthole Surfers breakbeat shuffle but the rest of the arrangement is as synthetic and full of weird tricks as any recent Kanye jam. Vocals all over this album are fucked up in ways that parody autotune and jungle edits, the drumming and lead playing are expertly done as usual, but the real star is the care taken over the way proceedings are being disrupted. More than is usual in normie music, that’s for sure, but never too much or in the wrong spots.

Michel Faber in Listen had a good chapter on fandom, pointing out the benefits of getting in early. Some Swiftie was the first Swiftie, and that one got replies to her fan mail. What’s the point of liking what everyone else likes after they’ve already liked it? Shares in Frog Power can only increase in value from this point. In ten years time he may well be just another success story, occasionally releasing languidly creepy yacht rock from the South of France, too busy swimming in champagne with supermodels to remember how real music was made. Here’s your chance to make that dream come true.

Algorithmic overload - just go to YouTube and search for “Lana Del Rey unreleased”

1. I’m aware that this song was a single at the time, but there seems to have been something singularly half-hearted about its release.

2. In point of fact, FWF’s music, after being perfectly recorded at considerable expense, is usually processed and mixed to sound as murky as possible.

3. Pete wasn’t interested in the names of notes and chords. He taught you his songs by showing you how he played them, or by placing your fingers on the frets or keys and implanting his rhythm in you by repeated example.

4. Pandora’s Box and Jack The Ripper are references to, among other things, Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays. Fanny Adams was the eight year old girl butchered by 29-year old solicitor’s clerk Frederick Baker in a hop garden in Alton, Hampshire in 1867, Baker writing in his diary "Killed a young girl. It was fine and hot."