eMMplekz

I'm in 2012 now

Whilst waiting for the new Boards Of Canada & The focus Group LPs I find my self still engaged in 2012. It's nearly bloody May. What's going on? I missed the eMMplekz LP IZOD Days when it came out, not getting it till after Xmas. This could possibly have been my record of the year had I heard it before the festive season. I don't recall it in any end of year lists at all. IZOD Days is my most played record of 2013 by far. This album has given me a renewed interest in Mordant Music. I loved Dead Air which I see as the key wake for rave album. Dead Air is an endlessly listenable record. When Symptoms (the follow up to Dead Air) came out though I was Perplexed and thought they'd gone all rock, you know, with vocals and shit. On Dead Air there was a track Fallen Faces which was quite incongruous as it had vocals and rock like sounds. I thought why did they put that track on? When Symptoms was released I saw that that's where Mordant was heading. Symptoms was quickly turfed but now I want to hear it again along with any other Mordant Music releases that followed.

Ekoplekz, who can keep up with this guy? It's similar to James Ferraro 3 or 4 years ago when every time you'd turn around he would release a new tape or cdr. All the Ekoplekz material I've managed to track down is quality. Nick Edwards aka Ekoplekz is definitely an artist going through an unstoppable purple patch.

This collaboration between Baron Mordant & Nick Edwards is totally inspired! A musical match made (I was about to say heaven, but that's not quite right) in late capitalist dystopia. It's the perfect blend of both artists. They both shine equally. Usually in these projects one artist has more influence over the other or both collaborators sleepwalk through the recording. There's a track that I think might be a love song to an Automatic Teller Machine. Some of the language I don't quite understand. Is some of it made up? What the fuck is an IZOD Day? I hope this is not a one off performance but a continuing entity.

BBC in the Desert

On a recent trip to the semi-arid zone of Sunraysia district for a family wedding during the late throes of an Indian summer, I found myself listening to Delia Derbyshire (music & documentary), BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Ekoplekz, eMMlpekz and an audio book of JG Ballard's first novel from 1962 The Drowned World etc. A couple of the tunes from the eMMplekz record Izod Days surprisingly fit the draining summer heat, eMMplekz Theme and Bocanet particularly. I was going for that incongruity thing.

Later smoking out in my sister-in-law's backyard I heard the Dr Who theme (arranged & cowritten by Derbyshire) tune wafting over from a neighbour's TV set and thought 'yeah, right, that sounds perfectly normal to me. It's from my childhood and I spent that time in this geographical zone!'

The Drowned World I thought would be incongruous too, but as I thought about it; not really. As this district I was in was once part of an inland sea. Despite now being 500km from the sea, remnants of that inland sea remain - massive sand dunes, sand bars along the Murray River give the river that weird beach-like vibe, without the waves of course and the salinity problems in the soil. Post apocalypse stuff fitted too, considering Mad Max I and II were filmed a few hours north of Mildura and contain similar features to the terrain of Sunraysia. Man made disasters from damming once great rivers, now drying up  and salinity problems caused by over-irrigation and so on. All this stuff on my ipod seemed well, normal, and quite fitting. Blue Monday on the wedding dance floor - natural - as Joy Division/New Order were part of the soundtrack of my youth here.

Funnily enough, the most incongruous music moment happened back in Melbourne in an inner-city suburb. At 4.30 in the morning, a party started up next door, full of 18-22 year olds where they were singing Billy Joel's Uptown Girl at the top of their lungs, followed by a bunch of early '90's mainstream alternative tunes. Weird? This also parallels recent footage of a friend of a friend's 16 year old daughter being dragged on stage at a recent Springsteen concert in Melbourne to dance the Courtney Cox part during Dancing in the Dark.

It made me think of the atemporality of the times. The kids don't own their own times like they used to. My dad dragged me to an Everly Brothers concert as a young teen. As a protest, I pretended to go to sleep. The Models and INXS were playing a concert in Melbourne that night and there I was at the Everly Brothers, how naff. Now, of course, I think I was being naff by being an obstinate brat. But you had that rebellion to make a generation gap and to have your own soundtrack to your life.