The ghost at the bottom of Maxinequaye
Not sure I agree with Emmy Hennings here.
She’s painted 2006 with a mixtape and it’s a lovely thing. According to the liner notes her March was all about Massive Attack. Amongst the discussions of hauntology - a Derrida pun, basically, that’s been transposed into the world of dark pop music - Emmy says Tricky gets too much credit for handing the baton to Burial.
It’s not a particularly linear argument. That is to say the discussion on whether Burial is the greatest hauntology record since Maxinequaye has little to do with the musical progression that gave birth to those sounds, the bedroom studios or mega tracked panels, and the car-boot distribution. Burial’s bleak dubstep verging on dark ambience was last year’s top record for a lot of people. Whereas Tricky’s sultry and stark opus dropped a decade ago, itself a deconstruction of Massive Attack’s soul-drenched and paranoid dance music.
There’s a thematic progression definitely. A literal reading says Burial’s music is dubstep built on at least five years of 12 inch singles and nights at FWD>>. Before that: 2step and garage, drum’n'bass, jungle and so on. A slightly broader look takes in techno and dub as critical ingredients. Wider still you get garage producer Wookie’s connections with Soul II Soul and hence Massive Attack.
Music is a magpie though.
All that and I’ve said nothing about the ghosts. Hauntology sounds a little high falutin to me, I’m not clear what it really means.
Emmy: “It’s the bottomless, dark space at the music’s centre; a gravity so dense that it pulls every other sound to the edge of obliteration, making the whole mix taut and tense as a ghost story.”
That’s nice, but does it overstate the case? I’m looking forward to Emmy’s explanatory piece in the next issue of Cyclic Defrost.
Emmy Hennings: “There is something unsettling in Massive Attack’s precision, the way in which there is never a note or a beat out of place. It is as if each song is an exercise in total control, made out of the fear of losing it completely. ‘Safe From Harm’ is a distant cousin to Marvin Gaye’s ‘Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)’: understated, crystalline, exuding an icy paranoia.â€
That quote brings it back for me. The thing that makes Tricky and Massive, as well as Marvin Gaye, so great for me is that above the music you get an insight into something deeper, something hurt or emotional, something that cuts through the perfection of the music. Being starved of heart is one of the reasons I was so disappointed by this Melbourne via Bristol producer Bassment. Burial’s emotional, but I’m still not sure he deserves a spot in that company either.
Oddly, Emmy’s February was fixated on the Style Council. A few months later I pulled out an effortless groove by that band - ‘The Long Hot Summer’ - for a DJ mix. It’s a haunting, lingering kind of song, just right for a chat about ghosts.
Matt, it’s not that I think Tricky’s getting too much credit, but that Massive Attack (circa their early-90s Tricky era) aren’t getting enough.
It’s not supposed to be a linear arguent! Surely one of the main attractions of this whole hauntology kerfuffle, in my mind at least, is that hauntology disrupts linear notions of time/narrative. Things appear and emerge where they are not ’supposed’ to be. Past and future get muddled up. Etc etc.
Thank you for the link and kind write up! I might have Pt 2 written by next week, with any luck.
emmy hennings
5 Jan 07 at 6:12 pm
The spectre that haunts Burial’s music (or stuff like Horsepower Productions’ - Voodoo Spell) is external, as if you’re enshrouded by the darkness, the cold, and the dirt of London. Dubstep’s at it’s best when it represents the external - the emotions of those in a dense, poor, urban environment who could create danger and fear for you.
Whereas the darker Wild Bunch stuff is more internal, like a deep ache of the heart. Such emotions are universal, but temporary as well.
That’s my take anyway.
I think Massive Attack have received plenty of well-deserved plaudits and will continue to receive them for their early back catalogue - it’s guys like Benny Ill and Hatcha who made something remarkable but may end up a footnote in years to come.
gravy
5 Jan 07 at 10:20 pm
Thanks Gravy, I think your comments about Benny Ill and Hatcha, and I’d add guys like El-B, was what I was getting at, kinda. Somewhat less articulately. And I’m with you on the external/internal too.
Looking forward to the hauntology of colonial oz piece Emmy - I guess the question shouldn’t be whether the Style Council is hiding a spectre, but whether Ed Kuepper’s managed to tuck one away in his songs.
calico
8 Jan 07 at 4:59 am
There are loads of interesting parallels being hurled around here. I think it’s wonderful to see that Burial’s album was so well received and important to bring up Benny Ill and co also.
No doubt it’s signifcant that all of the mentioned dubstep producers were never writing ‘dubstep’. Regardless of how Burial has been described, he wasn’t coming from that place (FWD etc) - no one even knew who he was for a long time, let alone being a regular in the community. And of course Horsepower, El-B and so on were a precursor and certainly not writing music for a scene.
And so I quite like the idea of comparing them to past electronica artists from a physical/internal place as opposed to an evolution of musical genres.
kodama
8 Jan 07 at 8:25 am
Kodama / Gravy / Calico - I am going to use another hi-falutin’ word here: phenomenological. Massive Attack and Burial trigger similar sensations & feelings. Altho not the same.
Massive’s first two albums feel warm and comforting - a source of protection? The third one takes that initmacy and cranks it up into an suffocating bear hug. But there is always that sense of being enveloped: oscillating between claustrophilia and claustrophobia. Zed Bias made me feel the same way.
Burial is not about initimacy. Sound floats out of the ruins. Likewise in trax like Highland Spring - forgotten tunes loom out of the murk at you then disappear again. I think I’m just repeating you here Gravy.
If I was gonna try and link the two in terms of feeling, it’d have to be something like Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein.
Matt M
8 Jan 07 at 10:25 am
I get what you mean Kodama - though the connection’s inevitably going to be made when being released on hyperdub.
I’m probably looking at it from a different perspective, but Burial evokes similar reactions in me as a lot of early post-rock (hate that term). It’s dark, foreboding, and what I’ve begun to term pre-apocalyptic. Another similarity: the mystery that surrounds Burial is the same mystery that surrounded Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
I definitely see where k-punk is coming from when talking about the end of music (Burial = post-rave *tongue-in-cheek*), but I would describe this as being music for the end of days, a sound of inexorable urban decay.
As Matt M says - “forgotten tunes loom out of the murk at you then disappear again” - like flourishes of hope that are quickly snuffed out.
But perhaps that’s all my grim take. I certainly feel that this music makes a good soundtrack for the direction the world is currently taking.
gravy
8 Jan 07 at 4:21 pm
Gravy> Cheer up - You’re starting to sound like Busta Rhymes. It’s only 5 years until the Mayan apocalypse.
You know what? I reckon Burial was created in lab by a cabal of Soho meeja whores to appeal to ravers in their late-20s / early-30s. They planned to use that tug of klaxonic lost youth to sell mortgages and designer baby food. Somehow Kode9 freed this latter-day Frankstein’s monster from their evil clutches and gave it a safe house somewhere in South London.
Matt M
8 Jan 07 at 6:24 pm
Interesting that you characterise those first two Massive Attack records as warm and intimate, Matt M. I would describe them in almost precisely opposite terms myself - cool and very distant. A sense of displacement, of paranoia - not safety - hence my instinctive comparison with Burial. Both make me feel the same way - unsettled. Which is surely what the hauntological should be about - not the comfort of nostalgia, childhood or otherwise. I have always got a fairly specific sense of (post)urban decay from those records. Inner city blues indeed.
Gravy - I get your comparison with Godspeed (another of my very favourite artists). I too would include Godspeed in any definition of the hauntological. And I think that what they were working with (towards?) was something quite specific, particularly in their use of field recordings - a sense of how capitalism itself haunts our lives. This would be closer (I would guess) to Derrida’s original hauntological project than several of the artists currently being name-checked in this wide-ranging debate.
But I hadn’t thought of the parallel with the ‘mystery’ surrounding both artists. Well pointed out.
There’s certaintly a thread of apocalyptic narrative runnning through artists like these, but that’s a whole other topic… That’s my potential PhD thesis :)
emmy hennings
8 Jan 07 at 7:10 pm
South London’s no longer free from their influence, Matt M. New Cross - on my top 10 places to never visit again - is apparently the new Stoke Newington. At least the hipsters are giving the developers the run around.
I’d be interested in your thesis emmy, whatever it ends up being on. This has been a good discussion.
There’s certainly strong paranoia in Massive Attack’s music, but I think that’s tempered with a soulful and intimate comfort. In Safe From Harm, the dissonance of “city slickers, gunmen and maniacs” is resolved with “just as long as my baby’s safe from harm”. In Burial’s world, no-one is safe from harm, and the hope for it isn’t even there. Instead it’s a world with U Hurt Me, Gutted, and Broken Home.
I think quite a while ago Matt (calico) summed perfectly what set dubstep apart from it’s cousins in 2step and drum and bass. It was the lack of resolution, the absence of breakdown-and-buildup formula, which made it relatively dancefloor unfriendly, yet built a mood far deeper than what it’s related genres have ever produced. From the start, dubstep’s had this tense edginess to its sound, a mood that has reflected the tense edginess of the city it was born in.
gravy
8 Jan 07 at 8:58 pm
Ahah, but you see, I never thought that the ‘just as long as my baby’s safe from harm’ was a resolution at all. To me it always sounded like a plea unlikely to met.
I often think of the filmclip for that song, which consists of one long shot of Sharah Nelson climbing up and up the stairwell of a council tower block, while various people lurk menacingly in the background. At the end of the song she gets to the top of the stairs and opens an apartment door, but you don’t really know what’s gonna happen when she closes it, ‘cos the song ends. There could be anything behind that door.
But I know what you mean about the fact that in Massive Attack, a sense of hope is still held out, whereas in Burial it’s gone. That’s an important distinction.
emmy hennings
9 Jan 07 at 3:24 am
Tricky will have a new albumo out soon on Domino which will be totally amazing. Keep your ears out for it. It will be wicked.
roosevelt j
9 Jan 07 at 3:44 am
fyi - tricky is directing his first feature film in london at the moment. no idea what it is like, but i imagine it’s not a romantic comedy.
dm
11 Jan 07 at 6:59 am
emmy> “I would describe them in almost precisely opposite terms myself - cool and very distant”
On reflection, I think hot & cold are the wrong set of descriptors. “Hymn To The Big Wheel” doesn’t strike me as distant nor does the close-to-the-mic style of 3D and Daddy G.
But the music can sound cool and the lyrics detached. It’s not accident Massive Attack called their label “Melankolik”.
N.B. One thing about heavy ganja usage (which applies to several members of that crew) is that it messes up your body’s ability to regulate temperature when you are caned. You feel chilly one minute & you’re sweating the next.
dm> Hmmm. Tricky directs Hugh Grant as the quintessential English dope-smoking conspiracy frfeak. “I, er, er, er, what I’m trying to, er, say is - you are speaking the DEVIL’S WORDS!!!!”
Matt M
11 Jan 07 at 2:08 pm
Where is new Tricky Album?. Can somebody say?.
Massive attack for all
21 Jun 07 at 10:38 pm