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ben-winch-writer-rocker · 5 years

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Broader Context

Top Five (for 2018):

Caterina Barbieri—Patterns of Consciousness,

Anouar Brahem—Blue Maqams,

Terry Riley—Persian Surgery Dervish,

Lojii—Lofeye,

Loren Connors—Airs.

(These are the albums I listened to most in 2018, not albums released in 2018.)

Backstory:

I never was a rock ’n’ roll animal. More like a werewolf, prone to sudden fits of rockism. I spent my teen years listening to Joy Division, New Order and early Cure albums. Favourite song? “All Cats Are Grey” (from Faith) or New Order’s “In A Lonely Place”. Slo-o-ow. Most bands played >75% fast. I craved >75% slow. Really, I craved atmosphere. By age 17 I was sick to death of distorted guitars. (I learnt to love ’em later, of course, but not to the exclusion of all else.) I thought music was serious business—“art”. And I thought art was “sophisticated”. So I took a stand, adopted a niche, and, to a large extent, that niche was anti-rock.

Of course, to a large extent, that stance was a pose. My first ever album purchase was Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet! I dug “Back in Black”, the Cult’s Electric, ZZ Top. But Joy Division’s Closer changed all that. The synths, the starkness, the spaciousness, the sense that anything could happen. The journey from anger through grief, resentment, resignation, desperation, and awestruck sad wonder. It’s unique, haunting, deathly serious. And though maybe what I should have done (what would have educated me more) was to hunt down Joy Division’s influences, instead I did what was easier and followed those they’d influenced. But in the back of my head was always this sense that music could do more. Of course I realise now that actually some of the straightest rock tracks are mini miracles of energy and precision, but maybe my respect for that form is heightened by the fact that, deep down, it isn’t mine. My music is (mostly) introspective, reflective, delicate. And slowly, as once-obscure albums have become more widely available, I’ve discovered other music like mine, like the music I’ve always heard in my head.

What brings me to this juncture, then—to the point of blogging about rock—is my background as a rock-fan who wanted more. Not more volume, more aggression, or more of any of the things that are normally associated with rock, but more infiltration into rock by other musics, other sounds—sounds which, in many cases, I couldn’t even identify myself, I just knew I wanted them. Keep in mind, I’d never had much money for music. I never was a collector—far from it, Never even owned a turntable. In fact, I always pirated music, first on tape, then on CD, then via download. Nowadays, I stream. So from taping friends’ albums, to burning CDs I’d taken on approval from the record store where I worked (not for long; I’m more of a bookseller), to taking whatever I could get on the Pirate Bay, to the minor miracle of Spotify and YouTube, the scope of my listening has steadily expanded.

I remember hearing Philip Glass and Steve Reich aged 20: I’d never heard anything like that before, and I never would have heard it then if not for a friend’s parent’s CD collection. I first heard Rhys Chatham and Glen Branca aged 35; even though I’d been listening to Sonic Youth since my early 20s, it took a guy ten years younger and internet-savvy—a workmate at a bookshop—to turn me onto their influences. (He turned me onto Bitches’ Brew too.) I was a late uptaker, technology-wise. I never thought music was about technology. I guess I thought I was Neil Young or something: just plug in and play and some loyal engineer would take care of recording, just as some Alan McGee or Ivo Watts-Russell would distribute the result. It didn’t happen. In 2009 I bought my first halfway-decent computer. Nowadays, almost everything I listen to is something I researched and sourced via the internet. Sometimes, an algorithm spits out something worthwhile. Maybe owing to my age and the fact I have a family, and that much of my listening is done via headphones while working on something else—that music, for the most part is background rather than foreground for me—90% of the music I listen to is ambient, predominantly textural, and distinctly lacking in melody. “In your face” it is not. But then again, maybe for that reason there’s nothing I like better than a sudden burst of rock.

One last point: maybe owing to a traumatic childhood and a lifetime’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I’ve always favoured music that subdues me rather than music that exhilarates me. Gangsta rap was good for this purpose (maybe incongruously, it reminded me of the Cure’s early days, synth-driven and minimalist and steeped in a sense of doom). The doom was crucial. I never could stomach a lot of cheese, or any false sense of reassurance. My ideal mood was a cushioned sense of doom—as if danger were all around, but I was, for the moment, safe. But maybe I’m over-simplifying. Exhilaration is fine, but usually for me it’s slow-building. The realisation of just how moving and well-constructed something is, for eg—that’s exhilarating. And then, sure, 10% of the time I like to blast myself with loud guitars and driving beats.

Other influences: Autechre, Tricky, J Dilla—Donuts, Miles Davis—Bitches’ Brew, Coltrane—Crescent, Floating Points, Visible Cloaks, Oneohtrix Point Never, Howard Shore—Crash, Stephan Bodzin, Plastikman, Flying Lotus, John Lee Hooker, Fats Domino, James Carr, Leonard Cohen.

Observations:

Ultimately, I can fist-punch and air-guitar with the best of ’em, but only on full moons. Which is to say, I love rock ’n’ roll, but not as a lifestyle, not as a religion. I like light and shade, always have. I’ve got my own take on rock, and to some extent it’s an outsider’s. I like bands whose aims are different from the average—who try for reactions other than fist-pumping.

More importantly for me personally, the fact of my slow education in music other than rock means I came to that music through rock. My skills as a musician and a critic (if I have any skills as a critic) are rock-centric. I want more than the average rock band offers, but it needn’t be more musicianship (though that’d be nice). I believe in a minimum of means. I believe in punk. I believe “There’s more to the picture than meets the eye”. But I also wanna see rock grow up.

ROCK THEORY, then? It’s about what I want rock to be, based on what I’ve loved in rock and outside of it in the past. The best rock has a magic to it. And it’s that magic I’m hunting here, trying to pin it down, to examine it. Why? In the name of science, I guess.

#RockMusic #ExperimentalMusic #ExperimentalRock #MostPlayed #RockHistory #RockTheory #RockJournalism

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