The Masthead

Time was it took so long to get from one tiny dot on the planet to another, the travails of getting there helped educate travellers in the social graces required to greet strangers without committing some faux pas so insulting that nothing short of a declaration of total war could satisfy the honour of the inadvertently offended host. The ever-accelerating speed of communication throughout the 20th century might well have shrunk time and space to the blink of an eye for the millions of Earth dwellers able to press Send or Receive on a nearby internet platform. The trouble is, few minds have gotten any quicker in their ability to process the data delivered to them at such an alarming rate. More than promoting dreams of world peace, love and understanding as envisaged by the entrepreneurial hippy pioneers of the Electronic Frontier, today’s access to lightning-fast global transmissions of information has blasted yawning canyons of incomprehension and anxiety through the vast mountains of knowledge on offer. How to negotiate these canyons, rather than bridge them, is a loose theme running through this issue. It begins on the Letters page, which opens with reader Richard Smith’s words of praise for Phil England’s Collateral Damage piece (The Wire 339) weighing up the costs to the Earth of internet-distributed music. In her letter belatedly responding to Nina Power’s year-old review of Cut Hands’ Afro Noise album, La Bruha Desi La deconstructs William Bennett’s post-Whitehouse project as yet another post-colonial fantasy of Africa as the dark continent. La Bruha Desi La doesn’t speculate about Bennett’s sources of information, but her criticism of music invoking fear of the unknown experienced from afar as an exotic cocktail of threatening drums and Noise terror touches on the problem created by the instant availability of sounds, pictures, anything barring heat and smell, that brings anywhere in the world into your backyard.

Awesome Tapes From Africa blogger and collector Brian Shimkovitz is acutely sensitive about misrepresentations of the exotic Other. But driven by a love of the continent’s myriad musics and cultures, this American has extensively travelled within Africa in search of new and different musics, combing market stalls for cassettes and cratedigging for rare vinyl from junkpiles of discarded records. He has then shared his finds with armchair travellers everywhere via downloads from his blog or as releases from his recently launched Awesome Tapes From Africa imprint. For all the kudos and minimal profits he might have gained maintaining his operation, he argues, his blog/label is essentially a portal for artists he admires and respects to engage economically, politically and culturally with the rest of the world that used to be inaccessible to them before the internet.

The downside of the global outreach of art is what its creators are prepared to sacrifice to facilitate the international understanding of it. In her On Location review of Laibach at London’s Tate Modern, Agata Pyzik makes the argument that their work was most powerful when it was deeply rooted in the local issues that directly concerned them: the downfall of communism and breakup of post-Tito Yugoslavia. Their desire to maintain their international status 30 years on has fatally weakened their music by uprooting it from the place that once so effectively shaped it. The roots of the music Ralph Cumbers makes as Bass Clef or Coseph Jonrad sink deep into the soil and filth beneath the broken pavements of the London borough of Hackney. It’s not immediately obvious what’s Hackney or London about his work, but it would be nowhere near so richly absorbing if nothing of Cumbers’s daily life had affected or informed the making of it. Chris Bohn

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The Wire is published 12 times a year by The Wire Magazine Ltd. Printed by Wyndeham Heron Ltd.

The Wire was founded in 1982 by Anthony Wood. Between 1984–2000 it was part of Naim Attallah’s Namara Group. In December 2000 it was purchased in a management buy-out by the magazine’s staff. It continues to publish as a 100 per cent independent operation.

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Issue 340 June 2012 £4 ISSN 0952-0680

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Words Steve Barker, Mike Barnes, Dan Barrow, Clive Bell, Marcus Boon, Michael Bracewell, Britt Brown, Nick Cain, Philip Clark, Byron Coley, Julian Cowley, Alan Cummings, Sam Davies, Brian Dillon, Phil England, Kodwo Eshun, Mark Fisher, Phil Freeman, Louise Gray, Andy Hamilton, Adam Harper, Jim Haynes, Richard Henderson, Ken Hollings, Robin Howells, Hua Hsu, William Hutson, David Keenan, Rahma Khazam, Biba Kopf, Tim Lawrence, Alan Licht, Dave Mandl, Marc Masters, Bill Meyer, Keith Moliné, Will Montgomery, Brian Morton, Joe Muggs, Alex Neilson, Andrew Nosnitsky, Ian Penman, Richard Pinnell, Edwin Pouncey, Nina Power, Agata Pyzik, Simon Reynolds, Nick Richardson, Bruce Russell, Peter Shapiro, Chris Sharp, Philip Sherburne, Nick Southgate, Daniel Spicer, Joseph Stannard, David Stubbs, Dave Tompkins, David Toop, Dan Warburton, Val Wilmer, Barry Witherden, Matt Wuethrich

Images Thomas Adank, Jon Baker, Dusdin Condren, Mauro D’Agati, Tara Darby, Jonathan de Villiers, Glen Erler, Jason Evans, Jason Fulford, Luke Gilford, Leonie Hampton, Brad Harris, Jamie Hawkesworth, Jak Kilby, Heinz Peter Knes, Tobias Kruse, Shane Lavalette, Benjamin McMahon, Tom Medwell, Jason Nocito, Fergus Padel, Cristobal Palma, Savage Pencil, Jaap Scheeren, Michael Schmelling, Bryan Sheffield, Ben Stockley, Chris Verene, Eva Vermandel, Kai von Rabenau, Jake Walters, Jeremy & Claire Weiss, Val Wilmer REGRM 001 Pierre Schaeffer Le Trièdre fertile LP

eMEGO 132 Robert Hampson Répercussions CD+5.1 DVD / Download

SP 017 Drainolith Fighting! LP / Download

REGRM 002 Guy Reibel Granulations-Sillages / Franges du Signe LP

SP 016 Motion Sickness Of Time Travel s/t 2LP / Download

SP 018 PLVS VLTRA Parthenon LP / Download

James Blackshaw Love Is The Plan, The Plan Is Death Written at a time of great emotional disquiet, the hauntingly beautiful and bittersweet ninth full-length studio album was recorded at Soma Electronic Music Studios, Chicago in December 2011 Important Vinyl & CD

Comus Out Of The Coma ‘Out Of The Coma’ is the much anticipated new album by Comus, their first in over thirty three years. It features three brand new songs, ‘Out Of The Coma’, ‘The Sacrifice’ & ‘The Return’, through which courses the unmistakable, Stygian DNA of First Utterance, plus the only known recording of the band playing their legendary ‘Malgaard Suite’, live at a college gig in 1972. Coptic Cat CD

Geoff Barrow & Ben Salisbury ‘Drokk’ Music Inspired By Mega-City One Soundtrack style collaboration from Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and emmy award winner composer Ben Salisbury inspired by AD 2000 Judge Dredd comic Strip Invada Vinyl & CD

Pauline Oliveros Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961-1970 Dense 12 disc retrospective of Pauline Oliveros’ early and unreleased electronic work including her very first piece for tape made in 1961. The majority of these pieces have never before been released. This box set is being released in conjunction with Pauline Oliveros’ 80th birthday celebrations.. Important 12CD Box Set

Fostercare Altered Creature With heavy visual influences from the hyperrealist world of advertising, pornography, violence, virtual environments, post humanism and fetish societies; Fostercare has shaped a strange world behind his strain of electronic music. Robot Elephant Vinyl & CD

Julia Holter Ekstasis Julia Holter’s Tragedy was Boomkat’s album of the year. Her 2nd album, Ekstasis, written and recorded over 3 years marks a return to the playful searching of her 2007 EP, but guided by newly-learned disciplines, better technology & nearly limitless home recording time. RVNG Intl. Double Vinyl & CD

Sun Araw, M. Geddes Gengras, The Congos FRKWYS Vol. 9: Sun Araw & M. Geddes Gengras meet The Congos For the 9th volume of FRKWYS, a music and film series pairing contemporary artists with those that may have preceded them in style and / or approach, Sun Araw and M. Geddes Gengras meet The Congos in Jamaica. RVNG Intl. CD+DVD/LP+DVD

Epic45 Weathered Weathered, the companion volume to epic45’s Weathering album (The Sunday Times - Album of the Week, July 20111) sees the Staffordshire duo invite labelmates and contemporaries to literally weather the recordings they made for that record. Wayside and Woodland CD

Jonas Munk Pan Pan is the first solo effort from Jonas Munk, known as the guitarplayer in the respected stoner/ jazz/krautrock-outfit Causa Sui as well as related projects such as Chicago Odense Ensemble, a joint session project featuring members of Causa Sui, Chicago Underground Collective and Tortoise El Paraiso Vinyl & CD

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