A trip back in time to the sanctified funk of the 80's, Atterton's a time traveller and seeks his past with beats and synths galore. An overlooked gem that truly mixes the old with new and impeccable bass work.
Sven Atterton’s latest release, The Cove, is a work of synth-funk genius that embodies the spirit of the Minneapolis Sound revolution that combined funk, rock, pop, synthpop, and other genres.
As someone who spent a good chunk of my life in Minneapolis, Minnesota — birthplace of the synth-funk offerings of Prince, Jimmy Jam, and Terry Lewis, among many others — I feel I’m able to grant honorary titles of Minneapolitanism to folks like Essex, England-based Atterton.
When we’re in The Cove, we’re part of something important, and are somewhere in a world in which that Minneapolis Sound is combined with the Miami one. We’re awash in contemplative analog synthesizer pads, funky guitar licks, and indecisive bass lines that arouse Sonny Crockett, excite Prince, and make the midnight wine-sippers on a nearby beach feel “of this world.” The drum parts are straight out of Phil Collins and Paisley Park. It’s a “Sussudio” in “Ice Cream Castles.”
Atterton, an expert bassist, rides the Roland Juno and Yamaha DX21 synthesizers as adeptly as he does his Stingray bass guitar. Layering that atop a kinetic TR-707 drum machine, Atterton crafts a smart and saucy retrosynth that’s just as at home seducing a shoulder-padded Mrs. Robinson as it is her daughter down at the dark, red-lighted club which her mother forbade her to visit. Things are just better there. Cooler. Happier. More productive. People are dressed better and deal with things better than others do or can. This is where you and I want to be right now, or tomorrow, or yesterday.
It took me a while to fully commit my life to music studies. Ive always played around on different instruments since a young age but it wasn’t until half way through my second year of GNVQ Art and Media studies I realised I wanted music to take a bigger role in my life. I studied at Colchester Institute for another two years before enrolling at Berklee College of music in Boston.
The Cove was your first album and came out in March – were the songs therein a long time in the making?
The tracks on ‘The Cove’ are a mixture of songs I had been trying to develop, some of which range back two years or more, but others were written relatively soon before the album was released, as late as five months or so.
Inter-dimensional’ is a not-inappropriate adjective in the Cove press release – what sorts of images go through your head when making this music?
The types of images going through my head when making this music are often places I have visited. I’m lucky enough to have lived in California, albeit for a short while. Whilst there I couldn’t help but be inspired by its beautiful palm littered coastline and rolling hills. One may not expect it, but Scotland also has some beautiful coastline, in particular where my parents moved to in the south west. On a summer’s day you could kid yourself that you were in a completely different country.
How does the taste for vintage equipment translate to the stage?
As for vintage equipment on stage, as much as I would like to recreate the same set up I use in my studio, it’s just not feasible at the moment. I do use my Yamaha DX21 for lead synth sounds running through a guitar effects processor. Everything else is printed down and essentially DJ’ed live. One day I hope to have a live set up that is basically the same as my studio rig, drum machines and sequencers triggering the Juno 6 and Moog Voyager.
What was special about 1983 – 1984?
Personally one of the special things about the 83-84 period was the way technology was influencing musicians. The use of sequencers and drum machines meant that people could program consistent beats and bass lines that did not fluctuate in time, but this also meant any live playing had to be very locked into the tempo. The rhythm sections for productions became super tight and I admire the bands that mixed the live playing with sequenced parts, live synth playing and sample triggering. David Frank from The System is someone I’m always inspired by.
LM I was thinking about this rigid idea of “pure” fiction. I’m interested in your particular position on this, perhaps because in the US this separation between fiction and nonfiction is under discussion quite a bit. There’s a sort of strange purism. I wonder if the interest that your work generates here comes precisely from this subversion. The review of Dublinesque in the New Yorker says that you hide false biographies in your work, but that behind these false biographies there is also the writer Enrique Vila-Matas. That uncomfortable zone is fascinating.
EVM Well, what I write is really pure fiction. The least interesting fiction for me is the kind that is based upon documentation. In Spanish literature what most interests me is the world constructed by Juan Marsé. People say that Marsé deals with the Spanish postwar years, that he always sets his work in the same neighborhood and always tells the same story. Yet that’s not true at all. There’s been a huge intellectual evolution in his work. The neighborhood is a complete invention—even though the actual neighborhood exists (I lived there for 30 years), his is an entirely mental construction. He’s such a slow writer because his novels are the work of a silversmith in search of a “fictional” fiction: without the aid of any document other than that of memory, which is always . . .
LM A false memory?
EVM Yes, and it is also the antithesis of the authors who work from journalistic data, who say they write from real events. Surely they think it will bring them more readers and maybe they aren’t mistaken. . . . Now that I think about it, whenever I finish a novel the questions from journalists tend to revolve around whether what I wrote actually happened to me or not.
LM That’s annoying?
EVM Yes, I’d almost give up writing so as not to have to answer the question. (laughter) So what if it happened in real life?
LM But your work provokes the question because you use the real names of authors with whom we are all familiar.
EVM Yes, it’s the trick that Sebald used, too, although through the use of photographs. Sebald fascinated me for his blend of essay and fiction. I had already seen it in Claudio Magris’s Danubio, but Sebald fascinated me even more, with his incredible closeness to Nietzsche’s prose, meaning it didn’t belong to any genre at all, except total melancholy—the idea that we don’t belong to this world. What was your question again?
LM We were talking about false biographies and your use of self-fictionalization.
EVM Yes, in my writing fake names and the names of real writers work much like the photographs in Sebald’s books. Nowadays, it’s harder to make a story seem realistic, and Sebald took a step toward the construction of verisimilitude through the use of photographs. They have a reality effect, so people believe that what he is narrating really happened. Giving my characters the names of real people accomplishes this sometimes. It gives fiction an air of reality so that readers can believe what they are reading, since it sounds like I’m telling the truth.
On the one hand: writer of the quotidian absurd, ferocious caricaturist of morality; narrator of esperpentos, excremental deliria, and conjugal intrigues. But also: indefatigable memoirist, author of an autobiography in fragments that is a grand travelogue; typologist of cultural life and a portraitist capable of recalling conversations from a dinner 30 years after it occurred. Additionally: critic of authors and traditions scarcely imagined by their national contemporaries; archaeologist to whom can be attributed without doubt the rediscovery of an overlooked region of the canon that today is indispensable. To which must be added: translator of a universal library that in itself is a complete literary education for anyone (a library with open windows, classics that breathe the air of a living language).
Sergio Pitol (1933) is all of the above; he is, I believe, a total writer. And by writer I do not mean one of those intellectuals who flirt with power (“The difference between who I am now and who I was then is defined by my passion for reading and my aversion for any manifestation of power,” he declares in The Art of Flight), nor a multipurpose lecturer: in Mexico we tend to laud with the uppercase W of “Writer” anyone who, in addition to publishing occasionally, anoints candidates in popular election. Pitol is a writer of another kind: his importance lies on the page, in the creation of his own world, in his ability to shed light on the world.
The first book by Pitol that I read marked, in a very profound way, my own literary endeavors: Domar a la divina garza [Taming the Divine Heron], 1988. The irksome monologue of the attorney Dante C. de la Estrella on the loathsome Marietta Karapetiz revealed for me, during my adolescence, that a brilliant novel in which all the characters were insufferable was possible. That lesson, along with the eschatological feast that the book includes, are reading experiences that remain forever with me. Dante de la Estrella’s voice is unforgettable: the hyperbole of folly and pedantry, a ridiculous hymn sung in a house in Tepoztlán during a rainstorm. As I reread that book, it surprises me that I have forgotten, since reading it for the first time, one brilliant detail: the first chapter of the novel, in which the narrator declares his intentions and explains in general terms the material from which he built the voice of De la Estrella (revealing, for example, the origin of the character’s fascination for Gogol).
Suddenly, during a pause in his monologue, Federico Pérez cautioned me not to become too lost in circumlocution. I should lay everything on the line, he said. I replied that I had already done that the very day I made the appointment by phone. I was trusting that his treatment by hypnosis, about which I had heard great things, would help me give up smoking. If I had gone into too many details at the beginning of my explanation, it was to clarify what my relationship with tobacco was and had been. I do not remember his exact words, but he did allude to the evasiveness and circumlocutions in my speech. He added that he thought it was a manifestation of insecurity, a defense mechanism behind which I was hiding. I do not know if the doctor’s intervention, his interruption and description of the structure of the story, which unbeknownst to me had become unnecessarily and painfully labyrinthine, was part of the treatment, an attempt to stimulate a particular reaction, the beginning of subjugation. I defended myself with literary arguments. I took refuge in the fact that my writing was fundamentally built on those devices. That is its visible expression. I feel incapable of describing any action, no matter how simple, in a direct way. I said that other writers were able to do that, which did not mean I was less competent than they. In my case, plain and naked exposition, without flourishes, without detours, without echoes or shadows, fatally diminishes the efficiency of the story, converts it into a mere anecdote; a vulgarity, when all is said and done. From the very beginning, what I had always done was scatter a series of points onto the blank page as if they had fallen there by chance, with no visible relationship between them; until one suddenly began to spread out, expand, sprout tentacles in search of others, and then the others would follow its example: the points would become lines running across the page to find their sisters, either to subordinate or serve them, until that initial group of solitary points morphed into an increasingly complex and intricate character, with gaps, creases, ironies, blurrings, and glaring darkness. That was my writing or, at least, the ideal of my writing. I could have added, but I restrained myself, that my exposition could be the reflection of a specific way of conceiving literature, or rather, that the apparent loss of direction in language had created in me a second nature from which I could not escape. To the extent that I did not know how to talk about anything, not even the weather, without detours, and that, in itself, had nothing to do with personal insecurity, as it is usually understood, but rather with a lack of confidence, abstract, of course, in the possibility of communication and persuasion in the ontological loneliness of being. The narrator who, as a rule, appears in my novels rehearses several starting points in the pursuit of a truth, a revelation, and in the effort will lose his way a thousand times, stumble constantly, and will maintain the pace with great difficulty between suffering hallucinations and sleepwalking, only in the end to declare himself defeated. He will come to know that absolutes do not exist, that there is no truth that is not conjectural, relative, and, therefore, vulnerable. But searching for it, no matter how ephemeral, partial, and inconstant it may be, will always be his objective. The narrator might be Sisyphus and Icarus at the same time. His only certainty is that along the way he might have touched a few strands in a marvelous and deplorable tapestry, obscured sometimes by ominous stains or by a sudden and immediate iridescence that, upon seeing it, gives meaning to his efforts.
NN yesterday suspended its global affairs correspondent, Elise Labott, for two weeks for the crime of posting a tweet critical of the House vote to ban Syrian refugees. Whether by compulsion or choice, she then groveled in apology. This is the original tweet along with her subsequent expression of repentance:
Everyone, It was wrong of me to editorialize. My tweet was inappropriate and disrespectful. I sincerely apologize.
This all happened after The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple complained that her original tweet showed “bias.” The claim that CNN journalists must be “objective” and are not permitted to express opinions is an absolute joke. CNN journalists constantly express opinions without being sanctioned.
Labott’s crime wasn’t that she expressed an opinion. It’s that she expressed the wrong opinion: after Paris, defending Muslims, even refugees, is strictly forbidden. I’ve spoken with friends who work at every cable network and they say the post-Paris climate is indescribably repressive in terms of what they can say and who they can put on air. When it comes to the Paris attacks, CNN has basically become state TV (to see just how subservient CNN is about everything relating to terrorism, watch this unbelievable “interview” of ex-CIA chief Jim Woolsey by CNN’s Brooke Baldwin; or consider that neither CNN nor MSNBC has put a single person on air to dispute the CIA’s blatant falsehoods about Paris despite how many journalists have documented those falsehoods).
Labott’s punishment comes just five days after two CNN anchors spent 6 straight minutes lecturing French Muslim civil rights activist Yasser Louati that he and all other French Muslims bear “responsibility” for the attack (the anchors weren’t suspended for expressing those repulsive opinions). The suspension comes just four days after CNN’s Jim Acosta stood up in an Obama press conference and demanded: “I think a lot of Americans have this frustration that they see that the United States has the greatest military in the world. … I guess the question is — and if you’ll forgive the language — is why can’t we take out these bastards?” (he wasn’t suspended). It comes five days after CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour mauled Obama on-air for not being more militaristic about ISIS (she wasn’t suspended); throughout 2013, Amanpour vehemently argued all over CNN for U.S. intervention in Syria (she wasn’t suspended).
Labott’s suspension also comes less than a year after Don Lemon demanded that Muslim human rights lawyer Arsalan Iftikhar state whether he supports ISIS (he wasn’t suspended); in 2010, Lemon strongly insinuated that all Muslims were responsible for the 9/11 attack when he defended opposition to an Islamic Community Center in lower Manhattan (he wasn’t suspended). During the Occupy Wall Street protests, CNN host Erin Burnett continuously mocked the protesters while defending Wall Street (she wasn’t suspended) and also engaged in rank fear-mongering over Iran (she wasn’t suspended). I could literally spend the rest of the day pointing to opinions expressed by CNN journalists for which they were not suspended or punished in any way.
By very stark contrast, career CNN producer Octavia Nasr was instantly fired in 2010 after 20 years with the network for the crime of tweeting a positive sentiment for a beloved Shia imam who had just died, after neocons complained that he was a Hezbollah sympathizer. Earlier this year, Jim Clancy was forced to “resign” after 30 years with CNN for tweeting inflammatory criticisms of Israel. As I’ve pointed out over and over, “journalistic objectivity” is a sham for so many reasons, beginning with the fact that all reporting is suffuse with subjective perspectives. “Objectivity” does not ban opinions; it just bans opinions that are particularly disfavored among those who wield the greatest power (obviously, no CNN journalist would be punished for advocating military action against ISIS, for instance).
It wasn’t just one of the attackers who vanished after the Paris massacre. Three nations whose history, action–and inaction–help to explain the slaughter by Isis have largely escaped attention in the near-hysterical response to the crimes against humanity in Paris: Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Syria.
The French-Algerian identity of one of the attackers demonstrates how France’s savage 1956-62 war in Algeria continues to infect today’s atrocities. The absolute refusal to contemplate Saudi Arabia’s role as a purveyor of the most extreme Wahabi-Sunni form of Islam, in which Isis believes, shows how our leaders still decline to recognise the links between the kingdom and the organisation which struck Paris. And our total unwillingness to accept that the only regular military force in constant combat with Isis is the Syrian army – which fights for the regime that France also wants to destroy – means we cannot liaise with the ruthless soldiers who are in action against Isis even more ferociously than the Kurds.
Whenever the West is attacked and our innocents are killed, we usually wipe the memory bank. Thus, when reporters told us that the 129 dead in Paris represented the worst atrocity in France since the Second World War, they failed to mention the 1961 Paris massacre of up to 200 Algerians participating in an illegal march against France’s savage colonial war in Algeria. Most were murdered by the French police, many were tortured in the Palais des Sports and their bodies thrown into the Seine. The French only admit 40 dead. The police officer in charge was Maurice Papon, who worked for Petain’s collaborationist Vichy police in the Second World War, deporting more than a thousand Jews to their deaths.
Omar Ismail Mostafai, one of the suicide killers in Paris, was of Algerian origin – and so, too, may be other named suspects. Said and Cherif Kouachi, the brothers who murdered the Charlie Hebdo journalists, were also of Algerian parentage. They came from the five million-plus Algerian community in France, for many of whom the Algerian war never ended, and who live today in the slums of Saint-Denis and other Algerian banlieues of Paris. Yet the origin of the 13 November killers – and the history of the nation from which their parents came – has been largely deleted from the narrative of Friday’s horrific events. A Syrian passport with a Greek stamp is more exciting, for obvious reasons.
A colonial war 50 years ago is no justification for mass murder, but it provides a context without which any explanation of why France is now a target makes little sense. So, too, the Saudi Sunni-Wahabi faith, which is a foundation of the “Islamic Caliphate” and its cult-like killers. Mohammed ibn Abdel al-Wahab was the purist cleric and philosopher whose ruthless desire to expunge the Shia and other infidels from the Middle East led to 18th-century massacres in which the original al-Saud dynasty was deeply involved.
The promise of Moloko finally comes through on a sonically expansive funky romp with Murphy's super expressive voice leading us through her cinematic travails. Delirious and contagious like a fucking virus driving through to your dancing feet.
The tale of why Róisín Murphy isn't a super massive global pop thing will have future historians scratching their heads in disbelief. How someone with chart form as one half of Moloko could release a succession of incredible music to decreasing audience borders on the criminal.
It's not to say that others haven't possibly cocked a look or two from her either. Lady Gaga for one, what with her lobster headpieces and outfits made from plastic balls, possibly might have been inspired by Róisín's Overpowered vision, where each sleeve had her done up in severe-looking avant garms while down the local caff or down the pub. That's always been part of Murphy's appeal - she can hang with the high art set and launch a perfume, between quite happily getting up and singing 'Sing It Back' at super tot rave Big Fish Little Fish. https://youtu.be/NjSwFsPCeJ4?list=RDNjSwFsPCeJ4
Now after a break of eight years - give or take last year's Mi Senti EP and the luxurious doof of 'Simulation' and various one-off singles - Roisin is back. At first Hairless Toys sounds barely there and free of tune, but to leave it at that would do it a disservice. Any initial fear soon defrosts once the melody of 'Gone Fishing' or 'Exile' claw into the head. With longtime associate Eddie Stevens producing intricate layers of ripples, teases and textures, Hairless Toys sounds like the work of a pair of minds that know each other inside out. That almost telepathic connection of artist and producer, that very rarely comes off as complete and as magnificent as this.
Roisin Murphy, formerly of Moloko, wraps herself in darkness for this third album. When disco meets the dark the results can be some of the most powerful in music. Nile Rodgers and his like might have thrust one particular facet of the genre back into the limelight following the release of ‘Get Lucky’ but this is a completely different vibe. And I’m glad it is, because invariably while my music taste does occasionally stagger hungover into the light for a few moments, it always returns to the darkness.
The production throughout Hairless Toys is more than just glossy and perfectionist. It actually lends something to the record other than to hide the flaws of Murphy (of which there are few). The album actually sounds classy. It sounds self-indulgent in the very best way. It sounds like a ridiculously expensive night out in the Eighties, except you’ve gotten bored of the fake and the cheesy and things have all gone a bit Twin Peaks. At a time when a larger chunk of us than ever are worrying about the monotony of modern life and things like the cost of living, the escapism that provides is absolutely crucial.
As if to highlight that self-indulgence, only one track on this eight track record clocks in at under five minutes. ‘Exploitation’ racks up at an impressive nine minutes 23 seconds on an album that goes for over 50 minutes. The crucial bit is that it always works. You could probably condense a couple of tracks over the record to make the pill a little easier to swallow (as demonstrated on the four minute single edit of ‘Exploitation’) but to do so would defeat the object. This isn’t a record to stick on in the car stereo but an album to obsess over on sleepless nights.
And that darkness is also really highlighted on ‘Exploitation’. A nine-minute-journey through what it feels like to cede control and give power to another. You can apply that to both a relationship or whatever you might do for your career. A sparse but effective beat whispers behind the track and gives the impression that the song is being delivered from a happy place. To achieve all of that within one (admittedly lengthy) track is a tribute to how well Murphy has honed her craft.
It’s actually a misunderstanding. I left the studio and didn’t name a track. Eddie tried to work out what I was singing and named it “Hairless Toys.” I came back, looked at it, and said, “That’s the album.”
What were you actually singing?
“Careless talk.” There’s an aesthetic that goes with Hairless Toys that has nothing to do with hairlessness or toys. It’s spooky, cold, dry, a memory of your childhood when there wasn’t as much luxury, so things weren’t quite as shiny.
I like that it’s abstract but that it does evoke all these feelings. It’s got this scrappy quality, it’s uncomfortable, it’s slightly sexual — but it also does conjure memories from childhood. It’s very much a psychological journey in two words.
It’s an album title that’s completely unique for a record that’s completely unique. It doesn’t sound like anybody else’s record title, and that’s the way the music is. There’s nothing like it. It doesn’t fit into a particular genre.
I put it on recently on a Saturday night and did a jigsaw puzzle to it.
Oh, how Hairless Toys of you to do a jigsaw puzzle. I love it! That’s a thing to do it to! It’s a bonding experience that will bring you closer together. I love that.
This record is jazz, dance, country, soul, gospel … Did you want to create an eclectic record? Or did it just happen organically?
Pretty organically, yes. We’d made 30 songs—we were very prolific. My children went away with their grandparents to the Bahamas for a few weeks, and I went into the studio every day, and we just experimented and played. The first song of the day would usually be a more structured idea. Maybe we might go to the pub in the middle of the day and have a pint, and the second song would be much more free—just Eddie playing and me singing at the same time, which I had never done before with anyone. I mean, I come from a generation of people who work in a studio, where you don’t do that. You make a piece of music, and you get it all going—you have drums, you have bass, you have melodies, you have bridges. But with Eddie, on a song like “Exile,” I made up the lyrics while he was making up the music. And that’s an old-fashioned way of writing songs: someone on the piano and a singer, making it up as they go along.
The first track, “Gone Fishing,” was inspired by the drag ball documentary Paris Is Burning.
I was reading this beautiful article that was trying to redress the balance about black gay culture and its part in the creation of house music. In the U.S. and in the U.K., it seemed like very white music. To see Paris Is Burning—I feel like that’s what I’ve been doing all these years onstage. The same thing. And [the Hairless Toys song] “House of Glass” is a completely autobiographical song. I used to live with a handful of girls, and we were deep into music. Lots of us came from broken homes and made our own family. That’s a theme of the record. Youth culture—music culture—can save you.
‘Hairless Toys” (PIAS) is Róisín Murphy’s first full-length album in almost eight years, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been busy. The Irish-born singer, composer and producer, who splits her time between homes in London and Ibiza, Spain, gave birth to a daughter Clodagh and son Tadhg, who are five and two, respectively. Last May, she released “Mi Senti,” an Italian-language EP of pop hits originally recorded by Lucio Battisti, Mina, Gino Paoli and Patty Pravo. She remains a favorite vocalist of dance-music producers. Since her last album she has provided the voice for at least a dozen club-ready tracks by, among others, Crookers, a project of Italian producer Francesco “Phra” Barbaglia; German producer Boris Dlugosch, a longtime associate; and David Byrne and Fatboy Slim for “Here Lies Love,” their concept album about Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines.
“If you can count the tracks, you can count the number of days I worked,” joked Ms. Murphy via phone from London where she was rehearsing for a brief tour and a few festival shows. “When you’re a guest vocalist, it’s a day’s work. You lose control—that’s the downside. But it’s easy.”
Varied and adventurous, “Hairless Toys” is a bold example of Ms. Murphy’s uncommon approach to her music. Longtime fans know her work in Moloko, the duo she formed with Mark Brydon in 1994, as an eccentric, good-humored mix of dance-pop, jazz, soul and electronica, often within the same song. The duo was together for about a decade, and a greatest-hits collection, “Catalogue,” that was issued in 2006 serves as a sampler of its recordings.
Ms. Murphy’s comfort in a range of musical settings gave her a choice of formats when she moved on to a solo career. For “Ruby Blue,” her 2005 debut full-length disc, she selected as her co-producer Matthew Herbert, who had remixed some Moloko tracks, and they went further afield: Together, they placed Ms. Murphy’s voice in an electronic environment that had the snap and rhythmic propulsion of dance music, but was constructed in part out of sounds sampled from everyday objects—like the hiss of hairspray or the buzz of an alarm clock—enhanced by brass and woodwinds. The painting on the album’s cover portrays Ms. Murphy as a disco diva, but on “Ruby Blue” diversity reigns as she sings jazz, pop, experimental and Latin-flavored music with equal effectiveness. In concert, Ms. Murphy was a chameleon too: Her outsize public personality and taste for outlandish costumes foreshadowed Lady Gaga’s shtick.
Elise Labott Verified account