Fearless

Jeanette Leech

Description

‘The best thing about the so-called post-rock thing was it had this brief moment where the concept of it was to make music that came from the indie scene but had no limitations.’  KIERAN HEBDEN (FRIDGE / FOUR TET)

‘There was no earthly reason, no logical reason, no pragmatic reason, to function the way that most bands functioned.’  EFRIM MENUCK (GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR)

‘The main reason we were coming together to try these songs was as an alternative flavour to being in a rock band. Not to replace that experience, but in addition to it.’  RACHEL GRIMES (RACHEL’S)

‘We were young and naive.’  STUART BRAITHWAITE (MOGWAI)

‘When you don’t know anything, you’re much more fearless about it.’  GRAHAM SUTTON (BARK PSYCHOSIS)

In 1994, the music critic Simon Reynolds coined a new term: post-rock. It was an attempt to give a narrative to music that used the tools of rock but did something utterly different with it, broadening its scope by fusing elements of punk, dub, electronic music, minimalism, and more into something wholly new.

Post-rock is an anti-genre, impossible to fence in. Elevating texture over riff and ambiance over traditional rock hierarchies, its exponents used ideas of space and deconstruction to create music of enormous power. From Slint to Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tortoise to Fridge, Mogwai to Sigur Rós, the pioneers of post-rock are unified by an open-minded ambition that has proven hugely influential on everything from mainstream rock records to Hollywood soundtracks and beyond.

Drawing on dozens of new interviews and packed full of stories never before told, fearless explores how the strands of post-rock entwined, frayed, and created one of the most diverse bodies of music ever to huddle under one name.

Sujets

• Styles
• Genres
• Rock
• Music

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911036166
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

A Jawbone ebook
First edition 2017
Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press
3.1D Union Court,
20–22 Union Road,
London SW4 6JP,
England
www.jawbonepress.com

Volume copyright © 2017 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Jeanette Leech. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

Editor Tom Seabrook
Cover art Graham Sutton
CONTENTS
introduction
1. proto-
2. bring the noise
3. you push a knife into my dreams
4. spirit is everything
5. interested female vocalists write 1864 douglas blvd. louisville, ky 40205
6. tooled up
7. too bloody-minded
8. 1994: the year post-rock broke
9. the slow-down
10. vertical flux
11. splitting the root
12. sharks & courtesan
13. badtimes
14. young teams
15. regret. desire. fear. hope.
16. there’s a lot of dust in the air
17. the national anthem
plate section
acknowledgements
sources
endnotes

INTRODUCTION
fearless.
‘That’s the thing. When you don’t know anything, you’re much more fearless about it.’ Graham Sutton, Bark Psychosis
Trying to encapsulate in a title what unites dozens of artists is difficult at the best of times. But when the subject is post-rock, it borders on the preposterous.
‘Maybe the question [of post-rock], in your mind’s eye, might have a definitive answer,’ says Jeff Mueller of Rodan, June Of 44, and Shipping News, one of my early interviewees. ‘But, maybe, then you talk to ten different people and every single one of those ten people would give you a different response.’
For a long time, this book was simply called The Post-Rock Book . No working title, no in-joke, no florid author indulgence. Only those few words. They were frightening in their implied definitiveness. What could they mean ?
‘You’ll have to define what post-rock is, in this book,’ David Callahan of Moonshake warns me, not unreasonably.
It seemed sensible, as a first step, to go back to the source. The term post-rock was meant to be ‘open-ended yet precise’, or so hoped the critic Simon Reynolds, as he explained the tag he created in 1994. It meant ‘using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of textures and timbres rather than riffs and powerchords’.
‘I remember seeing [Reynolds’s article] and thinking, ah, he’s a clever cunt ,’ says Ian Crause of Disco Inferno, one of the original bands cited by Reynolds as post-rock. ‘He really knows how to come up with a brand name.’
The artists that predated (or were contemporaneous with) Reynolds’s article, on the whole, mind being called post-rock far less than those who came later. ‘I never had any issue with it,’ says Kirsty Yates of Insides, another band cited in the original Simon Reynolds piece. ‘The point was, actually: take rock up a level. I understood what he was trying to do.’
The ‘post’ part, as Yates says, implies that it came after ‘rock’: that post-rock had evolved from it, and yet was still in a symbiotic relationship with it. For some, though, it also insinuated a bit of snobbery. Post-rock seemed to say that rock was heading for extinction, and this was one reason why a lot of bands rejected the term. They saw themselves as part of a rock—and especially a punk rock—continuum.
‘Post-rock is a pain in the ass !’ says Efrim Menuck of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. ‘It’s sad, after this many years, that you roll into a place to play a show, and you see the poster, and the name of the band, and afterward, in brackets, “Canadian post-rock”. It’s still a little heartbreaking.’
‘The classic question that we’re asked all the time, is, Why did you decide to be a post-rock band? Where do I even start with that ?’ Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai tells me.
I did find ambivalence bordering on all-out hatred toward the term, but perhaps not as much as I’d prepared myself for. ‘Funnily enough, now I’ve come to accept post-rock,’ says John McEntire of Tortoise. ‘OK, we were there; we did that. If that’s what people want to call it, then we should own it.’
Nevertheless, it took time. Post-rock was not artist-created, nor did many bands wear it proudly. There are no albums called The Shape Of Post-Rock To Come or Post-Rock 1: Music For Airports .
Part of the problem with defining post-rock is that the thing constantly slithers away from you. It can be either lazily employed or rigorously policed, the worst of ‘open-ended and precise’. One moment it’s being used to describe virtually all modern experimental guitar music; the next it’s used for a needle-eye definition relating only to a certain type of instrumental volume-based dynamic music. And God help you if you argue otherwise.
Genre names are frequently created, and most simply fade on the page. All periods of popular music history are littered with pithy journalese that the wider public simply didn’t take to (and there are plenty of examples in this book alone). But post-rock clicked for listeners and critics. It became a staple of the modern musical lexicon.
‘I used to work as a rock journalist back in the nineties,’ says Gen Heistek, a Montreal-based musician whose many bands, including Sackville and Hangedup, were a key part of that city’s underground musical community at that time. ‘I remember getting in a huge fight over whether or not post-rock actually existed. They maintained firmly that it did, and I was of the opinion that it did not. I still don’t really believe it exists.’
Fearless argues that it does. It sees post-rock as an archipelago: islands that may speak different languages and are probably only on nodding terms with one another. But they are in the same sea. And that sea, the one ideological core that unites the major artists covered in this book, is deconstruction : a fierce desire to unpick and change predictable channels of expression.
‘One cannot get around the response,’ the theorist Jacques Derrida wrote in 1967, ‘except by challenging the very form of the question.’ Deconstruction doesn’t necessarily destroy. It takes apart, and then reorders, using the same materials .
‘We didn’t want a guitar to sound like a fucking guitar,’ says Rudy Tambala of A.R. Kane. ‘You might think that’s a power chord, but it’s not; it’s just smashing a guitar against something, dropping it, and then going over and having a smoke, or whatever. But it was really: let’s try and tear away, aggressively, any aspect of rock’n’roll.’
Some post-rock artists explicitly and consciously sought to deconstruct rock music; others realised they’d done it after the event; yet more didn’t give the process a moment’s thought. A lot of this deconstruction was made possible through the advent of the sampler, ushering in a new genre-bending mindset. Most of the post-rock bands used samplers in some form, but even the ones who didn’t were influenced by sampling’s possibilities for simultaneous structure and chaos. A major reason for the vast bulk of this book being concerned with the period after the mid-to-late 1980s is because it was then that samplers became more affordable.
The attitude of deconstruction was not only related to sonics. Post-rock was usually adamant that it didn’t want anything to do with rock’s gang-of-mates image. Roles in a band could constantly shift, as musicians changed up instruments, and a single front person or a focal point was rejected. This theory didn’t always work in practice, as we shall see, but the idea—to confront the expected spotlights of rock through decentring both sound and representation—was strong.
‘There’s a whole way you’re meant to interact with the audience,’ says Jacqui Ham of Ut, a trio who swapped guitar, bass, and drums on record and onstage. ‘ Oh, you want us to play this song? That wasn’t our thing. We wanted people to enter into this intensity, to be there totally, none of this interacting with the audience. Our whole philosophy was that we were into shaking things up. Making things uncomfortable. We did not want people to be comfortable. We did not want that.’
In many cases, playing live was an ordeal. Post-rock artists generally preferred to shape a sound in the studio rather than prove their ‘authenticity’ onstage. It could be a challenge to find an adequate way to express their ideas in a live setting, as this is where the entire corporate rock machinery dropped its full force on a band: venues were designed for staring at a stage and emptying your wallet at the bar. There were also the technical limitations of small venues, unused to bands turning up with electricity-hungry samplers and film projectors, or spending fifteen minutes tuning up between songs. Some bands got around all this by establishing their own spaces, some by avoiding gigs as much as possible, some by doing a totally different live set to the record that they were meant to be promoting, and still more by muddling through as best they could.
Why did they do all this, usually to very little reward? They were on a mission. And they were fearless about it.
Fearless: The Making Of Post-Rock winds up in the very early 2000s. By this point, two major and linked phenomena had happened. Firstly, post-rock was now substantially and, it seemed, permanently altered from its original positive and exploratory base.
‘For a while, a new record would come out and you didn’t know what it would sound like,’ says Kieran Hebden of Fridge. ‘But unfortunately, after a year or so, post-rock became a sound. It became very predictable.’ Certainly, by 2000, the term ‘post-rock’ had locked anchor and become exactly something that connoted certain (and not always flattering) sonic cues.
Secondly, elements of more conventional rock were incorporating post-rock ideas—sometimes well, sometimes clumsily. But post-rock now had enough