ความคิดเห็นที่ 3
If the sound of their best album, 1993's Hex, feels instantly familiar, you can take that as a testament to both the broadness of their influence and the prescient good taste of their influences. The record is warm, comfortable, and surprisingly easy to access. Songs stretch out to eight-minute lengths, casually conjuring up space and weaving together rich, human sounds: Splashes of live drums, fluid dub bass, barbiturate vocals, wisps of guitar and piano and strings. The feel is both pastoral and impressively concrete-- a little like dub reggae might have sounded if it had developed in the English countryside. Those same building, chiming tones echo in bands on either side of the Atlantic, with UK groups like Hood and Movietone, and U.S. groups like South, Zelienople, and the American Analog Set.
What keeps Hex up at the top of the pile, though, is that surprising lack of delicacy, glitter, or gloss. Those things would imply that they were doing this all on purpose, headed here from the beginning. Hex, like Disco Inferno's work, sounds better than that; it sounds fresh, unpremeditated, just-discovered. It's here that another one of post-rock's major influences comes through, in the work of German acts like Faust, Neu!, and Can-- bands that offered a model for how to trip out in real time, gathered together in real space and coaxing out new patterns of sound. For both Bark Psychosis and Disco Inferno, there are shades of "rock music" in that Carducci-style band-in-a-room sense-- only the band's playing something more abstract, cerebral, otherworldly, and fluid than rock usually manages to be.
*** The avant side of the 90s, though, wasn't all about softness and dream. One of the biggest differences between British post-rock and its American counterpart, in fact, was the former's freedom to trade in hard grind-- an impulse best located in the London duo Main. This group's background lay as much in industrial and experimental sound as it did in rock and pop, and their earliest releases had a dark, scrappy feel that's anything but serene.
One of the biggest inspirations for the first wave of post-rockers was techno music, which was just then perfecting the massively popular British strain that would fuel its progress over the next decade. Along with that came the development of "ambient techno," the more abstract, less danceable genre associated with the earliest releases on Warp Records. Main's industrialist grind turned out to be a perfect match for ambience, and around 1992 they merged the two into one, letting metallic guitar textures spread out over sparse, percussive beats. Two years later, and they saw the big payoff: A massive set of tracks called Motion Pool, where drums disappear almost entirely, leaving only deep, dark patterns of noise and drone and mumble. This is post-rock in one of its most "difficult" and obviously experimental modes, more Neubauten than My Bloody Valentine-- but turn the volume up high enough, and it's easy to hear and feel the draw to it. Like plenty of modern-day techno and modern-day drone, all the action is in its texture and its size: Grim, bottomless, even disorienting. Two years after that, the group collected a series of EPs as Hz, leaping even further out into the void.
Closer to the line between comfort and fright was Insides, a half-electronic duo that started its career on the influential art-pop label 4AD. The space and simplicity of their music fell somewhere on a line between synth-pop and trip-hop, with a few chilly guitar tones circling through the mix-- smooth, lulling stuff. The full effect of their songs, on the other hand, is a little too haunting to ever leave you comfortable; singer Kirsty Yates may sing with coy Euro cool, but her lyrics push at the bad side of human relations like its just another sore tooth.
By and large, though, English post-rock offered up some of the decade's sweetest, dreamiest sound, following straight up on another one of its biggest influences-- the late-80s art-pop of the Cocteau Twins, A.R. Kane, Talk Talk, and 4AD. Seefeel, for instance, followed another combination of guitar background and techno impulse, bringing all that floaty art-pop and shoegazer delicacy into the world of beats-- and casting themselves as central figures in the first wave of indie kids to go electronic. From today's viewpoint, their method of combining the two things seems blindingly obvious: Wisps of shoegazer guitar and vocal, drifting and floating over the slow roll of breakbeats, something not entirely unlike Andy Weatherall's groundbreaking dance remix of My Bloody Valentine's "Soon". This was the original indie band that didn't want to be an indie band-- if anything, they wanted to be Aphex Twin, and just happened to bring their indie sensibilities with them.
Seefeel's career was all about straddling those two worlds, making bridges between them. They started releasing records on the rock label Too Pure, but wound up moving over to electronic labels like Warp and Aphex Twin's own Rephlex imprint. If, along the way, they developed a reputation as the techno act it was okay for rock kids to listen to, they also managed to inspire just as many people exploring the outskirts of techno itself: When then quirky German act Mouse on Mars sent their first set of demos to Too Pure, they enclosed a note thanking the label for releasing Seefeel's early work. As time passed, and Seefeel merged more completely with the techno world, it began to seem more and more like their original form of indie-electronica was a pretty useful addition to the musical landscape. Quique, their defining LP, is just one landmark in a subgenre that's spread pretty wide-- straight to current-day labels like Darla and Morr Music, whose acts offer updated combinations of indie aesthetics and computer-music trends.
Morr Music, in fact, makes one of the clearest connections from the early 90s to today. In 2002, they released Blue Skied an' Clear a compilation of electronic acts covering songs by the shoegazer band Slowdive. If you need any more obvious connection between the two things, it's easily found in Slowdive's last album, Pygmalion-- on which frontman Neil Halstead pushed the rest of the band to the sidelines and set out to make something every bit as abstracted as the post-rock set. The result, at its best, is one of the lightest, blissiest dreams of the era: "Blue Skied an' Clear," its standout track, is equal parts Cocteau Twins and Disco Inferno, a studio daydream firmly rooted in pop. The 90s, much more than this decade, produced hour upon hour of ethereal falling-asleep music-- and post-rock acts of every stripe offered some of the best of it.
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