L'Immeuble (brouillon de lettre)

so, as we can see, architecture is a very narcissistic profession. we even make a spectacle of our doubts or maybe a soap opera of our potential obsolesence, we eagerly anticipate our own redundancy, there have even been congresses organized about the death of architecture. can we imagine any other profession organizing an event around a similar theme? can we imagine a congress saying what can doctors do for the beginning of the 21st century, nurses, firemen, taxidrivers? how much more impressive would it be to organize a more aggressive congress, for instance "was leistet architektur für die stadt am ende des etc etc".

in the strange mixture of doubt and vanity that is the kind of present condition of architecture we have to abandon our obsessive preoccupation with architecture. architecture is a prison, architecture is a prison, we all have a life sentence, and the best idea would be a collective escape from that prison. architecture is a prison, becuase we still define it only as building as adding structures to an already overcharged world. architecture is still mass, matter, substance, detail, interest, beauty, and it is only very rarely thought. that kind of architecture as we still know it and as it is still mostly defined implies three conditions - control, stability and permanence. these, exactly these three conditions that are the necessities for architecture are the three conditions that at the end of the twentieth century are increasingly absent.

there are concepts that have to be abandoned forever. and therefore in this conflict between on the one hand the needs, the so-called needs of architecture and the present conditions in which control, stability or permanence are no longer availible, architecture has two choices. we can on the one hand have a heroic and maybe neurotic fight to the last architect, to conquer or maintain our position of architects, or on the other hand we can imagine a way to redesign architecture itself, and i think that could be a more interesting way to avoid a dilemma. we have to invent an architecture that implies that there is no longer control. each control brings additional authority, each authority brings additional authoritarianism, therefore each control implies less freedom, so therefore we have to find a kind of architecture that allows more deregulation and more freedom. we have to find a kind of architecture that lives with instability.

instability is in itself not a very attractive condition, the most stable condition is death, and therefore i think there is every reason to separate the relationship between architecture and stability. we have to find a way in which architecture can survive in permanence, some architectural memories are much more important than some of the present "bio-architecture" with which we are surrounded. we have to make architecture like a more general form of intelligence. it is humilliating in this day and age to only make things with our hands. we have to develop as architects a more developed, a more intellectual self-critical action. if a doctor looks at a desease, one of his choices is to do nothing. no architecture or architect at this moment has that ability. as architects we are always forced to do something, always forced to do architecture, always forced to imagine more architecture. in a world of incredible transformation why should we of all professions be on this side of conservation and this kind of conservatism?

so this is one part of my kind of representing the re-design of architecture. than the second issue i want to talk about is architecture in the city. at the end of the sixties my generation, the generation of may '68, inspired by our famous precedessors like aldo rossi and robert venturi, rediscovered the city. you all know perhaps the gap of images or remember the images of our paris in '68, we had a famous slogan "sous le pavé la plage" - underneath the pavement the beach - may '68 seemed a beginning of a new way of understanding the city, and i think this is unfortunate, it also was a new way of understanding the city, it immediately developed an obsession with understanding the existing city, the old city, the classic of the city, the city as we had known it. a movement that will later inspire and be formalized in the movement for the reconstruction of the european city and in germany more recently the iba in berlin.

what i think is dramatic about this kind of rediscovery is that in this kind of rediscovering the city we have lost somehow completely the ability to make the city. we have lost increasingly the ability to imagine the city as it could be and also to take the risks to imagine new cities and to take even bigger risks of making new cities. i would defend the thesis that the discovery of the city by architects is one of the greatest dangers that now threatens and faces the city. and this is again our problem as architects because we are forced to diagnose each condition only in the very limited terms of our own production. we are weak, because all our solutions are architectual. parallel to our increasing sophistication on the one hand, an increasing understanding about the existing city we have rediculed and laughed out of existence an entire profession, namely the profession of urbanists. they used to have avery famous profession, a profession of those who made the city, we as architects have somehow pushed them into a corner, made them ridiculous, simply because we did not like the cities they produced.

once it was a proud and elegant discipline, and instrument of a systematic optimism, a profession that knew how to built cities, but because we did not like their city, because we did not agree with the city, we have dynamited an entire profession away from the face of the earth. you may look at schools of architecture in america, in europe, more and more institutions of education have closed in the eighties and nineties their schools of urbanism. and his was a big and expansive mistake for architecture i think. we put ourselves in the foreground, our competition with the urbanists was won by the architects, we killed urbanism there can be no architecture.

urbanism is a profession that creates potential. urbanism leaves things open. architecture closes things, architecture pre-empts. urbanism widens, architecture narrows. and i think these important differences between these professions are incredibly neglected and we have incredibly underestimated the effect what has happened in our killing urbanism. well, architecture has been so far unable to deal with three major conditions of modernity and of this final part at the beginning of the 21st century - decontrol, impermanence and instability. urbanism is the one profession that can take them as points of departure, that can use them for its own ideology, and that can base a worldview on them, within which architecture could eventually play a role. but because we have killed urbanism, we are separated from this kind of modernity and it is harder and harder for us to find a connection with it. and this is, has been very obvious in our own work.

i would finally say that there has been one major shift from early part of the 20th century to the end. in the beginning you could be a hero or a visionary on the basis of generalizations. frank lloyd wright's broadacre city is a proposition for the whole of america. le corbusier offered his city on at least four continents and if he could he would he would have offered it on five. mies von der rohe produced an architecture that - in his opinion - could exist in europe or in america. now, the person who generalizes is inevitably almost a fool. the time for generalizations is over. there are no similarities any more between conditions.

the new period, the present moment needs an endless repertoire of intelligent specificities, an explosion of differences. the future will be high-specific, not general. it will be a rule of exceptions, and only the most flexible will be "heroic". the future will be the end of consistency.

/ by rem koolhaas.

L'Immeuble (les lieux)

1. do you think that serious talk about music intimidates people?
- it threatens several ideological ideas about music - listening as well as producing - being a specifically unintellectual or anti-intellectual practice. some of those ideologies have somee good reasons going for them in the sense that music can be a claim to a place of your own to which the legitimate cultural practices have no access. i can understand the function of this kind of anti-intellectualism. nevertheless, i have witnessed a million times how people can't stop believing in their idea of unmediated creativity and other nonsense. it becomes too painful for them to drop this belief or reformulate it as strategy, therefore they have to belive in it. but there are other types of intimidation by serious talk about music. i regularly feel intimidated by the music talk of young male specialists. but maybe i feel intimidated by them because i used to be like them. you are always hate your own mistakes more than others. plus, older critics are always bored when they recognize something they've experienced before, and they become aggressive when things differ from the way they have experienced them in their days. the present can't win.

2. how accessible is your criticism?
- i am afraid not very much and it's getting worse the older i get. i refuse to talk about new music as if it were the first album i ever heard. i also refuse to stop listening to new music. so i tend to fall into the trap where i talk to young and new listeners about young and new products with the attitude and typical vocabulary of an old man - comparisons and references to records that are out-of-print and books that are boring to read for the very audience that enjoys new music - although i also write a lot about old people's music. there are cases where the conditions of communication with my readers are much better.

3. what's music criticism like in germany these days?
- it's like everywhere else i guess. extremely specialized discourse by specialized fans who know a lot about their field of expertise but not much more. brutal ignorance on the side of the establishment media. that is probably the big difference to the anglophonic world: there is more established music journalism and there is a university-background which does not exist at all in germany.

4. as a german music critic active in america, what forms of cultural intervention are possible within the context of rock criticism?
- i wouldn't call myself "active in america" . at least not in the field of music. most of my activities in the states were fine art-related. even when i talked on music, it was published in artforum or on panels organized by artforum or artists and art critics. i was teaching in pasadena at, again, an art / graphic-design institution. i am doing the same thing in germany. i think it is very difficult to intervene as a german in the anglophonic countries in the field of popular music - at least that is what my german publisher experiences whenever he tries to sell my books on the british or us market - because pop music is considered the domain of english-language writers. i am not talking about wagner or whatever the national stereotype makes me seem more qualified for, but then i have never really tried to make myself known to the american audience.

5. does your approach change when you engage in criticism outside of your home country?
- yes, definitely. since i have been active in austria, spain, less often in belgium, switzerland and denmark, i am familiar with the imperative to drop all insider-talk and all references to certain agreements and past discussions that make it so comfortable and also more elegant to address an audience that you know and that knows you. the other main problem is that i have to write and speak in english (outside germany, switzerland and austria) - and since i am not so good at that, i'll never have the same sense of commanding the language.

6. "spex" is a cool name. what does it mean?
- back in 1980 when the magazine was founded - two years before i started writing for it, five years before i became an editor, and eight years before i became a publisher - the editors and publishers were fans of the british punk band, x-ray-spex, with polly styrene and lora logic. that's it.

7. what was / is the agenda of spex?
- the agenda was: highly personalized writing and new music - first new wave, industrial, new german music, and later more hardcore and soul; since the 90s: hip hop, so called alternative music, techno and post-techno - politically leftist perspectives, and a lot of extra-musical subjects, mainly from the art world. the agenda is: to publish the leading german magazine on music culture, on certain musical and artistic extremisms, and also dissenting views on mainstream subjects, with now nearly 50% of the magazine dedicated to non-musical cultural and political subjects, including more theoretical and academic debates from the field of cultural studies, as well as the criticism in that field. now and then "spex" has been highly determined by personal taste and the ideas of its editors and publishers. so there always been forms of "extreme music" that we hated and never included, and vice versa, boring mainstream music that we loved and featured.

8. in a recent interview with mayo thompson, you mentioned the liason between rock and art. where would this liason lead us?
- sometimes art can provide institutional support for projects that have no backing in either the mainstream or alternative music industry. sometimes you can escape the respective limits of one of those two worlds by flirting with the other or cheating on it by sleeping with the other. of course there is not principally an advantage in the combination or liaison of the two, but in history quite often there have been strategic advantages, like for examle the fact, that i can make a living as an instructor at art academies only on the grounds of being a music writer - but i would never be accepted by a music institution. germany is a country with a very retarded academic scene when it comes to the study of popular culture, but within art institutions it's a highly developed field. it's similar to the historic fact that all british musicians of the 60s were art students.

9. do you think that artists and musicians end up mutually idealizing each other?
- in general? david bowie is idealizing balthus and damien hirst. i think lou reed and john cale never understood andy warhol's art - maybe it's the same vice versa. joseph beuys recorded a 7" with one of the worst german bands. jospeh kosuth designed a john cale sleeve - i have no idea what the two have in common. mike kelly, of course, knows more about music than most musicians or critics, and he collaborated quite productively with sonic youth who obviously know a lot about art - neither of them are idealizing each other. all those metal bands who are into dali or fantasy kitsch don't know what they are talking about, but when they give descriptions of the art they like to their young friends who do their album covers, they produce sometimes the most brilliant paintings. i think we have all kinds of possible interpretations and projections between artists and musicians, just as we have between everyone else, but we sometimes have interesting milieus that are composed of both sides.

10. who would represent your ideal rock star? (male and female)
- the age of rock stars is over, isn't it? at certain moments in history this position was held by - in no particular order - john lennon, roger mcguinn, nick drake, robert wyatt, julie driscoll, yoko ono, green gartside, boy george, cecil taylor, ornette coleman, miles davis, mayo thompson, john cale, nico, nicolette, alison statton, peter hein, harry rag, lora logic, gina birch, mark beer, bob dylan, detlef diedrichsen, dudu pukwana, peter brötzmann, jim o'rourke, david grubbs, mike ink, brian ferry, david bowie, ninjaman, cedric myton, lee perry, prince far I, mark stewart, krs one, chuck d, curtis mayfield, marvin gaye, diana ross, goldie, david thomas, madonna, tupac shakur, erykah badu, janet jackson, lizzy mercier descloux, kid creole, coati mundi, bootsy collins, kim fowley, todd rundgren, george clinton, thelonious monk, johnny winter, jerry garcia, derek baily, van dyke parks, chuck dukowski, greg ginn, tony williams and the notorious b.i.g. - to name just a small number of people who come to my mind in five minutes.

11. can you tell us a little bit about your books freiheit macht arm - life after rock'n'roll 1990-93 and political correctness?
- the title of the first one is a pun: literally it means, "freedom creates poverty", but it also refers to the infamous words at the entrance of a concentration camp, "work sets you free" (arbeit macht frei). it's the reversal of that one. it's about the end of the idea of freedom that rock'n'roll was about, which came from the cold war and the american lifestyle. this freedom was the freedom of the market that we have today which literally has created a lot of poverty around the world and formed the dominant ideology of today - from "wired" to boris yeltsin. my point in that book (written in '92 and published in '93) is that hip hop, as a music of disappointment and hopelessness, provides the master narrative of our current situation - with a lot of counter narratives of course on its side. the scope of the essays in that book is very wide - from a tour diary (on the raod with ice-t), to theoretical essays on subversion and the new german right and its consequences for sub- and countercultures. the second book, "politische korrekturen", does not translate "political correctness" but "political corrections". it's about the import of the pc-debate in europe and parallel cultural war maneuvers. my point is there never was any perosn in the world who definded him or herself as politically correct, but that the label "pc" was an attempt to unify and subsequently demonize all kinds of different micropolitical activities. this becomes especially interesting in germany where everything from anti-racist resistance to the still very underdeveloped germans of contemporary feminism is quite successfully and routinely dismissed as "pc". my final question in that book is: if such a thing as pc - the way the right wing describes it: a powerful leftist cultural political agenda - would really have a chance to exist in this world, how would it like to be?

12. how do you conceive of cultural resistance in rock today, particularly after punk and hip hop?
- i have no idea. is there such a thing as cultural resistance by itself? at least there wouldn't be if it weren't connected to any broader type of resistance. of course i don't believe in the power of the nice opinion and the good will and don't even think it is a task of any art to resist, but more modestly at best to articulate what hasn't been articulated - and that something hasn't been articualted and something else cannot be articulated today is political, but not in the narrow sense of censorship by the mainstream or assimilation and subsequent devaluation by the culture industry, but in a much broader sense. nor do i believe on the other hand in the culturally pessimistic reading of adorno/horkheimer's rather dated culture industry essay or debord's analysis of the "spectacle" - as two versions of totalizing the cultural field from a pessimistic high-art point of view. to me hip hop is not a part or an episode or a subgenre of rock, but its antithesis: anti-utopian, pragmatist and realist, in the best and in the worst sense of those qualities. i don't see hip hop exclusively as a form of resistance, but rather as an artistic type of articulation that adds material to what should be considered and looked at before one starts to conceive of any type of cultural or other form of resistance.

13. have any musical movements been particularly significant to you? why?
- i was a little bit too young to become a hippie and little bit too old to become a punk, thus i've ben influenced by both. i spent some months in ny between '80 and '83, and saw bambaataa at the roxy and hung out at the negril when they had breakdance shows, and at one point even danced at the paradise garage. so hip hop and club culture have been impressive and significant to me, but i wasn't so involved. in the late 80s i started spinning records , mainly raggamuffin and electronic reggae, some hip hop and proto-jungle, until 1993. i missed techno and many other movements of the 90s. i was bored by grunge. you see that the reasons i offer are mainly biographical. music became meaningful because i happened to have some sort of priviliged access (geographically, socially, mentally, or whatever). growing up in germany you never consider any music natural or part of your roots - because german "roots" are too horrible to have any investment in them - but everything in the world is equally close or far. it all depends on what happens to you.

14. how do you read the present dj / remix trend?
- it's been going on for almost twenty years. green gartside called it deconstructive as early as 1982. it's the dominant mode of musical production after the song. the remix is the successor of the song and it follows different rules of signification. and it influences musical pratices far beyond dance music.

15. what are your thoughts on the revival of krautrock in america?
- it's amusing. 95% of what is reissued is the worst music i happened to have to listen to when i was between fourteen and nineteen. the music that is worth listening to again never really needed a revival, it was always known: can, faust, kraftwerk, amon düül 2 and so on have been mentioned by everyone since the punk days. the rest, especially the mystic wing like tangerine dream, ash ra temple and the likes, are plain horrible with the exception of early popol vuh. at "other music" in ny you'll even find german rock bands of that time that sound worse than, let's say, norwegian bands. but everyone should check out xhol caravan, especially when they were still called soul caravan.

16. you've written essays on "the swing to the right" in post-unification germany. is ethno-nationalism still a big issue in relation to music/cultural formation in germany?
- it's a complicated discursive phenomenon and it still plays a big role in defining post-unification normality. there are much stricter asylum laws, easy deportations and of course an ideological background for that. in music you'll find here and there a techno or post-techno electronic musician who tells you that his or her music is now free from african-american elements or british elements, it's now really german. even good musicians and nice people say things like that from time to time.

17. what interests you the most in the current music scene in germany as a listener and / or critic?
- a) minimal techno - the sound of cologne: mike ink, gas, j burger, the modernist, etc;
b) stella - a band from hamburg that sound like the most brilliant moments of 1980-rough-trade-sound;
c) minimal techno from berlin: maurizio, basic channel and so on.

18. are you optimistic or pessimistic about now?
- neither, nor.

19. any zeitgeist comments?
- no.

20. what's the last sublime music moment you experienced?
- terre thaemitz's cd, means to an end; the blood&fire reissue of king tubby meets morwell unlimited; cecil taylor's berlin cd, always a pleasure; janet jackson's recent activities; music from porter ricks on a tape i often listened to.

/ originally published around 1998 and taken from an us-fanzine titled music.

L'Immeuble (travaux pratiques)

... // the 1984 first meeting in new york between adrian sherwood and keith leblanc was one of the most important events in the history and direction of On-U sound. it saw the birth of radical collaboration between the british producer and three american musicians that continues to this today. tackhead is the vanishing point, the vortex, at the end of many years of formative, experimental collaborations between the innovative british producer and mixologist extraordinaire adrian sherwood and the american trio of musicians: guitarist skip mcdonald, bassist doug wimbish and drummer keith leblanc. wimbish and mcdonald, whose partnership goes back to the mid-70's disco boom first met up with keith in 1979 on the newly-formed sugarhill records.

they soon became the label's house band, providing backing for the ground-breaking sugarhill gang (rapper's delight), grandmaster flash (the message) and melle mel (white lines), helping to launch the onslaught of 80's rap. after the demise of sugarhill and drawn-out legal wranglings, the three musicians continued to work on various projects. described by the new york times as, "one of today's most extraordinary rhythm sections", they included recordings for tom silverman's tommy boy label. bop bop 12 inch was fats comet's first release. moving on from the early 80's rap explosion, keith leblanc already released some solo work on tommy boy (maneuvers and uh! on the 1985 masters of the beat compilation; mixing the (now legendary) DMX drumbeats with his own special drum sound). no sell out featured the cut-up raps of civil rights activist malcolm X pitched against the infamous DMX drumbeat, now acknowledged as the first ever sampling record. ahead of its time no sell out, brought him to the attention of london's dub-meister extraordinare and On-U Sound label owner adrian sherwood.

in 1984, while working on a remix of akabu's watch yourself for tommy boy, he met keith leblanc. after a productive meeting, mcdonald and wimbish later joined them in london to begin work on a new project which they christened, fats comet. leblanc's beat, pitched with sherwood's dub methodology, taken it to the limit created a unique media where the heavily distorted sound of mcdonald´s guitar and wimbish's funky bass made things complete. as leblanc summed up: "we started fats comet as a studio experiment. the stuff we considered being "non-commercial" got stuck on adrian sherwood's label and doug wimbish came up with the name tackhead; which is new jersey slang for homeboy."

after releasing a number of 12 inches, including science fiction dancehall classics mind at the end of tether (ON-U DP15) and what's my mission now? (ON-U DP13) tackhead had gained a lot of credits and popularity, especially among those who tied up to the industrial virus. a forthcoming album was inevitable and tackhead released tape time (ON-U LP46), including the newly unearthed talents of gary clail, was bound to be a classic from the day of release. in the meantime, they also found the time to back former pop group main man mark stewart as the maffia; a collaboration which resulted in probably some of the most deranged hip-mutant-funk-metal-dub-hop records ever to be made.

tackhead in the area! became the common chant after the the game 12 inch (ON-U DP17) which featured TV commentator brian moore. the band also started touring, which resulted in the in concert live album, quickly withdrawn soon after release. the friendly as a hand grenade (ON-U LP41) album marked a new direction. they were now joined by fellow american and ex-peech boys vocalist bernard fowler, giving a soulful edge to their beats and making them more accessible to a wider audience. bernard's introduction to the band came through mick jagger who was himself a big tackhead fan. tackhead, now signed to EMI subsidiary SBK, released in 1990 the strange things album which, despite some good tracks turned out to be the band's major malfunction. they were dropped by EMI and the use of the name to promote new material largely dried up. though tackhead as a name has slipped out of use, collaboration between various of its former members continues to this day - such as releases by the strange parcels ("a tackhead re-duction"), the barmy barmy and probably most notably, the acclaimed skip mcdonald-fronted dub-blues releases of little axe.

besides the previously mentioned activities it cannot be forgotten that tackhead's members also continue to play, produce and remix for a wide range of well known artists: e.g. james brown, africa bambaataa, george clinton, seal, bb king, robbie robertson, annie lennox, mick jagger, R.E.M., tina turner, depeche mode, bomb the bass, robert palmer, neneh cherry, malcolm mclaren, ABC - and then we're not even mentioning the numerous releases and formidable productions for the whole On-U Sound posse; dub syndicate, gary clail, bim sherman, jesse rae ... ! tackhead are a vast monumental influence on the music of the eighties and nineties, charming visionaries and story tellers about life, love and lust.

/ adapted from echo beach's tackhead biography found at echobeach.de

... // a brief biography of the drummer responsible for fats comet's tackhead beat via keithleblanc.org: keith leblanc started out as a session drummer with sugarhill records, early 1980’s. he formed the sugarhill house band with fellow americans doug wimbish (bass) and skip ‘little axe’ mcdonald (guitar), working with leading rap artists as the sugarhill gang (rapper’s delight) and grandmaster flash and melle mel on "the message" and "freedom". from his own no sell out, the first ever sampling record, on tommy boy records (1983) to his involvement in creating the sound of funk noise giants tackhead with wimbish, mcdonald and british dub producer adrian sherwood, he has gained recognition as one of the top and most innovative drummers / programmers around.

his landmark album major malfunction (WR005) (considered to be the first tackhead recording, although credited to leblanc solo) was of great influence to a whole generation of musicians. the album, a reaction to the 1986 disaster with space shuttle challenger, started off a whole new genre of industrial music. apart from his work as member of the legendary On-U Sound posse, keith leblanc has continued to experiment with new sounds using his own blanc records as a base from which to release pioneering albums and push musical boundaries even further. apart from that he made a series of sampling CDs for the advanced media group with loads of drum samples and sound effects, free for anyone to use. his writing and production skills have attracted the likes of living colour, peter gabriel, the cure, ministry, and nine inch nails. as a drummer / programmer he has worked with everyone from james brown to trevor horn, seal to R.E.M., the rolling stones, jalal (last poets), the stone roses, robert palmer and bomb the bass. he also produced charles & eddie’s hit record would i lie to you, along with tim simenon of bomb the bass. more recent work includes sessions for Annie Lennox, Tina Turner, Brian Ferry, Sunscreem, Babylon Zoo, Sussan Deyhim, Depeche Mode, Sinéad O’Connor and of course Adrian Sherwood's solo project never trust a hippy?. "KLB" is currently exploring the boundaries of jazz (an early love) with manu ventura's band noah ground.

african head charge's master percussionist bonjo iyabinghi noah is one of On-U Sound's longest-serving musicians and maker of ground-breaking records. steve barker (with additional content from the editor of skysaw) takes a look into his back catalogue: it always seemed that adrian sherwood's future-proof labelling of his early eighties On-U Sound albums, as for example - "another 1992 On-U Sound production", was an affectation at best and mild megalomania at worst. listening back to that work now the at the time young producer's artistic licence can be acknowledged as precociously well founded, especially when applied to the work of the unit known as african head charge.

this virtual band coalesced around the percussion talents of bonjo iyabinghi noah, bonjo to you and me, subsequent to the demise of creation rebel, a real time band who had been subject to the rigours, disciplines and boredom that recording, rehearsing, touring and playing inevitably bring. on the streets in late 1981 my life in a hole in the ground (ON-U LP 13) paid direct, if somewhat disrespectful, tribute to the groundbreaking my life in the bush of ghosts, the collaboration by brian eno and talking head david byrne which had emerged earlier in the year on e.g. records, home of early second-wave ambience. on the one hand eno's "vision of a psychedelic africa" was an elevating concept at the time, but putting it into practice my life in a hole in the ground was to provide the challenge to bonjo and adrian. the "hole in the ground" referred to berry street studios in the city of london, an establishment accessed off-street and down a flight of stairs.

the studios were in possession of particular ambiences and resonances popular with the producer at the time, but also the basic rest and recreational facilities offered little for the late night worker. the my life in a hole in the ground album can now be viewed as an experimental work in that it was a search for a fresh musical template for the then virtual band african head charge. at the time it was made, and certainly more prosaic than the grander sounding term "experimental", it was a case of "what next?", "how about trying this?" or "will this work?". studio time was precious and samplers, even in their most rudimentary form, had not yet arrived in commercial studios. the introduction of pre-captured sound had to be managed by the use of precious channels or the mind-numbingly tedious process of multi-edits. so we find adrian, bonjo and the usual On-U suspects of the time playing with fairly free-form rhythm creation based on the tenets of reggae - drum and bass makes the space.

on this bed bonjo was then free to develop percussion patterns and breaks, whilst contributions from the likes of deadly headley and dr pablo filled in the requirements for colouration. the album environmental studies (ON-U LP 19) was originally released in the UK in september of 1982. apparently the set was so titled because of the producer's vague interest in a school subject of the same name. it was recorded and mixed with the producer being very much influenced by, and wanting to be a part of, that musical avant-garde which was possessed by no country, or even continent, of origin, yet took influences from wherever and whenever it wished. the producer recalls talking to geoff travis of rough trade and david thomas, from the band pere ubu, about water noises and other ambient sounds playing louder than the band. the album's sound could only been have achieved in the studios at berry street. they had an old style reverb plate just waiting to be used and abused - in a king tubby style, a mainly stone-built toilet where adrian stacked big speakers with an auxiliary microphones to obtain the sound of distant drums (sic), and most importantly a bunch of stacked-up free time in which to record some tunes.

the players included benbow on drums, who was in the UK with prince far I after style scott had been seduced by the roots radics, george oban lately of aswad, bruce smith ex-slit and rip rig and panic-er, charlie "eskimo fox", nick plytas previously with roogalator, crucial tony as "fuse", london jazz-player dave wright as "flash", on sax the great deadly headley, and the multi-talented steve beresford who cropped up on so many early On-U affairs particularly with the new age steppers. talking in more recent years to bonjo he had little recollection of the sessions that constituted this and other early AHC albums - none of which he owns in any format. this is not necessarily due to the ingestion of any mind altering substances during that period or since, but more to do with the time that has passed and the music made between then and now.

as bonjo says: "i man just here for the music." the drastic season album (ON-U LP 27) was originally released on vinyl on the 20th of october 1983. like its predecessors it was a largely instrumental affair with little actual dubbing and no detectable vocal samples. however the sound of sherwood's production had become radically different with the move to southern studios, where state of the art digital studio hardware lived in harmony with the hard edged punk ethic of the musicians who inhabited the area by night. the first phase of AHC's development was coming to a logical conclusion, as on their future recorded output we would discover more studio generated ideas and the introduction of more chants and captured vocal and ambient sounds (samples) whilst bonjo conversely emerged as the leader of not only a real band but also a fully-fledged touring outfit. so this set finds head charge very much in mid-stream. bonjo had not yet carved out his niche as the happy-go-lucky king of the ethno-chant so beloved by the festival-goers of UK and europe.

the sound of drastic season is stop-go, at once urgent but searching, wired and speed-fuelled, some would find the listening experience failing to stop short of the psychotic. the band suffered from not conforming to one particular category or another, not reggae or new wave and certainly not new romantic. who would play this on radio? which promoter would take the risk of presenting this stuff in live performance before a crowd of innocent and gullible students? where was this music coming from? the answer was - the mind and fingers of adrian sherwood who regarded the album's studio sessions as ... "... experiments in active frequencies, out of time noises, rhythms within rhythms, and endless tape edits (edits on edits) resulting in the ultimate cut-up and paste job ..." ... which, in retrospect, can be seen as an integral learning experience for the then young producer.

when drastic season was originally released On-U Sound were not in the habit of commissioning sleeve notes for their albums. however, a few sporadic press releases crept out of the On-U bunker, including this one: "a high-tech rhythm mix of human, animal and machine sounds, captured on the southern studios digital rig by the "wackid' mixer adrian sherwood, up in sunny wood green, drastic season features that On-U rugged bass sound. check it if you're a dancer, a listener, a film maker, a computer programmer, a human or an animal. special treats in store for steam locomotive enthusiasts and biologists. you've never heard such sounds in your life (to quote ESP). in the intervening years between the 1986 release of off the beaten track and drastic season, AHC had been moulded into a live blood-pumping band by bonjo, who had truly come out of the shadows where percussion usually resides, fuelled by a righteous desire to occupy that front-of-stage position.

also during that time sherwood had volunteered to be fed through the funk-mangle by messrs. (skip) mcdonald, (doug) wimbish and (keith) leblanc, and had come out the other end more disciplined and focused on what fresh sounds might be possibly be created through the blatant use and abuse of state of the art technology. the result of this "great leap forward" was the first "modern", AHC album - off the beaten track (ON-U LP 40) - which sounded like nothing else around at the time, and whose combination of fat beats and ethnic chants was to provide the template which many lesser lights were to attempt to emulate over the ensuing years. compared to previous efforts the "new" AHC rhythms were less abstract and more direct, with continuous and flowing percussion lines and more managed tempo shifts. the application of loops and samples of increased time duration made all the difference when combined with the more fluid and confident approach of the musicians involved in the build of the tracks.

sherwood shows up once more under his by now redundant guise as the prisoner. skip mcdonald makes an early non-funk entry and the reappearance of jah wobble makes clear his creative commitment to his old friends at On-U. but most remarkably, and making his debut as a recording artist, is the twentieth centuries most radical scientist - the super-cool albert einstein, laying down a sweet rap with the most conscious of lyrics in language and mentality. of course, albert was in the studio in spirit only and the exercise, to my knowledge, has never been repeated. the songs of praise albums title off the beaten track was not just an example of a great piece of wordplay but also incredibly apt as the music was not only a departure for On-U Sound but also a landmark album for what was to become the whole new ethno-beat strand within the commercial category of what we now know as "world music".

the track also led, over the following four years, to the eventual creation of AHC's meisterwerk - the 1990 peerless songs of praise (ON-U LP 50) - a set so complete in its realisation that it provided a peak that the band could not scale again, even though the later, and by most standards excellent, 1993's in pursuit of shashamane land (ON-U LP 65) provided some splendid moments. having gained a taste for being AHC's spiritual leader and spurred-on by his more vocal-based work with noah house of dread, bonjo and On-U went their separate artistic ways in 1994 - bonjo finding greater creative freedom in a number of self-produced sets on either Acid Jazz or his own Bonjo I label. a relocation to ghana also took place after he completed a small beach-side housing compound for himself and his ever-increasing family.

ten years later, revived and now very much a father, bonjo and adrian are once again working together on new material and 2005 should see the first On-U AHC album for over a decade, bonjo returning to london specifically for recording purposes. it is fitting that bonjo has made ghana his home, in an act of self-managed repatriation, as the country accords its musicians due respect and status, especially the masters percussion - of which bonjo is certainly one.

given the nature of especially the early On-U Sound releases, basic rhythms were often re-used, sampled, overdubbed and remixed by the same collective of artists under different names and with variant or completely different titles. this has lead to the On-U catalogue being awash with multiple re-works of the same basic track with little way of associating them.

thus the rhythm directory was born. the first version of the rhythm directory was painstakingly researched and compiled by Richard Davies back in 1992 and together with updates by culf in 1993-4 was once available along with his discographies by FTP - but sadly no longer. this re-incarnation maintains richard and culf's original classification system, brings it more or less up to date and adds further new rhythms i have allocated. my corrections and updates are to a july 1994 paper copy of richard and Culf's original with brand new rhythm additions to it comprising all rhythms above 92 and B39. my thanks go to them both for letting me develop their creation further and for doing much of the hard work on which the information within is based. a rhythm in the context of this directory is given a wide definition in the absence of any other suitable term i can think of. it's taken to mean any underlying pattern within a track that is clearly reproduced in more than one recording. this pattern may be one or a combination of lyrics, tune, drum loop or recurring bassline sequence.

while every track therefore consists of elements on which a rhythm can be based, the rhythm directory deals mainly with those rhythms that have been re-used in such a way that a change in track name and / or mix name and / or artist name has occurred that makes the common link between them non-obvious. that said, this directory is not a completely exhaustive list. in the table header of each rhythm is a column marked version. in this context a version is a distinct recording which contains a rhythm in question. i.e. every edit, remix, dub, re-recording etc etc is considered to be a separate version. generally speaking there are at least two versions of each listed rhythm known. the names for versions i have used are purely of my own derivation and are designed to descriptively differentiate them from each other.

in particular, versions called "original" do not necessarily mean "very first recording", but probably more accurately "suspected first recording of those versions listed". perhaps confusingly, from time-to-time, the name of a version is given as 'version'. when used as a name, version is simply taken to mean variation or difference.

/ taken from the official biography appearing on www.keithleblanc.com, via skysaw.org