 Meet Dani Siciliano.
She's got her back to us but she'll come around, later. She knows what she 'Likes...' and I love it.
It felt safer to give no warning before extending this entry!
Dani reminded me to put some notes together myself. An occasional look at the social impact some musicians are having is part of the new deal.
Some label Dani's tastes electric, she's a mixer, has magic and she's on a broad avenue. Finding out more took me a while ago to a gay night-club for the first time since the '80s when a friend occasionally fancied a very late drink. My ears discovered a quite different place, with no thick smoke, thick leatherwear, and thick darkness in tiny alcoves.
That issue of 'Trax' I've mentioned? The August special has a brief, breast-beating editorial in a magazine written by men. Is what we're doing "sexist"? Is it politically correct, ask those guys? What will they think, the women? There's an anti-editorial too -- and finally we get to "women in a man's world" and considered hard up against it.
They're not; far from it, they're changing how people listen.
I should take care in calling 'Trax" an often obtuse and unclear French music monthly on a log that was itself tough going, but this issue gets it right, just off to a bad start by spying a home-made ghetto, not one the women are in.
I'm still trying to get it right. If you're interested, I said more of 'All that remains...', not much, since August last year where such notions should be now I know so much less than then.
There's more music out the in orchard as well, but Dani's here.
She stunned people with 'Likes...', released 18 months back after a meeting and even a marriage of a couple and like minds. The woman was known for how she "had played with jazz combos in addition to DJing in San Francisco clubs" (mp3.com's very sketchy portrait).
Now she's done her own thing. I'll flesh that out later.
DJing? Women are doing this in Paris, Berlin, many places, and if you're keen on trying the explosive, fascinating mixes you get when the ladies sing very electric, I know I'm on new ground for some visitors of old.
Ellen Allien? Miss Kittin? Jennifer Cardini? Carla Elves? The first pair are seen as pioneers and now they're on the cover of 'Trax', which by chance -- a theme tune in the orchard -- suited me, but I didn't mention a pitfall when this post appeared in the early hours.
Miss Kittin has a sexy reputation, one that looks forward to a freer future, no looking back. I turned round, my ears in the late 1970s and what was happening then and before in "serious music".
What an appalling label that was, serious, enough to put anyone off. It often did. I've no idea whether any of these youthful musicians has heard of Henri Pousseur, but he'd be unlikely to mind if they called him Henri with barely an "Excuse me".
 "Is it music? Sounds like a jet on a flight path to hell. Brahms is music, not this!"
Such comments were common when the BBC's Radio 3 reluctantly made a spot for 'Paraboles'. It was also a night-time job, probably; I forget. 'Music In Our Time' was, like John Peel being progressive on a sister station. I taped the electronic wonder and had my answer to the music quiz until the cassette was stolen soon after I arrived this side of the Channel. It was a great loss until 'Acousmatrix 4' (Artist Direct on the man) came out in 1995.
I wonder if anyone ever listened to those cassettes, full of irretrievable treasures after four years in Radio 3.
Stockhausen, Berio, Jonathan Harvey, even the venerable Olivier Messaien (Wikipedia, whose sonic adventures are now mainstream, were rarely allowed on the station until most people were in bed. By 1995, grandfather Messaien was three years' dead.
A decade later, women are running turntables and releasing CDs of electronic noise, as well as instruments the majority of ears know better, as if born to it. Henri's getting on, turned 76, a respectable age with an adventurous and prolific career to his credit.
No jet though.
One 1995 'Paraboles-Mix' is called "Aerial view of Haiphong, Massachussetts" and I'd enjoyed it on the wing first time. The album, if still you can find it, also includes tributes to the Belgian city of Liège, which said "Thanks!" Then those 'Trois visages de Liège', (including the "smelting works") were, Pousseur wrily said, "removed by the municipal authorities of this town and replaced by some 'milder' music".
Kittin lovers, Cardini fans, Allien addicts, go your noisy way if you will, I'm a newbie but I liked one of your clubs. Henri Pousseur, if he knows of these young souls, probably has an amused but good word for them. They're not his offspring, but turning your back doesn't help.
"Boring," I once thought. "Repetitive."
Then I listened. They're neither, such mixes. It's hard work being a first-rate club DJ, ears always open, eyes everywhere. For days, I've listened to little else.
'Trax' got Ellen Allien and Miss Kittin on a leather sofa together, as you'll see. Allien looked far more serious when 'Berlinette' came out last year. Someone say "electroclash"? I won't.
When it's past my bedtime, these women are likely in full swing, if not on vacation. They know where they're at. Once Jennifer Cardini (Beatfreax portrait) unleased 'Lust' in June, you got a picture of her.
She might talk about being asexual when she prefers because a part of the job gets others steamy with strangers.
Carla Elves may be perhaps the least accessible of the musicians named, if you head into 'Soundtracks' blindfold.
There's more: she's not a woman.
She's really Laurent Hô, a man who says, in English, it's "my electronica project, made of sound, pictures, human beings."
In French (click for English), he added the name was the "most ridiculous" he came up with.
He's here because he's opened doors and runs an 'Uncivilized World', a small label where Cardini's at home and so, for that matter, is Femi Kuti, son of the late legend, Nigeria's Fela.
Hô haunted the Paris clubs, used movie talk bites for his 'Soundtracks', and steeped them in layers of noise, haunted and haunting, some harmonious, others you don't hang around in, like an airport terminal.
People who like to start on common musical ground could go straight to 'Nex april', track 13, on from there, then back again. Familiar melody and harmonies, these aren't Ho's point of departure.
 As 'Discogs' explains, he chose a woman, Matali Crasset, to package the album ... or flying saucer. A normal CD's in there, then a plastic circle, a transparent box and it's in a flimsy see-through bag. All layers, one on another, a mix for music often described by those who know with a arcane vocabulary.
Remember a glorious Wikipedia mention in January -- the "Heavy Metal Umlaut" and Jon Udell's "walking, talking" webpage about about how it made the virtual tome?
The first wonder of the co-operative Internet, the Wikipedia itself, has become good at telling us what 'Trax' and 'Beatfreax' are saying in English.
The bizarre categories say "This way" on shelves in all big music stores, but unless you're among the rarest of regular visitors here, it's not a language you speak. Nor me. The more chances the stores and particularly the Net provide to "try before you buy", the more languages you might like.
Messaien was into birds and their vocabularies, he filled his music with birdsong, painstakingly annotated for orchestral instruments. He loved some traditional Asian music, used that too. In 'Turangalîla Symphony', a huge love-in by a devout church organist, the ondes Martenot, or Martenot's waves, bring sweet glissandos, sliding sounds, strange loops and halos of electronic and metallic nature in to sing.
It's a vastly successful mix, now popular and several times recorded if rarely performed because of the resources required, and no mess.
These night birds mix without mess.
If it's all new, I'd start maybe with 'Lust', where Jennifer takes 18 tracks by other people, you can't argue it's music, the rest is taste. There are beats, plenty of drum and bass sounds, and the skill Cardini has as both DJ and album maker is to create links.
On first hearing, 'Lust' was fine. Subsequent ones brought delight in the wit and skill of those links. 'This World' (track 11) takes Slam Feat and Tyrone Palmer and tells us the revolution is here. Indeed, it's part of a lively dance album that is so much Jennifer's own, a sequence, any contrast with the people she works with is pointless.
To Miss Kittin, Jennifer nods and plays with 'Requiem for a Hit'.
A remake of a movie, sure, sometimes you like it, often you don't. People who take material and hack it, dub it and chop it and mix it to get feet moving and others doing aren't in the same game, whatever the art form.
In the climate of the 1980s, sex in those dingy bars was almost sordid and taboo, fine with everybody if most didn't have to know and the police had no reason to move in. The club I went to reeked of sex, a throbbing and dancing throng of happy people, casually dressed and variously lit up in many colours, sweaty and hot.
Whoever's in charge isn't just musical, it takes social skills to do it well, break so much ice.
Unsure what to expect, I was soon getting offers from men, politely declined, but glad 20 years have seen such change. It's no love-in, people are people, some unpleasant anywhere, but when I could hear, the mix of accents was a pleasure. The 'Rex' (Fr but Eng too) saw Laurent Hô, is a Cardini hang-out ... and closed tonight. It's August. This is France, the capital empty of many of its usual inhabitants. Some say the most "in" place to go, as if the Rex lacked very bright young stars, is Le Pulp Paris.
While the club scene isn't my thing, it's impressive to see how women and many men have turned the clock back a century and brought a life to the city's Grands Boulevards you'll find in few other parts of town, however trendy. Times are hard in France, set to get worse for many according to a bright friend and music mixer himself who knows these things. Places where people can both make a tomorrow and quit worrying about it for a while are worth having.
 The pic, taken for 'Trax' by Pierre-Emmanuel Rastoin, goes with a funny, long meeting now in print where Miss Kittin (left) and Ellen Allien ask each other the questions.
Ellen's car, the day she introduced the French miss to what's new in Berlin, a cheap place for risky artistic living, was a dreadful sight: "I remember, I asked a friend to repaint the old wheels: 'Do me something nice.' When I got it back, I told myself: 'No, not that...'
We have one thing in common. On 'Berlinette', Ellen wants a world unpolluted by cars and wars, but these girls don't live in the clouds. Miss Kittin's World warns you at the door: "100% sun, 100% blood."
Equally hard-working, Allien recently released 'Thrills' -- I've yet to hear them -- on her own label, Bpitch Control (Ger and Eng), but wish power to such independence of mind. Her sound makes plenty more use than some of straight lead and rhythm guitar work, Ellen does the writing, singing or talking and, of course, the production.
If there's one thing worse than "serious music", it's what the French can say, "musique savante" -- if you're no savant, what are you doing with the likes of us? What a shameful message.
My own is a mixed one, at least a couple of Carla Elves' 'Soundtracks' I just don't like. Electronic music with no heart in it doesn't speak to mine either. Some of it is very boring. What I do like is people who take prejudice and don't just stamp it, they dance!
When I first knew of "sampling" and "beatmatching" and heard the result, I was prejudiced. In Kansas this year, Kittin heard from "some guy: 'You know, we don't much like blacks round here.' That petrified me, I wondered what the fuck I was doing there," she says.
She's not black, but knows where some of the beat comes from and how lacking in repetition it is in the right hands.
African percussion, as a few rock drummers went to find out in the 1970s, is an astounding kit of languages. Three disks in a French box set people like to borrow, 'The continent of one thousand drums' are an introduction, more than half the countries in Africa are missing, like places the British thought they owned.
The techniques are there, the mixes often shared and the performers, like most DJs, are men.
A Wikipedia piece that fills you in on DJing and its techniques doesn't have a woman on the page except in a picture. By the time you read this, there may be words too: that's how it works.
"I don't like 'electroclash' sound," Allien told 'Trax'. So much for someone's perspective at Amazon, but the review had five stars. My ears heard repetition because they weren't open to the subtleties, techno elements and changes in pulse and rhythm that get people dancing like crazy. Many of the women are gay, for sure, but they don't make a fuss. Kittin says she's not half the sex fiend some call her, she's "mixed" herself, there for "feminine boys, masculine women" ... everyone.
If Cardini talks of being "asexed" without being asked, she means she's a DJ first.
Kittin has one of the biggest followings of all, three highly rated albums on the UK's Amazon and just enough tracks on my iPod to put more on my list.
What's Pousseur really doing here, apart from a kinship across barriers that are just classifications? He's still difficult for some, that's what he's doing. His thing is often electric and in classical music and jazz, people frequently tell me "I stop at... (bong, a name, an era)". Fine, if that means "enough".
If I wrote up newly released music, that's beyond my own "enough", I lack the means, but I was given a headstart by a man whose then objections to inventing walls, some music inside, the rest on the street, resonate on.
I've logged a bombshell in its day, 'Music, Society, Education' and at last found my notes from an interview, almost 30 years ago. Still so important in its anti-elitist message and now reprinted, that book's available on demand long after the retirement of Christopher Small.
Pousseur's no "minimalist" though some of his work builds on the very small. Whatever you make of the movie, the same goes for 'Signs,' part of a pack, the Shyamalan Collection, with a DVD interview on how by then director and composer James Newton Howard (unofficial and good) were a team. Howard had three musical notes he worked from. Three. I've rarely seen a film where music and what most of us -- but not a single musician named here -- call only "noise" function as one.
What these women and the men do call for sharp, attentive ears, open to what music is: a name for sounds people put together and say "Here's my music."
That's thought. What gets us in the end is the beat, the energy, the ability either to strike out right on your own or pick up somebody else's melodies and pulses to make what you want of them. When it works, it's different and no longer difficult.
 Still, I couldn't hack it every day. Here's where this "essay" and introduction started, where I picked up, the superb Siciliano, a great place to start or resume, since her 'Likes...' are so delicious. Here's another look.
"About four years ago Dani set herself up with a very basic studio and learned how to sequence, sample and record her own songs. Every piece on “Likes…” has some basis in the demos she recorded on this set-up. As her confidence grew with the equipment and through her work with (Matthew) Herbert in the studio and on stage, these recordings began to take shape and the album developed.
Dani has an extraordinary musical world-view. Informed in equal parts by jazz and soul, punk and country, go-go and hip-hop and of course house and electronica. Fragments of all these can be heard on “Likes…'" (k7.com, a hearing aid and some amazed reviews).
Never mind "go-go and hip-hop and of course house". The lyrics are first-rate, these are very good songs, from 'Same' about a man who isn't, the rumble and clatter of 'Canes and Trains' to a risky encounter with Nirvana, by an accomplished jazz woman with a rich voice. Dani takes that band's 'Come as You Are' easily in her stride, slowly, brings out meanings in the words.
"I just wanted to give it a bit more of an edge musically, and make it sound like a standard."
Dani, interviewed by Emmerald, "just wanted" a lot:
"I enjoy what I’ve gotten out of jazz music so much, but in some ways I feel like it hasn’t moved forward very much. (...) I just don’t feel like a real ballsy shift has occurred. I don’t think I've necessarily done that. I don’t think I’ve done anything extremely pioneering, but I just didn’t want to fall back on the laurels of things that have already worked within dance music. For example, with "Walk the Line", that song has a lot of different styles, whether it’s like a kind of trashy semi-punk new-wavy sound, or, you know, a house song, or kind of like Two Step. So there’s all sorts of sounds. I just didn’t want it to sound like anything else" (Dance at About).
There's modest for you. There's electro and techno and the way Dani makes a mix is a dream. Often out around town, between people and episodes of an aural immersion course in the ballsy shift I've written up at last, it's been great to sit down for a coffee, watching favourite bits of the world stroll by, and sometimes plug in Dani's 'Likes...'
Real novelty, many mixes unmentioned, is exciting but could be relentless in excess. Pousseur means "pusher", simply enough. Limits, frontiers: for some it wasn't music, now it is, for others it never will be, the wrong side of the border.
The big man, Pierre Henry, born in 1927, began with blocks of sound (like Edgard Varèse in another tale somewhere) and "rudimentary" electronics. In one big store, I heard somebody call him a pop star!
Henry's back, never disappeared: "In 1997 he was paid a tribute by a series of electronic artists such as William Orbit, Fatboy Slim, Coldcut, and DJ Vadim in the remix album 'Metamorphose: Messe Pour Le Temps Present'" (Intuitive Music went straight on the blogroll, now I have I'll drop in often).
Crossover is always in the air, on the airwaves, in our ears. Try any one of these "kids" -- some are little more, but they get on -- and you've got a changing social model, a generous, outgoing one where music is essential as ever, but the how of it is yeast to the mix.
Cardini may know what she owes Henry, but it's no matter, who cares? She learns, as he did, on the job. Education, music and a society where people enjoy mixing in new ways, not growing up amid cerebral delectation or disgust from classical concert-goers.
Apart from some sniping at the comparisons that drive me and many a musician insane, as a rule I shan't look this closely to my method in writing on music, just get on with that, but my debt to snotty-nosed people who voiced their disgust is a big one.
3:41:11 AM link 
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