Today it could be 'Client' (2003) by Client or P.J. Harvey's 'Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea' (2000) or her newer releases.
I'm also getting into Anna Oxygen's latest album.
Deirdre Dubois (right) and the men in Ekova sample so much on 'Soft Breezes and Tsunami Breaks' (2000) it can sound like the world heard from space; a notion the trio embrace on another album.
I'm far from through with Collide. A list of names, a couple of pics (the one of Collide's kaRIN is by Dan Santori, Dierdre came uncredited) and a selection of styles so varied that if more were added to it is simply a way of bucking the trend this International Women's Day.
Most news to mark the event so far this year seems to have struck people with its focus on women the oppressed and women as victims, an outpouring of rape and crime statistics, stories focussing on their struggle to feed families in poor countries and the other hardships of tough times. A surrealistic flourish was added by a friend from America, where less is made of the occasion, who was gently amused when somebody on a Paris street tried to give her a "communist plastic rose".
One theme of entries on current listening and mystifying industry descriptions has the great merit of grouping women such as these as achievers, creators and occasionally initiators. They are people who take the best of what they find to build their own music and lay sonic foundations for others to come.
Since they lack pretension, they might find these words overblown, pointing out that what they do is just pick up on what they like, work that raw material rather hard and make music that's sometimes of an especially deceptive simplicity, which is what happens where modern technology gets involved.
'This is an Exercise,' Anna Oxygen calls her new album in the electronic arena. So is what I begun in 'Chasing the Ghost' with Collide, swiftly to realise the ghost is where you might expect to find it when people are involved: deep in the machine.
Going to the Wikipedia proved a good idea. When you're foxed, the place has grown better at clarifying the meanings of 'music genre. Thanks to a constant flow of contributions, that page is well worth anybody's bookmarks if you're also working from the familiar ground most people know, which are listed on it, to the terms you see in the music media and especially in the stores.
There's more listening to do and when it's gone far enough, then like the frequently direct and blunt lyrics of the women listed above, I want to explore the fresh perspectives each brings to the universal themes of song.
It would be overstatement to say that machines in hands like these -- when P.J. Harvey, the Client duo, Anna Oxygen and the others don't always use them to do much more than explore a potential today's technology can bring to instruments whose origins date back centuries if not millennia -- is helping make 21st-century women and men radically new in outlook. The "modern" in any culture is overrated when it happens.
Last night's trip to Africa brought reminders that however removed the 'City' lives Client delivered in a later album may be from those of some sub-Sahel village, musicians are at a loss if they're uprooted.
The ghost worth chasing, before anyone's hasty to write off newer noises (or what kaRIN said the other day of a haunting we can't quite put our fingers on) as "decent music" the way people in each generation can tend to do with that of the next, wouldn't be there if it failed to echo what's in the people who made and use the technology.
Thus, in short, it's no phantom at all. The interplay of voice, hand and tool is often taken up in literature, then a century punctuated by occasionally great movies about what might happen to us when the machine gets the upper hand or the more powerful mind, and constantly, from times long before anyone bothered to speculate about it, in music.
The women of this international day column and the men they play with are on top of the technology, there's no doubt, and they buck that downtrodden trend with an assertiveness and self-assurance I'll celebrate any day.
This doesn't mean we're in for a completely sunny spell. Electronic music, synth-pop and the very dreamy stuff I often really like isn't inevitably upbeat, any more than you and me are.
What's new, then, is the means of saying the same old things. That may sound potentially dull, but I bet you really enjoy the most perennial experiences life has to offer once you've taken a liking to the people with whom you share them.
I like these women.
11:12:54 PM link
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