SELECTED WRITINGS

“I don’t really go on the internet, it’s like a ouija board, it’s like letting someone into your head, behind your eyes.” William Bevan.

I was lost, deep in the internet, and I can’t remember exactly what I was looking for when I spied the track on Youtube’s sidebar; Zia ‘Helelyos’ Iranian Funk, it said. Click. It was beautiful just because of how strange it was; a rolling, and no doubt funky, drum beat, horns blowing a hypnotic, cyclical melody, and an Arabic vocal that started off in deep, baritone restraint yet soon exploded in an octave-stretching show of pure ebullience.

After some digging it turned out this track was featured on a compilation called Pomegranates a few years back, released on Finder Keepers with the subtitle ‘Persian Pop, Funk, Folk and Psych of the 60s and 70s’. I soon found the whole thing, sat back and listened. Despite the immediate shock of the unusual of Zia’s ‘Helelyos’, the tracks that really stood out were by an Iranian singer called Googosh, whose songs are sultry, otherworldly ballads; her voice a crystalline, emotive echo over synthesized basslines and traditional percussion. In her day, Googoosh was one of the most popular singers in the Arab world, probably as famous as Paris Hilton, except with the cool and talent of a Sandie Shaw, she was the first woman in Iran to wear hot pants, cut her hair like Jean Seberg in À Bout De Souffle and famously made a reference to engaging in fellatio in a film;her singing career was cut short though, in part due to the restrictions of the Iran’s post-revolutionary government on women performing in public and compounded by her refusal to leave Iran and move abroad, instead marrying a florist.  

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About 600 miles north of Norway’s northernmost town, across the Barents Sea, is Pyramiden, once a Russian coal mining settlement on the island of Svalbard, now an uninhabited ghost town. It’s about as far north as you can get and, to put its isolation in context, for every four people who live on the island permanently, there’s one polar bear. Yet a trip undertaken by the Danish band Efterklang to the island over nine days in 2010 provided both the sonic and emotional inspiration to create their fourth album, the appropriately titled Piramida.

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If I look out of the back window of my house I can see the local telephone exchange; a large, squat brick structure, three or four stories high, pierced by rectangular windows, running vertically, exposing its guts to us. In the middle of residential London, the exchange, through which the borough’s telecommunications pulse, is grandiosely silent; no security guards patrol the corridors and staircases at night, armed with torches, I’m yet to see a human enter or leave it’s premises. It just sits there mindlessly, allowing us to communicate with each other. 

If I look out the front window of my house I can see a security camera, metronomically ticking back-and-forth, it’s electronic-eye keeping watch over us. It is hard to fathom anyone sitting at some remote desk, observing what the camera sees on a computer screen, their own eye trained to spot the unusual or possibly illegal amongst the everyday comings and going of a building.

Last week I video-called my friend in New York. To my continual amazement, the sort of technological infrastructure that even ten years ago was the preserve of Star Trek, is now commonplace, de rigueur, an everyday part of every day. The video signal from the camera built into my laptop is transmitted wirelessly, magically, into my internet router which is connected into the telephone socket of the wall (and probably feeds through the telephone exchange behind the house) and then, in New York, this signal is transformed into a real-time moving image of myself on my friends laptop. We don’t bat an eyelid. Space-age technology is here, and it’s boring. On a dull and wet afternoon, we scan the contours of the globe aimlessly, looking for nothing in particular; the fantasy of being able to see any spot on the world via webcams and Google’s Street View is quickly subsumed by habit into ordinariness. No doubt the same process will occur when we get jetpacks and hover boards and own sunglasses that can shoot laser-beams; eventually even space travel will become as mind numbing as going on a car journey, flicking through the radio dial in the command module trying to locate programmes now millennia old.

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Will Archer is moving house. He is also busy trying to finish his second year of university, he has a record coming out next month and is trying to ready his band to play their debut UK show. Having just been evicted from the flat in Brixton where he wrote and recorded his debut EP Increases and adjusting to life on the other side of the city is taking its toll, and when I arrive he’s asleep. “Sorry if I don’t make much sense,” he offers as a warning, “I’m knackered.”

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It’s taken Kwes two years to follow up his 2010 debut EP No Need To Run, not that he’s been slacking. No Need To Run’s four tracks hyperactively burst around, cramming idea upon idea into its twelve minute run-time. From ‘Hundertwasser’ with its squeals of guitar and squelching low-end synth; the arpeggios and drum breaks of ‘In And Out UK’, and the retro-futurist Komische-impressionism of the title track. 

His new EP, Meantime, his first on the distinguished Warp label, fleshes out No Need To Run’s sonic template; it’s more relaxed, less anxious in its beats, drawing more on electronic drones. The long-wait in between releases is down to the fact that Kwes has been honing his craft behind the scenes, rather than working for himself. His production credits in the last two years include Dels, Mercury winner Speech Debelle, Sunless ’97 and DRC Music; a project initiated by Damon Albarn incorporating Kwes, XL Records’ head Richard Russell, Actress and Dan The Automator, where they went to the Congo for ten days to record local musiciansfor a record called Kinshasha One Two.

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