Phonomancy Mixtape 1

Somehow, in the past year, I've become a massive music geek. In retrospect, this isn't too much of a leap forward; ever since I got my first iPod, I've always had a pair of headphones on me, and now the world without music seems so drab and dull. Now, I'm actively seeking out new bands and acts, and even went to my first gig on Wednesday (Chvrches at the ICA, and they were uh-mazing).

The result is an iPod that has, at the time of writing, 1694 songs. This translates to a couple of days worth of music, which is more than I can probably get through, like a smorgasbord the length of Oxford Street; sounds great, but there's a good chance you'll collapse before the end. Out of these 1694, I've gathered a playlist of 500 songs, constantly changing and very, very eclectic. Genres on here range from grandiose cinema soundtracks to slick electro-pop, from hip-hop dripping in braggadocio to rock of all stripes. As a writing exercise, I'll post ten songs from here every week on Friday - what the song is, why I like it, and why it's worthy of your time. Hope you enjoy.

Phonomancy Mixtape #1

1) Scott Walker - "Mathilde" - Scott

Oh, we're off to a good start. My last Phonomancy post was me extolling the virtues of dear Mr Walker, and as starting points go, you can't go wrong with the first track from his first solo album, an English-language cover of Jacques Brel's "Mathilde". What's so extraordinary about this is that Scott had just come out from a teen idol band whose repertoire mostly consisted of covers of lovelorn ballads given sumptuous Spector-esque orchestration. Then they disband, and the most beloved of them releases an album full of gloomy ballads about death, prostitution, the goings-on in a shared house, and - leading the charge - a grand charging number about a man in a sadomasochistic romance, who fears the titular Mathilde and yet, in a repeat of the first verse, embraces her, eagerly telling his mother "Your baby boy's gone back to Hell!" Hard to see any of the current wave of teenyboppers pulling that off.

The original French version is ace as well, but that's because Jacques Brel was a god and could do whatever he liked. The arrangement there is mostly piano-led with a horn section adding bite, but the arrangement by Wally Stott (later Angela Morley) opens with a timpani roll, segues into a triumphant brass section, and later adds Hitchcockian strings as Scott whimpers "My hands, they start to shake again/When you remember all the pain", his mental shell peeling away. Stott's arrangement work would always come closer to truly replicating the Wall of Sound better than the Walker Brothers' albums, which still did a sterling job considering they were comprised of British session musicians.

Scott believed his solo album would flop; John's effort, If You Go Away, had disappeared without a trace, and the doomy young Mr Walker always had the least desire to be a pop star. Somehow, a sombre baroque pop album by a troubled musician ended up being what the public wanted.

2) Japandroids - "Fire's Highway" - Celebration Rock



Canada seem to keep producing good alt-rock bands - Arcade Fire, Tegan and Sara, Metric, all of these have discographies worth your time. It's a bit early for me to say if Japandroids can join that Elite Indie Corps, given they have two albums and I've only just started listening to them, but they're definitely on the shortlist.

Really, if you name your album something like Celebration Rock, it needs to do two things: it needs to be about having a good time; and it needs to rock. And Japandroids succeed admirably on that count, not just on this song but the whole album, which opens and closes with the sounds of fireworks in the sky. This isn't just about a good night out, it's about every good night out. The guitarwork is so relentlessly energetic, you can't help but start dancing like a dork to it. The percussion keeps it surging forward. The lyrics are a call-to-arms to fuck everything else and just enjoy the moment, about letting it overtake you. It's elemental - the narrator's blown away by gale force winds, and finds salvation in a girl with "a soul of fire and eyes of flame that overwhelm her tender frame".

No, this isn't the deepest thing in the world, the lyrics are ridiculous, and an album about one's right to party does eventually get tiring. But goddamn it, this is fun.

3) London Music Works - "Requiem for a Tower" - Requiem for a Tower | Dream


The Music to Every Modern Film Trailer Ever™. The original version is "Lux Aeterna", composed by Clint Mansell for Darren Arofonsky's Requiem for a Dream, better known as Super-Smile-Happy-Fun-Time to those with a bitter sense of humour. I'll admit, that version will always be the victor: the Kronos Quartet give it the proper sense of discomfort, tragedy and of falling into a pit of despair that the film needs while still sounding full. The fact it isn't as overplayed as "Requiem" probably helps as well.

Still, this isn't to be sniffed at. It takes considerable arrangement to change a sad disturbing composition into a rousing blood-pumper, even if it was to get audiences excited about Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. If "Lux Aeterna" was the mental apocalypse, the ever-consuming black hole of depression, "Requiem", with its full orchestra and choir, is the actual apocalypse; that moment when the hordes of Hell are at your back, and you're the only thing that stands between them and all you hold dear.

Also, essay writing becomes a manner of life and death when you have it playing.

4) Plan B - "ill Manors" - ill Manors


This one had me hooked right from its opening frantic burst of strings, the musical equivalent of a pure shot of adrenaline, and which are sampled from Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. Shostakovich completed it in 1941 as a tribute to the city of Leningrad for holding out against the invading German forces, and is very much a middle finger to a giant faceless power looking to consume and assimilate all it approaches.

So you can see why Ben Drew, alias Plan B, thought it would be useful for a protest song (the strings were already appropriated by Peter Fox's "Alles neu", but I think Drew would have looked up where it came from as well). 2012 was a golden year for him - having gotten the mainstream's attention with his blue-eyed soul/R'n'B crooner concept album The Defamation of Strickland Banks, Drew switched gears back for ill Manors, the best-selling soundtrack to the film of the same name, which he also wrote and directed. An intelligent, perceptive young man, Drew wrote the title track in response to the 2011 London riots, viciously laying into Britain's failure to truly provide for its disenfranchised youth. He weaponises the idea of the chav, the estate kid, sneeringly telling the listener everything they read in the Daily Mail is true "so stay where you're safest/there's no need to step foot out the 'burbs", and for every chav to "be the joker/play the fool". Middle England doesn't care about you, so you might as well live up to the hype, right?

As a middle-class kid from a Kent suburb, I'm definitely not the target audience, but listening to this, I can't help but feel pumped.

5) David Bowie - "I'm Afraid of Americans (NIN V.1 Mix)" - Earthling



It was only a matter of time before Bowie showed up on here. The 90s are largely a forgotten period for the Dame, but then to the public, any time past 1983 probably counts as a lost period. People still remember the Let's Dance album, but have you ever heard "Blue Jean" on the radio? Following the collapse of Tin Machine, where he recharged his creative batteries and make us all suffer for it, Bowie began stretching his wings and adding new elements from the world of music, particularly electronica and techno, into his work, to mixed results. Earthling is one such offering, and is often thought of as Bowie's drum n' bass album even though not many of the tracks take after it.

"I'm Afraid of Americans" is a good example. Composed by Bowie and Brian Eno, and originally intended for his rock-opera album Outside, the original track is an aggressive slice of industrial rock full of buzzsaw guitars, synth-strings and white noise. This is a remix by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and where the original frequently goes off the rails, this is more like controlled, tightly controlled insanity; the bassline and synthesiser dominate, the chorus changes in intensity as the song progresses until all hell breaks loose towards the end and the drum machines come in DRRDRRDRRDRRDRRDRRDRRDRRDRR, before they all fall away to a restrained bass and Bowie numbly going "God is an American".

Even if you don't like Nine Inch Nails, this remix should leave you with no doubt that Reznor is a fantastic composer.

6) Björk - "Army of Me" - Post


One of the newer additions to the playlist. Björk is someone I've been meaning to get into, considering she's basically Kate Bush turned up to eleven, and "Army of Me" seems a good place to start. For someone who has a reputation as being away with the fairies, this track has a surprising amount of steel, opening with feedback and seguing into one hell of an industrial bassline, complemented by her deadpan crooning. It sounds like an outtake from the Blade Runner soundtrack, and it's icily cool.

7) Bon Iver - "Come Talk to Me" - Flume/Come Talk to Me


Peter Gabriel released Scratch My Back in 2010, an album where he covered various artists with no instrumentation other than an orchestra. It was a diverse range - Elbow, Paul Simon, Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Lou Reed, and Bon Iver. Scratch My Back was planned to have a sister album, I'll Scratch Yours, where all the artists he covered would respond with a Peter Gabriel cover, but with some of the acts bowing out, the project dissolved into a series of one-off singles containing both covers.

In this case, Gabriel's cover of "Flume" was matched with Bon Iver's cover of "Come Talk to Me", a song about growing emotional distance set in an esoteric...nightmare-scape? References to "shadowed milk" and deserts transforming into jackals mean your guess is good as mine. In true Gabriel tradition, this becomes strangely beautiful with the right arrangement, and Bon Iver's suits that, being a lovely mix of banjos, synthesised chords, acoustic guitars, and voiceless chants. If anything, it makes the bizarre setting more mystical; it could be a hallucination from a desert in an Alejandro Jodorowsky film.

8) Yasushi Ishii - "A World Without Logos" - Hellsing Original Soundtrack - RAID


This may sound like English on the track, but it's basically just Japanese musicians scat-singing anything that might vaguely be called Anglophonic. The original Hellsing anime was not particularly strong, with a subpar horror script married to ugly limited animation, but soundwise? It was fucking ace. An English dub with actual British voice actors for a show set in London, and Crispin Freeman's delightful turn as everyone's favourite mass-murdering vampire assassin Alucard? What's not to love?

If nothing else, the makers were going for "cool", and there's not much cooler than the blues. A nifty Barrelhouse piano riff anchors the song, the ghostly wails after the first chorus are a nice touch, and then you have what sounds like a haunted organ breakdown followed by whistling synth chords. In short? This is awesome.

9) Scott Walker - "Farmer in the City" - Tilt

And here we are, back to Walker. Or rather, moving forward to latter-day Walker. Having outgrown the rich baroque instrumentation after years and years of doing contractually obligated albums that nobody bought, Scott moved to the sound of Bowie and Eno circa "Heroes" for a track on the last Walker Brothers album, which marked his beginnings as a modernist composer. Yet the ghost of 60's Scott still clings - the sound is as full as ever, but it's not a ray of golden light; it's funereal, stark, sorrowful.

As is par for the course with Walker, the lyrics are abstract stuff that feels like what would have happened if T. S. Eliot turned to songwriting: if you can figure out the meaning of "Can't go by a man/with brain grass/go by his long/long eye gas", you stand to win a major prize! "Farmer in the City" is loosely inspired by a poem by Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini for his protégé and lover Ninetto Davoli - the song's subtitled "Remembering Pasolini", the song's narrator drifts from Pasolini ("Hey Ninetto, remember that dream?/We talked about it/So many times") to Davoli ("Paolo, take me with you!"), and the chant of "Do I hear 21?", combined with the rest of the lyrics, suggest someone who was drafted into the army and then left. He's a country boy in the big city, but only darkness and torment await him, so he has to flee, being careful not to run into the wrong man.

The strings are hauntingly beautiful throughout, whether they rise and fall through the main body (that "dah-DAH, dah-DAH, DAH-dah, dah-DAH" motif), or when they reach a crescendo as Scott screams how he pleads Pasolini to come back for him. The song rests on the Sinfonia of London's playing, no mean feat considering it's just a few chords repeated over and over, and the result is a work of dark beauty.

10) Queen & David Bowie - "Under Pressure"

Dun-dun-dun-dadadundun. Dun-dun-dun-dadadun-DUN-DUN. God, I love that bassline.

Hearing that and trying to figure out whether it was Queen and Bowie being awesome or Vanilla Ice's bare-faced theft for "Ice Ice Baby" is this generation's Vietnam moment, at least until the gestalt horror that is Jedward mashed the two up and now the whole system's fucked. It feels weird to get defensive about this song because it's essentially a glorified demo. This really shouldn't work when you think about it - it barely changes key, the lyrics are abstract social commenatries about how terrible it is that people live on streets, and a good chunk of it is comprised of scat-singing. It's incomplete. Yet the two acts will this into being so much more than it is by performing these two-bit lyrics with real passion and emotion. The zenith of "Under Pressure" has to be the bridge when Mercury reaches a devastating falsetto, the calls for "love! (love, love, love, love...)" echo into the aether, and Bowie sings with ferocity "insanity laughs/under pressure we're CRACKING!"

From there, it becomes a hymn, Bowie and Mercury shouting "LOVE" at the heart of the world. It's cheesy when put down in words, but it's delivered with such sincerity, especially when they talk about how "love's such an old-fashioned word", that you can't help but be swept up in it. It's big, it's ridiculous - it's everything beautiful about pop music.