Radiophonic Dub
People always say, "What the hell does that mean?"
Andrew Nolan - Radiophonic Dub out now, vinyl available from Phage, streaming everywhere and on my personal Bandcamp.
Or buy it in person at my next show (July 15th at The Garrison in Toronto w/ Lucretia Dalt & Stefana Fratila)
Art by Che Uno aka Cura Designs 1
Eight songs, this is the description on bandcamp:
As a child my favourite sounds were:
The Tardis materializing.
Davros delivering a monologue to the Fourth Doctor.
Anytime in the King Tubby and Yabby You album (pink/ purple cover, that one...) where it sounds like your speakers are broken.
The fade in at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever.
Intro music to Chocky.
The sirens in Cool C - Juice Crew Dis. 2
The reverb on P.S.K./ Gucci Time.
This is my love letter to that era.
P.S.K. We’re Making That Green
Schoolly D gave the world some notable firsts:
Ice T released gangster rap’s ground zero 6 in the Morning in 1986, but Schoolly D was already there in 1985 with P.S.K. & Gucci Time.
Launched in 1983, Schoolly-D records is likely the first artist-owned hip hop label.
Other people have written and talked at length about Schoolly D in the pantheon of Gangster Rap - if this is new to you and you’re interested find any interview where Ice T talks about discovering PSK. The story of Schoolly D being the first (or at least one of the first) to entirely finance, produce, and distribute his own material is, to my knowledge, still unwritten.
Aside from being my favourite rapper in the mid-80s, for me Schoolly D is a framework to understand the dramatic shifts that hip hop underwent in a few short years in the 1980s.
His body of work straddles the musical shift from simple heavy hitting robotic rhythms to significantly more complex sample-based compositions and a different approach to drums - more swing, less quantization, the emphasis shifting from the 1st to the 4th note in a bar.
And he also sits clearly on both sides of the change in rapping that happened at the same time as the musical shift. This change is easiest (easiest but definitely oversimplified) to see by comparing rapping before Eric B and Rakim’s 1987 track Paid in Full and after their 1988 track Follow the Leader, 1987-1988 being the transition time.
Post-Follow the Leader rapping was fully transformed from from the nursery rhyme A/ B rhyme scheme street-corner routine rap to a new style that was faster and had more complex cadences, structures, and subjects, leaving those unable to adapt to become persona non grata almost instantly. 3
In 1986 Rakim contemporaries (and perhaps under celebrated co-creators of the new rap style) Ultramagnetic MCs call out the previously unassailable godfathers of hip hop Run DMC in the opening lines of Ego Trippin’
Say what, Peter Piper?
To hell with childish rhymes!
Kool Keith (who even in the pre-Paid in Full era didn’t sound like anyone else in the game) further twists the knife:
They use the simple back and forth, the same, old rhythm
That a baby can pick up, and join, right with them
But their rhymes are pathetic, they think they copacetic
Using nursery terms, at least not poetic
Schoolly D survived these twin shifts with his 4th album, 1989’s Am I Black Enough for You? The music was less stripped down, the lyrics marginally less gangster-centric and embracing the increasingly front and centre afrocentrism that was hip hop in 1989. The rapping was faster, the flows switched up, and opening song on the album (i’m excluding the intro) Gangster Boogie feels like it contains as many lines in one 4 minute song than appear on the entirety of the 6 song, 37 minute 1985 self-titled debut.
Schoolly D had arrived in the post-Follow the Leader era.
Brutality and Minimalism (and drugs and plate reverb)
From here I’m talking interchangeably about the two song 12” of P.S.K. What Does It Mean? & Gucci Time with the self-titled album. Both came out in 1985, the 12” makes up two of the albums six songs. I owned the 12”, but not the album (I had to eventually make do with some unknown Euro bootleg album containing songs from the first two albums).
Writing in 1986 Simon Reynolds considered that unlike his contemporaries in the rap world Schoolly D’s 1985 self titled debut was unrelated to dance music, funk, and disco, instead containing
“the brutality and minimalism of avant-garde groups like Throbbing Gristle and Swans.”
And he’s right, Schoolly D takes the stripped down drum machine as lead instrument assault of mid-80s hip hop and accidentally comes up a nightmarish off-target reinvention that is as much Controlled Bleeding and Hellhammer as it is Kurtis Blow.
These are long songs, too long. P.S.K. is over 6 minutes of one almost continuous jack hammer beat, 2 verses, 4 choruses, and DJ Code Money cutting “fresh” (from Fab Freddy’s 1982 Change the Beat) throughout the entire song in a way that’s reminiscent of Aaron Melnick’s approach to guitar solos in Systems Overload.4 Gucci Time is essentially the same formula as P.S.K. but marginally shorter; there’s an extra verse, Fab Freddy cuts are switched out for Kurtis Blow cuts, we’ve got some more pauses, and something slightly resembling a bassline almost appears twice twice.
This could be rap’s equivalent of S.P.K.’s tour de force Slogun (“S.P.K. We’re making that green, people always say what the hell does that mean. Bomb bomb bomb For mental health”). Ildjarn’s 4 year lifespan is basically the black metal application of the formula found here.
And it sounds FUCKED UP. The drums (a TR909 instead of the standard TR808) are LOUD, there’s almost nothing else to the songs, and everything is drowned in a very distinct sounding reverb that pushes and pulls in a way that modern side-chain compression doesn’t do.
Schoolly D in 2004 to The Philadelphia City Paper
They had these big plate reverbs, that’s why you got the 'P.S.K.’ sound because nobody used the real shit. We did everything live, and if you listen you can hear my fingers programming the drum machine. We just kept getting higher and higher and higher, and smoking and smoking, and all of a sudden the song just took on this whole other life because we were just so fucked up. It just made this sucking sound like 'boosh, boosh’ and we just looked at each other and were like, 'Yeah, do more of that shit.’
To Brain Coleman (Published in Check the Technique 2005)
In 1985 there were no rap studios, not in Philly at least, so we had to go to a real studio, with this guy we called Jeff Cheesesteak. We recorded P.S.K., Gucci Time, and Freestyle Rappin’ there. And the craziest shit was they had a real reverb, not just a processing effect [i.e. a Lexicon PCM-60 or 224XL]. It was these big fucking plates - they took up a whole room. It takes like three or four people just to move them around.
Even years later i’ve tried to get that sound again, but I can’t. People ask me how the fuck i got that sound and i still can’t duplicate it. One other thing in those days is that we were hiiiigh. It was like - puff puff - more reverb! More reverb!
From the same interview:
The only way I knew how to record back then was like old James Brown style, all in the room at the same time. If you listen real close to P.S.K. and Gucci Time you can hear me hittin’ the buttons, rappin’ at the same time, with Code cuttin’.
I sometimes wonder what the musical landscape would look like if the lasting influence of the TR909 came more from Gucci Time than It Is What It Is (absolutely no shade to Derrick May whatsoever btw).
Recently read:
In Delirium’s Circle - Stephen J Clark
And those who claim to have found a way through initiation are truly lost, for there is no way to be found; revelation is only discovered by accident when chance strikes you down. Revelation is only for those who have made a pact with the god of bad luck.
Weird Fiction set in Newcastle Upon Tyne (my home from 1992-1996) in the immediate period after WWII about an artist and augur who encounters the hidden hand of a secret society via a letter found in a second-hand bookstore in Edinburgh.
Themes of willingly embracing madness (madness as ecstatic disconnection to see the world anew), divination in quotidian surroundings, perennial wisdom, mystery religions and a lot more. Incredible illustrations that remind me equally of Nick Blinko and the automatic drawings of Austin Osman Spare.
If Flâneurs plus Western occultism appeals to you then you’re probably the books target audience. Excellent work and I’m excited to read The Feathered Bough as soon as I’m done with the new Bret Easton Ellis.
Recently listened to:
Warlord - Kjostad
Kjostad is an act I periodically check in on when I’m in the mood and I never regret it. There’s a feeling of methodical intent to Stefan’s work, without knowing very much about the project I get a song sense of physical environment across multiple Kjostad releases. Field recordings appear and disappear, metal clangs in an arrhythmic frenzy in the background, cassette tape overloads and saturates every sound into an audio event horizon, and then we get bird sounds and meadows. Much like Finland’s Nuori Veri I find a deep sense of the rural to Kjostad’s output (which is definitely there in Nuori Veri, in Kjostad I could just be projecting.)
It’s genuinely absorbing stuff.
I asked Che to listen to the album and come up with whatever it inspired within him. I was intentionally seeking the take of someone not rooted in the worlds of grim-noise-black-and-white-skull-xerox-bürtality - which is an aesthetic I obviously love and still use. If you look really carefully you can see me in the video for his track Irish Moss - shot at Toronto’s amazing hip hop bar Laylow. I’m the guy in a werewolf mask in the background that’s probably on screen for around half a second chopped up and sprinkled throughout the entire video.
Cool C’s 1987 track - and his most memorable imo - is unfortunately hampered by the similarity in voice and style he has to the more popular Juice Crew member MC Shan, who he’s mostly taking aim at in the track. Things are made particularly unfortunate because the first voice on the song is MC Shan’s and it’s basically indistinguishable from the start of Cool C’s verse (“must be talking about me”)
When any asshole does that “weeeeellllll my name is MC Your Dumb White Dad and I’m here to say…” parody they are always referencing a style that was savagely amputated from hip hop almost 40 years ago.
Up until this point DJs were largely relegated to scratching in the chorus.
the third footnote 👍