Fans of Mixing It who use Last.fm should consider joining the Mixing It Last.fm group! The neat thing is that each Last.fm group has its own “radio station”. The more diverse the music collections of the group members is, the more eclectic (and there like the real Mixing It) the radio station becomes. I’ve just tuned into it and heard a Paul Anka cover of Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ in a swing style. Of course, nothing will ever beat the real thing.
Archive: Mixing It
Mixing It presenter Mark Russell has an interesting post about the demise of the programme. It certainly seems as though the programme has been quite harshly treated by Radio 3 in its final months. Thanks to Simon Russell who sent me the link.
Tomorrow is a sad day for fans of experimental music, and it is a particularly poor one for the reputation of the BBC in certain circles. Probably the best music programme on radio, Mixing It, has been axed. The final programme will be tomorrow at 2215 on Radio 3.
Mixing It was probably the only radio programme I would go out of my way to listen to. Ever since I was introduced to it six years ago by a good person on a messageboard about Feeder (of all bands), the programme has been the main source through which I discovered new bands. It’s been doing the same thing for many others since 1990. But that will all end tomorrow.
Over the past six years, nothing has influenced my music buying habits more than Mixing It. There literally is nothing else like it on the radio. It wasn’t called Mixing It for nothing. You genuinely wouldn’t know what was around the corner. It took Blectum From Blechdom as seriously as the rest of Radio 3 took Bach and Beethoven.
This love of modern experimental music earned it a certain reputation from some particular snooty-nosed Radio 3 listeners who would rather the station was filled with classical music and nothing else. People such as Friends of Radio 3 (some “friends”, huh?) say that Mixing It would fit better on Radio 1 or 6Music.
I can only assume that they have never listened to Radio 1. A perousal of Radio 1′s “Experimental” [sic] page would downright offend any self-respecting fan of experimentation. Right now it features The Klaxons and CSS. It is hardly boundary smashing stuff.
As for the programmes on Radio 1, even in the past five years the change has been drastic. Back then there was The Blue Room, an ambient / acoustic music show which, while tucked away in the schedules at 5am, at least suited its slot. In the past year, it has been axed. Other experimental shows by Mary Anne Hobbs and Gilles Peterson have scandalously been moved to graveyard slots like 2am to make way for Colin Murray.
Meanwhile, 6Music (with a couple of notable exceptions) is really just Radio 2 for people in denial. For all of its good aspects, 6Music probably does not have the ability to accomodate a programme with such varied and eclectic playlists. I certainly could not imagine Radio 1 or 6Music broadcasting concerts by artists like The Matthew Herbert Big Band.
And this is not to mention the approach taken by Mixing It, which really took an interest in the way the music was made. It was chin-strokey but not po-faced, an approach shaped by the brilliant banter between Mark Russell and Robert Sandall. The programme didn’t take itself too seriously, but it had quite an analytical bent that really only suits Radio 3, certainly more than it would suit Radio 1 or 6Music.
Take, for instance, last week’s special programme on the Berlin music scene. Radio 1 might do a documentary on Berlin, but it would probably only focus on a genre at a time and it certainly wouldn’t last ninety minutes. Mixing It‘s programme explored many aspects of the Berlin community and took a genuine interest in the way the music was made. It didn’t try to relate everything to some kind of superficial, non-existent scene.
Mixing It was a unique in that it didn’t see a boundary between pop and classical music as somebody like Friends of Radio 3 or even your average Radio 1 listener would see. The approach of Mixing It has possibly fostered a new culture linking pop and classical music. I recently wrote about how brilliant Jonny Greenwood is. Writing on the Media Guardian website, Ed Baxter of Resonance FM said:
Witness the BBC Concert Orchestra’s coy description of its current Composer in Residence, Johnny Greenwood, as “probably better known as the guitarist in the hugely successful band Radiohead”. Probably. And probably too such a collaboration would have been inconceivable without Mixing It connecting savvy classical players and serious young pop stars.
It is very sad that Radio 3 should be turning its back on something so wonderful, in a year when Jonny Greenwood won the Radio 3 listeners’ award in the British Composer Awards.
Because not only has Mixing It been axed, but its only close relative — Late Junction — has been cut from four shows per week to three as well. Radio 3 appears to be closing the door to the sort of music that doesn’t get an outlet anywhere else (despite what Friends of Radio 3 might believe!). And to think that just a few years ago things were looking up, when Mixing It‘s slot was extended.
So what has Mixing It been replaced with? Something called Jazz Library, a new programme dedicated to playing old jazz records. Now I don’t have an aversion to jazz, but I find it difficult to believe that this new programme will make anything like the same impact as Mixing It did.
Is there really not enough space for Mixing It to remain on Radio 3′s schedules. It is not as if 75 minutes tucked away on a Friday night (or even its old slot of 60 minutes on a Sunday night!) is really getting in anybody’s way.
What can fans of experimental music listen to now? Do we really have to make do Mary Anne Hobbs’ yelping (at 4am) and whatever podcasts we can rustle up from the internet? What will influence my music purchases from now on? From Saturday onwards, I will be a little bit more lost than I was before.
There is something about Matthew Herbert, the revered electronic music producer who has a new album out at the moment, that I find a little bit annoying. Don’t get me wrong here. I have three Herbert-produced albums — ‘Goodbye Swingtime’, ‘Likes…’ and ‘Bodily Functions’ — and I think they are all pretty good, especially ‘Goodbye Swingtime’. But recently I haven’t felt the urge to buy any more Herbert stuff.
My problem with him is this: noise. By noise I don’t mean the completely insane dense noise music à la Merzbow. I actually quite like that sort of stuff; it can be quite fun. If I’m angry or upset or something, noise music is actually the very best thing I can put on because it kind of neutralises me, and once it’s all over I feel okay. I dunno why that works, but I shouldn’t question these things.
But in this case I mean noise as in found sounds. For the uninitiated, Matthew Herbert’s big gimmick is to stick a microphone up a chicken’s bum, record it taking a dump, then turn the sound into a quaint, skittering (pun intended) jolly piece of music that’s meant to get you wiggling a bit.
Once again, I should stress that I do not have a problem with found sounds at all. In fact, I have read that Autechre make heavy use of found sounds, which is believeable. But they do it really cleverly because they do it with the intention of making good music. Matthew Herbert, on the other hand, does it to make some kind of grandiose statement. At first I thought it was really cool. Ripping up copies of The Daily Mail in time to the music? How can you resist?
But after a while I began to wonder if the big concepts were getting in the way of making good music. If you read all of the liner notes for ‘Goodbye Swingtime’, which was released at the very height of the Iraq war debate, there is a lot of shit in there. Whether you agree with the broad thrust of his argument or not (and I happened to be against the invasion), it is easy to see that there is a lot of extremely pretentious bollocks going on in the album. Here is an example of the notes for one of the tracks, ‘The Three W’s':
Sounds: Vocals by Mara Carlyle, Typing of the URL for www.soaw.org, the School of Americas Watch website dictating American involvement in Latin American dictatorships. Printing of pages from the same website / Flugel horn by Pete Wraight.
Sure enough, listen to the track and there is the sound of an inkjet printer churning away, presumably printing pages from said website. I mean, fair enough if Matthew Herbert feels like this message should get out, but it sounds shit on the record.
In the notes for another track, ‘Misprints’, surrounded by the usual notes crediting musicians, there is this:
…Newspaper clippings about Iraq from around the world shaped in to instruments and filled with popcorn, rice and foreign coins…
‘Simple Mind’:
…Band also played the instruments without blowing them…
Also peppered around the album is the sound of books by Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Greg Palast and others either being flicked through or silently read. Presumably all of this is meant to enlighten the listener via the mystical voodoo telepathic power of the CD in a stereo. I think the idea is that if you hear (I say ‘hear’, but all you actually hear is pages being turned) on the album a saxophonist silently reading Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men then you too can become a ranting, fat, hypocritical millionaire who likes to dress up as a tramp.
Herbert getting political As I said, it is all very well if Matthew Herbert wants his political viewpoints to be known, but it doesn’t make for good music. It just makes for embarassing liner notes. There is hardly anything worse than a musician pretending he is an expert in international affairs. You need look no further than those posers Bob “ten out of ten” Geldof and Bono to see the absolute tossery that this leads to. This stuff is no better than Tony Blair stiltedly posing with his Stratocaster. I buy a CD to listen to music. If I want lectures on international politics I’ll buy a book.
‘Goodbye Swingtime’ was all right though. I still think it’s a pretty good album, so I was interested when his following album, ‘Plait du Jour’, was released. It was an album all about food politics. As I recall, the general thrust of the argument was, “Buy all your food from local farmers, but don’t let African farmers starve.” I’m not sure how buying British produce is meant to help poor African farmers. Still, that is his viewpoint which he is entitled to, so I was still going to buy the album because the music was still going to be good, right?
Well it turned out that ‘Plait du Jour’ was where musique concrète turned musique wet. Matthew Herbert exactly recreated a meal that Nigella Lawson once cooked for George W. Bush. Then he whipped his microphone out and recorded the meal being run over by a tank (the tank was chosen even though we should “start no wars”). Okay, it raises a smile, but does it result in good music? I have no idea because as soon as I read about it I decided I was not going to touch that album with a bargepole.
I once asked a Róisín Murphy fan to convince me to buy her solo album which was produced by Matthew Herbert. I explained, “I’ve gone off Matthew Herbert.” The reply? “Herbert is back to his best!” Thank goodness, I thought. I read on: “He recorded her making cups of tea, whacking a notepad about, jumping up and down on bed, hissing…” My hopes were dashed. I still haven’t bought the Róisín Murphy album.
Here is the blurb from a recent edition of the tip-top Radio 3 programme, Mixing It:
For his latest album release, Matthew Herbert has concentrated on writing songs, although his experimental side is still very much at work, with sound sources as diverse as coffins, petrol pumps and an RAF Tornado bomber, and drum tracks recorded in a variety of locations: a hot air balloon, under the sea and in a car travelling at 100mph.
Since this is supposed to be an album of songs, I wonder if he has also recorded sounds from inside his own arse — otherwise how would he record the vocals with his head stuck so far up it? As I said at the start of this post, found sounds are absolutely fine. But with Matthew Herbert nobody ever talks about the music, they only talk about his mad recording exploits. Herbert allows all of these silly ideas to get in the way of a good tune which, at the end of the day, is surely what it is all about?
I shouldn’t really single out Matthew Herbert like this because he is not the only artist who puts the concept and the found sounds ahead of the music. You know me — I like music with an experimental edge, and in that arena being pretentious isn’t exactly an unusual thing. But there is a line to be drawn.
When I first heard that Venetian Snares was making an album with his girlfriend Hecate which was made entirely out of the sounds they made while having sex I thought it was a genius idea. The problem was, when the album was released it sounded like all they ever do in bed is fart.
Olive branch: To prove that I still quite like Matthew Herbert, despite all the bile I directed towards him in this post, I am putting his ‘Hoedown Bump’ instrumental remix of Jamie Lidell’s ‘Multiply’ here, because I think it’s really cool. As always, you’ll have to press play every 30 seconds.
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