1981 Box Set

That looks amazing. The 'Briefcase' disc is even kind of intimidating. Where / how is this available?

Ah, just processed the 'hassle him to make you one' bit (it's late for me). Think the guy'd actually do it for random internet strangers?

icehouse

It reminds me alot in spirit of Marcello's break-out of 1983 (which I couldn't find a link to) and which surely must have inspired it.

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Actually it was 1982 and the piece in question can be found here:

http://cookham.blogspot.com/2003_08_10_cookham_archive.html#106051592668390875

1983 was a terrible year for music and I didn't think it worth deconstructing. But the '82 thing shows you how much better this kind of exercise works when you just do it on the turn of a dime, spontaneously (I originally wrote it for an ILM thread in my lunch break!) rather than spend six months labouring for no good profit (i.e. Koons '74).

let us know if you do any good! i'd love to get hold of a copy of this beauty

WOEBOT said:

It reminds me alot in spirit of Marcello's break-out of 1983 (which I couldn't find a link to) and which surely must have inspired it.

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I hadn't heard of this, but it seems like a fun assessment of '82. Basically, I made a mix because I'm not a writer--I couldn't do the stuff justice with words.

In terms of historical technique it what's called "potholing" quite akin to that method whereby a master cheese maker will plunge a narrow instrument into the centre of gigantic truckle of parmesan to evaluate the curd's maturity. This mysterious bloke has done that with 1981 and the early eighties. A very deep and, it has to be conceded, incredibly rich picture of a musical epoch emerges.

I did think it was kind of limited in the way that it's almost exclusively white rock with actually only the slightest concessions to music which isnt American or British. I mean, in 1981 there were whole universes of music happening beyond this axis and as we've remarked in the past, this era's porosity to the other was what in part made it so rich. So for example, no Jamaican music, no German music, no Italian music, no African music, no Funk, no stirrings of HipHop......

Notwithstanding this, or rather what is illuminated by this, is the mindfuck fecundity of the era. I couldnt begin to imagine trying to do this with todays "White Rock scene". I don't know whether he's still making them, but get hold of him here: soundslike1981@gmail.com and hastle him to make you one. Its a truly beautiful piece of design and conception at the very least, beyond being a thoroughly entertaining listen.

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The simple '1981' title is slightly misleading, I'll admit--but it had more graphical appeal than '1981: post-punk/diy/proto-indie/electropop/new pop/new romantic/ska revival/electroscuzz/punkfunk/NDW/protogoth/etc.' ; )

My parameters were intentionally limited. Partly this was because I enjoy the focus required when making a statistically non-eclectic mix, as most of my mixes are more concerned with texture or mood. Although I enjoy early hip-hop, loads of African music, plenty of Jamaican music, etc. I have no particular expertise in them, whereas I have more than average familiarity with what we'll call "post-punk" in the broadest sense. Finally, I was inspired to focus on "white rock" during 1981 because, frankly, it's one of very few years during which "white rock" could sustain such in-depth evaluation (in my opinion, of course). Not to mitigate valid arguments of cultural imperialism, elitism, obscurism, or ironic popularism---but to my ears, 1981's "white rock" is genuinely expansive, with edges blurred and disparities diminished in a way that has rarely occurred before or since within "rock".

Every "other" type of music of the era deserves a treatment in like kind, but I'll have to leave it to someone else. Certainly it is my hope that a neophyte to "post-punk" or the era in general will be drawn outward beyond the confines of the set's scope; I think the "porosity" is self-evident enough to make it clear that this music did not occur ex nihilo. Also, not to quible, but I might also mention that in the final version of the mix (not the one posted above) approximately 1 in 5 tracks originates outside Britain and America.

All that apologising and rationalising said, I also made this mix as a protest against the relatively unporous, unmotivated "post-punk revival" of slightly glammed up indie rock apparently occuring the last few years. I admit I don't follow it closely, but in the criticism I've read, it seemed to me fewer than a handful of bands were being put across as the total encapsulation of post-punk (both as a sound and an era/ethos). It is indeed the broad "mindfuck fecundity" that has inspired in me such excitement over the years, not the blazing brilliance of the top tier (revelatory as those bands may be). Most of the "lesser" bands/artists found on this set didn't seem to know they were lesser--or at least, they didn't play like they did. I hoped to put the always-namechecked on equal footing with the rarely-heard in order to awaken in my imaginary Pitchfork-inundated 19-year-old listener a sense of the possibilities and energy beyond what is hype du jour. Of course, I seem mainly to have reached other unabashed geeks who, for better or worse, have long since grown too obsessed with sound to be mistaken for hipsters---and that's been a lot of fun, too.

I really appreciate your criticisms and your kind words. I doubt I'll ever have the energy, time, or money to take on another project like this one, but it's been immensely gratifying and heartening to find that there are so many people who enjoy this music today. Fairly normal, non-music-obsessed people have even told me they've enjoyed it; whereas I expected most people to laugh at the very idea. While I can't claim to have dashed off the mix over a lunch hour, I feel the hundreds of hours spent culling, sequencing, cleaning, stapling, folding, stuffing, boxing, mailing, and emailing have amounted to a worthwhile experience.

As for getting a copy---at the moment, I'm taking a break from making them due to personal and professional needs. However, it is my hope to start making them again by early autumn. I do have a queue of ~150 already, but if you're interested and patient, do feel free to contact me at soundslike1981@gmail.com and I'll add you to the list.

I've attached the most up to date tracklisting for the mix--coming out at right around 460 bands/artists. I'm still waiting on an Essendon Airport record, and I'm considering adding some LAFMS stuff and waiting on those recent Brasilian post-punk mixes to evaluate--but basically, what's posted here is 99.9% final.

I want everything, in 1981

I got this a few months ago, and still feel like I'm getting to know it. I do agree with Woebot's assessment that the box doesn't quite connect the dots as it might; for me the value of the moment is all about a (likely spurious) analogism between various disparate genres, from "world music" to hiphop to dancehall to moebius & plank to radical funk & disco. It's as if there was some kind of massive historical shift (in what? recording technology and distribution?) that allowed for a moment of formal flux in music that looked like possibilities opening, enabled wild genre-crossing, etc. (we might point to a similar global break in art, say, in 1913, or 1970)

Who knows what a compilation tracking that immense movement would look like? Its an image that one can't really even hold in your mind--Borgesian almost. What's stunning is that a 10 CD set could somehow include so much and yet seem like only part of the story. I think of Martha Rosler's "The Bowery In Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems": anyone's incarnation of this project would be inevitably "incomplete" or partial. Its up to us to infer what this moment might have looked like from above--one almost sees another entire set pressed up against this one, in negative, so to speak

Fredric Jameson's "Periodizing the Sixties" tend to think these things not in terms of analogies or contiguities but "breaks", moments of change that ricochet unevenly across radically different narratives. One of the achievements of this set is to think of 81-82 as one such moment--which certainly corresponds to critical intuitions many of us have had, I'd guess.

“The period,” Jameson writes, “is not some omnipresent and uniform shared style or way of thinking and acting, but rather the sharing of a common objective situation, to which a whole range of varied responses and creative innovations is then possible, but always within that situation’s structural limits. It is surely only against a certain conception of what is historically dominant or hegemonic that the full value of the exceptional—what Raymond Williams calls the ‘residual’ or ‘emergent’—can be assessed.” I'd think that this kind of historiographic value appies to both the 1981 set and Marcello's 1982

I feel like I should add how stunned I am every time I listen to the set, at the care IM's taken in curating the flow of each disc, and at the editing of the sound, especially considering how disparate the sound sources--

Tagging all your mp3s withs year tags is a good way to listen to your music collection in a new way. It's a pretty laborious process though. But interesting.

juliand said:

I feel like I should add how stunned I am every time I listen to the set, at the care IM's taken in curating the flow of each disc, and at the editing of the sound, especially considering how disparate the sound sources--

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If I could write like you (in your previous post) I probably wouldn't have made a mix ; ) I would be incredibly happy to see someone else take a stab at the year from a wholly different perspective--and I think it could be done with equal intensity and quality. With my own set, I don't feel like I'm reaching that "of historical interest only" point untill perhaps artist #440/460, and as you and Woebot point out, I'm only covering one subset of 1981. I honestly don't know whether every/many other areas were cresting in the same way "rock music" was at that time---I do consider it a peak of said genre and I don't disdain "rock and roll" even though I love many other forms of music. But if so--I myself haven't, as you say, attempted to "connect the dots" and see, with that particular year--then I can't wait to find out.

I did put a lot of time working with the sound qualities, trying to mitigate distracting disparities in source quality and production style through subtle tweaking. I'm glad so far no one has felt I altered things too much, or in such a way as to alter the artist's intended effect--it was certainly a concern. I never wanted the set to serve as a "history" or as a "resource," at least not as its primary function: I wanted to make 9 highly listenable mixes that could stand on their own. Rather like a metrical form as opposed to free verse, having the limitation of one year and one genre/aesthetic/impetus per mix actually helped me create some of the most pleasing individual mixes I've ever made. Perhaps that's another argument for the limitations I imposed: sometimes when one has ones entire collection to try to pull from in making a mix, things become diffuse, and 20 "perfect" tracks from all areas fail to coalesce.

To see if anyone is interested in taking this thread in another direction. . .

Any thoughts on the ethicality of this sort of endeavour?

I began feeling very confident in the ethicality of the set---my intent was to cause purchases of music, expose people to things they might not have heard (the imagined 17 year old kid buying the post-punk=Go4/JoyDivison-only critical hype especially). It seemed impractical to track down the musicians and ask their permission, and to produce a set like this aboveboard would be a financial impossibility.

But I also originally anticipated making maybe a couple dozen copies for local kids. Then word spread, I discovered many more people wanted to hear the set, and then I started seeding interest (mentioning it on ILM, showing it to Mr. Reynolds). More attention then came about despite my attempts to avoid it, from various publications/blogs/etc. In the end, I've made far more copies than I originally anticipated, caught up in the excitement of finding other people who liked the music.

I've never taken any profit in the project, and in fact I've lost money--not even factoring in the hundreds of hours I've devoted to it in one capacity or another. I've even managed to parlay it into some substancial donations to my local community radio station via a "1981 Dance Party".

But a few recent comments/questions have left me wondering if my original intent---to propagate record sales for the (relatively small portion of the) artists who are in print---has been superceded by the quantity of music on the set itself.


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I'd also be interested what others think a set like this says about the "democratisation" of access to music. I've yet to run into anyone with the attitude of the voice in that LCD Soundsystem song; and in fact everyone who "was there" seems happy to know that a young kid like myself would take it on.

The more I've thought about it through making this set, the happier I am to let go of the romanticism of "the hunt," the clubbish exclusivity of access to the "best" music. Not to say that when I travel, I don't spend more on records at great record shops than I do on everything else combined. And not to say that I don't love my local shop and the relationship I've developed with its owner. I still believe in the validity--perhaps the essentiality--of a vibrant local "scene".

However, I love that the ability to go to GEMM in a pinch, and the availability of so much critical "expertise" in the absense of a sage older brother or cool uncle, means that location---which for young people is very much luck of the draw, wherever their parents settled--no longer determines what music one gets to enjoy. As a person living in the relative hinterland most of the year, I know I have benefited immensely in the last six or seven years.

Important as "the community," "the club," "the rave," these social experiences may be---for me, it's ultimately about the music, the sounds themselves. And at this point, the only thing keeping anyone from accessing astonishing music of all kinds would be a lack of passion. If you have the passion, though, you no longer have to take what you're given.

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All this is also highly relevant to the matter of the reissue in general. While I've read several well-argued explanations of how the availability of so much of the past may be dilluting the impetus to create something vibrant and great *now,* I'm ultimately unconvinced. If anything, it has been my fantasy that somehow young kids aping the superficial edges of music from the past could be forced to up the ante if they were exposed to a *broad* crossection of music from the past. The expectation of greatness, the sceptical stance of "impress me," is ultimately a good thing, I think; and knowing just how much great music has been made before should be empowering, not paralysing. I felt more paralysed when I was 15 and thought there were these few shining lights of brilliance who could never be matched; if someone had made me a set like this one, it would've shown me that very good music doesn't require genius so much as passion and education.

'81 Ike Yard

Hey Soundslike81
Thanks for including Ike Yard 's "Motiv" !
Cheers man

I don't see an ethical problem - unless someone is losing out (ie a punter gets the 1981 box and doesn't buy an album because of it) then there is no harm and only good can come of it. plus, the circulation we are talking about is not going to be affecting anyone's pockets.

this project seems to be about preserving and presenting partly-lost/forgotten/unknown music to people who it'll awaken to it. it isn't taking the artists' work and running with it. more power to ya!