Blackest Ever Black

Local Authority

bitch city
You're drawing connections between things that aren't necessarily there.

Yes they both operate within a similar frame, electronic music with a middle eastern context, and it is very clear that MG lends a hand to influencing Dominic. That's as far as it goes though.

MG takes middle eastern music and re-contextualises it within a western frame and is very playful with his work. VS only uses slight middle eastern influences, if any at all other than song titles and name (although they're more politically minded, focussing on western world conspiracies which happen to play out in the middle east), his music is strictly of the noise/techno/industrial camp and it doesn't venture far from that.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Well, you're using the expanded parameters of someone who's gotten how many years of release, against a roughly 2 1/2 year career for a side-project, OBVIOUSLY the latter's going to seem a bit limited.

Also there's the elements with the former being used to imply a sort of... mixture of dread from inside the foreignness and alienlike quality of the Middle East to the western world, and it's own internal struggles and tensions. With VS, the dread is actually mostly concerned with us (westerners) AS aliens inside a world we may not truly belong in. 'War inna Babylon' vs. War UPON Babylon.
 

SecondLine

Well-known member
VS only uses slight middle eastern influences, if any at all other than song titles and name (although they're more politically minded, focussing on western world conspiracies which happen to play out in the middle east), his music is strictly of the noise/techno/industrial camp and it doesn't venture far from that.

There are some middle eastern acapellas used in the recent LP for Modern Love.

Don't know any MG so can't comment on the similarities (although interestingly Chris from mnml ssgs was going on about VS being a MG rip off on twitter a few weeks back).
 

Martin D

Well-known member
Also there's the elements with the former being used to imply a sort of... mixture of dread from inside the foreignness and alienlike quality of the Middle East to the western world, and it's own internal struggles and tensions. With VS, the dread is actually mostly concerned with us (westerners) AS aliens inside a world we may not truly belong in. 'War inna Babylon' vs. War UPON Babylon.

The worst explanation ever, seriously, are Pitchfork hiring? :)
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Coming a bit late to this thread, but I quite like the tracks linked on the first page and thought I'd ask if anyone has any other recommendations for roughly similar-sounding stuff that's around at the moment, whether on BEB or other labels. I'm hugely into Demdike Stare at the moment, are they part of this scene at all? I really like music that's atmospherically dark without getting as cheesy as full-on capita-g Goth (though Sisters of Mercy will always rule, obvs). Some of this stuff reminds me of the darker bits of Future Sound Of London in feel, but with dubstep and vintage industrial/post-punk as its main reference points rather than trip-hop and acid house.

Love the echo-y sound on that Tropic Of Cancer track, really Joy Division/JMC-ish. Great stuff.

Edit: as it happens I like Muslim Gauze too, or the bits and pieces I've heard, anyway.

£4.25 for a can of Red Stripe tho.. fuck sake.

I can beat that! £4.80 at Fire in Vauxhall the other night, I mean Jesus shitting Christ. £2 per item in the cloakroom and they still charged me £4 for putting my jacket and coat on the same hanger. Plus a couple of nasty little pikey cunts managed to nick my girlfriend's iphone. Just seemed to add insult to injury to be robbed legally as well as illegally. Sorry, off-topic but needed to vent.
 
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you

Well-known member
i smell a drop box a-comin....

off topic - I think I paid 4.50 at corsica, kinda pricey
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"I'm hugely into Demdike Stare at the moment, are they part of this scene at all?"
I think that this Machine thing (not the Kid Creole one) is quite similar to Demdike Stare, both vhs exploitation fanatics and record collectors kinda combining their passions. There are a load of soundfiles at the bottom. Certainly Spellbound might tick that box.

http://www.electronicbeats.net/2012...machine?&_suid=135154968151906262991410715937

(oh and that guy Jon is dj-ing with us at The Alibi on Friday if you're around)
 
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CrowleyHead

Well-known member
no i liked your observation on the difference between war "inna" and "upon"...

Appreciated, though I'm not joking about Pitchfork hiring my friends who do even more groan-worthy moments than I do.

I'm afraid I missed the boat, and I'm not as puritanical as Noz or The Martorialist when it comes to writing. I'm going to have to learn carpentry or landscaping like all the regular citizens. RATS.

But no, back to the subject, I'm dead serious about the MG/VS difference. MG was always fascinated from how people think in that mindframe, projection through wearing masks and etc. VS is more about... infecting, manipulation. In other words, MG has the perspective of the people directly involved in that conflict, whereas someone like Dominick seems to be fascinated with those who manipulate the people MG is fascinated by; people in the CIA, or other organizations where they're truing to use the crisis for their own gains. I won't lie and admit that when I was reading that history of the car bomb Mike Davis wrote, that I tended to use Vatican Shadow and other BEB stuff as a soundtrack.
 

SecondLine

Well-known member
Read a blogpost last night about Muslimgauze being an anti-semitic genocide apologist.

Won't link to is as it was pretty mouth-frothy, but perhaps that's something else the two have in common - a certain ambivalence in the way they present themselves in relation to their subject matter. Fernow was wearing US military getup at the BEB night, a move which struck me as a bit schoolboy tbh - not a great thing when you're tackling such a fraught subject.

Anyway sorry to contribute to the derailing of this thread.
 

Gombreak

Well-known member
From what I can tell Fernow has always woven sixth form politics controversiality into his stuff, it's one of the things that turns me off Hospital Productions a bit. I mean what is this? :slanted:
5dt8o0.jpg

and pressing a record edition in 911?
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
maybe people who follow this more closely have already seen this. from the man himself "I love certain sides of Muslimgauze records, and I kind of ran out of that sort of music to listen to, so that’s partly why Vatican came about…". altho that seems like it could be taken to support either side in this argument.

personally I feel like VS apes the sonics + aesthetics but lacks a great deal of MG's depth that was imparted by sincerity. MG was explicitly polemical. whether you agreed or not, the politics meant something. for VS they're just symbols - in that same interview he talks about how he's interested in conspiracies not as an actual thing but as as an abstract symbol for "global failure" - and it just comes off like posturing, not to mention the shock value of putting Nidal Hassan's face on a cover (which is a whole other thing from a cover showing, say, fedayeen or Khomeini). granted VS still makes some great music, but it's like comparing a shadow to the actual physical object. just IMO tho.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I mean it's like MG is just a style to ape, the same way d-beat fetishists try to slavishly recreate Japanese noise punk records or whatever (incidentally there is a whole weird hall of mirrors related to this, Finnish bands trying to sound like Brazilian bands from 1982, Japanese bands trying to recreate old Finnish h/c down to actually singing in Finnish, etc). all the sonic details are mastered but the power of the original is pretty much totally lost in the process.
 

Gombreak

Well-known member
Coming a bit late to this thread, but I quite like the tracks linked on the first page and thought I'd ask if anyone has any other recommendations for roughly similar-sounding stuff that's around at the moment

I'd say the new Beneath thing coming out on Keysound soon isn't a million miles away.
 
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