Inventing Sounds Way Ahead of Historical Schedule

[blissblogger]

Spinning off of phil.'s Reggae Roots in Techno? thread, and hopefully helping to keep it uncluttered with irrelevancies, how about a free-for-all dumpthread for examples of freakily premature and precocious occurrences that uncannily preview much later developments in music.... especially when the avant-eruption occurs within an otherwise rather staid or uncool-on-its-face area of music like EZ Listening / M.O.R., or country?

There's this blogger who had this much-used stand-by phrase - his way of making a big claim - and it involved saying of an artist or piece of music, that it "invents" a later artist / song / genre. Can't think of a great example but these proclamations would go along the lines of "on "The Land of Make Believe', Bucks Fizz invent Aphex Twin".

This works especially well when it's an artist or area of music that is overlooked and disregarded by critics and the hipsterati. It doesn't work quite so well when e.g. you point to the track Delia Derbyshire did in the 1960s that sounds a bit like drum & bass, because she's got loads of cred as an innovator and is the business of pushing the envelope - there's an element of "why wouldn't she?".

Still, those do count. For instance, here in 1963, Sun Ra "invents" dub.

 

[WashYourHands]

Can - Pnoom, proto d&b


Eno’s mix goes too far with the squawking horn but brightens up clarity

 

[thirdform]

Hermeto Pascoal inventing power noise and devil grime in 1979.

 

[blissblogger]

The "invents jungle" / "invents drum & bass" could be a thread in itself

This is a classic instance - from about 1.38 in - especially because it's not just the sped-up breaks, it's the effects on them that gives them that scrunchy metallic-fatigued quality just like darkside


In fact I think This Heat might have been using the exact same pitch-shifting gizmo as Goldie on "Terminator" - the Eventide Harmoniser.

As also used by Bowie on Low

Even what Tony Visconti said of the device when pitching it to Bowie + crew sounds "Terminator"-prophetic: "“It fucks with the fabric of time!”

 

[WashYourHands]

Kevin Ayers - Irreversible Neural Damage, doom Balearic (110 bpm 4x4, ish)

 

[IdleRich]

I do find this kind of thing fascinating. Especially cos I'm really in two minds about what BB said regarding how a tune in 1842 that sounded exactly like dubstep can't really be said to have invented it or even had any effect on it if no-one heard it. Certainly even if it invented the sound it didn't create a (in fact THE) scene... cos this is basically right of course... and yet, I dunno, it's fascinating in itself and in a way even it didn't lead on to anything or invent the scene it can sort of claim to be the first dubstep tune, albeit a random, unique, stand alone one.

So here is your first ever coffee table drum and bass tune

 

[IdleRich]

And I suppose one of these is the first ever DJ Shadow style hip/trip-hop tune (sure I've mentioned these before for one reason or another)





And here is your first ever cover of a DJ Shadow style hip/trip-hop tune




Speaking of Jimmie Haskell, this electronic bassline has gotta be the first example of something surely?




And this is... I dunno, is it trip-hop again? I dunno, I really like it.




He was an interesting guy Jimmie Haskell, I think he was Swedish (could be wrong) - the album with the cover of Prelude on it is a peculiar concept album about some kind of dystopian future US - it comes with a pull-out map of the US as he imagines it in the album.

 

[borzoi]

not sure what this is anticipating per se (motorik sorta, a little arthur russell maybe?) but i've always dug that canned heat has two singers and one is really boring boomer 60s white blues and one feels much weirder, more knowing, unique. like you'd think you'd have to get the boomer stuff out of your system before you could make something more interesting out of it. but they coexist.


also mississippi put out the compilation of electric gospel that sounds like live velvet underground and the like

 

[version]

UK Funky in '91.

 

[IdleRich]

I'm not sure if it's exactly a style of music as such but I feel that Pram, Broadcast and Stereolab along with maybe some of the Ghost Box stuff have a sound that almost constitutes a sort of micro-genre, and if that is indeed the case, then surely the first song in that mini-genre was this one (unless it was something by 50ft Hose perhaps)



I suppose that including that in this thread is a bite of a stretch, probably what I'm really doing is saying - in an unnecessarily complicated way - that those three bands were strongly influenced by USA.

In the same way, some have said that Portisheaed pioneered a particular style of trip-hop, and if that the case, then Portishead-style-trip-hop was in fact invented by teenage Danish pervs The Lollipops - famed for stripping off before they arrived on stage, hence the lyrics "naked when you come, naked when you go" (although I'm not sure if they put them back on in-between the entrance and exit, the song isn't clear on that)

 

[Benny Bunter]

Sino grime 20 years before Wiley, jammer et al. Even sounds about the right tempo too. Somebody should whack a dizzee rascal acapella on top of it

 

[thirdform]

The "invents jungle" / "invents drum & bass" could be a thread in itself

This is a classic instance - from about 1.38 in - especially because it's not just the sped-up breaks, it's the effects on them that gives them that scrunchy metallic-fatigued quality just like darkside


In fact I think This Heat might have been using the exact same pitch-shifting gizmo as Goldie on "Terminator" - the Eventide Harmoniser.

As also used by Bowie on Low

Even what Tony Visconti said of the device when pitching it to Bowie + crew sounds "Terminator"-prophetic: "“It fucks with the fabric of time!”

tbf this from 1972 sounds more like the streamlined 94-95 jungle.

 

[blissblogger]

I'm not sure if it's exactly a style of music as such but I feel that Pram, Broadcast and Stereolab along with maybe some of the Ghost Box stuff have a sound that almost constitutes a sort of micro-genre, and if that is indeed the case, then surely the first song in that mini-genre was this one (unless it was something by 50ft Hose perhaps)

This is a bit different I think - United States of America seem ahead of their time, but that's because some groups quite a long way into the future decided to be behind of their time by going back and revisiting .... In the case of Broadcast, their whole sound is pretty much based on a few United States of America songs, White Noise's An Electric Storm, and that one song "Old Man Willow" by Elephant's Memory (as heard in the party scene in Midnight Cowboy, the one modelled on Plastic Inevitable). It is sort of an optical illusion that makes USA seem prophetic (although they were certainly genuinely out there and doing things nobody had done then).

Harold Bloom in the Anxiety of Influence talks about this weird syndrome where a strongly influenced poet or artist can in a strange victory over their influencer comes to seem as if they preceded the very artist they are inspired by and in fact influenced them. The precursor poet starts to seem derivative of the deriver. But that doesn't really happen with yer Broadcast and Stereolab types, in part because they are so keen to talk about the esoteric sources they have discovered. So you never get the sense that Stereolab invented Neu! - although they certainly do some brilliant things with that sound.

Talking of which there was a Canned Heat track up above but it doesn't display for me - I'm assuming it's "On the Road Again"? There is something motorik about it (although "On the Road" is only few years earlier than the Neu! sound's emergence, so it's not such an amazing feat of prophecy). But picking up the thread, the first time I interviewed Stereolab round their gaff, Tim played "On the Road" and said he loved the mantric monotony and the continuous drone going through it, and was trying to develop a 'Lab-ish take on it, a sort of 'ambient boogie'. And I think there is actually a later 'Lab track that has a Canned Heat vibe to it but I can't remember which.

It is an amazing song, that high, thin, lonesome vocal - I have wondered if there's anything else as good in the Canned Heat discog, never found anything, but not really delved that deep.

The Broadcast et al thing with United States of America relates to this idea of counterfactual pop, which I looked at in this recent piece on hauntology, steampunk and alternative history http://retromaniabysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2022/11/sideways-through-time-steampunk.html - it's like they tried to imagine a world in which synthedelia became the dominant form of rock music and the guitar got sidelined. Add N To (X) tried something similar but more bombastic.

These sorts of groups - retro-curator types - tend to be very much in the business of searching out things from the past that were Inventions Ahead of Historical Schedule. There's an investment (in the portfolio sense as well as emotionally-aesthetically) in things that were missed at their time, but can be reclaimed and sort of reverse-heralded. Time starts to go in a peculiar loop.

 

[IdleRich]

not sure what this is anticipating per se (motorik sorta, a little arthur russell maybe?)

It does have some kind of hint of motorik going on in there - good spot. Did you see we have a thread for motorik tunes? If you got any more ideas like this please get involved.

 

[IdleRich]

This is a bit different I think - United States of America seem ahead of their time, but that's because some groups quite a long way into the future decided to be behind of their time by going back and revisiting .... In the case of Broadcast, their whole sound is pretty much based on a few United States of America songs, White Noise's An Electric Storm, and that one song "Old Man Willow" by Elephant's Memory (as heard in the party scene in Midnight Cowboy, the one modelled on Plastic Inevitable). It is sort of an optical illusion that makes USA seem prophetic (although they were certainly genuinely out there and doing things nobody had done then).

Yeah like I said it's tenuous. I can't claim it's a scene, it's just a few songs that sound similar.
Back into the future... something like hauntology I guess.

 

[borzoi]

Talking of which there was a Canned Heat track up above but it doesn't display for me - I'm assuming it's "On the Road Again"? There is something motorik about it (although "On the Road" is only few years earlier than the Neu! sound's emergence, so it's not such an amazing feat of prophecy). But picking up the thread, the first time I interviewed Stereolab round their gaff, Tim played "On the Road" and said he loved the mantric monotony and the continuous drone going through it, and was trying to develop a 'Lab-ish take on it, a sort of 'ambient boogie'. And I think there is actually a later 'Lab track that has a Canned Heat vibe to it but I can't remember which.

It's "Poor Moon"! Which along with Time Was is almost as good as On The Road Again.

 

[wild greens]

Pulse X styles from 89. Sort of

 

[DLaurent]

The electronic pulse thing from Piero Piccioni's score to the The Mattei Affair from 1972 sounds like Techno.

 

[bassbeyondreason]

I thought I'd already done a thread like this but can't find it.
1984 footwork:

 

[bassbeyondreason]

Oh here it is:

Out-of-Place Artifacts

Following on from This Heat's "24 Track Loop" in the post-punk thread, a thread of eerily prescient old records, the digger equivalent of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-place_artifact E.g. this mad proto-footwork from 1984:

dissensus.com