Year of the Dugg: Steve’s 2015
What a shitty year. Personally and globally, it’s hard to see how much worse 2015 could have gotten. My own year was riven asunder by brain surgery; the world’s by wave after wave of terrorist atrocity, economic hardship, deadly weather and swathes of people so terrified to remain in their homeland they preferred to risk death in the perilous waters of the Mediterranean than spend another second there. Unfortunately, Professor Stephen Hawking’s recent prediction that the termination of the human race will be in some way self-inflicted seems ever more likely to come to fruition; 2016 has started in much the same way as its predecessor ended. Perhaps it’s a combination of all these things that led me to find solace in a children’s TV show last year — a kind of subconscious regression, maybe, towards the tender comforts of the womb. Or perhaps it’s just the fact that CBeebies’ Hey Duggee was so damned marvellous as to help wipe all these awful thoughts from watchers’ minds for 5 all-too-brief minutes every weekday morning. More Duggee later but this is, first and foremost, a music site, so…
Hit it, Norrie!
Thanks.
I had precious little opportunity to survey the musical landscape in a critical sense last year, thanks mainly to the medical lay-off. My most listened to albums, therefore, tended to be those already heaped with praise elsewhere: Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (Top Dawg Entertainment/Aftermath Entertainment), saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s The Epic (Brainfeeder), and DJ Paypal’s Sold Out (Brainfeeder). Easy to acquire records I didn’t have to think about too much at the time because everyone else had done the thinking for me. They still stand up, of course, now that I can listen more deeply (albeit in mono — I lost the hearing on my left side completely) and all three would make it onto my Top 10 for the year at least, with the possible exception of The Epic which faded a little, for me, with repeat listens eroding its initial sense of radical grandeur to the point where I couldn’t shift the nagging idea of it being a modern-day coffee table prop in the manner of those old Jason Swinscoe records with the Cinematic Orchestra — betrayed by its own sheen and destined for use as break-up scene backing music. It’s a minor pang; Washington, as his production work on Butterfly proves, is a first-rate composer requiring the kind of grittiness Lamar brought to his arrangements, where on The Epic smooth surfaces abound, just keeping it from being the transcendental experience its intergalactic cover art suggested it should be.
Otherwise, Ghostface Killah’s second Twelve Reasons… collaboration with Adrian Younge (Linear Labs) was as lucidly realised and groovy as the first, if a little one-paced, and “Get the Money,” which featured a scene-stealing verse by Vince Staples (who ran Kendrick Lamar pretty close as rapper of the year with Summertime ’06), ended up being one of my most played tracks. I also enjoyed Helen’s shoegaze throwback The Original Faces (Kranky) but only insofar as I’m a big fan of both Grouper and Eternal Tapestry so felt duty bound (without prior knowledge of constituent members’ work, it mightn’t have been easy to understand what the excitement was for), and I was pleased to see my favourite Flaming Lips album Clouds Taste Metallic receive the deluxe treatment in the shape of Heady Nuggs (Warner Bros.), which collated what I consider to be some of the Oklahoma freak-rock veterans’ most crucial material and provided a timely reminder that they were once a genuinely important band and not a rich man’s mid-life crisis desperately masquerading as one. The live version of The Abandoned Hospital Ship – at once fragile and thunderous – is all you should need to help you fall back in love with the band.
Here are five more releases that flew mysteriously under most people’s radar in 2015 but which I consider worthy of your attention.
•••
Ho99o9 – Dead Bodies in the Lake (Self-Released)
I’m actually genuinely intimidated by Ho99o9 (pronounced “Horror”), the punk-rap duo made up of TheOGM and Eaddy — two New Jersey ne’er-do-wells whose music calls to mind Big Black just as often as it does Gravediggaz’s most outrageously grimy moments. Think that skit from 36 Chambers where Method Man and Raekwon gleefully describe increasingly violent methods of torture and run it through, say, “Colombian Necktie” — now you’ve got a basic idea of how Ho99o9 operate. Intentionally horrific in both delivery and demeanour, the pair have been releasing music for free online for a couple of years bout only really came to general attention in 2015, first with The Horrors of 1999 and then an unremittingly vicious 25-minute skull-fuck titled Dead Bodies in the Lake. The lyrics — all bloody murder and rotting junkies — are puked up and spat out over messy throwback thrash riffs to fearful effect. Still, I may have played this more times than anything else over the past couple of months.
•••
El Mahdy Jr. – Ghost Tapes (Discrepant)
El Mahdy Jr. (real name El-Mahdi Rezoug) might be the closest thing we have to a Muslimgauze in the modern era and he has a far more relatable reason for wanting to reflect civil unrest in his music. He was born in the Algerian region of Sidi Bel Abbès in the 1990s while the country was being decimated by a civil war, and was again unfortunate to find himself entangled in the violent protests that broke out across Istanbul during 2013; his tracks have titles like “Zalim Delay” and “Crack-Addicted Bellydancer,” and his début album (partly written during a battle with malaria) is called The Spirit of Fucked-Up Places — all worthy and suggestive of Bryn Jones at his most politically embittered. Ghost Tapes lays jagged ever-changing radio transmissions, disembodied vocals and the sounds of bustling city squares over clanking Middle Eastern rhythms to create a kind of drive-by effect — a window upon the many personal worlds brought together by the common fact of conflict yet determined (as Rezoug reflects in this interview with the Quietus) “to keep on living.”
•••
Bastien Keb – Dinking in the Shadows of Zizou (One-Handed Music)
Much like his label-mate Mo Kolours, UK one-man band Bastien Keb sculpts skulking modern funk which blurs the lines between what’s played live and what’s been digitally wrought. A guitarist by trade, the Leamington Spa native and Zinedine Zidane admirer took up the trumpet, drums, clarinet and flute for this, his heady début release, which melts soul, psychedelia, hip-hop, jazz and ambient into a smooth late-night groove that evokes Flying Lotus as often as it does classic Stax and Bernard Herrmann.
•••
Emmanuel Mieville – Ethers (Baskaru)
Emmanuel Mieville is, for my money, one of the best sound sculptors currently working, and yet his music seems to be consistently overlooked. Since Baskaru released the fantastic Four Wanderings in Tropical Lands in 2011, I’ve made it a personal mission to try and obtain everything I can by the Parisian — I hold no other artist working in this realm in quite such high esteem, with the possible exception of the far more prolific (and consequently far more erratic) Francisco López. Mieville takes his time and it shows; I have yet to hear a piece of his work I have found less than exquisite, and Ethers is no exception to the rule. Initially the record sounds like Mieville’s most synthetic work to date: the air is filled with glassy, high-pitched electronic drones and recognisable sound sources are hard to come by. But given time subtle hints of life begin to emerge — the whining of a power drill, the beat of stiletto heels pacing across a polished floor, the cold spatter of rain on already sodden ground. Mieville’s stated aim has been to “lower drone music from the skies,” and while Ethers goes about achieving that goal somewhat literally, it remains a powerfully engrossing addition to his gradually expanding catalogue.
•••
Thomas Köner – The Modernist Manifesto (Von Archives)
Köner’s first work for visual accompaniment since Nuuk in 2005, The Futurist Manifesto was created to commemorate Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s infamous missive of the same title from 1909. The 40-minute piece groans by at a barely discernible and excruciatingly tense 4 beats per minute — vocalist Ivana Neimarevic eerily channels the Italian poet from a dusty-lunged afterlife and Carl Faia claws at his prepared piano with cadaverous distaste. The atmosphere stirred up as a result is not too far removed from Sunn O))) at their gloomiest. This might well go down as Thomas Köner’s masterpiece; it’s certainly the most striking music he’s made since the classic Nunatak/Teimo/Permafrost trilogy and precisely as hellish as Marinetti’s vision suggested our current world could turn out to be.
•••
Various Artists – Uchronia: Field Recordings from Alternate Realities (Sahel Sounds)
Collated by the musicologist Christopher Kirkley as a soundtrack to photographer Maciek Pozoga’s Unequivocal Interpretation of Reality exhibition in Paris, this 21-track selection of short songs and field recordings imagines an alternate version of history based around the Malian belief that Emperor Abubakari II discovered America in the early 1300s, almost 3 centuries before Christopher Columbus. Recorded in Bamako, Mali’s capital city, Uchronia brings together musicians, sound designers, rappers, street singers — even taxi drivers — to generate a dreamlike atmosphere where, as Kirkley put it in an interview with Red Bull Studios the distinction between reality and fiction becomes smudged.
•••
The two TV shows I was looking forward to most last year were both major let-downs. Fortitude, a glossy attempt to cash-in on the recent trend for Scandinavian crime drama (even going so far as to include Forbrydelsen’s Sofie Gråbøl among its impressive ensemble cast), couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be Twin Peaks, Fargo or The X-Files and ended up in a sleety mush that made practically no sense whatsoever. And the second season of True Detective? Well, that entire undertaking made practically no sense whatsoever.
So it was that Hey Duggee, a cartoon about a big brown dog and his menagerie of students aimed at an audience of 2 to 5 year-olds, became the only show across the 1000-odd channels we seem to have amassed that I ever took time out of my day to watch. I tuned in religiously every morning during its 52 episode run and even — to my wife’s mirth — found myself watching repeats online late into the night. Fortunately my 2-year old daughter adores it too, meaning we were allowed to record the show and enjoy it together at our leisure. Which we do. Repeatedly. Every day.
As the series progressed it became more and more subversive, as though its creators at the Oscar-nominated Studio AKA were trying to one-up each other by creeping as many adult-friendly references in as possible. These range from scatological sight-gags to vintage video game allusions and characters whose names and traits are so esoteric as to be way above the heads of the majority of the show’s intended audience: Whoooooo The Shamanistic Owl, for example, atop his crumbling totem pole; and Tino The Artistic Mouse whose attitude suffers badly for his daubing. There are crabs in civil partnerships, Cockney pandas and a redneck hyena in touch with UFOs (“Mama, I’m coming home!”). The fact that Happy, a young crocodile, must be adopted because his briefly-glimpsed parents are elephants has been picked over by adult fans almost from the very start. Hey Duggee may appear simplistic to the uninitiated but its layers are manifold.
Every single episode is based around the Squirrel Club (Happy the aforementioned crocodile, Norrie the mouse, Roly the hippo, Betty the octopus and Tag the rhino) working towards a badge — essentially, the Squirrel Club is the Venture Scouts for overachieving infant animals. Obviously I know all the instalments off by heart now and I rarely miss a chance to wax poetic about it to everyone I meet, whether they have young children or not. I’ll take this platform to expound its many delights to you, dear readers, and hope you might at least take a peek at the five must-see episodes I’ve picked out as a kind of Hey Duggee “starter pack.”
The first episode to really make me take notice after a period of semi-watching with my daughter under the mistaken impression it was “just another kids’ show.” Naughty Monkey draws the Squirrels into a Super Mario Bros.-inspired chase when he steals their fruit collection and throws it all down a hill. Tin Sounds’ spot-on chiptune soundtrack plays out as the clan dodge his missiles and everything ends happily with a shared round of jammy toast. In retrospect, this marks the point when Hey Duggee goes from just incredible to certified genius.
Episode 13: The Omelette Badge
An early classic in which the Squirrels try to make an omelette but the chickens are too busy watching TV and munching junk food to lay the requisite eggs. The Italian soap opera favoured by the birds is a little stroke of genius in itself, as is POK! Magazine — their trashy literature of choice. Henny the flamboyant ostrich is tasked with getting the chickens in shape: cue muscle vests, fluorescent leg-warmers and one of Tin Sounds’ greatest hits in the Cyndi Lauper-referencing workout tune that continues over the end credits — something I always love, for some reason.
Episode 15: The Paddling Pool Badge
A zoo full of colourful creatures — snakes, zebras, giraffes, you name them — join the Squirrels for a pool party, overlooked by Duggee on lifeguard duty. Everyone is required to abide by the rules, as set out by the infamous 1980s “Kindly Refrain from…” poster well-known to any Brit growing up at that time. Happy briefly mistakes some floating cake crumbs for something less tasty in one of the series’ best sight gags and a pair of love birds get caught out by the “No Petting” regulation much to narrator Alexander Armstrong‘s embarrassment. Tin Sounds contributes a kicking boom-bap beat track.
Episode 41: The Puppet Show Badge
An experimental episode like those times The X-Files went black and white, The Puppet Show Badge plays out for the most part as an actual live-action puppet show. Betty the octopus portrays herself using a purple balloon on a stick and one of the chickens falls off its seat when the character of King Tiger is introduced. Armstrong’s line about “the power and poetry of the theatre” has rightly gone down in Hey Duggee folklore.
Episode 44: The Be Careful Badge
Naughty Monkey falls down a hole after slipping on his own discarded banana skin so the Squirrels set out to save him, learning how to “be careful!” along the way. A prickly bush and a bull with serious anger issues stand in their way before Ethel the Elephant uses her shape-shifting trunk to help Naughty Monkey out. Not for the first time, the animators switch perspectives so most of the action is viewed from above. The bull’s manic return just before the end credits roll provides one of the series’ most amusingly random punch-lines.
