Larry Levan vs James Alaska

I’m telling you now… you ain’t never heard anything like THIS before…

James Alaska is one of the most marvelous people I’ve ever met. He’s also one of the most persistent musical train spotters I have ever known. In metaphorical terms, his beard of knowledge has grown to such gargantuan proportions that sometimes in bad weather, light aircraft attempt to set down on it. His love of disco knows no bounds and for this, I must salute him. Having played storming sets as a resident at Magnet in the late nineties he then went on to deliver repeated nights of musical passion as one half of the Love Thy Neighbour duo James Shakti & Stuart Principal, between 2001 and 2006 in various salubrious venues in London.

James has now arrived in another age of musical knowledge, having recently completed an MA in Sonic Art, he’s now creating music compositions as part of experimental electronicists Vlk and The Alaska None. The beard situation has worsened. Now, on top of the impromptu run-downs of Chic catalogue numbers and release dates, we are blessed with further knowledge about the source of sound itself. Its bloody mind boggling – so I thought I’d share… brace yourselves.

What we have here is a 10 minute edit of MFSB’s Love is The Message by James (the full piece is a whole 19 minutes long!) called Paradise Dust. If you’re expecting disco, please readjust your head, but consider first that this was generated from disco – from the very essence of our dear godfather of groove Larry Levan:

And here’s what James has to say about his composition – yes, it’s an essay, but if you’re into vinyl, disco, Levan and a bit of musical philosophy, then you should probably trim your beard, grab yourself a cup of tea and settle down to a story. A story about how James found Larry, and Larry found James…

Inspired by the spirit of Gavin Bryars’ ‘The Sinking of The Titanic’ (1969), the composition ‘Paradise Dust’ explores issues surrounding the vinyl record as a sonic medium, cultural artefact and physical object, in relation to the themes of music and memory, decay, and the passage of time.

The piece is part homage to Larry Levan, widely cited as the most influential DJ of all time, who died age 38 in 1992. The piece utilises a vinyl copy of ‘Love is The Message’ by MFSB, which I sampled only after allowing it to be covered with a thick coating of dust; the final, locked groove left playing until the stylus lost touch with the vinyl. I also utilise field recordings made at 84 King Street, SoHo, New York; a site of central importance for the city’s underground dance music scene in the late 1970s and 80s, where the Paradise Garage once stood. Here Levan inspired “an unparalleled reverence” in his devotees – the club’s 15,000 or so members, dancers and fellow DJs.

Larry Levan began DJing in 1971 at the age of 16, but it was at the Paradise Garage from 1977 to 1987 that he had a profound impact of the development of DJing as an art form. Levan lived and worked at the Paradise Garage, literally sleeping in his DJ booth. He was obsessed with perfecting every tiny detail of the environment, spending days fine-tuning the custom made sound system or adjusting and redesigning the lighting rigs.

According to fellow DJ and producer Francois Kevorkian, “outside, insurance men were knocking their knees to Abba and the Bee Gees, dreaming of the coke and celebrity fuelled nonsense of Studio 54. Inside the Garage the original disco family were continuing and amplifying their tribal rituals. At the centre was Levan himself, a DJ who enjoyed such a passionate relationship with the people on his dance-floor that they worshipped him more or less as a god….and for everyone there, it really was the temple, it was sacred ground.”

The Paradise Garage played host to life changing experiences for thousands of people and Levan has become a legend due to his DJing, production and remixing skills. For those of his devotees who remain, they may have fragmented memories, but physical objects, once charged with significance and meaning from that era, also remain somewhere. These are a cultural residue, no longer significant as they once were, in the same way that 84 King Street, no longer the Paradise Garage, remains.

Vinyl records offer us a curious paradox – the more they are heard, the more they decay. Valued, treasured and played, vinyl is a victim of its own form. As David Toop notes in ‘Haunted Weather’ “Record (player) design encapsulates the idea of self destruction in perpetuity. The needle ploughs through the spiralled groove, wearing away at both itself and the message it transmits.”

Records, as sound artist Christian Marclay has pointed out, will almost always have once been, “bought and sold, loved and protected, played and collected.” Yet many years before vinyl began to disappear as the DJ’s primary tool, domestic record collections, victims of technological advancement, began to be discarded, given away, donated to charity shops and relegated to attics and storage spaces. Although occasionally bought up by a few remaining vinyl enthusiasts, the record’s fate more often than not is to fade in significance, at some point the once prized object invariably finds itself on a slow, downward trajectory.

Now the same is true of DJ’s vinyl collections. Replaced by CDs and sophisticated DJing software, attics and charity shops house once treasured records which are destined to fade into obscurity. Yet, rarely is vinyl afforded any kind of definitive final passing. Often these objects are not dumped or destroyed, perhaps due in part to their status as a once valuable object, but nor are they ever esteemed or played again in the way they once were. Fluxus artist Milan Knizak scored, marked and broke records during musical performances in the 1960s, shocking and dismaying his audiences at a time when vinyl was sacred. One can’t help feeling that in our present age, most records sitting in attics, car boot sales, or in one of a handful of the few surviving second hand record shops, would jump at the chance for such a merciful release from their un-dead state. Instead, denied an end, most of them sit unwanted, unheard and ignored, ‘gathering dust’, in a literal or metaphorical sense.

This fading, forgetting and slow decay of vinyl, imbues the object with a certain poignancy. As Josh Davis (DJ Shadow) explained while being interviewed in a warehouse full of records for the ultimate DJ movie ‘Scratch’, “just being in here is a humbling experience to me, because you’re looking through all these records and it’s sort of like a big pile of broken dreams.”

Cultural theorist Theodore Adorno spoke of records as “freezing, this life into itself”, fixing a musical moment “that otherwise would flee”. Toop goes further describing records thus; “a spiral scratch, a gleaming hole into which memories are poured, only to emerge again as ghost voices, life preserved beyond death. Frozen in time within the grooves, a voice, an instrument, becomes the living dead.” It is this sense of suspension or of being frozen in limbo which I’m recreating in this composition.

I significantly chose “Love is the Message” as my source material. Described by Bill Brewster as “the lodestar of New York Disco”, ‘Love is the Message’ was one of Levan’s signature songs, integral to his DJ sets. He produced and remixed several versions of the track for the band MFSB. In a curious echo of Toop and Adorno’s comments on vinyl as a medium which ‘freezes’ and suspends, Levan’s fellow producer Tom Moulton described the track thus; “when I got to certain parts of it, it was like being pushed off a cliff and not falling. Suspended. Because that’s what the song does to you”. Levan is reported to have listened endlessly to the track, telling Moulton that he heard ‘ghost voices’ in the grooves of the record.

Gavin Bryars’ 1969 piece “The Sinking of The Titanic” centres around similar themes, the freezing in time of a musical moment. Bryars’ piece draws out and extends the episcopal hymn “Autumn” which was played by the Ships’ band as the Titanic sank beneath the waves of the Atlantic. Bryars notes the efficiency of water as an acoustic medium, and therefore invites the listener to imagine “The prolongation of the music into eternity”. In the sleeve notes for a 2006 performance of the piece, Bryars also notes the first use of Marconi’s wireless telegraphy in the Titanic’s rescue operation, reporting that one of the rescue ships, the Birma, heard radio signals originating from the titanic, 1 hour and 28 minutes after the ship had finally sunk. Furthermore, Bryars cites Marconi’s belief that “sounds, once generated never die, they simply become fainter and fainter until we can no longer perceive them. Marconi’s hope was to develop sufficiently sensitive equipment… to pick up and hear these past, feint sounds”. I’m employing a similar methodology, a sonic ‘stretching out’ of one of the final records to be played at the Paradise Garage, as if in to some distant musical horizon.

The composition share’s a central parallel with Man Ray’s Elevage de Poussière (Dust Breeding – 1920). By photographing dust which had been purposely gathered on Duchamp’s work in progress ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even’, Man Ray incorporated and appropriated the work of another artist he admired, fashioning a new creation, founded on the obfuscation of another.

 

By exposing to the air the unsheathed copy of “Love is the message” which was the sound source for this piece, allowing it to gather a thick layer of dust, I’m highlighting my chosen compositional themes through an exaggerated symbolic gesture. Fusing Vinyl’s physicality and status as an object with broader, conceptual issues, this makes for thought provoking listening.

One could say that the layer of dust accumulated on this particular vinyl record is emblematic of the inevitable falling into obsolescence of vinyl as a medium, and of the accompanying slow obscuration of all of the memories embedded within the world’s discarded record collections. By encouraging the dust gathering process, and by featuring and employing it as a compositional device, I attempt to draw attention to the passage of time, making it, and the displacement and fading of those memories by the present, audible.

MFSB? OMFG.

Rich