05: ENOCH LIGHT AND THE LIGHT BRIGADE
SPACED OUT
(PROJECT3, 1973)
FACT: Is it possible to treat an album of synth-augmented lounge covers as anything other than kitsch? Is kitsch a bad thing?
DD: “Kitsch is a bad thing if your name is Clement Greenberg. I love the arrangements of Enoch Light as music, full stop – he’s just a brilliant collage artist who happens to have worked with human beings and notes instead of scissors and glue. We’re sufficiently historically distant from the time when there was some kind of viable distinction between ‘rock authenticity’ and ‘pop trash’ that the idea that Beatles and Bacharach covers somehow lose their vitality by being set for glockenspiel, Moog, strings, 30 piece choir etc seems absurd to me.”
“Radical joy might be a more appropriate response to the desperateness of our contemporary situation…”
There’s obviously a real joy about this record; it’s music that delights in itself. Is that a quality you feel is lacking in contemporary music, electronic or otherwise?
DD: “I think you have to listen for it- it’s there in music that formally has nothing in common with this record – for me, mostly in noise music. But it’s true that joy seems absent these days – I think there’s something reactionary about the way that underground aesthetics have become so credulous about ‘melancholy’ necessarily being the only critical stance that’s left, the only ‘deep’ emotion. Radical joy might be a more appropriate response to the desperateness of our contemporary situation, in its insistence upon something absolutely absent. But that’s hard to sustain when you’re looking at pictures of Haiti right now.”
What’s your attitude to reinterpretations and cover versions in general? Could you ever imagine really throwing yourself into a Matmos covers project of any kind?
DD: “Sure, there’s music we’ve covered live that I would love to record: songs and compositions by Bo Diddley, Robert Ashley, Terry Riley and Kraftwerk come to mind. We’ve released covers of songs by Coil and Gladys Knight & the Pips and John Philip Sousa and I’ve been bugging Martin to cover a song by Holger Hiller. It’s a slippery slope though – once you start, you can’t stop.”
Kiran Sande
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aidee
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Matthew McKinnon