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The Masthead Anyone who witnessed Keiji Haino’s blistering performance with Apartment House in London earlier this year may have left scratching their heads upon seeing the setlist. With his scourging vocal and guitar-based interjections, was he really playing “Strange Fruit” and “Summertime”? Haino has spent a lifetime grappling with the guts of songs and transmogrifying them into unimagined forms. His versions of songs go beyond covers; the term he prefers is “dissimilation”. As he tells James Hadfield in this issue’s cover story, “Interpreting a song is a question of taking the words, thinking about them for yourself, and whether or not you understand them. Dissimilation is more about embodying those words.” At their best, covers should be an ongoing dialogue between the original and ongoing interpretations. Each song emerges from a set of social and material conditions; so does each interpreter, and cover versions are where layers of meaning clash, amplify, and reveal new truths. At their worst, the opposite happens. David Toop’s new book about Dr John’s Gris-Gris, reviewed by Michaelangelo Matos in Print Run, does not shy away from discussing how not just songs but entire genres of music by Black artists were historically covered, or more accurately, whitewashed for crossover success, with credit denied to the music’s originators. Any of Haino’s dissimilated song versions is purely his own. He speaks out about his awareness of his own Japanese identity and against US imperialism, but is also keen to make clear that he is not into nationalist posturing of any kind. He praises elements of noh theatre: “There’s nothing else like it in the world which gives that thrill, which makes a moment when nothing is happening so charged with tension.” But as Hadfield makes clear, “He’s quick to note that he isn’t practising noh himself, which would make him open to charges of “Japanese essentialism”.” Wolfgang Voigt, the Cologne based Kompakt label founder who produces music under the GAS moniker and other aliases, warms to this theme in this issue’s Invisible Jukebox. As a nod to his homeland, he has long incorporated tongue in cheek polka and schlager rhythms into his productions. “I was not the guy who was ignorantly stealing other people’s music, especially not from the Black community from Chicago,” he tells Derek Walmsley. “So I try to find a German way of techno, much more like march music, in an ironic way.” The same could be said of Seppuku Pistols, the longrunning Japanese group of self styled ‘drop out’ punks who perform versions of songs like Sham 69’s “Rip Off” on traditional instruments, and in the traditional costume, of Japan’s early modern Edo period. As Biba Kopf explains in his feature on the band, it went acoustic in response to the 2011 Japan earthquake and Fukushima disaster. The moshpit that emerged at London’s Cafe Oto during their August show was a crush of ecstatic limbs flailing against a platoon of tako drummers swinging their sticks through the crowd. Elsewhere, Wayne Shorter’s triumphant, songlike spin on, of all things, Arthur B Rubenstein’s title theme for 1983 film WarGames, gets special mention in Andy Hamilton’s review, and Raymond Cummings analyses how Yellow Swans devote an entire album to ripping apart 13th Floor Elevators and Suicide tunes. “The static suddenly becomes a righteous, cleansing roar; perspective shudders,” he writes, “might there be a guitar in there, mimicking the core melody? And then the Suicide single is unmistakably back, spinning marvellously in place, brilliant and eternal.” Emily Bick Distribution Newsstands UK, Europe, USA & Rest of World Seymour Distribution Tel +44 (0)20 7429 4000 UK Vicky.Waterland@ seymour.co.uk Export Kerrie.Callow@ seymour.co.uk Bookshops Worldwide Central Books Tel +44 (0)20 8986 4854 sasha@centralbooks.com Independent record shops UK Shellshock Tel +44 (0)1603 626221 neil@shellshock.co.uk Europe state51 Tel +44 (0)20 7729 4343 distro@state51.com USA Forced Exposure Fax 781 321 0321 AVisser@forcedexposure. com Rest of World Contact The Wire direct Tel +44 (0)20 7422 5022 Fax +44 (0)20 7422 5011 publisher@thewire.co.uk Subscriptions Print Subscription 12 issues UK £65 Europe £90 Rest of World (Air) £100 Digital Subscription 12 months Worldwide £40 See page 104 for details, or go to thewire.co.uk/subscribe The Wire is published 12 times a year by The Wire Magazine Ltd. Printed in the UK by PCP. Typeset in Unica77 (Lineto.com). The Wire was founded in 1982 by Anthony Wood. Between 1984–2000 it was part of Naim Attallah’s Namara Group. In December 2000 it was purchased in a workers’ buy-out by the magazine’s staff. It continues to publish as a 100 per cent independent operation. The views expressed in The Wire are those of the respective contributors and are not necessarily shared by the magazine or its staff. Copyright in the UK and abroad is held by the publisher and by freelance contributors. Issue 488 October 2024 £6.50 ISSN 0952-0686 The Wire T21/T22, West Wing, Somerset House, London WC2R 1LA, UK Tel +44 (0)20 7422 5010 thewire.co.uk @thewiremagazine Subscriptions subs@thewire.co.uk Events listings listings@thewire.co.uk Publisher/Director Tony Herrington tony@thewire.co.uk Editor Emily Bick emily@thewire.co.uk Deputy Editor Joseph Stannard joe@thewire.co.uk Sub Editor Derek Walmsley derek@thewire.co.uk Advertising & Licensing Manager Shane Woolman shane@thewire.co.uk Advertising Sales James Gormley james@thewire.co.uk Online Editor Meg Woof meg@thewire.co.uk Listings Editor Phil England listings@thewire.co.uk Newsletter Editor Kay Grant kay@thewire.co.uk Subscriptions & online shop Misha Farrant subs@thewire.co.uk Art Direction Guillaume Chuard (ard.works) guillaume@thewire.co.uk Design Gareth Lindsay gareth@thewire.co.uk Sean Charlton White sean@thewire.co.uk Photo Editor Sean Charlton White sean@thewire.co.uk Online Development Dorian Fraser Moore dorian@thewire.co.uk Editorial Consultant/Director Chris Bohn chris@thewire.co.uk Subscriptions & Systems Consultant/Director Ben House ben@thewire.co.uk Words Yewande Adeniran, Vanessa Ague, Jennifer Lucy Allan, Kehinde Alonge, Steve Barker, Mike Barnes, Dan Barrow, Robert Barry, Tristan Bath, Clive Bell, Claire Biddles, Abi Bliss, Gabriel Bristow, Britt Brown, Madeleine Byrne, Helena Celle, Philip Clark, Byron Coley, Lara C Cory, Julian Cowley, Raymond Cummings, Laina Dawes, Josh Feola, Phil Freeman, Noel Gardner, Michael A Gonzales, Francis Gooding, Kurt Gottschalk, Louise Gray, George Grella, James Hadfield, Andy Hamilton, Adam Harper, Jim Haynes, Ken Hollings, Miloš Hroch, Jo Hutton, Leah Kardos, Kek-W, Joshua Minsoo Kim, Biba Kopf, Matt Krefting, Steph Kretowicz, Chloe Lula, Dave Mandl, Howard Mandel, Peter Margasak, Marc Masters, Ryan Meehan, Noel Meek, Bill Meyer, Frances Morgan, John Morrison, Joe Muggs, Deborah Nash, Daniel Neofetou, Louis Pattison, Hannah Pezzack, Stephanie Phillips, Antonio Poscic, Emily Pothast, Edwin Pouncey, Chal Ravens, Mosi Reeves, Tony Rettman, Simon Reynolds, Mariam Rezaei, Ilia Rogatchevski, Bruce Russell, Sukhdev Sandhu, Claire Sawers, Dave Segal, Stewart Smith, Rosie Esther Solomon, Daniel Spicer, Richard Stacey, Richard Thomas, Dave Tompkins, Spenser Tomson, David Toop, Rob Turner, Val Wilmer Images this issue Ivory Campbell, Kazuyuki Funaki, Victoria Jung, Lewis Khan The Wire / The Masthead 4
page 5
Get even deeper into music. Take out an annual subscription to The Wire When you subscribe to The Wire for one year* you receive: Monthly issues of the print magazine T h e W i r e 4 8 8 O c t o b e r 2 0 2 4 The Wire 488 October 2024 SEPPUKU PISTOLS Do or die punks SHAMICA RUDDOCK Between sound & vision A user’s guide to JOHN BUTCHER WOLFGANG VOIGT’s Jukebox K e i j i H a i n o / S e p p u k u P i s t o l s / J o h n B u t c h e r / S h a m i c a R u d d o c k / W o l f g a n g V o i g t KEIJI HAINO Back in black 9 770952 068137 10 £6.50 Adventures in Sound and Music Viktar Siamaška Gregory TS Walker Byard Lancaster Ivo Perelman Heroines Of Sound Supernormal Mark Webber on Spacemen 3 Nashazphone Wendy Eisenberg Céline Gillain on Leonard Cohen Dr John 12 months’ free membership of the magazine’s online library containing PDFs of every issue of The Wire ever published Monthly issues of the digital edition of the magazine The Body & Dis Fig Together, the longstanding US sludge duo and the Berlin based producer/vocalist take a community-driven approach to heavy music as they explore realms of emotional overload By Antonio Poscic Photography by Gracie Hammond that teetered between rage and catharsis, pain and relief, while her voice crashed and pierced through walls of devastating electronic effects. “I went to Portland, Oregon, we did a show together and I stayed at Lee’s house. The record was almost done, we were mixing it at that point,” reflects Berlin based DJ, vocalist and producer Felicia Chen, aka Dis Fig, recalling the first time she met The Body in the flesh. It was October 2022, when they were finishing their collaborative release Orchards Of A Futile Heaven. This might have been their first physical encounter, but their mutual appreciation goes further back. In 2018, Chen included The Body and grindcore band Full Of Hell’s “Didn’t The Night End” on her eclectic Fact mix. “I reached out to Felicia after seeing that she mentioned us someplace,” remembers The Body’s Lee Buford. “I was already a fan, so I suggested if she ever wanted to work on anything, we’d be honoured! She operates in the same vibe as us, making emotionally intense and heavy music without the usual tropes of that kind of music.” When we speak over Zoom, Chen, Buford and King are finishing the first week of a lengthy North American tour. They are taking a pit stop on the way to Seattle, after playing Minneapolis the night before. King, a self-professed driving aficionado, is the designated chauffeur for the 12 hour journey ahead. The three of them are in good spirits – “a little sleep-deprived, but not bad,” discloses Chen. They are gathered around an iPad, drinks in hand, in what looks like a bright cafe when we begin discussing the positively dark themes in their music. Led by Buford’s pummelling strides behind the drum kit and Chip King’s screaming voice, guitars and electronics, The Body meld noise, industrial, doom and black metal into a majestic hammer that smashes against loose pop structures, reverberating dubs or dissonant choir chants. Punishing, voluminous and overdriven by emotion, their music weighs heavily on your chest. Yet it cradles fragility and the potential of reflective, cleansing and preternaturally beautiful resolution. “A lot of people tend to be heavy in a very specific way that’s one dimensional,” declares Buford. “Both of us have those elements, but it’s not the totality of what our music is, which to me is more effective because it’s not just one thing all the time. It starts to feel a little forced when it’s like that. No one is angry all the time. I like the elements of getting the point across, but in a more human way than just a contrived way. It feels more genuine to me.” “Maybe for other folks heavy music is the equivalent to them of expressing anger,” Chen says. “But I don’t think that our heaviness is anger. Heaviness can also be beauty, and it can also be fear, and it can also be just a range of emotions. What makes it heavy is emotional heaviness. But there’s a whole range of emotions, not just outward anger.” She continues: “Any inner emotions have to also do with the world. Unless you live in a fucking barn by yourself, don’t have internet and just spend the whole day mowing your lawn with your cats.” While The Body’s story begins around the turn of the millennium in Little Rock, Arkansas, the mutations of the duo’s raw, utterly bleak sludge make them almost impossible to tie down to any particular scene. “Our audiences are pretty mixed demographically, which both of us are pretty proud of,” says Buford. “And I think that from looking at the people we work with, it’s obvious we’re not normal metal tough guys.” “We grew up in the same town, so we’ve known each other longer than that,” Burford continues, “The punk scene in Little Rock in the mid-1990s was pretty good. It was small, everyone knew everyone in that scene. That’s where we met and that’s where a lot of our old friends are still around.” The notoriously orthodox scholars responsible for the Encyclopaedia Metallum website might give The Body their metal stamp of approval, but Buford and King themselves emphasise their original punk roots. “I still think this is a punk band,” insists Buford. “We’ve always been politically punks, very, very far left. A lot of that the metal community didn’t really vibe with, because of how limiting it is in those aspects.” Chen arrives at heavy, discordant music from the opposite direction. Her DJ sets are an unusual mix of techno, rap, ambient and noise topped by heady shifts between styles. As a producer, she belongs to the school of leftfield electronics nurtured by the PTP label: one foot in daring experimentation, the other in urgent, emotional storytelling. Her 2019 debut Purge encapsulated this wide range of sensibilities into pulsating electronic miniatures To ask them what’s the formula for their success feels a bit WEIGHT OF THE WORLD The Wire / The Body & Dis Fig 36 The Body and Dis Fig, Chicago, July 2024: (from left) Chip King, Felicia Chen, Lee Buford 37 The Wire / The Body and Dis Fig The next three volumes of The Wire Tapper on CD and DL, and the next four volumes of Below The Radar as DLs + 12 months’ free access to The Wire’s audio archive where you can download more than 90 albums put together by members of Wire staff The Wire Tapper 65 i n e Li t C r e d © Turn to page 104 for full details. 5 5 * Six months, two years and digital-only subscriptions also available The Wire / Epiphanies The Wire / Subscribe

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The Masthead

Anyone who witnessed Keiji Haino’s blistering performance with Apartment House in London earlier this year may have left scratching their heads upon seeing the setlist. With his scourging vocal and guitar-based interjections, was he really playing “Strange Fruit” and “Summertime”?

Haino has spent a lifetime grappling with the guts of songs and transmogrifying them into unimagined forms. His versions of songs go beyond covers; the term he prefers is “dissimilation”. As he tells James Hadfield in this issue’s cover story, “Interpreting a song is a question of taking the words, thinking about them for yourself, and whether or not you understand them. Dissimilation is more about embodying those words.”

At their best, covers should be an ongoing dialogue between the original and ongoing interpretations. Each song emerges from a set of social and material conditions; so does each interpreter, and cover versions are where layers of meaning clash, amplify, and reveal new truths. At their worst, the opposite happens. David Toop’s new book about Dr John’s Gris-Gris, reviewed by Michaelangelo Matos in Print Run, does not shy away from discussing how not just songs but entire genres of music by Black artists were historically covered, or more accurately, whitewashed for crossover success, with credit denied to the music’s originators.

Any of Haino’s dissimilated song versions is purely his own. He speaks out about his awareness of his own Japanese identity and against US imperialism, but is also keen to make clear that he is not into nationalist posturing of any kind. He praises elements of noh theatre: “There’s nothing else like it in the world which gives that thrill, which makes a moment when nothing is happening so charged with tension.” But as Hadfield makes clear, “He’s quick to note that he isn’t practising noh himself, which would make him open to charges of “Japanese essentialism”.”

Wolfgang Voigt, the Cologne based Kompakt label founder who produces music under the GAS moniker and other aliases, warms to this theme in this issue’s Invisible Jukebox. As a nod to his homeland, he has long incorporated tongue in cheek polka and schlager rhythms into his productions. “I was not the guy who was ignorantly stealing other people’s music, especially not from the Black community from Chicago,” he tells Derek Walmsley. “So I try to find a German way of techno, much more like march music, in an ironic way.”

The same could be said of Seppuku Pistols, the longrunning Japanese group of self styled ‘drop out’ punks who perform versions of songs like Sham 69’s “Rip Off” on traditional instruments, and in the traditional costume, of Japan’s early modern Edo period. As Biba Kopf explains in his feature on the band, it went acoustic in response to the 2011 Japan earthquake and Fukushima disaster. The moshpit that emerged at London’s Cafe Oto during their August show was a crush of ecstatic limbs flailing against a platoon of tako drummers swinging their sticks through the crowd.

Elsewhere, Wayne Shorter’s triumphant, songlike spin on, of all things, Arthur B Rubenstein’s title theme for 1983 film WarGames, gets special mention in Andy Hamilton’s review, and Raymond Cummings analyses how Yellow Swans devote an entire album to ripping apart 13th Floor Elevators and Suicide tunes. “The static suddenly becomes a righteous, cleansing roar; perspective shudders,” he writes, “might there be a guitar in there, mimicking the core melody? And then the Suicide single is unmistakably back, spinning marvellously in place, brilliant and eternal.” Emily Bick

Distribution

Newsstands UK, Europe, USA & Rest of World Seymour Distribution Tel +44 (0)20 7429 4000 UK Vicky.Waterland@ seymour.co.uk Export Kerrie.Callow@ seymour.co.uk

Bookshops Worldwide Central Books Tel +44 (0)20 8986 4854 sasha@centralbooks.com

Independent record shops UK Shellshock Tel +44 (0)1603 626221 neil@shellshock.co.uk

Europe state51 Tel +44 (0)20 7729 4343 distro@state51.com

USA Forced Exposure Fax 781 321 0321 AVisser@forcedexposure. com

Rest of World Contact The Wire direct Tel +44 (0)20 7422 5022 Fax +44 (0)20 7422 5011 publisher@thewire.co.uk

Subscriptions

Print Subscription 12 issues UK £65 Europe £90 Rest of World (Air) £100

Digital Subscription 12 months Worldwide £40 See page 104 for details, or go to thewire.co.uk/subscribe

The Wire is published 12 times a year by The Wire Magazine Ltd. Printed in the UK by PCP. Typeset in Unica77 (Lineto.com). The Wire was founded in 1982 by Anthony Wood. Between 1984–2000 it was part of Naim Attallah’s Namara Group. In December 2000 it was purchased in a workers’ buy-out by the magazine’s staff. It continues to publish as a 100 per cent independent operation. The views expressed in The Wire are those of the respective contributors and are not necessarily shared by the magazine or its staff. Copyright in the UK and abroad is held by the publisher and by freelance contributors.

Issue 488 October 2024 £6.50 ISSN 0952-0686

The Wire T21/T22, West Wing, Somerset House, London WC2R 1LA, UK Tel +44 (0)20 7422 5010 thewire.co.uk @thewiremagazine Subscriptions subs@thewire.co.uk Events listings listings@thewire.co.uk

Publisher/Director Tony Herrington tony@thewire.co.uk

Editor Emily Bick emily@thewire.co.uk Deputy Editor Joseph Stannard joe@thewire.co.uk

Sub Editor Derek Walmsley derek@thewire.co.uk

Advertising & Licensing Manager Shane Woolman shane@thewire.co.uk Advertising Sales James Gormley james@thewire.co.uk

Online Editor Meg Woof meg@thewire.co.uk

Listings Editor Phil England listings@thewire.co.uk

Newsletter Editor Kay Grant kay@thewire.co.uk

Subscriptions & online shop Misha Farrant subs@thewire.co.uk

Art Direction Guillaume Chuard (ard.works) guillaume@thewire.co.uk Design Gareth Lindsay gareth@thewire.co.uk Sean Charlton White sean@thewire.co.uk

Photo Editor Sean Charlton White sean@thewire.co.uk

Online Development Dorian Fraser Moore dorian@thewire.co.uk

Editorial Consultant/Director Chris Bohn chris@thewire.co.uk Subscriptions & Systems Consultant/Director Ben House ben@thewire.co.uk

Words Yewande Adeniran, Vanessa Ague, Jennifer Lucy Allan, Kehinde Alonge, Steve Barker, Mike Barnes, Dan Barrow, Robert Barry, Tristan Bath, Clive Bell, Claire Biddles, Abi Bliss, Gabriel Bristow, Britt Brown, Madeleine Byrne, Helena Celle, Philip Clark, Byron Coley, Lara C Cory, Julian Cowley, Raymond Cummings, Laina Dawes, Josh Feola, Phil Freeman, Noel Gardner, Michael A Gonzales, Francis Gooding, Kurt Gottschalk, Louise Gray, George Grella, James Hadfield, Andy Hamilton, Adam Harper, Jim Haynes, Ken Hollings, Miloš Hroch, Jo Hutton, Leah Kardos, Kek-W, Joshua Minsoo Kim, Biba Kopf, Matt Krefting, Steph Kretowicz, Chloe Lula, Dave Mandl, Howard Mandel, Peter Margasak, Marc Masters, Ryan Meehan, Noel Meek, Bill Meyer, Frances Morgan, John Morrison, Joe Muggs, Deborah Nash, Daniel Neofetou, Louis Pattison, Hannah Pezzack, Stephanie Phillips, Antonio Poscic, Emily Pothast, Edwin Pouncey, Chal Ravens, Mosi Reeves, Tony Rettman, Simon Reynolds, Mariam Rezaei, Ilia Rogatchevski, Bruce Russell, Sukhdev Sandhu, Claire Sawers, Dave Segal, Stewart Smith, Rosie Esther Solomon, Daniel Spicer, Richard Stacey, Richard Thomas, Dave Tompkins, Spenser Tomson, David Toop, Rob Turner, Val Wilmer

Images this issue Ivory Campbell, Kazuyuki Funaki, Victoria Jung, Lewis Khan

The Wire / The Masthead

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