Coffee-Table Notes

Sam Knee was thinking about his two young daughters when he decided to put together the book that became Untypical Girls. Subtitled Styles and Sounds of the Transatlantic Indie Revolution, Knee’s compendium of images combines coffee-table gloss and a DIY sensibility to create a vital document charting the irresistible rise of female-centred bands from punk to riot grrrl. Inbetween, umpteen shades of post-punk, indie, no wave, hardcore, shoegaze and grunge show off an emancipated underground of women seizing the means of production. As they do so, they remain charity-shop groovy enough to set a street-smart example for future generations.   “My daughters are too young yet to be into music,” says Knee. “One’s nine, and the other’s still a toddler, but I wanted something for them to have when they’re a little bit older that says they don’t have to be synthetic, but that they can dress like this if they want to. They’re not ready for that yet, but I thought it would be nice to ha...

When Bill Drummond started a choir called The 17, the audience became its members, performing Drummond’s text-based scores, then having the result played back to them once before being deleted forever. Fuck documentation, Nick Hornby and 80s revivals, Drummond seems to suggest in this restless meditation on a life-long love affair. Music has reached a dead end, and should be kept as pure as that Beatles record that so switched him on as a little boy. This latest volume of Drummond’s musings moves from The 17 to No Music Day and beyond. Impassioned, persuasive, egocentric, vulnerable and contrary, Drummond seems scared to stand still lest nostalgia or age get the better of him. Forget that he founded Zoo records, managed Echo and the Bunnymen, took The KLF to number 1 and burnt a million quid. Drummond is on a mission, desperately seeking a brand new sound to save him. Amen to that. The List, July 2008 ends

David Toop has been navigating his way through the cries, whispers, creaks, cracks and other noises off and good vibrations from the natural world ever since his split album with instrument inventor Max Eastley, ‘New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments,’ was released on Brian Eno’s Obscure label in 1975. Eastley’s side of the original vinyl edition found wind and water vibrating the air via the chimes and rustles of customised kinetic contraptions such as the Metallophone and the Elastic Aerophone. Toop’s flipside was more frippish in tone, describing the calculated undulations of the three tracks on the sleeve as ‘dance music.’ The title of the opening ‘Do The Bathosphere’ conspired with the suggestion, despite only featuring Toop’s keening voice incanting his playful lyrics like a post-modern mantra aided and abetted by The Cetaceans, a three-man choir that included Eno. The centerpiece of Toop’s contribution, ‘The Divination of the Bowhead Whale,’ is a series of sl...