Karl Jung is a Grass: Thomas Pynchon, performance with slideshow, 2012

I am reading a book by Thomas Pynchon which is called Gravity’s Rainbow

This presentation will refer back to it a lot, so I thought I'd talk about it first.

Thomas Pynchon is an American author. This is him. He is a reclusive character – hence all the question marks - he doesn't have any promotional photos for his books, and until someone ran a police check on him in the 80s, everyone thought he lived in Mexico. These are the only photos widely available of him, when he was in high school. Because of this 'recluse' status, there are loads of weird rumours about him, like that he was the Unabomber,

or that he had tried to kill the Executive Director of Peel holdings whilst on a trip to England .

In reality, his no-photo policy is just a mixture of shyness and contrariness.

Even when he appeared as a cameo on the Simpsons, he appeared with a paper bag over his head...

I guess he is like the king of the American post-modernist novelists – All these later writers like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers are really influenced by his style and the themes he writes about. Gravity's Rainbow came out in 1973 and is an anarchic sprawling, multi-layered piece of fiction which weaves together loads of different stories and ideas. It is sort of hard to summarise but I'll need to at least give it a go in order to do the talk so here it goes.

It takes place in London at the end of the second World War, and then in Europe in the weeks after VE day. The whole book is about the V2 rockets that were fired at London by Germany in the last year of the war.

There is this American Intelligence Officer in London, called Tyrone Slothrop, and he is being followed by these war scientists because it seems that he can predict where the V2 rockets are going to fall. Basically, where ever he has sex, that is where the next rocket will fall. The idea is that his erection is sort of sensing where the rockets will land.

The thing to know about V2 rockets is that they work backwards, in terms of how people perceive them from the ground. With the blitz, you would hear the planes coming, then see the planes, then hear the bombs dropping, then see and hear the explosion. But V2 rockets are faster than the speed of sound, so you would see the explosion, and then, moments later, you would hear the screeching sound of the rockets approaching. They reversed the causal chain in terms of your subjective empirical perception.

The book relates this reversal of causality to the possibility of predicting events. As in, V2 rockets reverse the causal chain of noise and thing-that-makes-noise, and therefore are, in a way, working backwards in time. Sort of like if you could bet on a horse race after it finished and you knew who won.

But the thing is that Slothrop, the character who is predicting these events, doesn't know that he is doing it. He just goes around London having sex, it is everyone else who makes the link between his erections and the V2 Rockets.

After VE day, he goes on the run, leaving London and going to Europe, because he realises that he is being watched by “Them”, but he doesn't know why.

“Them” is an important term in the book – the paranoid idea that there are people who are watching you, and who are controlling everything. “Them” is who you have to look out for, “they” connect the dots, without “Them” nothing makes sense

So “They” end up following Slothrop around post-war Europe – which Thomas Pynchon refers to as 'The Zone' - and Slothrop follows his cock, via a succession of sexual encounters with women, men, children and animals towards this Nazi rocket base – at the base is the next stage of the V2 rockets, which are faster and more powerful than anything ever built. This is what “They” are really after. They are following Slothop's cock to secret Nazi technology.

These ideas of prediction and causality and technology are also linked to Slothrop's paranoid theories about why “They” are following him.

And this really becomes the central theme of the book, because it turns out that everyone in The Zone has various paranoid theories about what is happening and who is behind it. Everyone is getting incomplete information, and this naturally leads to everyone having a different interpretation of what is going on.

Paranoia, in the context of The Zone, becomes quite a functional, useful thing. It helps the different characters make sense of what is happening. I suppose Post-war Europe was totally chaotic, so anything that explained what was happening was better than nothing, even if it was based on misunderstanding and falsehoods.

In the book, paranoia is seen more as an excess of reasoning, sometimes true and sometimes untrue, but never un-useful or unreasonable. In fact, sometimes it seems that paranoia is the only way that any of the characters can make sense of the chaos in which they are trying to live.

At one point someone is talking to Slothrop about the hierarchies of paranoias. There is your basic paranoia, which is all about Them, the “Them” that is watching you and out to get you and knows what you will do next.

But if you want to really get into it, then you need to move onto “Us” or “Me” paranoia. As in, the paranoia that even your own actions are motivated by other, mysterious reasons that you can't possibly comprehend.

Once you have cultivated this paranoia, says the character, then you can really understand The Zone, because you can rid yourself of the fallacy of reason, i.e. you can finally submit to the chaos of reality, without believing that you have any influence over it whatsoever.

–

So for my bits of this talk, I'd like you to keep in mind the idea that perhaps all human reasoning, all our understanding of cause and effect, and all our attempts to predict what will happen next (in daily life, in the economy, in politics, in everything) are just different levels of paranoia, different but equally ill informed psychotic hypotheses.

Menhir Blackberry Vimeo Fails

 Menhir Blackberry Vimeo Fail, arranged screen grabs from blackberry phone, 2013

 Menhir Blackberry Vimeo Fail (in disarray), arranged screen grabs from blackberry phone, 2013

Presentation of a Failed Artwork and a Court Case That I’m Still Not Really Meant to Talk About

Presentation of a Failed Artwork and a Court Case That I’m Still Not Really Meant to Talk About

A script for a performance by

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau

(This work was performed at the Ben Uri gallery, London, in 2011)

--

My name is Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau and this is a lecture about a piece of work that isn’t in this exhibition. Actually, it is a lecture about a piece of work that no longer really exists - both physically and legally.

In due course you’ll find out why this is the case, but first I’d like to explain to you the relationship between this lecture and to the current exhibition at the Ben Uri gallery.

For this exhibition, I made an audio guide to the work of John Allin. You put a pair of headphones on and whilst looking at his paintings of the East End of London, you can listen to a fictionalised biography that mixes up the real story of John Allin’s life with the stories of various other John Allins that I found on the internet.

Making the work for this exhibition reminded me of an artwork that I made in 2008, which was for an exhibition that was similar to the format of this exhibition. Both this current exhibition and the exhibition I’m going to tell you about were based on the concept of responding to another person’s work or life. I thought I would tell you about this previous exhibition, as a way of comparing two artworks - one that I consider a real success, and one that didn’t go so well. I must warn you now that a lot of the specifics of the artwork cannot be discussed because of legal proceedings, some that are still going on, and some that have effectively gagged me from speaking too much about the work itself.

So, the exhibition took place in the city where I studied, which for absurd but unchallengeable legal reasons I can only refer to as ‘N.’. I studied in N. from 2004 to 2007, and then stayed on for about a year before I moved to London. That year from 2007-2008 was pretty hard for me. I was working badly two badly paid jobs that I hated and not being offered much in the way of exhibitions. I was also drinking a lot and using drugs.

Maybe it is important to elaborate somewhat about the drug use, as it explains a lot re: the artwork and subsequent criminal and civil proceedings.

So, I don’t know if you know the TV show called ‘Mad Men’? It is an American TV show about advertising in the 50s - or at least the first series of it was, and that is the series I watched in N.. I basically structured my drug taking around watching this program. Ketamine was the drug, by the way, that I was taking, and in large doses it can have an incredible, hallucinatory effect - creating huge, logically consistent worlds within your mind, shifting space and time in a way unlike any other drug with the possible exception of DMT, which I hadn’t tried and certainly wouldn’t even think of trying nowadays.

Anyway, so with ketamine you have to build up a tolerance before you can take the large doses required to get the full, otherworldly, hallucinatory effect, and so throughout the week I would take small amounts of ketamine after work, and perhaps drink a few cans of strongbow black, which is like the Special Brew of the cider world. The people who make Strongbow have actually recently discontinued Strongbow Black on grounds of ‘social responsibility’ . For unrelated reasons I also eventually had to give up drinking cider, and now I can barely look at a bottle of Bulmers without wanting to be sick on the person drinking it.

Anyway, so the tolerance building was so that I could take a huge dose of ketamine without passing out entirely, because obviously you can’t experience the full hallucinatory effect of a large dose of the drug when you are unconscious. Also you sometimes piss yourself. Which is annoying. Both for the person doing it and the person who next sits down on the sofa after the person who pissed themselves stumbles to bed without realising they have pissed themselves until like a day later.

And the reason I was building my tolerance over the week was so that when Mad Men was available on the iPlayer, I could go into this little room which I suppose was like an office, but just had a shitty PC which we used solely for the purposes of watching BBC iPlayer plus a sofa to crash onto with washable covers that the other housemates made me buy, and take a huge, mind-shattering amount of ketamine in one go, just before pressing play, so that I could watch the opening credits of Mad Men - which involved the silhouette of a 1950s advertising executive moving around and eventually falling out of the window of a skyscraper - and be totally drawn into a world that was based on the visual and audio input I was receiving from Mad Men, but was, essentially a totally subjective, individual world inside my own mind.

That point, in the opening credits, where the guy fell out of the window, was normally the moment at which I would like ‘drop’ into my hallucinatory world. As I remember the whole soundtrack sort of crescendos at that point, and this would in some way make the hit of the ketamine happen all at once - this feeling of synchronicity was also just an effect of the ketamine, but you don’t know that while it is happening. I honestly thought that everything was happening at the same time and there was some sort of necessary connection between the ketamine hitting my nervous system and the crescendo of the music and the little silhouette man falling out of the window. And, in a way, I became that little man falling out of the window. Out of my world, and into a completely separate physical and temporal space.

I didn’t see my drug use as problematic, but now I realise that it had a direct effect on the artistic opportunities I was being offered, because basically I was a social cripple, drunk on strong cider and either always on ketamine - which gives you the equivalent conversational skills of a corpse - or on a residual drippy, half stoned ketamine hangover, which would make me an irritable arsehole with grand visions of my artistic skills and philosophical prowess but no actual artwork or ideas that might make people look past how much of an arsehole I was.

I did eventually get the opportunity to take part in a group show at a gallery which I am still legally obliged to not use the name of so I’ll call it ‘W.’. The idea of the show that was to take place at W. was that we would make work in response to local figures of interest. And, apparently, I had proposed to do a sort of sound work.

Actually, the reasons I got offered the opportunity to take part in the show are hazy, even to me. The curator - I shouldn’t even be referring to him at all, because according to my lawyer the restraining order he has taken out on me could technically get me taken to court for even saying his name when no one can even hear me, i.e., just saying it out loud to myself in an empty room is a breach of the restraining order. Which obviously doesn’t work on a practical level, because if no one can hear you then no one can know you are saying his name, but it gives you an idea of how seriously everyone took the whole thing, even after the criminal cases were dropped.

So, I think I randomly met the curator - who we shall call ‘K.’ for the aforementioned legal reasons - at a pub in N. and I had snuck in several cans of Super Strongbow and had taken a relatively small amount of ketamine to build up my tolerance for my ritual weekly Mad Men/ketamine binge which was scheduled for the next day and was braying on and on about something like hypothetical factual representation, or disrupted histories or something like that but I think there was actually quite a good specific idea which I proposed, which must have caught K.’s attention for a second because the next day I got an email asking if I wanted to be in the show.

I was excited but also quite confused because - just like a serious skunk addiction - the effects of ketamine on your short/mid-term memory are outrageous and I had only the vaguest of recollections of speaking to the curator and for the life of me couldn’t remember what the idea was for the artwork. In his email K. had referred to a sound piece and the concept for the show, which as I mentioned before was that each artist responded to a local historical figure in some way. He explained who I was meant to be responding to, we shall call them BR. and it is enough for me to say that this person was very much alive at the time and was something of a hero in N. and even the mention of his name in certain pubs near the football stadium could make grown men weep and stand up and sing local songs in broad regional accents.

Just as an aside, I want to talk about the effects of infrasonic waves on the human body. Now, I cannot stress enough that this information was not known to me at the time, and it is only through more recent research that I have found technically specific and scientifically correct data which does back up some but not all of the charges that were brought against me after the opening night of the exhibition.

So, infrasound is basically super-low pitched sound. and here are some some direct quotes from research papers I found after the first of the court cases had been brought against me

“Lethal infrasonic pitch lies in the 7 cycle range (7hz). Small amplitude increases affect human behaviour in this range. Intellectual activity is first inhibited, blocked, and then destroyed. As the amplitude is increased, several disconcerting responses have been noted. These responses begin a complete neurological interference. The action of the medulla is physiologically blocked, its autonomic functions cease."

“Acoustic, Infrasound. Very low-frequency sound, which can travel long distances and easily penetrate most buildings and vehicles. Transmission of long wavelength sound creates biophysical effects; nausea, loss of bowels, disorientation, vomiting, potential internal organ damage or death may occur.”

---

So, although I was a bit worried about the exhibition, because I couldn’t remember what it was I was meant to be making, that wasn’t going to stop me taking a huge dose of ketamine and watching an episode of Mad Men, which I did do. And I don’t actually remember what happened that evening - generally I didn’t remember the content of the episode, or really anything about the hallucinatory experience. All I would remember was the significance of the experience, how it felt really life changing, and meaningful, even though I couldn’t remember what the experience was, or if I could remember anything, I could only describe weird stupid dreamlike notions like how everything was massive or really far away but in perfect detail. And the fact that it sounded stupid and boring just made it seem, to me, that I had experienced something ineffable and really profound, when in fact, it was just the ketamine that made me feel like it was really profound, and in fact it was actually really stupid and boring.

Yeah, so I don’t remember what happened but it must have been a particularly heavy evening because instead of sort of ‘coming to’ after an hour or so and taking myself to bed, I actually woke up in my bed with all my clothes on and I was holding my laptop - I was actually holding my laptop up in the air like it was a trophy or something and I had no idea why.

The important thing at this point is that my extra-heavy session of ketamine use seemed to have wiped all memory of the exhibition from my mind. I didn’t remember the email I had received, the conversation at the pub, or anything about any exhibition or any artworks and I didn’t think anymore about it until the day of the opening, when I got a phone call from the curator saying that he had installed the piece and though he hadn’t turned it on the techies had installed all the sound equipment that I had asked for and they said that it should all work fine for the opening and that it was a shame that I hadn’t come down for the installation but that he looked forward to seeing me tonight for the show.

Another important thing to say is that BR., the local hero that I was making the work about, actually funded the W. gallery, and was a big patron of the arts in N., and would actually be at the opening of the exhibition along with his family - including his pregnant daughter, and his wife - now widow - who had recently undergone a hip-replacement. Also - and I couldn’t have possibly known this at the time - he had a pacemaker, and these certainly don’t respond well to infrasonic waves at any volume, let alone the volume of a 100K system with specially adapted bass bins, designed for the purposes of emitting what is known in sound circles as a ‘burp’, which is a super-loud burst of infrasonic waves made by using a sharp low-pass filter to force all of the power of the soundsystem into the lower frequency ranges.

And so when I got that phone call, and he began speaking to me I felt several emotions and trains of thought moving through my head all at once which are probably useful at this point to explain to you. In no particular order, the thoughts and feelings were these

- I suddenly remembered this exhibition and that I was meant to have made some work for this exhibition and I was filled with panic at fucking up the only opportunity I had been given since university
- I slowly came to realise that somehow I had given K. some sort of work, somehow, possibly digitally, along with instructions on how to install it, and that the only time that I could have done this was in the middle of a severe hallucinatory episode brought on by a huge dose of ketamine.
- I felt a wave of relief, mixed with fear: relief that I hadn’t fucked it all up, and fear at the fact that I had no idea exactly what the artwork was.
- a sort of pride that I had managed to do anything at all whilst hallucinating wildly. Typing was normally pretty impossible when on ketamine, let alone conceiving of and producing a sound work, and writing an email and attaching files to the email and writing instructions on how to install it and what equipment I needed.

I am limited as to what more I can say by the legal implications of what actually happened, especially in regard to the actual content of the work and how it came to be that the curator didn’t have time to listen to it, and how no one had even questioned the rental of a 100K soundsystem with specially adapted bass bins that could actually deafen people in a space as small as the W. gallery, even without the infrasonic sound-work that apparently I was responsible for.

Here, I must stress that the word ‘responsible’ does not imply any legal responsibility on anyone’s part, especially not on the part of the gallery or the curator.

And I am especially limited as to what I can say about the ongoing medical issues for everyone concerned, especially BR. who sadly passed away in 2009 which I would like to just say is a year later and therefore cannot be related to any injuries sustained whilst at the exhibition opening, and I have been asked to not mention specifics regarding the moment when the sound work was turned on, like for example how close the famous local hero BR. was to the speakers, or to describe the smell of around two hundred people simultaneously evacuating their bowels, or to even explain - though it is easily searchable on the internet - what happens to a pace maker when it is subjected to 100k of infrasonic frequencies, and definitely I can’t go into the visual details of what happens when a metal hip is literally ripped out of a woman’s body by a series of super-loud pulsing 7HZ sound waves.

What I will say is that this experience allowed me to move on from my drug use, effectively ‘curing me’ of my dependence on ketamine, and also gave me the legally enforced opportunity to leave the city of N. and move to London and make artworks that are always thoroughly tested for safety before members of the public get anywhere near them.

Also I don’t watch very much Mad Men anymore, though I hear it goes downhill after the second series anyway.

Thanks very much.

The Humenhir, home made play doh with human hair, 2013

Oase Filtocap Rock Cover (Angles), eight found digital images, 2013

Rocks You Can Buy on Amazon

Wiki Menhirs

"In the French comic series Asterix, the main character's Asterix sidekick is Obelix, a menhir smith and "delivery man". His handling of menhirs is easy thanks to his superhuman strength. Although menhirs are featured prominently in the series (Obelix is frequently seen carrying one on his back, occasionally hurling them; he even offers one as a gift), their purpose and significance is never taken into consideration. In the issue Obelix and Co., the Romans devise a scheme to introduce a menhir industry and market, although it is also made clear that menhirs actually don't serve any particular purpose, and Roman citizens are soon overwhelmed. (At one point, the Druid wizard Getafix admits to Asterix that even they, the Gauls, are not sure what menhirs are for.)"

from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menhir

Menhirs Reblog (dns failure), jpeg, 2013

Tumour

I was going through some writing and found this which is a scene from a story that has now been cannibalised into something different. I thought I'd put it here so the original isn't lost for ever.

--

Dell’s last tutorial of the day at this windy, nasty little art department of the ex-polytechnic in N.. It doesn't look good. She’s wearing a green polo shirt which apparently is the uniform of the Polish restaurant where she works. She has a big nose like a hawk or a French person and she doesn't have any artwork in her studio. Though Dell notices that she does have nice eyes that look hazed and drugged, and full lips, which she teases with her teeth. And then also she has looked at Dell’s website and brings him a photo of her bedroom which she says reminds her of his work. She has a slow, low voice and he warms to her because it’s the end of the day and he likes it when people go on his website. She says today she has invented a new type of dumpling. Dell laughs but she is deadly serious and so he feigns interest. Apparently she has invented a Thai sweet chilli Polish dumpling which frankly sounds disgusting to Dell, but in N. Polish food constitutes a major breakthrough in local cultural relations.

Dells ask her to talk about her work and she shows him a Poirot magazine (the type where you buy a magazine + DVD every week and build up your collection of a famous TV series. They are a purgatory for cancelled TV programmes.) and tells him she found it and wants to do something with it. Dell gets all excited because he has a friend in N. who used to dress up as Poirot to go to school from the ages of 7-10yrs and he is a performance artist and although he is currently in L. running away from a drug debt, Dell is certain that he would want to be involved with the student's project as long as she had money for alcohol (later on Dell realises what he has done re:the student’s safety because his friend has a habit of coercing vulnerable young women into letting him commit unspeakable deeds and who is more vulnerable than a second year art student with a big nose and good lips? The next week Dell will actually contact the University and ask the lecturers to keep an eye on her, e.g., follow up any unplanned absences and ask about any suspicious bruising).

Dell is actually enjoying talking to her, and she has a good childhood story about how she killed a rabbit because her grandma had two rabbits, one white, and one white with black spots. Granny is off round the house, cleaning and hoovering and singing old granny songs to herself and having the TV on at an extreme granny-appropriate volume while our little future-art-student child is frolicking with the two aforementioned rabbits. Future-art-student child decides that the black spotted rabbit is dirty and that it needs to look like the white rabbit (racial undertones here, in the student’s story, that also say a lot about N.’s attitude to race/ethnicity, but actually the girl is originally from the South West. But then actually the South West of England isn't exactly diversity central either is it...) and, thinking that she is doing Granny a big favour by saving her some time by finishing up one of the smaller cleaning jobs, she gets a bottle of bleach, pours it all over the black spotted rabbit, and starts massaging the liquid into the fur and skin of the rabbit. The rabbit dies an indescribably painful (and, luckily for the student, unremembered) death, and future-art-student child goes to hospital with chemical burns and scarring + ripping of her vocal chords because of the screaming she did when she realised what she had done i.e., killed the rabbit. These broken chords account for her now low, husky voice, but also, apparently (also unremembered, but confirmed by both Granny and Mum) it meant that for a few months future art-student-child was moving her mouth but no words were coming out, and there were a few weeks where future-art-student child was so wound up and scared and angry that her face was constantly wrapped around a silent, screaming mouth because she was trying so hard to communicate via the broken chords.

Dell and the student laugh about the story, but it is hard for Dell not to keep looking at her hands for permanent scarring and then she starts telling Dell that when she was born, inside her right arm was a huge (apparently about ¾ of the size of her as a [relatively large] newborn baby) tumour. She was born via forceps (or rather, the tumour was born via forceps, and she was pulled out along with it), and taken straight into surgery, to have the thing removed (or perhaps, remove her from the thing), and as they cut into the skin of her arm (which she says, showing Dell her arm, has a scarred indentation from whence the thing came, a sort of gap in the muscle that she allows Dell to really push his finger into and wiggle around and she sort of laughs and sighs when he does this, which, frankly, is both arousing and disturbing for Dell and it’s hard for him to work out which feeling is which), the thing birthed itself out of her arm, and exposed itself to be:

1. Almost perfectly, Platonically, spherical.
2. Covered in thick, black, pubic style hair.
3. Containing moving eye + sets of teeth arranged in jaw-like formations (but not moving or gnashing), embedded within its hairy surface.
4. Pulsing, with blood + a seemingly self-contained vascular system, but no heart.

All this she tells Dell while his finger is inside her right arm and he is wiggling the finger more and she is sighing and laughing and letting out the occasional groan as she speaks and then Dell is sort of getting hard but then he hears another student coming around the corner. He leaps back in his seat, realising that this is not the way to end a day of teaching. And then when the tutorial finishes and he subtly suggests that he and the student go for a drink or something she looks at him like he is totally insane.

Menhirs_web res, 3 jpegs, 2013

Euphoria, History, Tragedy, Farce: A reduced history of stupid dance music

There's a theory that at the start of any new genre of dance music there are a lot of female vocals in the music because:



1) Female vocals signify female friendliness. This attracts a mixed crowd, which makes the nights more fun because people can get off with each other which is what dance music is (mainly) about.

2) Female vocals signify euphoria. Obviously different vocalists can do different things, but the general rule is that at the start of the creation of a new genre, a female vocal will be all warbly held notes and eye-rolling transcendence.



Then I the scene develops in different ways, some more serious and progressive, some dumber and more populist. I guess I'm calling this 'History' as this is when a scene will be most recognised as culturally meaningful. It will influence pop music, and possibly have crossover hits.



Then, history repeats itself.



First as tragedy. the music is mournful, or regretful, or angry (see: loads of angry jungle and drum and bass, The Eternal Sadness of the Post-Dubstep Scene, mournful house, the-bit-in-garage-before-people-properly-started-doing-grime). It knows that the real history of the scene is over, and it can only mourn. Imagine what sort of music you'd hear at a drum and bass rave in the late 90s. You're stoned and on loads of smacky pills while everyone else is listening to uk garage and drinking champagne and having loads of sex. Tragic.



And then as farce. Which I guess is when a scene jumps the shark and becomes sort of unintentionally hilarious to everyone who doesn't listen to it. (see: brostep for dubstep, the end of drum and bass for jungle, happy hardcore for all of dance music ever [though, actually, if you ever watched the weird videos you got with drum and bass tape packs, it always looked like everyone was going to the happy hardcore room and having the best time ever], lots of types of scally-house, donk etc., for techno and house). This happens when the music has already been completely abstracted from its scene: geographical and ideological. Perhaps the drugs aren't any good either. Or non-drug takers are listening to it.



--



I was thinking about those bits of dance music where it acts out of character. Where dance music reflects on its history as that history progresses. It is most obvious when it is humorous, because dance music isn't normally humorous on purpose, but normally just at the end of that progression from euphoria to farce. And even then it doesn't know its funny. In fact, Skrillex's dedication to music, and the seriousness with which he makes it, is heartbreakingly funny (see: Skrillex posting his favourite song of all time [Aphex Twin's beautiful Flim] and his fans' reactions to it).



I was reading Stewart Lee's book How I Escaped My Certain Fate and he writes about the possibility of a comedy without language (he's quoting someone else, maybe Malcom Hardee), just noises and movements that invoke humour. That got me thinking about all the songs from my misspent youth as a drum and bass listening teenager that were funny somehow.



Sometimes there might be a very conscious attempt at humour - a sample from a film, or a maybe a re-mixed theme tune, and obviously a few novelty raps don't go amiss, but some tracks were just funny via the sound or the feeling of the record. Here's a short selection of songs I remember and songs other people have recommended.





Ray Keith - Chopper Tune. Probably the king of stupid drum and bass tunes. It has a sample of a helicopter, an air hostess saying 'We're now ready for take off' and a portamento bass line.







Andy C - Bodyrock. A swing time drum and bass tune. I hated this when it came out and still do. It started a whole trend of swung drum and bass and it was awful. But it was an unexpected direction for a scene that was, by that time, populated by very predictable music.





Aphrodite - Superman. Pretty obvious really, but really triumphant and stupid. Imagine coming up on pills to this.





Oxide and Neutrino - Bound 4 Da Reload. It has a sample from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and  the music is based around the theme from the TV show Casualty. I remember watching it on Top of the Pops and being totally horrified but now I'm quite a fan of this as a late-garage/pre-grime classic with a really nice sense of geography. If your song samples prime time UK medical drama, you probably aren't looking to break America or whatever.





Donae'O - My Philosophy (Bounce). I'm kind of obsessed with this song. I found it while buying some classic UK garage and I kept playing it over and over. It has weird comedy-moral lyrics ('Don't do guns, don't do drugs, just have sex... Protected!'), its bassline is massive but also sounds really stupid. And it has someone pretending to be a frog saying 'Widdit' in the background.





Funky Dee - Are You Gonna Bang Doe. A funky/grime tune with lyrics which do that thing that grime lyrics do where every line ends with the same thing. In this case it's 'Are you gonna bang though?'. Funky Dee is kind of taking the piss out of it (when I first heard grime I just thought the MCs had got confused about what rhyming was), but he's also testing its limits in the safe environment of the comedy song. It has the same weird sample all the way through and he just messes about over the top. Obviously meant for a holiday crowd in napa who will just shout along and then definitely bang, though.







Whistle - Just Buggin. A quick detour into hip-hop, I actually wanted the Spoonie Gee version of this song, which has the same mad keyboard sample, but also has a comedy narrative rap about a girl who smokes too much weed. That is kind of a genre of its own: comedy-narrative rap w/ humorous music.







D.A.V.E the Drummer & Chris Liberator - One Night in Hackney. This is sort of like a farcical techno version of the hip-hop comedy narrative where someone talks about a really good/really bad night out in Hackney. It sounds stupid now, but when I was a bit younger this song made me feel really scared about raves and drugs. There's a brilliant bit at 4:26 where he improvises the line '15 cans of Stella' and then everyone in the recording booth laughs and then they all chant '15 Cans of Stella'. Also, I've only just realised that the title is a joke on One Night in Heaven.







Robbie T - Mrs. Jones 4x4 mix. This is a very popular remix idea, where the actual song plays for a bit (normally a "classic" bit of soul or pop) and then the remix drops in and everyone listening to it sort of has to acknowledge it as a bit clever and silly and fun. These are also the most annoying songs in the world if you don't like them, because while they are popular they are guaranteed to be played at every night you go to.





Hudson Mohawke - Thunder Bay. Someone suggested another Hudson Mohawke tune but a lot of this music is sort of funny and Thunder Bay is just so brilliant and up front and stupid. It sounds like a theme tune to the best Saturday night program ever.







EPROM - Regis Chillbin (Machinedrum Remix). Amazing suggestion of a recent piece of music. Its serious funny, if that makes sense. It's a very heavy, well produced tune, but with loads of dog barks doing the melody. And then at the end the dog barks turn into a baby crying.



Any suggestions?

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Ok, here are some more from people. I'll update this every now and again...



Jamie Jones - 911. The normally dry world of minimal/tech house is livened up with a pretty lol 911 call. Apparently the call was actually made by a policeman who subsequently lost his job.



Marc Houle - Techno Vocals. Self referential techno record: "why are all the vocals pitched down so low, this is the way we make techno." Actually a really good tune as well as being absurd.



Mr. Oizo - Flatbeat. Someone suggested "Anything by Mr. Oizo", so I picked the famous one. But it's a good point, all his songs are pretty tongue in cheek, as was a lot of French of the 2000s. All the Ed Banger records stuff was knowingly dumb - an invitation to unpretentious fun.

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Menhirs_Reblog, 3 looped digital videos, 2013

Menhirs

Menhirs, triptych of altered digital images, 2013