Our Spilt Milk: Lone Revisits Rave, and Sammes Makes Futuristic "Music for Biscuits"

Lone

Our favorite things this week include a wary reflection on the romance of rave, and music for commercials that sounded like the future in the mid-1960s.

Since I'm not much of a clubber, most of my favorite electronic albums reflect a listen-at-home intent. Rather than, say, microhouse albums that each burn away over a full night, I gravitate towards albums that speedily get across the producer's personality, abilities, and outlook with no fluff. Lone's 2016 album Levitate is 33 minutes—or about four seconds in electronic-time—but given that it arrives seven albums into Lone's heavily-evolving career, there's loads of outlook to cram into that half hour.

What I get from Nottingham’s Lone most of all is a romance for the long-lost aesthetics of '90s UK rave culture, and a desire to relive that era. But despite that, Lone isn't all too romantic for the technological limitations that kept rave in a grimy, lo-fi spot back in the ‘90s. He's more into gloss, sparkle, production that's immersive and futuristic. The closer to a 6-year-old's fantasy of what a dream world might look like, the better.

That outlook gets more transparent throughout his discography. Early Lone rode a trendier, more chopped-n-screwed chillwave sound back when chillwave ruled the late 2000s. But as he came into his own, his '90s-isms rose to the surface, and his production became way less concerned with appealing to lo-fi-heads. His genre cluster also spiraled in a bunch of directions over those years; house, breakbeat hardcore, instrumental hip hop, and ambient all became pieces of the Lone equation.

Levitate brings those pieces into the same neighborhood, with each one exaggerated. "Alpha Wheel," "Backtail Was Heavy,” and "Triple Helix" are BPM-maxed-out rave cuts that highlight the bubbliest, splashiest side of Lone's production, building off the tropical thread he started in 2012 with Galaxy Garden and has been fine-tuning since. On the opposite end, "The Morning Birds," "Breeze Out," and "Hiraeth" are ambient breathers. The latter two are carried by luscious pads, synths that feel like they took a few seconds to find in some 'classic vintage synths' bank and countless months to layer, balance, and EQ into the perfect blocks of ear candy they are now. Songs like "Vapor Trail" bridge the extremes with the same '90s-house drum timbres, glistening synths, water sounds, and wind chime samples of the rave cuts, but chiller tempos and a more ethereal demeanor.

Transitioning from a Madlib-style sampler wizard to a high-gloss producer can, for a lot of people, look like an artist dumbing down their sound, reducing their recognizable qualities into an ambiguous, hi-fi soup. I don't get that from Lone, because going hi-fi only made his recognizable qualities crystal clear. Where earlier, hazier albums like Ecstacy & Friends feel like a colorful '90s-electro fantasy filtered through layers of shyness and subversion, Levitate feels like that same '90s-electro fantasy hiding behind nothing. It's an outlet for some curious nostalgia of Lone's that somehow only gets more genuine the more artificial it sounds. (Andreas Jahn)

I’m always suspicious of glib pronouncements, but that doesn’t mean I don’t consider the possibility that they’re true. One I think about is the possibility that pop music that’s worth anything is in the process of imagining the future. For that reason, I’m fascinated by pop expressions that make that clear, particularly now, looking back, when you can hear how it all played out. You can easily hear it in glam rock and its bratty stepbrother punk rock, you can hear it new wave, but you could also hear it in the British Invasion and most pop music if you think about it.

I’d argue that you can even hear it in the hi-fi-friendly Music for Biscuits, the posthumous collection of recordings from in the mid-1960s by Mike Sammes and The Mike Sammes Singers. In the U.S., the Mike Sammes Singers answer a trivia question: What vocal group made the noises on The Beatles’ “I am the Walrus”? In England today, they probably have the same lack of presence, but Sammes scored the theme music to three of puppeteer Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation series, with stacks of voices treated as instruments. During the opening theme to Stingray, they sing the title like horn stabs over rolling drums and a frenzied arrangement.

I’d argue that in 1965, that represented an attempt to sound cutting edge, or as cutting edge as an artist who made wholesome music could manage. On the 2007 Music for Biscuits collection, you can hear music Sammes made for commercials, and it’s similarly as forward thinking as someone could be when selling laundry soap, undergarments, and the trappings of a middle class good life. Most songs—they’re too well-developed to comfortably call them jingles—focus on a single idea, such as reminding shoppers that watches make good presents by singing again and again, “It’s a gift, it’s a Timex.”

But the best go sparer than that and let the music do the work. A community of singers take turns singing, “Ariel washes cleaner” with the straight-faced assurance of someone sharing a life lesson, Sammes sells Vespas with singers articulating the product name and wordless ba-ba-bas as if they’re a gentle summer breeze in your face while tooling through London. A very, very, very white breeze, admittedly. 

Where’s the future in that? The sonics, for one. Sammes paid a pop producer’s attention to the sounds and instead of trying to faithfully capture them, treated them as malleable according to the needs of the song. Also, every song was a pastiche that borrowed from a host of musical traditions whether recognized as high or low art at the time. That’s not drastic but it’s not nothing, and Music for Biscuits imagines a future a day or two away when you next go to the store. That gave the songs buzz, and today their brevity—most are under a minute—give them a blink-and-you-miss-it quality, which is pretty much the way the future becomes the present. (Alex Rawls)