LaRM day 134 (Alec Empire)

Some totally ridiculous nonsense all day today with our old chum Atari Teenage Riot's Alec Empire. Having spent a few years noodling around with ambient techno and releasing a number of experimental ambient albums, 1993 was a pivotal year for Empire when, having played a fantastic fast one with his record company and artfully manouevered a ton of cash out of them for nothing (it was a brilliant trick he played), he started mucking around with breakbeats and hardcore samples, creating a superb template for a frantic drum and bass breakbeat built around vicious bpms, arhythms, thrash guitar samples and antique keyboard noises. The first solo output of this stuff was 1996's compilation of session, single and new tracks, The Destroyer. This is a totally invigorating record and one which seemed peerless at the time. Obviously it all sounds rather silly and desperately (even laughably) earnest now, but there's no missing the intention to create an all-encompassing, brain-blasting soundscape in which declarations about how "when you've reached your peak - it's time to die!" almost make sense. There are some pieces which are scuzzed up versions of his previous calmer work ('Firebombing', although dirty and messy, still adheres to the stoned repetition principle), but most of it is blasting, skittering fury delivered as if to a scowling crowd pointing in the air and, as Empire himself would have it, banging their heads. A further compilation of disparate tracks was released in 1997, Squeeze the Trigger, which is basically more of the same, but there's possibly a greater focus on the construction and density of texture of individual tracks but the whole thing feels slightly less passionate, probably because the sources of the material are fairly diverse, and because it's more tightly put together.

One thing that I'll always have a lot of respect for Empire for is his unwavering commitment to opposing the right-wing in the techno community and in the world at large. Often sounding absurd, his passion is unchallengeable and although it often means he sounds extremely silly, I think it's worth remembering that at least he's on the side of the angels and is prepared to be vocal about it. Anyway next up is the three and a half hour long compilation of early Empire material, dating from around 1990 - 1996, called The Geist of Alec Empire (1997). It covers his various ambient and atmospheric experiments before alighting on the blitzkrieg style of breakbeat techno that became his trademark. There's some excellent stuff on here and also some truly dismal nonsense. When it's at its worst it sounds like the laziest stoner student version of every other art-house techno that was doing the rounds at the time, but at its best it shows how thinking outside the box can create intriguing results. There are some muddy, sludgy beats, writhing around in amongst the low-level techno and although none of it has the barrage of noise that he's famous for, there are enough idiosyncratic approaches to the Autechre template on The Geist to put most techno and ambient experimentalists to shame.

Normal service is resumed for the start of the next splatter of noise though. Miss Black America (1999) is one of Empire's funniest and most genuinely unpredictable records, but it starts off straightforwardly enough with 'DFo2', which is trademark Empire, shattering, thudding breakbeats and the man himself shouting about something, socialism probably or how the time is right to fight. But then everything goes a bit odd, with some seriously scuzzy noise experiments, many of which are almost entirely beat free. The fifteen minutes of 'The Robot Put a Voodoospell On Me' and 'I Can Hear the Winds of Saturn' are basically loads of squiggly bleeping electronic noise but recorded with a vicious sheen which almost hurts to listen to. The album as a whole is bit like some kind of psych-techno, with a surprisingly open early Tangerine Dream influence. Much of the album is composed of similar stuff, slow, nasty, noisy constructs which are much more like the stuff of cheap nightmares than Empire's usual blistering, ranting beats. It does however contain the superb '(Untitled)' which is akin to the stuff that Atari Teenage Riot played at the recorded Brixton gig - 6 minutes of hideous, frantic, industrial and electronic noise collaged together with absolutely no sense of melody, rhythm or structure. It's completely absurd and utterly brilliant. Finally for today's Empire fun it's the super limited edition of Alec Empire vs Elvis Presley (1999). This is probably the absolute zenith of both sample culture and cultural appropriation. It's mind-boggling stuff. The whole album is an array of Elvis samples, songs from records and dialogue from movies, pulped and mashed into an absolute malestrom of fractured beats and almost unlistenably muddy electronic noise. It's absolutely brilliant. It's barking mad, totally idiotic, meaningless and at the same time it's probably one of the most profound statements about the post-modern cultural condition ever made. It's the work of a maverick whose one trick finds its perfect expression.