Description
In 20 Jazz Funk Greats Drew Daniel (of the experimental band Matmos) creates—through both his own insights and exclusive interviews with the band—an exploded view of the album's multiple agendas: a series of close readings of each song, shot through with a sequence of thematic entries on key concepts, strategies, and contexts (noise, leisure, process, the abject, information, and repetition). This is a smart and unusual book about a pioneering band.
Author(s)
Drew Daniel,
Drew Daniel is one half of the acclaimed electronic group Matmos - successful in their own right, and also as collaborators with Bjork. Drew has taught the history of electronic music at the San Francisco Art Institute and a sound art seminar at Harvard. He has just moved to Baltimore, where he now teaches in the English Department at Johns Hopkins University.
Reviews
"Daniel brings erudition and clarity to the 33 1/3 series with writing that's both meticulous and giddy...Daniel achieves a fantastic hat trick-- a love letter to an unacceptable band about their least-loved album in a book series that, until recently, was reserved only for acceptable albums. Let the wrecking of civilization begin." --Brian Joseph David, Eye Weekly
Brian Joseph David,
“Drew Daniel employs a very rich lexicon, but chooses his
words judiciously. More importantly, he admits right up front to being a huge
TG fan boy, and that enthusiasm translates — even when he veers towards
head-scratching territory — particularly in some of his interview passages with
the band members (all of whom participated in the creation of his book). And by
focusing squarely on the group’s music, not their sensationalistic trappings,
in a song-by-song analysis, he opens up the listening experience, both to
neophytes and diehards. I might never have imagined such a thing was possible,
but Daniel’s musings on 20 Jazz Funk Greats have made me a committed Throbbing
Gristle fan. And that kind of connective tissue I can heartily endorse.” –Weird
at my School Blog, KXEP
,
"Always perverse, Throbbing Gristle was perhaps never more so
than on their 1979 release, 20 Jazz Funk Greats. From the cover art, which at
first glance appears to your standard “band outdoors” snap, (but is actually
the group assembled at Britain’s Beachy Head, a suicide hotspot) to the almost
“normal” synth pop found within, TG deliberately alters reality until it nearly
comes back around- nearly. Drew Daniel, one half of the electronic group
Matmos, draws on new interviews with the group to craft a look at one of
music’s most extreme, intense and provocative artists, who delighted here in
subtle rearrangements of benign elements into darker statements, such as
captured field recordings of young children, mashed against a simple drum
machine to create “Persuasion”. Daniel ably illustrates the sheer brilliance of
the record, in which TG turned down the volume but upped the intensity of their
message. At nearly 200 pages this is one of the longer “33 1/3” releases, but
is such a captivating look at the legendary group of pop culture provocateurs
that you won’t put it down." --The Big Takeover
,
“This is a
fascinating and thought-thorough accompaniment to the album, augmented by
interviews with all the group members, which uncovers a trove of pertinent unfamiliarities
in songs which feel like longstanding parts of the mental furniture after
nearly 30 years.” –David Stubbs, The Wire, UK
David Stubbs,
“I fell into this book like Alice down an unfathomable dark
rabbit-hole. It reads like a riveting
detective novel, so concisely has Daniel (AKA one half of Matmos) woven
personal history (both TGs and his own), (un)reliable narration (thanks to the
members of TG themselves, contradictory bastards the lot of them), close
dissection (a forensic/anatomical tank being particularly appropriate with TG)
and overarching pop-cultural critique…this tiny volume on only one album in the
massive TG oeuvre situates the group so powerfully in the appropriate
historical, personal, and musical contexts that I never wanted the book to
end. It’s a vivid, revealing, and very
personal work that is beautifully written from start to finish, and my favorite
of the 33 1/3s so far. ” –Warped Reality Magazine
,
"Daniel is more than fully qualified to author this personal, historical and cultural deconstruction of TG's third album."
Reviewed by George Taylor in Plan B, 2008
,
“Daniels is a lucid and engaging writer who captures the
struggle of a band that felt increasingly trapped by its own accomplishments
and confined by the conventions of a genre that it hadn’t really wanted to
create.” --Signal to Noise
,
"an excellent reason for picking up or dusting off the album"
Reviewed by Scott McKeating, 2008
,
“Daniel has delved into the album and dissects it here,
sony-by-song, with acute insight, and with some thought in providing the
context and meaning of each track. Daniel had access to all four band members
for the book, garnering valuable information in his conversations with each,
also drawing upon the band’s historical record as documented in print.” -Blurt
Magazine
,