Bonkers Food of the Week

This week's bonkers food is from my very own mother country, Sweden. Well sort of, I was actually born in London but I've been going to Sweden two or three times a year for most of my life to see family and generally get away from the noisy chaos that England can be. The food in question is a fish dish. Not just any fish dish, however. Think way past its sell-by-date and you're getting close. It's called surströmming, which translates roughly as sour herring. Mmmmmm. So what they do is get some herring and 'ferment' it (read: let it go off in a controlled way) and tin it, there's even a festival to celebrate it, although knowing festivals you're probably drunk enough not to taste it once it deigns to violate your taste buds. Even I, with my taste for eating insects, have not dared to try this 'delicacy'. My mum describes it as having a soggy consistency and a foul smell, a book I'm currently looking at describes it as having a "pungent aroma". It's usually eaten with a flat bread and a variety of strong Swedish cheese called Västerbotten. I'm sure I will try it one day but for now I think I'll stick to skipjack and mayonnaise.  

Acid

Acid. What is it? Am I talking about something inside a battery? Am I talking about the infamous psychedelic drug enjoyed so much by Mr. Leary and many others in the sixties and beyond? No. That leaves two options given the nature of this blog, either citric acid (of not that much interest to me) or a term for a sound in music. For me it'll always be a passionate interest and has been a virtual obsession at other times.

Acid is in fact the name given to the noises created through a failed bass guitar synthesizer made by Roland at the beginning of the eighties. This synthesizer was called the TB-303 and is known most often known merely as a 303 or acid. All this sounds pretty inconsequential but it has in fact been massively influential in underground and overground music. This little box helped create whole new styles of music, alongside drum machines made by the same company such as the 606, 808 and 909. At some point in the early eighties various people in Chicago, amongst other places, got hold of this device and noticed that by deliberately not following the 90-page user manual they could tweak this machine to make a bizarre selection of noises with an acidic cutting kind of sound. In fact the there is an incredibly wide range of sounds that can be made with this versatile and unassuming little box. Soon people were making all kinds of crazy noises with it and it helped to give birth to a vibrant underground dance music scene in Chicago and Detroit. The best known early acid label for me is called Trax records and had such names as Frankie Knuckles and Jamie Principle producing music (Principle wrote Your Love, later famously covered by Candy Stanton) using acid noises. I love the use of acid in Fantasy Girl  and the aptly named Acid Trax by Phuture, you can really here that iconic squelch and cut. They are far from the earliest acid tracks, but they really give a good taste of that unique acid driven sound. 

During the eighties the 303 was used in hip-hop, hip-house, techno and house tracks and of course took the UK by storm in the infamous Summer of Love in 1988, when the UK, depending on your viewpoint, was ravaged or blessed by a proliferation of rave parties seemingly exploding from nowhere. This gave birth to a huge selection of acid house tracks in the UK, with such hilariously cheesy examples as Everything Starts With an E  by the E-Zee Possee and much higher quality and inventive tracks like Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald, a native of Moss Side in Manchester who took the rave scene by storm in 1988. Later on, as dance music took on a harder edge we saw the coming of hard Detroit techno and Underground Resistance, who offered us experimental but highly danceable tracks soaked in acid, such as Seawolf (UR 12-released 1992), a really driving track with several overlaid acid lines. What had become very apparent was the versatility and consequent inventive possibilities attached to this little box. This was also being exploited in the UK a couple of years earlier by LFO with their release of the same name on the eponymous IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) label Warp, later to host such trailblazers as Autechre et al.

So, perhaps the 303 was a fad that would start losing energy in after ten years or so of use? Far from it, in the mid nineties the UK started developing it's own unique acid techno sound. It should be noted that there was a lot of acid techno about before this, from Underground Resistance to Outlander and many others besides. Producers in the UK like Chris Liberator and Guy McAffer (sorry to all those I left out, there are lots!) took up the acid soaked torch and continued to develop this ravey sound in to a rising tranced out sound where the acid sound was used to create a euphoric build up, albeit based on a hard pounding beat usually between 140 and 160 bpm (beats per minute). Some of my early favourites include Glass Ball by Rebel Yelle and London Acid City by Lochi. At the same time and a little earlier the acid sound was utilised by people with a much harder and darker sound from the free party scene, like Spiral Tribe. UK acid techno quickly became darker and harder too. So, the 303 continued to be used to invent and push boundaries, being used in many other genres of dance music in an increasingly subtle and less squelchy way. It has continued to this day, enjoying a considerable rebirth in the genre Acid with such artists as Ceephax Acid Crew on the IDM label Reflex. I watched a documentary recently about the 303 (see below for a link) that pointed out its uses in even pop music, such as Ray of Light by Madonna, so next time you're listening to some pop that seems a little dance music influenced see if you can hear that tell tale squelch...

The 303 has been a massively fortunate accident then. I think what allowed this was experimentation on the part of the early pioneers, in the very way that created techno as a genre; it's versatility in creating a huge selection of noises that are to a greater or lesser extent experimental sounding; and its involvement in the explosion of dance music that took place in the late eighties and in many ways never really ended fully. One thing I've always thought is interesting about the 303 is its ability to concentrate on high piercing frequencies whilst apparently doing something low pitched at the same time. Perhaps this is my imagination or the outcome of multiple acid lines, someone with a better technical knowledge will have to enlighten me. The 303 actually went out of production pretty quickly but was relaunched as basically a 303 sample box (although by all accounts very effective) which had similar tweaking abilities and was called the MC 505 Groovebox and is now emulated by software like ReBirth created by Propellerhead. It seems amazing that an overly complex bass synthesizer has brought me so much joy, but the world is full of many lovely accidents.  

I'd just like to take a moment to apologise for the countless artists, labels and such that I've left out. I could probably bang on about this for 10,000 words, but alas life has other ideas. 

I've just put a few interesting links and artists below.

A documentary about the box in question.

An interview with Chris Liberator on Pheonix FM, a really interesting description of the coming of UK acid techno in its modern form:

http://www.graybo-photo.com/podcasts/phoenix/080113_Podcast.mp3

A mix of classic acid house tracks that made me want to write this.

A far from exhaustive list of some UK acid techno tracks I like

Fat Arse - D.A.V.E. the Drummer

New Wave of Acid Techno - Lochi

Santa Pod - Crash'n'Burn

Barbed Wire 303 -  D.A.V.E. the Drummer

Clawhammer - Temperature Drop 

Neurodancer -  Wippenberg

Glass Ball - Rebel Yelle

London Acid City - Lochi

Even if Now She's Got a Perm-Lawrie Immersion and Rowland the Bastard

Control - Secret Hero

Right, I wanted to post this, there's still lots I want to add in terms of tracks, I'll return for an edit later. 

Thanks for reading!

Bonkers Music of the Week

This week I want to tell you about another fantastic website I like very much. It's a website founded by a collective of musicians and music lovers, much of it coming from dance music but of the very underground variety. It's run by Ill FM, which is an internet radio station that you can also listen to at this address. I first heard of Ill FM through Pitchless, a sound system that played a fair bit in London at various underground events. They always interested me because their ethos seemed to be more to play what was odd, interesting and often downright bonkers rather than to stick to a genre or pure concentration on floor filling. A sort of avante garde rave soundsystem, I always thought. As you can imagine Ill Fm has aired many weird and wonderful sets over the years and, once again, they're all available for download here at zero cost. I'll be coming back to this favourite of mine in later posts.

There is one particular bonkers set that I've been listening to of late. It's a Terra Audio set and can be found by searching the archives sections for this: PITCHRAD #13 - TERRAAUDIO - REVERSE23
I'm not entirely sure how to describe this. It's a strange mixture of international music, noise and general ambient chaos. It's a bit like an experimental speedcore act doing a chill out room.
Anyway, here's a quotation from the artist introducing the set:
"Following the course of an underground river as it veers through the stars contained in the DNA of each cell of our bodies, the invisible night life and sensory apparatus of an otter's dreams merge off the sett in hologramophonic delight. From Shaolin to Drexciya we're planning our escapes. The process begins with an initial breath..."
So that rather interesting description should give you a taste of the esoteric nature of this mix. 

The Ill FM site is located at:

http://www.illfm.net/

I hope you enjoy this website as much as I do.

Bonkers Food of the Week

Hello again, I thought I'd continue my bonkers posts. They amuse me.

Today I want to tell you about some bonkers food, and not bonkers in a good way. This food truly is from the kitchen of Satan. I feel to truly communicate the full atrocious horror of this culinary curse I must set the scene a little...

So me and my lovely girlfriend Celia were on holiday in Xiamen in China (better known to us ex-imperialist westerners as Amoy) and having a walk around the pedestrianised island of Gulangyu. It was a lovely September day in late summer, hovering around the 30C mark and bathing us in balmy South China Sea sunshine, we'd eaten a lot of truly delicious food on our stay in a town replete with a vast array of fresh seafood. As you may have guessed I am apt to take an adventurous attitude to food. Sometimes so adventurous as to be a little like if a Kamikaze pilot decided to become a food taster. Needless to say this means I'm always on the lookout for weird and wonderful things. Thus it was that we spotted a fried article being sold on a roadside stall. It was a conical thing that had the look of a giant potato croquette, so to us it seemed like a win-win situation, a new and interesting food that surely must be delicious as it was fried and most likely savoury, perhaps even full of marine delights. Of course we had to try it.

The savoury assumption was reinforced by the lady smothering said apparent delight with ketchup. Yum, fried thing with ketchup, my favourite. So now we were ready and we both sank our teeth into this delicious treat. And then it happened. The possession. As I bit into it the crunchy texture and ketchup gave way to... Ice cream! Yes, ice cream. Suddenly the barmy surrounding darkened and my being was overwrought by a sensation of pure culinary dread. I will remind you that I am a man who will happily eat a fried spider and then say it just tasted a little too spidery by way of reaction. This food was no normal bonkers creation, it was a true collision of inappropriate tastes. It was like the hordes of Beelzebub himself had cottoned onto fusion cooking. Thankfully the taste was quickly exorcised from my tortured mouth by something altogether delicious from another stall, for Xiamen truly is full to the brim with tasty marine treats. I do not recommend this oddity to anyone who is faint of heart or, quite possibly, not from the seventh circle of hell.

I'm not sure what this conical food of Satan is called and I'm not sure if I want to find out. Perhaps someone braver than me can go out there and taste one again and find out the name. Personally, I think I'll stick to deep fried soft shell crab from now on.

Thanks for reading and please don't have any nightmares.

Bonkers Music of the Week

So, this being a music and food blog I should obviously do a bonkers music of the week post too. I want to introduce you to an old favourite of mine that is no longer being updated but is still available. Take a look at http://www.spannered.org/ which specialises in bizarre mixes from DJs like DJ Bus Replacement Service who apparently "travels to the end of the internet to assemble another platter of freshly polished audio turds". Er, yes, quite. I really like 'Nam Shub's Spannered Sitars', a mixture of electro and crazy sitar covers of, amongst other artists, Nancy Sinatra. Odd and highly listenable. There are various mixes by Jerome Hill, founder of the Don't record label and probably one of the most eclectic DJs I've ever listened to. Given how varied his sets usually are you can imagine how nuts some of it gets on a website that specialises in providing us with "audio turds" and "the audio equivalent of ice cream with pickled onions". There are also mixes by Kid Kameleon (mad mash up stuff), The Heatwave (a Bristol dancehall mash up outfit) and Bobby Corridor (a hip hop selector), amongst many others. One of my old favourites is this mix (http://www.spannered.org/radio/1357/) by Word the Cat, a highly interesting mixture of bass focused music and, at one point, Nepali lok pop. I said it before and I'll say it again: er, yes, quite. There are also some more normal mixes, albeit still very different and well selected for a really individual sound, these include various hip-hop, dancehall and dance music mixes that come from slightly closer to the Milky Way. 

If you like it odd and interesting I definitely recommend getting yourself there and downloading the 100+ tracks and mixes. Oh and, by the way, they're all free! Oh yeah. Thank you Spannered. 

Right, so please feel free to add some of your own oddity finds in the comments box. 

Bonkers Food of the Week

As I'm into esoteric stuff and generally like the more odd side of things I thought I'd start a new little weekly feature. I'm going to put one kind of food which struck me as unusual. Some will be utterly bonkers and some, like this one, just a little unusual. I'd really love it if people can add some of their own finds in the comments box, I always like to be introduced to odd things I've never heard of.

Anyway, so in my house we often eat sweet potatoes but we always cook too many. For this reason we decided to make sweet potato brownies. Right, so I also said "bleeeeurgh!" when I heard this, but they're actually really delicious and sweet, whilst being healthier (I assume) than the standard chocolate variety. It's actually a recipe from the Guardian. Here is the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/19/sweet-potato-brownies-recipe-lepard
They're very easy to make and very tasty, perhaps surprisingly so.

So, not very bonkers this week, but I'll try a little harder next week.

Thanks for reading and please add your own ideas in the comments, I'd love to hear them.

Malatang or pick and mix soup

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, but you know how it is, food to overeat, drink to overdrink as per usual at this time of year. Anyway, after writing my post about my favourite noodle joint I thought I should treat the more cosmopolitan food lovers out there to a description of another uniquely Chinese favourite of mine. This is something I don't believe will ever be successfully introduced here because of its complete disregard of anything even vaguely health and safety orientated, but there's a certain charm to China's somewhat ironically anarchic disregard for our kind of obsessively beauraucratic nit picking. Well, it does exist, but it's a lot easier to just ignore. Anyway, I digress.

The mysterious and steamy broth.

Today I want to tell you about Malatang, a lovely and cheap delight to be found on many a street corner in the Middle Kingdom. Malatang is a bit hard to translate as the 'mala' flavour doesn't really exist outside of East Asia, but it roughly translates as 'spicy and numbing soup'. Tang is simply the word for soup and mala means a spicy numbing flavour derivative of lots of Sichuan pepper and some other stuff (search me, perhaps one of my Chinese friends will leave a comment). The base of the food is a spicy and numbing stock and the rest is up to you. You'll recognise Malatang places from the massive metal cauldron belching out steam and the fridges full of various fresh and frozen Chinese things, anything from bean curd to squid to greens to those fried breadstick things you get (I saw you can buy them in China town in London now) to quail's eggs to... I could go on. What you do is go up, take a basket with a number on, fill up your basket with whatever you desire and give it to the nice man or woman by the cauldron. They then dump all your ingredients into an individual basket in the boiling brown stock of doom, which gets reused all day (possibly longer, I'll look into the possibility of carbon dating upon my return to China). To those of you who are squeamish, get over it, you're really missing out on a delicious stock that is at boiling point all day anyway, it's really delicious as long as the establishment hasn't gone too crazy with the mala flavour.

The fridges of magical Chinese ingredients.

This food takes a bit longer than some Chinese foods, so it could be anything up to six minutes, maybe even seven if it's busy. However, when it comes you're treated to an enormous bowl of soup for anywhere between about 5 and 20 kuai (50p-£2), you can usually then go and help yourself to as much fresh garlic, chilli, mala spice and chopped up spring onion as you like. It's a marvellous dish, essentially a pick and mix soup, it's also a great option if you're new to China as obviously you don't really need to be able to speak Chinese because it's all self-service. For anyone living in Hangzhou my favourite was opposite EF East school just south of Jiefang-Jianguo lu kou on the left, really nice broth and friendly staff, beer for 3 kuai a pop too, don't listen to the unbelievers, it's much better than the one by the hospital. Right, that's it for now, I hope I haven't made you too ravenous.