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Various
Artists – Childish Music (Staubgold) |
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Teetering
careless at the cutting-edge, the tiny Berlin-based Staubgold label seems
to have identified something rather interesting. The hows and whys are going
to have to be left to the cultural historians, but the fact is that an increasing
number of musicians have been independently exploring a sort of naïvety
in their work, and Staubgold’s response has been to release an eighty-minute
mix-tape, compiled by producer Ekkehard Ehlers and curated by musician and
music theorist David Toop, of twenty-five examples of ‘new music for
new children’ from artists as far afield as Germany, Scotland, France,
Japan, Australia, and the United States.
There’s a whole raft of issues being addressed here contingent on the
paradox of the adult’s interpretation of ‘childishness’: keywords
like ‘innocence’ tend to get attached to modifiers like ‘lost’,
turning childhood into a mythic Garden of Eden enshrouded in pre-sexual and
pre-alcoholic nostalgia. Whatever the reality behind this, there’s an
obvious attraction in listening, occasionally, to something that seems to
offer, even if only in a kind of tongue-in-cheeky way, a temporary reconnection
with those relatively uncomplicated times - a momentary holiday from grownup
cares and woes.
Childish Music sets out its stall quite unequivocally with an opening
track – Mika Bubble Sing by Fan Club Orchestra, which is a simple
little ditty composed around the sample of a baby blowing bubbles in the bath.
If you can’t handle cute, this seems to be saying, better leave now.
‘Cute’, however, only accounts for maybe a couple more tracks on
this entire compilation. The greater part of the album consists of more or
less experimental vignettes – short interludes, indeed, averaging barely
three minutes or so – whose common resource is xylophones, simple clapalong
four-in-a-bar rhythms, major keys, lots of repetition, and simplicity, and
whose common theme is a rather refreshing anti-pretentiousness, a deliberately
unsophisticated remix of substance as well as style into a more or less guileless
forum of honesty. It actually leaves each contributor quite exposed, which
deserves respect, at the very least.
There’s a clear distinction to be made – which this album doesn’t
– between music written for children and deliberately naïve
music written for grownups. The former is a minefield of sentimental assumptions
that, at its worst, is clichéd, patronising, and saccharine to the
point of upheaval. None of that here, thank goodness, although a couple of
tracks kind of mess with your head a little in that respect: Bernadette La
Hengst’s Meets Cybermohalla, for instance, seems to be a Hindi
Playschool romp – very strange. And the first time I heard World Standard’s
Tic Tac I was listening in the quality-challenged circumstances of
my in-car on-motorway CD player when, embarrassingly, I misheard the repetitive,
sweetly sung chorus of ‘like a clock, like a clock’ as ‘like
a fuck, like a fuck’, which lent to the piece the dark, knowing irony
of a club DJ flirting with kiddie porn allusions, thereby, once I learnt my
mistake, lending to the same track two henceforth unerasably confused readings.
The three Autopilot artists represented here – Anne Laplantine, F.S.Blumm,
and Guido Möbius – provide three particularly pleasing examples
of a sort of post-electronic thing that seems to be going on in this genre
– if it is a genre – that hints more at the arts of canon and fugue
than track-layering and copy/pasting: a reference, maybe, to that period in
the High Baroque when the only music written for children was instructional,
but, in the hands of such composers as Monteverdi, Purcell, and Bach, managed
to contrive to be as beautiful and resonant as it was didactic.
Very few artists are unaffected by the birth of their first child – someone’s
probably already released a compilation somewhere of the dozens of songs,
from Joni Mitchell’s Blue to Martin Dosh’s Naoise
inspired by that life-changing moment – and there are at least half-a-dozen
examples here of musicians working with samples of children’s voices
in one way or another. Asa-Chang & Junray’s Kobana is the
oddest by a mile: they’ve manipulated their child’s voice to sound
like a creepy Japanese Gollum muttering to itself on the edge of a campfire
as someone warbles on harmonica, blissfully unaware of this evil in their
midst, whilst someone else doodles on bored bamboo bongos in the background.
Child as Chucky.
La Grande Illusion’s Let’s Pretend, on the other hand, emerges
shyly out of a brief sample from George Harrison’s 1969 Here Comes
The Sun to work up one of those melodic spells that inject a seemingly
unremarkable two-bar piano melody so deep into your hippocampus that you end
up whistling it as you pull your socks on, clean your teeth, save the rainforests,
and synthesise the universal hangover cure. And still it just Will-Not-Go-Away!
Harald “Sack” Ziegler’s Ritterball also uses a child’s
voice, but here as a tantalizing prelude to some bizarre virtual performance
event whose opening gesture – a mournful trumpet fanfare - seems to have
been hijacked by a four-year-old’s stumbling over an open mic and enjoying
the effect of shouting into it. Quite operatic in effect if not in scale,
this enigmatic little piece is one of the less easily decoded contributions
to the compilation, and all the more satisfying for that.
As in any themed compilation, be it chill, Christmas, or childishness, there’s
bound to be a few indigestible lumps in the mix depending on your taste, and,
even moving from one listening session to another, what yesterday sounded
charming and fresh might today sound winsome and cloying. But hey, that’s
why the Great Sony gave us skip buttons, n’est-ce pas?
Whereas it addresses some quite challenging ideas about naïve music,
and provides a handy index for further explorations, Childish Music
is in itself an exhilarating sugar-rush dive into the collective toy-chest
of these twenty-five artists’ adroit regressions. If nothing else, it’s
a timely reminder that, by the same token truism that youth is wasted on the
young, playfulness was never, nor should ever be the prerogative of the child.
June 2005
