9. CanTago Mago
I always thought I was someone who had broad tastes, then I met this group of people through music. I started attending this place called the Weekend Arts College and we had music workshops on a Saturday afternoon. So I met all these musicians who were around my age or a bit older, and they were phenomenal musicians and real music lovers. As I started hanging out with them I started to realise that my sense of broad taste was pretty limited. I have a memory of going to this guy’s house, and he’s a good four years younger than me, so at the time he must have been around 13 or 14. I went into his bedroom and he had this wall of records, and there was all this stuff that I’d never heard. I grew up listening to ’80s pop music, soul, funk, discovered jazz quite early on, and that seemed quite broad to me. Then I walk into the 14-year-old’s bedroom and he had Neil Young, Wu-Tang Clan, Ornette Coleman, Slayer, just such a broad range of stuff, and I was totally overwhelmed. So I became introduced to so much music through these people. It was just so liberating to realise that I didn’t have to belong to a camp; because I’m black it doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy Slayer. I think I knew that instinctively, but it was just really great to have that reaffirmed.
I just love that record. I can feel that it’s a group of musicians that are searching for something. OK, I guess the rhythm thing hits me really hard, the sound of those drums in particular. The experimental nature of it, it’s almost frightening in a really good and healthy way, because it feels like they’re trying to access something unconscious. Damo Suzuki is just so abstract in how it goes from mumbling to shrieks. It’s really intense. That stuff is quite funny in a way but I feel like there’s a real integrity in it, there’s really something extraordinary in that sound they created. That record in particular, it just gets progressively weirder and really abstract and textural, conventional rhythm disappears a bit but it’s such a journey. Also from a production point of view, that marriage of rhythm and texture I find myself always looking for in my own music.
It took me a while before I could make it all the way through ‘Peking O’.
That’s definitely a lights-on, in-company sort of track isn’t it? You don’t want to be alone and feeling a bit vulnerable and put that on. Not advisable.
