Rough Trade Shops annual review of the year – the 2 CD Counter Culture 2010 – just out. Essential purchase of course – just like CC 2002, CC 2003, CC 2004, CC 2005, CC 2006, CC 2007, CC 2008 and CC 2009 – but possibly the least inspirational in the truly wonderful series so far. More evidence that 2010 might be the weakest musically of the 21st Century so far? ’Dust Shuffle’ (featured here) from the very very good Brian Eno album, ‘Small Craft On A Milk Sea’, is however a gem.

Brian Eno has a reputation for being a very clever man who thinks far more about his music than most of his peers do. He could almost be regarded more as a musical scientist than a typical musician or – God forbid – Rock Star. And with all these preconceptions comes the suspicion that everything he does musically must be pre-planned and thought-out in immaculate detail before he ever picks up an instrument or touches a dial on the mixing desk.

In fact, in many ways, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, he deserves the ‘egg-head’ moniker he’s sometimes given because he does intellectualise and pontificate about his music (and other people’s) more than most musicians or producers will ever do in one lifetime. But the result of all this intellectulising is, paradoxically, not some kind of pre-planned blueprint, detailing exactly how his music should take shape or should sound. Instead, if he plans anything, it’s how to allow randomness into, and to, shape, his music.

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We encountered Caribou and their Rough-Trade-album-of-the year, ‘Swim’, earlier (see ABON 0120). ‘Swim’ is a wonderfully original mixture of thought-provoking ideas and left field dance rhythms. Written and performed by a genuine Dr of Mathematics, it - very appropriately you may think – sets out to prove that music can make you dance and think at the same time.

Whilst it’s not the first record to do that, ‘Swim’ doesn’t have many obvious historical reference points. In fact it doesn’t sound much like anything that has gone before.

Except of course for A Certain Ratio’s early Post-Punk icey Funk.

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This might just be the most significant 2 minutes 27 seconds of music that has been posted on ABON so far. Because…

Back in the late ’60′s Jamaican DJ’s fronting the enormous, and enormously loud, Sound Systems that toured the island started ‘toasting’. Which involved ad-libbing over the rhythm and in between the singing on the 7″ hit singles they were playing. U-Roy was one of these DJs.

At some point around 1968 he met the then unknown King Tubby who was a disc cutter and engineer at Duke Reid’s studio. Duke Reid ran the Treasure Isle label which was producing many of the hit singles U-Roy would have been playing at Sound System parties. King Tubby of course had access to the rhythm tracks that sat behind the vocals on these singles. And he started experimenting with these tracks – producing what would turn out to be the forerunners of Dub. He also started to give these tracks to DJs like U-Roy to toast over live.

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It seems such a simple and straightforward idea…I have something I want to say. So I write some words that I believe will convey my message and set it to some music I’ve written. And then my audience listen to my song and absorb the message and the emotions that I intended when I wrote my lyrics.

And then Brian Eno and David Byrne – rock stars who should surely be out partying not discussing philosophy – come along and tell me I’ve got it all completely wrong and that it just isn’t that simple or linear at all.

And they may be right. Talk to any two human beings with working ears (and that’s not easy to define for a start) and you quickly realise that no two people get exactly the same meaning or emotions from the same song. So the meaning that a song conveys must be at least partly defined by the listener and not completely by the song writer.

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On the surface Wire are just another Punk group from 1977 playing angry, loud, fast, short songs. But scrape only a millimetre under that surface and you realise how completely wrong that assumption is. Maybe naming their debut album ‘Pink Flag’ was the first big clue that things weren’t going to be quite as they first seemed.

Wire were really a fantastical art project. Closer in attitude and spirit to Brian Eno than, say The Clash. Their raison d’etre was to create new, radical music through a mixture of serious artistic experimentation and often quite funny game-playing. So when they temporarily became a 3-piece after one member dropped out for a while it was no real surprise that they changed their name to Wir. And then back to Wire when he re-joined.

In fact the only completely consistent thread throughout their 25 year on-and-off existence has been that every single song they’ve recorded is not quite as it first seems.

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