I wish I'd remembered I had this; I might have liked to have listened to it some more. My records show I got it on my birthday eleven years ago, and it's got a "promotional copy — not for sale" sticker on the back. The mostly likely explanation of how I came by it is that it was a gift from Tim, though it's possible I was scouting in Jack's Records that day.
So, Jazz Satellites: it seems the theme that ties together the artists is that they're all orbiting Planet Jazz at various degrees. Sun Ra? Bien sur! Electric Miles, Ornette, Alice, Herbie — all present and correct. And a second track from Joe Henderson's Earth to add to the one we had three days ago.
Alongside this are a bunch that you wouldn't normally think of in the same sentence as jazz, like 23 Skidoo, The Pop Group. There I was in August saying that no one much remembers Slab these days, and, well, that's still true, but they were at least included on this mid-90s compilation, alongside people who are completely new to me: Norman Connors, Gill Mellé 16-17, Ui, Fat and Krakatau.
Sure enough, this selection is from the same Virgin Ambient Series that gave us The Music of Changes and Macro Dub Infection. It was compiled by Kevin Martin, with Simon Hopkins presiding again.
Special mention must be given to the graphic design of the album, which surpasses even Macro Dub Infection in utter crapness. The sleeve notes are literally illegible — which, to be fair, may be a blessing — but so are the credits, meaning I can't tell what contribution Bill Laswell made, and the reading list. Yes, there's a reading list. David Toop and Marshall McLuhan are on it; I can guess which books without having to decipher the tiny red font on green, grey and mauve backing. Looks like Philip Larkin is on it too, for All What Jazz. There was a rash of these analogue-digital-chaos-mathematics mash-up graphics in 1996 and 1997. Thankfully, and for obvious reasons, it didn't spread and now looks incredibly dated.
Postscript [because I actually wrote all the above yesterday, and then caught up with some further very relevant info today]: By happy coincidence, I just checked my favourite jazz blog, Destination:Out and found that Monday's posting there features the Stu Martin & John Surman collaboration that is also on Electrification, so if you head over there soon you can download a couple of tracks. (In fact, since the Songbird open source music player was released yesterday and makes playing music blogs beautifully simple and smooth, I've been playing a lot of the tracks on that site.)
But more than that, Destination:Out links to a much better informed account of this compilation than I could ever write. It reads in part,
Listening to the music and perusing the liner notes, one feels one is not only scavenging the album for relics of space age Jazz but also for the remnants of a mid-nineties aesthetic that has now become mummified. That aesthetic is that period's Mondo2000 cyberpunk optimism of limitless faith in technology, internet, psychedelia and smart drugs; it is that era's discourse which presented studio technology as a musical instrument in it's own right (while what is or is not a classified as a musical instrument is a semiological question); it is that era's discourse which reappraised Miles Davis's electrified psychedelic music, presenting that reappraisal as a return of the repressed and as a revolt against Jazz critic's orthodoxy; it is that time's particular music critic's writing style, a style which would find it's culmination in Kodwo Eshun's cult book More Brilliant Than The Sun.
I've got a copy of More Brilliant Than The Sun somewhere, and saw Kodwo Eshun speak three and a half years ago, which kind of put me off reading it.
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