Sheffield - City on the Move

Came across this while looking at stuff for the Park Hill post. An amazingly well done documentary, with the perfect soundtrack, voiceover and choice of images. A reassuring and comforting exercise in public relations.. Sheffield, the city that inspires confidence and makes you sleep well at night.

Park Hill Sheffield

Park Hill, in front, and the Hyde Park development behind 

Built between 1957 and 1961, in a flurry of post-war optimism, brutalist behemoth Park Hill in Sheffield is Europe's largest listed building. The slums it was built to replace began to be cleared in the 1930s, but work stopped for the second world war before architects Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith started designing the flats in 1945.

Newspaper cutting from The Star, 15 Mar 1955 describing the new Park Hill Flat Scheme (from Sheffield Libraries and Archives)

It wasn't long before Park Hill had gotten a pretty bad name for drugs and crime (nicknamed San Quentin by residents) but is now being redeveloped so is likely to become a much nicer place to live (for those who can afford the redeveloped flats, I guess).

Brutalist archtitecture owes a big debt to modernist Le Corbusier, and more locally to the Smithsons, British architects from Sheffield and Teeside who were early proponents of raw, rough-hewn finishes, exposed workings and pipes. Modernist architecture at that time was so deeply idealistic. The attitude of the architects towards the people they were building for was unconsciously quite patronising but they did design buildings where they genuinely believed residents would have a better quality of life. After the mess of the second world war, these guys literally wanted to build a new Britain. In a programme on BBC Radio Four, one of the architects fully admitted that their motives were utopian, adding they wanted to forget the horrible things that had happened and wipe the slate clean. Misguided as their intentions may have been they were certainly a long way from the ensuing reality - the experience of people who ended up living there in the following decades as they became oppressively crime-ridden is pretty godawful. The buildings became rundown, damp infested and structural problems developed on top of the anti-social behaviour, lack of community and isolation.

The Smithsons, speaking at the International Congress of Modern Architects in 1953:

"'Belonging' is a basic emotional need- its associations are of the simplest order. From 'belonging'- identity- comes the enriching sense of neighbourliness. The short narrow street of the slum succeeds where spacious redevelopment frequently fails."

Ironic really coming from these guys, as they not only inspired Park Hill but Paul Smithson designed the hideous Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, one example of brutalist architecture guaranteed makes the heart sink and the bile rise.

In the clip below there's some nice footage of more 'mature' Park Hill residents talking about the tenements they lived in before - the intro is well naff though so skip straight on to about 0:55. 

OFF THE TRAXX (Catch That Train)

Well it's only a radio rip but it's worth a listen. Really quite big.

OFF THE TRAXX (Catch That Train)

Walter Gibbons

Walter Gibbons was a DJ/pioneer beatmatcher/etcetc producer legend etc etc. In the 1970s, he kicked it off by producing disco outfit Double Exposure's Ten Percent before going on to work with Loleatta Holloway, Salsoul and West End Records. He produced the above track, 'Moon Maiden' for the Luv You Madly Orchestra, and it's an absolutely incredible oddball disco track, with schizo layered rythmns and bonkers strings..

Strafe 'Set it Off' produced by Walter Gibbons



Strafe's Set It Off from 1984 is another track he's well known for producing.  House techno and electro blend somewhat easily - I'm utterly indifferent to the vocal myself, however i do love the laid-back but insistent drum track.. hypnotic. Anyway because of this one song he's been called a forerunner of Chicago house. Not hard to see why.


WG also produced a lot of Arthur Russel's releases, including one of the best AR tracks of all time, Schoolbell/Treehouse. If the rhythm track on Set it Off is going off, well this is literally some other planet. It starts intricate and switches up a lot but the drums just go off from about 7:00 and keep lopsidedly jogging their way through to the end of the track with a really cool manic energy.

Baku, Azerbaijan

photos from Yvan Rodic

L.I.E.S.

I bought a 12" by Willie Burns (snigger) on L.I.E.S. a little while back. I'd like to say I've bought all their releases since, but disorganisation and laziness have led me to haphazardly follow them on Soundcloud instead.

Fantasy MD is quite a nice track from the Willie Burns release. Built from pure Chicago components, although too slow and sweet to be a real jacker, it's the keen non-stop synth lines (sometimes they go back and forth like a conversation!) that makes this gentle-hearted track endearing. Key Horizon runs on a looped piano riff, and a a stabby synth line competes for attention. A solidly polite throwback track with mildly euphoric undertones  -  I know, I know, steady on.

L.I.E.S. stand out as a label because they're making really decent house in NYC. Other neat US House labels are Future Times from Washington DC and 100% Silk who are West Coast, and of course there's Chicago and Detroit. There's Jus Ed and Levon Vincent, and obviously they are pretty damn serious about house.. but outside their boutique set-up, there's not really labels released a variety of good stuff.. except now L.I.E.S. are here to save the day. Phew.

The label is masterminded by a guy called Ron who had some stuff to release, and his friends did too. He works at A1 records, which sounds like NY's answer to the Notting Hill Music and Video record shops. Anyhow, across the label's releases so far there is a mix of more and less dancefloory stuff but I guess it could be all be described as analog house, raw and lo-fi with lots of synths, handclaps and drum machines. Some of it is definitely not designated for dancefloors, but it's still great, atmospheric and woozy. It's interesting house. It's fun and it's got a nice personality, and an aesthetic that's left of centre and a bit vintage (well, back to the future).

I could have picked any of their tracks from Soundcloud but i especially liked this expansive technoish number from an earlier release. Soo good, be sure to listen.

Steve Moore-Frigia (L.I.E.S. 003)

Strange Attraction

Julian Henrique's Sonic Dominance (Part Two)

Obviously at the heart of dance music is a primal urge to dance, be transported away in the groove, etc – but it’s also an innocent urge, and a really pure one. (Tom Lea, interviewing Amanda Brown for FACT)


This quote from the really sweet and interesting interview with Amanda Brown is a nice and unpretentious way to sum up what JH gets to later in his essay 'Sonic Dominance' (continuing from my earlier post, part one). 


Henriques basically takes the fairly common sense idea that really loud music in dark rooms late at night is an entirely opposite experience to many of the things which make up everyday life. He couches it in intellectual terms, but anyone who's passionate about music has an understanding of the way it can take you out of yourself and give you a different bit of yourself back, leaving you moved around and realigned.. whether we articulate it to ourselves or not, it's certainly true. 

It's a different kind of knowledge, not a fact or kernal of intellectual knowledge that you can hold onto, but a physical knowledge which comes with letting go and letting the physical body live a bit more fully and freely. It's not a way of relating to oneself or the world which is valued at all in the rest of life.. which is kind of a shame, and goes a long way to explaining the cult of dance. 

Belgian New Beat

Kreem 'Triangle of Love' 1987

In honour of the reawakening of the colossus that is Metroplex, here's Kreem's Triangle of Love. It's early Detroit techno, obvs, credited to Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, A. Forest and J. Johnson. Highlights for me are the incredible Blue Monday-esque synth line and the total switch just before 5.00. A gorgeous bit of synthetic warmth.

I'm posting the dub mix, if you'd rather listen to the vocal it can be found here.

Kreem - Triangle of Love (Dub Mix)

(Thanks to The Beat)