Space Rock

There will always be someone else on Flickr who not only shares your obsessions but has beautifully photographed and catalogued them (cf - an English Modernist Suburbia Pool, groups dedicated to rotting bus stations). Looking up photographs of Skinner, Bailey and Lubetkin's Dorset Estate in Bethnal Green, with its tower blocks built around intricate, essentially functionless staircases, grand cantilevered entrances and decorated on the outside with panels based on Caucasian carpets, I found the photograph above - which in turn was part of a flickr group called 'Unknown Pleasures - Post-Punk Aesthetic'. The other contributions cleave to a much more predictable Robert Smith style, but the connection between the sonic space and Piranesian place is clear enough, the confirmation that of course you can dance about architecture.

On the tenth floor, down the back stairs, into no man's land

I'm not going to write about Joy Division - others have done it better than I ever will - but the figure most often cited when people talk about this intersection of space and rock, Martin Hannett, for taking all the lyrical signposts and adding their synaesthetic, spatial counterparts. There's a record out now of his 'personal mixes' of various JD tracks, taking it to Beatles Anthology levels of archivism. The original recording of the tower block lift, the doors clanking shut and the popping noise as it begins its descent. The synth tones and broken glasses isolated from their context, making them acutely eerie. All these empty spaces, free of their usual decoration with shards of metallic sound. Hannett space can actively work against any 'message'. Basement 5's 'No Ball Games' derides tower block 'modern living' (yeah, let's yearn for Victorian terraces! Punk rock!) but Hannett makes it into space of compelling trepidation, evoking the sublime terror felt overlooking a flyover from a system-built balcony. There's a dub version of the Basement 5 LP in which it becomes even more blasted and beautiful, begging the question of why he never got to do this with anyone else.



I've been listening compulsively to all manner of minor Hannett productions lately - those wan second-rank groups on Crepuscule or Factory Benelux that get reissued on the invaluable LTM, all given the obligatory Saville sleeve and Martin makeover. In theory, the more blank the slate, the more Hannett should have been able to do with the sound, as in all the stories of records being returned to the band in an unrecognisable state, after the producer ostensibly spent his time asleep under the mixing desk. Section 25's Always Now is one of the most anemic sounding records ever made, a diaphanous drone of rote postpunk with peculiar mantric tendencies worked into a sound of elegantly catatonic prettiness - unidentifiable noise always somewhere in the mix, the sound of crowds muttering between tracks. Sometimes it becomes so ornate and ornamented that you can hear a band utterly overwhelmed, the baroque productions for The Names occasionally conjuring something glorious, more often sounding like ideas unworthy for their end use. The fragments of what could have been perfect collaborations - 'Procession' for Nico, backing her medievalist harmonium laments with glittering, queasy effects.



down a web of cracks, like twisted veins
a stranger... calls my name between the rollerama and the junk yard
where the panorama looks like Mars
and the belladonna looks like stars
behind the Panamanian bars
in the dying gardens... down below
walking together in the purple snow.

Perhaps the most impressive meeting of environment and sonic space was for John Cooper Clarke, who as a non-musician left the producer even able to do whatever he liked. 'Belladonna' is the most seductive evocation of these spaces of despair and dilapidation - a curtain-wall of sound with the dull ache of a swelling bruise, where the flip equation of this bleakness as a place to escape from is totally reversed: the idea of a crumbling concrete shopping centre like a Joy Division record starts to become sensualised and psychedelicised into something desirable, in which you can wallow, as if you'll uncover something precious in the wasted spaces.