Damn Everything but the Circus

Freeform Five, "No More Conversations" (Richard X remix)
Pete Shelley, "Homosapian" (Martin Rushent dub)

To say that I'm looking forward to the gigantic wad of Richard X looming large on the horizon is something of a heroic understatement; lesser cases of blue balls have led honorable men to fuck sheep. I mean, lord knows the man's due - to follow up a year as impeccably pristine as X's 2005 (a year in which he managed to not only come up with songs as good as MIA's "10 Dollar" or his remix of New Order's "Jetstream" or his magnificent silk-pursification of Gwen Tedious-Assed Stefani's "Cool, but also to emphatically top them all in one go) by laying in the cut for months on end is the stuff bell-tower shootings are made of, especially when said cut-laying is interrupted by cryptic allusions to collaborations with Annie and mysterious Americans and THE MOTHERFUCKING PET SHOP BOYS, I MEAN FUCK. Every day that the new stuff doesn't leak is like realizing your girlfriend just slipped out of the bathroom window and left you lying in bed gearing up to think about baseball.

I realize that some people may think that my, let's call it, "insane, blithering fandom" of Mr. X may be something of an affectation, a way to enthusiastically pass the time before I get older and/or hang myself. I cannot emphasize the vast distance between this viewpoint and the truth strenuously enough; Richard X really is the guy who made music make sense to me in a way that only maybe three or four other artists working in my lifetime can lay claim to, in spite of the fact that he basically writes a lot of music engineered to make beautiful women sound anxious and sad about their romantic lives. I mean, yes I hang out with a bunch of indie-rock dorks in real life, and yes I grew up in the 1990s, so yes I'm familiar with the idea that music can/"should" have substance that you can relate to, and as a result yes I'm well aware that "Chewing Gum", overwhelming in its awesomeness though it may be, doesn't have a thing to do with me and therefore I just "like" it in that most ephemeral, least legitimate way imaginable. I am many types of idiot, but I'm not the type that's ignorant to all that.

It's just that I don't give a fuck, because (a) liking music is severely underrated, even in today's post-Fluxblog daily-Pitchfork-singles-column "Since U Been Gone"'d up world, and (b) I give Richard X an unfathomable amount of credit for making me aware of it, if only by sheer force of will. Mr. X makes music for the part of my brain that likes noticing weird shit going on in the background of movies, mostly by making absolutely no concessions to people who want That Shit-Hot Newness or whatever - his mix of "No More Conversations", for instance, probably only sounds remarkable in the macro sense if you never picked up an issue of Mixmag five years ago, because I could probably point you towards some rigid, love-the-maching house music older than your little cousin that absolutely slays it from a formalist standpoint which WAIT COME BACK I STILL GOT SOME JOKES ABOUT THE KILLERS IN A MINUTE I SWEAR.

My point, as it were, is that none of that shit matters with a great Richard X track - not that they're impossible to evaluate critically, of course (lord knows the "No More Conversations" remix has to rank up there with the best Latin freestyle-influenced records of recent years to say the very least), but rather that the pleasures that a great Richard X track has to offer up have nothing to do with placement on any continuum whatsoever. I mean, I suppose it's possible to come at all those sickening stereo pans and vocal cuts and "You Spin Me Right Round"-era basslines from a putting-this-into-a-continuum perspective, but it seems to me like doing so might just get in the way of actually enjoying them, which is only slightly the motherfucking point. Richard X songs don't work like DFA songs, by which I mean you shouldn't have to figure out if/how much you like them - you're just supposed to listen to them and either enjoy them or not. And while this may sound, let's say, "a little" oversimplified, it's actually quite the little trick to accomplish; these days pop audiences are so in love with the idea of "listening" being a meaningful act that they have an easy time missing out on the artistry of stuff simply put there to engorge the senses. I mean, God only knows how true that is for me.

That being said, "No More Conversations" might not be the best example of this particular ethos; it is, after all, basically just a pop-dance song, and being surprised to discover exsquisite show-offy flourishes in a pop-dance song is just about the quickest way to reveal your stupidity short of asking who put all that water in the ocean. Fortunately for all God's children, a few years ago Mr. X decided to contribute a disc to the Back To Mine series, and in doing so accidentally came up with one of the most compelling pieces of music it's ever been my privilege to buy. It's not that the mixing's all that great (though it kinda is) or even that the selected songs are all that great (though they really are) - it's that the Back to Mine disc is as effortless a document about liking music as you're ever likely to stumble across, or at the very least a more adept one than anything I'll ever be capable of writing. And while this may be something of a gimme in favor of the disc (insert old-n-busted quotes about dancing about architecture here), it's still worth pointing out, because I've heard some mix CDs in my day and none of them touch Mr. X's "casual one-off". They don't even come close.

Not to pick up on a theme from earlier in the week or anything, but I'd really like to make it clear that I think it's important that it's not possible to listen to music in a vacuum, that by listening to and enjoying music, you're actually making a point, albeit a particularly juvenile point that'll only get you laid if you're a scuzzy advantage-taking roofie-slipping reprobate to begin with. As a result, a lot of the time I listen to mix CDs and get overwhelmingly tired; there's just so much effort being made to be correct, to distill your entire consciousness down to an artistic, aesthetic singularity and OH HOLD THE FUCK ON, YOU'VE ALREADY MADE IT THIS FAR. It's not like you don't know what I'm talking about; odds are pretty good that if you've ever listened to even one mix CD in your life, you can recall a couple of tracks that didn't serve any purpose other than simply keeping the thing going - in other words, songs you'd never expect to hear from anyone other than a DJ trying to maintain a particular level of energy in the mix. And while that's certainly not a negative thing, it's also not love - it's just being a man-whore.

The Back To Mine disc is categorically not like that. I mean, yes there are some songs on it that aren't as good as others, but there are musical through-lines for days on it - if you just want to listen to some crazy, distorted drum-machine programming, you can follow that the whole way through to the end of the disc, or if you'd rather, you can follow the synths as they get progressively more furious and uncompromising before reaching a raging climax with the Silures' still-unimpeachable "21 Ghosts", or or or. Most crucially, you can do this because these songs are on here for one reason only: Richard Fucking X likes how they sound. I mean, as a text, the Back to Mine disc has the kind of tantalizing contradictions more typically found in David Byrne-penned songs; it doesn't make logical sense, in other words, for a thin-assed Tiga remix of incidental music from Miami Vice to be the lead-in to a behemoth like "21 Ghosts", but it sure sounds allright. And it 's a ballsy move at best to open your techno dance mix with seven minutes of low-impact wistfulness; I've seen otherwise sane people flat-out lose interest. And, fuck, above and beyond anything else, it's an incredible statement to feature such a song as charged with meaning as Pete Shelley's "Homosapian" in a way that completely strips it of its sexual politics; I literally had to be told that "Homosapian" was actually Shelley announcing his homosexuality to the listening world, because lord knows its place in the Back to Mine mix came from Those Drums and Those Crashing Synths and Oh God That magnificent little stutter right before the chorus kicks off. No wonder I got all those weird looks back when I'd blast it as loud as possible on my car stereo with the windows down - a time, I might add, which stretches right up to my drive home from work today. Songs that sound this good should just be played as loud as fucking possible, no matter what they're about putting your dick into.

And that, children, is why the Back to Mine mix is one of the most compelling CDs I've ever bought as well as why Richard X makes the most compelling music on this planet: it's the kind of thing you get when someone is able to be both artfully specific about the stuff they like and smart enough to take it absolutely no further than that, and it's just the most liberating, invigorating attitude to have towards music that I could ever dream up. Every time I see the man's name on a track, it's like getting one of those "Do you like me/Check which box/Yes/No" notes that everyone other than me used to get in elementary school - simple, straightforward, unthreatening, unburdened by intention, and absolutely thrilling. I have to wonder about anyone who'd want anything else from their pop music. Well, except maybe Annie covering Suzi Q. Oh man, that'd rule.

(Click here to buy Freeform Five's Strangest Things, which comes with a bonus disc of remixes including the Richard X mix of "No More Conversations", from Amazon.co.uk)
(Click here to buy Richard X's Back To Mine from Amazon.co.uk)