I hate Twitter. That living your life online ish isn’t for me. Tucking self-promotion between tweets about how good your Cornflakes taste and how you feel about sitting on a bus in traffic jars my spirit….I still use it though. And as much as it pains me to say it, I have to admit its not all bad because it’s thanks to a tweet from the Brownswood BPM that I found out about Bookworms.

His bumpy yet hypnotic re-imagining of Mi Ami’s African Rhythms is currently smacking up the real and virtual worlds and his dense, unreleased dubs have rumbled their way onto the playlist of Ms Mary Ann Hobbs more than once over the past year. With our current wave of hot beat producers, you’d be forgiven for thinking Mr Worms is yet another fresh-faced talent jostling for position in the Bass Music marketplace….not so. He’s been doing this for a minute.

“…since around the year 2000, I was 17 years old…making beats on PlayStation recording to boom-box. The first music I ever let anyone hear was a couple Bjork remixes I uploaded to this old website called bjorkremixweb. This was around 2000. Then I produced and worked with some punk and hard-core bands who met through friends from high school. I also made beats for a couple mc’s from around the way. Around 2003 I got really into making my own beats and instrumentals, mostly because other people were too hard to work with…I guess you could say it was a natural progression.”

Although other artists proved hard to work with, it would seem Bookworms has no problems making friends with different genres. Listen to any one of his original productions or remix efforts and you’ll hear traces of Punk/Rock, Hip Hop, Detroit Techno,Disco, Dubstep and Experimental Electronica all present, all correct and all somehow managing to compliment one another.

“My dad was really into stuff like Talking Heads,Brian Eno, Elvis Costello and Jazz. The first music I started buying was random Punk CDs, because I would hear those bands in skate videos. When I started high-school I got into Wu-tang and Drum and Bass…Lately I have been into Detroit Techno, Gucci Mane, Arthur Russell and Kate Bush. I have also been feeling a lot of San Francisco based bands like Tussle, Mi Ami, Roche, Steve Summers, Yao, Lemonade and CB Radio.”

I need to know more about the San Francisco scene. There’s some hot music out there and by the looks of Bookworms’ discography, he’s busy remixing a lot of it. Lemonade are a San Fran based band who have been getting some hype this side of the water recently and sure enough, who do we find on their ‘RemixTape’…

“My ex girlfriend used to work at a used-clothing store in SF with the Callan from Lemonade, so we knew each other from around SF and going to shows. They’re cool dudes, we talked about it at a show and they sent me the files to remix ”

Talking to Bookworms it soon transpires that many of his links are a direct result of long nights spent listening to loud music on herbal foundations. Take the Solos label that’s put out his version of African Rhythms as a case in point.

“Solos is on some crazy shit, it’s electronic music. It’s all across the board. I met Roche at a warehouse party Solos was throwing in Berkeley, I wanted to smoke and he was rolling a blunt, so we smoked and then I gave him a CD. A week or so later he asked me if I wanted to put some music out with Solos. The rest is history.”

Probing further, I discover that sadly, not all of Bookworms night-time trips have such a happy ending

“…back in about 2006 I went to Big Sur, California for this weird show where San Francisco bands Tussle, Brookhaven, Lemonade and the Drift were playing. Now Big Sur is way out in the woods and nature so I was a bit out of my element and it was hella dark….to cut a long story short I end up jumping off a motor home into the darkness and spraining my ankle really bad outside the show…not a good way to end the night…”

We feel you on that one…moving on to happier times we’ll focus on the music, or rather how Bookworms would like it to be received.

“I would like people to listen to my music on headphones while riding around a medieval city on Tron light -bikes. I am trying to expose parallels between sounds and samples and styles of music. I hope to share that with others.”

Shared it he has. Sounds to me that he’s read a little too much Sci Fi though. Well I guess with a name like Bookworms you can’t fault the brother for hitting the books…

“I like Simple Takes A Wife by Langston Hughes… anything by Isaac Asimov and [I read] lots of Sci-Fi end of the world stuff when I was younger..Reading helps me come up with names for songs…sometimes.”

DOWNLOAD BOOKWORMS’ HEADS HIGH PODCAST

DOWNLOAD AFRICAN RHYTHMS

DOWNLOAD LEMONADE’S REMIXTAPE

Bookworms Live @ Lipo 07/06/09 from Solos Records on Vimeo.

Bookworms’ Discography

Remixes:

Finest Dearest – Slow Going (Bookworms Rmx)
Brookhaven – Something Must Remain Of Us (Bookworms Rmx)
Brookhaven – Static In The Valley (Bookworms Rmx)
Mi Ami - How Can I (Bookworms Rmx)
Mi Ami – African Rhythms (Bookworms Rmx)
Lemonade - Sunchips (Bookworms Rmx)

LP’s, EP’s and singles

Bookworm Kills (Demo cassette)
The Hidden Staircase LP (Solos Records)
Mandarine Hits CD (Expel Records)
Folks: Remixes (Self released)
African Rhythms CD (Solos Records)

Links

Bookworms Myspace

Bookworms Blog

Solos Records

Big respect to Bookworms for his time, energy and exclusive Podcast!

A singer, self-taught guitarist, painter, writer and musical pioneer, Lizzy Mercier Descloux was special. Her sound, like that of her No Wave peers, occupied the space between Punk and Funk. It was her expansion of that space that made her so unique. Sounding more like a softly spoken beat poet than a singer, Lizzy chanted, scatted and chatted over effect-laden rhythm tracks composed of minimal, single note guitar lines, off-key harmonies and rhythm sections oozing with funk. To begin with at least, the people weren’t ready. Like Albert Ayler’s Free Jazz formations of the early 60’s or J Dilla’s late 90s MPC musings, Joe Public and Ian Industry slept….thankfully though, they woke up.

A Paris native, Lizzy made the transatlantic jump to New York in the mid 70s. Starting as she meant to go on, she published ‘Desiderata’ (a collection of poems and photographs), bought a Fender Jazzmaster guitar, starred in the New Cinema short ‘Blank Generation‘ and eventually recorded a six-track mini LP for the cult legend ZE Records under the moniker Rosa Yemen in 1978. Rosa’s low-key Punk Funk stylings invited comparisons to fellow No Wavers ‘Mars‘, but the release showed few signs of the genius that was ahead of her.

The real gold came with the release of her ‘Press Color‘ long player in 1979. The album is simply off the chain. Now, I was born in 1979 and waited almost twelve years to experience genres whose seeds can be found germinating on Press Color. LP cuts like ‘Hard Boiled Babe‘ and ‘Birdy – Num -Num‘ are mind blowing. The former sounding like a pre digital Burial/Sbtrkt cut with French accented vocals while the latter presents an eerily pitched jazz workout punctuated by double time, proto Drum & Bass rhythms. Heat.

Predictably, LMD found little fame with her 1979 offering. Despite its artistic calibre, ‘Press Color’ was barely distributed in the U.S.. The true light of her work managed to shine through however and a tour of the States and Europe grabbed the attention Island Records supremo, Chris Blackwell resulting in the tropical funk of ‘Mambo Nassau‘.

Recorded in the Bahamas at Blackwell’s Compass Point Studios and crediting one Wally Badarou with co-writing and production, Mambo Nassau married the futuristic Punk Funk of Press Colour with subtle African/Caribbean musical constructions and hyper energetic equatorial vibes. Although not as hard-edged as it’s predacessor (which is natural when you exchange the NY skyline with the Bahamas coastline), Mambo Nassau still has it’s fair share of noteworthy moments. Highlights include the synth driven syncopation of ‘Five Troubles Mambo‘, the melancholic stepping of the Bob Marley cover ‘Sun Is Shining‘ and the Pidgin Funk of ‘Lady O’K'pele‘. Lizzy had been closely studying ‘World Music’ collections issued on the french Ocora label and it’s no accident that the Mambo Nassau LP bears the hallmark of an artist who was looking beyond the Western preoccupation with funk, soul and rock. Again, success was elusive under the star spangled banner but this time Lizzy’s efforts were appreciated in Europe, with her home country’s CBS office adding her to their roster. The people had woken up.

Clearly the ‘World Music’ bug (World Music was a term which was yet to come into existence) had bitten LMD hard. 1983 saw her exploring the African continent, beginning in Ethiopia and culminating in South Africa. Naturally, she recorded an album on her travels, it’s title track ‘Mais où Sont Passées les Gazelles‘ becoming a surprise hit in France and despite being three albums deep in creation, it is this track that remains her signature piece to the European market. It peaked at number 30 in the French charts and it’s international focus somehow managed to alter the course of French Pop music from that point onward.

From here on in we complete a familiar story. The sequence is this:

1. Artist offers up some truly inspirational forward thinking creativity. The people sleep.

2.Artist continues to do so, the people sleep but some take it on.

3. Artist’s output loses some of its original magic but the people are now awake and lauding his/her present offerings with praise.

4. Artist ‘peaks’ in the mainstream sense and continues to create work which gradually falls into obscurity again, but this time without the quality that characterised their early releases.

In Lizzy’s case, this ‘post-peak’ period saw her working with Chet Baker on her 1985 offering ‘One For The Soul‘ and linking up with old peers from her No Wave days Mark Cunningham and Constance Burg for her final release, 1988’s ‘Suspense‘. There is also rumoured to be an unreleased album of her work recorded in 1995.

At the end of her recording career, Lizzy settled in Corsica and revisited her old loves, painting and writing, completing a novel ‘Buenaventura’ which is as yet unpublished. Sadly, in 2003 she was diagnosed with a cancer which proved terminal when she left our realm in on 20th April 2004. It is said that two Dolphins surfaced as her ashes were scattered into the sea off the coast of Saint Florent, Corsica. The Dolphins knew too…

Needless to say, the very fact I am writing this shows both my admiration and gratitude for the influence her work has had. I am happy that compliation projects like Strut’s ZE 30 and Soul Jazz’s New York Noise are doing what the re-issues of her early work failed to and shine a broader beam on a truly inspirational pioneer. An artist who was immersed in punk and yet never conveyed any anger in her work, instead presenting a child-like wonder of the world, its cultures and possibilities. I’ll leave the last words to punk icon Richard Hell with whom Lizzy worked on her ‘Desiderata’ book:

“At 17 she was more sophisticated than anyone I’d known, while also seeming utterly unaffected. Or at least her affectations came from such a stubborn confidence and will to defy convention that they were irresistible.”

Click Here to listen to Duke Etienne’s latest Afro/Two-Step/Funky/Aquacrunk/Soul selection which kicks off with LMDs ‘Hard Boiled Babe’… and see below for Lizzy Mercier Descloux’s unrivalled discography.