mute records | 12"/cdv mute72 | 10/1989
| track listing
Ohi Ho Bang Bang was a collaboration
between Holger Hiller, Renegade Soundwave's
Karl Bonnie and video artist Akiko Hada.
The result of the collaboration was a 12” and CD-video for
Mute which is possibly also entitled Ohi Ho
Bang Bang, or maybe 'The Three' after the first track on each
format (I've elected to go with the latter, rightly or wrongly).
Whilst neither format is particularly specific by way of credits,
a little web research suggests that the music was created by Hiller
and Bonnie, while Hada was responsible for filming and editing the
video. If you read the Cross Platform pages of The Wire,
such collaborations between electronic musicians and video artists
are ten-a-penny today, but in 1989 such projects were scarce, or
confined to highbrow artist endeavours. The name of the collaboration
has a Disney-ish whiff, while 'bang bang' was military slang for
recreational activities of the mostly horizontal kind; overall,
the name for the collaboration has a percussive quality, something
that the music – and in particular the video – draws
out.
The three audio tracks are examples of late Eighties
plunderphonic sampling, Hiller and Bonnie lifting uncredited glam-rock
and jazz samples (including some Gene Krupa-esque drumming) to create
a dense, skipping sound world which swings with a pop insouciance.
These days, sampling tends to be an altogether more structured affair,
but in the late Eighties the technology was still in its relative
infancy, the results tending toward a juvenile grab-and-go reassembling
of pretty much anything you could get your hands on. The laws on
crediting samples in 1989 were also nowhere near as stringent as
they are today, meaning that you didn't have to clear any samples
that you used if they were under a certain number of seconds, allowing
tracks like those assembled here by Hiller and Bonnie to be constructed
more or less entirely from lifted sections from other records. Hiller
was an early exploiter of the sonic potential of the sampler, while
in Renegade Soundwave Karl Bonnie was used to nabbing large swathes
of other peoples' songs and crafting something new and brilliant
from the wreckage.
Of the three tracks here, 'The Three' is probably
the least effective, simply because it is the one bogged down the
most by the layers of samples, feeling a little at times like a
John Oswald remix of a Jive Bunny megamix. The best sections tend
to be the ones dominated by more electronic sounds – bubbles,
electro percussion and industrial scrapes and headcleansing noise
– and a range of clipped vocal sounds, rather than the distorted
guitar passages. The other two versions on both formats are more
sonically rewarding, possibly just by being a lot more restrained.
'The Path' has a delicate, layered percussive quality which echoes
a lot of early Soundwave material, particularly its submerged bass
noises. Latin jazz horns and piano, as well as some summery bongo
percussion sounds are a nice, laidback addition, and when the Krupa-style
drums and frazzled guitar samples creep in they're less intrusive
somehow. 'The Two' is better, and more minimal still, focussing
on fragmented electro beats, percussion loops built from vocal snatches
and a bunch of nice, scratched-up industrial noise.
The video for a different version of 'The Two' which
dates from the year before is clearly a clever and painstakingly-crafted
enterprise, structured in a way that visually responds to the technique
of sampling, showing a very fresh-faced Bonnie and Hiller conjuring
sounds from a variety of household objects, smashing pianos Christian
Wolff-style, making vocal sounds, scratching records with bones
and slinging guitars about the place. Each time a particular sound
is used, the image of that sound's supposed generation is stuck
on screen, often layered above another section. Videos for dance
music at the time made great use of sampled imagery – old
black and white movies, psychedelic swirls and jump-cut imagery
– but nothing quite so inventive as Akiko Hada's 'mix' here.
Sadly, the technology required to watch the CD-video is now obsolete
(though you can still play the audio tracks), but the video is (currently
at least) available on YouTube (see below).
