squelch!

This appears in the latest TRIP magazine.For subscribers of RRR Melbourne Community Radio

Squelch. Its a form of music. A nano genre at the moment but I am handing it to the public to make it into something enormous. Take that to the bank! Simple as that. Doing BLB with Elizabeth early on I was moaning about pathetic names for genres of music. Like “beats”. That has got to be the worst. What the fuck is that all about then? I never go near anything if its called “beats”. I mean I probably have heard a lot of it and liked it and I probably listened to some very recently. i wouldn’t call it “beats “ though. “Dance” is also piss weak. And that scene is usually full of great pr whizz with great names for tracks that don’t really deserve it. DJs have great names too, and they mostly don’t deserve much. I respect their biz though, their shamelessness is most admirable. I love it. Their view of the world is total SQUELCH.
One night I sat at a club and asked a lady to identify all the sounds that were flying around the room. She did this for me, she was glad for the opportunity to dump this useless offall that was crowding her mind onto me. SQUELCH! Turned out that each song was its own micro genre. Just as I suspected! They know how to squeeze every ounce out of the stuff in that scene. Nothing is left to chance. Flog it!
Reggae is a great name for a form of music. It took a while and then someone heard someone say it and it caught on. Rockabilly too. Actually, while we’re at it, “spoken word” has to be the lamest shingle anybody has ever put out in front of their act doesn’t it? SPOKEN WORD! That is bad. For people who are trading in WORDS, that is very , very lazy and mo poke in the extreme. There is no jizz in that title, no bounce. Jazz is a great name for a form of music. Blues. Punk. Anything with “core” in it is pretty pathetic. Like a dangleberry or clingon on the arse of something bigger, grimly hanging on. Same with “post” or “alt” . Just substitute “not”. Modern shit with good names are GRIME. CRUNK. Shit, thats about it.
Rock Music is hopeless. Whats the best they came up with recently ? Emo! They ran out of puff trying to say a word and we were left with that three letter furball . Paste a message on Friendface and leave us! SQUELCH!

I could go on. On BLB, Elizabeth usually stops me. Ta.
I have to say that she has the capacity to go on too. I am a live and let live guy though. I just put on my earphones and listen to sports radio until it looks like its all over. The loyal BLB listeners text me constantly to keep me in touch with what shes on about this time. What can I say? I’m a man- I give- I bend like a tree in a gale- then I give again.

One day I came into the studio and said I wanted to hear nothing but squelching sounds. I wanted to get my SQUELCH on. I was after a new kind of SQUELCH. I wanted , you know “ dark side of the squelch” or "never mind the squelch “ or “ a hard days squelch”. “The SQUELCH SESSIONS”! “the squelch remains the same!”
“I know what you mean” Elizabeth said. I reached for this disc by “SPOONBILL” called “AIRBORNE”. It was total squelch. See, I’d already slipped into talking about a noun there. i moved from adjectival discourse into naming the sounds. Thats what happened on the show that day. I got so many texts from BLB listeners wanting more SQUELCH! Straight off. We had a movement. People wanted squelch before hey knew what it was. And then , best of all, it was already here. SQUELCH was in the house! Elizabeth and I moved quickly to define the new genre. I wold say it s a form of music with no known boundaries save for the lack of loud guitars. Effected guitars are ok though , bendy, wah and soft fuzz sounds. Octaves especially. That sound on a lot of 70s soul with the trickling waterfall effect. Thats total SQUELCH. SQUELCH is a smooth and viscous sound. Like machines shitting. Horribly organic. Vegetable automatons gurgling to the nth. Taking things to the logical rotting conclusion. Its rooted in machines having wet dreams. Nocturnal funk. Smooth and bubbling. Electro diarrhoea. Non verbal. Know what I squelch?
We tried to reach into the past and we played a song by a person we archly and crassly called “the Godmother of SQUELCH”. This was Sophie Ellis Bextor , mainly because I had her cd in my bag and I think shes a doll. “Murder on the dancefloor”. We heard SQUELCH everywhere. It was a SQUELCH,SQUELCH,SQUELCH,SQUELCH,SQUELCH,SQUELCH world.
Later, I was working in my studio and used a plugin , ( a virtual effect). It was called COSMONAUT and it eq’d the sound to make it vintage and clunky. It also had a setting called , you guessed it- SQUELCH! There is nothing better than making something up that already exists . I’m sure everybody has experienced that heavy, throbbing, thrill. It must be good if its already here! Authentic also. Its just that nobody has identified it yet. Its a fact that you simply cant see things that you don’t recognize. Its not there until you see it! All performers know this conundrum.

So, for the history books, let it be known that SQUELCH - a new microgenre of music was first identified and therefore sighted and named and therefore created and sent out into the world from the studios of RRR fm in Melbourne by Dave Graney and Elizabeth McCarthy from within the sturdy construct that is their show, BANANA LOUNGE BROADCASTING in August 2010.

postscript. The week after we’d invented SQUELCH, when we were all set to deal with POST SQUELCH, Elizabeth had to go away on a course with that guy Anthony Robbins and I had to do the show solo. I was going to have an old friend in on the sow, New York based record producer Victor Van Vugt. I called him and said I was going to be playing some SQUELCH on the show. Without dropping a beat he said, “is that like SQUEE?