today, the last day of my indie rock boycott, i was listening to the most amazing velvet underground bootleg. it's called the guitar amp tape and what happened was someone put a mic next to lou reed's guitar amp and his guitar playing drowns out the other instruments. you can still hear the drums and the organ, but you can only barely make out sterling morrison's lead guitar or when lou sings. by this point (1969), john cale had left the band and, in place of his irreplaceable droning viola and locked keys organ, they had doug yule on bass and organ (and, at times, he supplied some god-awful vocals). unlike most of the other velvet underground's live recordings, most of which also feature yule's brother billy on drums (completely failing to replace what mo tucker's inimitable and absolutely essential drumming brought to the band), the absence of cale is less glaring, in part because the guitar amp tape highlights lou reed's underappreciated (and, before today, more or less ignored by me) contribution to the band's drone. you can hear the difference between john cale's studio version of "sister ray" from the white light/white heat album and doug yule's uncomprehending hippie-psychedelia turn on the keys, but it's lou reed's guitar work that you're listening for and it's amazing. seriously, the guitar playing, droning, fuzzy, and constantly feeding back, combined with the recording constantly in the red (the mic was apparently literally right next to the amp), this is better than anything yellow swans or wolf eyes have ever done with guitars and, dare i say, the twenty-six and a half minute version of "sister ray" even trumps one of my sacred cows, lou reed's much-maligned but absolutely brilliant metal machine music. i have often cited john cale and mo tucker's work on the first two velvet underground albums as completely changing rock and roll. from this tape, i've realised that lou did his part too, only it's harder to hear on the studio albums. it's the kind of thing that makes you feel so guilty about ever wanting to hear that pretty, aestheticised dirty guitar sound on the first strokes album. i'm not above it, but i do feel bad.
i listened to a few records i've been meaning to get around to today:
the velvet underground the guitar amp tape
wizardzz hidden city of taurmond (yawn, brian)
peter br�tzman octet machine gun
as well as a couple of my favourite records of the year:
mouse on mars varcharz
nicole 12/prurient love and romance split 12"
(by the way lieb, you're getting one hell of a blood reigning in data cd-r with yr fan club package.) and that's the last of my enforced indie rock not listening to. come morning, i'm going to put on "debaser" and, hopefully, it'll make me want to vomit and the experiment will have worked.
in all seriousness, though, listening to the guitar amp tape reminded me of this one amazing red light sting show at seylynn hall when all you could hear was andy's guitar and paul's drums. andy and paul had been playing together since they were twelve and thirteen, respectively, in my favourite band of all time, d.b.s. by their late teens, to hear them play together was a beautiful thing. you can kind of hear it in studio recordings like this one, though it was better experienced live. (d.b.s.' last show, the show i took two eight hour long bus rides in the middle of finals my sophomore year of college to catch, is available for download at jesse [former d.b.s. singer/ex-operation makeout/ex-black rice/ubiquitous producer of vancouver bands]'s website, if you scroll to the bottom of the page.) but that one red light sting show was especially amazing because literally all you could hear was andy and paul, without anything to distract from their amazing feel for each other's playing. apparently, they're playing together again in a band called winning, which i haven't heard but am dying to. earlier this week, a friend of mine told me she heard jesse's new band on cbc radio three. the band, ghosthouse, features contributions from, among others, katie makeout and andy.
ghosthouse's album, all songs written by jesse, is available on their website. so far as i can tell, there are no winning files on the internet to hear, but i've been wanting to hear ghosthouse since thursday and i can't because of this no indie rock thing. i've also, because of the guitar amp tape, wanted to listen to andy and paul and i can't play my d.b.s. or red light sting records. what joy tomorrow will bring. i won't listen to "debaser" at all.
9/29/06
THE OPACITY OF THE AVANT-GARDE
day six of my holy indie rock fast. i didn't write about what i listened to yesterday, but rest assured that i listened to nothing but wolf eyes in anticipation of tonight's wolf eyes show. yesterday and today's playlists:
wolf eyes driller 12"
wolf eyes human animal
they reigned in blood, by the way. olson played this plank of wood with a single string (i think it was literally a piece of string) tied to a pickup. but several things bothered me during the show. the first was when they played more or less standard hardcore songs through their arsenal of distortion pedals. sure, with the pedals they don't sound like hardcore songs, but, when i'm seeing wolf eyes, i'm not paying to see anyone rock out. that whole dude screaming into the microphone as if he's singing thing throws me right off. it adds a performative aspect to the music that detracts far more than it adds. i like wolf eyes for the long patches of droning noise, not for the pulse beating, dude screaming, rock out sessions. there is a time for hair police and there's a time for wolf eyes, but never should the twain meet. but with mike connelly (from hair police) replacing aaron dilloway last year and trevor tremaine (also from hair police) having now replaced nate young, i fear the worst.
the other thing that cheesed me off was when this group of kids were banging their heads along to the drone. that was cute enough, particularly as they somehow found a beat that wasn't in the music to headbang along to in unison. but then the first pumping. when i was a kid and at hardcore shows, i always hated the call and response.
singer: "when i say 'fuck,' you say 'authority.' fuck" crowd: "authority" singer: "fuck" crowd: "authority."
especially given that the kids were pumping their fists in the air in unison and that these kids all had shaven heads (this was, after all, the mid 90's and the heyday of the victory records brand of straight-edge), it seemed all too totalitarian ("fuck authority" indeed, ya dumb jocks). but it's not just a kevin seconds thing. it's the power dynamic between performer and audience that alienates me; i refuse to participate when singer-songwriters do call and responses too.
john wiese was one of the openers and, a lot of the time, it wasn't clear if he was doing anything or just playing his album off his laptop. on leaving wolf eyes, nate young said, "All I really did was press play anyways." so, as awesome and blood reigning in as john wiese's music was, i couldn't help but feel a bit cheated. i know it really shouldn't matter what dude is doing if i'm enjoying what's coming out of the amps, but i'm interested in how this music is made and what goes into the act of laptop noise improvisation, which i know next to nothing about. they used to address this at blim gallery. electronic musicians would perform with their backs to the crowd, so you could see their laptop screens. but it was really more of a token gesture of transparency and nobody really learned a whole lot from these performances. i appreciated it, though. if nothing else, the performers' facing away from the audience and the act of allowing the audience to see what one would see from "the backstage" did a bit to fuck with the performer/audience power dynamic.
9/27/06
GARY GILMORE'S EYES
i didn't really listen to anything today, except the soundtrack to matthew barney's cremaster 2. it provides one more reason why drawing restraint 9 is even worse than the other major films in barney's already abysmal oeuvre: the absence of jonathan bepler (only minimal disrespect to bj�rk intended). bepler, whose work is defined by the pretty beepiness that lullatone would go on to steal outright (and to great effect, i might add), soundtracked all of the films in the cremaster series and, in cremaster 2, enlisted the help of slayer. that's right, blood-reigning-in mother fucking slayer. as jumbled as the cultural references are in the film (e.g. gary gilmore, johnny cash, houdini, norman mailer, and mormons), slayer makes it tolerable. for some unknown reason, barney chose to use slayer playing over the sound of droning bees to symbolically depict gilmore's apocryphal dying wish phone call from johnny cash. the failings of barney's execution of the scene notwithstanding, the track is awesome. the next track on the disc is the elegiac song that plays during gilmore's execution, which sounds just like springsteen's "my father's house" sung a capella by mindy smith. in the film and in the context of the series, where everything, including the music is abstract and pointlessly obscure, it sticks out like a sore thumb. the song itself sucks too. my response to both the song and the film: i'm so bored with the u.s.a. nothing else to report.
9/26/06
DAY FOUR: IN WHICH MY FACE IS MELTED, BLOOD REIGNED IN
last night, before bed, i listened to
david bowie low
david bowie "heroes"
david bowie lodger
while reading edmund burke's treatise on the sublime and, i'll admit it, i still don't get them. yeah, they have nice songs on them, though not as good as the songs on hunky dory and, for sure, the second sides of low and "heroes" are nice, but why would i listen to those when i could be listening to can or the talking heads' records with eno or eno's ambient tetralogy? so why is the berlin trilogy so completely venerated? why are any of these records even supposed to be any better than the albums of lou reed or iggy pop's berlin periods? what have i been missing all these years? please tell me. i'm dying to know.
on tuesday nights, i have the apartment to myself and that means i get to listen to obnoxious and noisy music as loud as i want. as my roommates walked out the door today, the first thing i put on was
h�sker d� land speed record.
i had a bit of a revelation with it today. land speed, you see, is one of the purest hardcore/thrash albums of all time, but for its last song, "data control." the much maligned "data control" � much maligned, that is, by the lieb and me � is really slow and long. but today i didn't hear it as the letdown at the end of land speed record (the entire album is just over 26 minutes and "data control" takes up 5:28 of that), as i had since the lieb and i first discovered this record when we went through the entire h�sker d� oeuvre wondering why everyone liked them so much when they clearly suck (my thoughts on some of said oeuvre have changed somewhat over the years, his have not) and were completely dumbfounded and awestruck by land speed, their first album, recorded live in minneapolis four days before i was born. what changed for me was listening incessantly � until i began this seven day indie rock hunger strike, of course � to the first song on the new yo la tengo album, the seven minute noise-guitar jam "pass the hatchet, i think i'm goodkind." because of said yo la tengo track, i've also been revisiting the velvet underground's white light/white heat, particularly its twenty minute garage rock nugget stretched out and ripped apart proto-sonic youth-style epic "sister ray." it's best to think of "data control" in that tradition of prolonged guitar rock meditations on a single riff in which the being-there-ness of the noise (illusionistically) builds through the accumulation and monotony. this is neither to say that "data control" is the hidden gem hinting at the greatness of h�sker d�'s subsequent work that most of the band's fans take it as, nor is it to say that the track isn't nonetheless a blight on what is otherwise the most unrelenting and concise album any of us have ever heard. i'm saying we shouldn't necessarily always stop the record as soon as "data control" starts is all.
what was really epiphanic today was listening to
kevin drumm sheer hellish miasma
at full blast all the way through. as i was saying yesterday, i've been working towards a sort of bodily aesthetic relationship to music (i mean this in the classical way: the aesthetic as bodily and sensible as opposed to the philosophical, which is abstract and intelligible). one frequent interlocutor of mine, occasionally mentioned in this space, for years pushed for me to engage with music and art on what he called a "visceral" level (my de rigueur response: i can't � i stand in front of rothko paintings for fifteen minutes at a time and feel nothing). but if i'm going to listen to the new timba/lake and shake my booty, i might as well be listening to music that literally rocks my body, no? and so i let sheer hellish miasma do what it does all over me today. which is to say, i listened to this thing really fucking loud, sitting all the while right in front of the speakers. i can't relay the technical aspects to you. i don't even have the vocabulary to properly talk about it (does anybody?), but something about the tones drumm gets on the first half of the album gets all up into my bones and rattles in my ribcage. i'm saying this completely literally. it's a strange sensation that i can only compare to that first split second of being tickled, only prolonged and never climaxing. at first, i kept uncontrollably shuddering. then i couldn't stop laughing for an entire minute. then i settled into the experience and, while it was never comfortable, it did what a lot of structural film does only moreso, because, in addition to forcing its listener to endure the passing of time (cf. bergson's concept of dur�e), it is also able, in the literal bodily experiencing of it, to force you to be aware at all points that you are listening to it.
it also gave me pause because i've been meaning to listen to this album for a long time, for years in fact, but never got around to it until now. had i known what it does, i would have gotten around to it years ago. but i had no idea. i first read about this album when it was named 39th best album of 2002 by pitchfork. this was the proper review. writing about the album twice, not once does andy beta mention the physical sensation of listening to the album. (i should note that you feel it in the back of your skull when you listen to it on headphones). here is a brief passage from an interview with kevin drumm, conducted by the very same andy beta:
Pitchfork: What sort of music still has a surprise for you?
Kevin: The latest thing that has caught me by surprise is Maryanne Amacher. I like sound that affects the listener physically. Traits such as complexity or simplicity don't really become a factor then. It's just the sound that I pay attention to.
not only did he not think to ask about the physicality of the music, there was no follow up question on this topic even after drumm brought it up. (also no clear sign he knows who maryanne amacher is). surely, in three pieces on the occasion of sheer hellish miasma, he would think to remark on this central and obvious fact once. so my question is 1. did he even listen to the record? or, more importantly, 2. am i the only person who feels this when i listen to it?
last spring, i went to la monte young and marian zazeela's dream house. the thing about the dream house is that it blasts these sine waves at you with these four big speakers from each corner of the room and, as you move around, the pitch changes. you can create your own melody, theremin-style, by moving around the space. while i was there, there were all these rich kids on l.s.d. sleeping on mats on the floor. you have to understand how unbelievably loud it is in the dream house, by the way. were these kids overwhelmed by the sheer physicality of the sound as it rattled in their skull and bones? or did they miss the point altogether? i was in a seminar last spring where we watched all these tedious structural films by people like stan brackhage, tony conrad, michael snow, and paul sharitts � the latter two being particular favourites of mine. the professor would say about some of the films that you can get the "idea" after about five minutes and we wouldn't watch the whole things. but is it really the same?
i think, here, that a phenomenological understanding of our relationship to music is necessary. and if we are going to actually experience the music, whether it be submitting unflinchingly to kevin drumm or just standing there and letting that new timba/lake single move our bums, shouldn't we try to understand why these things affect us, what it is about them we find pleasurable or not pleasurable, tedious or interesting? or if we're not going to question our aesthetic judgements and assume that certain sounds "naturally" cause certain bodily reactions, shouldn't we then be listening to something like kevin drumm or maryanne amacher instead of timba/lake and ed banger?
like everything else in life, this blog started off crappy, then was consistently awesome for a short while, then was occasionally awesome, then occasionally good, and then it settled into prolonged mediocrity. oh well. this is what i listened to today:
the bulgarian state radio and television female choir le myst�re des voix bulgares
dvergm�l song i himmelsalar
christian death only theatre of pain
after listening to le myst�re des voix bulgares, which reminds me of nothing so much as an eastern european version of burial at ornans, and dvergm�l, in which hovers the god-is-dead bleakness of bergman's winter light, i was in a morose mood. the only logical place to go from there was doomy goth music, hence christian death. i realise that i'm exoticising les voix bulgares and dvergm�l here, but what can i say? europeans remind me of godlessness and death.
on my way to and from the grocery store, i listened to this half hardcore/half electro-ish mix:
1. m.d.c. "john wayne was a nazi"
2. the untouchables "nic fit"
3. the necros "i.q. 32"
4. minor threat "filler"
5. h�sker d� "bricklayer"
6. the circle jerks "don't care"
7. the circle jerks "live fast, die young"
8. t.s.o.l. "code blue"
9. reagan youth "reagan youth"
10. reagan youth "u.s.a."
11. gang green "snob"
12. the rites of spring "for want of"
13. reagan youth "degenerated"
14. the misfits "skulls"
15. slayer "raining blood"
16. d.j. shadow (ft. q-tip and lateef) "enuff"
17. the blow "fists up"
18. justice "waters of nazareth" (erol alkan's durrr durrr durrrrrr re-edit)
19. mouse on mars "duul"
20. nelly furtado "maneater"
21. kool keith (ft. d.j. dexter) "ants"
22. dem franchize boyz (ft. three 6 mafia) "don't play with me"
23. justin timberlake (ft. t.i.) "my love"
24. uffie "ready to uff"
25. kylie minogue "red blooded woman"
i think, now that i've been off the indie rock for three days, i'm beginning to think about music in a different way. my relation to the pop and guitar rock traditions is primarly based on melody and composition. it's not so much the material fact of hearing the song as it is the "idea" of the song. there's my neo-enlightenment liberal arts education for you. for me, hardcore and electro/dance/hip-hop/pop represent two ways around my aristotelian understanding of pop music that privileges composition over production. hardcore isn't about songs, it's about playing really fucking fast, approaching but never reaching the point of unintelligibility. i can hear superchunk's "art class (for yayoi kusama)" in my head right now and that's all well and good. but if i try to run through "i.q. 32" in my head, it will fall hopelessly short of actually hearing it. similarly, the music on the second half of my mix is, for me, about the texture of its elements, not melodies or rhythms. even something like the d.j. shadow track is remarkable on these grounds because, if you listen closely enough to the beat, there's a lot more going on than just the rhythm. i know one of you out there has been waiting years for me to say this and there it is. i'm giving it a shot. (what was the t.s.o.l., misfits, and slayer for, you ask? aw, that was just for fun.)
of course, there is that third, (neo?) avant-gardist and brechtian (imaginary) pop r�sistance relationship to music. could i ever privilege this material fact of hearing music (hardcore and/or electro) over the materiality of the conditions of producing music (pop r�sistance)? i don't know. as much as i'm trying to get down with aesthetics qua aesthetics, the aesthetics of anti-aesthetics never gets old.
9/24/06
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MATTHEW BARNEY'S ASSHOLE
i just saw drawing restraint 9 and, let me tell you, it's the greatest whaling epic since moby dick. i'm kidding, of course. i've never even read moby dick. and drawing restraint 9 was even more abysmal than i had imagined. worse, perhaps, than i could even possibly have imagined. two and a half hours of mindless, nonsensical, racist garbage. all of your trademark matthew barney motifs are at play: aestheticising things that are gross, salubrious bodily fluids, alchemical transformation involving said gross and salubrious fluids, and that stupid ubiquitous testicals logo of his. but this was somehow worse than any of the other barney garbage i've seen � including the time barney literally crawled up his own ass in cremaster 4. the racism was part of it, but there's more. but i've been in a bit of a stupor since seeing it, kind of like those meat, butter, and fried food comas i used to lapse into after having dinner at the delta, so i can't really tell you right now. i will say, however, that there is an excruciatingly drawn out sequence in which barney and bj�rk chop each other's legs off and eat little pieces, as if sashimi. at least the scene in jodorowsky's holy mountain where that jesus guy eats his own (cake) face is funny. this was just tedious.
in a recent entry, i cited performance artist/professor of art history and studio art/university of rochester graduate programme in visual and cultural studies alumna tina takemoto's "drawing complaint" interventionist performance at sf moma. we'd all do well to see that again. still, i should note that drawing restraint 9 did at least nicely allegorise itself, with matthew barney and bj�rk's extravagant waste of other people's effort and resources making a completely pointless and narcissistic film (one that also wastes two and a half hours of its audience's time, i might add) being reflected neatly by barney and bj�rk's characters' decadent primping and pampering on a whaling ship where everyone else is either doting on them hand and foot, cooking, running the ship, or trying to catch whales. but it's not as if those two characters (listed in the credits as "occidental guests") give two shits about what's going on around them, so long as they complete their painfully long metamorphosis into whales. that's right, they turn into fucking whales at the end of the movie. several days earlier, tina warned us that this was going to happen and that it would infuriate us, but i still felt like barney was saying "deeez nutz" to me at the end of the film.
it's day two of my weeklong indie rock detox. i listened to more free jazz today:
locus solus s/t
locus solus john zorn's 50th birthday celebration
graveyards it's a very beautiful world
graveyards the end of a graveyard
excuse me, i'm just excited because graveyards are coming to rochester. graveyards, by the way, is john olson's awesome free jazz side project. and, this friday, i'm seeing wolf eyes. it never gets this good in rochester, so i'm going to need to gloat.
(ahem). as i woke up this morning, the first thing i put on was
sheena easton s/t
i don't care that she was basically maggie thatcher's mouthpiece and all her songs are about family values and a woman's place (e.g. "morning train/9 to 5" and "one man woman"), "modern girl" is a phenomenal song. sure, it's about all independent women secretly wanting a man to cook and clean for, but i couldn't have written that melody. can you?
john zorn spy vs. spy: the music of ornette coleman
ornette coleman sound grammar
john zorn angelus novus
john zorn kristallnacht
locus solus s/t
locus solus john zorn's 50th birthday celebration
the new ornette coleman is especially brilliant. until last year, when the lieb mentioned that he was going to see the old man, i had no idea he was even still alive. i've always found zorn's take on coleman's oeuvre on spy vs. spy to be somewhat overrated, but there are tracks where he gets it completely and that, my friends, tops the best moments of lightning bolt. i should note, however, that lightning bolt's project of doing zorn/fier/mori/lindsay/horvitz/et al. only using the musical idiom of riffy hardcore instead of jazz seems particularly brilliant to me today. currently downloading: ornette coleman and howard shore naked lunch: original motion picture soundtrack. i remember liking the music when i saw that unwatchable film in high school, but let's see if it holds up without the advantageous context of a movie that it completely outshines.
i just searched tina's name in google to find more interesting links for you all and came across her rate my professors page. that will be of little interest to you, i'm sure. but, while i was there, i did a little snooping around and found hyong's ratings page. one particular testimonial rang true:
Hyong will haunt me until the end of my days. He never failed to make the effort to embarass someone personally in class. Expect to hear many analogies about not being able to build a house without bricks. Good teacher if you are invisible. If not, avoid.
did the rube write this?
ADDENDUM: i should say that hyong is an excellent professor and was absolutely crucial to my graduating from college with any level of distinction. i think of him when i watch dr. cox on scrubs. hyong's not a big man, but he has the world's most amazing calves. he works out like a madman, runs marathons, drinks like a whale and belittles those who can't, challenges large students to arm wrestling competitions and goes around bragging when he wins, and humiliates his students by making them do pushups in front of the class. he once showed up at my house unannounced and drank my roommate's beer. he also once kicked my crutches out from under me. he told me that he'd go home at 5:00 every afternoon to have dinner and spend a few quality hours with his family before driving back to campus to spend the night working. every night at 2:30 a.m., as i walked by the building his office was in on my way home from the library, i'd see him still in there writing away. i don't know if he ever went home to sleep, but, by all accounts, he'd be back in his office by eight in the morning. i spoke with him recently and he bragged about how he met hwang woo-suk at a function at university of seoul and "knew right then that he was a fraud." but let me make one thing clear: hyong's right, you really can't build a house without bricks.
ADDENDUM #2: yep, hyong was one of the very very good ones, unlike this other reed professor/former colleague of mine at this yuppie newspaper where he was, no small feat, the biggest charlatan/sleazebag whom i had the great pleasure of snubbing the fuck out when i last saw him. that was good times.
9/14/06
I'D LISTEN TO DISINTEGRATION IF I OWNED IT ON VINYL
six or so years ago, i conducted an ethnographic investigation on self-righteous teenagers. having myself once been somewhat of a self-righteous and angsty teenager clich�, it fascinated me at the age of nineteen to look back on this strangely self-satisfied and isolated relationship to the world. so, for a few months, i posted on the minor threat message board (which has since, after completely turning over its membership several times, become more or less inactive; but it once housed a vibrant dialogue for straight edge hardcore punks and their hatred of "society"), posing as a teenaged sXe goon and trying to understand the logic of these kids' worldviews.
the troubling thing i encountered, however, was that a lot of the people on the minor threat message board were some years older than me. for every impressionable 14 year old kid who feels alienated by his (it was always his) classmates and who hates "jocks" and "preps" because how they're "weak" and partake in the vices of alcohol and narcotics, there was a twenty-something sXe for lifer, who never reevaluated received ideas from 7 seconds and earth crisis songs as he got older.
i've been following this dawson college "new montr�al massacre" thing pretty closely and, while the facts have still not come completely to light (e.g. i'm unclear as to whether there was only one shooter, as the news is currently reporting, or two or three, as eyewitnesses said yesterday), they're telling us that the shooter was a twenty-five year old grown man � a little over a month older than i am � named kimveer gill. this is his online goth-version-of-myspace profile. this is his picture gallery. this is his online journal. i realised as i was reading cbc.ca this morning that this is the first time in my life i've actually felt like a real adult. because dawson college is apparently what happens when kids never grow the fuck up.
p.s. i always thought this kind of idiocy only afflicted suburban white kids. and i can sympathise with those kids. the years between thirteen and sixteen are rough, particularly if no one ever taught you to question the self-satisfying easy answers a lot of these self-aggrandising kids subscribe to. this, of course, does not condone incidents like colombine, but i think i sort of see how these things happen. but what really gets me are the hitler and third reich-positive references in kimveer gill's online journal. aside from the question of how a punjabi kid gets caught up in the whitest of white subcultures, how does a grown punjabi man get his rocks off on hitler?
9/14/06
ALL OF MY IDEOLOGICAL ARCH NEMESES, IN A ROW
so pitchfork was talking to hutch from the thermals, who, before the new blow album was leaked, might just have had the album of the year, and this is what followed:
Pitchfork: How was working with Brendan [canty from fugazi �ed.]? Was it any different than working with another musician-slash-producer like Chris Walla?
HH: Working with Brendan was great, because he was just so excited. Working with both him and Walla is great because with the Thermals and both of their bands, Fugazi and Death Cab for Cutie, we all come from... not necessarily a punk background, but a do-it-yourself background, where you're just making records for yourself on your own. They had that same experience and knew what we were aiming for, so we worked together really well.
if i still had that old interview i did with ben gibbard back in 1999, i'd reproduce the part where i predicted, citing the commercial viability of dcfc and modest mouse, the mainstreaming of northwest guitar-based indie rock and asked him if he'd pander and sell out when it happened and he was all like, "not that it's foreseeable, but no way. indy punk 4 life." but, anyway, no comment is really necessary, right?
9/11/06
NORTHWEST SKIES, I LOVE THE WAY YOU SHINE
some of us will only write one great song in our lifetimes. and some of us have the grace and dignity to leave it alone and smile politely when people scream, "oh my god, you're michael brown." "yes, yes. i wrote 'walk away ren�e.'"
and some of us rerecord our once in a lifetime songs years later. some of us run that one contribution to the world into the ground. in 1998, alt-rock also-rans tripping daisy, long forgotten by most, wrote a song you absolutely have to download called "sonic bloom." i don't know if you remember tripping daisy's m.o., but it was to be the flaming lips. on that song, for three and a half minutes, they topped anything the flaming lips ever wrote. now, eight years later, tim delaughter has put it through the talentless grinder of his creepo hippie sunshine cult band the polyphonic spree and, yes, destroys the one great thing he ever did do.
i don't think i've ever written a once in a lifetime song, but i sure do like that first, unnamed track from my first album. grace and dignity be damned, i included the original version on my greatest hits compilation and three other versions on my odds and ends collection. okay, i'll stop blog-pimping my fan club now.
ADDENDUM: no, we're not getting the old band back together. but centipede's drummer, centipede m.l., had this to say about the touch & go 25th anniversary party:
> it doesn't look
> like i'll be going
> to the t&g show (pede m.r. thinks he'll be too busy
> to go, we have no
> wheels, and neither he nor I have a place to crash
> on short notice).
> another missed opportunity. like that time you were
> like "let's go see
> belle and sebastian" and i was like "haha u r teh
> l4me" and spotty was
> like "pwned!!1" and we totally didn't go.
though i have often pined about not seeing belle and sebastian on 9/11/01, back when isobel was still in the band and airplanes had just flown into tall buildings in new york, it was probably for the best. i just received the records i sent myself from vancouver and how could anything be better than listening to if you're feeling sinister on vinyl? seriously. it was worth every cent of the $36 + exhorbitant canadian taxes i spent on it. i spit on the digitised version of the album i've been listening to for all these years.
9/05/06
CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
corey motherfucking rusk, man. the legendary bands scratch acid, big black, and negative approach are all reforming to play one single gig. and they're doing it to give props to corey rusk. long defunct bands like killdozer, man... or astroman?, the didgits, seam, and gvsb, legendary dudes from the ex and the mekons who never play north america, all for corey rusk.
but the title of this blog entry isn't in reference to mr. rusk. today, pitchfork ran a great interview with corey rusk. there. i can admit it.
so you can read all about the wonderfulness of touch & go records in that interview. but, as much as i respect everything corey rusk has done for punk rock on this continent and as much as i've played the shit out of some of the records he's put out, to me, corey rusk will always be first and foremost the guy who played bass on the greatest hardcore song of all time. i don't care how much you hate hardcore. download that song. it's 22 seconds of the purest thrash ever recorded. did anyone ever do teenage wasteland better than the necros? certain bands may have topped certain necros songs, but i don't think rock and roll ever was as real as "i.q. 32." incidentally, a compilation of the entire long out of print original lineup corey rusk era of the necros is available for download here.
it's been said before and it seems perfectly obvious, but i'm going to quote a few sentences from the corey rusk interview. discussing digital filesharing:
Most people have grown up conditioned that if they like a record, they want to buy a copy of it. There's something about having that CD, or having that record if you're into vinyl, so I think a lot of filesharing [enabled] people to find out about our music who never would have found out about it, then they went out and bought it. Of course there's thousands and thousands of people who heard it, and never went and bought it. But those people also would have never gone to buy it in the first place. What did we we really lose there?
this argument, which was flying everywhere 5-7 years ago and now has become so clich�d that it doesn't even bear repeating, seems so simple and obvious because it's only half true. read what follows in the interview. corey pegs the magic age of music non-consuming at 15. i'd say he's giving people's memories too much credit. i'd place it at 30 and, even then, that number is going to increase at a rate far higher than one a year in the coming years. real physical object? where was he when i was in high school (the mid-to-late 90's) and a lot of my friends would buy a 10 pack of C90 cassettes and raid my record collection? the only difference, as i see it, is that those people, who were never going to buy the album with or without the internet, now have greater access to it. once upon a time, as corey notes, you had to know someone who bought the album to copy it. now you just need to find one person out of the billions connected to the internet. kids are poor. when i was young, it was like, "okay, you buy this one and i'll buy that one and we'll go home and tape them." i like having records, but i also bought a lot of albums because it was necessary. now it's not. but the argument goes both ways. good things and bad things, neither of which i'll dredge up any more than i already have. instead, download this.
the touch & go 25th anniversary party is next weekend and i can't go. shellac is playing a rare show in new york city tonight and, alas, i am not there. but i do have some albini stuff to share. now that i'm back in rochester and have my books with me, i can directly quote the punk planet interview i mentioned here. it follows from a discussion of the analog v. digital debate:
pp: what about the positive aspects of digital recording such as sampling and how it allows music to be redistributed in the manner that bands like public enemy and negativland do it? would you recommend that they record their samples in analog?
albee: a sampler can play something back onto a digital storage medium or an analog tape � it really doesn't matter. i happen to dislike most music that's made by sampling. that's a perspective that i don't expect a lot of other people to share. from experience in making records, i know that when someone starts making records with samples, they're content to take other people's ideas and put their name on them. it's a very common attitude that you see in recording studios because it saves a lot of effort. you can either write a song and arrange it and get people to play and record it properly and mix it and then have something that you can sing over, or you can play a curtis mayfield album and loop it. it's a hell of a lot easier to play the curtis mayfield record. i don't have a lot of respect for records that are made out of other people's records. it seems like a trivial task. i don't find it enlightening. the key to me is that when i hear a piece of music that's made of samples of other people's records, the bit that you like about it is not the fact that it has been assembled in this new thing, the bit that you like is remembering the other song that they've stolen: "oh yeah, that's that creedence clearwater song. i like that song. therefore i like this thing."
pp: what about treating it like a collage that's part of a larger patchwork quilt?
albee: the defence that all sampling artists postulate is that they are making a collage piece. the difference between a collage painting and sampling music is that a collage structure and a collage image does not exist until the source material is assembled into a new visual form, whether it's representative or not. there is no structure to the collage's raw material. it's used for its texture, color, malleability, whatever its handling properties are. all of the structure of sampled music is embedded in the samples. so when someone plays a bit of sampled music for you and then puts new words on it, or plays a sampled bit of music for you followed by another sampled bit of music, they haven't broken down the basic integration of the music, which is what makes you like it. the substance of the music was imbued into it before the sample artist ever got ahold of it. that means that the potential for basic creative control is strictly editorial. it's not compositional in any reasonable sense of the word. its just editorial: "i'm gonna choose which records i play to make my record, but i can't choose what is on those records because it's already on them." again, i just see it as a trivial art form.
i made an analogy at one point that it's sort of like taking whole pages out of somebody else's book and re-stapling them into your cover and calling it your book. that might be interesting once as an experiment. before it had ever been done, it might generate something of interest. but once there's an entire body of people making spy novels by taking john le carre novels chapter by chapter and reassembling them, the concept plays itself out. it doesn't take many iterations of the process before the possibilities are all naked and exposed. and then it's just editorial � whose material are you stealing and hwat its intrinsic qualities are that you can appropriate. i can't say that it's impossible to make music with a sampler � i don't think that's true. i just would prefer that people concentrated on making music with samplers rather than playing somebody else's records through a sampler and saying that they created music. so much of it just seems to be an image matter. people want to think of themselves as artists and they want to think of what they do as being more original and creative when in fact it's the same as sitting around at home and playing records on your stereo, except you're charging other people money for it.
let's isolate the key terms in this exchange: "create," "composition," "art," "editorial," and "new." those of you who are familiar with art theory will recognise "composition" as a master term used to differentiate heroic artistic geniuses from artisans, whose work was received as craft-based and/or decorative. here, we have a privileging of both the aristocratic artist over the working class and the genius male artist over the feminised decorative artist. the italians and, later, the french also used the concept of "composition" to make fun of the dutch and their "simpleminded" still life and landscape paintings. oh steve. that he proposes creative and editorial work to be mutually exclusive binaries is also troubling. man goes out and kills buffalo. then he brings it home for his wife to cook. you know what i mean?
I was NEVER an A&R person. That was a Steve ("God Bless Him") Albini construct to help him seem important.
I did help run some 'cool' record companies, like Caroline. I walked away as the industry fell off the cliff � hell, they didn't want me anyway.
lest it seem like i'm picking on albini here (and i'm not; centipede owed a huge debt to him), i should point out that, probably, albee didn't see eye to eye with caroline � how many of us did? � and was taking a shot at that label as much as he was at preslar. and rightfully so. the people working at sub pop are still a&r goons to me. incidentally, lyle preslar was, as of last year, in law school. interpret as you wish.
9/01/06
WELL I GUESS THIS IS GROWING UP
i've already talked about my fan club. well, to create a bit more hype, i've got songs to sample. while i refuse to be like all the other bands and create a myspace page to pimp my work, i did decide to create a myspace page dedicated to the memory of my long defunct high school band. go there to sample three old monop�le! songs. the first, robert gordon newell's classic "hypothermia," will be on the upcoming greatest hits collection. the other two will be on the emo years: 1997-2001, which is a collection of mostly previously unreleased recordings i made before i turned twenty. as previously stated, both collections, as well as tradition and the individual talents' new record, the joshua tree: demos, studies, and jokes, are only available by joining the official monoculture media conglomerate fan club. also, please add monop�le! to your myspace friend lists if you're into that kind of thing.
