For the better part of the past decade, Loren Chasse has been refining his compelling sonic approach, which generally involves "activating" the latent sound-making qualities of natural / commonplace objects, such as pine cones, leaves, stones, or paper.  This approach will seem immediately familiar to fans of John Cage, although Chasse's work has always felt more humanist to me than Cage's—driven less by theory and more by a romanticism that isn't afraid to get muddy or wet.  

You could also align Chasse with R. Murray Schafer, father of acoustic ecology and author of the soundscape manifesto The Tuning of the World.  Chasse often attempts to capture the acoustic properties of unusual environments, and his recordings of drainage pipes, old buildings, forests, and barns might fit nicely next to Schaefer's recordings of Vancouver soundscapes and European fishing villages.

If, following Chasse's lead, you start looking at every space as having a latent sonic quality, waiting to be awakened by sounding an instrument or object, and if you start looking at every instrument or object as in and of itself having a latent sonic quality, it begins to seem as though the entire world is pregnant with sound, and charged with (for lack of a better word) spirit.  This animist world-view undoubtedly inflects Chasse's work with bands like Thuja, the Blithe Sons, and Coelacanth, but it finds its most unadulterted expression in his solo project, Of.  

The Buried Stream is the second Of full-length release, following 2004's The Infant Paths, and, like its predecessor, it is an album that feels profoundly spiritual at every turn.  Whether Chasse is engaged in uncharacteristically muscular drum-work (as in "The Jut of Rock") or eliciting numinous drones from organ and flute ("Mud Vowels"), or accompanying a recording of waterfowl with a quiet rattling bell ("Glowing Prints"), each track feels like the work of a man trying to bear witness to a vision of personal holiness.  

The difficult thing with spiritual music, of course, is to avoid degenerating into New Age blandishments, to remember that true spirituality isn't necessarily comfortable, that there are moments of bliss but also moments of terror.  So too it is on Buried Stream: although there are tracks here that coax you open gently and delicately (such as the minimal album-closer "The Guidepost", performed on what sounds like a balalaika), there are also tracks that crack open your head and overwhelm you with sheer force, most notably on "Underground Cloud," which features a startlingly close-mic'd recording of what sounds like a squealing metal gate cutting through thick layers of flaying violin.

The complaint I hear most commonly about the Jewelled Antler folks is that they're over-prolific, and while it's true that they release material at a nearly incomprehenisble rate (my casual count reveals three Jewelled-Antler-associated releases so far in 2005, which as of this writing is only 28 paltry days), it's also true that almost nothing on this release feels like filler.  If Chasse and his cohorts can continue to produce material of such high quality at such a rapid pace, far be it from me to gripe.  I'm content merely to luxuriate in the results.

Hear: "The Jut of Rock"

(Note: this is part of an occasional feature where we'll post MP3s of bands we review for as long as the review remains on the front page of the blog. Once the review goes into the archives, the MP3s will be removed. Special thanks to Loren for his kind permission.)

This review cross-posted to Thaumaturgy

Labels: music_commentary

Friday, January 28, 2005
8:19 PM
0 comments

Great post over at the indispensible City of Sound, wherein Dan Hill takes the emergence of the iPod Shuffle and uses it as a jumping-off point for an essay about the collage zeitgeist that so dominates late-twentieth / early twenty-first culture in general. Hill slots "shuffle mode" (or, more broadly, "the mix") into its rightful position next to such other cultural pursuits as "photomontage, cubism, pop art, tape loops, multitrack recording, hip-hop culture, sampling, mixtapes, Ocean of Sound, filters, quotations, hyperlinking, blogging, Photoshop, layering, aggregators, adaptation, recombination, [and] reappropriation."

The post also contains a wonderful quote from Brian Eno, taken from this long Wired interview:

"An artist is now a curator. An artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention, and says, What I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things. ... [P]ostmodernist thinking is suggesting is that there isn't one line, there's just a field, a field through which different people negotiate differently. Thus there is no longer such a thing as 'art history' but there are multiple 'art stories.' Your story might involve foot-binding, Indonesian medicine rituals, and late Haydn string quartets, something like that. You have made what seems to you a meaningful pattern in this field of possibilities. You've drawn your own line. This is why the curator, the editor, the compiler, and the anthologist have become such big figures. They are all people whose job it is to digest things, and to connect them together."

Nicely put. (It's worth nothing that "making a pattern in a field of possibilities" is as good a description as any for what I'm trying to do with my own more experimental writing.)

Labels: writing

12:02 AM
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Axolotl, who I reviewed a couple of posts back, are featured as the cover story of the SF Weekly this week.

The journalist who wrote the piece, Justin Farrar, puts his finger almost exactly on what I've been calling the "New Electrical Sublime":

"Axolotl, you see, is one of literally hundreds, possibly thousands, of super-obscure bands and collectives [which] have sprung forth just within the past five years ... they've spurned traditional song structures in favor of a brand-new electronic-based brand of mind-expanding tones and sounds inspired by '60s minimalism, feedback-packed experimental noise from early-'90s Japan, traditional Indian ragas, the faux world-music jams of the Sun City Girls, post-techno ambient electronics, fiery free jazz, field recordings of African and Asian tribal musicians, and ridiculously rare acid freakout psych-rock from the late '60s and early '70s..."

Axolotl's Karl Bauer rounds it out:

"We want to feel the sound in our guts. We want to make huge gorgeous drones ... We do not want to hurt people, but we do want them to feel this expanse of sound. I want to create an incredible physical experience. We really like the idea of the visceral fused to really blessed-out sounds. We really like the way frequencies affect hearing, depth perception, and sense of space. We love powerful tones. We just love that feeling."

Labels: audio_commentary, music_commentary

Thursday, January 27, 2005
1:15 PM
0 comments

1. What If: a graphical representation of one man's life, complete with bifurcation points

2. The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley, part of the University of California's eScholarship Editions initiative

3. This online quiz successfully guessed my age

4. Mass geekery at SmartPlaylists.com, a site devoted to tricks you can play with iTunes' Smart Playlists

5. The Hounds of No, awesomely weird and violent poems by Lara Glenum

6. Lullaby, an MP3 from noise artist Jessica Ryland

7. Chaorin Kombat, fantastically ugly noise-making in a battle arena

8. As Star Wars movies get worse, Star Wars-related products get better? Darth Tater

9. Brighton gives us 20 Jazz Funk Greats, a high-quality MP3 blog

10. These animals made from the Bembo fontset remind me of zoomorphic Islamic calligraphy

Labels: linkfarms

Saturday, January 22, 2005
8:07 PM
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Although I've seen them play, and can thus confirm that Axolotl's Karl Bauer and William Sabiston are, in fact, human beings, it's still hard for me to imagine actual people making this music. With this disc (their debut), Axolotl have taken the most humanistic qualities of music—things like melody, harmony, the lyric—and flayed them away, building seven pieces from what survives. "What survives" is mostly sonic material at its rawest: woozy electronic oscillations and ping, violin scrabblings, wordless murmuring, the unidentifiable sounds of things being scratched or ground against one another.

By voiding the easy techniques of self-expression, Bauer and Sabiston flirt with the inhuman, but without taking the (also easy) route of creating music that is mechanistic or robotic. Although these songs use electricity (most are positively thick with ozonic reek) they also feel distinctly organic. Like the amplified naturalism of Thuja, or the Sun Blindness Music of 1960s John Cale, Axolotl have unearthed things here that seem less like "songs" and more like natural artifacts, the byproducts of a world that teems with physical forces. And, as with any sampling of natural byproducts, we have some which are ugly and fearsome, and some which are beautiful and transcendent (the calm, crystalline drone which constitutes the album's final third being a good example of the latter).

All in all, another worthwhile album for fans of the New Electronic Sublime.

On Psych-O-Path.

Hear: Track 4 [Untitled].

(Note: this is part of an occasional feature where we'll post MP3s of bands we review for as long as the review remains on the front page of the blog. Once the review goes into the archives, the MP3s will be removed. Special thanks to Karl Bauer for his kind permission.)

This review has been cross-posted to Thaumaturgy

Thursday, January 20, 2005
2:31 PM
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I've always loved libraries, and I've always found the idea of being a "library haunt" to be attractive. The University of Illinois has a pretty good library, but I can't say that I've really haunted it: all too often, when I'm done with teaching and office hours for the day, I find myself just wanting to go home and relax.

I'm hoping to change that: this semester my roommate (the esteemed Harvey P.) and I have secured a private study room, and I've built "library time" into my schedule. So hopefully more haunting will be the result.

For me, haunting involves more than just hanging out in the library and reading whatever book I'm working on. That's something I could do at home. I see haunting as involving a certain degree of unstructured drift: browsing around in the stacks and grabbing whatever looks interesting. Last week this included books with titles like Babylon Is Everywhere, Squatters as Developers: Slum Development in Mumbai, City A-Z: Urban Fragments, and Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (described on the cover as "The best available contemporary defense of anarchism").

Most of these books (aside from the excellent City A-Z)weren't all that rewarding upon closer inspection but that's OK: library drifting should be all about temporary engagement. Maybe I'll do some deep research later, we'll see.

Wednesday, January 19, 2005
10:28 AM
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Last week, Cathy H. forwarded on this article to me, which critiques hipster culture by way of critiquing the films of hipster posterboy Wes Anderson.

The most interesting part of this article, for me, is the way it looks squarely at the "casual racism" of Anderson's films. I've seen each of Anderson's films as they've come out, and I'll confess to being won over by their substantial charisma and charm, but I think this criticism is spot-on. Over Christmas break, I was talking to people about The Life Aquatic and I said "I liked it, but I wish it didn't feature a black character who does nothing but hang around playing guitar." I mean, I like a Portugese David Bowie cover as much as the next guy, but I have a pretty serious problem with straight-up minstrelsy.

That said, I'm not sure that I agree with all of the examples that the article raises—it seems obvious to me that the scene (in The Royal Tenenbaums) where the pre-redemption Royal Tenenbaum calls Henry Sherman "Coltrane" is meant to illustrate Royal's racism rather than being an expression of racism on Anderson's part. On the other hand, I think the article's point about Tenenbaum's Pagoda being "pretty much bereft of any individuality" is spot-on. To me it comes down to "inner life": the goals, desires, feelings, or anything resembling what we'd traditionally call "subjectivity" that a character in a movie gets accorded. If a character is granted little or no inner life then they're really functioning as a prop, not a character, and although the Belafonte is nothing if not ethnically diverse, only the Caucasians are characters; the rest are props.

Rushmore's Margaret Yang and Bottle Rocket's Inez are, for me, borderline cases—although they're both stereotypes (it's hard to think of cultural types more "stock" than the Asian whiz-kid and the Hispanic maid) the movie does grant them some degree of inner life, although this inner life is limited, almost exclusively, to a desire for / interest in the strangely irresistible Caucasian protagonist. Seems fake to me—and while an argument can be made that all of Anderson's films are really about the comfort of the fake or imaginary, and while I'm sympathetic towards this theme, I still can't help but wish that the fantasy of Anderson's world(s) didn't seem so goddamn colonial.

The magazine this article comes from, N+1, looks pretty good to me: check out their annotated table of contents (links to the actual articles themselves are, somewhat confusingly, stored on a different page, so you need to sort of toggle from one page to the other to really make sense of what you're doing).

Labels: media commentary, race

Tuesday, January 18, 2005
5:15 PM
0 comments

Spent the day working on a redesign of the Rebis site—we're going to be releasing an exciting batch of material this year, so I felt it was time to improve a little upon the site design.

Audio reviews that appear here at Raccoon will now also be cross-posted to Thaumaturgy, the Rebis blog, which will be jointly maintained by me and my colleague Chris M.

Saturday, January 15, 2005
5:51 PM
0 comments

1. MIT plans to release a DVD of three pieces of generative cinema

2. Directory of MP3s by sound poet Christian Bök, including a version of Schwitter's Ursonate

3. Jittery Flash experiments by poet Brian Kim Stefans

4. I still haven't tired of parodies of hip corporate Newspeak

5. The Geek Hierarchy, abridged and unabridged

6. The Webcomics Examiner: "discerning criticism of an evolving artform"

7. Anacrucis is a site composed of 101-word flash fictions by Brendan Adkins

8. Geeky flowchart that helps you figure out how to deal with tasks

9. New blog from Brad of Foxy Digitalis

10. Are bloggers are allowed to protect confidential sources in the same way that journalists can? This lawsuit may decide

Labels: linkfarms

Friday, January 14, 2005
11:56 AM
0 comments

Crunching the numbers on last year's reading reveals the following trends:

Total number of books I read last year: 59 (down three from 2003)

Novels / novellas: 9 (down seven)

Collections of poetry: 22 (+7)

Collections of short stories: 0 (-8!)

Books on science / technology: 2 (-1)

Books on religion: 0 (-3)

Graphic novels / comics anthologies: 5 (+2)

Books of literary or cultural criticism: 6 (+4)

Books on art / architecture: 3 (+3)

Essays / memoir: 4 (+4)

History: 2 (+2)

Authors I read in 2004 who have written at least one book I read prior to 2004: 14 (Colson Whitehead, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Marjorie Perloff, Marguerite Duras, Don DeLillo, Henri Michaux, John Ashbery, Terence McKenna, Stanislaw Lem, Virginia Woolf, William Burroughs, Donna Haraway, Grant Morrison)

Books I read in 2004 that I read at least once prior to 2004: 3 ( Radical Artifice : Writing Poetry in the Age of Media by Marjorie Perloff, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, White Noise by Don DeLillo)

High points: Manuel DeLanda's One Thousand Years of Non-Linear History and Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination, two nonfiction works of untrammeled brilliance; Eros and Magic In the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano's idiosyncratic study on esoterica; Virginia Woolf's The Waves, the newest addition to my all-time favorite novels list; Christine Hume's startlingly good poetry debut Musca Domestica; William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Soft Machine; Rae Armantrout's Made To Seem and Precedence; the coffee-table-book compilation of Jim Woodring's hypnotic, transcendent Frank comics; Colson Whitehead's unclassifiable The Colossus of New York.

Labels: book_commentary

Tuesday, January 11, 2005
2:06 PM
0 comments

1. Devendra Banhart, Rejoicing In The Hands

I initially was eager to dismiss Banhart as little more than the sum of his vocal quirks, but I was won over by the staggering songwriting on this disc, which is some of the strongest I’ve heard in years. Banhart’s starting point seems to be the archetypal acoustic-blues forms archived in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, but he uses these forms to articulate his own idiosyncratic vision of the world, which is magical, chameleonic, and engagingly weird. Writing masterpieces can’t be easy, but this album spins out so many that it seems absolutely effortless. On Young God.

2. The Skaters, Dark Rye Bread

The most exciting new band I've heard this year, the Skaters pick up where the Taj Mahal Travelers or the Theatre of Eternal Music left off: utilizing amplified noise, heavy drone, and tribal fug as the most direct route to some deep abyss of ineffable beauty and terror. It's the New Electrical Sublime and the Skaters are playing forward guard. On Nature Tape Limb, but also soon to be reissued on vinyl by Humbug.

3. Philip Jeck, 7

Jeck’s dense sonic constructions have been made him a longtime favorite among fans of experimental turntablism, but this disc is the strongest work we’ve ever seen from him, surpassing even 2002’s exemplary Stoke. His work has never been more painterly: each track on this album uses great impasto smears of sound to generate visions of disintegrating memory-haunted landscapes. Fragmentary, rich, and organic, like a tapestry dug out of a bank of moist soil. On Touch.

4. Deathprod, Deathprod

These four discs provide welcome insight into the mind of Helge Sten, who, as the primary producer for Norway’s near-perfect Rune Grammofon label, has had his fingerprints on many of the most interesting albums of the last decade. Archiving solo material all the way back to 1991, this set catalogs so many different strategies of decay, corrosion, and abrasion that it’s practically an instruction manual for those who aspire to the making of menacing electroacoustic ambience. Revelatory, indispensible. On Rune Grammofon.

5. CocoRosie, La Maison De Mon Reve

Most interesting hybrid record of the year, La Maison De Mon Reve features old-time gospel and blues strained through a pair of sensibilities indelibly stained by hip-hop, trip-hop, and indie-rock. Electronic thrift-store noise, found sound, and lyrics that deal with topics like McDonald’s and Madonna—the album sounds like it was assembled out of a grab-bag of twentieth-century junk culture. Setting aside a few clumsy attempts at parody (does the world really need more ironic songs about Jesus?) this album consistently engages and charms. On Touch and Go.

6. The Skygreen Leopards, One Thousand Bird Ceremony

Fifteen tracks of laid-back music from Jewelled Antler personnel Donovan Quinn and Glenn Donaldson. Warm and beguiling, these loose, occasionally off-key songs (featuring acoustic guitars, tambourine, jew’s harp, unidentifiable drones, and field recordings of birds and sheep), sound like what stoned Middle Earth types might sing around their summertime campfires. On Soft Abuse.

7. The Ivytree, Winged Leaves

Crumble One Thousand Bird Ceremony’s feelgood summertime vibe into melancholy autumn and you have Winged Leaves, the second notable Jewelled Antler release of the year. On this disc Glenn Donaldson shows his strength as a solo performer, coaxing forth introspective acoustic songs and grey industrial drones that sound more indebted to the rainy Britain of Nick Drake or Richard Youngs than to Donaldson’s sunny California. On Catsup Plate.

8. Jack Rose, Two Originals Of...

This disc, which compiles the vinyl-only releases Red Horse, White Mule and Opium Musick, demonstrates that the vocabulary of American guitar established decades ago by John Fahey’s great Takoma label continues to possess nearly unrivaled powers of transcendence. Don’t be fooled into thinking that Rose is on the retreat here—these pieces (and those on Rose’s other 2004 release, Raag Manifestos) are not nostalgic exercises but rather potent arguments for a tradition that bears releavance for our present and for our future. Rose’s music, here as with his work in the drone combo Pelt, is endlessly mercurial, driven by a restless intelligence to work and rework itself until it becomes something shining and holy. On VHF, with the original LPs still available separately on Eclipse.

9. The Liars, They Were Wrong So We Drowned

Music is scary again. The Liars have dug up a motley assortment of raw data on witches and witch trials and used it as a loose conceptual frame around which to build songs driven by incantation, electricity, percussive energy, noise, and error. In a year where so much rock tended towards the tight, the polished, and the tidy (Interpol, the Walkmen, Franz Ferdinand) it’s nice to see that there are still a few bands that take a pleasure from tapping into Dionysian chaos. On Mute.

10. Greg Davis, Curling Pond Woods

Almost since the inception of electronic music, electronic musicians have been playing the game of trying to puzzle out the thorny dialectic between synthetic sounds and organic / acoustic sounds. This year’s most interesting move was made by Greg Davis, who goes a little bit further towards collapsing the dichotomy entirely by using his laptop to create an album of pastoral psychedelic folk. In this heterotopia, Beach Boys and Incredible String Band covers can coexist comfortably with abstract, textural drones, which is good news for us all. On Catsup Plate.

Also:

My other top tens from this decade

Dusted Magazine's end-of-year wrap-ups

Aquarius Records' staff faves of the year and Other Music's Year-End Recap

Pitchfork Media's top 50 of 2004

Labels: audio_commentary, music_commentary

Thursday, January 06, 2005
8:30 PM
0 comments