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green inferno, by bird show
Many people coming to Green Inferno will already be familiar with Ben Vida, most likely from his relatively high-profile work with Town and Country. Fans of that outstanding ensemble might find, at least intially, that Green Inferno isn't exactly what they expected: the album opens with a loud nasal drone and an exuberant kalimba rhythm that is miles away from the acoustic constructions that have become Town and Country's stock-in-trade (and even further from the gentle arrangments for solo guitar that constitute Vida's 2000 album, Mpls.). With this opener ("All Afternoon") the album immediately earns its title, plunging us, without warning, into a chromatic head-space of teeming fractal intensity.
This opening is especially startling because it seems to draw its inspiration from a tradition of African ritual music, rather than from the tradition of Western art music that I'd more readily associate with Vida. Upon reflection this shift isn't actually so surprising: American minimalists have long been fascinated with the open-ended form and trance-inducing repetitions of African music—a piece like Steve Reich's Drumming (1971), heavily informed by Reich's study of Ghanan polyrhythms, serves as the best expression of this tendency.
Not all of Green Inferno owes as heavy a debt to African traditional musics, however: the harmonium drones, acoustic guitar and trumpet of a piece like "Always / Never Sleep" would feel quite at home on a Town and Country album, and the album's vocal pieces, in which Vida murmurs vocals over field recordings of insectile hum, feel almost like a response to the sun-dappled meadow psychedelia of the Jewelled Antler folks. Then there's the short vocal piece "Landlovers," which, with its dazed croon, weird multitracking effects, and languid trumpet swells, uncannily evokes Chet Baker's collaborations with Terry Riley.
This compelling array of hybrid forms makes Green Inferno a consistently intriguing album. At its best it will show you a route through intricacy to bliss.
On Kranky.
This review cross-posted to Thaumaturgy |
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
10:22 PM
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in which the full depth of my geekery is revealed
The meme that's going around in the comics blogosphere at the moment (birthed by Fred Hembeck, believe it or not) is to blog 100 things you love about comics, and since I'm an inveterate list-maker and long-time comics lover I decided why not?:
100 Things I Love About Comics
1. 24-hour comics
2. the Absorbing Man
3. Achewood's Ray Smuckles & Roast Beef
4. Adrian Tomine's 32 Stories : The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics
5. Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve
6. Agatha Harkness
7. Animal Man travelling back in time in Issue #22 and causing glitches in Issue #14
8. the Anti-God decreating the universe very very slowly, in Doom Patrol
9. the archetypal grasslands and talking birds in Anders Nilsen's Big Questions
10. “Assistant Editor's Month”
11. B. Kliban's non-cat-related cartoons
12. Ben Edlund's The Tick
13. Big Numbers #1-2
14. Bill Sienkiewicz's Stray Toasters
15. Bloom County's anxiety closet
16. Bloom County's Steve Dallas
17. Bob the Angry Flower
18. Brian Ralph's Cave-In
19. the Brotherhood of Dada, in Doom Patrol
20. Bugtown, the setting of Matt Howarth's Those Annoying Post Bros.
21. Calvin and Hobbes, especially the Sundays
22. Chris Ware's impossibly complex diagrams and cut-out toys
23. the conceit of Go-Man: keeping the main character in a coma for the first twelve issues of the series
24. the convoluted network of cyborgian family relationships between Henry Pym, Ultron, the Vision and Wonder Man
25. “The Coyote Gospel,” Animal Man #5
26. Craig Thompson's Blankets
27. Dan Clowes' Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
28. the Danger Room
29. The Dark Knight Returns' approach to Superman
30. Dark Phoenix
31. Dave McKean's Sandman covers
32. David Heatley's “My Sexual History (Slightly Abridged Version)”
33. Doonesbury
34. Dr. Doom / Latveria
35. Dr. Manhattan building a palace on Mars in Watchmen
36. Dr. Strange
37. Eddie Griffith's scratchy, terrifying art in From Hell
38. Edward Gorey's Amphigorey
39. Eightball #23, “The Death Ray”
40. the fact that Wolverine was made by Canadians
41. the first two issues of Grant Morrison's Invisibles
42. For Better or For Worse
43. Galactus / the Trial of Galactus / the Ultimate Nullifier
44. Gerhard's backgrounds on Cerebus
45. getting Two-Face to use the I Ching, in Arkham Asylum
46. Ghost World's Enid Coleslaw
47. “Gin makes a man mean!”: Evan Dorkin's Milk and Cheese
48. How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way
49. Huey Freeman from The Boondocks
50. Iron Man
51. “I did it fifteen minutes ago,” in Watchmen
52. J. Jonah Jameson
53. Jack the Ripper having visions of the 20th century in From Hell
54. Jack Kirby
55. James Kochalka's American Elf
56. James Kochalka's Monkey Vs. Robot
57. Jim Woodring's Frank
58. Jim's Journal
59. John Porcellino's King-Cat Comics
60. the Joker
61. Julie Doucet's Dirty Plotte
62. Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer
63. the kid from St. Swithin's Day markering “Neurotic Boy Outsider” on his forehead
64. Kitty Pryde
65. Life In Hell, from the 1982-1987 era
66. Little Nemo in Slumberland
67. Lynda Barry's Ernie Pook's Comeek
68. Magneto
69. Marc Bell's weird Basquiat-ish text-image agglomerations
70. Marvel Team-Up
71. the Negative Zone / Annihilus
72. parodies of the cover of Fantastic Four #1
73. Paul Pope's THB
74. Peanuts' Linus
75. Peanuts' Lucy
76. Phil Foglio's Phil and Dixie
77. Phil Foglio's XXXenophile
78. the physics and internally consistent logic of Larry Marder's Tales of the Beanworld
79. Prohias' Spy Vs. Spy, in MAD Magazine
80. R. Crumb's Zap Comics #1
81. the R. Crumb issues of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor
82. Reed Richards / Susan Richards / Franklin Richards
83. Rick Veitch's dream comic collections Rabid Eye and Pocket Universe
84. the Scarlet Witch's hex magic
85. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics
86. the second half of Church and State
87. Sentinels / Roxxon Oil
88. Sergio Aragones' margin cartoons in MAD Magazine
89. the serial killer convention in Sandman
90. She-Hulk
91. the Silver Surfer
92. “Something fell”: Cerebus
93. Spider-Man
94. stories where characters meet their creators (Animal Man #26, Cerebus haggling with Sim on Pluto, recent issues of Alan Moore's Promethea)
95. Tank Girl
96. Tom Orzechowski's lettering
97. “unstable molecules”
98. Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest
99. What If? / Uatu the Watcher
100. Why I Hate Saturn, by Kyle Baker
I may come back and round out this list with link-annnotations later. Labels: comics, lists |
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
10:34 PM
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ten
C-Lo.net's Playlist Meme wants you to play ten songs in Shuffle mode and blog the results. Here are mine, with annotations:
1. "So Breaks Yesterday," by Pullman
I think of Pullman as basically the "acoustic Tortoise," since it features Doug McCombs and Bundy K. Brown. Weirdly, though, this Pullman album (Turnstyles & Junkpiles (Thrill Jockey, 1998)) has aged better than almost all of the Tortoise stuff. Like most of the tracks on the disc, this is a heartrendingly pretty instrumental.
2. "Staring at the Sun," by TV on the Radio
OK, Tunde Adebimpe's voice still reminds me a little too much of the guy from Seal. But ultimately the experimental barbershop quality of this piece (and the entire Young Liars EP, for that matter) wins me over.
3. "Canned Oxygen," by the Halo Benders
A scrappy little lo-fi rocker, but like a lot of the Halo Benders stuff this track is initially pleasing yet ultimately kind of forgettable. There are some good moments, like the scorching guitar that follows an aimless reverberating noise break in the middle of the track, but there's nothing here that you're going to come away humming.
4. "Oh Comely," by Jeff Magnum
"I wish I could save her in some sort of time machine": this is a solo version of the Neutral Milk Hotel track, recorded for an XFM radio session, whatever that is. Imagine a slightly rawer version of the version on Aeroplane, and with no horns at the end.
5. "Today Has Been A Fucked Up Day," by Beck
One of the best Beck songs ever, not only because of the sentiment, which I can definitely get behind, but also because of the incredibly primitive production. Anyone who's ever recorded a song to a shitty tape recorder stolen from their parents will recognize at least one aspect of the MO here. Plus: banjo!
6. "Sadie" by Joanna Newsom
Key track from the eerie Milk-Eyed Mender album. Lots of ink has already been spilled on Newsom; I don't have much to add other than to say that this is one of the tracks that best embodies what people like about her.
7. "Milk and Honey" by Jackson C. Frank
Fans of obscure folk are big into Jackson C. Frank, but his reputation has always struck me as slightly over-inflated. This is a melancholy, semi-poetic track that would sonically fit pretty comfortably next to tracks by the Mamas and the Papas or Simon and Garfunkel from the same era, and would lyrically fit pretty comfortably next to Dylan Thomas. Pleasant enough, but doesn't exactly trigger an epiphany for me.
8. "Ananda" by Kalaparusha
Free-form, spiritually-inflected jazz from 1970. "Ananda" meanders along for most of its nine minutes: Rita Omolokun uluates, Sarine Garrett and Fred Hopkins noodle minutely on guitar and bass, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre periodically contributes some small burst of notes on the tenor sax. Gradually comes together into a moment of ecstasis at the end, but I can't say I really feel like it's earned.
9. "Seahorses and Flying Fish," Christian Bök.
Sound poetry recorded live at a SUNY reading. Strange, incredibly visceral incantations. An MP3 of this track is yours for the taking in the Buffalo archive.
10. "I Am So Very Cold," by Town and Country
And so we end where we began: a pretty acoustic instrumental from Chicagoans, on the Thrill Jockey label. This piece is short for Town and Country, only 3:15, but it still manages to move the listener through at least three or four distinct stages, giving the piece a feeling of a toy contraption. Wind it up and it intriguingly unfolds. Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary |
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
8:34 PM
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raiding the 20th century
Everyone's been talking about Raiding the 20th Century, an hour-long mashup mix that also serves as an unofficial history of the cut-up, featuring samples from William Burroughs, Grandmaster Flash, Steve Reich, John Oswald, Negativland, and other plunderphonic pioneers. But because of its unweildy size, it's been hard to find: various sites where it's been available have taken it down because of bandwidth concerns. (Those of you using BitTorrent may have an easier time, but at the risk of losing my geek badge I'll confess that I'm not very adept with P2P networking).
In any case, it was just made available yesterday over at the WFMU blog. This is a temporary situation, so don't delay. |
Sunday, February 13, 2005
12:58 PM
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google = consciousness
Over at Clive Thompson's interesting blog Collision Detection, there's a post on the findings of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which finds that two-thirds of Americans feel they could stop using Internet search engines entirely without much change to their lives.
I like Thompson's reply:
"During the workday, I use search engines several times an hour -- and for several extended periods during the day I'll be doing queries several times a minute. If I were to average it out, I'd say I probably do a search every 15 minutes while I'm at work at my desk. Obviously, I skew pretty far off to the side of the bell-shaped curve here because I'm a) a journalist, b) a technology journalist, c) a blogger, and d) someone who regards the Internet, functionally, as a part of my consciousness. Search engines aren't merely the way I find information: They're part of my basic thought processes."
Hear hear. (The number of Google searches I do while writing an average Imaginary Year entry would probably surprise people, and I'm currently working on a set of projects that use Google even more fundamentally, sort of in the style of flarf, only minus the comedy.)
The comments thread on Thompson's post is full of people praising Google and talking about the usual signs of Google overuse (using it as a spell-checker, etc.), but I also found this comment on "the changing nature of the Web" to also be insightful:
"An unindexed mass of pages made centralized search engines a necessity. These evolved into even more centralized portals. Now we're seeing these portals lose ground to decentralized blog networks [...] The Web is becoming increasingly more social and decentralized in nature. I use Google pretty often, but classic internet search is just one of many, many access points at my disposal now."
Labels: internet, technology |
Friday, February 11, 2005
4:27 PM
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Ovo, Cicatrici
I've always liked bands that swallow down lots of different musical influences, and then vomit them back up again in a kind of half-digested form. The commingled mixture that issues forth from these types of bands isn't always pleasant, but it can be fascinating to try identifying the recognizable bits floating in it.
Enter Ovo, a duo made up of Stefania Pedretti and Bruno Dorella, from Italy. Their album Cicatrici ("Scars") starts blaring its championing of violent hybridization from the moment you lay eyes on the cover art, which features a drawing of two happy amputees stitched together at the arm-stump. The music follows through on the promise of the image by taking a dog's breakfast of parts—doom-metal riffs, the sweaty percussive energy of hardcore, studio-based noise-fuckery, weird vocal uluations—and, over the course of nine tracks, conjoining them all together into a freaky chimera.
The sluggish metal grime and Gollum-esque vocals of "Ombra Nell Ombra" might appeal to fans of Sunn O))) or Khanate, and the overdriven squall that the violin of "Phiphenomena" disintegrates into might appeal to fans of acts like Cock ESP (who Ovo have toured with), but the album overall is more reminiscent of the radical chamelonic antics of the Boredoms, particularly circa Super AE or Chocolate Synthesizer. As with those great records, the crushingly heavy or brutally abrasive elements here are always mercifully leavened by a giddy humor, a nearly cartoonish element. (Imagine two Muppets starting a noise band and you'll be getting close to imagining the Ovo soundworld.)
If pressed, I'd admit that Ovo doesn't quite reach the awe-inspiring heights that the Boredoms, at their best, can scale: Cicatrici isn't without its paler moments, pieces that flag or flail. But the record as a whole still feels startlingly fresh and consistently original. Well worth checking out, and a band to watch for the future.
On Bar La Muerte.
This review cross-posted to Thaumaturgy |
Thursday, February 10, 2005
1:10 PM
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the filth by grant morrison
The Filth is Grant Morrison's most recent piece of long-form comics narrative, a thirteen-issue series published by Vertigo and recently collected into a trade paperback. The Filth is a pretty trippy compound of provocative ideas and strange imagery, but it doesn’t really work as a story, and over the past two months I’ve been reading and re-reading the collection trying to figure out where exactly the flaw might be found. (The post that follows will contain minor spoilers (and postmodern theory), so beware.)
In the book-length study Postmodern Fiction, author Brian McHale discusses the concept of "ontological oscillation": the way that postmodern narratives tend to set up two or more incompatible worlds and lets the text "flicker" between the different realities without necessarily establishing one as more-or-less "real" than another within the space of the story (although some may bear a greater degree of resemblance to our own "real" world than others). This model maps neatly onto The Filth: within the first three issues we're introduced to three distinct ontic worlds. The first of these is the world which seems (initially at least) to be fairly congruent with our own: the contemporary urban Britain where everyman Greg Feely works at his office job and buys pornography essentially functions as a stand-in for our own world's contemporary urban Britain. There are some minor inconsistencies—for instance, early on in the series we're introduced to a race of nanotech organisms evolved by a Nobel-Prize-winning scientist—but daily life in this first world seems like it would be more-or-less familiar.
The second world is the one into which Feely is abducted, the world referred to as "the Crack," which houses the headquarters of a secret hygiene organization called the Hand. "Are we on another planet?" Feely asks, bewildered by the funhouse architecture of Hand HQ and the blighted landscape outside. "Am I in the future? Or in virtual reality?" The answer isn't exactly any of the above, but it's clear that the Crack is a kind of para-space where the normal rules of reality don't apply: monkeys speak, giant submarines are powered by cathedral-batteries, time and space operate in unusual fashion. And then we have a third world, the least real, introduced at the beginning of Issue Three: "the Paperverse," a comic-book universe that emulates the look-and-feel of old Marvel and DC comics, featuring cities like "Omnitropolis" and super-powered characters like "Alpha-Sapiens" and "Machine Girl."
Morrison spends a lot of time exploring the permeability of the boundary between these three worlds: Hand agents covertly (and not entirely benignly) manipulate events in the real world; Feely is disoriented and troubled by the high weirdness of the Crack, mostly wanting to return to caring for his sick cat in his normal life; the Superman-like Secret Orginal cripples himself by leaving behind the action-packed but comparatively innocent world of the Paperverse and punching into the perverse, morally-ambiguous universe of the Crack. And for the most part, all of this works effectively as a means of bringing dramatic tension into The Filth (although the events occuring at Paperverse / Crack boundary never really amount to more than a tantalizing digression).
But one of the difficulties with writing a postmodern narrative containing universes that lack a firm ontological basis is that events occurring in those universes begin to lose some of their weight and consequence. Ontological instablity is a condition with its own degree of tragedy, and Morrison has proven himself able to exploit this in the past (see Deus Ex Machina, the volume which collects some of his run on Animal Man, or the unsettling conclusion of his more recent three-issue series Seaguy) but in The Filth the pathos-generating events tend to be more traditional, and when they occur in a space like the Crack they have a tendency to feel featherweight: the death of Hand agent Cameron Jones from time-accelerated lymphatic cancer just doesn't seem to matter that much because the universe where it happens has already been established as a place where nearly anything goes.
Pathos in The Filth functions more effectively in the "real world," at least for a while, but by mid-series the science-fictional elements of that world have begun to ramp up, which violates the terms of that universe: we’re introduced to elements like a floating nation-ship, the Libertania, in Issue Seven and a man who can manifest clouds of "visible thought" above his head in Issue Ten. With no recognizable reality left for the weirdness to orient around, the story begins to feel completely ungrounded, and events which seem intended to carry emotional weight begin to fall flat: it's difficult to feel like the death of a sick cat is "real" when it happens in a universe where events like the destruction of a nation of over 100,000 people and the mutilation and assassination of the President of the United States seem to have no notable consequences.
There’s a lot to like in The Filth, but I’d stop short of claiming (as the Comics Journal claims) that "The Filth is the best thing Morrison has ever written." It strives for a certain degree of dramatic gravity at the same time as it systematically kicks out its own dramatic supports.
Labels: book_commentary, comics |
Sunday, February 06, 2005
5:29 PM
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