geek apotheosis

Earlier this week:

...and, well, I meant it. Take "Red F," for instance. For the first two minutes it's a pleasing blend of frenzied drum programming, synthesizer noise, and geek anthemics—which already hits my pleasure center pretty hard—then, just before the 2:00 mark, it gives one final push into the transcendent. If this is what my God looks like, then this track is what my angels sound like.

Caution: loud.

Labels: audio, audio_commentary, mp3s, spirituality

Saturday, February 28, 2009
6:38 PM
0 comments

the overdriven landscape: summons of shining ruins

A nice album from 2007 that crept under my radar until I stumbled upon it a few weeks ago is the self-titled debut release from Japanese one-man band Summons of Shining Ruins [MySpace]. The pieces are mostly made with guitar drone and tape echo, which puts me in mind of acts like Rafael Toral and Area C (and anyone who likes those acts should definitely check this out), but this album also has a melancholic sweep and grandeur that sets it apart. You could almost imagine it as having been cut from the same cloth that makes up M83's overdriven electronic anthems, although you'd have to imagine viewing that "cloth" under an electron microscrope, blown up from a detail into a texture into an infinite landscape.

Or you could just click this link to hear an eleven-minute piece with a lyrically unwieldy title: "Facade was burned down, glass cracks innumerably and diffused reflection, How did I come here?"

The Summons of Shining Ruins debut is available through Moufu-Rokuon, as is this year's "sequel release," entitled "Summons of Shining Ruins 2." Also available is a collaboration (dated 2009?) between the Summons of Shining Ruins dude (Shinobu Nemoto) and another gentleman, Brian Grainger, who some of you may know as a result of his very fine release Autumn Soil Feedback (2008).

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Tuesday, December 02, 2008
8:28 AM
0 comments

blue like the fingernails she wore

I'm generally a believer in the idea that artists should grow and change through time, continuing to experiment and try new paths. So the fact that the songs that Mark Kozelek is currently recording in Sun Kil Moon are essentially indistinguishably compatible with the songs that Mark Kozelek was recording ten years ago with the Red House Painters should at least theoretically come as a disappointment.

On the other hand, in times of great change and personal upheaval there's a certain reassurance to be found in constancy, and the fact that I'm going through such a time right now should suggest that I could find these new songs to be a comfort.

But then again this is Mark Kozelek we're talking about, whose songs, although often calm on the surface, are not known for their psychologically uplifting qualities.

Listen: Sun Kil Moon, "Moorestown"

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Thursday, May 08, 2008
8:24 AM
0 comments

track of the week: "if we can land a man on the moon, then surely i can win your heart," by beulah

As you might imagine, I've accumulated a lot of CDs over the years, enough that storing them has become something of a challenge. This problem is accentuated by the fact that probably 98% of my music listening these days is on the iPod, and so the actual CDs go mostly unused: their cases serve as room decor at best and extraneous wrapping at worst.

At this point, I've run out of room for more CD racks (plus I can't get to Ikea) and so I've been forced to begin the process of packing them up into boxes and putting them into storage. Choosing which go and which stay is something of a challenge, although I'm aided by the fact that since 2001 I've created a top-ten list of albums released that year (for the curious: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006). This provided a sort of happy solution: there's not enough room to store everything I buy, but there's definitely enough room to store a measly ten a year... plus those are the ones I most want to have at the ready / on display anyway...

But it got me to thinking about those pre-2001 years... the Nineties (and beyond). In order to properly follow through with this project, I should, in theory, need to go back and figure out a list of the Best Nineties Albums.

So I've spent some time, over the last few weeks, looking over the shelves, and trying to make some preliminary list of 100 CDs. It's a decade with a lot of good music: including (for me) canonical college-soundtrack stuff (Nirvana's Nevermind, the Beastie Boys' Check Your Head; Beck's Odelay); landmark electronic / dance albums (DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works, Portishead's Dummy, Tricky's Maxinquaye); a really strong selection of albums from labels like Matador (Pavement; Liz Phair; Yo La Tengo; Cat Power) and, later in the decade, Thrill Jockey (Tortoise; Oval; Town and Country). Then there's the rise of the Elephant 6 Collective, who released some albums that were pretty key for me back then (Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea). Today's track, "If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart," is from the lesser-known Elephant 6 project Beulah, from their very fine album When Your Heartstrings Break (1999). It's perhaps the best song ever written on the topic of "selling out," a topic which as of today seems, in its way, very 90s.

I'm eager to receive additional suggestions for great 90s albums: feel free to use the comments field.

Cross-posted to Raccoon Audio.

Labels: audio, mp3s, personal

Tuesday, November 27, 2007
1:06 PM
2 comments

back

Just got back (late last night) from a two-week New Hampshire / Vermont / Massachussetts trip, which included the seventh annual Spring Conference, which is either a summer camp for adults or a utopian cult, depending on who you ask. It pulled its normal sort of polarity-reversing mojo on me, this year most especially in the form of a letter- and journal-writing workshop that my longtime collaborator Lulu S. and I co-ran. We organized our writing prompts into a particular sequence which was designed to lead people into some challenging emotional space; this worked a little bit better than expected, leaving us pretty raw and vulnerable-feeling by midweek: fortunately we'd also designed a second arc designed to get us back to safer territory in the second half of the con. DIY therapy can be a chancy thing (cough), but when it works, it's great.

Some other highlights: naked lake swimming (last year was too cold and I skipped the swimming entirely); powerfully reconnecting with two old old friends from whom I'd recently been estranged; bonfire action; dusting off the Spring Dance Party iTunes playlist and successfully sneaking in some new tracks among the old favorites (Spank Rock's NSFW "Lindsay Lohan" perhaps being the best new addition); playing new games (most notably the simple/diabolical Blokus); etc etc etc—too many to list.

And sad bits: the critical illness of Kiwitayro's dog Fianna (RIP); the one-two punch (hard drive death / dislocated shoulder) that kept sweet Catling from having an exemplary week; continued tensions simmering between people who I love.

Output: the 47 best photos I took are here in a Flickr set (completists may also want to check out the sets from other years: 2006, 2005, and 2004). Also, as part of my journaling thing I did a new hundred-favorite-things list, which I will type in and post here sometime soon.

Labels: audio, mp3s, personal

Wednesday, June 13, 2007
11:19 AM
0 comments

full of pastoral dreams

Over the weekend, I went out to Chicago's newest good record store, Permanent Records, and picked up a bunch of stuff, including Honey Rose, the newest record by Rameses III.

I'd been introduced to Rameses III from the fine track they contributed to the three-disc Gold Leaf Branches comp from Foxy Digitalis (2005), but that didn't really prepare me for the sheer loveliness of the this very fine short disc.

Give the second track, "Theme 2," a listen: it's mighty in its hush and drift. Rameses III are sometimes grouped in with the "free folk" crowd, but to my ear this music is less folk and more shoegazer: it's like My Bloody Valentine, if My Bloody Valentine wanted nothing more than to lull you into a warm, lovely sleep.

Honey Rose is available for purchase on Important Records.

(This post cross-posted to Raccoon Audio.)

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Sunday, April 01, 2007
4:46 PM
0 comments

raccoon audio: wake up wake up

Getting up in the morning can sometimes be a challenge. And this challenge is complicated by the difficulty of finding the right sound to wake up to. I don't like the harshness of alarms, and the radio's not really an option either: I can't stand waking up to commercials, and the commercial-free alternative provided by NPR is... well, that's really a whole separate rant, that I'll spare you for now.

Determined to wake to music, I picked up a CD-playing alarm clock a few years ago, which kicked off a whole investigation of which CDs are better to wake up to than others. Recently, I've really been enjoying waking up to albums by the duo Lullatone.

As the name implies, this track, "Wake Up Wake Up," (from 2004's Little Songs About Raindrops) is just about a perfect song to hear first thing in the morning. It is absolutely gentle in every way, but it won't put you back to sleep either: it has an electronic glitchiness about it that delicately stimulates your ear until you're ready to rise.

Lullatone's newest release, Pajama Pop Pour Vous (2006), goes it one better by beginning with "Good Morning Melody," which has all the same strengths as "Wake Up Wake Up" only with the addition of breathy vocals, sung in Japanese-inflected English, about getting up and starting your day. It is so cute it makes me just about want to die of pleasure: your mileage may vary.

Cross-posted to Raccoon Audio.

Labels: audio, cuteness, mp3s, music_commentary

Wednesday, February 21, 2007
9:35 AM
7 comments

raccoon audio

I've decided to spin off the MP3 posts into their own blog, over at Blog*Spot: Raccoon Audio. The reason for this is mainly because I want to start getting indexed in the Hype Machine's database, and I thought they were more likely to index an all-MP3 blog than this one, which I think could comfortably be descrbied as "eclectic" in its focus.

MP3 posts will still be cross-posted here, so you don't need to do anything or even think about the new site unless you're only reading this blog for the music-oriented posts, in which case you might want to switch to reading that one, which has a nice syndication feed and all that jazz.

That's also the place to look if you want the whole top ten all in a single post, specifically here.

I took some liberties with the dates, don't look too close.

Labels: audio, meta, mp3s, music_commentary, personal

Thursday, February 08, 2007
10:38 AM
0 comments

10 CDs of 2006 (with mp3s): part 4

And finally, my pick for best album of 2006:

1. Sunn O))) / Boris, Altar

Before I say anything, I should acknowledge that a fictional version of this album (accurate down to the participation of Dylan "Earth" Carlson) appeared in the 2005 April Fool's Day edition of the Aquarius Records newsletter, in which the album consists of a single E chord, with each band contributing a single note.

Pretty funny. And there's truth to the fact that this record could have been made with about that much investment of effort: since both Boris and Sunn O))) have rabid fan-bases, both acts could have come together and operated more-or-less on autopilot, piled up by-the-numbers guitar drone, and they probably would still have made bank (it's not for nothing that the title of the fictional parody album is Reserve Not Yet Met). So the fact that the end product isn't content to rest on its laurels is all the more amazing.

There are the requisite "heavy" pieces here: the opener ("Etna") and the closer ("Blood Swamp") are pretty much what you'd expect the collaboration to produce, which is not to say that they're not accomplished pieces of monolithic roar. But the album's real achievement is in the way that the intervening tracks diverge from comfort zones and expectations, and produce four tracks of genre-defying occultist weirdness: "NLT" is a gong-and-bass soundscape, "The Sinking Belle" is a Metal-inflected ballad (with vocals by singer-songwriter Jesse Sykes), "Akuma No Kuma" is an electronic anthem full of messed-up vocoder'd vocals and bombastic horns (maybe the soundtrack to a Conan movie set in Kirby-esque deep space), and "Fried Eagle Mind" is a trance-inducing bit of opiated ambience and static. The bonus disc, featuring Dylan Carlson wrangling daemonic Telecaster all over it, is just plain icing on the cake. This is the only album I bought this year on the day it was released (also the only one I bought at Metal Haven) and the only album I was eagerly anticipating that did not disappoint me (hello, Joanna Newsom and Lady Sovereign).

Listen: "Akuma No Kuma," by Sunn O))) and Boris

Bonus link!: Sunn O)))'s Steven O'Malley interviewing Dylan Carlson for Decibel.

Extra bonus!: Chicago residents might want to hit the MCA sometime this month, where my pal Terence Hannum has an installation up. Entitled "Evocation," it consists primarily of video projection of a Sunn O))) performance. (Terence has curated a month's worth of drone performances at the MCA in conjunction with this installation; the first one was last night, featuring Rebis' own White/Light. Who are also playing tomorrow at the Empty Bottle, opening for the Rhys Chatham Guitar Trio. Wow. Heavy goodness all over the place this month.)

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Wednesday, February 07, 2007
5:54 PM
1 comments

10 CDs of 2006 (with mp3s): part 3

The countdown to number one continues...

4. Mrtyu!, Blood Tantra and With Throats As Fine As Needles, s/t
I know that putting "ties" on year-end lists is kind of a cop-out, but these two discs complement one another so well that by year's end it was difficult not to think of them as a unit. They showcase two opposing sides of dronemaster Antony Milton's technique: on Blood Tantra, he submerges the listener into the cauldron of Metal's deep distortion and roar, whereas on Throats Fine As Needles he and his cadre of NZ experimentalists (Campbell Kneale, James Kirk, and Richard Francis) work with quietude and stillness, their palette built largely out of cheap electronics humming softly in subterranean darkness. Look beyond the differences in surface turbulence, though, and both discs reveal themselves as similar investigations, exploring stasis, modulation, tension and release. On 20 Buck Spin and Digitalis, respectively.
Listen: "The Worldy Skein," by Mrtyu!

3. Mountains, Sewn
For the past five years, Brooklyn's Apestaartje label has released a cool twenty discs of pastoral drone, organic noise, and sound art. I own about half of them and there's not a dud in the bunch. Mountains is an Apestaartje "supergroup" of sorts, representing a collaboration between two one-man acts, Anderegg and Aero, who have each recorded albums of abstract electronica which are individually superlative. Together, though, they seem to reinforce one another's strengths, and this album--a combination of pretty acoustic passages and warm electronic texture--is as fine as anything the label's ever put out.
Listen: "Sheets," by Mountains

2. Ghosting, Why Not Be Utterly Changed Into Fire?
The single track that comprises this album spends a half hour exploring the title question, using distorted guitars and squealing machines to conjure a circle of angelic flame around the listener, threatening to consume but also promising to transfigure. This could certainly be described as a noise album—it spends a lot of its time channeling a storm of white-hot needles through the open spaces of your skull, and the experience is undeniably harrowing—but remember that the goal here is transcendence and the methods suddenly invert, seeming magical instead of menacing. No MP3 of this one, as the disc's only track is single-minded in a way that fundamentally resists excerpting. On Jyrk.

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Saturday, February 03, 2007
4:25 PM
0 comments

10 CDs of 2006 (with mp3s): part 2

The countdown to number one continues...

7. Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura, Between
One game you can play, if you're a music geek, is trying to determine the point where "free improvisation" became officially detached from anything resembling jazz. A related game is trying to determine the point where one bifurcated tendril of free improvisation again crossed the territorial lines of genre to become avant-garde electronica, renouncing even the tools of jazz in favor of rewired mixers, detuned radios, dismantled guitars, and repurposed iPods. Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura are among the most interesting practicioners of this branch, producing stark fields of abstract electronic texture that defy easy categorization but which compel forcefully on their own terms. The two CDs comprising Between resemble not music so much as they resemble the sounds you might hear if you could tap into onboard recordings made by an interplanetary probe as it descended through a toxic, static-riddled atmosphere. On Erstwhile.
Listen: "13630 kHz," by Keith Rowe + Toshimaru Nakamura

6. Vampire Can't, Key Cutter
This disc represents three sorts of noisy music fused into an improbably well-oiled hybrid: free-jazz drumming from the ever-astonishing Chris Corsano, abrasive scuzz-rock guitar from Bill Nace, and circuit-bent squee from Jessica Rylan and her homemade machines. The on-paper incompatibility of these modes would seem to dictate that these tracks explode on the launching pad, and it's true that fully half of the songs on the disc last for under two minutes, but the fearsome blazing singularity that they attain in their short and furious lifespans is like something that came straight from the mind of God. On Load.
Listen: "War Lips," by Vampire Can't

5. Girl Talk, Night Ripper
Momus once described mash-ups (here) as "Everything that ever sold a record, all on one plate," and I think he meant it pejoratively, whereas I see it as something of a grail to strive for. We haven't quite gotten there yet, but this album from Gregg Gillis might represent the most successful attempt yet. Night Ripper jettisons the conceptual rigor that undergirds other notable mash-up albums (say, the Kleptones' Night at the Hip-Hopera, or DJ Food's Raiding the 20th Century), replacing it instead with an understanding that increased density equals increased enjoyment. Highest pleasures-per-second count of any album this year. On Illegal Art.
Listen: "Hold Up," by Girl Talk

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Wednesday, January 31, 2007
9:35 AM
0 comments

10 cds of 2006 (with mp3s): part 1

Right around the time of Christmas and New Year's, I was travelling, and sick, and working on other writing projects, and trying to beat Armadillo Run, so I never got around to posting my "best of 2006" CD list. Working with the better-late-than-never premise, I thought I'd do it this week, ornamenting it with some MP3s as a bonus. Expect it in three installments, starting with the bottom of the list and working our way up:

10. Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere
Flawed and occasionally indulgent, but St. Elsewhere earns major points for managing to be both a record that I heard or played at just about every party I was at this year and an album-length meditation on mental illness and the fragmentation of [black] identity. Improbable, but the unsettling lyrical content consistently fit perfectly into the alluring vibe generated by Cee-Lo's charismatic croon and Danger Mouse's warm grooves. The most obvious manifestation of this trick can be seen in the way they took a song explicitly about madness and disintegration ("Crazy") and got it to pass as the feel-good pop hit of the year, but the pattern is repeated everywhere on the album, from the inviting cover of the Violent Femmes' menacing "Gone Daddy Gone" to "Necromancing," an ode to necrophilia. Impressive, fascinating.
:: "Who Cares?," by Gnarls Barkley

9. The Rapture, Pieces of the People We Love
Aside from "45:33," there wasn't a new LCD Soundsystem release last year, but this indie-dance release by the Rapture served as a decent stopgap, as long as you were willing to substitute Luke Jenner's sleazy charisma for James Murphy's subcultural wit. Pieces essentially updates the ideas of the disco-inflected post-punk era for an audience weaned on 80s power-pop: something like Loose Joints reinterpreted by Ric Ocasek. No claims to high significance, but definitely the most fun album I heard all year.
:: "Whoo! Alright—Yeah...Uh Huh," by the Rapture

8. Keiran Hebden and Steve Reid, The Exchange Session, Vol. 1
Many, many talented people have attempted to integrate free jazz and electronic music, with outcomes that have ranged from the blandly respectable to the utterly dreadful. This disc, made up of three improvisations between sample-manipulator Keiran Hebden and longtime jazz drummer Steve Reid, avoids these fates, managing to at least partially scale the peaks that characterize the best of ecstatic '60s jazz. Hebden's body of solo work (as Four Tet) is impressive, but he seems especially freed up here by being able to hand off the rhythm duties to Reid; this allows him to stretch out and focus on the role that would normally fulfilled by an especially "free" saxophonist, namely, providing squall and color and noise. The album isn't perfect—there are moments when the pieces lose their way—but this disc provides the most substantial piece of evidence to date that these two branches of music can be successfully wed.
:: "Soul Oscillations," by Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Tuesday, January 30, 2007
10:34 AM
0 comments

raccoon audio: hot soft light

When I think of the Hold Steady, I think back to something music-journo Justin Farrar wrote about the rise of the band Comets on Fire: he calls them a bar band, in fact "the best bar-rock band ever known to man," but something about their acceptance as "in-the-vanguard, underground artists" doesn't sit well with him. His conclusion? It's because Comets on Fire are "all instruments and no storytelling." He, in fact, presents this as the very thing that relegates them to bar-rock status, arguing that bar-bands, by definition, lack storytellers.

I thought this was a pretty good axiom until I heard the Hold Steady album Separation Sunday, an album that rarely strives, sonically speaking, to provide anything more than old-fashioned bar rock, but which lyrically functions as a song cycle roughly on par with The Mountain Goats' All Hail West Texas ("fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys"). The characters on Separation Sunday are born-again Christians or drug-addled burnouts or both, and although the title of the new album, Boys and Girls In America, reveals that the Hold Steady guys are taking aim at bigger themes, the general air of dead-endedness and clutching desperation still permeates.

For instance, this track, "Hot Soft Light," which basically describes the trajectory of every Hold Steady song ever written by rhyming "recreational" with "medical" and then with "tentacles" (later "manacles").

Labels: audio, mp3s, narrative

Saturday, January 27, 2007
12:39 PM
0 comments

raccoon audio: let's boogey to the elf dance

For each of the past five years, Sufjan Stevens has released an EP of Christmas-themed songs, both traditional carols and originals (now collected in the Songs For Christmas box set). I heard a few of these last year around this time, and was struck by the way that they play up Stevens' central strength (his skill at composing unusual arrangments) while completely sidestepping his central weakness (his tendency towards pretention).

Take, for instance, today's track, "Let's Boogey To The Elf Dance." Its palpable aura of casual goodwill and all-around lightheartedness are so winning that I find myself preferring it to nearly all of the more (self-consciously?) "important" tracks on [Greetings From] Michigan and [Come On Feel the] Illinois[e].

[Related: I often have a hard time stomaching material by The Decemberists, whose tendency to indulge in twee anachronism is by now so shtick-y that you could essentially make a drinking game out of it (1 shot each time Colin Meloy mentions a European place-name; 1 more each time he mentions an occupation that existed in the 19th century). It is for this reason that my favorite Decemberists song is "Apology Song," about something as modest as a stolen bike.]

Thanks to Ray and Rich T. (respectively) for gifting me these tracks.

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Friday, December 08, 2006
2:12 PM
0 comments

raccoon audio: rag for william s burroughs

So if you were to ever make a 10-minute film about the life of William S. Burroughs, you could use this Matmos track as your soundtrack. Gunshots, adding machine sounds, Jajoukan pipes: this cut has it all. (If I were to quibble, I'd say they should have faded out into the sound of purring cats in the final minute, but otherwise, spot-on.)

From Matmos' new(ish) album, The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth of A Beast, which is a suite of ten songs, each dedicated to a different deceased queer.

Labels: audio, mp3s, music

Tuesday, December 05, 2006
6:32 PM
0 comments

seven songs for summer III

Ok, enough with the pop, time for some good old-fashioned weirdness.

5) Growing, "Fancy Period"

This inspired number starts off by cultivating a field of acid-trip patterns into an impossibly ornate tangle which threatens to blot out everything behind its whirling calligraphic streamers. Like all barriers, though, this one is illusory, and around minute four you slip through into a totally different landscape, where pseudo-Zimbabwean filligrees float beatifically over funky bionic stutter. Ambitious!

6) Vulture Club, "Untitled"

I don't know much about Vulture Club other than the fact that it has released an album full of heavy guitar drones in their most concentrated form: no riffs, no melody, no Julian Cope poetry, just sweet sweet room-shaking low-end, with the tiniest bit of occasional modulation serving to hold interest. This track is for anyone who finds unadorned amplifier hum to be strangely lulling and comforting.

7) Vampire Belt, "Snake Out"

Mixtape-makers take note that that Vulture Club track flows nicely into this piece, which commences with a few seconds of grimy hum before busting out into some of the finest splattering skronk I've ever heard. Chris Corsano has been earning so much praise for his inventive improv drumming that people forget that he can also do straight-up hardcore pounding when paired with a player who demands it: Bill Nace is that player here, providing inspirational art-damaged guitar-work that is very finely mangled indeed.

Labels: audio, mp3s

Thursday, August 17, 2006
3:31 PM
0 comments

seven songs for summer II

Two more.

3) The Coup, "Laugh, Love, Fuck"

This song features a refrain that goes: "I'm here to laugh, love, fuck and drink liquor / and help the damn revolution come quicker." What more do I really need to say? Will it help if I say it also features a cheesy clap machine?

4) DJ Drama and Lil' Wayne, "Georgia... Bush" [edit]

Chuck D once famously referred to hip hop as "black America's CNN," an assertion that was questionable then and remains questionable now. But the statement feels relevant in reference to this song, a chilling little bit of post-Katrina reportage from 23-year-old New Orleans native Lil' Wayne. Anger and sorrow tangle here with conspiracy-theorizing and good old-fashioned Bush-hammering (although it's worth noting that Ray Nagin takes a solid hit as well).

Three more to come.

Labels: audio, mp3s

Sunday, August 13, 2006
1:06 PM
0 comments

seven songs for summer I

So LJM / unscrambled tagged me to do a "seven songs you're listening to" blog-post. I enjoyed her list but thought that the whole "seven songs" game might be improved with the addition of some MP3s.

So:

1) Ladytron, "Destroy Everything You Touch"

A better summer would not have featured this song playing over and over again in my head. But instead of the better summer, I am having the one in which I am blundering through the landscape like a grief-maddened Godzilla, leaving a trail of bent wreckage and disappointed people behind me. The gap between this song's upbeat bent and the bleakness of its lyrical content conveys a certain fuckheaded resoluteness: that desire to confirm one's own worst suspicions about oneself, and the feelings of idiotic satisfaction and cynical glee when this dubious goal is achieved.

2) Kimya Dawson, "My Rollercoaster"

I'm not sure who brought the Kimya Dawson tunes to Spring this year, but I stood in the kitchen by myself on the final night and listened to this song and it brought tears to my eyes. This song is goofy and dorky and exuberant and tender: these are the ways I like to think of myself when I'm not thinking of myself as a maddened Godzilla, v. sup.

Five more later?

Labels: audio, mp3s

Friday, August 11, 2006
9:05 AM
0 comments

mouth sounds

I was surprised to see Maja Ratkje's show at the Empty Bottle so sparsely attended last night. Her radical vocal work is pretty demanding, but there are so many subcultural routes through which one could come to an admiration of her. Sound poetry fans and improv-loving beard-scratchers alike should love the way she uses language and vocalized sound as a strange dynamic instrument, while there's enough weird electronic manipulation to appease the Powerbook set as well. Even the noise-niks should be in awe: her set last night at the Empty Bottle was easily as noisy (at times) as the Merzbow set from back in September, while also being far more inventive and variegated.

Here's an MP3 from Voice, her 2002 collaboration with Norway's Jazzkammer: "Trio." Try to imagine these sounds (some of which border on the Lovecraftian) emerging from a tiny woman who looks a bit like like a china doll and you'll maybe have a better understanding of why I think the full force of her work is best experienced live.

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Monday, January 30, 2006
4:04 PM
0 comments

two million tongues : preview I

For those of you who can't be in Chicago for the Two Million Tongues festival (hyperlinked lineup below), I figured I'd post some relevant MP3s.

Since tonight Tony Conrad will be playing [!], here's "Trance #2," a sweet little drone miniature featuring Conrad in collaboration with Velvet Underground alums John Cale and Angus MacLise. This is from 1965 (!) and yet you could slot it next to something more contemporary (a psychedelic noise jam from Finland, or a slab of lo-fi sound from New Zealand, say) and it would still sound completely at home.

I'll try to post another MP3 from one of Friday's performers tomorrow, but my schedule is pretty tight, so... we'll see?

Unrelated: list of books I've read this year now up-to-date.

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Thursday, November 03, 2005
5:09 PM
0 comments

counterpoint and ironies

Although most Western music for the past, oh, I don't know, roughly four hundred years or so has been written with a focus on harmony as its predominant structural element, you could make an argument that turntablism, by its very nature, marks a return to the musical principle of counterpoint: viewed in a certain light, the way turntablism takes rhythmic or melodic fragments and juxtaposes them with other fragments or with duplicate versions of itself could be said to be almost round-like or fugue-like.

The contrapuntal effect of musical irony could be said to apply to much turntable material:

"Counterpoint is one of the most essential means, in musical composition, for the generation of musical ironies; a melodic fragment, heard alone, may make a particular impression, but when it is heard simultaneously with other melodic ideas, or combined in unexpected ways with itself, as in canon or fugue, surprising new facets of meaning are revealed."
(from Wikipedia)

A nice example comes to us in the form of this week's Friday MP3, "Jukebox Capriccio," a piece made by turntablist Christian Marclay in 1985, which jumbles together big band horns, skating-rink organ, tinny New Wave beats, sundry bits of exotica, and scrawls of white noise into something that "means" something far more complicated than any of the records might manage individually. (This piece, along with many other pieces of radical counterpoint, are available on the wonderful 1997 Marclay anthology Records 1981-1989, on Atavistic.)

Listen: "Jukebox Capriccio"

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Friday, May 27, 2005
10:29 AM
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super bore

"The Boredoms are like a moon on a lake. Only there is no moon and no lake. Only Boredoms." —Yamatsuka Eye

The Boredoms are coming and playing in Chicago tomorrow night, which, for me at least, is great news: ever since 2001's masterpiece Vision Creation New Sun the Boredoms have topped my list of acts that I've wanted to see live. The Boredoms are especially interesting to me because over the last ten years or so they've managed to enact a transformation from brilliant, juvenile spazz-punks to psychedelic mystics, releasing stunning albums at every step in the process. For my money, this ranks as an artistic development that rivals any in the history of popular music. (The best comparison I can think of would be The Beatles' shift from brilliant, juvenile moptops to, well, psychedelic mystics.)

This Friday's MP3, "Super Are," is taken from 1998's Super AE, which I love because it's something of a transition album, fulfilling roughly the same sort of function in their catalog as Revolver does for the Beatles: it's that perfect blend of a developing psychedelic sound (which isn't yet in full bloom) and a pop-mania past (which isn't yet fully behind them). This track is pretty representative: it begins with gentle electronic drones, meditative chants, and a fucking drum-circle jam before lurching into the realm of the death-metal freak-out.

Listen: "Super Are"

Related: Loads of Boredoms links over at the Boredoms Temple of Worship; MP3 blog the of mirror eye has a good post featuring two tracks from Vision Creation New Sun.

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Friday, May 20, 2005
2:18 PM
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pastoral circuses of the future

I don't think Nobukazu Takemura's album Child and Magic, released in 1997 by Warner Japan, has ever been released domestically, and more's the pity, since this disc is one of the odder ones in Takemura's catalog. He's mainly known stateside as a purveyor of fragmented, crystalline electronica, and that, indeed, is one facet of Child and Magic, but the disc also contains pieces more akin to affable J-pop, Reichian minimalism, or the gentle sort of electroacoustic music offered up by Lucky Kitchen.

This Friday's MP3, "Clown and Crown," is representative of the hybridity and scope of the album: it functions as a fantasy terrarium wherein stately violin, children's voices, electronic bloops and bleeps, circus-band horns, bird twitter, and gravelly noise can all come together to form a completely natural and balanced whole.

Listen:"Clown and Crown"

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Friday, May 13, 2005
3:22 PM
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princesses with nice figures

A few years ago, feeling glum and only finding depressing music in my home library, I asked around for some "life-affirming" music. No one at the time suggested Mighty Spoiler's 1953 tune "Bedbug," but I think it's a great example of what I was looking for: although Spoiler is singing here about dying and being reincarnated as an insect, an initially unpleasant-seeming prospect, he manages to spin it into an irrepresible vision of parasite heaven, in which he'll be spending his days in fat women's beds, pleasuring himself by biting on their flesh.

Of this song, sleevenote writer Alvin C. Daniell remarks: it's "a textbook example of how a master calypsonian can transform potential pornography into a charming smut, and add a bit of social satire in the process."

From the joyous, ribald 1995 collection Unspoilt; thanks to Darren D. for turning me on to it.

Listen: Mighty Spoiler (1926-1960): "Bedbug"

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Friday, May 06, 2005
2:32 PM
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I posted an MP3 last Friday, and I'll post one today-- maybe we can make this a weekly thing.

Today: the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

Famously described by William S. Burroughs as "a 4,000 year old rock 'n' roll band," the Master Musicians are a Moroccan ensemble located south of Tangier. It's theorized that the primary Jajoukan festival is in fact a reenactment of the Lupercalia, the Roman Rites of Pan, and much of the ecstatic Jajoukan music found on this recording (1992's Apocalypse Across the Sky) can, indeed, be described as panic-inducing: it's some of the most frightening music I've ever heard. The dominant instrument on many of these tracks is the ghaitia, a terrifyingly shrill pipe: when played in mass ensemble, these pipes are pretty ego-annihilating. (Their intricate melodic lines may also have inspired the hallucinatory calligrammatic art of cut-up pioneer Brion Gysin, who for two years ran a Tangier restaurant where the Master Musicians served as the house band.)

The particular piece I'm putting up today doesn't feature the pipes, but rather a drummer and what sounds like two musicians on stringed instruments (to deduce from the liner notes, I'd guess a gimbri and lira). What's special here is the way that even with only these minimal means, the track still has the capability to send the receptive listener directly into a potent trance state. Lights out.

Listen: "The Middle of the Night" by the Master Musicians of Jajouka

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Friday, April 22, 2005
4:49 PM
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motherfuckers

Learning (via iTunes) that I have twelve songs which include the word "fuck" (or a variant) in their titles suggests a possible theme for a mix.

I can pretty much guarantee you that this theoretical mix will never come to pass, but I will give you an MP3 of one possible track, Gaunt's "Jim Motherfucker," from 1992.

It's a scuzzy little bit of punk rock goodness that tells the familiar cautionary / celebratory tale of drunkenness, poverty, and nihilism. Use it to kick off your weekend.

Listen: "Jim Motherfucker"

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Friday, April 15, 2005
8:09 PM
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alphane moon / our glassie azoth, experimenting with an amen / the magician's heavenly chaos

Students of alchemy, that compelling science-in-ruins, know that "azoth" is one of alchemy's four symbolic substances.  The other three, mercury, sulphur, and salt, are all familiar enough— azoth is the one that's truly cryptic, described variously as a mysterious life force, an invisible fire, or a river of living water.  It's thought, by some, that azoth is a sort of proto-electricity, or that electricity is azoth itself under a different name—so the name Our Glassie Azoth suggests something cryptic, slippery, and above all, enthralled by the transfiguring fire-water of current.  

In this regard, the three Azoth tracks that make up the "Magician's Heavenly Chaos" half of this album don't disappoint: each of them are a long-form experiment in attempting to harness (or to liberate) a wild torrent of primal electrical squall.  It's impossible to tell exactly what is generating the sounds captured here: it could be an analogue synth, guitar feedback, an array of test-tone oscillators, a theremin—basically these tracks sound like pure unrefined voltage, given voice.  And it turns out voltage has a personality: it chatters, it wails, it thrums menacingly and veers chaotically.  It evolves patterns which then disintegrate, other patterns corroding it cancerously from within.  

This music is hard to situate precisely—the band's from Wales, but if I were hearing these tracks without that knowledge I'd probably guess Japan (at its noisiest it recalls the terrifying white-hot typhoons of analogue-era Merzbow, and at its most delicate it could be the spastic cousin of sinewave minimalists like Sachiko M or Toshimaru Nakamura). Listen with a slightly different ear, though, and it's suddenly reminiscent of a 1960s American electronic composition—there are moments that could be from a lost Tod Dockstater tape-piece, some occluded moon of Quatermass.

The album's opening half is contribued by sister act Alphane Moon, which, if I understand correctly, is the Our Glassie Azoth folks recording under a different name (or vice versa).  I know that, of the band's two faces, Alphane Moon is the one that explicitly invokes the moon, but, frankly, they seem like the solar half of this sacred marriage— "The Magician's Heavenly Chaos" is all about lunatic darkness, whereas "Experimenting With An Amen" seems more willing to cast a few beams of illumination to guide the wary.  It's still noisy—the shriek that kicks off the album's first track is as punishing as anything on its flipside—but the noise is consistently tempered with warm, hazy drones.  Take the second track, "Opal Fire," for instance: overlook the occasional wraithlike keening, and it could pass for one of the otherworldly bog-spaces on Eno's On Land.  There are even a few side-steps into wyrd-folk territory: "Cyngor y Borgen" is a straight-up acoustic ballad, sung in Welsh, which is paired with "Further," which sounds more like Nick Drake than it sounds like anything else on either half of the record.

These are brief digressions, though, and before you know it we're at the final Alphane Moon track.  This track, "Usk," is the one which makes an attempt to form a union between the two acts on this disc—it opens with magnificent pulsating sheets of noise which seem like they belong more readily to the Our Glassie Azoth side of things, but then the noise gradually clears, replaced by a palette of calming electronic arpeggiations and what sounds like a distant flute, revealing the gentler hand of Alphane Moon.  It's a lovely, hermaphroditic piece, showcasing the best side of each of these intriguing acts.

On Oggum.

Hear: "Usk"

(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 Daffyd for his kind permission.)

This review has been cross-posted to Thaumaturgy

Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary

Thursday, April 07, 2005
9:57 AM
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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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