(con)temporary

the party & the afterparty

2011-12-22T19:44:00.014+11:00

Review: The Weeknd - Echoes of Silence

Why not review an album hours after its release? Things move fast now, hype is warp-speed, so best enjoy it while its fresh. And aren't The Weeknd the most befitting subject for this kind of reaction? Abel Tesfaye's project feeds off the buzz, hate, love, etc. generated by the same dispersed online audience that he has offered up his immaculately produced, beautifully executed mixtapes to all year, and all void of a discourse save for Tesfaye's undeniably shitty Twitter account - Weeknd albums come to us as clean as the sound itself, shorn of any critical and promotional baggage - but one that is soon after filled in by amalgamation of all those little moments of reaction that his collective audience of critics and listeners (and it seems like a good chunk of these listeners are critics) have felt and expressed.

And if general opinion is anything to go by, it's that general opinion is The Weeknd is amazing - various year-end lists with House of Balloons somewhere near the top have commented that Tesfaye's was the sound that united highly diverse and otherwise antagonistic listening groups in 2011. I feel like this kind of claim needs empirical evidence - insane blog and Twitter hype doesn't count, given as a fairly specific group of listeners are the ones producing this chatter. But I'll give in to intuition and say, yes, basically anyone who loves music will find something to like or even love in The Weeknd. And for free! And lots of it. Three mixtape albums in a year - and sure, whilst admittedly there's been signs of diminishing returns throughout this 'balloon trilogy', in isolation, anyone of these three would be more than enough to recognise that here is a prodigous, precocious talent.

What anyone will also find in these three albums, if they care to listen, is I think a subtly executed but also oddly engrossing narrative, a tragic story of excess and its shadows. In this regard, if House of Balloons was the courtship - Tesfaye oiling us up with his debased but undeniably exciting ways - and Thursday was the party itself, then Echoes of Silence is the comedown, the morning after where you put some Sade on the stereo and nursing your heavy head, think about all the fucked up things you did and how your girl fucked you over last night and wonder about how soon you're going to do it all again. Each album in the trilogy has, somewhat amazingly, achieved its own specific aesthetic - from the alternating ecstasy-soaked epics and late-night slow-jams of his debut, to Thursday's faux-rock histrionics, and now Echoes of Silence, with its far more sombre tone, each song a kind of holding-pattern ("the same old song", as he sings on the track of the same name, that maybe "you don't wanna sing no more" as he admits on 'XO / The Host') of not necessarily great emotions - jealously, regret and loneliness chief among them.

The album opens with a cover of Michael Jackson's 'Dirty Diana' - an explicit acknowledgement not only of the influence MJ's vocal style seems to have had on Tesfaye (there's a couple of seconds where the two are indistinguishable) but also of Jackson's tortured, existential romanticism that he perfected in songs like this and 'Smooth Criminal'. Later, on 'Outside' he's letting a girl use the same positions she liked with her ex as he tries convincing himself that it'll be okay once he's inside her and that he's the one she wants. Bitterness, jealously, the lovelorn run-off of one-night-stands - the dull glow of heartache pervades the atmospheres of Echoes of Silence, even if Tesfaye tries convincing himself otherwise, that he "ain't scared of the fall". The other side of the coin, the feeling of waking up. The balloon has been popped.

What has unified The Weeknd's trilogy, apart from Illangelo and Doc McKinney's uniformly amazing avant-R&B production, is Tesfaye's ultra-seedy spin on the typical sex and drug signifiers of the genre, taking them into their most debauched and perverted extremes until something like a crypto-Surrealism is reached. I'm not talking the melting clocks and quirky styrups saccharine of a Dali, nah uh - what we're dealing with here is pop's version of Bataille's renegade surrealism - the kind of works which in the words of Adrian Martin "enact a bleak politics of surrealist transgression - a tearing open of bodies, and a voyage of no return into furiously alienated minds". I don't think I'm drawing a long bow here when I say that listening to The Weeknd is basically the sonic equivalent of Hans Bellmer's La Poupée series - a never-ending parade of fucked up bodies contorted through the sickening haze of the coke-gaze.

That's why 'Initiation' is both an apt and an odd track on this fairly introspective album - well, let's say, even more instropective than usual. At the pivotal point of the album, it's basically the epitome and let's also say the exhaustion point of the fucked-up-party-surrealism that Tesfaye has been developing. As the music trips from left-to-right channel, creating a sense of woozy, giddying disorientation, the narrator creepily, softly croons to a girl that she "can have it all" (his attention, affection, that is) only if she passes his "test": "to meet my boys" - now there's conjecture around the traps as to what the 'boys' Tesfaye is referring to here actually are. Is he - echoing the slightly creepy mention of "light-skinned girls, first flight from Poland" on his guest verse for Drake's 'Crew Love' - basically talking about a gang-bang? Or is he saying that, as the rest of the lyrics would suggest, that if she wants to get down, she has to be introduced to and imbibe all the various drugs that will cause the kind of vocal effects we hear throughout the song, constantly warping and winding their way up and down in pitch and speed:

Got you drinking out them white cups. Sodas. All this shit sound foreign to you. Thick smoke. Choking. Babygetfamilliarwiththeorderjustcrackitthenpouritthensipslowthentiplowmyeyesredbut mybrimlow that x o

But really, I don't think whether it's his boys or his 'boys' that Tesfaye is really referring to is the point here, it's the fact that he's fucked up enough to make this highly ambiguous comparison in the first place. The gang-bang-as-bunch-of-drugs-as-gang-bang extended analogy perfectly dilates The Weeknd's wider sketch of a hedonism that understands no moral or material bounds, where every night is a party and every orifice is a receptacle for drugs and/or genitalia, take your pick.

But there has to be consequences right? Smack bang in the middle of the album, 'Initiation' is the debauchery that surrounds the dawning sense of consequence and alienation that might be the ultimate byproduct of the kind of lifestyle House of Balloons and Thursday introduced us to. Girlfriends go missing, things go quiet, parties always end. Echoes of Silence really is a fitting conclusion to all this unbridled hedonism, and poses the question that everyone puts off thinking about whilst the good times are rolling - what's going to happen once it all comes to an end? What do I do then? And who will I have left?

I like the thrill
Nothing's gonna make me feel this real
So baby don't go home
I don't wanna spend tonight alone
Baby please, would you end your night with me?
Don't you leave me all behind
-- 'Echoes of Silence'

dope as dark

2011-12-14T13:05:00.019+11:00

In lieu of a 2011 review, I just want to say a little bit about how amazing hip-hop and R&B have been this year. Mixtape with some of tracks mentioned throughout is below.

These genres have always been musically promiscuous, hustling beats, samples and hooks from anywhere their producers can find them, but 2011 marks a year in which the boundaries truly exploded, where much of this music found itself drawing from the fringes and ending up in some bizarre and thrilling limbo between commercial boom-bap and truly outré esoterica, both and neither at the same time. This isn't the willed abstraction of a Shabazz Palaces or Antipop Consortium, hip-hop for thinking men, but neither is it outright chart-chasing rinse. Instead, this is music dripped in a thick haze of experimentation and sonic adventurousness that always keeps one eye on a listenable, rappable beat and structure. The result is something both immediately accessible - laced with gripping hooks and beats - and continually beguiling, ever deeper. At the core of this music is the way in which raps just melt into the lush, hazy productions in a way that's about ambience and atmosphere as much as the traditional concerns of beat and rhyme.

There are a number of directions this thing has gone, and here I'm thinking about the more languid stuff that some have labelled 'cloud rap' - basically hip-hop's night bus or chillwave - which shares the same trashy, lo-fi aesthetic of Dipset trance but dials down the mood and pace, dripping plastic. That's why, unfortunately, I don't really have room in this piece for Araabmuzik - a dude whose MPC detournements of commercial trance music I've written about previously - despite the fact that he perhaps epitomises the paradox of epic roughness that I'm trying to get at here, where constant reminders that 'You are now listening to Araabmuzik' would leave you thinking you were listening to a hastily cut demo CD if every song on Electronic Dream didn't also sound like stars exploding. Nevermind, though, because the final word on Araabmuzik comes from the man himself: all you need to read are the choice quotes collected on his last.fm bio, nam sayin'.

Anyway, the woozy aura of the hip-hop and R&B I'm thinking about centres around two poles. First, there's the 'based' sounds of Clams Casino, who typifies the duality of this stuff in that he produced beats for Soulja Boy whilst also releasing an EP on witch-house/drag label Tri Angle this year. He also did hazed-out work with dollar-sign rapper A$AP Rocky for the ground-shattering opening tracks of his LiveLoveA$AP and later track 'Leaf', which also features associates Main Attrakionz (released also on their 808s & Dark Grapes as 'Take 1'), the prime members of the prolific Green Ova Underground crew, whose swamped out, psychedelic indie-rap is another major touchstone here. Clams' Instrumental Mixtape collects various base(d) tracks he has made for Lil B, Soulja Boy, etc. and given their own room to breathe, the spectral aesthetic of his work emerges fully-formed as a singular, atmospheric take on electronic production.

Then you've got the Canadian contingent, the OVOXO - Drake, The Weeknd and all the implausibly and consistently amazing Toronto knob twiddlers in their crew: McKinney, Illangelo, Zodiac, Boy-1Da and Noah '40' Shebib. Whilst the styles are distinct here, much of this stuff revolves around a less swampy, more immaculate down-tempo, ambient vibe marked by sexy synth and keys. This late-night slow-jam style is switched up with the occassional epic like 'Headlines' or 'Lonely Star'.

Both these poles emphasise different elements of the new vibe - call it the cannabis-cocaine continuum - but there's two things that, at the risk of sounding glib, they both have in common: drugs and computers. Whether it's the psychotropic cloud of Clams and co. or the uppers, downers and coke-addled cornucopia of The Weeknd, this music seems to almost literally attempt to transubstantiate the experience of getting high, tripping, etc. into musical form. Rap has always done this, sure, but there's more of a willingness now to musically and lyrically explore the darker parts of these vices, the weird places they take you to and the bizarre sounds they can produce. The Weeknd epitomises this - whether it's all a ploy or not is up for debate, but a track like 'Initiation', with its chopped-and-screwed vocals, is basically designed to sound out the experience of taking a pharmacy aisle's worth of drugs which, not coincidentally, Abel Tesfaye is singing about - the warped up and down pace of the vocal pretty much perfectly approximates the shift from the dissociative drowse of lean to the hyped-up gloss of coke. Elsewhere, in a beautiful turn of phrase, Colin McGowan says the music of the Green Ova crew "sounds like an anthropomorphic freezer bag full of narcotics eating itself—one moment commingling with the clouds, the next neck-deep in a swamp thick as glue".

Then there's the internet. As I said, rap has always feasted on the fruits of sounds it has cherry-picked far and wide, but there has never been as much exposure to 'outside' as much as there is today, in a way that has made hip-hop and R&B the premiere exponent of the 'miscegenation' that Sasha Frere-Jone's so longed for a few years back when he surveyed the white-washed world of indie rock. Only the funny thing now is that 'black' music is borrowing liberally from genres and subcultures traditionally seen as white - from Danny Brown's hipster-thin jeans to Main Attrakionz sample of ethereal pop outfit Glasser on 'Bossalinis and Fooliyones Pt. 2'. There's a parallel story here about white producers and black rappers - peep Clams Casino and his clientele - but the fact these artists are coming together signals just the kind of utopian 'smelting pot' someone like Emerson held out hope for and, what's more, for once it's white people in the background.

One thing driving this explosion of sounds and influences is the networked digital, in two ways - the first is that these producers are have grown up punching out beats on a laptop in their bedrooms and flinging them out through the ether via self-maintained Tumblrs or even just Mediafire links - the concept of physical releases and actual studios is largely alien to them. All that's needed is a cheap computer and some $250 Fruity Loops software, and with that an openness to different production and distribution styles, and these producers have found ways of not just approaching but eclipsing the 'digital maximalism' of recent electronica that Simon Reynolds has recently passed ambivalent comment on:

The combination of computer (infinite flexibility) and internet (infinite resources of raw material and "inspiration") seems far more likely to cause complete artistic paralysis: the impulse of fusion collapsing into con-fusion, the musical equivalent of a gone-too-far collage.

Reynold's fears about all these options prove unfounded in the hands of someone like Lex Luger, who has crafted a distinct and streamlined but indeed maximalist aesthetic from the very tools that Reynolds daunts, as Alex Pappademas writes about in his excellent article on the young producer:

A few years ago, before anyone knew his name, before rap artists from all over the country started hitting him up for music, the rap producer Lex Luger, born Lexus Lewis, now age 20, sat down in his dad’s kitchen in Suffolk, Va., opened a sound-mixing program called Fruity Loops on his laptop and created a new track. It had a thunderous canned-orchestra melody, like an endless loop of some bombastic moment from Wagner or Danny Elfman; a sternum-rattling bass line; and skittering electronic percussion that brought to mind artillery fire. When the track was finished, he e-mailed it to a rapper named Waka Flocka Flame.

The beat Pappademas is talking about here, the one Luger flipped off one afternoon in his dad's kitchen, is 'Hard In Da Paint', the beat du jour of the exploding trap rap phenom, which is somewhat tangential to the vibe of the hazy hip-hop that came to fruition this year, but ultimately linked to it in a deeper sense by the DIY ethos of the young, autonomous producers pumping out hits with consumer-grade audio software on along all points of the rap spectrum. The other thing we find out in the Pappademas article, also alluded to in the Reynolds quote above, is that Luger "has what seems like a million sounds loaded into this laptop" - and that's the other side of the coin of the agency digital production has leant these producers and artists: the excess of digital consumption. These young producers are ones who have grown up in the MP3 era, when any conceivable music is just a couple of clicks away - I know this is a terrible cliché, but it's also true. Scope the influences and samples used by producers like Luger and the Main Attrakionz kids and you get a sense of how huge, and liberating, these musical options have been. With the increase in inputs, hip-hop and R&B's outputs have only become more interesting. What we're seeing this year are the strange fruits of the digital apex of the hustling, do-it-yourself ethos that has always attended hip-hop, which taken to its limit and exploded beyond the genre's own bounds has opened up a whole new, darker cosmos. Just peep how Clams Casino finds his samples - not through obscurantist crate digging but digital serendipity:

To find things to sample, I used to just type a random word-- like 'blue' or 'cold'-- into LimeWire or BearShare and download the first 10 results. I had no idea who the artists were or anything.

If there's a third factor in this music, it's perhaps the most unlikely of them all - emotion. Hip-hop and R&B in 2011 is a post-808s & Heartbreak paradigm, drenched in affect. Half the time its the anger, regret and despair stirred up by drugs and the status of the scene itself that we're dealing with - from ASAP Rocky being 'sick' of hipsters and 'tired' of backpack rappers to The Weeknd's incessant, resigned reflections on coming-down - there's just as much here about genuine shit, and perhaps no one more than Drake embodies all these conflicting tendencies, as post-fame anxieties are mixed in with reflections on love, loss and nostalgia. A brilliant Fader article on producer Noah '40' Shebib and Drake's fascinatingly intimate relationship sheds light on the conditions necessary for this - not only Shebib working "to force-feed R&B to rap music" to "make rap more musical" (a key push that has a wider resonance in the trends I'm describing) but also the 'comfort zone' he has created for Drake in their late-night sessions, which allows the rapper to bring his guard down, as Drake recalls in the article when he recorded 'The Calm' for 2009's So Far Gone mixtape:

I would be [at Shebib's] every night and I hated going home. I was deep in debt with my family. We were fighting every night. I had spent a lot of money at trying to succeed at music with these poppy songs like ‘Replacement Girl.’ Trying to be famous and trying to do it with a hit. I remember I had this vicious fight with my uncle on 40’s balcony. I had never said such cruel things to anybody; I had never had such cruel things said to me, especially by a family member. 40 could tell I just needed to say something about it. He made me this beat. I wrote the first verse in his bedroom, which is where we used to work. He gave me an opportunity to vent about my serious family situations. That was a definitive moment in my career. That was the first time I had ever said anything like that.

Drake has continued the same sort of raw, confessional tenor with this year's Take Care, an album whose title is lifted from one of Gil-Scott Heron's final songs, 'I'll Take Care of You', which itself was remixed by Jamie xx. The remix version also provides the bed for the standout title track of Drake's album, a collaboration with Rihanna about forgiveness and the bonds of love. The convoluted, colourful background to this track and its downbeat, ghostly take on Chicago house might epitomise all the things about openness, exploding influences and strange, stirred sounds that I've loved in hip-hop and R&B this year, but ultimately it also holds the promise that this music might also be "an open letter, about family and struggle and it taking forever".

Dope as Dark 2011: A Mixtape
[right-click pic for download; tracklist below]

01 - (00.00) - Take 1 - Main Attrakionz feat. A$AP Rocky (prod. by Clams Casino)
02 - (04.47) - Wassup - A$AP Rocky (prod. by Clams Casino)
03 - (07.25) - Genesis - The Jealous Guys (prod. by Jeremy 'Zodiac' Rose)
04 - (10.25) - What You Doin' [Lil B] - Clams Casino
05 - (14.32) - We Can't Stop - jj feat. Ne-Yo
06 - (19.42) - Make It Happen - Araabmuzik
07 - (21.48) - Chuch - Main Attrakionz (prod. by Friendzone)
08 - (25.12) - Marvin's Room / Buried Alive (Interlude) - Drake feat. Kendrick Lamar (prod. by 40, Supa Dups)
09 - (33.27) - Initiation - The Weeknd (prod. by Doc McKinney & Illangelo)
10 - (37.47) - Thinking About You - Frank Ocean
11 - (41.04) - Take Care - Drake feat. Rihanna (prod. Jamie xx & 40)

eros/thanatos

2011-10-24T11:01:00.005+11:00

HTRK - Work (work, work)

The problem with pleasure nowadays is that it’s just really hard work. When the injunction to ‘enjoy!’ is no longer optional but a veritable demand in all aspects of our daily lives, desire and its consummation are no longer something special and rare but just a grind. Grind, grind, grind. A relentless grind from which we cannot escape. Labour isn’t just something we do between 9 and 5, it’s constant, pervasive – at the gym, the club, in bed we’re always “Working that body out”, as Jonnine Standish intones through the distant haze of ‘Work That Body’.

“Girls move to the back / Boys move to the front”, she drawls elsewhere, on standout ‘Eat Yr Heart’, over some genuinely industrial beats, the sound of persons and machinery locked in some doomed sex/death march. “Your body’s so perfect”, “You fill me up” are heard later, Standish’s choruses are like bizarre snatches from the clichéd, ironically passionless language of porno talk, cosmetics commercials and R&B tracks. Work (work, work) is both a mirror of contemporary sex and its inversion, mercilessly replicating its hydraulic, oppressive character whilst also peeling back the true horrors that are its runoff: contorted, mechanised bodies ripped apart and reassembled with petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals so that they may continue their macabre dance of interlocked limbs.

Manufactured pheromenones, plastic breasts, “glucose, cellulose, saccharine” (‘Eat Yr Heart’) – not to mention Viagra, amyl nitrate, Ketamine – sex truly is synthetic and we’re all doing bondage, whether we realise it or not. Looking for an emotional statement or genre-defining moment on this record can only miss the point – that the languorous pacing, stubbornly-looped programmed beats and abrasive textures are all there to teach us but one thing: at the end of all this grinding, we’re emptied out, as bleak as this album’s undeniably desolate atmosphere.

say you'll remember

2011-09-12T02:26:00.003+10:00

Lana Del Rey's overly-affected 50s Hollywood starlet with a dangerous smile kind of steez is just great. The reason her schtick works so well is because she has cunningly read the nostalgia that lies at the heart of all the recent powerful female soul vocalists for a kind of feminine origin, a Patti Smith or a Nancy Sinarta to take us back to some musical home we never had. Del Rey's approach is to take all such vocal and lyrical allusions - there's Smith and Sinatra, but also Cat Power, Tori Amos, you name it - and blender them into a kind of vocal melange that kind of leaves you insatiable - beckoning for a kind of fulfilment, a faint hint of 'that voice' or 'that chorus' that you have heard before deep in some past and know as a classic, but that isn't quite the same and that keeps you from bringing it up. In this way, along with her heavily generic lyrical references (her recent singles are unironically called 'Blue Jeans' and 'Video Games') and collage-heavy, faded video aesthetic - with homemade skate tapes and lovers footage interspersed with equally as temporally hazy snippets of old cartoons and films, Super 8 and moving pans of old but iconic US landmarks - Del Rey disassembles and reassembles our nostalgia for us in the very same movement. Our memories are all media now, not like they ever weren't, but it's in this longing for a home inside them that she exploits and caresses so smoothly that makes her work so immediately powerful.

bitcrushin'

2011-07-04T16:27:00.001+10:00

What is it that makes Araabmuzik's Electronic Dream so immediately and uniquely brilliant? Coz in many ways its absolutely generic! With its nondescript divas singing about love-in-the-club, liberal use of easy-hitting trance euphoria, and some might say overuse of rapid-fire kick-drums. But in a sense, its convention is its invention - it sounds like a Cubase demo; it sounds like racing game music; but it really doesn't. Cop its absolutely cliched title too - there's nothing new here, but that's of little importance when all these familiar elements are used as sonic assault weapons.

Its unrelenting, this album, and the compressed length of the tracks only works to intensify this sweetly oppressive feeling that some of the best club tracks achieve. Part of the genius here is the alchemy Araabmuzik has discovered in mixing the melodic overtones of trance with the repetition and rawness of crunk beats - hip hop and dance never looked so good together. The other intensely brilliant technique is the shortness of the tracks - nothing is left around too long to gather a residue of monotony or boredom, everything hits hard and sharp and then bails, with the next same-but-different beat right behind it, abruptly beginning.

In this way, Electronic Dream feels not just like a club mix but almost like an album sampler - the constant replay of some chick half-singing "you're now listening to Araabmuzik" just like you get on a rap blend downloaded off the net or an advance album copy only increases this feeling. Maybe Araabmuzik has the 70 minute boring-as-fuck version of this album on his laptop somewhere. Probably not. He realises electronic music is like a hand grenade - the splintering harshness of his beats, shards blasting out my speakers, last only as long as an explosion - which is both miniscule and infinite.

Craig Mathieson on Authenticity

2011-04-06T12:02:00.003+10:00

A little while ago I had a great conversation with Australian music critic Craig Mathieson to talk about the craft. Whilst it was for another project, he still had some great stuff to say and was as funny and insightful as his writing tends to be. Amongst other things he had a classic and concise take on the debates around authenticity, genres and who's footing the bill. Transcript of this section below.

What do you think of the popism and rockism debate in the US?

Well Americans came to pop music really late, and they always used to look at the British, because the British would write about anything, in their very British way, and the Americans were very unsure of pop music for a long time. It's almost an alternative badge now, in America, to be into pop - the more pop the better, you know, right down to this bizarre fetishising of Kylie or someone as being this completely authentic pop figure. Umm, well I used to fight about this when I was a kid, but I remember when people used to get upset because bands used keyboards on records. [Laughs] That's ludicrous to you probably, and it's ludicrous to me now, but you know we used to take that shit really seriously. So I don't get too bothered about it now. You know, music is more mashed up every year anyhow. But it's funny how indie attitudes and stupidity sort of hangs on, like "what's independent?" and "who should be in the AIR Awards?"

I find that stuff kind of exhausting.

It's just a sideshow. It's what's on the record in the end. I really don't care who drove the truck to the store. Unless it's paid with conflict diamonds or some shit, and I'm pretty sure Liberation's not doing that these days.

Well I remember the liner notes to Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Yanqui U.X.O had a diagram connecting major labels to arms manufacturers.

Well EMI used to make parts for nuclear weapons, a division, they made triggers or something in the 80s. But I mean I don't think a record company could afford to be in arms manufacturing anymore.

I love how disproportionate the cultural influence of the recording industry is, given how little money it makes. One oil company would make tonnes more than the entirety of the record industry.

Yeah it's like, no one worried about BP for a really long time, and you know, look what they were capable of doing once they fucked up. You know and everyone's worried about why Husker Du are on Warner Bros or something.

bananas

2010-12-26T03:14:00.003+11:00

1 Drake - Over 2 Wavves - King of the Beach 3 Kanye West - Runaway (SNL performance) 4 Die Antwoord - Zef Side (YouTube version) 5 Die! Die! Die! - We Built Our Own Oppressors 6 Willow - Whip My Hair 7 Parades - Loserspeak in New Tongue 8 Otouto - W.Hillier 9 Duck Sauce - Barbara Streisand (video version) 10 Warpaint - Undertow 11 David Guetta - Memories (ft Kid Cudi) 12 Cyst Impaled - Spectral Bus 13 Crystal Castles - Empathy 14 kyu - Sunny in Splodges 15 Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

twenty ten ten

2010-12-23T14:48:00.011+11:00

Things are often said better by others, so in the spirit of Yeezy's infinite guest spots and as a half-assed concession to Nick Sylvester's particularly convincing call to left things unsaid on the Internet, I've pulled a quote from others more eloquent alongside my own thoughts on each of my top albums for 2010.

10 Warpaint, The Fool
If music were vapor, Warpaint's would be a smooth, tasteless black and grey haze, clouding your latenight thoughts and sending you into a sublime stupor. This album is just the perfect concoction of mood and style, constantly aloof, perfectly crafted, sexily austere. Album highlight 'Undertow''s masterstroke is a lifted line from Cobain, "what's a matter, you hurt yourself" - though it has no debt to anyone, be it Nirvana, Interpol, Joy Division, or any others you might care to name. They simply they slide off - "open your eyes and see there's no one else".

And so yes, it is cosmopolitan stuff, its sexiness an entirely stately thing that is built into the very DNA of the music. If it is sexy, it does not give a fuck, in other words. -- Clayton Purdom

9 Drake, Thank Me Later
On first blush I wasn't very taken with Drake's melodrama, but after overhearing 'Best I Ever Had' again recently I decided to make a return, stumbling on the perfect time and place for Drake in the process: at night, through laptop speakers. Because even though Kanye has been called the pinnacle of emo-rap or pain-pop, next to Drake, West seems like a stony ascetic. Drake's whole MO on his 2009 So Far Gone mixtape was these ambient-laced beats over digi-croons about how hard his not-gansta-but-still-rich-rapper life is. The lyrical sentiment hasn't changed much - he's just added to it with musings on how he might be thanked and remembered - but musically, his debut is much tighter, less of a drift - switching from meandering chills to properly sequenced, well constructed pop in the disguise of hip-hop. And to the extent he maintains the same woe-is-me drama and synthesises it with just really great hooks and lines, Thank Me Later deserves a thank you right now.

@tabloidsores: Drake's a synthesis of early 00s emo-rap, the lessons of Kanye's 808s and Heartbreak and post-weezy mixtape hype

8 Owen Pallett, Heartland
Just like Kanye West and Drake, Owen Pallett is obsessed with thematising the act of creation itself. But whereas for Kanye this means an aesthetics of ego and for Drake a lyrical preoccupation with his own uncertainty over 'making it', for Pallett it's a far more academic affair - a bristling, lavishly adorned concept album about the fiction overcoming its creator. Or, as Pallett explaions it, "a narrative [of] one-sided dialogues with Lewis, a young, ultra-violent farmer, speaking to his creator". It's already getting crazy I know, but consider this: on the first album Pallett slaps his own name on (dropping the Final Fantasy moniker at the threat of libel, or ridicule, or both), he kills himself. Well Lewis kills him, in 'Tryst with Mephistopheles', driving an "iron spike into Owen's eyes". Triumphant, he sings:

I draw a bruise on your brawny shoulder,
Scratch my fingers over your tattoos
The author has been removed

Pallett takes Roland Barthes a tad too literally here, but the irony is that he is the one doing all the killing, Lewis belongs entirely to Owen. And in the end the former cannot help but re-erect the latter, not at least given how much 'Owen Pallett' there is all over this album - brimming with his best arrangements and some of his most playful and clever moments yet. Yet that's also why this album is so great, because it works as a piece of music as much as it does as a concept. A rare union, and a joy to listen to.

If this all sounds too much like homework, it's worth re-reemphasizing that, whatever his protests against casual poignancy, Pallett has crafted an absorbing gem of a record, one that delivers substantial emotional payloads by means of incredibly intricate pop music. Rather than striking a blow against emotionally captivating music in favor of the album of ideas, Pallett makes a compelling case that the two need not be antagonists -- Matthew Cole

7 Joanna Newsom, Have One On Me
Joanna Newsom has gone from eeking out sly but poignant little solos (The Milk-Eyed Mender), to constructing flourishing, expansive longform pieces (Ys) to something that's is kind of like a combination of the two of them - Have One On Me is like an intricate set of little rococco monuments all pieced together into something much bigger, and longer, but happy too - like a casual sprawl. There's a sense that Newsom is taking her time here, and she's asking us to do the same - by all means I'll oblige if it means that at almost every corner I get to be struck and taken along by some beautiful little gem of a moment. Everything on here just sings, a celebration of confession.

Have One One Me, in all its unprecedented Tolkienian sprawl, may be a two-hour love letter to the guy who wrote fucking “Dick in a Box.” Someone more ambitious than I will have to take on the [massive] task of analyzing that one -- David Greenwald

6 Die Antwoord, $O$
Many people I think would be too embarrassed put this album anywhere near their top ten for the year, what with it's ridiculously dodgey sexual politics, KLF / The Manual style genesis, and, let's face it, abundance of dud tracks - most of which were thankfully exorcised from the American release, replaced by the quite good 'In Your Face' and fucking rad 'Evil Boy'. But $O$ deserves it's place here for two reasons. The first one is pretty simple, a lot of these songs are just fucking great - sick beats and hooks, Ninja's crazy flow, how great Yo-Landi Fi$$er sounds swearing in Afrikaans. The other is just how hilarious and inspiring the whole cook-up itself is, the detail with which they went about concocting a backstory and aesthetic, not to mention the fucking commitment - Watkin Tudor Jones has literally embodied his Ninja persona, marking his body with prison tatts to complete the street look. Then there was their intensely savvy use of the internet, willingly turning themselves into a meme for everyone outside South Africa. But after the curiosity wore out, there remained some highly original and catchy music. It won't last, it's not meant to, but it was fun riding the Zef zeitgeist all the same in 2010.

Ek wonder hoeveel mense besef hoe ongelooflik goed hierdie musiek vervaardig is -- Johan Swarts

5 Die! Die! Die!, Form
How is it that these three Dunedin ratbags, who tour relentlessly across Oceania, America and Europe, live barely above the dole-line when back home in their NZ hometown, and do themselves regular tineal damage at said shows (one memorable gig vocalist Andrew Wilson sung half his set head shoved in the floor-tom), manage to continually produce such brilliant albums? 2007's Promises, Promises focused their abrasive, kinetic punk ethos with an emphasis on songwriting and emotion. Form continues this combination but adds to it a new layer, heavily indebted to shoe gaze, a swirling, stormy, mood, an almost reflective patina. And it all comes to fruition on single 'We Built Our Own Oppressors', which feels like the culmination of everything Die! Die! Die! have been working towards. I listened to that track on constant repeat when it first came out, a month or two before the album, arm-hairs bristling everytime. I feared I'd drained that song's energy in those heady first days, but when Form arrived and it rolled around again I discovered that this band's well cannot run dry. There is too much life in it, sweaty, torn-up, im/mature, but it's all there, fuel for an eternal fire.

Form contains a sound most unlike many other bands on the planet. Their hyperactive rhythms inspire vivid imagery of movement, of change, of progress -- Andrew McMillen

4 Parades, Foreign Tapes
This is like a dream. Where did it come from? Aching, clamouring, soaring, and above all wildly ambitious, Sydney's Parades dropped easily the most surprising and arguably the strongest debut of 2010. Like a kaleidoscope projected widescreen in a darkened theatre, this album is unambiguously joyous and beautiful, but glitters with an enigmatic magic all of it's own. Foreign Tapes is destined to take its place among the greats of Australian underground pop.

Foreign Tapes is like a carnival, a fairground in lights. It’s one of those records where magic and mirage can come true like in the Flaming Lips and the music of Iceland: colours slip and fade and explode neon again, little soft bombs of sound gently burst. Great possibilities exist, a real sense of wonder runs through it. But great drama also waits -- Chris Johnston

3 Crystal Castles, Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles was great, but Crystal Castles is another thing altogether! Subsuming their glitch-tics into something much more ambitious, this album is fucking transcendent. It's cloudbursts, stars glittering, beautiful. That's right, a pretty Crystal Castles album. Of course Alice Glass is still screaming away in there, there's chop cuts, but harshness here always gives way to bliss. Gauze isn't just for covering up cuts.

beauty and clarity -- Ian Cohen

2 Sleigh Bells, Treats
I am 100% behind this album. You don't have to work hard to get it, in fact it's genius lies exactly in how simple, even dumb, it's idea and execution is. Literally: mix peaking hip-hop beats, ridiculously large guitars and some babe singing like a bratty yet motivational teenager to her fellow teenagers (and let's face it, we're all teenagers when we're listening to Sleigh Bells). The result: Treats - really yummy treats! Lot's of treats! It's easy, it's big, it's fun, it's also entirely unique and unrepeatable.

There’s a moment [on] “A/B Machines” when a condensed, almost inhuman scream bursts through a half-second gap between guitar breakdowns. It’s a small gesture, one that seems pretty insignificant on a cursory listen, but for me this says it all: here the band has taken an intrinsically repellent sound, something universally associated with violence and pain and just general badness, and have made it enormously satisfying. And not satisfying in the sense that a lot of traditional noise music can be, nor obliquely satisfying like confrontational Dadaism. This isn’t “challenging but ultimately rewarding” ... Sleigh Bells render noise legitimately delightful. This stuff is genuinely, earnestly satisfying, in the same way all great pop music is: these songs, simply and purely, sound fucking great -- Calum Marsh

1 Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
For a long time, Kanye West redefined hip-hop, with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he transcends hip-hop. Not only that, he makes hip-hop transcend itself -and he does so by vacuuming everything around him, musical, political and emotional, into the centripetal force of his producer's maw. This album is unequalled in its omnivorous voraciousness, but just as much in the singularity and consistency of its aesthetic. Equally paradoxically, Kanye West is ravenous, he is all over this album, and yet at times what's most striking is that at times it's as if he's barely even there. This is the master project of the producer, the conductor, who speaks through other people's voices, verses, samples, in order to construct their art (and in the case of West, also an edifice to themselves). When he returns to his own voice, it's so often found wanting in its unadorned state, so that it's pushed through vocoders, distortion effects and so on, the recorded voice pushed beyond the limits of the 'natural' so that he might do justice to the excess that defines emotion. And yet he relents even here, knowing just one man cannot do this job (and West is exceedingly honest about his talents, his talentlessness is what fuels his talents - he recently told MTV "I do have a goal in this lifetime to be the greatest artist of all time, [but] that's very difficult being that I can't dance or sing"). So he relents, turning back to Justin Vernon to milk the sweetest, most hair-raising moment of the album for the opening of the astounding closing track. Kanye making the white-boy Auto-Tune of 'The Woods' even more impassioned. Speaking through others voices so that we all might hear what's vital. Can we get much higher?

Kanye West loves music. Only someone who loves music with every fiber of their being could put every fiber of every music they’ve ever loved into the music they make and have it make such ineffable sense. These six-minute bangers are haikus. Kanye West loved music better than any other artist this year and I loved his music better, too -- Chet Betz

lost in the world

2010-11-25T23:23:00.005+11:00

At 23, I'm discovering what it means to be a fan. Sure, I've enjoyed various different things intensely before, but I've never had that singlemindedness that attends the fan's relationship to his object of obsession. That object, of course, being none other than the work and persona of Kanye West. I've been doing all those things a fan does with his favourite texts - endless repetition ('Kanye megamix' playlist is on constant rotation), contextual research ("what the hell is 'Chi-town'?"), continual discussion with fellow converts (happily, my housemate - with whom I watch the 'Runaway' video every couple of days with), etc.

And of course this has gotten out of control in the past week or so with the release of Yeezy's masterwork - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It's getting perfect scores in reviews all over the place, and I'm not sure I'd go that far, but at the least it's the most ambitious, voracious, egotistic, political and emotional thing he has done yet - and all that is saying something. I've been devouring these reviews, desperately longing to add my own voice to the tidal wave of acclaim and discussion, but up until now I simply haven't been able to muster the courage or even barest ability.

At first I thought this was because the album was so colossal, so definitive and defining of such big things - art, pop, celebrity, hip-hop, relationships, distortion - that I just wasn't up to the task. Where would one begin? How could I possibly even hope to do justice to this beast? To match up to even it's weaker moments (which it has, of course, but that's one of the things that makes Kanye so great - his brilliance and his inexactitude are mutually defining)?

(I could say many things for sure, most of them disconnected tidbits - about how the production on the album shows evidence that he just couldn't help himself, his maximalist tendencies swallowing up every possible voice and sample he could find, adding more and more even after the completely acceptable cuts of the tracks we heard on the Runaway video (the 'so high' of Dark Fantasy case in point, shoved in between another vocal itself). About it's intense black consciousness, evident at every turn, moreso than ever before in West's rapping - as a unifying thread through the album, right up to the Gil Scott Heron sample that closes it off, 'Who Will Survive in America?' About it's incessant thematising of failure, musically and lyrically - how he feeds off the fuck ups in his own story to fabricate an epic tragedy, how he pushes his voice through filters and modulators til it's past the brink of legibility, as a statement of emotion, how everything breaks down but then just builds itself up even higher on the rubble. These are all interesting points, but they are not well-made, and they have been made better by others.)

But then I realised why I couldn't talk, also why I will try again but probably fail - because that's what being a fan is. Being a fan deadens your critical faculties when it comes to the object of your fandom. 'But doesn't fandom make you want to understand more the thing?', you might argue - and of course it does, but what I've found is that this desire for understanding is matched at every point by being overwhelmed by the thing itself. Fuck it, by the music - by these songs, whose titles I just want to start typing out as if they possessed some kind of incantatory force, as if you would just feel the same way that I feel when I hear this shit. But they don't, you won't (you might?), and what one can't speak about, one must pass over in silence - and it's a kind of relief, a bliss. I've submitted myself to this album, and I'd be damned if I would even try to put into words just how this music makes me feel.

japan four

2010-11-18T00:13:00.003+11:00

Ghoul - '3Mark'

This is ridiculously good. Finally this group look like living up to their name; there's a muscle and colour depth to this track that their previous recorded forays - skittish if enticing one, two minute synth scribbles and vocal snatches - lacked. One might level a 'dubstep 101' at '3Mark', but I'd argue it's offering dubstep a place to go beyond its own border, a post-dubstep if you're okay with wanky prefixes. Sure, there's the obligatory glitchy basebeat and chipmunk vocal mirror, but there's also a palpable cleanliness and determination that a lot of dubstep lacks. It's as a poppy a dubstep track that you'll ever hear in this regard, yet one that maintains the enticing schematic quality of Ghoul that always gives the song room to breathe and burrow.

There's also a sense of the arbitrary or serendipitious about it - a nonsensical title, like it was randomly culled from the lettering on the bottom of some consumer electronics item or the strings of a webpage script - a vocal hook, that never quite provides the crucial second half of its own dictum. 'Choose life, / over...', 'over...', 'over...' - the fact that Ghoul never answer their own question is an indication of the group's philosophy, their sense of experience as stochastic, of music's ability to do justice to that which cannot be worked out.

whoa

2010-11-16T02:40:00.002+11:00

Finally!,… a ‘kids’ mixtape that doesn’t feature MGMT’s ‘Kids’!!!

a minor place

2010-10-11T23:37:00.006+11:00

Ah, moments, those little moments in music - they are the quintessence of the art, when things come together in perfect unity, expressing an emotion, an idea, a force, in the space of seconds. Often the entry of a song into the realm of the amazing hinges on such a moment, or moments, which form a fulcrum in the flow of sound and lyric that blasts open the meaning of the composition to shine forth in glorious harmony. Sometimes, though, they are disharmonious, antagonistic - they reveal the previous lines of the song to be a kind of ruse, a ploy, a trick, and split it at the seams to bare its true meaning.

Spencer Krug, of Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown, has always been a man of moments; I'm sure you can name your own artists or songs whose moments just slay you. But I come to this post today thinking of a different musician and a single moment: one Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Will Oldham, and that crucial turn in his masterful 'Hard Life', the closing track of Master and Everyone.

For the first few minutes, the song ambles along, a fairly pretty, subdued country pastiche, as Oldham and his vocal partner Marty Slayton meander through platitudes such as "And it's a hard life, for a man with no wife / Babe, it's a hard life, God makes you live" in that typically country way, where the emotion behind the lyric is one step removed from the voice itself, which remains composed. This continues, the sparse acoustic - the album itself is marked by a palpable spareness - gently strumming along.

And then it happens, around 1.59 - there is little forewarning, the bars immediately preceding have followed the established structure. But there it is, the slightest of chord changes, and the most poignant of shifts in the voice of Oldham himself, as his voice, always slightly rough, takes on an unmistakeable tenderness and sense of longing, the ends of words stretching out, as he sings:

But I ain't breathing, let me breathe
Let me go, let me leave
I don't know, but I might lose
I might bum, might blow a fuse

And then on the next verse, an electric guitar - both warm and cold in its tone (think of the same sound Oldham and Matt Sweeney achieve on Superwolf) - accompanies the acoustic, as Oldham becomes more insistent and yet somehow sadder, "So let me go, lay it down / On my own, let me drown", his voice taking on a an almost canine longing. And in a few dozen seconds, Oldham has somehow turned the mood of the universe around, and this is all the more amazing for the subtlety with which he does so. There is no hystronics or abrupt gear shifts here, just a slight tilt of the scales, a shift in the breeze, that brings with it an ocean of meaning.

feel right

2010-10-01T12:59:00.001+10:00

from little things...

2010-09-19T19:25:00.005+10:00

counter-anthems

Anwyn Crawford has written a piece for The Age about alternative national anthems, and her mention of the continued misinterpretation of Cold Chisel's 'Khe San' got me thinking about what you might call counter-anthems. There are quite a few instances of this in Australian pop history that I absolutely relish; songs that speak of national injustice and the dark side of the Australian condition, but that like 'Khe San' end up being received in a state of hallucination as to their actual content. I'm thinking especially of Powderfinger's 'Like A Dog', an otherwise forgettable track thick with cliches - generic 90s crunchy guitar riff, intercom vox on the bridge - that nevertheless throws some brutally pointed lines at Howard's racist treatment of Aborigines; and Presets 'My People', that confuses dance floors and detention centres, globetrotting romances with heartbreaking political exile. It's the sight of a crowded room of inebriated revellers shouting along to this last track, in particular, that always throws me.

It's not surprising either that these sorts of songs tend to be high-spirited, chorus-driven rock and dance tracks, it's as if the force of the music itself overtakes the possibility of reflection on their lyrical musings. This itself probably makes their political impact all the more powerful, in a sense, or at least more attractive from where I'm standing. Rather than the (generally) earnest, sickly prosetylising of the traditional protest song, these songs mask their true intentions behind an insistently catchy chorus or overwhelming beat; politics by stealth, massaging the subconscious perhaps, if not it in the blissfully unaware audience then hopefully at least in that undefinable thing known as the national psyche...

dream factory

2010-07-23T11:49:00.003+10:00

Saw Inception last night, quite simply a brilliant, epic movie. I can't remember the last time I watched a film that captured the experience of the 'cinematic' (as opposed to the merely visual) so well, in all the aesthetic dimensions this entails. The soundtrack, with it's ominous, brass-heavy score that impresses its weight on you. The performances, in which the actors didn't really have to do much considering the scenery and narrative basically overwhelmed whatever performance they gave, but they were nevertheless lean and accomplished (plus Joseph Gordon-Levitt's star turn from teen dork (10 Things I Hate About You) to ultra-slick sidekick is inspired, perfectly cast). The plot, which is schematically complex but not so much that you're ever lost - it's spatio-temporal structure replicates the diegesis itself so at all times you know what 'level' you are on, even if Nolan can't help himself and occassionally push this question (most brilliantly, frustratingly in the final scene).

Indeed, space and time are probably the two main preoccupations of the film as a whole, thematically and stylistically. The film flips and flops between conceiving of the subconscious as a mindscape or as a series of memories and events, and beyond that as a horizontal expanse or a vertical one. Regardless, within the experience of the film itself what is most fascinating is that the audience awareness of time alternatively telescopes and dilates in the exact same way that the characters explain dreamtime - five minutes of sleep feels like an hour in a dream, and if an agent pushes into a dream within a dream time exponentially increases, and so on. This effectively replicates the effect of cinematic time and space - many have realised that sitting in a darkened theatre, immobile, with giant sound and light filling our perceptual field is quite similar in many ways to a dream state, and in the two and half hours of Inception we effectively undergo many more hours and days of experience - through the usual editing but also through the more complex editing of different temporalities in the film - the plot of most of which takes place in the few seconds it takes for a van to fall off a bridge - a slo-mo shot that Nolan periodically returns to with great relish.

In many ways, one might conceive of Inception as an allegory of the process of filmmaking itself, about which I might have more to say later, but for now, why not read a highly technical and enlightening interview with Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister on the making of the film:

http://www.theasc.com/ac_magazine/July2010/Inception/page1.php

heads will roll

2010-06-17T01:56:00.001+10:00

but then i find, just the right thing

2010-05-26T23:17:00.004+10:00

Music always meets us at a certain time in our lives, and sometimes it's the perfect time. There was a time when I needed Children of the Wave's Carapace, when I needed Wilderness, and lately Noah Symons' Great Earthquake has just found me and lifted me right where I needed to be. It's not like I'm some narcissist when it comes to everything I listen to (though I wonder who isn't to some degree), but that certain kinds of chance encounters between one's mood and the music one finds to listen to at a particular time are often the times when I get most out of my relationship to it.

Great Earthquake's Drawings is an album of a similarly nocturnal, restrained and mainly 'instrumental' mood to the music I mentioned above, and it's resonated perfectly with my current feelings of ambiguity, of quiet solitude and a small, almost comfortable melancholy - a word I've always associated with a kind of happy sadness, a sadness that is never quite grief, or a happiness tinged by the realisation of what it lacks. Drawings is the perfect music for my current time of coming and going, of beginnings and endings, and it helps me feel my way - not think - through the things I'm currently going through. It illuminates - that is, throws a light on - my situation, my feelings, and for that I'm eternally grateful. In its cyclical drum patterns I find a kind of resigned drive, in its piano accordion that very bittersweetness that so grips me, in its plaintive guitar a plaintive state. It's that kind of later, quieter post-rock that isn't quite post-rock that I've always been drawn to, felt emotionally nourished by - a post-rock with far more heart and sense of wonderment than the serpentine and po-faced technicality the genre often descended into. Recalling expatriates Because of Ghosts in its evocation of the very slim distinctions between hope and sadness, a song like opener ‘Clap Clap’ has that very Australian sense of tone that always rests in melancholy. It's where I rest my head tonight.

donkey peacock goose

2010-04-19T01:16:00.003+10:00

At first it was very difficult as we really didn’t know anything about opera. We’d never been to one. I didn’t even know what the word libretto meant. But after some studying, and just getting used to opera’s essence of pretentious and dramatic gestures, I found that there is a lot to learn and play with. In fact, our ignorance gave us a positive respectless approach to making opera. It took me about a year to become emotionally moved by an opera singer and now I really do. I really like the basic theatrical values of opera and the easy way it brings forward a narrative. We’ve approached this before in The Knife but never in such a clear way -- Olof Dreijer.

For the most part, The Knife's Tommorow, In a Year opera is an admirable failure. One cycle, however, stands out most clearly as a brilliant achievement, a synthesis of all that makes The Knife and opera and experimentalism worthwhile - 'Colouring of Pigeons' (available to stream here). This 11-minute epic recombines operatic voice, Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer's unmistakeable voices, alternatively gamelan-esque and martial percussion, and deeply moving cello and halldorophone into what is more or less a classical opera song refracted through the structures and dynamics of dark house. This is what makes the track so gripping - The Knife force all the melodramatic elements of an opera song through the prism of their equally melodramatic and atmospheric electronica. It's a perfect match, made all the more perfect by the formal experimentation and minimalist arrangements the track is formed in. Each genre illuminating one another in perfect symbiosis.

2010-04-08T13:19:00.002+10:00

The artistic arc Joanna Newsom has displayed across her three albums is just beautiful, each work builds on and consolidates her aesthetic whilst introducing some amazing new element. I've heard lots of people arguing that Have One Me is a caricaturing and popularising of her style (i.e. she's sold out) but I actually think it's quite distinct. Anyway:

- The Milk-Eyed Mender's defining element was just that every song is timeless and amazing, and how it creates absolute beauty out of odd smallness. It's just this chick who sounds like nothing we've (but others probably have) heard, playing on a harp these beautiful songs.

- Ys was brilliant for the decision to do an album of extended songs, that spun out into cohesive, holistic musical and literary tapestries - just try not to get lost in Emily.

- The best thing about Have One On Me is that it's really composed of a series of little and intensely exciting to listen to moments - the songs are good, sure, but they are good because they are peppered with these bristling moments - that line, that vocal change, that progression, etc. Take 'Have On One Me', whilst it's of similar length to the songs on Ys, it's really quite different, it's just like a little treasure chest of moments: .50 as the harp starts to wind up; 1.10 'in the night, in the niiight'; 1.26 as harp resolves itself; 1.38 as the 'chorus' (?) comes in!; etc. etc.

There's very little else I wanted to say, just to get this down here. Joanna Newsom: amazing.

kill yr. idols

2010-03-19T11:12:00.003+11:00

I have a personal bias against rock, classic rock, that is borne of the Boomer generation, and the continued reverence of it by my generation. It is regressive to constantly re-hash and pay tribute to our parent's (and grandparent's) tastes. The cult of Springsteen is the prime example here. Rock ideology is one of success and fame, white male charisma, counterculture as money spinner, etc. etc. But mostly, it's just sad because it means we basically confirm that old "back in my day" bullshit ourselves, by being like, "yeah - the past is where it was at musically, let's just play blank homage to it".

As such, my bias is not just a typical 'indie kid' stance, and this article by Zach Baron at Slate drives that home - in many ways, the indie and rock ideals have crossed - a certain version of indie is now the cultural mainstream, and it's bands and style are taking on the same bullshit myths and cultural centrality as the Stones, Beatles, etc. Reading this article kind of depressed me then - should I be holding up indie as the alternative when now it clearly isn't?

Nevertheless, two issues present itself here.

First, is Baron's claim that

There are very few successful young bands today that don't play some variant or descendent of indie rock. And the alternative musical culture that spent most of the '80s and '90s as the exclusive property of college students, critics, and independent labels is now a fairly uncontroversial, major component of pop music in general.

really that accurate? Is pop not still defined by, on the one hand, (electro) pop in the vein of Britney, Kesha, Gaga, etc. and hip hop and R&B on the other hand? Indie might be encroaching, but I think it's a slight delusion to argue that very few bands are successful without an incorporation of indie rock. As such, even if indie is dead (as an ideal - definitly not as a commercial genre, in fact that stage of its life is moving into full swing), then I still hold out genuine hope for more general pop as a potential site of generational difference and definition.

Second point, and further to the first, is that the success of indie is, as I said, a certain version of indie - namely 90's indie-rock. That's why Baron focuses on the Pavement reunion, and not say the success of Animal Collective (which is an entirely different story). And really, what we're seeing then is just the latest in the canonisation of a generation's music - no longer Boomer rock but now Xer indie. The trouble is for Gen Y basically to reject both.

talk like that

2010-03-16T22:57:00.004+11:00

Intelligent music critic Nitsuh Abebe has a new column on Pitchfork, 'Why We Fight', that looks at discourses and conversations we have around pop. His first post begins to dive into the very thorny question of where the music ends and the discussion begins, and how the latter increasingly impacts the former with everything online:

Because on the web, there's no such thing as silent dismissal, the invisible shrug of this-is-not-for-me: everything's verbalized. Casual dismissal-- "this bugs me," "I can't stand that voice"-- starts to look more like active criticism. People snipe or worry about whatever seems to be at issue, even if what's at issue has more to do with our arguments than what's happening in the music.

Beyond that, it seems to me that Abebe is grappling with the very thorny issue of how exactly to write about music. Clearly his notion of criticism transcends mere evaluation (criticism as consumer guide), but as soon as issues of representation are brought in, then with it comes the question of whether pop (I'll leave out indie for now) should even be amenable to intellectual discussion. Or, to put it more simply, isn't it just about the music maaaan? Of course not, but whether picking the eyes out of popular texts either by constant bitching - "simply locating what's different or notable about a given act and then chipping away at it, finding the most efficient way of mocking it, ferreting out the exact interpretation of what's happening that best allows us to critique it" - or by treating it as a given semiotic system just waiting to be unpacked, as academics do, really amount to anything different is another question. I cannot say in any way, shape or form that I'm not guilty of this exact thing, but I think criticism (mine included), needs to find a way to incorporate intellectualised discussion with appreciation for - and moreover, articulation of - the pure affective force of pop, and music more generally.

I was thinking about this when reading Robin Jame's wonderful post on 'Single Ladies' and the way she couched the discussion:

Beyoncé is an amazingly talented artist who plays around in very subtle and nuanced ways with “serious ideas” – all while singing some damn catchy hooks. It’s REALLY HARD to make delectable pop that also problematizes ideas in ways that are interesting to academics.

And I wondered to myself, 'is that what pop music should do? Make itself "interesting" to academics? Isn't this kind of depressing?'

Anyhow, I'm not sure if this whole issue is just one that anybody thinking about pop music in a theoretical or philosophical way inevitably comes up against, but I'd very much appreciate anyone's own experiences and take on the whole thing, please, to help clarify my own.

I'll leave the final word to Philip Brophy:

Time has well passed for the need to analyse pop culture, as if it were a frustrating closed system of signs proliferated through each wave of subcultural commodification. Pop culture is too pervasive, rampant, eclectic and polyglottal to unravelled and remade into an academic macramé pot holder.

don't stop / can't stop

2010-03-14T21:11:00.011+11:00

Have you ever had that experience where you're in a hyper-audiovisualised location, usually a city bar or garish chain store, and there is the latest robo-pop/doof playing over the speakers, filling every bit of space that hasn't yet been occupied by commodities, whilst numerous flat-screens in the same place play a video music channel with the sound turned down? It's a crazy, aberrant synaesthetic experience, listening to - as I found myself, a few days ago - say Ke$ha's 'TiK ToK', whilst watching the video clip for Ne-Yo's 'Closer', but one that strangely seems to make sense. Recreate the experience for yourself below, and see how it actually took me a good ten or twenty seconds to realise that I wasn't listening to the audio of the video but an entirely different song:

Listen to this...

... Whilst watching this:

There are strangely a number of quite logical audio-visual connections in this song, to the point where they seem kind of interchangeable on one level: shot cuts seem to roughly follow the beat, Kesha sings "don't stop" as Ne-Yo mouths "can't stop", handclaps sound out on 'TiK ToK' as they appear on the video... I'm not entirely sure what this might point to - the ultimate formal similarity (both musically and visually) of all pop? Or simply a forced intertextuality? Either way, weird coincidences.

talkin' bout my generation: SLAM Rally, Melbourne, 2010

2010-02-24T21:42:00.007+11:00

I've been thinking a bit about the whole rally yesterday, and after posting my initial elatedness to Facebook my friend mentioned his cynicism about the whole endeavour. I pressed him on why exactly he was a bit jaded, and he duly listed the reasons, which I'd like to use as a bit of a launching pad for my own thoughts on the whole event. Please bare in mind that I'm not targeting any of this at anyone in particular, and I understand that my arguments brush over many of the subtleties of the whole schamozzle, but I felt like I had to at least air my reservations.

Here's my friend's list of gripes:

1... The people loudly retching and complaining during the short free-jazz piece that was performed, EVEN THOUGH several of the speeches had just taken great care to praise the diversity of Melbourne's music scene.

2... Every part of every speech where people were prodded to BOOOO. I mean Christ ~ we're adults, legitimately protesting; not 6-year-olds at a skeezy pantomime....

3... The Socialist Alternative douchebags trying to co-opt the rally, sullying the power of the number in attendance and diluting the unity of the message.

4... The backward-focus of most of the speechmakers. There were definitely some exceptions (Pikelet, Tim Rogers), but it seemed like most of the speakers were more focused on talking about some amazing gig they saw in 1976 than talking about Melbourne music's *future* -- which is what is at stake.

5... The inflated estimates of how many people were there. It was a big fucken turnout, but there is *no* *way* that there were 20,000 people there. (And they're the more conservative guesses ~~ Amanda Palmer claimed upwards of 70,000.)

6... The low-sitting shame and disappointment that comes with knowing that this rally will almost certainly succeed ... (I'll be astonished if we don't see a direct effect of this in liquor license policy in the next 6 months) ... while the just-as-big rallies for climate justice have led to absolutely nothing. Why can this succeed where the far-more-crucial one was doomed to fail?

...

Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. I did like the rally, by and large, and I thoroughly support its cause.

Stuff just annoyed me, that's all.

Some great points in there, and I have to say I more or less thoroughly agree with his ambivalence, and especially with points 1 and 4. My major issue was how there was this sustained undercurrent about the 'authenticity' of live rock music as opposed to other forms of musical participation and creative expression in Mebourne. I find it kind of sad that it was the proponents of this bloated rock myth - the Boomers and the Xers collectively known as "Melbourne's rock royalty" (a phrase that couldn't be more apt) - that mostly held sway in the speeches, and who set the tone for the rally, as some kind of repairing of this great big rock establishment in Melbourne. If you don't believe me, look at the performers (the RockWiz orchestra of old dudes) and the speakers, all generally in the Xer or Boomer category (Rick Dempster, Paul Kelly, Irine Vela, Jon Von Goes, etc.), or better still the 'supporters' on the SLAM home page. And it's sad that most of the indie kids (i.e. young, Gen Yers) were mainly happy to go along with this narrative and fold their own cause into that of some nonexistent rock utopia that apparently existed in Melbourne in the 70s or some other ill-defined era. So whilst I agree with Crikey's Charles Richardson that the generation gap was overcome, his positive spin on the whole thing is as much depressing as it is a show of intergenerational solidarity:

"Yesterday's rally in Melbourne in defence of live music is as good an occasion as any to proclaim the death of the generation gap. The crowd ranged from teenagers through to the oldest of the boomers, now in their 60s; they may not listen to the same bands, but they share the same musical sensibility and a determination to defend it. Rock has won this battle."

Rock certainly has won this battle, and if it's not on the terrain of popular music that we can differentiate ourselves from our parents, then on what basis can we? The indistinction of our generation to that of our parents is fucking depressing sometimes.

That's why I think Evelyn Morris, AKA Pikelet, (though her speech was a little twee) had it most right out of them all - focusing on the current thriving music community that Melbourne is supporting right now. So I totally agree with my friend that the misty-eyed nostalgia that dominated most of the speeches was probably not the best place to air that kind of stuff. What is at stake is the future of Melbourne's music scene, right now, not whether a couple of old Boomers can play to their rich mates in Melbourne's inner suburbs each Thursday night.

Considering the first point regarding the show of unity, what annoyed me most about the whole rally probably, was the slamming of Melbourne's DJ and dance culture, especially from that guy that spent three or four minutes of his speech deriding the 'soulless' club scene and its 'faceless', drunken adherents. There is this really unhelpful binary being set up - and it's also potentially a class division, as Anwyn Crawford mentioned on Twitter - between pre-recorded music/dance/nightclubs/violence/drunkenness/problems and live music/rock/pubs/peace/community, which anyone from either side (if they are even willing to pick a side) will tell you just isn't true. All this talk about "notorious nightclub zones" and "the pilled-up douches at the King Street discos" is not only offensive to people that go to these places and actually enjoy themselves without glassing each on the street afterwards, but it also misrepresents the actual problem (not nightclubs but punitive liquor licensing laws).

There is both shittiness and awesomeness across all scenes in Melbourne's hugely diverse and quite massive music culture in general. That's why I think a show of solidarity could have been achieved much more fully if we embraced all forms of music making, listening and loving in this town instead of either: singling out nightclubs as 'beer barns' full of idiotic hoons, or jeering old Wilbur when he and his mates got up to rock some free-jazz. Because if there was anything that the speeches did at least drive home to me was that it isn't just the 'indie/rock' circle of venues and section of the music industry, but the 'contemporary music' industry in Melbourne as a whole that is at stake here. 'Contemporary' is the adoptive term I'm using, as I can't think of something better that doesn't necessarily discriminate against 'pre-recorded' music, which can still involve inherent performative elements by DJs, dancers and, of course, the fans and patrons dancing all night long.

Regarding my friend's points 2 (infantile crowd response), 3 (pseudo-Marxist wankers) and 5 (inflated estimates), though, I have to say these things probably just come with the territory, stuff like that is inevitable whenever you're assembling this many people for this kind of cause. The inflation of figures are because people want desperately to think that the march was the most earth-shattering, historical event ever to rock Melbourne's CBD, plus also because nobody really can accurately count exactly how many people rocked up. I bet every figure bandied about thus far emerged initially as a guesstimate by some journalist, organiser or random Facebook friend and then did its rounds, accruing ever more ludicrous numbers until we get to Amanda Palmer's ridiculous suggestion of 70,000 people.

As for the booing and jeering, well that's probably to be expected - mass crowds tend to act fairly stupidly, and the nature of that congregation means only very simple emotions of a limited range can be expressed en masse when prompted, really only either approval (claps, cheering) or dismissal (booing).

The Socialist Alternative rocking up is hilarious - not only are you always going to get those divisive, misguided people at anything like this, I find it quite amusing that - if they were there in support of the whole thing - they were basically rallying for the government (the state) to keep their hands the fuck out of business (or at least wind back their regulations) so a bunch of Melbourne pubs can continue (or attempt) to make shitloads of money from punters. Of course, that sort of thing is generally good for us - i.e. anyone who has a cultural or financial interest in the productivity of the scene and its places - but if you consider the fact that the rally was also yet another confirmation of the institutionalisation and mainstreaming of rock music then SA might be exploring more agitative and revolutionary pathways for social justice, or just staying the hell away.

And point 6, well I guess my only answer - though it's probably not enough - is that it's far easier to mobilise people for such a comparatively softer and less challenging cause (keeping pubs open) than something like global warming, which actually takes concerted, long-term, difficult effort on behalf of those who believe in it (not to say that this whole live music fight hasn't expended the energy of many tireless and brilliant individuals working in front and behind the scenes to push the cause).

So like my friend, I am left feeling majorly ambivalent about the whole SLAM Rally. Of course, I agree that Melbourne's music community should be provided with the conditions under which it can flourish, and I was bouyed by the turnout of quite a diverse group of people (in the crowd at least) that support this very same sentiment, but like my mate, I just don't know if the whole thing was framed and executed in exactly the right way.

I think, then, that the defining image of the day was probably the Coalition members, staffers and suits up above us all on the Parliament steps, because their placards ('Brumby's liqour fees killing live music'=positive response; 'Liberals love live music'=booing) and even their very appearance summed up the contradictions of the whole thing. The Libs were just doing what they do best - opportunistic vote-grabbing - or at least attempting that, until they were predictably lambasted by nearly everyone there. But in the end, it's probably the Liberals that come closest to what the organisers - and perhaps even the protestors - want. Following that, the sense of confusion about the whole thing is summed up by protestors slamming politicians just as the whole event is designed to get politicians onboard - institutionalisation in the false veil of counter-culture.

Part of me also wonders what Melbourne's music might be like under conditions more similar to that of Sydney or Perth - the amazing privilege and taken-for-grantedness of this privilege we have here all too often breeds complacement, uncreative bands and music, just as much as it of course has the potential to nurture super-creative ones. Nevertheless, might our art not flourish under more dire circumstances, or is there a way for oppositional, unique or even just interesting music to be made in such conditions of plentitude?

watching you run

2010-01-25T17:31:00.002+11:00

you want a man full of love
more dangerous ways
you're guarding your ground, that i'm sure of
you're cutting your gold with grey
and you're showing your pinkest parts in my absence
and telling nine lies in the moonlight
and you're showing your pinkest parts in my absence

you slip on the yoke like it was a cute top
and drag a frozen lake full of fish and whatnot
across a living bed of flowers
and you leave it laying heavy on the bed of ours

do you see a cold floor in your future?
or do you sleep sounder when the sheets are sour?

you wanted a man, i showed up
and gave you a rib from my cage
that rib went bad, you let 'em all rot
replaced with tattooed snakes
may your bones turn to rope and go limp inside you
if you were burning me boy you'd get ice
may your bones turn to rope and go limp inside you

you slip on the yoke like it was a cute top
and drag a frozen lake full of fish and whatnot
across a living bed of flowers
and you leave it laying heavy on the bed of ours

i lit a match and watched it throw shadows
while you grew a hell on the top of our kingdoms

and you are
your father's daughter
and i am (i am)
no runner

study an affair and contemplate how a complicated train of events that ends in a final result of men's flesh becoming stairs

--Why? & Themselves, 'Canada'
(corrections welcomed)

are you swimming in her pools?

2010-01-25T16:04:00.003+11:00

I once asked a musician friend why so many of his songs were full of references to the sea. “Because it’s big and you can put all your problems in it,” was his succinct and profound reply. If there was ever another artist to explore the vastness of the ocean (and thus of life), and the beautiful and terrible associations it calls up, it would be Spencer Krug. His work up until now is littered with references to the briny deep, but whereas for my friend, I suspect that the ocean is a cleansing, if sometimes dangerous, thing – something to wash away life’s troubles with that bracing feeling we all experience when we finally give in and put our head under the water even though its cold – for Krug the ocean is nothing short of polluting. Indeed, if we’re all throwing our problems in it, if it is the collective bathing pool of humanity from our dawn, then it’s a very dirty thing indeed:

I don’t really want to swim with you
I don’t really want to swim with you
I don’t want to swim swim swim
In the water you claim all has been through
Sunset Rubdown, ‘I’m Sorry I Sang on Your Hands That Have Been in the Grave’
(possibly apocryphal)

When you think about it, that last line is entirely true – I remember a great bit of trivia I once read somewhere that if you pour a cup of blue dye in the sea, then in a thousand years it would be spread throughout the entire ocean. Everything moves through this water, and whilst it gives life, for Krug that fact is a disgusting one. Effluent and bottled spring water are all the same thing in the end. There’s something possibly Freudian here, like this fluid were one, big mucousy discharge from a certain place, circulating the drier, safer parts of our world.

Nevertheless, Krug cannot help himself, and he goes back in for a dip, most recently and brilliantly on his solo effort, the stupendously titled Dreamland EP: marimba and shit-drums, under the Moonface moniker. For both musical and lyrical reasons this single-track, twenty-minute piece is perhaps the most gripping and interesting thing I’ll hear all year. Musically, it’s simply amazing how much pathos and excitement Krug can pull out of something that otherwise signifies Calypso beach party! – here the marimba becomes a fast-paced death knell, constantly rising only to be met with as much force by treated drums straight out of bad 80s synth-pop. If ever a piece of music reinterpreted the mood and aesthetics of an instrument – well, two instruments – this is it.

Lyrically, Dreamland is ostensibly a narration of Krug's dream journal – and it sure has that hazy, irreal atmosphere of dreaming – where we find Krug “hanging out in the tower / The tower overlooked the sea”, surveying his surreal and dark landscape of spiritualists, chameleons and glass guitars, looking for someone or something. No matter how reluctant he might be to go in there, he's only going to find it by searching the waters, so he prepares himself to dive:

(Dreamland EP cover)

At least he won’t swallow anything if he keeps that snorkel on, unless it flows over the top and down the tube like it sometimes does if you don’t push out whilst going down. He spots her!, after futilely looking where he probably knew she wouldn’t be found:

All through the sky, all over the ground, I was looking for you
You were dipping in the water like a beauty
Did you think about your man out in the whirlpool sea?

He’ll have to go after her, and there is little hesitancy to return to shore, as the marimbas quicken their pulse – if that was already possible, giving the absolutely lightening rhythmic rate they bang up:

Above the dirty harbour water
Half a mile from the shore
A cannon fell out of the sky
Now it sits upon the dirty ocean floor
Girls already in their swimsuits
They are sitting on the pier
I will swim to them like a fish
I have ridden on these waves
I will be there in no time
.
I have ridden on these waves
I have crashed into the shore
I have rolled along the dirty ocean floor

As the gated drums accentuate his journey back to land, we find that Krug has been through it all, he has felt, smelt and probably tasted the absolute despicable depths of humanity at the bottom of the sea, what he found there we do not really know. All we know is that the tide that brings us in will always take us back out. Whether we like it or not, we “are bound to the water / like creatures on a leash”.

spent that on a necklace

2010-01-25T09:34:00.001+11:00

Kanye’s discography is defined by the Sandinista! (1980) principle, the almost universal understanding that there’s a truly great record in there somewhere but it’s up to the listener to slog through roughly 2/3 of poorly executed shit to compile his or her own personal masterpiece. --Lindsay Zoladz

(con)temporary

2010-01-12T17:55:00.002+11:00

I just want to be positive for a minute and say: sub-genres are SO GREAT. They’re one of the best things about music. These little sceney bubbles of everyone batting round an idea, running with it, trying to cash in, trying to imitate, not caring about being original, not caring about being ridiculous, just this mad goldrush sprint to work through something - it’s brilliant. Especially as no matter how stupid things get the ideas never get used up: every sub-genre, even if it dies out after a couple of years and gets snarked on, is a packet of possibilities, a music DNA branch ready for someone to mess about with years and decades later. They all matter.

And for the fans they’re amazing too. Of course they look stupid from the outside: that’s what ‘outside’ is for. Ones that look great from the outside just become ‘pop’ I guess. Following one from the inside though, appreciating why one ridiculous blog hype is great and other one is crap, and figuring out what you love about a style, not to mention justifying it to the world (and of course maybe making it yourself) - it’s just a really good experience. If you’re a critic I’d say it’s an essential experience. Seeing all these little scenes and never really getting invested in any of them is like going to Disneyworld and just wandering around not actually going on any of the rides because, oh, that queue is too long and that one looks like it would be over too quickly. --Tom Ewing

sport your br.

2009-12-26T00:56:00.001+11:00

Going back to at least Sung Tongs, the dominant themes in Avey Tare and Panda Bear's lyrics have been responsibility, familial love, and a desire to work toward self-improvement. These aren't new ideas for pop music, but they are difficult things to express in song without coming across as unbearably hokey. Animal Collective circumvent this tackiness in part by investing every sound with an intense generosity rather than just leaving the sentiment to the words being sung. "Brother Sport" in particular is a big warm hug of a song, and would feel loving and supportive even if Panda Bear were not singing lyrics encouraging his brother not to descend to depression following the death of their father. Cynics may grumble, but anyone in need of this sort of earnest, full-hearted empathy will find it here as the music gradually shifts from a gentle exhortation to move on from a state of mourning to a celebratory climax merging elements of rave, psychedelia, and folk jamborees. On a good day, "Brother Sport" is a joyous romp, but in times of trouble, it's profound and life-affirming song, rejecting self-defeating despondency while showing a deep respect for the agony of loss. --Matthew Perpetua

the sex life of the inorganic

2009-12-03T11:30:00.003+11:00

The Vinyl Factory Manufacture.

As digital music without a fetishisable container marches on, it's abundantly clear that vinyl is stepping in to fulfil the role of covetable hard copy. Witness the inclusion of digital download cards in new vinyl releases; it would seem that the CD is actually the medium destined to 'die' in the face of MP3s, not its much older plastic counterpart.

This video is only further proof of the progression of vinyl, as the format takes on some kind of odd living dead quality - having died, we can now fondly and nostalgically look back on its heyday as if it were somehow over and yet in that very act continually renew its existence. I'm not sure if I like this. What is being valued here? Mere hard goods fetish? Some kind of pale simile of something like a unique piece of art? The concept of the long-playing album?

What is clear from this video is that whatever is actually being pressed (i.e. music) into this viscuous black goop is not the focus, rather the thing itself. What is most fascinating is how perhaps the most fundamentally violent industrialisation of music - it's transformation into an object of mass production with the advent of the record - is now being recalled fondly. Pre-post-industrial (i.e. pre-immaterial) forms of labour take on a residual craft aesthetic, we see people and coffee cups and signs of life amongst what is really, just a big fucking factory like any other, literally stamping out more of the same day in, day out. I'm not sure if the workers there get the same kind of fluttery, Wes Anderson film feeling viewers are copping when they look back upon 'vinyl manufacture' as some kind of quaint, even slightly magical process.

Clearly this isn't going to go away, but for one all I can say is bring on the digital. Wave goodbye to the container (at least in discrete, fixed and bounded form) and you begin to realise what's really at stake, musically and of course financially: music.

ultimate satisfaction

2009-11-22T06:04:00.006+11:00

My iTunes play count / Last.fm profile / personal music surveillance devices tell me that I have listened to Bear in Heaven's 'Lovesick Teenagers' 10 times, and their album Beast Rest Forth Mouth about 7 times, since I downloaded it barely three days ago. Little about the album is wearing off as I approach double digits, those towering, jarring choruses seem only higher. The music is soupy, swirling, brooding, a mixture of bedded-down indietronica synths, proggy, choppy guitars, whining boy banshee vocals and ingenious pop structures all clocking in at about 4 minutes - a list that looks completely fucking incongrous when you read it out but is also a list of everything I love and basically a list of things that this band somehow manages to perfectly melt together every single track. Like Home Video actually worked out how to not make things so creepy or Sunset Rubdown c.Random Spirit Lover gave up the circus. If you've bothered reading to this point, you'll realise - like I just did - that I have nothing witty or significant to say about this music. I just really fucking love it.

Props to Harvey, shout out to Pitchfork, bring on more GIF album covers!

waking up the ghosts

2009-11-19T05:22:00.003+11:00

Sitting here deliriously at 5.30AM listening to Collarbone's 'Waiting for the Ghosts' from the Waiting for the Ghosts EP, having studied all night and deciding to just keep going. There's a bird that starts its chirping at around this time every morning, and it's shrill, distinctive cry - a one-two whistle followed up by three piercing stabs in rhythmic succession (if I was a musician I could tell you what key or something, but I ain't) - has strangely and sweetly matched up with the tempo of the song, adding some strange animal echo at the end of each bar of this swirling, man-made electronica. 'Your words run dry', repeats Marcus Whale, and the bird's coo echoes his sentiment as I sit here, numb, trying groggily to construct the last parts of the piece of writing that has consumed my entire fucking year in its hellish depths. It's a really strange moment amidst a haze of far shittier and quieter ones as of late, but just one of those times when you love music and nature and all the things that make a sound, even at such ungodly hours.

6AM UPDATE: A far more pleasant little twitterer has decided to soundtrack 'Weatherman' with its sing-song call. Goosebumps.

memory tapes and tapes

2009-11-14T11:23:00.000+11:00

Listening to Washed Out's High Times at the moment, apparently it was released only on cassette tape, but inevitably it's made its way onto the Internet and onto my hard drive. The thing that strikes me about it - and I'm prone to assume that much of the current chillwave/glo-fi/hypnagogic pop stuff does similar things - is its playing around with 'audio patina'. Strictly, patina describes that great effect that comes when certain metals oxidise over time, and they get a fine coating of age. In other words, patina describes the unique effects of wear on substances due to time, their environment and history of use. Patina is the making visible of the temporal. It's all very zen and Romantic and nature-meets-culture kind of stuff, but most people only really think of it in terms of tangible things. The golden brown of aged mahogany, the crackling of paint on Australian weatherboard houses, and - if I may be so bold - that attractive, soft and tacky shine of an overused keyboard key.

But it's not just visual, patina, for our experience of music and sound in general often has a rich sense of the patinated, perhaps owing to the fact that recording media are inevitably objects in the world, subject to the physical vagaries of time and wear. Analogue media, to be sure, have a far more immediate sense of age than their digital counterparts, and I think part of the resurgence of tape and vinyl in music making and consuming has to do with this romantic idea of patina - these are formats that we know have lived.

Chillwave, to me, seems, in part, to be about surfacing the experience of sonic patina in the sheen of its sound. Not only do a great number of bands circling around this putative genre specifically reference cassette tapes, the 90s, and other such signifiers of time in their band names and song titles (and even their release strategies), but so too does the music itself have an overwhelming sense of being of a particular time. I'm not talking about the idealised thematic images of a particular era/childhood (beach, surf, weed, skating) which undoubtedly abound here, nor is it the reference to musical styles from a particular era (grunge, surf, 60s pop, punk), it's rather the evocation of the very electrosonic horizon of a certain past.

Washed Out, I mean, is evoking memories of the sound of childhood formats and media experiences. Take 'Clap Intro', whose looping piano sounds like it is coming off the back of some warped, beaten videocassette recording of an old Saturday morning cartoon, whose magnetic heads have stretched and defected from the incessant playback of juvenile fixation. Add to that a hazy admixture of other not quite so identifiable but highly visceral sounds from 'back then' and you get what Daniel Krow calls "warped nostalgia" or David Keenan, more intellectually, "hypnagogic pop" - music that reaches back to 80s (I'd also say 90s, but whatevs) mass culture and somnabulistically reimagines the memories.

I love this shit - most probably because it's the first mediatic genre I've come across that specifically aestheticises the dominant formats of my own youth. It just can't not be made by late Gen Ys that were growing up in the late 80s and 90s, people now in their 20s who lived their entertainment youth through walkmans, videotapes, and cassettes. By its very definition, this music is has a time-limit, it 'wears thin' quite literally, and I think that's something to embrace rather than premeditatively dismiss as just hype or "vaguely retro sound".

The question is, will Gen Zs be musing over tracks in ten years time that are full of the artefacts of digital encoding and compression?

neologisms

2009-11-02T14:49:00.006+11:00

Over at Under the Rostrum, Shaun has pithily dismissed the modern (Internet) music critic's fetish for coining pseudogenres, like the portmanteaus of two prior existing ones (nu-gaze) or additions of adjectival prefixes to a genre: freak-folk, bloghouse and, Shaun's target, chillwave. It's great stuff, and I have to say I mainly agree with him, especially the part about how coining these genres is so often "the death knell of a dying artificial movement" - as Anwyn once mentioned to me, it's precisely because there are so many people detailing every incremental little move in indie music that the genre is so turgid, not getting a chance to properly evolve itself.

But then, again, I wonder if the obverse move - which Shaun kind of points to but doesn't necessarily partake in - is just as much of a tendency in music writing as the one of ceaselessly coining pseudogenres? i.e., the "I'm above / this music is above pigeonholing" thing is itself a kind of snooty music writer stance and/or a kind of shortsighted 'this music is unclassifiable' Romanticism, which I'd argue is difficult on a few levels - Shaun and others, please take umbrage if you feel like it.

Firstly, when does the music ever speak for itself? Isn't the very definition of the musical something that can't describe itself? And doesn't everything we hear already come through some preexisting filter, be it personal taste, peer group, social status, etc., through to more structural things like economic and social processes? For example, even my very selection of Washed Out's High Times (another chillwave contender) to download last time I visited an MP3 blog is because I'm already contained within a particular personal and social milieu which says indie music is worthwhile, because I was looking for something a bit calmer to listen to whilst I studied and the tags on it said 'Lo-Fi' and 'Synth-Pop', and then even because I'm a middle class kid with access to broadband and the affectation of having a 'personal' taste that defines me through my pseudo-consumptive practices. I'll stop there, but the point is that I don't really think, sorry Shaun, that the music can ever just write itself onto our imaginations, free of some greater context. Genre is just one of these contexts, just more visibly codified.

Second, isn't the role of critics precisely to describe and contextualise a given bit or bunch of music? I think we can't help but acknowledge that criticism will always constrain and frame music in a particular way, it's just more how we go about doing it that is the question.

And to that, I guess if you said that this shitty genre coining is probably not a great way of doing this framing you're probably right, but in another way I kind of see something playful and kind of democratic about it. Clearly the writers using these terms don't actually think they are consecrating entire genres in the traditional sense - as an entire, definable class and movement of music with its own conventions, rules, styles and adherents - and if they do then they need to have a good look at themselves. Instead, I think genre here just becomes a kind of analogy for describing the sound and style of a band - chillwave, for instance, is a fun way to describe some kind of gauzy, lost in time melange of synths, samples and effects, that all sounds like its playing from a fifth generation videotape dub - which is helpful for listeners and often has a pithy and evocative kind of resonance when the right terms are put together. And to the extent these sub(sub)genres are outside of far more monolithic and determining terms like 'indie', 'rock', 'hip hop' and so on, I think there's more room to move here.

In the end, too, I guess these throwaway pegs also become their own litmus tests for a band's sticking power - if they can transcend their putative handle, then they're good enough to keep going. All the other ones that die as quickly as labels like bloghouse, chillwave and so on are as ephemeral as the label itself - necessarily 'of their time' - and neither do I really think that's a bad thing. Indie has become pop in that way, and why not?

haunted synaesthesia

2009-10-31T23:12:00.003+11:00

I find it amazing how Boards of Canada never fails to evoke for me some nebulous suburban sunshine America in the 70s I never lived through, simultaneously with intense feelings of childhood. No words, no explicit stylistic references, just pure tonic nostalgia for an absent past.

Boards of Canada - Dayvan Cowboy

Earthgrazer, Wyoming, 1972

pro-stars, pro-skies

2009-10-30T22:34:00.006+11:00

"Listuuuun, I been drinking"

I guess most artists probably write their songs in a kind of odd toss back and forth between music and lyrics, lyrics and music. Come up with a nice line, or a nice melody, fit the words to the sound, the sound to the words. Whatever, I have no exact idea.

The thing that strikes me with Destroyer's 'Bay of Pigs' - an epic(ally quiet) ambient disco number that clocks in at just under 14 minutes - is that Dan Bejar has really just let this song write itself, there's almost no causality. Like he really was drinking one night and decided - 'hey, I know how to revive my flagging artistic cache: I'll devise a sprawling, spacey song that's as casual as it is profound, as lethargic as it is groovy, as aporetic as it is layered, and I'll do it without any apparent template'. I defy someone to tell me how Bejar actually started to write this song, what came first, second, third, so on. It just seems fall out of sky, every minute peppered by some divine synaesthesia of voice and sound: "As apocalypses go that's pretty good, sha la la wouldn't you say" as a Roland blurts a trance line; "Say a prayer for the light" as a starburst of synths appears; "Now shut your mouth" as the music quietens after a funk out. I'm not going to go on. Only someone either utterly tanked or utterly genius could have devised such serendipity, where everything is connected but no one is in the driver's seat, in part because of just how long this thing is, like he fell into a stupor and forgot to stop playing for another five minutes, like "the tide comes in the tide goes away / Oh the tide comes in, yeah the tide yeah the tide", like the final minute or two reprises almost exactly the beginning as if the song were some cosmic Mobius Strip in which the secrets of the universe glittered like so many synth stars amongst its ethereal drone.

"Listuuuun"

consumer grade

2009-10-04T19:06:00.004+11:00

Michael Jackson - Billie Jean (VBR Remix)

The materiality of Michael Jackson; the aesthetics of digital audio degrading.
The materiality of digital audio; the aesthetics of Michael Jackson degrading.

320>32

its just a reflection

2009-09-13T19:51:00.001+10:00

[Cellular phone key tones; ringing tone; rising strings]

Hello
Hey it's me.
Hey baby, what's going on?
I'm just leaving the club right now.
So how was it tonight?
Good, the DJs were alright.
Oh good. You wanna come over?
Yeah I'll be there in about an hour, I'm gonna go for a drive.
Hey can you get us a couple of bottles of wine on your way?
Sure.
Okay, I'll see you soon.
Okay, I love you.
I love you too.

[Phone snaps shut; car ignition; sombre strings]

"every song you've ever owned. in your pocket"

2009-08-11T12:04:00.002+10:00

I'm not even going to go into how fucking long it took me to acquire this image, or how much it cost me, but I certainly am going to put it here in the hope that some poor bastard like me desperately searching for it for some research project stumbles across this blog!

(Full size)

The new iPod Every song you've ever owned In your pocket Records record vinyl cds cd tapes tape cassettes cassette 1st generation commercial advertisement ad spread magazine

hard synth

2009-08-01T18:28:00.002+10:00

Peter Howell of BBC's Radiophonic Workshop describes the creation of the Dr Who theme:

"One function of the sonic hauntology of Ghost Box and Mordant Music is to remind us of how it was a public service ethos that gave rise to something like the Radiophonic Workshop. The sleeve designs of Ghost Box’s Julian House frequently make associations between the paternalistic, educationalist impulses of the postwar, pre-Thatcherite period and the Weird fictions of the likes of Arthur Machen, suggesting that, far from being stuffy and dreary, it was public service which could provide breeding conditions for the Weird (by contrast with the relentless pursuit of market share which afflicts today’s BBC and, instead of producing diversity, ends up in monotonous populism)"
-K-Punk

fighting for your life inside a killer

2009-07-29T02:45:00.003+10:00

Late Thoughts on the Late Michael Jackson

Philip Brophy has put up an article on Jackson’s Ghosts, written in 1997, the same year the short-film/long-clip was released and it’s sufficiently brilliant (as with much of Brophy’s writing) to spur me into some belated musings on Jackson, none of which are too brilliantly constructed.

The first is a point of contention with Brophy’s claim that “Michael Jackson’s sense of his own being” is “something which most of us will only ever ridicule rather than understand its fundamental otherness”. I think this is only true for the more cynical types, myself included, who usually declare little or no sorrow at the news of Jackson’s death in what seems like an almost desperate attempt to flash their non-fan-of-Jacko credentials and thereby separate themselves from the gullible grieving masses. Such people almost certainly tend to ridicule any and all aspects of Jackson’s ‘being’, a suitably wide term that might reference his style, body, dress, deportment, voice, manners, morals, behaviours, quirks and, of course, music (though the latter, strangely, is almost universally sacrosanct).

They contrast with the majority of people I’ve spoken to about the death, fans of widely varying levels of intensity (from barely to fanatically), who want always to cut Jackson some slack. This tendency isn’t solely a function of his passing, though of course it’s now more pronounced than ever. As this describes the great majority, I’ll switch to the inclusive pronoun: We seem to have internalised Jackson’s 'otherness', in many ways. It may be by rendering it a didactic mirror for the excesses of our era, domesticating it into a kind of harmless Peter Pan fantasy, ‘looking past appearances’ to find the black artist or King of Pop of our dreams at his core, or more simply just accepting it. Such acceptance, of course, plays off against the widespread cultural fascination for Jackson as a symbol of decay, and media outlets were so happy to indulge this desire as to continue into gruesome descriptions of his autopsied body – missing hair, bruised, undernourished, etc. ‘Look,’ chorus the media, ‘before you lies the corpse of the fallen king! Recoil!’

But – was he not already a corpse? At what point did Jackson actually exist as a flesh-and-blood being? The kneejerk (and inversely racist) answer is to say sometime around when he was still black and his nose hadn’t fallen off, but in terms of the Jackson we know, that’s just as questionable. Jackson was, from early childhood, a sign – nay, spectacle – more than he ever was a human, a great cultural cipher, sending to do our bidding across sexual, racial and other trajectories and whose actual body, which lay underneath, would eventually manifest the remainders of such toil. Mark Fisher calls him an accelerant angel of capitalist production, “plugged in from the start into the media landscape”. And indeed, if anything, Jackson’s corporeality lived in our flesh, not his, in the kinaesthetic, somatechnic, liquid way we absorbed his image and the various sounds that pinged off his recordings – for his words were only the beginning, so much more of Jackson’s hits are taken up sonically by corporeal tics and subvocal gestures, they come to us strangely alive, but, like the Jackson character of ‘Thriller’ and, indeed, ‘Ghosts’, and, again, ‘Billie Jean’ (should I go on?), it is forever the product of an apparition, an absent presence - it is the rotting flesh of the living dead that we feast upon.

I guess that’s partly why we were prepared for his death, in a sense, to be a fan of Jackson is to worship the very process of (corporeal) erasure that commodity production and consumption demands (feel free to insert Marx’s definition of capital). It is a way of aestheticising the kind of zombie stomp (Jackson leading the way) we all make throughout the littered landscape of popular culture, the way in which we degenerate along with our idol. For we have only ever known Jackson through the signs of his degeneration, which are ours. It's all very circuitous.

That’s why, in a sense, I struggle to see Jackson’s aesthetic as a transgressive one, which is what Brophy seems to be agitating for in his 1997 piece: “He has left our world where plastic surgery is frowned upon, race must be black or white, music is required to be pure, and video clips are excluded from the cinema”. Giving kudos to this is basically kissing the feet of a mutant, shape-shifting late capitalism and the fundamentally unanchored, ambiguous qualities of signs – be they textual or corporeal – it relies upon to extract profit.

Nevertheless, that last quote from Brophy does return us to the point, and I’ll try to bring it together here – that is, at what point did Jackson leave us? 25th June 2009? Or sometime in 1997? Or any other relevant date? Or, just as pertinently, did he ever leave? You’ve probably heard from at least one grieving pop singer or family member or corporate executive attached to Jackson some variation on the theme of ‘he lives on in his music’. Perhaps the most shameless was from Randy Phillips, president of AEG Live, the conglomerate that were putting on Jackson’s upcoming tour. Phillips said that the company had "more than 100 hours of footage that could be turned into live albums, a movie and a pay-per-view special. He was our partner in life and now he’s our partner in death". It leaves a bad taste in the mouth, but Phillips’ post-mortem synergising contains a statement more profound than he realised – Jackson has always had one foot in the grave so to speak, and as such, nothing much really changes in terms of commodity production. Perhaps no icon other than Jackson can more fully express the ambiguity of the mourning of a celebrity; we live our relationship to the media figure through the para-social interaction enacted by media consumption, and to the extent that the filmclip, memorial TV special, signed poster, CD, news report, and so on remains (is explosively reanimated, even), then Jackson is still alive, we become his flesh more than ever.

He was dead for so long; he will never die, but even this is not comforting enough – what, then, do we mourn?

if i asked you to make funny faces with me

2009-07-18T16:18:00.002+10:00

For reasons I'd rather not go into, I recently found myself without a driving licence, and with that, I have temporarily lost perhaps my most loved of all musical experiences: singing alone in cars.

The distinct pleasure is hard to describe, but there's nothing like having the windows down, sound peaking above the barely adequate dashboard speakers, screaming your lungs out (Animal Collective's 'Grass' was always a favourite pick, probably because it was already unhinged). What it all comes down to actually, is experiencing the ecstasy of hearing your own voice seemingly becoming that of the songs, as you feel your mouth move to the words but hear (mostly) those of the recording. The overtones of your own voice are sonically present just enough for you to convince yourself that it is indeed you that is co-producing that beautiful, skilful sound.

I guess you're reading this and just think, 'wow, what a sad guy' - and yes, I guess it does seem delusional, idealistic and even solipsistic. But I don't quite feel like I'm consecrating my own farcical vocal talents or the genuine ones of whoever I'm singing along to, rather worshipping the way in which music comes to life in the bodies of all those involved, be those of the car, myself or the artist.

Though I might claim otherwise elsewhere, music really doesn't exist (or is only a fertile possibility) until it is heard, and music isn't heard until it is played in the heart of both giver and receiver. So driving along highways karaoking to the latest chart topper (or indie jam) of course is a telling symptom of modern times and all that produces us, but there's a spirit inside it that speaks to nothing other than the promise of music as something we all share, even if we're alone.

When I used to drive, every now and then I would pull up next to a fellow convert, blissfully (dangerously?) unaware of their surroundings as they mouthed whatever it was they were listening to. It's always an odd feeling, this - you can perceive them singing, you know they are listening to music, but no sound escapes from their auto-bubble and makes it into yours, save sometimes for a bass hum. Often you also have no idea what it is that they're singing along to, unless its you're a particularly good lip-reader. But you still know they're feeling it (anyone that spontaneously externalises song is), which is all to say that 'music' isn't content, let alone even sound, but event.

Do you know what I'm saying here? You have 'heard' music when you see fellow commuters singing along, but no sound, you don't even know which song. Like me, you probably feel good whenever you catch someone doing this - it's a strangely innocent activity, and completely uninhibited. What you are feeling is music.

I always do my best to smile knowingly/approvingly when, inevitably, the singer glances over to your car and finds themselves caught in the act. I probably look like a raving loony giving them a big toothy grin, but upon receipt of the smile the fellow convert's look often turns from embarrassment to camaraderie. It's important to keep the faith.

he loved me

2009-07-15T14:33:00.009+10:00

Though we admit it or not, all of us have unexamined assumptions when it comes to listening to popular music, and many of these often meet at that effervescent point of the singing voice which, since the advent of mechanical sound media, has been the treasured 'sign of life' of a recording, that which we listen for to remind us that what we hear has human origins, indeed, that it comes from the recesses of a specific, individual human body - of which, again, the voice is the mark of. Save for this voice, recordings - and people - are liable to dematerialise into ghostly apparitions, gravestones of an absent presence, for though it devils us to confront the fact, every recorded voice is really an inhuman event, the trace of trauma, of giving oneself over to the apparatus which, in turn, tears the lifeforce from the performer to be magnetised or digitised, edited, mixed, pressed or burnt, then finally distributed into that great ocean of ears. It's a fundamentally inhuman process, but comfort always comes from that thin though crucial membrane stretching through it all, the sonorous human voice.

The singing voice of Azeda Booth is lush with life. It's always the easiest cliché, but this voice is angelic, it is a golden shaft of light piercing the stained glass windows and coming to rest upon the altar. It's impassioned yet ethereal, on the brink of evanescence, and it breathes through the wings of a thousand butterflies. And, above all, on lines like this:

How can you bring yourself to love me
when a hope can die like a body can?
Does it make you weak
when you hear me speak?

From the opener, 'Ran', the voice is ultimately elegaic, mournful, pierced by an unidentifiable sadness. It is this admixture of insistence, purity and melancholy that makes her voice a wholly beautiful one, one that absorbed me from the first line.

***

Though the details are incidental, a note on how I came to Azeda Booth. It was through the meeting of two things: first, I absolutely loved Women's eponymous debut from 2008 and was hungry for more. Second, a friend had recommended anti-folk trio Little Teeth to me, so I hopped on the Absolutely Kosher site to order their album. Whilst there I noticed In Flesh Tones, the debut from Azeda Booth, a band, the little blurb informed me, that featured two members of Women! With that nugget I was sold. I didn't even head to the band's Myspace or download the sample track, I just chucked it straight into my order. Weeks later, the albums arrived, and whilst Little Teeth was good, it was grating and patchy in parts; I found it was In Flesh Tones that I would return to almost daily as time went on, seduced by the strangely sensual nature of its science, the hazy and distant atmospherics juxtaposed with Feels-esque percussion and experiential glitches, but most of all, that voice. Oh (last line, 'Ran').

The hypnotic quality of the album, its gauzy emotional landscapes, were only heightened for me not knowing anything at all about this band, save for the fact two of Women played in it - but the sounds here were so divergent that I could barely draw a line between the two acts. I was without anchor, and I confess, all the more blissful in my ignorance. The songs had weird titles like 'John Cleese' and 'Numberguts', that seemed to suit a punk band more than this detailed, intimate electronica. It was all a happy anamoly, but I knew one thing, and that was enough: I was in love with her voice.

***

Nearly a year had passed with In Flesh Tones, and I hit up webzine cokemachineglow, as I often do, to find about the latest leftfield releases and read the kind of brilliant, insightful commentary the writers offer on the music. I see that Azeda Booth has released a new EP, Tubtrek. Since I had long formed my own special relationship with the band and was safe in the knowledge that whatever the reviewer said about them would do little to dent or divert this affair, I decided to read the review before listening to the EP (which is freely available, it turns out) - something I almost always never do. The reviewer was a little worried that the cluttered quality of this recording was a sign of faltering from the band, whom he also admires. I continue on, and get to this:

"the band’s two primary strengths, which were on ample display throughout Tones, were its use of traditional rhythm instrumentation in non-traditional arrangements and Jordon Hossack’s voice twinged androgynous."

Jordon Hassack? Jordon? 'Androgynous'? I 'twinge' myself - it couldn't be? Hang on, there are women with that name; one particularly plastic specimen, but I suppose many others beautiful and waifish and everything like the 'flesh tones' of the body whose voice I had found so pretty listening to Azeda Booth. A slightly panicked trawl through blog posts and other reviews ensued, but the seed had already been planted.

***

Of course, it would emerge in the course of my research that indeed, the luscious voice I had been hearing on In Flesh Tones was that of a man, Jordon Hassock, who has an uncanny ability to hit those kind of high, 'head voice' notes in soft and fragile tones that we so often associate with female singers.

Certainly, I could have just made all of this some kind of knowing account of how Azeda Booth cleverly subvert expectations we have when it comes to the gendering of vocal style in pop music whilst still managing to articulate an authentic and attractive voice - placing the band in the history of popular androgynous stylings the likes of Antony Hegarty, David Bowie, etc. And this is certainly true.

Or I could get really aesthetic on the whole thing and just return to my initial musings on the ghost of the recorded voice, and conclude with something like, 'Azeda Booth shows that the voice still has an emotional after-life even beyond the recording, even beyond the particular identity markers (in particular, here, gender) of a voice'. And this, in the end, I think is probably true.

But to end here, on either of these points, would amount to little more than a slight, a pitiful sidestepping of what's really the matter, because the revelation, and its consequences, is far more personal than this philosophical posturing. Because the nub of it is about what I have to come to terms with as a listener, as a man who had fallen in love with another man, or his voice, and as someone who most often wanders through his life, infinitely tolerant and compassionate in words, but securely heteronormative inside. For all my professed enlightenment about sexuality as performance, the funngibility of sexual codes, the queering of the voice, I still clung (still do?) to the principle that what hits me first is what it is, that what sounds like a woman is a woman, and moreover that her being a woman grants me a more romantic relationship to the music. It's easy to be anti-essentialist in theory, much less in reality.

I don't write this as some kind of clawing confessional or as evidence of my now enlightened state ('If my outlook is heteronormative, at least I know it is' - I find this possibly even more offensive). I certainly have not resolved whatever issues the Azeda Booth revelation dredged up for me, and I am left wondering if my attitudes have at all been changed by this, or only momentarily shaken.

It's still an intense moment in my listening life, and I guess what I was most afraid of upon learning about Jordon was that the specialness of Azeda Booth - well, to be honest, the idea of Azeda Booth, whatever Azeda Booth means to me - might be tainted, that I would constantly be left psychoanalysing my reactions to the music or trying to pick out the masculinity or just being generally disoriented whenever I played In Flesh Tones. I think it's a credit to the band, and to Hassock's vocal ability in particular, that I have since had none of these issues, because when I hear those emerging strains of 'Ran' I find myself flung back into the otherworld that is their music, where, really, everything is nebulous but at the same time beautiful.

Wet strands of hair drift into pink hills and dales, the soft skin of a lover burbles about in electric tones, the feather doona is a pillow of synth washes, the burst of a marble's bounce coming closer to the wooden desk - pick it up, it's an iris. When I'm embedded in the flesh of this world, I tend not to think about the hands or mouths that crafted and breathed life into it, let alone whether they are man or woman. If, at times, I do wonder who is behind this, it is truly an angel I see, Gabriel, that eternal androgyne, whose sex might only be revealed as in a dream.

And I'm still in love with his voice.

in the aeroplane over the sea

2009-07-11T00:35:00.002+10:00

For some strange reason, after a CD has finished playing on my old rotary changer 3-disc Philips 'Mini HiFi System', there lingers a subaudible dust, barely emitting from the stereo speakers. Often, like many albums tend to do, if the last song is a fade out or has its own few seconds of recorded silence, the moment between the music and this sound is imperceptible. Some time later, the unit automatically goes into standby, and the sound stops then, but by this time I cannot usually tell, for it has merged with the ambience of my room, or the seashells in my ears. Such times, an ocean of sound opens itself up to me as this leaking dust settles around the room, and what I hear is that vast expanse of 'noise', continuous, anonymous and everpresent, that makes up the greater majority of vibrations in our world. Music and speech are only ever temporary dilations of this greater sound-in-the-world, and it's the latter that so often we find hard to hear. Certain stimuli, however, like this soft hiss, sit at the interstices, forming a tissue, a ridge, between what we call sound (laughter, rain hitting the tin roof, wind, Lift yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven!) and noise - but not noise as we usually think of it, as a disruptive and redundant phenomenon, the crackling as a phone signal drops out, the murmur of a crowd before the band strikes up. I'm thinking of someting closer to what we might call white noise - the odd sound of the snow fuzz that clawed at the sides of properly tuned television sets (digital televisual noise is more frustrating, just blocky chunks of missing sound), even the piercing internal acoustic of a migraine, both sounds that seem like they're always there but only reveal themselves to us every now and then. Because contrary to popular belief, it is not noise that disrupts meaningful sound, but sound that must be ripped from the ground that is noise, that vast entity; it is sound that must be forged in the crucible of noise. Sometimes we hear things like this semiaural dust - I can think of no better word, for dust is everywhere - that is both sound and noise, or the afterlives of sound as it returns to noise, or the prenatal moment of sound as it is emerges from noise's cradle. My CD player has a timbre like the tide, but its horizon is ever vaster.

noise: scourge of modernity?

2009-05-25T08:28:00.000+10:00

"The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire -- we hold history's record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the eardrums...."
(A cranky Aldous Huxley, 1944)

<<<<<<<>>>>>>>

"Toward making a 'dead room' in the living room: patented acoustic building materials isolate the subject from city noise. Advertisement for Herringbone Rigid Metal Lath acoustic insulator, Architectural Forum, July 1923." (Caroline A. Jones, Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art)

hollowed-out galaxies inhabiting your eyes

2009-05-11T13:24:00.004+10:00

I'd like to tell you about Swan Lake's new song, 'A Hand At Dusk'. It's metaphysical, it's mystical, it's going to save us all in slow movements from the very thing that kills us all in slow movements.

I first encountered this song when I played their new album, Enemy Mine, on my cd player. It's at the back of the album, so it was small time until I chanced upon it. The group always committed to at least one extra release post-Beast Moans, and what a good thing that is, because otherwise this song would not have been spawned from the dark, swampy millpond that is the transcendent creative triad of Dan Bejar, Carey Mercer and Spencer Krug. Beast Moans was so named, by the way, after Krug decided it sounded as if "a boar dying in a tar pit". What a slow and painful way to go.

So, anyway, back to the song. One of the most striking aspects of this song is that it doesn't feel as long as it 'actually' is (in terms of chronos) - go listen to it. Then come back and I'll reveal a secret.

...

...

...

It's over six minutes long! You'd never guess. That's because somehow the cosmos themselves turn slower as this song lapses (as in kairos). It's probably because they are listening to that haunting guitar (?) feedback in the background that sounds like angels colliding with doves high up in the grey clouds. Or that gradual, assured piano line that is as much about yawning gulfs between notes as it is about the chords actually struck. Pianos have these little thingscalled hammers and I like to imagine flecks of gold coming off the flint of the steel strings every time one of these notes hammer it, ever so softly, breaking it down until the floor is all covered with little glinting particles just like those you get in the bottle when you come back from Sovereign Hill.

"The Emperor Of Time Has Been Stationed
Where The Pavement Melts Into All Forms Of Light"

This line is this song's epigrammatic manifesto. 'A Hand At Dusk' chases this leviathan and lo and behold snatches him at the shore of the crashing sea. That means the ocean. Oceans are particularly interesting bodies of water because their magnitude is incomprehensible, the collected sound they make literally too great for human ears, but if we sit at the shore they can be at least apprehended.

If we gaze upon this ocean, we see that "There's A Hand At Dusk, In The Wake, In The Water, It's Mine (Mine?), Can You Take The Palm Of It?" This question is mostly rhetorical because you're not the one doing the action here, this song is the one working you over. But grab the hand, and travel along space and time, "Mountains And Peaks", "Books Of Maps",

"Can You Believe That We Will All Get Old?"

Think about that whilst the song builds to its middle section peak, before the sea comes crashing down with the realisation that, yes, we will, but at least we can still hold onto one another, and at least we still look good. And at least we can live and die over and over again all in the space of just six slow minutes.

VICTORY!

2009-04-16T02:32:00.002+10:00

(By Julie Hill)

the post-apocalyptic uses of compact diskettes

2009-04-13T23:20:00.000+10:00

(From A Steampunk's Guide to the Apocalypse)

BEN LEE DOES NOT HEART POP

2009-02-21T03:11:00.002+11:00

Ben Lee - ~~I Love Pop Music~~

I love pop music, more and more every day this year in fact. 2009 is my very own Year of Pop. But it's not going to be trumpeted by this utter douchebag's apparent 'tribute' to that genre, nay MODERN PHENOMENON, that we call pop. Because there are about a million reasons why Ben Lee has it all wrong, why he neither understands nor loves pop music:

Pop, despite what some might think, is not so fucking obvious as this song. This song thinks it can perfunctorily summarise the entire genre whilst simultaneously operating in it's register. Observe:

I love pop music, this is how we do it
It’s politics you can romance to
I love pop music, sprinkle sugar through it,
Philosophy that you can dance to

(Started listening to the actual song to transcribe those lyrics, found an almost primal reflex within myself to instantly hit 'STOP' and was thankfully saved having to live out any more than the first line again by the joy that is Metro Lyrics)

THIS IS NOT HOW WE DO IT (this, however, is) - what the fuck does dude think he is doing reducing the utter complexity that is pop to this pithy little couplet? I can imagine Ben sitting there in his studio, writing that one down - I dunno, maybe it came to him in an epiphany whilst 'jamming' - and thinking to himself how supasmart he is, "Well done Ben," he says to himself (classic narcissist, we all remember), "you've cracked the code!!!"

Like, fuck, no way, pop music can hold in tension seemingly contradictory positions/affects?! Wow. Now I know that that's something I've banged on about here, but where Ben makes the obvious fuck up is that he thinks it's that fucking simple. That that's all there is to it. Tellingly, for him its a zero sum game; his lyric posits a kind of mutually exclusive equation - it's political and after that you can romance to it, as if there was no politics to the romancing itself, or no romancing to the politics, etc etc. But that's not even the half of it.

Coz like I said, the worst part is that he thinks he can get away with revelation of pop within pop - just not possible dude. The whole reason pop can work in paradox is because it is entirely surface but with a second side, like a surface that conceals another surface that is its mirror. I have no idea if that makes sense, but think of like looking down from a still boat at the sea, then looking up from under the water at that same spot. Kind of like that. So it's meanings are simultaneously clear and yet always completely hidden. It's like it's depth works through its shallowness, so some throwaway lyric about Kissing A Girl is politicised just as it is seemingly only romantic. But Katy Perry certainly didn't sing - "This is a song about ambivalent sexuality / Even though I sound like I'm kind of tolerant and/or experimental re lesbianism / I'm actually just a hetero scab / That cares more about turning on my boyfriend". NO ONE SINGS WHAT THEY'RE SINGING ABOUT IN POP. That's just not its mode of self-reference. This kind of shit actually nullifies its very force!!!

And where it really becomes clear (haha, like anything I write here ever is) that he has fucked things up is his fucking hubris in just casually throwing in completely fucking bare sentences like

"Our leaders have not committed to a plan of action on renewable energy
The food crisis is currently affecting a hundred million people world wide"

If pop is ever going to have political import or effect it's certainly not going to be through bashing its listeners over the head with such loaded and yet entirely boring (written like they are as gross little sound bites from some lazy left-wing politician's speech) statements as this. Because that's the entire fucking point of pop - sure it matters, its powerful and political - but it doesn't solve global hunger/warming/war, there is no material conditions to pop, it cannot propel or change these conditions, in fact it never claimed that it could or should. So why the fuck is Ben Lee singing about this stuff in a fucking pop song? And why so fucking obvious?

When it comes down to it, dude has completely and stupidly confused the politics of pop with Politics proper, and the artifice of pop with the manifestly explicit, the simple.

Listening to this song is to know what it feels like to play a song as a complete and utter document of itself - there is no depth, nothing but what it says and plays, and no conception of its own stupidity. Max aptly compared it to 'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)' - and he is completely right. Both songs are so far stuck up their own completely megolomaniacal and solipsistic philosophising that they can't ever provide even a scrap of insight, all the more because they think they are peeling back the layers of the whole fucking world.

Plus you know you're fucked if Missy Higgins is on backing vox.

jedi dreams of being able

2009-01-26T00:57:00.003+11:00

Final Fantasy, Meredith Music Festival, 13th December 2008

"[Antony Hegarty has] established himself as a purveyor of both constructed identity and heart-on-sleeve sincerity" (Joel Elliot on cokemachineglow)

The problem we face when it comes to Owen Pallett (for Final Fantasy live is just himself, a violin, keyboard, loop pedals and four or five amps to play said loops set up with the precision of roman columns behind him) is one of relating emotion through conceit and artifice. For our bleeding hearts want him to wear his own on his sleeve, to bare all rather than wrap it up. But the nature of his stage setup means that his performance is one of extreme concentration, Pallett plays with the reserve and detachment of a surgeon almost, as the orchestration of various song phrases and instruments (all evoked from just voice, violin, keyboard, itself quite amazing as he creates a miniature orchestra) overtakes any considerations of expression. The most wrenching manifestation of this was when he stopped on a pin, mid-song, to complain to the technicians about the audio onstage, in the middle of some beautiful, grand composition as if he'd just paused a video game.

But really this is just like his recordings - for all the sense in which Final Fantasy is adherent to that expectation us indie fans have for unmediated emotional sensitivity (come on, he plays the violin - meaningfulness guaranteed with string instruments) there is just as much in which this is wrapped up in fables and fallacies of Dungeons & Dragons (he said that He Poos Clouds was originally intended as "an eight-song cycle about the eight schools of magic in Dungeons & Dragons"), fictional characters (impotent businessmen), obscure metaphors (the world's tallest tower as a monument to the dead) and history-crossing scenes (his EP Spectrum, 14th Century contains the line "I've a temper as shiny as any bling!").

And in this obscurantism, Pallett is a true romantic, at least in the way I think of romanticism. Because far from the popular idea of romantics as conveyers of direct, inherently human feeling, they were actually elevators - always looking for the nicest conceit to raise the emotionaly mundane to the transcendent, even in love it almost becomes an intellectual game.

And sitting there watching this set, I came to realise just how much this tendency informs Pallett's entire approach. It's like how his voice is so often put through an intercom mic, and sung at a kind of half-pace so that it lags behind the music, never quite fulfilling the sense of feeling that it hints at. And that way he covered Joanna Newsom's Peach, Plum, Pear - whereas Newsom made this maybe the only song where she pulls back the layers and layers of metaphor and simile for unbridled emotional expression (screaming 'I am blue' in a thousand Joannas), Pallett as it were re-Newsomifies it, singing it in an almost throwaway manner that once more covers up its emotion.

And it is in all this that Final Fantasy asks us to confront an uneasy experience, but one that I think is worthwhile: something akin to the denial of our desire just as it is being fulfilled perfectly.

more human than human

2009-01-26T00:16:00.003+11:00

So this whole auto-tune thing is definitly something close to the heart of the (con)temporary. It's been a tendency in pop music somewhere since the eighties I'd say, the robotisation of the 'natural human voice'. But that decade's robopop was wilfully inhuman, a kind of excess of synthesisation that evidenced more just a fascination with the technology rather than expressing emotional truth, so much so that artists like Tubeway Army and Gary Numan found that technologisation of the voice and music could stand for the same social process, one of social alienation:

Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It's the only way to live
In cars

Whereas nineties and millenial pop was focused more thoroughly on 'perfecting' the human voice, the use of digital and manual production technologies to make the voice sound as natural as possible, catch Avril Lavigne for this. This tendency reached its exhaustion point in Cher's Believe, the first track to use Auto-Tune software as a deliberate effect rather than attempt to 'naturalise' the voice - that distinctive pitch mangling on her vocals became a highly used effect ever since.

Nowadays, it's kind of like something of a mixture of these two tendencies, an attempt to simultaneously shoot for nature and effect, that energises a lot of pop music. R&B artists like Chris Brown (see Forever) use pitch correction to excellent effect, accentuating their soulful/soulless music by stretching out modulations, or deliberately over-correcting 'hey' and 'oh' backing vocals. There is a obviousness to this practice that means they are not concerned with 'covering up' their use of corrective software, but rather become virtuouso performers of technology. The human voice is found wanting, or more a base material to be input into a system with far greater fidelity and emotional potential. Not that this hasn't been the very axiom of pop since its conception; the human voice is always object as much as subject. Anyway, in this domain, the idea is that the technologised voice is perfect, not a substitute to 'complete' the human voice, but rather in and of itself beautiful, expressive, its own apex. That we have reached this juncture in our historical ways of listening is quite interesting.

The exhaustion point of this new tendency, I think, would have to be Kanye West's Love Lockdown. This is what marathonpacks calls the "grotesque performance of prolix, technologized amateurism", but I'd re-think that first (and def last) term. It's not so much grotesque as complete - the handing over of emotion to technology. It's as if West cannot deal with the messy grief that consumes him on 808s and Heartbreak, so he relegates (or elevates) this job to technology. Machines that can cry for us.

depth that was never there [pop jamz 08]

2009-01-04T23:46:00.005+11:00

Deerhunter – Nothing Ever Happened

From the moment that stick hits the snare skin, Nothing Ever Happened doesn’t let up. The thing I love about this song is that there is just no fucking around whatsoever, lockstep bass and drum lines ensure it is 100% propulsion and the lyrics are spare, repetitive and to the point – exemplifying most of (the best parts of) the work on Microcastle. But this selfsame tendency is collapsed with noodling at the back end of the song, but it somehow doesn’t feel like noodling whatsoever! What a fucking awesome concept! I’ll just put this here again to point the way forward for all music – indie, pop, hip hop, polka, whatever:

"I wanna make songs that, like, a wider, younger audience can get behind. You know? A kid who just now is getting over My Chemical Romance or something. Or like, just now thinking, like, 'I wanna hear something a little more experimental.'" (Bradford Cox)

But not too experimental!

number one champion sound [pop jamz 08]

2009-01-04T23:41:00.003+11:00

Estelle feat. Kanye West - American Boy

Well the first thing you need to know about this song is that it’s an absolute breeze. Apart from that metallic grill synth push you hear in the chorus – perfectly embedded nonetheless, and gradually less grating – everything else in this song just flows along real nice and smooth. Of course there’s some interesting minimalist sections that keep the song interesting, like from when “He said...” rolls off Estelle’s tongue. But the guitars are almost loungey, there’s a bunch of ‘ooo’s in the background and that drum, dude it’s just a simple rock beat! And girl’s voice, real nice. Got a tiny few British pebbles in it to make its purr unique enough.

But the funniest thing is when I first heard this song – and I still think this most of the time – I thought it was actually a Kanye West song! Because no matter how nice she is, Estelle just doesn’t have the presence to fill out a song as great as this, and her main event somehow seems to take backseat to the ‘feat.’ dude and the flawless production. I guess that’s because the ‘feat.’ dude is, yeah, Kanye, and he just saunters into this whole thing all cocksure and smooth as, dripping money and self-props, even as he (as always) finds it necessary to explain himself to his detractors. But not even Ye’s sometimes suffocating self-awareness could possibly overtake this track. The whole thing just slots in behind itself, taking its own ride on a transborder flirt in such a slick and catchy way that it really does summon pop’s duality of transience and memorialisation.

on some real shit [pop jamz 08]

2009-01-04T23:37:00.001+11:00

T.I. – Dead and Gone / Whatever You Like

I feel like I am just way underqualified to talk about r’n’b/hip hop, let alone pop rap, but damn T.I. just makes such great tunes! It’s not just in the excellent choice of Timberlake for emoting the chorus and the totally-obvious-yet-still-sweet digi-clap/HEY! moment and all the sophisto production and shit, but also it’s his really great flow. It’s just so palatable, the way it’s so structured but still flows across lines but then with tiny little punches. Like the dis/enjambment in this little bridge...

No more stress

Now I’m straight

Now I get it,

Now I take

Time to think

Before I make

Mistakes

Just for my family’s sake

... Is just great. It inputs some kind of error/flow tension into his songs that’s well appealing. And the way this flow works on Whatever You Like is funny – it’s like this metronomic, tennis-court rhyming sways back and forth between seemingly discrete lines until sex becomes money becomes possessions all wet and slippery until they all dissolve into this pop fantasy of nothing in particular or, y’know, whatever you like.

as the flames rose to around her nose [pop jamz 08]

2009-01-04T22:13:00.003+11:00

Coldplay - 'Viva La Vida'

Imagine the tacky and yet still somehow alluring emotiveness of Coldplay multiplied to an orchestral level. That is basically 'Viva La Vida'. They are a band that never really quite knew what they were doing, that could never properly seize on their ability to conjure swelling emotion and turn into something greater than its immediate affective borders – I’m not really sure if this song changes that, but at the very least it stretches the immediacy of their appeal to such a limit that it (almost?) breaks through into something greater, something like pure pop. Rock instruments morphing past their electricity into woodwind! Ostentation becoming a universal good will! Bloated stadium rock meets artful orchestration! And it can only help that Chris Martin is uttering some utter bullshit about Joan of Arc over this sweet yet martial music, because it means you concentrate on the sound, on the highs.

from the sea [pop jamz 08]

2008-12-25T03:20:00.001+11:00

Kings of Leon - Closer

Sex on Fire, in my opinion, actually isn't that great -not only is the chorus lyric frankly embarrassing, but the song itself seems strained and laboured, a problem the Kings have ran into a few times before. If you're looking for this band's true contribution to the year's pop scorchers, look no further than track one of Only By the Night.

Kings of Leon have always had an ability to create substance from style, but on Closer that operating principle is taken to its most majestic limit. Almost minimalistic in its composition, defined as it is by the sombre, soft, modulated guitar line and deliberate drumming, both progressing at a languid yet certain pace that, when coupled with the gaping secondary guitar, opens up into an absolutely tidal movement.

This is pure atmosphere becoming pop and returning to the ether, but not before swallowing us whole.

And it has nothing to do with poor old Caleb's tacky imagery of spooky houses and stormy oceans, though it has everything to do with his yearning delivery.

chips [pop jamz 08]

2008-12-25T03:13:00.001+11:00

Crystal Castles - Air War

Ah, these trebling, gutted digi-shards - couldn't possibly be mistaken for pop music could they? Well, I guess there's two ways you could say they are.

One just because these, no let's take an example and say this song - Air War - is of the now; contemporaneity one of pop's hallmarks. But not in just some narrow stylistic or trend sense (although that probz applies, choppy electronic music quite popular at the mo'), moreso in how this music pathologises our current techno-cultural condition. It is as if Air War is made up of the sonic bits and bytes of our day; the sound of our text message alerts, touchpad options, voice mail hang ups, laptop battery warnings, the noise an ATM machine makes when it spits your card back out. In one sense I guess this music always then teeters on the brink of being techno-fetishist, in the sense that it aestheticises this condition, it almost earmarks itself for the soundtrack to some IT company's latest cutting-edge commercial (too late).

This is partly why it initially seems an absolute joke that the outfit has a nominal 'singer' in the form of Alice Glass, whose role in the projection of anything resembling the unmediated human voice has long since been forgotten. Instead, Glass stands in as the voice-response, automated text-to-talk fembot that populates our phones and GPS systems, that nondescript femininity (woman always vocalises the machine) but now cut up into a thousand tiny little shreds like nodes in the network.

And yet all this likely off-putting-sounding stuff - vocal and digital snatches cut up and retracked as a song - is nevertheless thoroughly massaged into what is also a pop sound (not just 'concept', like 'being trendy'). Because the interesting thing about this song is really that its bits are far more than just 8. Crystal Castles enlist a fucking terabyte of engineering and data to produce sounds as if they came off a gameboy and kids electronic piano. All the glitch is also given a nice fat, rhythmic bass as bedding. And that's this song most finds its pop mark: over-production in service of simplicity. The only difference this time is that this simplicity is not rendered silk but mutated blip and blop. Because everything still functions in this song, integrates and hooks.

This is not the aesthetics of error, then, as one might initially peg Crystal Castles as making palatable. Instead, what they do allow us to swallow is the fact that no matter how many beeping buttons we push, how many times we get cut off, flipped out, dialled away, processed, connected, reconnected, no matter how much digital shredding our bodies and voices are subjected to/authorise, there is still something working in this techno-totalised culture that is soothing, satisfying, coherent. And Glass is the flesh in the shell.

Or you could just say they're pop becoz their album is not that gr8; stick w/ well-known, catchy singles like this one and Crimewave or Alice Practice.

tricky little gun [pop jamz 08]

2008-12-25T02:36:00.001+11:00

Jack White / Alicia Keys - Another Way to Die

Quantum of Solace is unaccountably awesome - wafer thin plot, brilliant action, a sense (but not sensibility) of emotional complexity, no real baddy. Then there's the Jack White and Alicia Keys theme, Another Way To Die.

So at the start it's all orchestral percussion section, with some far-out motorcycle-motor guitar effect, news-bulletin strings, etc etc.

But it's the subtle little things that really work this song into something great. Not the plinking piano key high notes that Alicia adds at various points throughout, though they are cool.

Nah, it's the really left-of-centre bits like the purposefully electronic-drum-kit-sounding electronic drum kit that lays down the bottom end, then the more-piano-than-piano lower notes that hang like butcher's hooks at around 0.36, then the hi-hat that sounds like the thing has had twenty cracks cut out of the metal. All of this over-produced/under-produced weirdness in the instrumentation is sweet.

But the best thing about the whole thing isn't even there yet - it's not only the fairly interesting gender tension between Jack and Alicia that gives this song a dynamic, but the fact that Jack (I'm inclined to think) has produced this thing in just the most bass-less, tinny way as possible so their voices come out as if they were gloriously untreated and without a bottom end. Like they're on one side of a concrete basement, mic at the other.

This textural quality lets itself loose across the whole song, actually, and every instrument starts to sound hollow, worn-out, ragged. Like a White Stripes song almost! But there's still the fairly controlled orchestral issues floating around the place, and a fairly rad guitar line, even some horns at some point.

Jack throws in a guitar solo quite irreverently over the top of what would normally be the 30 second highlight of this kind of song (a Bond theme song) - Alicia's wordless 'ooo bu do' female vocalist thingy, farting guitar just prickled all over it.

Quite possibly the most inspired moment, however, is the duelling, corkscrew 'o's that grate between Jack and Alicia at the song's climax (in trad narrative sense, ie, somewhere in the middle, then denouement) - it's got a bite and urgency behind it like Bond's never seen. It sucks up the whole song behind it, it's a barren desert no matter how much shit is going on.

And the lyrics, well 'another' gets trotted out like there's no tomorrow, the whole thing just piling up possibilities that can only end in the pseudo-nihilist sentiment of "It's just another way to diiiieee!" - it's more like Jack and Alicia are saying, what's this all for? It's just another way to kill and resurrect the Bond theme in a single blow. Quite suits this visceral Daniel Craig Bond, methinks.

to control me [pop jamz 08]

2008-12-25T02:25:00.006+11:00

Ne-Yo - Closer
[Unavailable thanks to DMCA drones]

In lieu of some bullshit year end wrap, I thought I might cap off the year with a series of posts on what I reckon are the year’s best pop singles, and try and get down to just why each one is so great.

First in line would have to be the smoothest darkest silk this year, Ne-Yo’s Closer. It comes off all intimate, erotic club romp on the first listen, with requisite elements: fast tempo, soft-padding doof beat vs wafered hi-hats, acoustic guitar loop for ‘live-ish’ authenticity quota, programmed handclaps, etc.

There's something quite melancholic about the whole thing, though. Beyond the very thematic thrust of the song, the whole seductive, possessive female bullshit, there's a kind of sadness in dude's voice that sort of gets echoed by the backing midi strings and acoustic guitar breaks, that can't quite be pulled under by the fast tempo, hi-hats and house beat.

The lyrics themselves contain some interesting bits. The first verse ends with this kind of transfer between certain object and unclear subject, a bit of a collegiate poetry manoeuvre but it shifts a kind of awkwardness into all the follows this:

"And I swear I know her face
I just don't know who you are"

The rest of the thing is this kind of sensory imbalance, with this fugitive female figure (I guess that's unavoidable, shit, I know, but unavoidable) kind of reorienting sound and sight as she pleases in order to rope in our protag:

"Turn the lights off in this place
And she shines just like a star
...
Turn the music up in here
I still hear her loud and clear"

It's like the club becomes a dream becomes some kind of washed out, darkened place of ambivalence and then even abandon to an uncontrollable force.

But this force, for me, isn't so much the woman's sexual advances as some kind of other feeling that is haunting Ne-Yo, something I'd like to call grief. Because notice in the chorus he's not referencing the woman at all, she's only there at most a distraction, or only the personification of a far more diffuse sense of resigned sadness that he is left crooning for almost the entire final half of the track.

The truly remarkable thing about this song for me, then, is how in both mood and lyric, it blurs the 'sense' one feels in romance with that in loss - something one can't stop doing (crying? making out?) that you "don't want to escape" or can't possibly?

It's even sadder then that the song itself never really comes to its own conclusion, that momentum that builds behind the whole thing is like a kind of dissipating.

So why not let's rewrite the lyrics, because this is how I heard them the first time, and it's how I'd like to keep them:

"And I just can't pull myself away
Under a spell I can't break
I just get by
I just get by"

Melancholy by (accidental) subterfuge; as is pop’s want.

we'll poke ur eyeballs out!

2008-12-16T02:38:00.003+11:00

There is something about this song, deceptively simple sheen and not much going on you think save for some RJD2 / Caribou vibing?

But then you listen a couple of times and it all works itself out. Dude has latched on to the natural poetic meter of the Japanese language, its own inherent musicality contained within the pitch-accents of its formants, the way it trips along in ups and downs but in quite a harmonic, uniform sense. Like the highs and lows of the piano and beats that make up Makkuro Kurosuke, which builds itself from a Hayao Miyazaki film quote.

Gejius - Makkuro Kurosuke

echo train

2008-11-27T00:12:00.002+11:00

I want to get down to why 'Shaking Hand' is such a fucking perfect track. I guess first you need to know a little about where it sits - at the top end of Women's debut LP Women, which itself is an almost perfect album. Exactly half an hour, 10 songs, a few of them sort of ambient interstitials, the whole thing just seamlessly sequenced and sewn together even though it crosses an array of styles - it is the perfect example of concise synthesis and I wish more and more bands would start making records like this. Stop fucking around with shitloads of songs and length and just get to it.

Elementally, it's all tape recorder grot, fuzzy textures that seem very Chad Vangaalen influenced (dude recorded them), lot of wooden-sounding percussion that loops in interesting ways around the guitars which are kind of shitty-sounding but in a good way. The whole thing is very rickety and knife-edge but in a totally feel good pop way.

So anyway, I think Women's song-making ethos is informed by this kind of very straightforward attempt to shave off the extraneous but to still keep complexity and repetition within songs that might last only one minute. But 'Shaking Hand' goes for like a full 4.44. But it's an album unto itself. So, here goes:

You've just heard the kind of sunny-folky 'Transport Hall' which is one of those songs that goes for literally a minute, and it's all handclaps and tambo and strummed chorus that quietly builds to somewhere, and they've fit the chorus in twice by the time it gets to 1.06:
Soon we will be laughing
Out there on the landing
Now it's too bright
Dancing through ash
You made other plans

The last three lines are sung with an echo with this guy who don't sing normally and has a kind of raspier quality that pits off nice. Then it all winds up with this kind of amazing break for about two seconds after the glockenspiel stops and just at the very right beat, in come the guitars of 'Shaking Hand'.

So these guitars, this song, are a bit of a counterpoint to the whole album really. They come in real urgent, kind of barbed and almost with a kind of hardcore riff that you might get from say And You Will Know Us by the Trail of the Dead. I'm thinking they might be arpeggio too.

They're soon joined by this brilliant stuttered, hollowed beat that kind of trips back on itself, and then in between these guitars and this drum a kind of full blown, 3D fucking circle of music emerges where every little inch of space within the song spectrum is taken up but only by two guitars and a drum beat. And they play off each other in this intricate way but it's not entirely intricate and it’s not really - but almost - prog or anything, because it's all going around like every five seconds and then starting all over again but not missing a beat. And it's cavernous and reverberates but whilst still being all treble and scratched tapes and moss.

Then the guitars cut and just this bom-bom-bom-bom beat comes in as "I saw it hit the ground / While no one was around" which then becomes another gorgeous arpeggio and one of them slurs some awesome sounding chorus that ends with "as you / as you" at each couplet. Then back to first cycle, then something about "bloody watches" and another set of complex drum paradiddles - this whole fucking song is just like an exercise in revolutions that pile up on another. It's this constant repetition that nevertheless builds on previous ones like some kind of crazy spiral that lends 'Shaking Hand' its amazing sense of progression and momentum. This song is all forward motion, and by the time it hits up with tom drum and tambourine-atop-snare double beat the whole thing has just got your head moving uncontrollably up-down-up-down.

It's like structure becomes form returns to structure then somehow finds pop. Artifice, precision, urgency.

The whole thing has an energy behind it that is so tightly wound that it always feels like it's just about to kind of somehow find itself stepping a little bit past real-time, like quicker than light, and with that tipping into politics. Like a serpent's head pop through the scrub.

Anyway, just buy the album. There's much more to find yourself dissected by.

Women – ‘Shaking Hand’

meaningful folky song ad

2008-11-06T18:43:00.008+11:00

Are you the marketing exec for a technology/car/entertainment brand? At a loss as to what sound to put behind your latest concept ad? Do you enjoy ads w/ people 'doing normal things' but also being kind of 'original' and 'authentic' at the same time? Are you are fan of slow-motion, drifty editing techniques? Do you like to 'empower' your customers? Do you prefer not even to call yr customers that, rather "partners in happiness maximisation"?

You've come to the right place: introducing, the latest genre of music/commercials - the meaningful, quiet/effusive folky song ad! It almost requisite has to be sung by a girl, or at the very least someone with a quiet, unassuming, airy voice. There's got to be hand claps, plinky percussion (glockenspiel more or less requisite), piano is good (very earnest, not too earnest like a violin tho), etc. etc.

Furthermore, the entire hook/melody to the song must be instantly graspable within 30 seconds (pref. 15sec) and the lyrics cannot mean anything. But they have to be seeming meaningful, like you know, like they really meant this song to be on this ad, and we're not really selling you anything, hey - in fact, why don't you even have this song for free?

Because, it seems, companies are getting nicer! No more harsh, shiny edges with electric guitar peels or thundering drums, or some kind of pseudo-futuristic synthy music (see most all shampoo adverts) - no, today's modern entertainment/car company cares about its customers. This care is expressed in their provision of dainty little songs for dainty little ads! It's all so happy and carefree. Kind of romantic actually.

Share the love ppl! Just don't think about the fact that your social life is so atomised you now need a mobile phn to contact separate friends/family for xmas!

It was all started by those trailblazers of uber-cool and urban and progressive lifestyles/products - Apple. Remember this ad? Although it would take a little while longer before things got more meaningful, seemed less product-focused:

(Extra dope bonus track/ad: the new NanoChromaticiPodCommercialElevatorMuzakQuirkyFemaleVocalHookAd)

Who provides this kind of music? Well, thankfully, there's a whole stable of obscure local and not-local indie bands that make folky quiet or folky happy songs for your backing track. All you need is someone with the 'inside knowledge' to hunt out these little 'gems'! Already taken: Whitley and Sia:

WARNING: MEANINGFULNESS OVERLOAD!!!!!! 2 meaningful can b 2 much!

Their categories of meaning are not directly meaningful, but they really sound or feel meaningful - the test is this: if you had this on your iPod and were looking out of a car window, would everything just seem really evocative/interesting/meaningful? But not too meaningful? Because only meaningful if you have the meaningful or useful product to go w/ your meaningful song.

Also, doesn't this song/ad/product just make you feel like it's time to have a good time with yr friends? But only through listening to and using this meaningful brand! In a fun way, too - there's a good chance the beach will be involved:

Wow, it's like a short film! So much meaning in such a little space!

In fact, it's all so meaningful that its a bit magic - isn't it? But only really in a whimsical way, nothing too heavy. Just remember what great fun this is - bouncing along in slo-mo and being carefree:

Talk about a techno-bubble LOL!!! Never mind, we've got our phone caps and lisa mitchell to make us feel meaningful and 'connected'

How long will it take before major financial institutions realise the awesome power of the alternative meaningful folky ad song? As soon as they roll these out it will end th 'credit crunch' in an overwhelming sea of goodwill and custom and community:

Bendigo Bank report that their profits and 'customer satisfication' rose 399% directly as a result of airing this commercial!!!

Like all great styles, there are many subgenres to the meaningful folky ad song - the 'old, unknown-til-now blues singer' brand is quite popular:

SAMPLE YOUTUBE COMMENT: "OMFG !!! u have no idea how long ive been trying to find this song and to find out wat add it was cos ive been lookn for ages and i eventually saw the add"
PS - This short/scruffy-hair guy is v. popular w/ Vodafone execs; someone in marketing is ttly crushin'

It's not like we even really made this music, says the companies, because our products are so meaningful to yr personal life that they just fit so well with already meaningful music, right? Well, that's the problem I guess - whaa happens when this genre becomes so codified that companies learn they don't have to find this shit anymore but they can just make it!

(Wait til the last 15sec!)
"For the Honda "Jazz Comes to Town" advertisement, original music was composed by Jamie Masters and Stephen Patmanby at Adelphoi Music, London, with producer Greg Moore. Vocalist was Jo Coombes. Sound was mixed by Paul Baxter at Risk Sound with producer Kath Momsen."

Becoz we all know that no one listens to radio or reads magazines or any other boring old media crap like that anymore - but neither does anyone even bother with last.fm or myspace or whatever antiquated 'social networking tool' you used to find music on. No, now advertisements tell us what to buy and what to listen to at the same time! What a relief! It was getting sooooo annoying trying to find new folkly girly singer songs! But, then, the problem is that these fucking companies don't list the song on the ad itself! Never mind, we are resourceful enough to GOOGLE IT for the lyrics - or ask on the YouTube page or whatever.

Like some resourceful laddy or lass did for the Honda Jazz ad!

"Harls said...
Is there anywhere I can download this song. Its a very good song. Reminds me of Kate Nash, if you've heard of her.
Its a great ad though.
I'd buy the car."

Anonymous - bless him - provided the perfect reply to complete the circle of the evolution of the meaningful folky song ad:
"Anonymous said...
i think its from feist .. the reminder."

From Feist to 'Jamie Masters and Stephen Patmanby at Adelphoi Music' - these meaningful songs have come a long way!

I can't wait for the next installment tho, I have no idea what to listen to atm!

Finally, seems things are getting a bit more sporty/rocky in the meaningful folky song/ad - are we witnessing the transition into the future with this Yves Mitsubishi Blue jam?

2008-11-06T01:34:00.003+11:00

Deerhunter - Microcastle (/Weird Era Cont.)

Take out the 'c', replace it with an 'a' and rearrange the letters and you actually get 'mariocastle'. Which is itself quite profound, but what I really just want to get down is this little tidbit:

There's nothing particularly amazing about Microcastle, and yet that is precisely why it is so brilliant.

I can't be bothered explaining that, but Deerhunter have never been particularly inventive, to say the least. Their genius lies elsewhere, and I think on this album they've hit onto it perfect-like.

PSSSSSSSSS : Bradford sez:
"I wanna make songs that, like, a wider, younger audience can get behind. You know? A kid who just now is getting over My Chemical Romance or something. Or like, just now thinking, like, 'I wanna hear something a little more experimental.'"

I HEAR DAT

ribs out

2008-10-30T18:30:00.001+11:00

We’re interested in noise as a sonic tool, not as an entity.
- Benjamin John Power, Fuck Buttons

What the fuck does this mean? What is the site of noise?

I guess pretty quickly you'd tell me that it's the body. Duh. But, then the problem is, why is it that so much noise is art-noise, the kind that sits very much in the cognitive, post-/anti-affective dimension? Like a kind of classical for technology? Fuck that.

Because Fuck Buttons make music that is for your bones. But not just to rattle them. Power and Andrew Chung got together initially, so they say, to make pain-inducing noise music. You know the kind, creepy shit that scratches at the back of your neck, repeats on itself in a really violent way. Then they wised up. And they realised that noise and pop/pleasure (well, something like it) were not ≠ - you can bring in structure and process and intention and melody and shit like that, but in a way that fucks with both ends o the spectrum.

Because - we're getting there - the end result is something like a sonic continuum between drone and pop, primal and culture, mind and body. It pleases a deep-seeded animalistic instinct in us (but not in those drums and monkey noises, no no, they're for this next desire) and yet it also appeals to our irreducible socialised sense of 'what music should sound like' - in doing so it deconstructs, no, fuck it, destructs, the barriers between noise and music and opens up once conservative ears to some truly outré shit.

Back to the question, though, what is the site? Mind and body? Well it's kind of actually not either really. Do you know that everything makes noise, that, as our fave John Cage found out, there is no such thing as silence? Well, then, that might give you a clue - FUCK BUTTONS IS EVERYWHERE. It's the horizon. It is the endlessness of sound, alien expanses of beats, drones, pitches, loops, bells.

But it's not all just some slap-dash throw it all together kind of 'world of sounds' bullshit. As if that would ever work. You can never actually include everything on an album, can you? But what you can do is kind of criss-cross bodies with their environments by passing through the ear, so that things kind of stretch in front and behind this music - I'm not really sure if I'm talking time or space, here, maybe both - so its special affect is like before and after you're listening to it.

That's where it is - it is both beating at your chest, and taking those bones well beyond whatever corporeal throne they were meant to stay inside, and it's doing it through your head - because you're processing the modulations, the harsh/nice sounds.

Ribs out.

bros

2008-10-09T22:39:00.004+11:00

Apart from some well creepy collages of children, animals and flowers, the inside liner notes to Panda Bear's Person Pitch feature a big, bold, unpunctuated list of musical acts, which I guess are like his favourites or influences. Well, at least that's what everyone on the netz has said about them if they mention this thing, that it's a name-dropping, 'check list' of inspirations for Person Pitch.

But, for me, far from acting like a helpful roadmap into understanding the territory he covers (well, makes, would probably be a better word, Person Pitch certainly beats it own path - even though I still do believe that it's largely the submerged, slightly theistic treatment of the vocal and samples that reviewers have mistaken for some kind of transcendent quality), this list is basically arbitrary and contradictory. For one, trying to join the dots between bands like The Police, Moodyman, Black Dice, King Tubby, Air, Jay-Z, Kylie Minogue, Spaceman 3, Duran Duran, Kraftwerk, The Kinks, Black Sabbath, Theorem, etc. etc. is a completely fucking futile exercise, and the multiplicity of sounds and styles this list references is not so much an indication of Panda Bear's 'eclectic' tastes (fuck I hate that word) but the unnerving, incommensurable, overriding difference that all sound is founded upon. And then as if trying to join everything back to Person Pitch was some way to make the connection - as a certain animated lizard might say, bull shit, no way.

In fact, it's almost like an affront or challenge - just you try and pinpoint the exact moment, sample, structure, whatever, on the record where X influenced me, Panda Bear seems to be saying. Because we're not dealing w/ Night Ripper here. Sure, you might be able to go, "oh his harmonic sunniness is clearly Brian Wilson", or "the repetitive nature of his samples is very 'Insert Hip Hop Act'". But have you actually said anything meaningful whatsoever? Have you even begun to understand how this record works, let alone sounds? Nein!

For me, this endless (ellipses cap it off) list ultimately affirms the uselessness of listing other bands as a critical practice - it's just not a matter of correspondence. Actually, it's only ever a connection made by the listener, wholly biased to their own history and potentially a very real impediment to actually considering the music in question. Sure, everything is a tissue of quotations, blah blah, but every combination is something unique and novel within itself. So deal with that! It just makes me want to try to vow to never listing another band name or genre as reference in a review, even if I can't quite help myself. But, then, at times, this almost tips over into a wish to just stop trying to describe sound at all, as if that were ever possible anyway. It's always connotation, metaphor, tangent - but then, isn't everything?

if FF had of said that the dead on the tower were once little fat babies then maybe

2008-09-30T18:40:00.009+10:00

- says:

hey, listen to this and just tell me it's not heartbreakingly beautiful:

REALIZE!
- says:
DO IT
- says:
you're doing it right? of course, your crippled by musical simplicity and flutter!
+ says:
yeah i just started it
+ says:
are you sure you linked me to the right song?
- says:
The one with little electronic keys, violin and some guy singing through an intercom? Final
Fantasy?
+ says:
yeah thats the one
- says:
FUCKING AMAZING
+ says:
its ok, a little too detached for me
- says:
so not detached, LISTEN MAH BOI
- says:
lol this is gr8
+ says:
am listening
- says:
listen to that viola stabs, how that little beat just ons and ons and how DESPITE his
intercomerising, it's still the most direct emotional shit you've ever copped!
- says:
it's not about the delivery but how he works around limits of delivery to make it even
more devastating!
+ says:
its same ol' sufjan lod-my-ass-with-strings-and-call-me-shirly crap, it would probs be far
more affective with an aocustic guitar and natural vocal
- says:
nah it would suck it off all its off-beat power - guy-with-a-guitar is tired and old and
sapped of its potential
+ says:
nah you cant ever kill that
its REAL man
REAL
- says:
and its so fucking different to Suffie it's not funny. this is no whiney choir pagent boy
grandiose bullshit but literally a raging queer singing about how the world's tallest tower is
meant for the dead
+ says:
why does he have to be so pessimistic?
- says:
FF OWEN PALLETT CN TOWER BELONGZ TO DEAD 2 REAL 2 HANDLE!!! OG MUTHA
- says:
it's not pessimistic but - fucking look through it, you know, beyond the surface - and it's
really quite sweet and happy.
+ says:
haha, yeah its quite sweet
- says:
"from the top of the tower / radio buzz in our ears / we can see you house from here" it's
like fuck this bullshit tower is killing us all but who cares because the little things (your
house) still exist
+ says:
i guess i just don;t like the package this tune is coming in
- says:
i dunno, don't care really, but i just love it when i get so fucking obsessive over one song.
doesn't happen but often
- says:
BIG THINGS COME IN SMALL PAKAGES!
- says:
lol
+ says:
you what song i love atm
+ says:
that 'little fat baby' sparklehorse song
- says:
how's that one go?
+ says:
he got dragged by a donkey
through the dust and the myrtle
but he was once a little fat baby
+ says:
it gives me this whole jesus imagery
- says:
nice call
+ says:
it's really sad and wistful
- says:
we wre all just little fat babies once i suppose
+ says:
I KNOW!
+ says:
its REAL man
+ says:
REAL
+ says:
LISTEN TO IT AGAIN RIGHT NOW
- says:
AS REAL TRU AS CN TOWER!!!
- says:
they complement one another
+ says:
nah if FF had of said that the dead on the tower were once little fat babies then maybe
- says:
no i just mean because they both so HEART yall
- says:
but god FF so much more steez; that's one of s-horzes most latent
+ says:
?
- says:
um - CN tower i think is better, because it's got style its got grace and pace, whereas
little fat baby is good lyrically, but musically/vocally just pedestrian Sparklehorse - he
could poo that song out in a minute
- says:
he poos clouds lol!!!!!!
+ says:
nah, its got WEIGHT
- says:
nah i think you're mistaking a gradual momentum and some string flecks for weight; it's
airy as mutha. but then i guess that's where the two songs are similar - they kind of play
off the juxtapositions between lyric and music? and beyond that, Sparklehorse is always
really good at singing about fucked up shit like it was a lullaby, nah mean?
+ says:
haha yeah they do do that
+ says:
re: the lullaby thing
- says:
some of his lines are unforgettable - "toothless kiss of skeletons / and summer hail / i'm
the king of nails"
+ says:
yeah that song is cool
[sic]

Thanks go to the anonymous interlocutor; just getting started. Like mentioned above somewhere, the sweetest thing is just how infatuated I've gotten recently. It's funny, I guess, like how the music you listen to often crystallises around similar things, bands, whatevers. But shit, that's enough. Go listen. And fucking debate yall!

neon bible

2008-09-28T13:36:00.002+10:00

Maybe I found a reason for why Neon Bible I just couldn't get with, it was so exhausting, you know, like you needed to lie down after listening to it. So maybe there was something else that Funeral had that this one didn't (funerals?). Oh god, I'm just not sure, and I don't want to throw it all out, but it's hard to disagree:

People who enjoy this album may think I'm cloth-eared and unperceptive, and I accept it's the result of my personal shortcomings, but what I hear in Arcade Fire is an agglomeration of mannerisms, cliches and devices. I find it solidly unattractive, texturally nasty, a bit harmonically and melodically dull, bombastic and melodramatic, and the rhythms are pedestrian. It's monotonous in its textures and in the old-fashioned, nasty, clunky 80s rhythms and eighth-note basslines. It isn't, as people are suggesting, richly rewarding and inventive. The melodies stick too closely to the chord changes. Win Butler's voice uses certain stylistic devices - it goes wobbly and shouty, then whispery - and I guess people like wobbly and shouty going to whispery, they think it signifies real feeling. It's some people's idea of unmediated emotion. I can imagine Jeremy Clarkson liking it; it's for people in cars. It's rather flat and unlovely. The album and the response to it represent a bunch of beliefs about expression and truth that I don't share. The battle against unreconstructed rock music continues.
Green Gartside of Scritti Politti on Neon Bible

Let go of expression and truth? Or reconstruct them?

The Enright House - A Maze and Amazement

2008-09-04T02:05:00.006+10:00

This has been out quite some time - well it has in NZ, at least, not yet here - but I was listening to it again recently and I considered that whole 'is post-rock a suitable tag to throw on instrumental, long-form rock music any more?' question that always rears its head. That's not to simply use this album as a prop in a generic debate, because precisely I'd like to argue that it represents a certain trend (and certainly not the only) emerging out of post-rock that is precisely about poetic expression as traditionally thought of. In this sense, I think the first LP by The Enright House, A Maze and Amazement, joins with All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone, something corroborated in that 'artistic' way Munaf Rayani spoke about his band's work. I'm assuming here that the prototypical post-rock record is all about decentring and that type of thing, which itself might be misguided. So, anyhow, time for some disparate thoughts.

I think much of post-rock nowadays has shed the initial ambition and weight of the world of the earlier stuff, like it had to tear everything apart and rise only from a broken rubble, and has concentrated on using the same musical elements to make just shamelessly emotive and pretty music. It's like post-post-rock. When rock finds itself back in touch with the tender side of it's history - or maybe borrows from the sweetness of pop, but never with the sour aftertaste - nevertheless underpinned by some dense riffage and beaten, stalling drum-work. To put it another way, it's like post-rock that has shed its ambition to thunderously document the apocalypse and turn inward once again, to explore emotional soundscapes. Still uses textured guitar, beaten, stalling drum-work, stretched out compositions, soft-textural vocals, spectral guitar timbres, etc. but it is to what these stylistic features are put in service of that is distinct, here.

Along these lines, A Maze and Amazement takes the atmospheric lessons learned and reverses the equation - the long tails and heady elements no longer thunderous signals of the social crumbling, but crimson internalisations of the personal, of thought and heart. Because it becomes more obvious from the second track onwards that Mark Roberts is a recalcitrant pop musician. A song-writer going straight for the heart strings, even if he discovers a more interesting path there might be through clouds and classicist arrangements.

So I start to think of him as strongly influenced by the Postal Service when I hear the third track, 'Up'. But there's also something more oblique here that stops that comparison from operating directly and opens up that crucial space between the 'personal expression' of the writer/performer and the 'personal import' such has for the listener, thereby preventing this from taking the 'all eyes on me' traditional singer-God [author-God] framing of rock.

The album is lined with strangely narrative-driven lyrics, like they would read as paragraphs in a story if you put them down on paper. Well, actually, tracks five and six feature the poetry of Mary E. Jones.

There is also something very relaxed, or maybe just considered, about this. Structurally and texturally. Lines do not obey their proper direction, electronic peels sweep/stretch across places. Languid, sombre, washed. In that, A Maze and Amazement opens itself up quite gradually, showing deeper complexity than you might first think.

Eventually, this album transcends all its geneses for an intensely idiosyncratic and fragilely beautiful music; an achievement ironically predicated upon its genre.

and i may do it again

2008-09-04T01:56:00.001+10:00

Just adding to a chorus, I guess, but it was a thought I had the instant I heard this song, and I just have to get it off my chest.

"Who? Little old me? He he! Oh no, you saw me!"

So this song clearly runs off the back of a cultural trend that may have reached its nadir moment in the Britney-Madonna incident at the MTV VMAs (hot rumour: might Perry and LiLo smooch at this years?! So naughty!), bringing to mind Philip Brophy's comment on The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert:

[T]he gay embrace of Priscilla is a cultural conundrum qualified by how gay iconography has been assimilated into mainstream currents of Australian imagery, and how gay content has strategically lubed broader media channels for PC reconciliation (2008: 54).

Although I'm certainly not sure whether queer culture has exactly 'embraced' Katy Perry, her song certainly furthers this practice of heteronormativity annexing queer identity. Sure, hear it once and you might think, "Wow, pop music certainly is still at the forefront of progressive sexual identities, this is great". You know, "I kissed a girl / and I liked it", all sung with that kind of snarly, sassy conviction. It's all a bit Pink*, heavily-tooled guitar pop that synths and synchs up those countless vocal dubs. Nice, in a way, like a play on surface (ie. as if a girl kissing a girl is just surface).

Wait another line, though, and comes: "I kissed a girl / just to try it / I hope my boyfriend / won't mind it". This is the kind of faux-lesbianism perfected by teenage girls trying to impress their boyfriends, and exactly that - Perry is probably the biggest 'male chauvinist' of the lot. For not only does she insist that queerness is a sort of sexy play, nothing more than a little experiment and certainly ephemeral, thereby evacuating any consideration of bisexuality and/or lesbianism as lived and committed sexual identities (with definite struggles), but that it's all just a bit of fun for the boys! Watch the video clip, and for the most part, the mise-en-scène is splashed with cute girls doing cute things (but, interestingly and pointedly, definitly not kissing) - but then, at the end, we see Perry wake up in bed next her dude, a wry smile across her face as if, thank God [aside: Perry was originally a Christian singer], it was all just some silly dream!

I can see footy jocks unequivocally pumping this out at their next house party, because, you know, chicks are never real lesbians mate, you can always turn 'em, har har! And Perry sings:

No, I don't even know your name
It doesn't matter,
You're my experimental game
...
Doesn't mean I'm in love tonight

How unbelievably offensive to suggest that queer and love are mutual categories. Like I said, though, the worst thing is that heterosexism gets its cake and eats it too. Perry's song effectively does the work of 'heterosexing' alternative sexualities at the same time as it denies the latter any lasting significance. "Ain't no big deal / It's innocent" - bullshit it is.

* I think this comparison is interesting in itself, for Pink is arguably another that appropriates queer signifiers into an undeniably straightforward (but empowered!) heterosexuality. But that's just it - the difference is that Pink plays only with signifiers, therefore effectively interrogating the 'taken for granted' images of queer identity (ie. the assumption that all lesbians are 'butch') which in certain instances are themselves points of discrimination. That Pink pushes these same images across to heterosexuality says that they are not inherently gendered. And, again, it's at the level of signifiers - Perry's song is so much worse because it registers certain attitudes and fucking narratively legitimates them.

now do you think the second movement has too many violin?

2008-08-15T00:04:00.002+10:00

...Such disagreements grew from deeper ones over whether the art [music] was to be valued for its emotional power, its sensuousness, its manipulation of abstract forms, or its enactment of "improving" ethical values. (Harold Love, How Music Created A Public)

Dipping my toes into some pretty heavy stuff at the moment, thinking about the place of music in the space of the public sphere, and further to that the role music criticism might play. Reading Love's historical account of the very emergence of a musical public (ie. a public that exists solely because of their love for music, to play or listen, which has not always existed but is actually a fairly recent phenomenon, roughly overlapping with the eighteenth century development of the literary public sphere) and I came across this quote, in which he is talking about the elements of debate that occurred between the musical public back then, and I come to realise that the mode (for want of a better term) of music is something that has been fretted over long before I came along, in fact ever since it emerged as a relatively autonomous sphere. Because to bring it back to the personal, I've been thinking a lot lately about exactly where music fits in for me, and I find myself moving closer and closer to an aesthetic, emotional connection or conception (that in my view links up with traditionally literary criticism centred on thematic insight), no matter how hard I try to politicise, economise, socialise the whole bloody thing. I'm not sure it's a necessarily bad thing, although I would like to devise a way of rejoining the aesthetic and social that is not through the moral or the personal, if that makes sense. I guess it might come through the affective, or possibly through a renewed 'textual' analysis that posits larger things within the text itself, (to paraphrase Barbara Johnson, herself speaking for Derrida, 'when one hears (or plays), we always hear more than (or less than, or other than) one thinks').

Nevertheless, it's comforting, and also somewhat annoying (in that it hasn't been sorted out) to know that these sorts of problems have been going on since wayyy back. And of course different positions are of course themselves submerged 'ideologies' - matters of taste are always far more than just that. Which one to choose?

emotional power

sensuousness

manipulation of abstract forms

enactment of 'improving' ethical values

But of course - it's not so much a question of style (music outwards) but taste (listener musicwards). And yet is this demarcation itself something worthwhile, or is it itself a kind of ideological (discursive?) operation (see Adorno's typology of listeners...)? Nevertheless, do we still tend to privilege a particular mode of listening in the everyday?

like an animal in your care

2008-07-22T22:25:00.002+10:00

I found a bridge. Or built one. I'm not sure. In two ways. The first is pretty restrained, and if I don't put it here the only other place it will languish is stuck between thing newsprint lying in a stack down the beige corridors of a sinking institution:

{...}

It would do to try build a bridge, then, lest the gap widen to the point where Wolf Parade becomes two bands with the same name. You might find it in musical cohesion – unlike the more ragged and disjointed debut, At Mount Zoomer gathers itself into a colourful tapestry of what might be called indie-prog, ornate arrangements, barbed and ringing, but all more lush and defined. Or maybe you pick up the lyric-sheet, noticing that, they’re both tired, preoccupied with radio wires and looking at the same sea. They might have gotten there from different places – Boeckner from within the decaying spires of the modern urban core, Krug, who long since gave up the city, riding horseback from a fantastic forest where he tried searching for some ritual, fantastic place to return to. They reach the edge of the cliff and pick up their tools (the rest of the band pitches in), building a giant, teetering helter skelter on the edge of the waves. It might topple, but we’re on it, and we gotta stay on it. It’s the modern world, baby, and whichever place you might sing and search from, don’t you know that you’re trapped in here. Or maybe not, maybe we can yell “fire in the hole” against this fucked up structure and jump as we sing with Wolf Parade: “Oh follow me / Allow me to play the voyager / Oh take a dive / Take a dive”.

That's pretty restrained I guess. It's not too held in, like it's probably not suitable for the channel it's going to, but whatever. So that's all good, then, but I'd much rather, much rather, build the bridge another way. Oh no, actually, this bridge I found, I didn't have to do anything here, make tenuous connections and mythologise rings around it all.

That bridge is Animal In Your Care. Penultimate track. I love how it's actually lyrically written backwards. It's just the sweetest kind of melancholy, because you never really know whether this will actually happen as he sings at the start:

Time after time
You will forgive me
Like an animal in your care
But give it time
You will outlive me
And take the bow back you put in my hair

Because he sings the end, oh the end, well the whole song sings the end it is like its own undeniable chorus the most amazing first-to-second half song transition I've probably ever experienced (I though My Latest Novel had the monopoly on that, but no) and it's all built around that ivory, no more meandering it all just comes out like glass punches and then he sings:

You let me hang, hang, hang around
You put your ribbons in my hair
It's in this language that I found
I am an animal in your care

An animal in your care
An animal in your care
An animal in your care

So fuck it, Wolf Parade or Spencer Krug or whoever they're all just tags for the music, this is not about the modern world and all that, well maybe it is if 'you' were some kind of structure, but god that's just sad. So I take back my review and I put this song in it's place. This love song. Twisted one, that's for sure.

It's not like this is all mine. Like I'm hoarding Wolf Parade's magic. (I was on their Myspace and I saw someone had just left a comment with a few lines from I'll Believe in Anything - why not say something, I might of thought. But I knew why, it's like those times you just can't say anything - 'hey guys, I love your music' just doesn't cut it. You've just gotta try and reflect that feeling you get from it. And you can't, but the closest you can try is just stamping those lines there like they speak for themselves.) Though I do get that solipsistic feeling sometimes that I'm the only one that knows them - or maybe it's that feeling like me and the music are the only things left in the world. For this song at least. But someone else must be introduced. Another Beast.

made me bolt like a horse

2008-07-17T01:54:00.002+10:00

Just to continue the obsession, I stumbled on a cover of Peach, Plum, Pear by Final Fantasy a little while ago, and I've been listening to it pretty regularly. Trying to work out what it's doing, yer, where it's going. Of course, it's all string-filled whimsy and plucking as is his steez, but there's something about the 'levels', umm no, the emphasis he places on the various parts of this song that just brings out a whole other side to it. For one, his vocals never get beyond this sort of mildly disinterested kind of talk-sing from the middle of the room into a tape recorder like it's all just something to be calmly and uniformally recounted, which in turn paradoxically gives the lyric even further desperation. And then like the whole plucking - it's a lot sharper, umm no, cleaner than Newsom's - less urgent, but still quick. Like is this a Disney film or something? Hahaha of course not, it's fruity indie chamber music, complete with strings that come in just where they should but of course are very surprising because you didn't expect them with the almost languid feeling of the song up until now. And that cobbling hooves sound? A tad obvious, but brilliant - just the right kind of discordance this whole thing needs to throw it all off the track it never really walked along anyway. Things stay vocally quiet all through the end, and why not. So what does it all mean Basil? Well, that's just it, it only can ever mean for me something secondary, and I'm not even sure what that is. It's like recently I'm losing some kind of analytic and thematic grip on music and to be really honest I love this. And this.

Final Fantasy - Peach, Plum, Pear

two men scale a hill

2008-06-27T01:04:00.002+10:00

Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer

There's really no mountain here, not even a hill. I think if you had to spatially imagine this band it would be more horizontal, more like an ocean I think. Nevermind.

To begin: At Mount Zoomer is cleaved. Whereas, for me at least, it was difficult to tell if it were Boeckner or Krug singing on Apologies to the Queen Mary, each and every song on this album clocks on with full vocalist (and lyricist) details from the outset. And there's this annoying habit of having them one after the other, in this kind of two-man baton pass but I'm not really sure what the baton is or where they're going. Anyway, I think it's clearly an (unintended?) effect of their growing solo careers in Handsome Furs and Sunset Rubdown particularly, who have both released in the interim. They're staking out a territory and putting up flags - sure, fighting over the same general chunk of land, but it's like a Starcraft map with a river separating the two of them. Whereas something like Beast Moans (paging Krug) approached music creation as an antagonistic process of coming together, At Mount Zoomer seems to propose that gaps are inevitable, well, that they at least grow from somewhere and then it's like tectonic plates at the surface, when the road cracks and splits and gapes. I hope I find a bridge.

blog club seven!

2008-06-19T16:02:00.012+10:00

Thanks to emmy for the opportunity.

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to."

Spring, eh? Anyway, time to get thoroughly autobiographical and live out the contradictions to two posts prior. Indulge me.

Die! Die! Die! - Sideways Here We Come
2008 begins and ends with Promises, Promises (literally, and musically); I'm quite sure that nothing will surpass it for me that I don't think I'll go through that arbitrary and thankless year end list exercise. So I've picked this one from the album because it is the most obvious and continually burrows itself through my consciousness/conscience but truth told I could have picked anything from this album, even Whitehorses. And I do admit that it is very hard to dissect this song, because for real it has become biomechanic - it would be like trying to pick apart your insides - do you know that feeling? But fuck it, let's try. It starts principally with the drums, fuck those drums like pounding pounding pounding, I'm losing articulate abilities here, and it's not the first time. But oh well, to continue... Or why bother, when "Some things are best left blind; darling I'll try make you mine" Oh yeah you're probably snarking to yourself, thinking that's real cute and quite trite almost for how obvious it looks as you scan across those lines. Fucking listen. Fuck you. Okay, sorry. Carried away, once again. I don't think I can really do this right now, so I'll just leave it with an observation from the horse's mouth:

"Sideways Here We Come was actually [written] a day before [recording the album]. Yeah, it was the last song we wrote on the album. What I found really funny was that was the song that was gonna be left off the album because we weren't gonna finish it, and that one - the structure’s actually not kinda finished."

Seams, yeah - all the time, it just seems set to come apart and show its guts, and yet it is sutured just by pure force and emotion. This is the dialectic of Die! Die! Die! Nothing can beat this down, except itself.

No Kids - For Halloween
Where's this coming from? It's like harmony groups just found the keys to amazing beats and lyrics and collegiate ennui and they all just partied. It's like, get up to the downbeat, that superflat bass drum that just trips its away all through the paths and summer houses and ends up somewhere where slow, middle, and fast just unite in all their great ways.

Portishead - Silence
There are a lot of things that can and have been said about Third but I'll just leave mine as a little footnote to an already out of control mythos. And mine doesn't go far, well, it can't - Portishead won't let me. For two reasons: this is the first - and best - song on the album, and second, it ends in a way that just cuts you off to everything but it. I'm not sure how to describe this - because it's not like falling off a cliff. You fall off a cliff you know where you're going and usually you're going down and you see the chasm that you fall into and it's all quite a drawn out process actually (it usually takes a good few minutes in movies, at least). Well this is isn't a cliff. It's a ... fuck, what is it? Because it strings you along, literally - rising strings, a beat that just nods your head constantly, pulling over for a brief break before returning to the course and an amazing guitar lick creeps in and then some heavier strings and you're like, wow [4.30], this [4.41] is [4.48] ... 4.59! What?! Where did it go? I'm not sure, maybe it's like being thrown into a void, and it seems like the time they choose at which to throw you was completely arbitrary and yet fully calculated (like, why bother doing it at 4.59? - that is both way too obvious and yet perfect). And it's maybe more like limbo, because there's nowhere left for me to go when I reach this point. What comes after 59? Naught.

Chromatics - Running Up That Hill (cf. Kate Bush)
It's a funny thing, this - how does it all work when a cover is the first thing you hear? In the great 'pop covers' rulebook that is sitting dusty on some shelf up the back of some official building that not many people visit anymore, there's a section about covers having to 'add something' to the original. Well, how does this go when you've never heard the original? When Running Up That Hill you first heard (to complicate things even further) on the Placebo Covers album, fitting the general pattern of what that band was only ever good for - making human relations truly alien - and that was what you took as your template (maybe it fits)? Not the banging, crashing mess of a thing by Bush that you only first heard on vinyl a week or so ago, which, actually, you didn't really like? Well, maybe it's like preposterous history. It's like you only know or care about the original because not only has the cover 'added' to it, it has literally made it. The cover is the original. And the original is great, too, beamed in on a post-urban record player, floating lyrics and metallic puttering basslines bringing it all to its most cinematic fullness.

Thom Yorke - Black Swan
I know this may seem like I'm stealing, but honestly I'm not, just following the precepts laid down by the almighty meme. And meme directs me to enjoyment (a fuzzy category that only pertains in tangential ways to most of what is on this 'list') - and I must say I quite enjoy this song. And only for one reason - A Scanner Darkly. This song and that movie are like this amazing conjuncture in which two perceived wrongs truly made a right. Because, initially, I was avert to both these works - both were just, well, too schematic? Too obvious. "It should be obvious, but it's not". And then they came together - Darkly pulled a moral and a purpose out of the preceding near-two hours of mess, and Black Swan snapped into focus as the credits rolled and they became perfect partners. I can't quite describe what happened at this exact moment, but suffice to say, I love both. "People get crushed like biscuitcrumbs".

The The - This Is The Day
This is the day
Your life will surely change!
This is the day
Your life will surely change!

Joanna Newsom - Peach, Plum, Pear
I'm really not sure where to start here. Well, I stumbled upon this song one day whilst forcing myself to listen to The Milk-Eyed Mender once again, an album I find I have a very conflicted relationship to, so much that I've never really gotten past Sadie, the fourth track. Well, things have their way and it happened that I made it all the way up until this song, the ninth. And what a time to happen upon this, what a perfect time. It grabbed me and shook me seconds inwards, as the harpischord lights up after the preceding bundle of harp strings, placating and quiet for eight long songs. Drastic, urgent - that doesn't even begin to approach what I'm hearing. Always twice, too, for some reason, even on the very first listen, I am compelled to press rewind, to avoid the saccharine Swansea (well, musically at least - but that's always the first thing we perceive, isn't it?) and hear whatever I do again, often with as much force. Yes I hold to a notion of music coming from without and directing me, I'm not sure if this is idealistic but this is Peach, Plum, Pear, don't you hear it? It bleeds with pathos, things just all seem like they're breaking as they roll on insistent, and then they turn:

This was unlike the story
It was written to be
I was riding its back
When it used to ride me

And yet who is controlling who here? Where does the power in this song lie? Now no now no now no now no now no now; is that what (s)he is saying? "Galloping manic" to a point ahead that seems distant and yet forever imminent, it hits! Dozens of Joannas come out in full-blown force, clipping the edges of the recording and breaking beyond the barriers of what once barely contained it:

And IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII am blue!! [wait...]
I am blue!!! and unwell

Scream it! Or whisper it screaming if you're on the train replacement coach that takes an hour and a half longer. Things break down here, it's like the literary facade propping up this whole ornate (and yet very simple) structure beforehand just gets blown away by this wind. The only moment where a fucking hurting, knowing, feeling human comes out of the pixie forest and makes themselves be known. And it is hard, and harsh, and it cracks and scratches but it is catharsis. And for once that term is fully apt (look it up properly and just watch the connections fire). Because things slow down again, regain their calm ("Now it's done..."), and yet their is an indelible mark, no matter the metaphors that one tries to cover it with:

Peach, plum, pear
Peach, plum, ...

Time to go: garage, incurable, cmg (lol), cassettes, .al, rose, mechanics - hehe hope you haven't been memed yet, apologies, my circle is small.

talkin at me

2008-06-16T23:25:00.005+10:00

You know this ad, right? Fucking annoying thing it is, too, I know - along with those godawful Optus ads featuring animals carrying out surveillance in cranky Telstra customer's homes, the telcos have the 'most nerve-wrenching commercials' categories tied up. Anyway, I think the wonderful thing about this ad (viewable here, if you are tricky enough to click 'Small & Medium Business' or 'Enterprise & Government') is how it dramatises the condition of these 'classic' Gold FM ditties. Because no one actually does remember the original lyrics (or artist) of the song it so shamelessly tears apart and rewrites according to its control society telematic narrative - this ad thematises the way in which this sort of music is so completely divorced from any original context and just floats around disanchored in our culture as a little harmony or rhyme or snatched lyric, ready and waiting to be snatched up by some misguided Telstra ad-man. Its lyric-sheet might as well read:

everybody's talking at me
i hear every word they're saying
with my phone and laptop combined

people conference call me
i can see there faces
send them files every time

etc. etc.

(btw, it was Harry Nilsson who sang it 'originally')
(btw, how did we ever conduct business without this array of highly useless-looking technologies? The answer, of course, is that we did. Telstra always seem so desperate to concoct practices that never really need practicing)

they have a secret world

2008-06-16T22:56:00.002+10:00

I think the brilliant thing about M83's Saturdays = Youth is how it imagines teenagehood specifically as some amazingly poetic and romantic and idyllic time when in fact it never was. We live our relationship to our young selves through nothing other than the dioramae of nostalgic popular culture such as this, which sets a scene (full of sultry night air, violent romance and meaning, so much meaning) that never really existed. The album itself never quite gets to this youth it so insistently turns upon, the space it is looking for which is also a time, and that itself is profoundly melancholic and beautiful. I listen to You, Appearing and the rest of it all with bad teenage poetry lyrics and heavy solipsism and I just marvel at the time, the beauty, that becomes mist (and it certainly does after a few listens, losing all of its evocative force when you realise the rickety structure it is built upon - but you still have that initial moment, the youth of this album, which you remember as an idyllic time, and you find yourself looking for it, and on).

corporate rox

2008-06-16T02:17:00.002+10:00

Just having a moment here, sorry...

Fuck I am sick of all these new pop stars that have come up grass roots style off social networks and the like. I don't care whether they do it themselves genuinely or if some marketing machine cooks it up, it's just terrible anyway. This whole ground up, 'DIY' thing where they post pictures of themselves with witty captions and blog about their life, I really don't care to know. I like my pop thoroughly adherent to the discursive division between public and private, in which the latter can only sublimate through songs. Here's to well-manufactured, primmed music celebrities whose minders actually hold back from throwing themselves all over the Internet. Get off my Internets!

(talkin' bout this, and this was the archetype)

reading sound

2008-05-31T00:26:00.004+10:00

Whilst of course not a simple march of succession, the shift from vinyl to compact disc and now to MP3 represents a kind of arc to an increasing impenetrability of the musical format, as music’s physical form becomes less and less clear through the recording device:

Whereas vinyl offers the tactile fetish of a needle literally scratching across the grain of the record;

CD obscures the particularity of the grooves for an unreadable surface sheen, that is nevertheless read by laser in a spiralling movement. We cannot see it but we can still hold it. (with burnt cds you get the unique phenomenon where one can ‘gauge’ the amount of data or length of recording via how much of the original surface has been burnt a slightly darker colour)

MP3 quite stubbornly hides the process of its encoding/decoding within the player (be it mobile or computer terminal), there is nothing to penetrate or read or look at beyond the file, which of course can be constituted as a sequence of code, but only at great effort and still completely indecipherable.

What does this mean culturally? For music?

What about the sense in which this impetus to obfuscating stands in inverse relation to the quality (conceived of as 'fidelity') of the recording? Is it true, as Adorno argues, that the better a technology gets at reproduction the less 'real' the music sounds? This is attached to notions of authenticity and aura, which themselves are fraught with the danger of privileging the original artifact, something that cannot possibly be done in terms of sound recording (this is a positive thing, in my view).

Just some thoughts...

ii

2008-05-30T23:05:00.000+10:00

Why I hate iPods #143

Amongst my biggest problems with these devices, or any other portable digital music players, is they way in which they structure a social tautology - the individual no longer moves to the rhythm of the urban soundscape but to their own daily schedule, continually modulating external events' affective states by bringing them in line with what's inside. Eg. I'm on the train, I don't like the sound of these people talking about whatever, I'll put on my iPod and listen to x because it will put me in the right mood for what I need to do when I get off the train, and then when I'm walking to there I'll put on y because it's good walking music, and so on and so on. Rather than attunement to whatever sonic textures surround one, the digital player allows you to continually collapse bodily and mental movement so that the only thing your listening practices mirror is yourself. Not even does the iPod force you to at least sit with a particular piece of music (say, a cassette or a disc), but at 'touch' you can switch things around endlessly, shuffle them up until all that's left in meaningful, affective, material terms is whatever you want it to be. Sure, this isn't some kind of liberated freedom rather a form of micromanagement of the self, post-Foucauldian control in action. Just what about the music though, at least? Does it even matter anymore? Is a politics of genre (or artist, or period, or any other identity of actual songs) even possible under these conditions?

2008-05-11T20:11:00.002+10:00

"Frances Densmore, collector, with Mountain Chief of the Blackfoot tribe, 1906. On behalf of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, Densmore made many field trips using Edison's recently invented wax cylinder recorder, as pictured here. [T]his photo, taken in Washington, D.C., reflects the special aims and conditions not of the "oral poetry act" but rather of what might be called the "photography act." For the benefit of the photographer and posterity, Mountain Chief has donned his ceremonial native dress (his own?). At his side are emblems of the vanishing Native American culture that Densmore was doing her best to document. The collector adopts a non-assuming pose, eyes lowered on the machine. Mountain Chief gestures as if declaiming, although any sound that he is uttering at this moment would not be registered, for he is seated before the listening horn of the machine, not the recording horn."

I can't even begin...

No Age - Nouns

2008-05-03T01:10:00.002+10:00

This will hopefully find it's way into Beat but of course you never know ... and reading over the review it struck me that it seemed more at home in the knotty intellectual domain that is (con)temporary, so here you go!

No Age - Nouns
(Sub Pop / Stomp)

A reactionary evaluation of the debut proper from No Age might go like this: so they're signed to Sub Pop (after releasing a string of totally indie vinyls that were collected into Weirdo Ripper), therefore they had lots of cash to make Nouns, so how come it sounds like shit, like they just chucked the tape recorder in the middle of the room and pressed play? I want to hear the KILLER tracks underneath all this crap! Well sure, No Age do pile things on, it's rough, distorted and their tracks are buried under a certain mulch, but this itself is a subtle reconfiguration of the traditional lo-fi aesthetic that one might initially angrily attribute to Nouns. Because the very thing is, Nouns undoes the ideology of lo-fi the says it can only emerge from tape recorders and the dole, just at the same time as they trash the notion that studio production itself must aim for a kind of perfect sound. It's clear from a little closer listening that No Age truly didn't just set up the mic in the middle of the room and then bash around it, but that its lo-fi grain is actually as much an addition of production - they use overdubbing, looping, resonant atmospherics and so on that take what might actually have been a fairly crisp punk track initially and cast it in some kind of mystical, elemental aura. This itself also delays the orgasmic excess that your traditional punk listener might want from his tracks, as if music were reducible to ejaculatory actions - Nouns says 'fuck that', asserting that we MUST bury things under mulch, make the ears work a little harder and recognise the duality of things - that punk itself can be ambient, and that ambient can be punk. It doesn't let you hear it kicking, even though it clearly is busting out of its seams of that grainy, tactile cloth that lays over it. This sound is punk as an environmental force, not one that works to charge you in force and politics but that works through bodies and envelopes of noise until it reaches something like a scuzzy nirvana. As such, Nouns ceaselessly seems to extend beyond itself, reaching past its initial hearing to emanate beyond and take primal flight - it makes sense that this band have played at the foot of canyons and gorges in their American homeland.

Their mixture of studio production and what you might call field recording (live music or otherwise) also flies in the face of what might be a positive evaluation of lo-fi as some kind of pure sphere of 'press record and play' musical creativity that lends recordings a life-giving and totally authentic force (case in point: Springsteen's Nebraska, “OMG he actually sat at his kitchen table to record this and that’s exactly what we’re hearing!”). No Age more subtly understand lo-fi itself as a form of engineering or trickery, not the beginning and end of production but one means among others to arrive at a particular recorded sound. This particular recording also smashes the two-piece mentality, which amazingly is what No Age are - against that whole ‘what you play live should be what we hear on album’ bullshit, the endless layering and marks of far more than just four hands that pervade this sound force you to hold this album as its own material entity. We're not evaluating what they should sound like here (which the reactionary review might ask for), this isn't sheet music and it isn't a gig. It's Nouns, and it’s the sign of something great happening in music when it can steer a smooth course through knotty, ambient complexity and fuzzy, unbridled fun.

Die! Die! Die! - interview

2008-04-19T00:41:00.004+10:00

("everybody move so fast none of this will ever last")

I spoke with Andrew Wilson, front man for NZ trio Die! Die! Die!, for their Australian tour, which is now underway - they hit Revolver on Thursday the 24th, it's well worth checking them out. They are insane live. We chatted about their new album Promises, Promises and what it means for the band. Andrew was warm and really nice to speak to, I'm not sure if that translates into hard text, but he was quite open and grateful to chat. I'm not sure if I interjected far too much, as well, stopping his flow and thoughts. Most of our conversation is below.

The last time you were out here, you played a gig at the Prince of Wales...
I had terrible food poisoning then, I went to hospital after that show. I was really, really, really fucked up – I don't want to go into too many details but I totally thought I was dying. It was probably a really laid back performance.

(Andrew screamed his way through the set, put his head in the hollow drum kit at one point whilst Michael Prain was hammering away at it. Meanwhile Lachlan Anderson, the bassist, is jumping up on the stacks and free falling.)

Well, by that stage, you were playing almost exclusively from Promises, Promises, despite the fact audiences here were yet to hear it.
We've started to play old stuff again now, it's just that we'd only gotten off touring the old stuff overseas and it was just kind of refreshing to play the new music.

It was strange for the crowd, but I thought still quite cool – an entire set list fresh to my ears was a great experience
We actually thought we got a really bad response from Australia, lot's a people were like 'ah you're not playing all the old songs', but see in New Zealand we kind of had the reverse reaction from playing all the new stuff.

(Andrew is at pains to justify playing this new material, but really the crowd should have just necked up.)

So how do you find Australian audiences in general? I find them very standoffish.
Yeah, sometimes, we've had really mixed reactions. They're either really, really, really super enthusiastic or they're super the opposite, and that Prince of Wales gig, well, I wasn't really sure. But I guess in Melbourne it's because you get exposed to so many amazing bands, so a band has to really impress you to get a reaction out of them, and really everyone is way too cool.

You tour shitloads, do you find you pick up many influences along the way?
Yeah, not really by choice we've spent a long time in America, which, um, I mean it was quite inspiring ... I haven't really seen that many bands which inspired me but just the hectic lifestyle and everything has just definitely inspired us, and we're really into dancehall and reggae this year because we ended up hanging out with all these, Rastafarian dudes who decided to really like our band and come on tour with us. So we've had some interesting stories, we're really influenced by the places we're at. When we were in LA we were hanging out with all these people really into Morrissey and the Smiths and stuff, and they're all like Mexican ... I wouldn't say gang types, but tough types. Everywhere has kinda got its own individual flavour and we definitely get influenced by where we're at.

The Locust Weeks EP looks like it has a photo taken in the US, on the front?
Yeah that was the street which we lived on in New York.

And was Locust Weeks the title any reference to your time there?
Nah: we practised on a street called Locust St, and then we recorded it there. I don't know about that recording - we did it in three hours.

Strange, I love that record, especially the last track - it feels like it's been made in three hours, but that lent it something.
Yeah, I mean, it was really - that song 155 has been around for a while. The other three we kind of wrote in NY, but 155 we wrote in Auckland before we moved.

Locust Weeks sort of seems like a bit of a continuation of the debut album, and it almost seems like it was kind of like it was the last chance you got to really kick out a lot of, not anger - but really expel something. And Promises, Promises seems a bit more calculated, do you agree?
Um, oh, I think a lot of that was that the first EP was done in a day, the Steve Albini LP was done in three days, Locust Weeks was done in three hours, and then Promises, Promises was done in 12 days. If you think about it, 12 days mixing and mastering in there too, is actually pretty insane. 12 days is not really that long. Although, I know what you mean calculated, but also the fact that we're working with the producer on Promises, Promises really affected, you know - working with Shayne [Carter, renowed NZ producer] really influenced Promises, Promises.

How?
Kind of arrangements and moods.

Because it definitely has a different recording grain/texture than say the Albini one which seems a bit more polished, whereas this one seems rougher around the edges but the songs themselves seem a little bit more hemmed in.
Well, that's kind of it actually. The sound is actually a lot more budget because we didn't have as much money as the other three recordings but the songs are a lot better, I reckon.

They seem like they have a longer gestation.
Well, actually, probably the opposite - we wrote most of Promises, Promises a week before we recorded it. Sideways Here We Come was actually a day before. Yeah, it was the last song we wrote on the album. What I found really funny was that was the song that was gonna be left off the album because we weren't gonna finish it, and that one - the structure’s actually not kinda finished.

It’s my fave track on there, especially the ‘ooo’ [makes terrible imitation of modulating, wordless falsetto refrain] in the background.
That was the most unfinished song definitely on the record.

So how do you explain that then, so you're saying it’s a bit rougher in the sound and then the songs sound more measured/focused, even though you still only wrote them a week before? Is it the song writing process?
I think that we really did make it an idea not to write stuff we'd already done, make sure that it was kinda fresh. I dunno we've just kind of got in a real pattern of song writing with the other records and we really wanted to mix that up, definitely.

From the self-titled EP to the self-titled album, it did almost seem like a loop.
Yeah, exactly.

This one it seems like you guys have entered into a new phase, this is a maturing of the band.
I definitely reckon. I mean like when we did that first EP we were 19, you know what I mean. And now we're 23, well Lachlan is 21. And there's a new bass player as well. Well I mean we've definitely grown up a lot, and a lot of the shit which used to impress doesn't impress me at all and a lot of the shit which used to make my skin crawl like now I really love, you know what I mean. And I think that's natural to anyone who is involved in music, your tastes kind of change.

Well what are some examples of shit you used to hate and you’re now into?
I dunno, like Led Zeppelin, I used to despise them. When I was really young and you know, punk music - I was like fuck that dinosaur rock shit and now I love Led Zeppelin. Not saying that Zeppelin has got an effect on our band, but. And even like T Rex, that classic rock. And we've got quite a good scene of friends and music in NZ and they've all changed what they're into as well, and I dunno we're all kind of just creatures of the environment.

This is a difficult question to ask, maybe even retarded.
I love difficult questions.

I'll ask you first from your point of view - do you write the songs/lyrics mostly?
Yeah I wrote the lyrics but the songs we all kind of write.

Well, what is it that sort of – if you say that you’re not as angry as much that you used to be – well, what is it that is still driving you, because there's still a sense of pissed-offed-ness that comes through.
Well I'm definitely still kinda pissed off. I dunno, just life and love and stuff. It's just kind of, well I've noticed Promises, Promises is more direct in the lyrics, and you know, on the first record I dunno I kinda wrote about the stuff I didn't really put my head around. Just kind of let me put my head inside it. I dunno, it's really hard to talk about.

Yeah, your other records seem a bit more obtuse, you kind of put what you were talking about to the side, whereas this one it's just kind of head on.
Well that's pretty much exactly it. Before it was like ‘Oh shit, do I actually wanna sing about that, oh maybe I’ll add something else funny into it so I'm not actually directly talking about it,’ whereas on this record, I just went like ‘Fuck it, I’ll just be as honest as possible for the whole record.’ It's quite a hard record for me to listen to, but in hindsight I feel a lot better about it than the other record, where I was not really trying as much.

So have you found it hard to go back, to play it?
Oh yeah, it's been out in the New Zealand since October so we've been playing it a lot, it is quite a ... it does take a lot to play it. Yeah. But you know, we're all so involved in it now that it’s all pretty good.

Is it almost that it's beyond yourself now?
That’s what I've noticed about it, it's definitely its own beast.

Whether or not it’s hard for you personally, too bad you've just gotta keep going on the juggernaut?
Yeah exactly. And now we've kind of, yeah. I mean it's kind of like, in New Zealand when the first record came out, it was really hated on - actually all our recordings before Promises, Promises. And when this one’s come out it’s actually be quite well received in New Zealand for the first time ever. And the first other recordings did really well overseas but not in New Zealand, and then this record has done quite well in New Zealand, and it's been out in America for three weeks, and its already outsold the first record which we thought did really well. So it's just become its own beast, we've really get into the mindset of it, and we've written a lot more new music recently, in New Zealand, but then we can't really do Promises, Promises justice unless we just kind of go overseas and just play it over there.

That's a good background actually - because I read some overseas reviews on you guys and you're stuff was coming up on quite a few US sites and the reaction was good.
It's doing really well in America, I think we're playing on one of those American talk shows. They've chosen one of our more abrasive tracks off Promises, Promises as well - ATTITUD. It's pretty funny actually.

What a gauge of how big you've gotten over there.
Yeah it's doing surprisingly well. and when it came out in New Zealand and we found that people were starting to like it in our home country which was a really big step, and everyone in Australia hated it. But now people in Australia have started to hear it they're catching on to it, and people in America are really starting to catch on to it. Hopefully it will be good - it could just flop, and we could be back in Dunedin on the dole, writing more songs.

So where to for you guys now?
Yeah we're recording a new EP probably in the next month actually. But um, it's for this American label - I dunno if it's gonna come out in New Zealand or Australia yet. and then I think we're touring in America in their winter. And then at the end of the year we wanna, we just wanna settle down in Dunedin and probably write our next record.

You're pretty quick really.
Yeah, we are actually. I mean there's a hell of a lot more prolific bands, but you know - it's just because we were kind of stuck in a rut touring that first album so much, for so long. With that first record, we kinda got trapped just playing that first album for so long.

And you know, so many of those songs on the album are on the EP as well.
We really weren't very prolific for a really long time, which was probably the time we should have been most prolific. Oh well, I reckon it's good, because we're not going to be like ‘first album fucking yeah’ and then, you know - we're quite glad we're not that band. And if we kind of reached our peak on our first record that would have just been a total disaster.

That wasn't quite the height you wanted to hit.
Totally not, just because we weren't prepared you know - we kind of wanted to get out of NZ so quickly and we didn't actually think about the music as much as we should have.

And so now do you feel like, not like you have more time because you're still on a strict schedule, but do you feel like you have a bit more space?
It's not really like we've got time, because we're playing more than we ever have, but I definitely feel like we've got a lot more space from it all actually.

tell 'em

2008-04-15T11:20:00.002+10:00

Biggest selling digital single of all time. Re-establishing the mass via interactive media, almost just through sheer numbers.

The film clip actually represents the 'viral' process of the song. Moves through dance crazes, video phones, youtube clips. Entirely inframediate - its audience knows what they are a part of. God, his album is even called SouljaBoyTellEm.com.

The song itself is an exercise in musical economy. Evcavates any discussions of 'meaning' (let alone regression or cultural decline), the issue here is affect and experience (of the dance, of the midi strings, the repeatedly modulated 'X that ho'). 'Ho' loses all designation as a sexist category and comes to mean about just as much as a lolcat.

There is of course the possibility that Soulja Boy has established something like a direct line of communication with his audience. He actually did popularise the track more or less from the back of his computer class, without any major label supervision. And so to an extent the track's content is 'uncensored'. He is the telos of web 2.0 in the category of music performer. And so through comes 'immature', titillating lines like 'supersoak that ho' - and yet this itself should be seen as something of a victory. Away from the incessant gangster gangster violence and mystique to a playground chant immaturity. Which itself is a performance, of course. A performance that energises hip hop's popularity.

Tell 'em.

musical portalopolies

2008-04-08T01:30:00.005+10:00

Pitchfork.tv launched today. Is it the seed of a portalopoly mentality in the music press, or the music business at large? It's interesting, because music is often slotted in amongst a variety of other lifestyle garnishings on terrible 'on demand', content-streamining web portals, but to an extend Pitchfork have inverted the framework. Their network seems to say: "music is central to our audience, and therefore will provide across the spectrum of music promotion". With the launch of this narrowcast, they now provide music news, reviews, interviews, op-ed pieces, streaming and downloadable tracks, it's own music festival, advertisement opportunities, and now of course a visual component that will in some way recombine all of the already listed.

It would be fruitful to study how the site disavows its obvious 'big media' structure with standard indie discourses. But one thing is for sure: Pitchfork demonstrates how indie music (press and bands) are now a major organ of the music industry as a whole, in fact they may now be at the forefront of its developments (Radiohead model, anyone?).

It will be interesting to see whether Pitchfork.tv platform will be successful, as it certainly requires a good deal of attention from a web audience habituated to distraction and fragmented reading practices. Having said that, the site of course works on the principals of visual internet media that are sure to dice programming into bite-sized pieces. Nevertheless, the principal of 'less content, more structure' seems to reign here - how will YouTube audiences take to this?

Another interesting aspect is what looks like the fairly high-quality resolution of the videos - will this preclude interest in some way?

And the fact that it offers almost completely original content puts it in good stead too, as so often other portals simply work as just that - portals to other contents - or as pattern repeaters.

I hate to say it, but I'm thinking MTV 2.0 - with all the allusions that term brings up.

Update: Stereogum come late to the party!

crippling/creative industries

2008-04-04T20:01:00.003+11:00

Fucking hegemonic bastards. The PPCA (Phonographic Performance Company of Australia) - who you just know are in the pockets of record companies (well actually that's their whole purpose, to represent them and these little plebs called musicians, but the latter are really peripheral) have just had their decision to hike licensing fees for venues to play recorded music upheld in the Federal Court. It's risen from 7c per person up to $1.05 a person, with dance party rates going from 20c to $3.07. Of course this absolutely kills the various pubs and clubs playing Australian music, who are now considering their options:

Approach the nice record companies individually and ask them to be nice (yeah, right).
Drop Australian recorded music and go for live music; or
Drop Australian recorded music and exclusively play US jams, which don't attract the same fees (a far more likely scenario considering it's ease and economy versus the live option)

Of course this presents a situation in which potentially we could see a beautiful explosion in the number of live Australian acts being paid to play music around the country. But then seeing as the majority of venues (and that's anywhere that plays recorded music) aren't indie clubs but rather local pubs, clubs, and hotels that are generally hostile to any live music other than terrible cover bands, the likelihood is that it creates a self-defeating situation in which both: a) no more or less Australian bands get paid for playing live, and b) certainly Australian bands (marginal or otherwise) get paid far less in recorded music royalty fees seeing as venues will drop playing Australian stuff because of the price hike.

Of course, this is just another example of a record industry in the death throes doing the best to milk the fuck out of the one thing the still have left: property. In the face of this whole 'digital music' thing, we're now seeing all these really cynical and desperate attempts to pull money out of the stuff they already have. Another case in point would be these bullshit new '360' degree deals US record companies are trying to push on their artists, which really operate on the reverse principal - "hey, we've got fuck all money coming from selling records, which is our stated purpose, so why not let's try scamming the fuck out of artists on our roster by asking for money from them for touring and merchandising and all that too? Even though we do little to help them in that department!".

I don't think these strategies are viable in the long term, nor are they very productive for (local) music as a whole.

when the glitter has gone

2008-03-05T02:16:00.003+11:00

Neither this post or what it discusses could get much more obvious – Goldfrapp’s intention to clearly signpost their musical development via the quasi-visual accompaniment of the cd sleeve and its contents.

A sketch of things:

The cover fonts: the angular scrawl of Black Cherry (this is cookie-cut electro!) or supra futuristic Supernature typeface, versus the embellished seven-ties serifs of Seventh Tree.

The cover portrait of Alison: strange how the very orientation of her figure shifts its axis through her discography, from the deflected mirror of Felt Mountain (inner? At the very least opaque), the blunt come-on of Black Cherry (not to add the pin-up found inside, both wilfully describing the music’s stance), moving back to the side for Supernature (and yet still suggesting a kind of attainable secret, a covering up that is itself an invitation) and then finally to the coy submission of Seventh Tree, with the figure back towards us craning her head, as if the camera had caught her offguard, vulnerable and lost (not the pirate’s hat and cravat – incongruous fantasy or juxtaposed innocent play?). I suppose one could of course suggest Alison’s poses are never more than just that – roles to be taken up and discarded at will, yet it’s still interesting the shift registered here.

The animal meets (wo)man motif: common to Black Cherry, Supernature and Seventh Tree, and yet manifest in different ways. Whereas Black Cherry irreverently cuts up sexualised fragments of Alison with that of wolves heads/bodies (suggesting a feminine animality that more or less theorises (and parodies) itself), Supernature is slightly more sophisticated, drawing a peacock’s tail out of Alison’s bottom-half (still suggesting performance, pose). Seventh Tree taps back into a second-wave feminist ‘union with nature’ type thing that the other two albums’ artwork both suggested and deftly disavowed. The 'pin-up' in this latest release is one of the clown Alison being embraced from behind by a sort of giant flower owl, taught how to fly perhaps, or at least return to the flesh of the world after her gritty, urban flight from it for two previous albums. "Come back to the folky (myth-ridden) pastoral", it beckens with open arms, and the music is only too willing to do so.

Will Gregory’s costume party: Black Cherry had musician/arranger Gregory hilariously donning sharp black shades, black/white striped top and black suit, a kind of electro captain or something. Intentions are again hilariously clear and different on Seventh Tree, with a bust photo of the man, presented in the grain of a slightly over-exposed film print, sporting semi-rimmed eye glasses and the folk rocker requisite moustache and dorky suit.

Their trip into the fields of the Seventh Tree can easily be seen as a playful retreat, and as such I suppose you’re forewarned against accepting its finality.