watching you run

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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?