The Satire of Death

Living abroad, the small-talk niche usually occupied by the weather or local sports team is filled by two questions:

• "So what brought you to [Name of Country]?"
• "When do you think you'll be moving home?"

Though initially an exciting chance for some minor self-exposition, these eventually become as rote & dull an anecdote as talking about, well, the weather or local sports team. People develop routine replies that can be rattled off in a single sentence and earn a few laughs while they're at it. My stock wisecrack involved a global prognosis so doomy that I would never move back to the States, if only because when the shit really hit the fan, I didn't want to be in a country where everyone was armed to the teeth.

Which is all well & good as a gag in casual conversation, but is chillingly underscored & stripped of any satirical overtones by the disturbing events of the past couple of weeks - doubly so because this is The Inevitable we've been waiting for. Now those with blood on their hands and a well-publicised bloodlust are somehow claiming not only that they've been painted red by their nemeses, but that their hands are clean. This is the sociocultural equivalent of "fixing" the financial crisis by pouring what little money remains back into the corrupt corporations who fucked us over in the first place.

They say that amateurs discuss tactics while professionals debate logistics, but the answer isn't simply a matter of gun control. There is, for example, an arguable link between gun ownership in the US (50%) and Canada (29%) and their murder rates (8.40 and 5.45 per 100,000 respectively). But this correlation isn't consistent: Finland has more guns per capita than any other European nation, yet their murder rate is a blessedly miniscule 1.98 per 100,000. Russia, meanwhile, has a only handful of firearms but a murder rate exceeded only by (in ascending order) Venezuela, Jamaica, South Africa, and Colombia.

So from whence spills this violence in the American character? Is it inherent, founded as it was by a genocidal venture capitalists and religious fanatics? Is America, in the words of National Lampoon's Vacation, "all fucked in the head"?

Fears Of Gun

1. Fumio Hayasaka - "Stray Dog"
2. Jimpson & Group - "The Murderer's Home"
3. Scientist - "Blood On His Lips"
4. The Clash - "Guns of Brixton"
5. Lungfish - "Oppress Yourself"
6. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "The Curse of Millhaven"
7. Michael Yonkers - "Kill the Enemy"
8. Butthole Surfers - "Graveyard"
9. El-P - "Deep Space 9mm"
10. Brainbombs - "Stupid & Weak"
11. The Birthday Party - "Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow)" (Live)
12. Swans - "Beautiful Child"
13. Grails - "More Extinction"

Update: I'm not the only one to have noted that it's just been a spiky, unpleasant kinda week...

The Son of: When Mates Release Records

To jack a theme from Sir Reynolds...



For those of you who've been derelict in clicking around the links to the right, may I draw your attention to the boutique label with the best roster in Blighty, SVC Records. The label bloomed from the fine music blog Spoilt Victorian Child when maitre d' Simon decided to evangelise more actively on behalf of (whom he saw as) criminally underappreciated artists - including fuzzbox enthusiasts Ringo Deathstarr and The Vandelles, bedroom pop alchemists The Harvey Girls, and, uh, myself. For this, I owe Simon a huge debt of gratitude. (But happily, not a huge literal debt - recoupment achieved, baby!)

But Simon doesn't just release records - he makes 'em too.



The Chasms is Simon's collaboration with Richard Quirk and the prolific Mike Seed. Their debut EP (recorded au naturel in a barn) will scrub your eardrums like steel wool dipped in Oxycontin. Packed with pythonic drones and primitive percussion, the seven songs sound like a young Jack Rose, in full hippie-war-machine-mode, and the sultan of sub Jah Wobble jamming on some Jesus And Mary Chain. Radiant and immersive, radioactive and absorbing, Advance Paranoia, Advance is best soaked in under the scorching summer skies. And since the whole shebang can be enjoyed for free at their website, I suggest you go cop that right now before the season gets any older.

Fair Use It Or Lose It

Hey, keep that chin up, Fairey. After all, it doesn't just happen to the worst of us. To wit... Click on the mix title to download.

Actionable Flattery

1. Foo Fighters - "In Your Honor" (00:00)
2. Scratch Acid - "Owner's Lament" (01:40)
3. Ween - "Japanese Cowboy" (Live in Toronto; 06:05)
4. Vangelis - "Chariots of Fire" (10:21)
5. Primal Scream - "Shoot Speed/Kill Light" (13:42)
6. The Fall - "High Tension Line" (18:53)
7. The Dust Brothers - "This Is Your Life" (22:32)
8. Primal Scream - "Kowalski" (25:49)
9. Jonny Greenwood - "Henry Plainview" (31:34)
10. Krzysztof Penderecki - "De Natura Sonoris No. 2" (Excerpt; 35:40)
11. The Fall - "Athlete Cured" (Peel Session; 38:45)
12. Spinal Tap - "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" (43:30)
13. Nirvana - "Come As You Are" (46:05)
14. Killing Joke - "Eighties" (49:36)
15. Jean-Pierre Massiera & Bernard Torelli - "Whistler Program" (53:20)
16. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown - "Child Of My Kingdom" (55:48)
17. David Bowie - "Rebel Rebel" (01:02:47)
18. The Mothers of Invention - "Trouble Every Day" (01:07:14)

Of course, Fairey's pop propaganda is less analogous to a misappropriated melody than to, say, DJ Shadow's radical recontextualisation of the churning organ from "Orion" in his own "Number Song". I'm being unfair to Fairey in comparing his icon(oclast)ic stylisation of an AP photo to intellectual theft as lock-stock & bludgeon-subtle as the Dust Brothers jacking "Kowalski".

Now, is it unfair to say the Dust Brothers deliberately traced "This Is Your Life" over Primal Scream's blueprint? Absolutely not. I doubt the Dust Brothers missed anything upon which Andrew Weatherall put his imprimatur. Both songs open and close with an AM-quality voice-over pulled from a film, and sport near-identical bubbling sixteenth-note sub, stacatto funk beats, cut-&-paste production that skips across vocal samples... but Primal Scream got there over two years earlier.

Yet not on their own: the song's martial crackle comes from a sample of Can's "Halleluwah". It's startling how many iterations an idea can withstand before anyone feels compelled to create something anew. But Primal Scream have always walked the tenuous line between sarcastic PoMo scrapbooking, classic rockist role-playing, and a more finespun resurrection of musical spectres in the spirit of hip-hop's oral history. Unfortunately, they more often fall into the first two categories.

As for the other songs, all the artists filching riffs & hooks were equally aware of what they were embezzling, given their particular idioms. As the drummer for Nirvana, Dave Grohl once split a single with the Jesus Lizard, who rose howling from the ashes of Scratch Acid - a band Kurt Cobain counted among his favourite acts of all time, not too far ahead of Killing Joke.

Meanwhile, a considerable amount of musical overlap is guaranteed within the diatonic vocabulary of the Western musical tradition - but within the inexhaustible sprawl of microtonal composition? What are the odds that, in his score to There Will Be Blood, Jonny Greenwood would merely happen to compose a legato string swell that crests upon a queasy F# - precisely the same motif that opens Penderecki's "De Natura Sonoris No. 2"? Or that Greenwood's chattering derrick fire theme bears more than a passing resemblance to Penderecki's "Utrenja (Ewangelia)", as does There Will Be Blood's title theme to certain phrases from "Polymorphia" by Penderecki?

About the same as the odds that all three Penderecki pieces appear in the soundtrack to The Shining.

And before expressing shock that Spinal Tap would be anywhere on Mark E. Smith's radar, remember that The Fall's gone through over three times as many drummers as Tap. Truth is stranger etc.

The Beatles were for sale - I give it away!

It's one kind of shock to find you've become a fixture on Russian file-sharing sites; it's another to find other people making money off a freebie CD-R you used to give away at live shows in Baltimore.

So, in the interest of undercutting these plunderous leeches, I've cast dignity & profits to the wind and posted I Used to Write Jingles For a Living in full, free to download, over at Last.FM - go get 'em, tiger.

Und für die Wahrheit verraten, yes I did actually used to write jingles for a living. For proof, a few melodic husks peeled off my soul are still kicking around the Discovery Channel, if my royalty statements are to be trusted. Then I was unceremoniously & acrimoniously shunted out of the company the last day before the company's winter break - thus depriving me of the Christmas party, a week's paid holiday, and any chance of getting a job until well after the post-holiday economic lull. Not that I was terribly upset: I regarded my superiors with as much contempt as they regarded me; I was the low man on the totem pole, which meant I was as much a janitor as an engineer; and there was nothing creative about being A Creative, since the instructions often boiled down to, "Just make it sound like that Coldplay song."

So the second Friday of December, 2003, I got fired. Following a celebratory screening of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, I headed home, dusted off my 4-track, and spent the weekend cranking out the uneven scrap heap of sonic whimsy that became IUTWJFAL. I later gave it away as a bonus disc to anyone who purchased my band's then-new album at shows up & down the East Coast.

So how exactly did it end up online in the former Eastern Bloc? Fuck knows.

Sing a Seasonal Song

What does one do in the afternoon once the internet's been disconnected but packing the suitcases can be put off for another couple of hours?

Bash out a (sort of/not really) seasonal cover song to hurl into the online ether at the behest of the yuletide spirit!

Merry Christmas (and a belated Happy Hanukkah) y'all.

Year of the Yawn, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Guitar

In a year where musos, blogdom, and the chattering classes were preoccupied with the likes of Fleet Foxes, Vivian Girls, Bon Iver, and the Last Shadow Puppets, I'm far from the first person to note how colossally dull 2008 was. I also guarantee that many of those now complaining about the annus stolidus are the same who catapulted the Prozac-'n'-pot mediocrity of Panda Bear's Person Pitch to the top of about several dozen End of Year lists in 2007. Gee, who'da thought lauding a reverb-soaked, well-produced snooze would only encourage more of the same?

But, since it's hypocritical to ramble at length on how the past twelve months were so unremarkable - cut to the chase, and click on the mix titles to download. Commentary below.

Five Songs from '08 Albums I Actually Dug

1. "The Guitar"
(by Young Widows, from Old Wounds)
2. "Night of the Lotus Eaters"
(by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, from Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!)
3. "Sag Harbour Bridge"
(by Women, from Women)
4. "Rise to Glory"
(by Earth, from Bees Made Honey In the Lion's Skull)
5. "Death Goes to the Winner"
(by Harvey Milk, from Life... the Best Game In Town)

Ten Songs from '08 Albums That Were Decent But Disappointing

1. "Life Is a Movie"
(by GZA, from Pro Tools)
2. "Golden Age"
(by TV On the Radio, from Dear Science,)
3. "Beginner's Falafel"
(by Flying Lotus, from Los Angeles)
4. "Ummer"
(by Zach Hill, from Astrological Straits)
5. "Vox Celeste"
(by Deerhunter, from Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.)
6. "Last Day of Magic"
(by the Kills, from Midnight Boom)
7. "Late Repeat"
(by Charlottefield, from What Are Friends For)
8. "Africa Just Wants to Have Fun"
(by Volcano!, from Paperwork)
9. "En Papier"
(by These New Puritans, from Beat Pyramid)
10. "Immediate Mate"
(by Grails, from Doomsdayer's Holiday)

Fifteen Songs from Albums That I First Heard This Year And Now Thoroughly Enjoy For Various Reasons

1. "Just As the Day Was Dawning"
(by Big Business, from Here Come the Waterworks)
2. "Sedan"
(by Todd, from Purity Pledge)
3. "Now I've Got a Sword"
(by the Muggabears, from Night Choreography)
4. "Spywatchers"
(by Icy Demons, from Miami Ice)
5. "Danse de L'enfant et du Roi des Mouches"
(by Jean-Claude Vannier, from L'enfant Assassin Des Mouches)
6. "Stoned Out of My Mind"
(by Speed, Glue, & Shinki, from Speed, Glue, & Shinki)
7. "I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape"
(by Teenage Filmstars, from A Day In the Life of Gilbert and George)
8. "Keep Warm, Keep Well"
(by the Advisory Circle, from Other Channels)
9. "Obedience"
(by Jade Warrior, from Last Autumn's Dream)
10. "Knockout"
(by Jean-Pierre Massiera & Bernard Torello, from Turn the Radio On)
11. "Hell Hound"
(by Sir Lord Baltimore, from Kingdom Come)
12. "Soft Sugar"
(by Noxagt, from Noxagt)
13. "Some Kind of Sad"
(by Ringo Deathstarr, from the Ringo Deathstarr EP)
14. "Crooked Head"
(by Fucked Up, from The Chemistry of Common Life)
15. "City of Dreams"
(by David Lynch & John Neff, from Blue Bob)

In terms of what tickles my sonic libido, I'm tipping my hand enough as it is with that first mix. Preferring not to be patronising, I'll leave you to connect the dots between Nick Cave, Earth, and Harvey Milk for yourself.

More worthy of discussion is what exactly is lacking in that second mix. Most of these releases were accomplished if unconvincing mimicry of sounds that perenially occupy my stereo. "Golden Age" is Prince as produced by Soul Coughing, far surpassing everything else on TVOTR's third album. Zach Hill's solo debut sounded like the Mars Volta covering Brainiac without the crisp production of either. Charlottefield is an impressive post-hardcore lyre bird, doing what was done over a decade ago by Bluetip and Cap'n Jazz as they came down from their adolescent charge. Volcano! join Deerhoof and Ponytail on the growing list of bands whose Jehu/QANU-esque contrapuntal guitar batshittery is ruined by cloying vocals - in this case, David Longstreth-style self-indulgence. These New Puritans are the Fall minus the ramshackle grit and lunatic wit.

So on and so forth - notice the pattern emerging. Granted, Christgau is correct when he says, "Kneejerk vanguardism is an important reason so much online record reviewing sucks." Pedantic envelope-pushing leads to those dead-ends, devoid of critical thought or coherent philosophy, where fashionistas cavort in unitards woven of bacon & emu feathers just 'cuz it ain't been done before. But then what's the alternative? Apparently, it's a lazy, defeatist self-appeasement that affords Pitchfork the hypocrisy of lamenting "a(nother) year when many young bands thrifted decades-old material with déjà-vu results" whilst placing Fleet Foxes atop their year-end album roundup.

The greatest problem posed by the nanosecond hype-cycle of online crit isn't bloody-minded trailblazing as an end unto itself. It's the cliquish fractalisation of subcultures so that the context for enjoyment of a given band or music is so narrow that it's damn near inaccessible. What am I talking about? Okay, Deerhunter are a band that I kinda like. I think their production is half-assed, their melodies predictable, and I can almost see Bradford's bullshit hippy swimmy arm movements when I listen to his self-conscious delivery. But the obvious points of reference are all bands that I really dig, so I can't categorically dislike Deerhunter. Ergo I often ask myself what I'm missing about the band that sends so many listeners over the moon. Well, according to Matthew Perpetua...

It helps to have the context of other Deerhunter records, and probably also Atlas Sound and seeing them live, to get the bigger picture of who Bradford Cox is and what he’s doing, and why it’s special and good, especially in the current context of indie rock circa ‘08.

In other words, only completists need apply to the fanclub. What the fuck good does that do anyone not immediately enthralled with their music? A band needn't be popular to be "special and good," but for them to be important, something needs to resonate beyond a certain navel-gazing blogipelago. But evidently, that's a door I'd need four keys to unlock, and I ain't got the time for that.

I ended my own recap of '07 with the following quote, which at the time was sort of lumped in without proper context. But if *ahem* "underground" music culture continues along its current course, this may become an annual epitaph upon the preceding 12 months:

I asked my friend James Marshall if he thought the current dismal state of music was likely to improve. “No,” he said. “It’s got to get worse, because everybody’s into their own thing and doesn’t wanna know. Pretty soon every band will have no more than three fans, and nobody will have even any friends. Then after that you’ll start resenting the other guy because he likes the same thing you like: it’s your turf! How dare he encroach? So then people will start killing each other for appropriating each other’s musical tastes and thus infringing on the neighbor’s hipness space. How can you be smug about being the only person in the world cool enough to appreciate some piece of New Wave shit, or a blues band or arcane jazz artist for that matter, if you find out somebody else likes it? Don’t dare tell ‘em! Don’t even tell your wife or girlfriend! Keep it safe inside your Walkman!”

~Lester Bangs, from "Bad Taste Is Timeless"

Happy holidays, everyone. Take care.

Mass Self-Deception at the C*cks*ck*rs' Ball

At the risk of crossing the number-of-mentions-per-month threshold into scuzzball stalker territory, one reason I enjoy 30 Rock is I find a certain emotional resonance with Liz Lemon (Tina Fey's onscreen alter-ego), and no, it's not just because of the glasses, pointy beak, and addiction to crap snacks. It's her wastrel, dimwit boyfriend, Dennis.

I mean this metaphorically, of course, lest my wife acquaint my face with a frying pan. The preamble proceeds: in the episode "The Break-Up" (duh), Liz' good instincts to cast off this gel-haired goon are thwarted by her peers' insistence that he's eminently likable, a go-getter, or at worst a slight dunce with the noblest of intentions. Naturally, Liz knows the truth about this selfish, stagey, table-turning, tumid, semi-literate simian with a double-digit IQ - yet she can't deny there's something mawkishly irresistible about him. (Speaking of "hate sex"...)

So it is, ladies & gentlemen, with how I regard, am repusled by, yet invariably attentive towards the contemporary pop underground.

"Oh boy," you say. "Thar he blows again..." Well, if you're familiar enough with my tendency towards muckraking cult-crit that it's become eye-rollingly predictable, what are you hanging around for? Fuck off, go back to reading the Gawker subsidiary that matches your wardrobe and feeling intellectually smug, dig?

Anyway... it's very easy to adopt a Shopenhauerian stance regarding both politics and pop culture: things began badly and are only getting worse. Most people convince themselves there came nothing new under the sun past the time they turned 30. This self-conscious narrowing of scope is as conservative as creationism: there was a divine genesis from which all current forms came and have since remain unchanged, or at least unimproved. Certainly, almost everything has its antecedents, but to reduce recent artists to second-hand reiterations (Burial of Massive Attack, Scratch Acid of Johnny Cash, etc.) betrays an incredibly coarse, glaucomal "appreciation" of the arts.

Yet, measured against the fossil record, there's very little to suggest any quantifiable evolution going on. I don't mean there's a creative permafrost (there ain't even a tundral permafrost these days) and nothing is happening. But tweaks, updates, variations, imitations, and minor refinements have taken the place of face-slapping flashes of genius - and this is most obvious when we look at how far from the center the "fringe" currently extends.

Devendra Banhart, for example, is the closest candidate to filling the scuffed leather shoes of Captain Beefheart: king of the madcap primitivists, a mercurial shaman born of some Martian swamp. But compared to the junkyard tornadoes Beefheart used to conjure, Banhart sounds as straight as John Denver. There's a similar dearth of new ideas amongst highbrow bohemians: whereas fashion-conscious dandies of the past (Jacques Dutronc, Paul Weller, etc.) polished their edge to a stainless steel gleam, current fops like Amanda Palmer or Jeremy Jay affect antique poses so preciously they gut their inspirations of the reckless fervor that made them bold in the first place.

The worst consequence of Pop gaining an -ism is rhythmic & diatonic conservatism, lumping listeners with unreconstructed mediocrity like the Arcade Fire, Spoon, and (yeah, I don't like the Beach Boys) Panda Bear. The Brooklyn duo High Places make for a concise case study: while taking advantage of digitech convenience and flexing their musical literacy (from twee no-wavers Ponytail to metal mathlete Mick Barr), their trifecta of musical perfection is Joni Mitchell, Canned Heat, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. That's right, folks, the vanguard is Dad Rock. Fukuyama was right, there was no one to fool us again after the Who; I'm going to put on The Idiot and find a bit of rope.

And what of the ruckus-bringers, the riot-starters like Les Savy Fav, Jay Reatard, or Team Robespierre? They're the musical equivalent of Dane Cook: so much energy is spent gurning and swinging the microphone about, they all but forget to, y'know, practice their craft. Is it asking too much that musicians take the time to sculpt songs and hone their instrumental skills? I get that the vibe is more party than Berklee, and there's similarly little to enjoy attending one of The Mars Volta's finger-sports decathlons. But remember how awesome At The Drive-In were? Or Fishbone? Fu-fuckin'-gazi?

The worst consequence of Rock gaining an -ism is that its symbolic ossification was contingent on physical signifiers (amps, guitars, long faces, bottles of Jack) yet somehow not on its sole ideological constant: anti-authoritarian rebellion. As tiresome and often empty as flipping the bird may be, it's still a more noble gesture than simply gettin' fucked up and trolling for tail. (Of course, even Dionysian dissolution is a kick to the crotch of pedantic moralism.) More enervating than the lack of a hook to hang your trucker hat on is the cottonweight frivolity of bands like the DeathSet and Crystal Antlers. It's all Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs and Saturday morning, which is great if you've succumbed to the Peter Pan syndrome epizootic. But for we who actually enjoy adulthood & thematic complexity, the kindergarten giddiness give us glucose gut-rot.

Given that the world woke up last week to the biggest financial crisis in history, this may sound like sniping over the tune Nero's fiddling. Well, Jane Dark recently asked, "What will be the soundtrack of capital's auto-da-fé?" She suggested M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes," but its "bona-fide hustla" braggardy about taking money at gunpoint sounds to me like the ethos of the former Masters of the Universe whose stock-born clout has swiftly deflated like a flan in the cupboard. Alternately, Owen offered Disco Inferno's "Summer's Last Sound," whereas I personally have been spinning the Fall's "Hexen Definitive - Strife Knot." But those songs are respectively 17 and 25 years old; who among the current crop have captured the zeitgeist in song?

No one. There's no contemporary update of "What's Going On" or "Fight the Power," no Sign O' the Times. Instead, we've got "A Milli," the Louis Vuitton Don, models with guitars in flagrante inferno, and 18 records worth of black-matte dinner music by Trent Reznor. As refreshing as wading into a "warm spot" in a public swimming pool.

And it won't get any better in the forseeable future. Now that the internet is the matrix through which all music is mediated, word-of-mouth and performance residencies have been replaced by blog chatter and webcasts, chewed & spit out by the gears of multinational media conglomerates. Even the most dick-swinging party banter about bands is more vital & provocative than anything aggregated by the Hype Machine. (Seriously, did you see the Pitchfork review of the new Mogwai LP? Someone shat on a thesaurus and left it aflame on Stuart Braithwaite's front porch.) Not that the contemporary "counterculture" has any interest in disentangling themselves from the cultural-industrial complex. Quite the opposite, in fact, given how gleefully they weave themselves amongst the cogs.

As quaint & potentially archaic as the Sell-Out = Bad dogma may appear, it's still applicable within the digital paradigm. Market your music via MySpace or A&M - Vivendi still owns your ass. Build schools in Liberia with your corporate-party paycheck - your good deed was funded by profits stolen from Southeast Asian sweatshop labourers. The MSM doesn't care if your appearance represents some ironic exploitation of capital's mouthpiece - they only care that they sell more advertising space. You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding.

(For a far more eloquent examination of the entertainment industry's corrosive assimilation & capitalist brainwashing, please read Theodor Adorno's genius essay "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception", of which I was reminded last week by Offnotesnotes and really would've done well to remember more about during the discussion about Music Industry 2.0's gluttony for cut-rate adequacy - man, my memory is for shit.)

My one hope is that My Bloody Valentine's live reintroduction will ingnite a few epiphanies. Perhaps some people with put down the laptops and eschew softsynth code-topiary, turning their focus to an intimacy with hardware and air sculpture. Perhaps people will finally tire of that delay-pedal patchwork-pillow ambience, cranking up the volume not as an end unto itself but as tool of sensual engagement. Perhaps TV On the Radio will finally stop fucking around and get their live act together, given that Shields & Co. have no trouble translating three years & a quarter-million quid worth of studio-time in concert.

Or who knows, maybe we'll get a bunch of dull pedal-junkie somanauts (because Slowdive wasn't boring enough the first time around), a growing legion of tone-deaf amplitude-obsessives (because why should A Place To Bury Strangers be the only ones not to learn from Lightning Bolt's mistakes), and retentive tech-heads who sap any jouissance out of live performance painstakingly reproducing their studio creations. Fuckin' hell, make me deaf now.

On that note, here's the misanthropic MP3 mix, as promised last week. Click on the title to download, and get to mean-muggin'.

We Are Not Your Friends

1. The Clovers - "The Rotten Cocksucker's Ball" (00:00)
2. Drive Like Jehu - "Caress" (01:16)
3. Rapeman - "Steak and Black Onions" (04:32)
4. Cody Chesnutt - "War Between the Sexes" (07:17)
5. Mu - "Jealous Kids" (08:53)
6. The Monks - "I Hate You" (14:17)
8. Pissed Jeans - "People Person" (17:47)
9. PJ Harvey - "Is That All There Is?" (22:42)
10. Brian Eno - "Baby's On Fire" (27:41)
11. The Birthday Party - "6 Inch Gold Blade" (32:57)
12. Ministry - "So What" (36:08)
13. Electric Wizard - "We Hate You" (41:23)
14. N.W.A. - "Straight Outta Compton" (46:15)
15. Guns 'N' Roses - "Doubletalkin' Jive" (50:26)
16. The Velvet Underground - "Who Loves the Sun" (52:58)
17. The Billy Nayer Show - "Billy's" (55:46)
18. Frank Zappa - "Broken Hearts Are For Assholes" (58:45)
19. The Brainbombs - "Stupid and Weak" (01:02:27)
20. The Fall - "Hexen Definitive - Strife Knot" (01:07:08)
21. The Jesus & Mary Chain - "I Hate Rock 'n' Roll" (01:13:59)

More Blogging About Buildings and Sound

It's been quite a busy week, hasn't it? The Democratic convention wrapped up, Putin continued coaxing heat from long-cold embers, Japan lost its second prime minister in as many years, New Orleans was struck by a dreadful deja-vu, Thailand's esteem as a vacationer's paradise plummeted, and (as Salon.com put it) Hurricane Bristol hit Minnesota. As the above links give away, I've been listening to an inordinate amount of Nick Cave because his dank, sleazy Jeremiads seem well-suited to the atmosphere. But I'm not interested in talking about Nick Cave today.

My friend JD is a devotee of '70s big-band funk & r'n'b - the Gap Band, Chic, P-Funk, and the like. Last week, he noted that (outside the state fair circuit) this species of act has gone extinct, and wondered aloud why this happened. The easy answer is that their moment in the sun had expired and they had to hang up their sequined jumpsuits. But that's as intellectually satisfying as saying 9/11 happened because They Hate Our Freedom.

A better explanation would be an economic one. The ascension of hip-hop in the late '70s was nothing less than the first homemade-music revolution: no longer was it necessary to have bulky amps, prohibitively priced instruments, PA, or (often the most troublesome variable) a secure practice space. If there was a turntable in the household, there was the sole necessary musical tool. By tapping into a streetlight's electricity, a home stereo could turn a park or street corner into a music venue as MCs battled unamplified in public.

This phenomenon grew exponentially and across genres with the advent of samplers, 4-track cassette recorders, and laptop computers equipped with a plethora of user-friendly software. In The Psychic Soviet, Ian Svenonius argued that a housing crunch exacerbated the trend towards smaller ensembles and amateur production. Following the urban blights of the 1980s, the forces of gentrification launched a full-scale invasion of major cities in the 1990s, leading to vanishing vacancy rates and skyrocketing rents. When a basement efficiency is costing upwards of 60% of your income, you can't afford to be concerned about practice space - you make the most of what you've got.

There's also the social element to consider. Bands are considered creatively compromising by, uh, everyone who's ever been in a band, which is why they all break up, spin off, or implode. The chance to be the lone (wo)man on the mic, solo and center-stage, is irresistible to the ego. As a matter of format, hip-hop is a soloist's idiom. Particularly gifted - or at least bankable - MCs can have their pick of the production litter while remaining the locus of attention, if only because they're the sole constant over the course of a whole album. Conversely, a skilled producer also adept at rhyming can run the whole show unfettered by conflicting opinions.

Also, though there's an unmatched magic in the balance of multiple strong personalities, every additional person in a creative venture represents a risk. At best, they're an extra voice in the conversation, but at worst they're a liability - a truth clear to those familiar with Professor Griff of Public Enemy, The Game, or, heck, Scott Weiland.

Having taken extensive notes, the rock underground (Jacking black culture since 1951!) has produced its own reconstitutions of the above creative considerations. Electroclash, mash-ups, chiptune, hardware-free solid-state techno, whatever the fuck it is village idiot Dan Deacon does - these are all self-produced, small-ensemble subgenres born of cost-efficient equipment and claustrophobic spaces. But unlike hip-hop, they're also tainted by the nebbish indie insistence upon an intrinsic smallness of the music; when made, grand gestures and spectacle invariably wink so hard the irony drips out like crocodile tears.

And so begins the bitter expostulatory portion of the essay! Following the analogous relationship between religion and music, I'd define myself as a kind of gnostic pentecostal; my philosophy is antithetical to Momus' anti-metaphysical "superflat" nihilism. Consequently, I find that the deconstructive materialism of much indie rock misses the whole point, smirking itself into an artistic Limbo instead of shooting the moon with the crosshairs on Heaven. There's little solace in hip-hop either, but for an entirely different reason: I find the human voice to be an invasive, traumatic presence. Card-carrying Lacanian Slavoj Žižek put it in layman's terms in his Pervert's Guide to Cinema:

Voice is not an organic part of the human body, it is coming from somewhere in-between your body. Whenever we talk to another person, there is always this minimum of ventriloquist effect, as if some foreign power took possession... It is as if we are expecting the famous scene from Ridley Scott's Alien to repeat itself. As if we have just waited for some terrifying, alien, evil-looking small animal to jump out.

In that regard, most of my favourite vocalists are pointedly unpleasant, exaggerating their assaultive presence within the music: David Yow, Mark E. Smith, El-P, early Nick Cave. (He made it into the conversation after all!) If only because their skills are rooted in street-corner braggadocio, most MCs have no interest in psychically unsettling the listener. They opt instead for either political discomfort (considerably easier to dismiss), or paying tribute to their own boundless star-power.

Though this comes as no suprise given how often I refer to His Worship Kevin Shields, the music I find most effective is a pan-sensual miasma, a syrupy narcosis, or a searing hail of sonic shrapnel. It boasts mass and velocity, but of a mercurial, chaotic sort. The music that ultimately means anything to me is an audial short-circuit to Stendhal Syndrome - immersive, overwhelming, yet organic. Being a mechanical artifice, the digital is incapable of transcendence. As noted last week, "Events that don't happen in air have no medium for existence, sounds made in a totally digital environment are effectively stillborn" - or, more horrifying, undead. But, stripped of digital alchemy, it becomes very difficult to produce music capable of sensory overload as a solo act.

And so, for all the squabbles, cramped quarters, and clumsy stacks of equipment... we're back in a big room, full of hotheaded humans, armed with steel, wood, and speakers.

By the way, the next time Earth, Wind & Fire come to your town, check 'em out. I hear they're still able to kill it. Click on the mix title to download.

Sensory Overloud

1. Ashra - "77 Slightly Delayed" (00:00)
2. Can - "Oh Yeah" (06:31)
3. Fugazi - "Steady Diet" (13:45)
4. The Jesus & Mary Chain - "Upside Down" (17:23)
5. Faust - "Krautrock" (20:16)
6. Brian Eno - "Here Come the Warm Jets" (27:45)
7. Tim Hecker - "Blood Rainbow" (31:30)
8. Jonny Greenwood - "Henry Plainview" (35:19)
9. My Bloody Valentine - "All I Need" (35:48)
10. Sonic Youth - "Eric's Trip" (38:47)
11. Tricky - "Christiansands" (42:32)
12. Fela Kuti - "Roforofo Fight" (46:11)
13. Boredoms - "Super Going" (53:57)
14. The Psychic Paramount - "Gamelan Into the Mink Supernatural" (01:05:56)
15. The Beatles - "Tomorrow Never Knows" (01:15:48)

Non-Sequitorial Postscript: Well, a pity - looks like we no longer live "in a whurruld..."

Sub Pop

Recently, I was lucky enough to stumble upon a surprising number of those rarest of musical jewels: stuff I'd never heard before. Obviously, this isn't to say they've never alighted upon the ears of another human in history - were that the case, how would I have found 'em? But let's be honest, someone else passing you some tunes is never as satisfying as excavating something yourself.

The great danger of crate-digging is that a record would be valued strictly because of its obscurity. This (along with its equally-evil twin, Popism) replaces any aesthetic considerations with cut-throat market ideology. There's a Sophie's Choice in approaching music strictly as a consumer: either the log-hollow pretension of the DJ who announces (to no one in particular) the "first UK spin!" of some forgetabbly muddy funk 45, or Girl Talk.

It's hardly controversial to note that some pop music is popular for good reason, and much obscure music is obscure for good reason. Less baffling than when something good goes unnoticed, though, is when something without popular appeal is popular nonetheless. I'm not talking about Timbaland's continued ubiquity despite the series of gold-leafed turds he's been handing his audience; booty-shakers three bottles of "woooo!" into their Saturday night are hardly going to care whether it's Madonna, Nicole Sherzinger, or Aaliyah cooing at 120dB. No, I'm talking about Jandek becoming standard on student pub jukeboxes; about Les Rallizes Denudes' swampy second-rate psychedelia getting glowing reviews on Pitchfork; about any band in the Nuggets collections singled out as geniuses despite the stylistic anonymity that earned their inclusion in the boxset in the first place.

In some cases, like Wesley Willis or Daniel Johnston, the story is too good to ignore. In others, a ridiculous name that goes viral as a punchline (!!!) is all the PR a band needs - or, for an unlucky few like Holy Fuck, all the PR a band doesn't need. Or (adopting squirrely Robert Downey Jr. voice) here's a theory, I'm just gonna throw it out there... maybe people are lot more sophisticated than the RIAA and Clear Channel give them credit for; maybe there's a reason Revolver, not A Hard Day's Night, is routinely cited as the greatest rock album ever; maybe something broader than rotation on 120 Minutes put Sonic Youth in arenas during the '90s.

Of course, the Smithsonian Institute ain't big enough to archive all the music that is, en fin, fucking ridiculous. Some white-label singles aren't worth spinning, and not every Italian horror soundtrack is worth sampling. But the sick joy to be found in dead-baby jokes and episodes of COPS is also in listening to people that should never have been sat in front of a microphone. (Hello, Liam Gallagher!) People stop more often to study a dead bird than to smell the roses.

Accordingly, here's a hodge-podge of some of the more peculiar curios in my collection; some of them are fresh discoveries, but most have been just weird enough to be worth hauling halfway around the world with me. A couple of tracks have been edited, 'cuz seriously, you don't need a quarter-hour of Gracious! quoting Beethoven and relating some thuggish reverie. Click on the mix title to download.

Less Allegro More Retardo

1. T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rhythmo - "Intro" (00:00)
2. Jackie Wilson & LaVern Baker - "Think Twice" (Alt. take; 00:11)
3. Klaus Doldinger - "Sitar Beat" (02:40)
4. The Bangers - "Baby Let Me Bang Your Box" (04:04)
5. Chinga Chavin - "Asshole From El Paso" (06:37)
6. Merv Griffin - "Have a Nice Trip" (11:19)
7. Cookie Monster - "Cookie Disco" (13:31)
8. Ray Sanders & Friends - "Karate" (15:35)
9. Alex Chilton - "Girl After Girl" (17:48)
10. Unknown - "Big Al's Country Bus" (20:06)
11. Boredoms - "Which Doo Yoo Like?" (22:15)
12. Machida Machizo - "心臓賭博" (24:09)
13. Plywood 3/4 - "Travailler Dans l'Beurre" (25:48)
14. Brainticket - "The Space Between" (27:46)
15. Les Baxter - "The Devil's Witchcraft" (30:43)
16. Ging Nang Boyz - "あの娘に１ミリでもちょっかいかけたら殺す" (32:39)
17. Tony Lowry - "Screw On the Loose" (36:44)
18. Marvin Pontiac - "Bring Me Rocks" (37:43)
19. Sex - "I Had to Rape Her" (41:13)
20. The Brainbombs - "Lipstick On My Dick" (45:23)
21. William Trytel - "Saw Theme" (49:55)
22. Apryl Fool - "The Lost Mother Land (Part 1)" (50:33)
23. Gracious! - "Dream" (55:55)
24. Dark - "R.C. 8" (57:51)
25. Aphrodite's Child - "Infinity Symbol" (59:47)

Been a Long Time

I've got a lot of reading to catch up on. Just as a long-simmering threat exploded into the most imporant geopolitical moment of the past five years, a deadline of which I was previously not told was unceremoniously shat upon me. Consequently, I spent the past week hiding in my headphones, wrestling with amp-emulator plug-ins (spiking 110Hz and 2.7kHz does not a Marshall stack make!) and trying to turn what was a snare drum from a timbale back into a snare drum.

Mercifully, my ears were well-tuned to my clients' particular idiom: I've recently been digging deep into the annals of sweaty, hirsute rawk. Once the whole Adbusters hipster debacle had saturated the blogosphere, I desperately needed to hear some music whose sincerity ripped straight past try-hard into the epically ersatz - and what music better exemplifies balls-out self-belief than vintage heavy metal?

Prog rock. The only thing that trumps a Rayon-locked dude with a Les Paul is a Rayon-locked dude with a Les Paul singing about extraterrestrial dragons.

What's long fascinated me most about pre-thrash heavy metal is its utterly junior-high male mindset. Here's the lay of the land: smoking pot, super heroes, and a cryptomystical obsession with death and Satan. These may seem like quaint and hokey enthusiasms in the era of phonecams and the Nintendo Wii, but throw out every gadget with a microprocessor and see what else there is to do when posessed of that restive adolescent essence. If humour rears its head (and it rarely does), it's typically sophomoric. If a girl enters the picture, it's framed in the same manner that a hormonally hysterical boy would gaze cautiously at the creatures on the other side of the cafeteria: there walks some unfathomable succubus or unattainable Venus! Which is actually the best argument against anointing Led Zeppelin the original heavy metal band: they may have sung songs about Vikings and Tolkien characters, but they also dared vocalise something approximating adult sexuality as opposed to, well, this.

In the introduction to Rat Salad, Paul Wilkinson parallels the history of rock with an average human lifespan: from its goofy insouscience in the '50s, across its mercurial adolescence in the '60s, through the barn-burning death of innocence manifested as the late-'70s punk shitfit, and finally slouching into the slick, careerist adulthood of the '80s. Based on such a timeline, the blossoming of prog rock as a technical & thematic maturation of early metal would correspond to the naive hubris of a first-year philosophy major who's just read Beyond Good and Evil, Siddartha, and/or The Simulacra for the first time. The clumsy gumbo of half-baked New Ageism, cherry-picked Oriental religion, and modernist philosophy; the use of fantastic narrative to make some profound (if foggy) point; the unflinching self-seriousness with which the discourse it carried out - why, it's as though those insufferable freshmen Know-It-Alls you sat behind in the lecture hall started a band!

The student analogy also underscores the class difference between much early metal and first-wave prog: while Black Sabbath were a blue-collar bunch from dingy Birmingham, Genesis were posh Charterhouse schoolboys. Though technical prowess is a prime directive in both genres, it's born of very different social instincts: in metal, of the working-class pride of a well-honed skill; in prog, of an indulgent, academic studiousness. The socioeconomic gap can also account for the lyrical thematic differences between metal (pulpy fantasy and B-movie theology) and prog (packed full of highbrow allusions to psychoanalysis, cultural theory, and philosophy).

Of course, with a little persistence and practice, some of these arrogant geeks actually progress (what is the parent word of "Prog" anyway?) into more difficult, exploratory realms. Their employ of philosophical themes graduates from toe-dipping to something more thorough; their inquisitive disposition often makes them early-adopters of new technology; the best even succeed in breaking new ground.

This creative questing is, of course, not without its pitfalls. Curiosity can still kill the cat, and what we need isn't always more technology. But better to look foolish and take risks than rest on someone else's laurels and give up even trying.

Anyway, click on the mix title to download. If we use Wilkinson's rock lifeline, this mix (at one song per year) would trace some young fellow's development from age 13 through 23. Or something like that.

Hard, Heavy, Heady

1. Fuzzy Duck - "A Word Form Big D" (00:00)
2. May Blitz - "Snakes and Ladders" (01:32)
3. Black Sabbath - "The Wizard" (05:58)
4. Sir Lord Baltimore - "Hell Hound" (10:16)
5. Warhorse - "Vulture Blood" (13:32)
6. Colosseum - "The Machine Demands a Sacrifice" (18:35)
7. Heldon - "Standby" (21:50)
8. Tool - "The Grudge" (35:52)
9. Magma - "Mekanik Zain" (Live; 44:15)
10. King Crimson - "Indiscipline" (01:00:18)

Bourgeois Art Threat

The great confluence of posts about creativity, class, and the "creative class" continues, though so far circumstance has conspired to keep me too busy to compose a proper reply. In the interim, here's a mix of music about class tension, the offspring of the obscene embrace between art & commerce. Not insignificantly, a number of the songs most declaratively aligned with the Working Man are by people who've assuredly never felt the sting of sweat in their eyes if not under stage-lights. A few of the acts - the JSBX, the Dandies, and of course the Shat - damn near disappear up their own asses in acts of self-satirisation. Meanwhile, for all their Fela-esque anti-capital populism, The 3rd Generation Band were actually the official Ghanaian state police band - but of course, capital adopting anti-establishment postures is as old as the rebel yell itself.

Also occupying my headspace: a couple of recent posts over at I Cite mentioned the difficulty of creating consensus, a difficulty aptly demonstrated by others who smugly self-paralyse with ping-pong rhetoric and infinite regresses. Discussions of the Symbolic with neither the Imaginary nor the Real and a theory of "progressive" tourism aside... One of the problems facing post-modern politics is that there isn't an ideology, that is neither essentially nihilist nor religious, which accepts that people just don't get along - that in all likelihood, we hate each other. In spite of this being a fundamental consideration of Enlightenment philosophy, there seems to be not the barest bones of any progressive agenda that incorporates a status quo of everyone hating each other's guts. This is not a new problem, as I certainly wouldn't be the lone member of a previously-proposed People Who Hate People Party...

Middle Class Revolt
(click on the title to download)

1. Tricky - "Money Greedy" (00:00)
2. The Fall - "Prole Art Threat" (05:24)
3. The 3rd Generation Band - "Because of Money" (07:18)
4. Pete Wiggins - "I Don't Work For a Living" (13:07)
5. The Wu-Tang Clan - "C.R.E.A.M." (16:08)
6. The Constantines - "Working Full-Time" (19:57)
7. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - "Sweat" (23:51)
8. Talking Heads - "Found a Job" (26:51)
9. The Beastie Boys - "Mark On the Bus" (31:42)
10. XTC - "Day In Day Out" (32:36)
11. Public Image Ltd. - "Careering" (35:41)
12. Fugazi - "Five Corporations" (40:09)
13. Buck 65 - "In Every Dream Home There Is a Heartache" (Roxy Music cover; 42:25)
14. Wiliam Shatner feat. Joe Jackson - "Common People" (Pulp cover; 46:55)
15. The Dandy Warhols - "Bohemian Like You" (51:25)
16. Tom Waits - "Heigh Ho" (54:54)

Smallpox Champions: US of A!

Doubtlessly, y'all have already seen it, but I'll be damned if it doesn't sum it all up better than I could:

Baseball, Apple Pie, and Kicking Your Fucking Ass: 21 Hilariously Hyperbolic Pro-America Songs

Courtesy of the Onion AV Club. Elsewhere on the interwebs, there's plenty of Third Eye-squeegeeing material by a few dead heroes on the last great global hegemon.

And should I ever feel that nine years wasn't enough, a quick visit to this Wal-Mart of thundering idiocy will convince me I needn't accrue any more time there. (It's kind of impressive, actually: shorthand to the worst ontological tautology, blinkered self-certainty, and broadsword-subtle analysis you can find in the body politic of America.)

Enjoy your barbecues and fireworks!

(Click on the title below to download.)

Seventeen Gun Salute

1. Beauty Pill - "Goodnight For Real" (00:00)
2. Outkast - "Gasoline Dreams" (04:49)
3. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "Tupelo" (08:07)
4. The Black Lips - "O Katrina!" (13:10)
5. Brian Eno & David Byrne - "America Is Waiting" (15:55)
6. Soul Coughing - "Misinformed" (19:22)
7. Charles Mingus - "Fable of Faubus" (22:41)
8. Frank Zappa & Captain Beefheart - "200 Years Old" (30:51)
9. Patton Oswalt - "America Has Spoken" (35:10)
10. Public Enemy - "Welcome To the Terrordome" (37:52)
11. Cody Chesnutt - "Boylife In America" (43:17)
12. Fugazi - "Smallpox Champion" (45:32)
13. Nation of Ulysses - "You're My Miss Washington DC" (49:20)
14. Rufus Wainwright - "Going To a Town" (51:42)
15. Q And Not U - "Kiss Distinctly American" (55:42)
16. Soundgarden - "4th of July" (01:00:47)
17. The Fall - "New Puritan" Peel Session (01:05:54)

C'mon, Feel the Beautiful, Euphoric, Transcendental Noise

Not even close...

I have the discrete pleasure of testifying to what a great many others have already been evangelising: My Bloody Valentine are back and will peel the skin from your skull using only air sculpted with their Fender-brand divining rods. The general critical consensus amounts to the impressionistic descriptive quicksand I find myself wading through every time I recount the concert on the phone:

I mean, like, str0bes&tremo1o-arm swand!ves went *#%*^!*#!* "Soon" and "Feed Me With Yr -> Blinida <3 fuckin' LOUD 5-10-15-20-25 minutes into "You Made Me ~ l0se my hearing #*%^* g!rl passed out, dude... w00t!

Honestly, all the ham-fisted similes and nebulous descriptions that bloggers & mag hacks have cranked out are blamelessly quixotic: given that the legend of The Loudness has proven inarguably true, how can one explain an experience for which one has no first-hand precedent? With ham-fisted similes and nebulous, impressionistic descriptions! After all, for any first-time MBV attendee, it must also be their inaugural experience of sound as a non-environmental (i.e. not derived from mechanical or meteorological sources) yet physically-arresting phenomenon. It was sensory overload of a purity and extremity I'd certainly never experienced.

Here is where it bears expounding upon "The Holocuast": that sonic schisming of space & time at the end of "You Made Me Realise", which lasts anywhere between a quarter- and half-hour. (I sure as hell wasn't checking my watch.) The effect on the audience was uncanny, utterly bizarre. Punters that had been punching the air all night slowed their bouncing into bug-eyed, shellshocked stasis. People nodded off like junkies in every direction. God knows how many eventually fled the front of the room with their fingers in their ears. The girl in front of me slowly crumpled against the barricade and, at song's end, needed to be picked up & carried away by security. I took my earplugs out and immediately felt my spine flush into my stomach. (I put the earplugs back in.) It erased any sense-memory of every song before, and the salvo of the final verse was like being resusitated out of an overdose only to be bitch-slapped by the medic.

It was also during this onslaught that I experienced a bemusing mix of existential dread (see above) and arousal (keep reading). As many others have mentioned, the band appears to have been cryogenically preserved over the last sixteen years - meaning Bilinda Butcher is still indie-adorable, the angelic yin to PJ Harvey's gothy yang. The sight of this petite pixie, strumming away in total indifference to the evil fucking sound assaulting the crowd, was one of the most oddly sexy things I've ever seen.

Long story short (too late)... I wouldn't have traded it for anything. You could have told me that, provided I tore up my ticket, Veronica Lake circa 1942 was arriving in a time machine for a threesome with me and Tina Fey and I would have told you to fuck off.

So, to keep the buzz in the air, here's a mix of songs to sandpaper everyone else's eardrums a bit. Click on the mix title to download.

Lo(-Fi) Rider

1. Nation of Ulysses - "The Sound of Young America" (00:00)
2. Laddio Bolocko - "Goat Lips" (02:29)
3. Shit and Shine - "Danielle" (09:24)
4. Method Man - "Sub Crazy" (11:00)
5. Ween - "Awesome Sound" (13:14)
6. Alex Chilton - "Baron of Love Pt. II" (15:34)
7. The Black Lips - "Lock And Key" (19:43)
8. My Bloody Valentine - "Feed Me With Your Kiss" (22:23)
9. NO - "This Suit Burns Better" (26:12)
10. Fugazi - "Swingset" (29:07)
11. Pavement - "No Life Singed Her" (30:43)
12. The Fall - "Slates, Slags, Etc." (32:43)
13. Karaoke Vocal Eliminator - "Hideously Amplified World" (39:12)
14. Oshiri Penpenz - "Love Letter From Shitty Booze" (43:25)
15. The Cramps - "Love Me" (45:01)
16. Jacks - "Gloomy Flower" (46:58)
17. The Brainbombs - "Drive Around" (50:13)
18. Labtekwon - "Capoiera" (55:13)
19. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - "Get Over Here" (57:58)
20. Ogikubo Connection - "Staring At Blood" (01:00:02)
21. The Brian Jonestown Massacre - "The Origin of Love/The Amazing Electric Talking Cave" (01:03:18)
22. Love Life - "[Trails]" (01:09:11)

Addendum:

The week before the concert, I came across this article about the use of music as a tool of torture by the American military. For a split second, I wondered whether my enthusiasm for both excessive volume and repetition somehow put me in a morally unteneble position. (Answer: only when it gets on Th' Wife's nerves!) Approaching the subject too subjectively (as demonstrated by Deicide drummer Asheim) can also lead to "Bring 'em on!" braggadoccio, or even to the myopic dismissal of the very possiblity that music can be torturous. (Similarly, the composer of the Barney The Dinosaur theme argues that "playing hymns to someone strapped to a chair wouldn't make them a Christian," never seeming to consider that such a scenario may have the exact opposite effect.) All of which ignores the simple yet fundamental difference between those of us in front of Kevin Shields' amp stack, and those in the Guantanamo Bay "disco": choice.

Take the time to read the full article, if only because it provides (in the fourth paragraph) yet another concise & explicit reason to hate James Hetfield.

Extension:

Fellow concertgoer and musical polygamist Bradford Cox sought to spark discussion by suggesting that

My Bloody Valentine are a folk band. Their music transfers experience in broad, ambiguous terms utilizing simple chords and melodies.

And now I'm running my mouth like flint and tinder: this seems to me a confusion of terms. I agree that MBV convey [whatever it is they convey] in broad, ambiguous terms - but isn't that the antithesis of "folk" music? I've always understood "folk" to stand for a thematic focus on finite, anecdotal evidence which alluded to some universal condition or sentiment.

It's also insultingly reductive to call MBV's chord changes and melodies "simple." Certainly, the melodies are spare and uncluttered, and there's no finger-sports athleticism on display, but part of the beauty of MBV's music is that it's largely adrift from a clear tonal center, a la Joni Mitchell. Though legions of knuckle-dragging hardcore acts may suggest otherwise, a workmanlike hammering of a handful of chords needn't be monotonic or unsophisticated. Please, if you disbelieve, tell me what key any given song by the Fall from '81-'83 was in.

Halfway Between Night and Day

It's been thirteen years since I've been so close to a pole during the summer solstice, and it is fuckin' with my head. I'm an amateur somnonaut at the best of times, pathetically sensitive to sunlight, the lunar cycle, fluctuations in temperature, altitude, vehicular velocity, paranoia (real and imagined), and what was the last song I heard before heading to bed.

So that the sun is playing this fleeting game of peek-a-boo as it barely dips below the horizon for three hours a night has robbed me of any hope for a good night's sleep. I'm not a terribly heliophilic person at the best of times, but this is ridiculous. To set my psyche adroit, and at least acknowledge this astrological moment, I've concocted a mix that is split fairly evenly (as it should be, dammit!) between the light and the dark.

Needless to say, there are a innumerable songs about summer that aren't included - but a lot of those are, lightly put, hippie bullshit. (Chin up, lads, I loved the video for "Boy In the Bubble" too!) Blue Cheer's rendition of "Summertime Blues" would've been an obvious choice, but honestly, I just don't think it's very good. (Certainly not stood alongside the Who's earth-scorching version from their "Live At Leeds" album.) In retrospect, I should've included "Who Loves the Sun", but then we just heard VU last week. I also have a hysterical-yet-half-assed attempt of "Sunshine of Your Love" by Ella Fitzgerald, but again, there's no need to repeat performers. ("Hey, what about the Billy Nayer Show?" you ask. I'm sorry, are you being paid to think?) As always, click on the title to download.

Halftime In the Sunshine

1. Jane's Addiction - "Up the Beach" (00:00)
2. Darker My Love - "Summer Is Here" (02:56)
3. Sly & the Family Stone - "Hot Fun In the Summertime" (05:42)
4. Cody Chesnutt - "Daylight" (08:16)
5. The Fendermen - "Beach Party" (09:04)
6. Serge Gainsbourg - "Sous Le Soleil Exactement" (11:05)
7. The Billy Nayer Show - "Sunshine All the Time" (13:52)
8. John Fahey - "On the Beach Waikiki" (16:17)
9. Rye Coalition - "One Daughter Hotter Than a Thousand Suns" (19:12)
10. Need New Body - "Beach" (23:55)
11. Spectrum - "Waves Wash Over Me" (25:51)
12. Les Baxter - "Pyramid Of the Sun" (31:19)
13. NO - "NO Sun" (33:48)
14. Ashra Tempel - "Sunrain" (45:11)
15. SunnO))) - "Defeating: Earth's Gravity" (52:31)
16. Ellla Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong - "Summertime" (01:06:12)

The Meme Whose Head Expanded

Fair Warning: This is a big'un, so before you get all "tl;dr" on me, simply click here to download the MP3 mix, you goldfish-minded brat.
Coming or going?

During my recent revisitation of bachelordom (to find it, take a left past the gates of Dis), I spent quite some time fencing myself in with films about misanthropy and mindlessly strumming the elliptical looped riff of "Wings". Around the same time, Mark K-Punk was returning to the territory he indisputably rules: academic dissections (post-mortems?) of the mind of Mark E. Smith. This dragged Perverted By Language out of psychic deep storage and myself out of a deepening well of paranoia. The single step towards salvation was articulated thusly:

"Turn that bloody blimey space invader off!"

The virtual world appears near-complete in its construction, with corporations, counterculturalists, cliques, cops, criminals, celebrities, snake-oil salesmen, schemers, dreamers, has-beens, and also-rans populating the pixelated landscape. The structure is seamless enough that, alongside The Sims and Second Life, "reality" becomes a bit redundant - but only insofar as "reality" is irrelevant to people ensconced in The Matrix. There is sufficient static & tension between the two worlds that the transition is traumatic. Being a wizard behind the keyboard often translates to being a hermit, a shut-in, or at least an awkward git in the "real" world. As the world shrinks around an individual, the greater the place the individual seems to occupy until they seemingly fill the screen. Simply put: the smaller the scope, the greater the solipsism, until all that remains is an all-roads-lead-to-Rome paranoia.

"The man who's head expanded explained:
The scriptwriter would follow him around,
of this he was convinced. It was no coincidence."

Now, the great paradox of paranoia is that it typically grows inversely proportionate to one's active participation & functional relevence. Unlike Smith's antihero, neither TV nor video games were (or are) prevalent in my routine. But my quotidian existence had withered down to whatever flashed across my laptop screen. The few external encounters I had - grocery shopping, riding the subway, helping the senile pensioner nextdoor find his keys - became unbearable intrusions. I was working damned hard to make myself as "non-" a non-entity within the civic context as possible. Yet I started finding my own memetic footprints, wayward traces of myself, scattered about online. Noted tastemakers would ape song selections I'd already posted. Digital flotsam I'd passed around would suddenly pop up in high-profile places. Then it began cutting too close: all these other cats were listening to the same songs I'd been playing on repeat for the past month. How'd they find out? Have I been spending too much time with one Onion and not the other? What does a Scanner see?

Of course, the obvious answer was: fuckin' get over yourself, dude. Not only is my taste in no way singular, but here I was bouncing between like-minded blogs, somehow expecting their enthusiasms to lie far afield from mine. Well done indeed. Much in the same manner that conspiracy theories fulfill the same function as religious faith, paranoia becomes a substitute for meaningful friendships: an ornately-spun and meticulously-balanced web of associations with a first-person locus.

As I've previously explained, I have become more or less irrelevant to my immediate environment - or perhaps simply disillusioned regarding my general relevancy. Either way, in my less level-headed moments, I'd sypathise with those who'd deliberately destroyed their brains to anaesthetise themselves to the chronic dysphoria of waking life: addiction as a 9-to-5 in the most grimly minimal, bottom-line, existential sense. Then came the sunny revelation that mors ontologica not only runs, but gallops in my family. A particular case set such an uncanny precedent that it was less like some melodramatic familial folklore than a funhouse-mirror What If? scenario, wherein all my darker, destructive tendencies had played themselves out to the end.

Suddenly, my intuitive fear & loathing of self-medication & applied personal chemistry seemed less monastic cowardice than an inborn failsafe - that I'd distilled an instinct from a soupy psychic miasma of suspicions, allusions, innuendos, and anecdotal fragments over the years. Looking back, I glimpsed what could have lay ahead, had I taken myself too seriously. It all looked remarkably like K-Punk's imagining of MES' nightmarish realization that

"At a certain point the powers will start to wane. The voices that speak through you will no longer make themselves heard. The words will not come. Your eyes will blink open and you will find yourself trapped in the most miserable reality, no longer able to make it take flight, or to yourself flee it. When all those egresses into other worlds recede, then this world will close around you, greasy with fried chicken fat, glossy with discarded celebrity trash, as seamless as a shopping mall, as interminable as a dreary videogame to which there is no level 2."

Mercifully, all this was learned with ample time to make a choice: No Future, Or... wherein the space after the "or" has yet to be blacked out. If, indeed, "the drive of unliving things is stronger than the drive of living things," then there is little difference between an amphetamine-burned, psychotropically-scarred zombie and staring at a computer screen all the time. Tuned in to the scanner, parsing the static, self-Googling, obsessing over infinitesimal details, becoming enraged over the smallest glitches in the Matrix, parasitic, paranoid, a stimulus-response somnambulist... a scanner or a speedfreak? Is there a difference, and does it particularly matter?

Not to me. Not yet. To stimuli, I can still choose from an arsenal of responses. An awareness of inertia is an awareness of the other condition as well. The voices still come; one has to stop thinking of oneself as "one self" and welcome them.

I'm going for a walk.

Saying Uncle

1. Buck 65 - "Achilles and the Tortoise" (00:00)
2. The Fall - "Wings" (03:18)
3. The Velvet Underground - "I Can't Stand It" (07:48)
4. The Rolling Stones - "19th Nervous Breakdown" (11:06)
5. Brian Eno - "Golden Hours" (15:08)
6. The Focus Group - "Reflected Message" (18:53)
7. Sonic Youth - "Schizophrenia" (20:27)
8. Shit and Shine - "Practicing To Be a Doctor" (25:04)
9. Tarentel - "Fever Sleep" (32:24)
10. Sonic Boom - "Help Me Please" (34:04)
11. Soul Coughing - "$300" (38:41)
12. Hüsker Dü - "The Tooth Fairy and the Princess" (41:35)
13. Public Image Ltd. - "Death Disco/Swan Lake" (43:51)
14. The Brian Jonestown Massacre - "Mansion In the Sky" (48:23)
15. Spacemen 3 - "Suicide" (50:36)
16. The Billy Nayer Show - "My Funeral" (01:02:08)
17. Scott Walker - "30th Century Man" (01:05:43)

Totally Nonsequitorial Postscript: I just saw the video for the new Sigur Ros single, "Gobbledigook". My guess is the only thing stopping Animal Collective from suing the shit out of those Icelanders is that the A.C. boys are way too burned to know the difference.

The Breadcrumb Trail Went Stale

It's a state of mind!

I blinked and May had gone from a pert grape to a granite-textured raisin. This isn't to say nothing happened. Plans were hatched and wheat was seperated from chaff. Resources were marshalled, laughs were had, doubts formed, and panic ensued. But before I can connect the dots, a little late spring cleaning is in order. Below is a tossed salad of epistemological detritus that I need to recycle out into cyberspace to unclutter my ontological niche. No particular theme, thread, or narrative is implied, but that doesn't mean one cannot be inferred.

Click on the title to download, peeps.

Record Needle In a Haystack

1. Amon Düül II - "Archangel Thunderbird" (00:00)
2. Laddio Bolocko - "As If By Remote" (03:36)
3. The Focus Group - "The Thre" (06:14)
4. The Golden Catalinas - "Can Your Monkey Do the Dog" (07:19)
5. Delia Derbyshire - Theme to Dr. Who (09:43)
6. Buck 65 - "Can of Worms" (11:58)
7. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown - "Spontaneous Apple Creation" (15:15)
8. The Lounge Lizards - "Incident On South Street" (18:07)
9. Duck Flowers - "Wicked Chicken" (21:26)
10. Pavement - "Gangsters & Pranksters" (23:29)
11. Los Saicos - "Demolicion" (25:04)
12. Andrew W.K. - "McLaughlin Groove" (27:56)
13. Cloudland Canyon - "You & I" (28:43)
14. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - "The Rider #2" (35:06)
15. Santo & Jonny - "Sleep Walk" (38:00)
16. Jade Warrior - "Borne On the Solar Wind" (40:19)
17. The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band - "In the Canyons of Your Mind" (43:18)
18. The Playboys - "Mope De Mope" (46:16)

Classic Western Archetype Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

It began as a matter of my circumstances: living in a country I had no prior experience of and whose language I did not speak, with a daily routine wherein human interaction was a matter of choice, not fact. It was aggravated by an ever declining number of return communiqués, slowly snipping what tenuous telecommunicative threads connected me to overseas. Not one to half-ass anything, I began replacing conversation with records (see below) and soon found myself quoting certain fictional characters more out of expediency than referential exaggeration.

A trip was taken that would hopefully provide some context and settle a few ongoing quandries. Certainly, some quandries were settled (and I returned sans moustache), but this was also a fact-finding trip and - as always - the Truth is hardly the tonic we'd like it to be. I came back more uncertain than I left, not the least because of two specific exchanges.

The first was between an old friend and me. In discussing our Hell In a Handbasket prognosis for the planet and how relationships slacken through transience, she mentioned that a source of strength was the knowledge that certain people do, and always will, have your back. Her parents' neighbours, for example: though she hadn't seen or spoken to them in years, when/if the shit really hits the fan, she knew the block she grew up on would wrap itself in a protective embrace. This caught me off guard, as I'd not considered that I have no such safety net. No one I've bothered to stay in touch with was remotely geographically compact. I'd exchanged my friends for a loose-knit network of globe-peppering acquaintances.

The second exchange happened in that most seemingly-unlikely-yet-inevitable place for epiphanies: a 24-hour coffee & donut shop. Unable to sleep one night, I took a stroll from my paternal grandmother's house through my old neighbourhood, past my elementary school and towards the university hospital. I soon saw the familiar beacon of my favourite fast-food franchise and decided to pick up something for breakfast. Approaching the counter, I smiled and started calling out various flavours of donut with an insomniac's husk to my voice. The pear-shaped woman behind the counter cocked her head like a confused beagle and, in that nasal gargle of an accent my home province seems to have acquired in the past twenty years, she asked me, "You're not from around here, are you?"

I paused to calculate the percentage of my life that had passed since I'd left my hometown. "No, I guess not."

The woman grew a broad game-show winner's grin. "Are you from New York?"

A half-dozen glazed donuts is a pitiful consolation prize for having lost your sense of place.

All My Friends Are Dead
(Click on the title to download the mix)

1. The Dandy Warhols - "Be-In" (00:00)
2. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "Cabin Fever" (06:57)
3. Hot Snakes - "I Hate the Kids" (13:01)
4. Tom Waits - "Misery Is the River of the World"(16:05)
5. Pissed Jeans - "Fantasy World" (20:20)
6. Bachi Da Pietra - "Non Io" (23:54)
7. Fugazi - "Long Division" (27:28)
8. Brian Jonestown Massacre - "Anenome" (29:38)
9. My Bloody Valentine - "I Can See It (But I Can't Feel It)" (34:52)
10. Cody Chesnutt - "Juicin' the Dark" (37:57)
11. Faust - "Jennifer" (40:44)
12. Ringo Deathstarr - "Some Kind of Sad" (46:27)
13. Sonic Youth - "Death to Our Friends" (48:30)
14. Spiritualized - "Home of the Brave/The Individual" (51:31)
15. Burial - "Nightbus" (57:44)
16. Brian Eno - "I'll Come Running" (59:49)
17. Marvin Pontiac - "No Kids" (01:03:23)