Because the Internet

Symptom? Sign? Cause? Not a damned clue.

Re-Telling Someone Else's Story

The ability to summon Asperger-ish focus upon a task is mixed blessing: on the one hand, I always manage to complete a project to satisfaction by deadline; on the other hand, everything else gets sidelined. The closer I come to completing a mammoth project, the more I become a kind of music-studio Gollum: a wretched, washed-out creature that exists to the outside world only in rumour.

Then comes the happy day that I achieve my goal and can rush outside, arms outstretched to welcome the world back within me. Of course, this time, it was more a case of rushing outside only to jump back into a cargo van and heave away on a month-long national tour - hopscotching from one great undertaking to the next. Not that this is a problem. I love touring Japan, if only because truckstop service area food actually resembles food. But then the coffee's never strong enough. Trade-offs!

Anyway, enjoying a brief breather between jaunts, I figured it was high time I unveil what's had me waylaid for the past month: my new solo album, a collection of genre pieces & "re-scores" inspired by indelible scenes from various films I love.



Over the winter holidays, as per usual, I spent a couple-dozen hours on planes with nothing better to do than drink cheap whiskey and watch eight movies back-to-back. I actually quite enjoyed most of the movies I watched (with the notable exception Drive) yet found myself thinking, more often than not, that I could've composed a better film score. Perhaps it was the booze talking, but it seemed a wager worth taking.

Of course, unless I was content to sit around & wait for my first commission, I'd have to work with pre-existing material. The initial plan was to re-score a entire film from start to finish, but I couldn't imagine who'd want to sit through a whole movie, stripped of dialogue & sound-effects, simply to hear several variations on a single theme. Instead, I selected a handful of films that whose visual content offered a reasonable amount of stylistic leeway - films that didn't scream out for another blustering Holst knock-off or the moronic thrum of bad techno. From each of these films, I chose a scene or two whose mood & pace would benefit from musical support and set about giving it to 'em.

I continued watching movies for fun in my free time. Recently, though, I'd been revisiting the ol' poliziotteschi, those gloriously amoral Italian cop movies from the 1970s that apparently all star either Franco Nero or Maurizio Merli. So naturally, a couple of weeks into the writing process, I began churning out generic themes to the best & bloodiest of Italian B-movies, attempting my best impressions of maestros Morricone, Piccioni, Ferrio, Micalizzi and - as seen below - Cipriani.



In the end, three of these genre pieces landed on the album; the other twelve tracks, however, were are written specifically to picture. It'd be silly, of course, to compose soundtracks whose visual component would go unseen, so I've made a YouTube playlist of the songs synced with their respective scenes for all to enjoy. So... enjoy!

Counter-Creative

The following has been rephrased, re-presented, and reiterated in a variety of ways, some more scholarly than others, but Frank still said it best: if you're involved with music in any way other than making it, you are the problem.

Through the Looking Glass

It's amazing how sexy & dynamic the clinical tedium of recording looks when rendered in gorgeous, smoky cyanotype.



It's also amazing how totally unaware I was that my band look like a bunch of fidgety, unshaven chain-smokers. Or that I look uncannily like Dez Cadena circa 1983.

Anyway, for those of you who happen to be in Japan this coming March & April, we'll be touring behind the split single featured above. Come check out one of the shows. You shan't be disappointed.

The Singularity, European Stereotypes Edition

I believe I've found the point at which total self-consciousness and zero self-awareness fold back upon each other Moebius-like. At least as far as the French and Germans are concerned.



A brief translation of that last bit:

Reporter: When are the regional elections?

Kindly old lady: I've nothing to say to that. I'm an anarchist and I want to fucking destroy all of capitalist society.

I swear, that is what she actually says. As for translating this next item...



None required. Or perhaps none possible.

Tuesday Morning Theme For Japan's Pacific Coast

I can't tell if I'm being ironic or not.

But that joke isn't funny anymore...

Possibly the strangest consequence of a twenty-four-hour infotainment cycle is that it's mobilized the infinite monkey theorem: all that round-the-clock, Quixotic, chaotic, vanity-pressed, niche-filling flotsam multiplied by the power of the internet means that sometimes, what was once an absurdist brain-fart will be made a reality. Our Everest-sized trashmound of pop-cultural ephemera is performing a cold reading on the future and it's bound to score the occasional hit.

For example, it's often claimed that Mark E. Smith is psychic, having predicted (among other things) the 1982 Guatemalan coup and the IRA bombing of Manchester City Centre in 1996. But after thirtysome years of packing thousand-word screeds into three-minute post-punk morsels, it'd be utterly baffling if none of Smith's words proved prescient. A kind of counter-clairvoyance, that would be.

So it's less appropriate to say Monty Python predicted the Tea Party than to say Cleese's anti-Communist freakout simply crystallizes the American conservative's most consistent style of paranoia of the past (yikes) sixty years. Granted, the resemblance between Glenn Beck and Dave Foley's "right-wing paranoid reactionary" is eerie, since it extends beyond content into cadence & rhetorical style. But surely between the combined archives of Kids In the Hall, SNL, SCTV, Fridays, and This Hour Has 22 Minutes there would be at least a single sketch starring a jeremiad-spouting jingoist?

But the MADtv sketch below is graying my hair - not the least because it's MADtv yet is actually damned funny. This is a particularly chilling example of something that was once patently screwball mutating into de facto plain-statement: 2000's most repellent, line-stepping satire (listen to those "boos!") is 2010's Republican populism. Again, I'm not saying Nicole Sullivan & her co-writers are psychic. It's just impressive when people continue to surprise you, albeit in the worst way possible.



(Hat-tip to FARK. There, Drew, are ya happy?)

Shigeru Miyamoto's Sleeper Cells

Hey, remember "math rock"? That gallingly clinical tag, inescapable in the late-'90s, used to describe any band that studiously avoided regular time signatures? Bands like Don Caballero and Oxes who camouflaged their geeky adoration of finger-sports athletics (e.g. King Crimson, Rush) by wreathing it in spasmic fury?

I don't know if it's just the particular idiom that my band finds itself in, but there seems to be an irrational number of math rock bands in Japan. Now, we're not math rock: all of our songs are in 4/4 or 3/4 and there's not any instrumental breaks that could possibly be confused for a Magma homage. But most of the bands we play with are math rock bands - abrupt tempo shifts, asymmetrical time signatures, technically-demanding guitar runs, etc. This is only odd because math rock's heyday in the west came to a close almost a decade ago, as technical puissance was reclaimed by metal-derived genres and indie kids became more concerned with texture & danceability. Why has math rock refused to fade in Japan?

There are several things that make math rock particularly appealing to guitar-oriented acts in their early-to-mid twenties. The first is its emphasis on technique; unless the intention is keeping it simple-stoopid, there's a genuine satisfaction in mastery of an instrument. The second is that there was significant crossover between math rock and emo; the semi-hysteric emotional mode of many late-teenagers and college kids is attracted to garment-rending catharsis (especially in a country as emotionally muted as Japan). Finally, when bucking musical convention is as easy as dropping an extra beat into a measure, math rock affords the easy illusion of doing something different - even if the genre's decades-old touchstones have become canonical.

Still, something about Japanese math rock doesn't sit well with me. It's a little too crisp in its execution and too rigorously diatonic. The western push towards deconstruction is being countered by some exacting pull from another source - but what? I couldn't tell from whence came this Will To Order until this weekend, when I noticed something curious on another band's merch table: a toy bank in the shape of a Nintendo Famicon.

I've a friend who's the kind of geek that hunts down audio rips of old video game music. The past several times I've been over to his apartment, he's had the Mega Man soundtrack bumping in the background. Given the poxy sonic palette of 8-bit FM synthesis, old-school video game composers such as Koji Kondo used every compositional trick available to create dynamic scores: chromatic counterpoint, syncopation, abrupt tempo shifts, asymmetrical time signatures... hey, wait a minute.

So that's where all these bands picked up their proclivity for epic melodies, Dorian arpeggios, and unnecessary 3-over-2 rhythmic juxtaposition! For every hour spent listening to The Dismemberment Plan, these kids probably spent two sat in front of a video game console. This is the kind of organic synthesis that so many western bands strive for and fail at miserably, coming off instead as so much embarrassing po-mo pastiche. And to think I was dismissing the Japanese bands as stiff, studenty knock-offs of Sunny Day Real Estate - which isn't to say that I like this music any more than I did last week, but at least I'm not baffled by its very existence.

I'll leave you with a couple of concrete examples. Exhibit A is the band we played with in Nagoya on Friday night, the incomprehensibly-named Mudy On The 昨晩.



Exhibit B, the "energy zone" theme from the Nintendo Entertainment System game Contra.



Non-sequitorial postscript: Corporate apologist Eric Harvey takes his "pragmatism" to the big leagues.

Shitting On Political Romanticism Is Fun!

Given the name-recognition that Armando Iannucci has most deservedly won in the UK, this is addressed more towards all North American armchair political strategists...

I ain't asking you to flush your principles or become so ruthlessly realpolitikal that you make Rahm Emmanuel look like Bob Ross. But if you want to know how the game is really played, you need to watch The Thick of It RIGHT NOW.



So if you're in it not to win it, but genuinely to make a difference for the benefit of humankind, understand that this is the level of PR opportunism, ideological schizophrenia, and sailor-mouthed sociopathy that you're up against.

Good luck! You'll fucking need it.

Double Je

Here's an anecdote I've been repeating often this week - I can't quite understand why it's been relevant to the various conversations in which it's come up, but funny enough...

A little over two years ago, I was visiting a friend in Lille, a Dutch-flavoured French city near the Belgian border. In the mood for some fine Flemish cooking (yes, there is such a thing), we wound our way down tiny countryside roads to a restaurant that couldn't have been more European: wrought-iron furniture on the patio! Wood & mortar structure! Implements & spoils of the harvest hung cadaverous from the ceiling! Dozens of exquisite ales whose delicate bouquets & subtle flavours swamp together after the fifth pint! Marvelous. I ate my own weight in dairy & meat that night.

Anyway, because this was a building of antiquarian peasant construction, the toilets were out and around the side. (Reassuring that Rule No. 1 has always been "don't shit where you eat.") Circling back towards the front entrance, a young couple passed me on their way out and almost gave themselves whiplash doing a double-take. Slowing their walk to a foot-dragging limp, they began whispering with beehive-loud sibilance, all the while staring back at me. I did my best to ignore them, until the man blurted out Tourettishly, "Kreestov Wil-ahm!"

"Excuse me?" I had no idea what had just been shouted at me. Was this some strange Ch'ti invitation to fisticuffs? "Kreestov Wil-ahm?" he repeated, more hesitantly. The women chimed in: "Aren't you Christophe Willem?"

Ah, a name! Mistaken identity. "No, sorry." They looked unnervingly skeptical. "You're really not Christophe Willem? C'mon, we promise we won't make a fuss. You're him, right?"

Dangerous territory: I looked like someone worth making a fuss over. What kind of fuss? Would I suddenly be set upon by the local S.W.A.T. team, like that unpleasant incident in Seattle? Was I about to get paparazzo'd and then accused of using my likeness to curry undeserved favour? Who the fuck do they think I am?

Keep in mind this entire exchange was taking place in French, adding a veneer of semantic surreality. "Look, I'm just come Canadian guy visiting friends. I don't know who you think I am." The couple deflated, apparently convinced by the nasal vowels of my affected Quebecois accent. "Oh... well, he's this French singer - god, you look just like him! You haven't heard his music?" They broke into an awkward disco stomp, as though arrhythmic caucasian hip-swiveling would make everything clear.

C'est comme ça, qu'est-ce que je peux, c'est comme ça...

I was unmoved.

Back inside, I was still slightly baffled by what had just happened. Taking my seat across from my friends, I waited for a moment's pause in the conversation to ask them: who is Christophe Willem? Their faces blanked as they flicked through their cranial card catalogue. Suddenly the penny dropped, they gasped and pointed at me like a bodysnatcher gone red-alert.

"Putain, c'est étrange!" Evidently, I did very much look like this Christophe Willem chap, a young performer who had won the 2006 French version of Pop Idol and had since become one of the country's biggest stars. Well done indeed.

But I wanted proof that the resemblance was strong enough to turn heads in a random restaurant parking lot. Back at my friend's apartment, we fired up YouTube and searched for the hit single that had been sung at me (yes, at, not "to") by the dancing duo. Ah, there it was - entitled "Double Je", or "Double I" appropriately enough. Let's have a look...

Fucking hell, it's me! Okay, my glasses are round-framed and I don't half-ass the facial hair whenever I stop shaving, but otherwise... The abominable posture, the Pete Townsend beak, the limp-greasy mop of hair, even the ratty-ass military-green hoodie. I am he and he is me and goo goo ga-fucking-joob.

But the son-of-a-bitch sings in a stratospheric falsetto that would make the Bee Gees sound like baritones. Atop shit disco! Goddamn, this was even worse than all those times drunk salarymen in Tokyo pubs called me "Harry Potter." Couldn't I get mistaken for someone cool? Please?

Yes I can. Now that my hair is greying and I've sloughed off any youthful gloss, I'm compared almost exclusively to my favourite Beatle. (George fans, mad respect; everyone else, get stuffed!) Quite nice to be told you resemble one of the great musical revolutionaries of the 20th century - at least far better than resembling either a cotton-candy French twerp or a fictional teenage wizard.

Shortly thereafter, l'affaire Willem inspired one of my better songs of 2008, "Dinner With My Doppleganger". Yes, I realize it's misspelled. Yes, I should proofread my tracklistings before the record goes to press. So be it. Although Willem really only provoked the title; the song itself is more a meditation about my hypothetical "evil twin," whose yin is my yang and whose vice is my virtue, and the disappointment that we'd be more or less indistinguishable from each other. Not that you'd necessarily glean all that from the lyrics. If, however, you can guess the two songs of which this track is a conscious hybrid, congrats, you get a free copy of my latest album. And a cookie.

The 27 Club

Of which I can now never officially be a member.

For Fans of La Furia Roja

Not that I had a horse in this race, but...



A word of advice to Spain: possession might be nine-tenths of the law, but the last tenth is doing something with it.

Loudest Drunk Always the Latest to Arrive at the Party

Can't believe I completely omitted these guys from the Riff War, but it's never too late to enjoy some truly awful, antisocial rawk.



I know there was something else I wanted to mention briefly but I've got a wicked case of medicine-head at the moment, having spent most of the week at the mercy of a clogged olfactory system. Allow me to eat my breakfast and I'll check back in...

The Infotainment Scan

It's old hat to complain that the 24-hour news cycle is a morass of irrelevant tripe because more coverage doesn't guarantee there's anything more worth covering... but this is ridiculous: a Guardian blog post bemoaning the lack of stand-up rock drummers, written by someone who's obviously never attempted playing the drums standing up. Hey, if you can maintain bipedal balance with all four limbs a-flailin', more power to you! But seriously, there's not much an upright stick(wo)man can do beyond the rudimentary boom-bap of Moe Tucker.

I'm not saying every band needs Terry Bozzio behind the kit, but unless there's room for a Burundi-class platoon of drum-beaters, it's nice to go beyond bang-on-a-can primitivism, isn't it?

Bandwidth Bandit Sub-Rosa Broadcast

I just moved from one side of the ward to the other, and consequently am again without internet access. (This seems an excessively recurrent condition for someone who lives in a developed nation...) Luckily, we've an indiscreet neighbour who doesn't password-protect their wireless signal, so tenuous & temperamental as it is, we've some means of being online in the meantime. The signal disappears between noon and sometime late in the evening (presumably when unseen neighbour departs to & returns from toil) so I'm having to occupy myself with matters of substance instead of blog-trolling all day.

But my god being off the intergrid relieves the mind of so much clutter. Yesterday, someone tossed me a sentence that included the nouns "American Music Awards", "gay dude", and "shitstorm" and I had no fucking idea he was talking about, yet felt effervescently unburdened for not knowing.

There are a several blog-pieces I'm cooking up behind the curtain for your pre-holiday hivernal entertainment, but they'll obviously be lighter on the links and probably considerably less au current than usual. For now, I offer you a piece of brain-tickling entertainment of a quality I can only hope to one day match: Cory McAbee's 2001 masterwork, The American Astronaut.

Re-up: Nothing Says Patriotism Like Screaming Like an Idiot

Recently, word from back west came that CBC Radio 2 was hosting a li'l something called the Great Canadian Song Quest, a listener-commissioned swing for the bleachers of immortalising some classically Canuck minutiae in song...

...kinda like what I did four months ago.



Now, I myself am not eligible for the GCSQ: the specific sights/smells/experiences to be enshrined in sound are first voted upon by the public, and then a handful of established Canadian musicians will write the tunes about the elected subjects. The roster of redoubtable artists include everyone from Hawksley Workman & Martha Wainwright to Sloan & Joel Plaskett, so no wonder my phone never rang.

Certainly, the Song Quest is full of noble intent: it's a bit embarrassing that the closest Canada comes to a self-celebratory anthem is the domestic-only hit "At the 100th Meridian" or, uh, "YYZ". Perhaps our famed modesty (at least compared to our noisy neighbours to the south) prohibits us from getting overly patriotic. But hell, if you want to run with the big dogs, your bark has to be as loud as theirs. If you want to compete with "I Love L.A." or "La Marseillaise", then you can't be shy about ceremonialising cultural ephemera or even bloodthirsty jingoism. If you want cops singing your song at wakes for their brothers-in-arms, you've got to aim bigger than bagels and go for heart-rending abstraction like the Pogues did with "Body of an American".

Which is why I spent two-and-a-half minutes hollering like a drunk at the Calgary Stampede about such True Northern staples as Mounties, Trudeau, and (of course) Tim Horton's. Damn the torpedoes! Show some love for the donuts!

For those of y'all interested who haven't already, you can download "A Hesitant Pride" as part of the Breeds With Anything EP for free over at SVC Records.

Kill 'Em All

That's it, I'm done with music. Searching for stimulating new sounds is the psycho-emotional equivalent of putting your life savings on a bar-b-q to see if dollar bills are still printed on flammable paper.

Witness the above: "Lust For Life" by the Sco band Girls - such deliberately slack, unskilled hobbyists that they can't be bothered to come up with a name that isn't face-punchingly dull, back-engineering the home-fi stylings of every boring white motherfucker with a 4-track from the last 20 years, all while coyly attempting to goldbrick that brass ring by blatantly lifting the hook from the most inescapable indie-bedwetter hit of the Noughties and jacking the name from one of the best-known, best-loved, and bad-ass rock songs of all fucking time.

These gluttons stand at the all-U-can-eat buffet of art history, with every giant upon whose shoulders to stand kneeling before them, and instead of giving us a crumb of even minor novelty - let alone gesamtkunstwerk - they regurgitate the most unambitiously reductive, faux-insouciant trifles, all Shits 'N' Giggles (hold the giggles).

Yeah, I'm looking at all y'all: Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, and even non-girl-name bands like Wavves, Smith Westerns, and Crocodiles. You too, Pictureplane - pilfering dance-pop as opposed to indie-schlock doesn't mean you're not a filching vulture.

Okay. Fine. Round up these smug cultural orphans, these pandering dilettantes, and lock 'em in the basement while you burn the building down.

My home and native land...

Homesickness can do strange and sometimes productive things - hence the video above, a speedball paean to my birthplace (delivered in a neanderthal manner suitable for a native Albertan). My friends who've seen the video picked up quickly that what I evidently miss the most about Canada is, naturally, Tim Horton's. Yes, it is, and to my dying breath will I insist that they make the finest donuts on god's green earth.

But personally, my favourite part of the video is the Three Stooges-style hockey punch-up. Physical comedy at its finest!

The song is from my latest EP, Breeds With Anything, which is available - no strings - for free right here. As I explained before, the record is a deliberately troglodytic affair, all red-blooded machismo and screaming invective because, y'know what, that's fun. The Melvins have proven it's possible to play that music with more than a modicum of intelligence, and who doesn't want to be David Yow for a day?

In this spirit - Foghat, motherfucker! - I offer you the mix below... with one caveat. I enjoy all of the songs, if occasionally for nothing more than the bassline (I'm looking at you, Lil' Jon), but some of them are so patently offensive I can't even bring myself to quote the lyrics (ibid). There is more than a little misogyny among the songs, and I don't want anyone thinking that I endorse that nonsense. But such is a byproduct of relentless Manliness; after all, how can a man consider himself the pinnacle of all creation without necessarily disparaging the other gender? Jay-Z almost gets away with it by putting a war-of-the-sexes spin on Chris Rock's Black People bit - almost. I'm pretty sure that N.E.R.D.'s whole catalogue is an elaborate cross-genre satire, though I wonder if that's putting too much stock in Pharrell's self-awareness. The only band that acquits itself of all charges (and at face value, no less) is NoMeansNo.

So, honest question: is this treading perilously close to the equivalent cop-out excuse for listening to a NSBM band, "Yes it's deplorable, but they rock"?

Click on the title to download.

Hard-Headed, Fuck You All

1. Action Beat - "Meat Head"
2. Mayyors - "Metro"
3. Pissed Jeans - "Human Upskirt"
4. The Jesus Lizard - "The Art of Self-Defense"
5. The Chico Magnetic Band - "My Sorrow"
6. Jay-Z - "Bitches & Sisters"
7. The Stabs - "Never Going Home"
8. Los Saicos - "(Fugitivo de) Alcatraz"
9. Snoop Dogg w/ Lil Jon & Trina - "Step Yo Game Up"
10. Reek & the Wrecks - "Stoners On Fire"
11. N.E.R.D. - "Lapdance"
12. Sir Lord Baltimore - "Helium Head (I Got a Love)"
13. Karp - "D+D Fantasy"
14. Rye Coalition - "Stairway To The Free Bird On The Way To The Smokey Water"
15. Johnny Fortune - "Dragster"
16. Ministry - "Breathe"
17. The Dildos - "Fuck Off"
18. Soundgarden - "Ty Cobb"
19. NoMeansNo - "Big Dick"

And by the way, the new Pissed Jeans album - sweet merciful crap, does it rawk. It's out August 18th. Mark it on your calender and prepare to get messy.

Four for 4th

Sorry I've been silent this week - it's been spent maddeningly clawing my way up the learning curve on some new gadgetry. Proliferating grey hairs aside, the good news is the recent caffeine-fueled screaming matches with compressors & MOTU have yielded something reasonably exciting that's just about to be let off the leash... Not to mention a fresh batch of hatorade is being cooked up.

AYMFY: awkwardly rockin' decade-old slang since '05!

In the meantime, all y'all Yankee types enjoy the pretty explosions. I can't begrudge your nation completely, far from it really, as the Constitution is (yawningly, yes) an incredible document, and the gubbamint was kind enough to allow me residence for nine years. (Seven of those legally!)









And in the interest of wishing my own people a belated joyous Canada Day...

Glue Factory

Oh, this is gonna piss K-Punk off...