Adieu to the Bon Jack

A sad day for Canada as the country loses its finest politician & a genuinely decent human being aside: rest in peace, Jack Layton.

Meanwhile, Muammar Gaddafi: still not fucking dead. Where indeed is the justice in this cockamamie punchline of a world.

Hiding In Plane Sight

The second I go off the grid, several new holes erupt in civilization's creaky, buckled hull. A delusional white supremacist single-handedly shell-shocks Norway; England explodes; and Malawi - my parents' current place of residence - takes a big, bloody stride towards becoming yet another penny-ante despotism. And to think my greatest personal concern for the past three weeks has been a single sickly bat fluttering about the rafters of a drafty cabin in rural Nova Scotia.

I'm going to have to work overtime upon my return to Tokyo to tap out appropriate responses to all of the above (not to mention my recent take-down of John Maus has unexpected renewed relevance and could benefit from further examination). For now, though, it's 1:14am in Vancouver and my wife is pleading with me to turn out the lights, so I'll leave you with an ornery screed I sent a friend from within the grey bowels of the San Francisco airport...

Well, instead of an 8-hour layover in your fair local airport, our inbound flight was 3 hours late and consequently we're stuck in the terminal without any open amenities or services and - because this is fucking California - nowhere to smoke. Fer chrissakes, if I could either smoke or get a cup of coffee, I wouldn't be one wry comment away from a Chris Benoit-class air-rage episode.

At least there's free wi-fi, so I thought I'd wax insomniac a bit about the flight into San Francisco tonight. Good god, it was sold-out economy cabin of living clichés. You'd couldn't have written a harder-stereotyped cross-section of the Bay Area populace. Towards the front of the cabin was a twentysomething black dude reppin' Oakland a bit too hard; also, the long-suffering wife of some Silicon Valley luminary was struggling to corral a newborn & a vaguely bratty toddler. (How do I know she was married to a tech-head? Who else would put an iPod on her infant, an iPad in the hands of a 4-year-old, and not stop talking ever on her fucking iPhone?) In front of me where two late-'30s first-time parents percolating with excessive pride in their bulge-eyed free-range baby which made disturbingly animalistic noises and was mostly charming until he shat himself with an hour left in the flight.

I was sat next to a young Russian blonde who was reading a book titled Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? and, despite being on the chapter about "Managing Social Distance", totally blanked me the whole flight. She had a mole like an anti-melanoma PSA behind her right shoulder. Two rows behind were a couple who weren't really a couple, having just met each other in the departure lounge, and broadcast the arc of their burgeoning flirt-friendship in loud, smug conversation. She actually hissed at the TV screens during the welcome message from United's new CEO, before going on at length about (despite "not really being into nationalism") responsibly representing her country & her gender during her Peace Corps stint in southern Ghana. He reciprocated with anecdotes of his time in Beijing. He was wearing these glasses. By the time the plane had landed, the two had moved on to lovingly (if critically) describing their parents and talking about their "really, like, totally healthy" relationship with their mother's French lesbian partner.

Currently sat amongst a planeful of furious passengers awaiting their connection to Dallas-Ft. Worth. I'm going in search of coffee somewhere in this Dantean mezzanine.

In Collusion With Virgin Trains

Everyone laughs at that perennially-quoted quip from The Big Lebowski - you know the one, The Dude's weary reprimand that "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole." Everyone laughs. But a few among us wish Walter would've shot back at Lebowski: "Yeah? So?"

A happy-49th tip of my hat to six-string strangler, sound engineer, and celebrated food blogger Steve Albini, a man whose initials might as well be embroidered on my own bag of tricks. May cultural politesse continue to tremble in his presence.

I'm In a Good Mood Today

How good? This good.

Speaking of musicians who got sleeve-tattoos of their influences yet were "ferociously and utterly contemporary"...

Looking For a Spectrum Within a Singularity

Since Ariel Pink loudly shat himself onstage earlier this year, the hipoisie have turned their attention to his former collaborator (and philosophy prof - bonus points!) John Maus. It came as no surprise that Pitchfork yawped and I yawned at Maus' latest release for more or less the same reasons: coyly blurring the borders between "Top 40 cheese [and] ironic cool"; using his academic stature to silhouette otherwise vague & swampy songwriting; and an album title that sounds like a try-hard undergrad thesis that would prompt derisive laughter before being suffocated in red ink.

Like so many of his '80s-pop-pilfering peers, Maus' reviews are peppered with allusions - which is unavoidable, given how openly derivative Maus' music is. For example, both the song & video for his "Believer" single are basically Spectrum's "How You Satisfy Me" if Pete Kember had handed vocal duties off to Ian McCulloch. But as Adam Harper has pointed out, Maus is not only apologetic but proud of resurrecting bygone sounds:

I don't see this as a returning, I see this as a palette that we have to work with. These sounds are part of the vernacular. I resist this idea that we somehow move on to 'better' sounds. It's not about nostalgia or some kind of remembering, at least not consciously for me; it's what the work necessitates.

...I think it's supremely contemporary to use these so called 'nostalgic' effects, in the sense of the contemporary being out of joint with the moment in some way.

Which begs the question of when the contemporary has been anything other than "out of joint." This is one of problems I have with the hauntology "movement" (I suppose "stasis" would be a more appropriate term): it's indistinguishable from stock post-modernism in its cherry-picked anachronism, and suggests that the march of history was, until recently, a linear narrative untroubled by cataclysm, disruption, sudden exits, and unexpected entrances. Time is more wrinkled than Rupert Murdoch's brow; history is a slapdash patchwork of unmatched epochs; the contemporary has always been out of joint. The difference is that now we've the time, access, and materials to retreat from the future's shock-&-awe into the warm embrace of nostalgia.

But I agree wholeheartedly that we don't necessarily "move on to 'better' sounds" and that the past bequeaths artifacts & ideas that "warrant exploration right now, here, today." But Maus is being too generous in describing '80s synth-pop as a "palette." Imagining an Alesis drum machine & Yamaha DX-7 constitute a "palette" is as coarse and reductive as remembering the 1950s as America's Golden Age while conveniently forgetting segregation, patriarchy, the Korean War, and McCarthyism. It's not a palette, it's a colour.

If Maus and others wished to be heard as anything other than nostalgic tribute acts, they'll have to far less conservative in their pillage of the past. There have been musicians (e.g. Public Enemy or Amon Tobin) whose music has been constructed solely of samples, of existent material, of second-hand semiotics, yet has sounded ferociously and utterly contemporary. This is because they imposed no limits upon their source material: if it sounded good, it was fair game. Panning for gold across every decade and genre, then melting it down into a single white-hot mass - that is what made their music so unmistakably immediate: a total implosion of temporality. However, once too much attention or emphasis is put upon any particular source of antiquated inspiration, the trap of retro-referentiality has sunken its teeth into you.

Man, I'd better post something about music I enjoy soon, otherwise everyone's going to think my sole preoccupation is shitting on other people's enthusiasm.

Happy Something Something

I know there's some epochal event being celebrated today... but for the life of me I can't remember what it is. The Bolshevik murder of Tsar Nicholas II?

No, that's not right. The opening of the Tuskeegee Institute? The birth of the Crab Nebula? The ascension of the last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire?

Oh! Silly me, how could I possibly have been so mistaken. Happy 201st Anniversary of the French Occupation of Amsterdam, everyone! Cassez-vous, the Dutch!

Phoning It In

The overwrought pageantry that passes for political punditry is so hackneyed & calculated, it's a wonder anyone pretends to be surprised anymore. Everyone so desperately admires & awaits a Howard Beale or Barry Champlain moment, forgetting (or ignoring) how expertly stage-managed & corralled by corporate interests those fictional "mavericks" were. Thus audience & broadcaster alike have managed to turn yet another non-event - Glenn Beck's exit from the Fox News network - into frothing political scopophilia.

Personally, I could give a fuck, not the least because I live outside America and have no TV or radio. More importantly, Beck himself is not special: his is a role to be filled by whatever appropriately attention-hungry ex-cokehead lunges hardest towards the microphone. But, as I explained last month in an e-mail to a friend, I'd had an appalling premonition about Beck's next step:

Beck can get the fuck off the air already. The only thing I'm worried about now is that, for his next act, he'll undergo some histrionic "crisis of faith" in the conservative movement and refashion himself into a pseudo-libertarian leftist and everyone will eat that shit right up. Don't think it can't happen! Ariana Huffington pulled off that stunt with startling efficacy (though I believe she's far more sincere than Beck has ever been).

But surely such a mawkish turn would be so transparent & tacky, no one would fall for it, right? I mean, come on. Yet, yet, yet, as I click across to Crooks & Liars this morning, what do I see atop the front page?

Beck on Republicans: 'I hate them'

Well, stomp on frogs 'n' shove a crowbar up mah nose! Who'da fucking thunk it. As good forgive-and-forget liberals, we should presently, if prudently, embrace the Fox News rodeo clown, not only for his dubious disillusionment with both mainstream political parties, but because Beck is (now) solidly against extraordinary rendition:

"Ghost planes - we're picking people up in the middle of the night. We're saying talk to us or we're going to drop you off over in Egypt. That's insane... We don't stand for anything."

Beck is unconvinced of the efficacy of state-sponsored kidnapping & torture (for which legal repercussions have just been forever swept off the table). Welcome to the club, buddy! Everyone against zapping civilians' scrotii with car batteries gets a gold star! If you disapprove of kidnapping, you get a cookie! How about this: as long as we're doling out special credit for shit you're supposed to do, can I get extra sprinkles on my sundae given that I've resisted the temptation to chainsaw off my neighbour's head & fuck his wife?

Just One More Thing...

Generally, I'm suspicious of people who are diligent in cataloging the birthdays & deaths of the better-known among us. It betrays an insipid nostalgia and a cloying, desperate hope that they themselves will one day be remembered fondly & eulogized flatteringly. Death: get over it, eh? But at the risk of hypocrisy, I can't allow this to slip by unnoticed...

Fare thee well, Peter Falk. I can't convey with any dignity or elegance how much I genuinely fucking love Columbo. I've not been so mortified since Patrick McGoohan's passing.

Solitaire With a Deck of Fifty-One

Hey, why haven't you been writing anything on your blog recently?

Uh... wait, you actually read my blog?

Well, yeah, it was kinda interesting back during that whole earthquake/tsunami clusterfuckalypse. Not to mention you're one of the top hits on Google searches for "I Hate Animal Collective", "lonesome cosmonaut", and "Thijs Van Leer".* But you've more or less vanished recently, what's up?

Well, I've been busy. Most of May was recording, then it was mixing, and now it's back to gigging. I'm spending my birthday playing some nicotine-tarred, beer-stank basement outside an American military base. Which has a certain unshaven charm to it, but I'd rather just stay at home, eat some cake, and listen to this Harmonia record my wife got me. Then play it backwards to see if there's any discernable dissemblance.

That's your excuse? Two months of near total silence because you're playing with microphones and compressors? Dude, Steve motherfuckin' Albini has engineered over a thousand records and he still finds time for a food blog.

Yeah, well, that's why he's Steve Albini and I'm not. Besides, when it came time to mix my own band's album, no one had a clue what they wanted it to sound like - roomy & loose? Cold & claustrophobic? Aspirationally big? It was a long road with many detours and much backtracking.

Why not write about the whole process of making an album then?

No. Certainly not before the album's actually out. The only thing duller than specialized tech-talk is when there isn't even any music to supplement the conversation.

So that's really it, you've just been locked indoors de-essing vocals and tweaking spring reverb for six weeks?

And look how stir-crazy it's made me: I've started thinking in duologue with some phantasmic other! But recently, I also finished reading a couple of books about the internet's oppressive demand for participation and its dilution of politics. Hell, Adam Curtis just aired a new documentary series about that very subject.

That was pretty good. Except for the second episode, it lacked the narrative cohesion of his earlier work, but they can't all be home runs.

Ain't that the truth.

So you've been a bit put off of self-important polemics & pop-cultural diatribes?

I mean, how much can I really contribute to the juvenile snickering or Malcolm Tuckerish political spinning of Weinergate?

I will, however, say this about last week's riot in Vancouver: watching the chaos unfurl on live TV, it was striking that news anchors repeatedly referred to the drunken miscreants as "protestors". Protesting what? That Canucks goalie Roberto Luongo played with all the skill of three pool noodles roped together? I don't know if it was an unfortunate tongue-slip or deliberate semiotic sculpture, but either way, it's disturbing to see that "protest" being impoverished as a legitimate tool of political struggle by directly associating the word with boozy troglodytes burning cars and smashing storefronts.

Sure enough, slanderous suggestions that the chaos was in fact an opportunist operation by the Black Bloc have proven completely false: it was the work of a bunch of beer-soaked bourgeois kids who were looking for an excuse to explode.

It's interesting to see the role social media played in the riot: on one hand, the mere presence of hundreds of gawkers wielding iPhone cameras must have egged on the more ambitiously destructive delinquents; on the other, the excess of close-range documentation did away with the anonymity of the crowd, effectively unmasking & shaming those who did the most damage. Do you think-

Look, that's a topic that absolutely merits more discussion, but I've gotta pack my gear for the gig tonight.

Okay, go on then. Well, come back soon and keep writing. If nothing else, you need the mental exercise if you're spending so much time locked indoors away from summer's swelter. Oh, and happy birthday!

Thanks.

* - I'm not making this up.

Not All Thoughts Turn To Words

Curious seekers that they are, musicians' creative intentions often bleed into other idioms, and then the trouble starts. Even backed by the full might of the publicity machine, few musicians are admired for their literary prowess, thespian skill, or political acumen. For every Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson, or Peter Garrett, there's a thousand Nikki Sixxes, Mariah Careys, or Bonos. The sense of entitlement that follows massive success in a specific field is the most obvious motivation for these multimedia misadventures, but it's also partially a problem of genre: rock & pop are deliberately simplistic & populist forms that often discourage experimentation or analysis. The purposeful, studious effort required to excel in any art form is likely onerous to anyone who just wants to rock.

Sometimes it works the other way: skills cultivated within a certain musical style translate well into other milieus. It's no surprise that as skilled a lyricist as Jay-Z is a decent author & thoughtful commentator; similarly, since hip-hop is all about embodying a persona, MCs often make far more convincing actors (e.g. Ice Cube, Mos Def) than musicians of other genres (e.g. Jack White, Jon Bon Jovi, Sting, etc) - though I imagine anyone who saw Get Rich Or Die Trying or How High would beg to differ.

It may be expecting too much for successful musicians to be skilled in other artistic forms. It's a reasonable assumption that someone chooses a specific mode of communication because it comes the most naturally to them. As the art most directly related to pure sensation, music is an expression of the inarticulable. Perhaps that's why the majority of musicians flex all the verbal dexterity & rapier wit of Koko the gorilla after chugging a handle of cheap Vodka.

I'd prefer artists were at least as lucid as their audience in discussing their art. Unfortunately, there's little in a musician's quotidian routine that would necessarily encourage aesthetic, philosophical, or political inquiry. The internet is an infinitely resonant echo chamber, packed with pop-cultural detritus, from which any musician can hand-pick a grab-bag of references & aesthetic allusions without having to confront said references' original context. Consequently, Lady Gaga can name-drop Andy Warhol & Nietzsche all she likes, but her "smartest" song is barely equivalent to forebear David Bowie's dumbest.

More importantly, the current means of recording have placed an undue emphasis upon the production - as opposed to the composition - of music. As digital technology has made world-class recording tools accessible to the masses, professional recording studios with veteran engineers have become frivolous luxury. So musicians must now craft their own sound-worlds from scratch, unaided, even if they've never so much as plugged in a microphone before. The fashion in which their music is captured & represented is arguably of greater concern than even songwriting.

This, unfortunately, leads to amateurish & underachieving performances of amateurish & underachieving tunes, because it's the only music that withstands amateurish & underachieving recordings. The post-JAMC lo-fi rock 'n' roll revival has been fueled by the fact that it's the only full-band sub-genre that doesn't sound like shit recorded one track at a time using only an SM57. I'd also argue the availability & ease of sequencing & sampling software like Fruity Loops has inculcated the moronic anti-lyricism so prevalent in contemporary hip-hop. Lo-fi, once an obstacle to be surmounted, has become a nostalgic aesthetic retreat for the musically unambitious.

This isn't to say that seasoned engineers make excellent musical directors. Gear-heads are notoriously coarse in their appreciation of aesthetics, since they can find something equally praise-worthy in either Pet Sounds (nice doubling of the piano & accordian!) or Linkin Park (excellent gating on the guitars!). But the musician-engineer relationship provided a valuable & effective division of labour: the musicians were left to focus on their artistic vision, unperturbed by technical considerations, and engineers employed their scientific savvy to faithfully capture & frame the musicians' sound-world.

Obviously, much of the best music is a synthesis songwriting and production, but it's almost never the result of vague intuition or ham-fisted fuckin' around. Those leading lights equally famed for their musical and technical prowess - Quincy Jones, Brian Eno, Steve Albini - began as musicians and gradually developed their own production styles by being inquisitive, assimilating experience, and spending a lot of time in studios. It's precisely because of their intellectual curiosity that polymaths not only craft some of the most interesting music, but are more engaging in discussion. Intellectual laziness breeds artistic laziness, which in turn spawns boring albums and bad interviews.