Après le deluge, moi...

Recently, a good friend and I were arguing about producers. We'd long since settled our differences over notorious opinion-splitter Steve Albini; the current contention hinged on why I have overwhelming respect for Mark Ellis - nom de production Flood - and kinda none for William Orbit. After all, both are brand-name British knob-twiddlers who've put their fingerprints on albums by some of the biggest names in mainstream music over the past twenty years, particularly dance-friendly pop acts with an electronic edge. What's the rub?

Well, in a nutshell, Flood specializes in manipulating sound from a physical source, whereas Orbit typically generates them synthetically. Even if the end results sound markedly similar, the difference is fundamental. Remember what Kevin Shields said when asked why he manually cranked a parametric EQ on the guitar during the mixdown of "I Only Said" as opposed to just using a wah-wah pedal: "It's as much about the approach as the sound."

Orbit started by playing in a dance act, Bassomatic. As you can see, he worked a full raft of electronics, samplers, drum machines, and the like, but nowhere in frame is there a "real" instrument, save the human voice. In fact, the only band (in the conventional sense) that Orbit ever produced was Blur; I'll grant that 13 is probably my favourite record of theirs, but I'd chalk that more up to the wannabe-Pavement songwriting & shambolic performances than the handful of twists in the production.

Flood, on the other hand, cut his teeth capturing the sound of wood & steel reverberating in a room. For me, the ne plus ultra of Flood's discography is his work on the first six Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds records, in particular the skeletal, claustrophobic cacophony of From Her To Eternity. On this debut album (both the band's and Flood's as titled producer), there is so little post-production cluttering the mix that the whole record highlights Flood's skill at capturing ambiance & sculpting a space purely through microphone placement.

Over the course of his work with the Bad Seeds, Flood honed what would become his signature techniques. "Deanna" (from the Bad Seeds' fifth, Tender Prey) is a perfect example of that super-compressed drum sound smacked with gated reverb that's now one of his signets. Also, several guitars worth of feedback are woven with various vocal hoots & hollers to create a layered, vaguely disorienting backdrop for Cave's murder barnburner. True, Orbit does very much the same thing, in terms of lush mixes carefully constituted of zipper-locked tonal strata. But doing that with sinewave-generators & softsynths - slavishly obedient digital Lego blocks of sound - is fuckin' nothing compared to doing that with a roomful of drunks & junkies armed with instruments.

When he began working with Depeche Mode, Flood started supplementing these painstakingly frequency-stacked textures with synthetic & artificial sources, including samplers, keyboards, and especially reverb & delay effects. Despite the icy, inhuman edge this gave the music, Flood still trafficked heavily in the manipulation of sounds from a physical source. To raise the obvious example, "Personal Jesus" featured processed percussion, human breath gated & run through a vocoder, and different reverbs applied to different tracks of a doubled vocal line.

Then came the crash course in high-gloss megastar pop when Flood began engineering U2 records, beginning with The Joshua Tree. Working with sound sculptors supreme Lanois & Eno was a brilliant pairing (as far as production was concerned; let it be said I can't fuckin' stand U2) that delivered the band their biggest albums to date. Despite the bumper crop of new sounds & sonic gags that peppered Achtung Baby in particular, virtually no digital instruments were used, apparently in keeping with the band's desire to be able to faithfully reproduce the album live. The lazery sting at the beginning of "Even Better Than The Real Thing", for example, is just a guitar running through a Digitech Whammy pedal.

Flood finally took on production duties for what many consider, quite rightfully, to be a trainwreck of an album, Zooropa. Part of the mess has to do with the deliberately curtailed period that U2 gave themselves to both write & record the album (three months between legs of the Zoo TV Tour). Part of it has to do with someone with as coarse a sense of irony as Bono going through an identity crisis while desperately trying to straddle the end-of-history zeitgeist of the early '90s. "Lemon" even sounds like something that molted off of an Orbit remix of Madonna's "Justify My Love" or some such bullshit. And yet again, the difference is that Larry Mullen's really playing those drums (as opposed to using those same fuckin' "Hot Pants" and "Think" loops everyone fuckin' used) and the tremolo wash is, once more, heavily processed & effected guitar, not some canned Kurzweil organ patch.

As his oeuvre expanded to include albums with Nine Inch Nails and the Smashing Pumpkins, Flood was armed with a much broader pallette. He could apply his decade behind the boards and uncanny ear for constructing aural environments to projects that would otherwise be bare-bones and straightforward, like PJ Harvey. To many, especially in the infancy of her career, Harvey recalled Patti Smith impersonating Nick Cave (or perhaps vice versa) so it made sense for Flood to recycle a few tricks from his days with the Bad Seeds: brooding organs, stripped-down arrangements, and capturing a powerful (as opposed to technically perfect) performance. Whether it was thanks to the rising stock of the producer's imprint or because of a synergy between performer and production, lead single "Down By The Water" became PJ Harvey's biggest hit ever.

But on a handful of tracks, like "Long Snake Moan", Flood was a little too eager to keep pursuing the experiments he'd begun with NIN and the Pumpkins - unsubtle treatments such as overdubbing an identical guitar riff five times, each with a different tone of distortion; staticky drum triggers; SansAmp on everything. These songs have dated the hardest in perhaps the whole Harvey catalogue, given that Flood's signature sounds had reached saturation levels of radioplay by the mid-'90s thanks to, well, NIN and the Pumpkins. The more spartan songs (e.g. "Down By the Water", "Working For the Man", "Come On Billy") hold up well because they're well-written songs, delivered honestly, captured faithfully.

...Though perhaps not as honestly, faithfully, nor ferally as the album history has decided is PJ Harvey's unimpeachable classic, the Steve Albini-produced Rid of Me.

From there, Flood seems to have suffered from the same wanton self-referentiality that afflicted everyone who wasn't a fratboy date-rapist in the late '90s. To wit, "The Perfect Drug" (while it may actually be my favourite NIN song ever) sounds less like a single than an abstract encapsulation of everything Trent Reznor has ever done in four minutes. That Flood didn't even work on the track is a testament to how pervasive his influence had become upon big-money-backed music. Hell, check out the tone of those live drums - that's the same sound from "Deanna" back in '88!

Now a 25-year veteran of the recording industry, Flood's engineering has gained a certain transparency, his imprimatur on the records he makes less obvious (something that cannot, for better or worse, be said of either Albini or Orbit). Take the latest Sigur Ros release - I'd never have guessed this was a Flood record. All I'd have recognized is that these twee Icelanders are clearly on some kinda saccharine Animal Collective new-primitivist bullshit, and I've got no fucking time for that.

But shit, Flood didn't write that garbage, and he's made almost 10 goddamn records that I listen to and wish I'd made. Respect is due.

(Not to mention Orbit's responsible for Madonna's somehow-worse-than-the-original rendition of "American Pie". That's burning your union card, pal. No forgiveness.)

A New Coat of Paint On An Old Perversion

Nestled within the flesh of Christopher Weingarten's virtuosic rant on the decline of music criticism, a particularly chewy bit of gristle was the truth - accept it, however grudgingly! - that several-thousand-word homilies aren't necessary to show appropriate enthusiasm for music/film/literature/[insert cultural commodity]. A skillful wordsmith can indeed convince someone to seek out (or avoid) a work of art in a mere 140 characters.

If career writers & critics are legitimately fearing for their survival amongst the twit-plague, then what the fuck are the rest of us hobbyists and amateurs doing wasting our time clacking away all this self-indulgent twaddle? In a world where people can pass judgment on Shaquille O'Neal's choice of breakfast as he reports on the masticatory process in real-time, is there any attention left for lengthy diatribes that pass their expiration date while being written?

Life is what happens while you're blogging about it, so I accept that a number of posts I've been working on are already irredeemably irrelevant. For example, I'm going to follow up Ads Without Products' withering "K-Punk's New Clothes" piece, but since that fracas is already (gasp!) several weeks old, I doubt anyone will even bother reading it. So it goes.

Similarly, I'd begun crafting a article inspired by another of AWP's posts - about the libidinal link between sex and violence, specifically when the two are wrapped in a sweaty embrace with global Big Finance - back in fucking October of last year. Then a record, the holidays, moving across the planet and re-rooting intervened, so here we are a full nine months after the fact. Mooted! In the interest of keeping your interest, I'm including two topical playlists I made for a mix-tape swap this past spring; click on the titles below to download. And not wanting to let any labour (however late) go to waste, here's what I was writing at the time...

Talking about the globalisploitation flick Boarding Gate, AWP wrote:

The first-thought thing to say about films like this, that wrap financial activity in sex and violence, is that they are allegories of the violence that works off-stage in the real world to keep the business running. A simple furniture import-export business is really a front for murder-for-hire and heroin dealing etc etc etc. ...And every sexual act is tinged with the aftertaste of violence and ill-gotten gains.

Which, to be sure, is a romantic exaggeration. Despite whatever mirages may manifest in the mirror, I doubt very many hedge fund managers actually sustain the violent portents of of Mr. Blonde while nailing guileful femme fatales like Asia Argento. "Somehow," AWP wrote, "the world wants investment banking to be a task populated by the feral, the oversexed, the trigger-pullers. But it is not."

But not for lack of trying! If the world of cut-throat young Turks swashbuckling across the seas of int'l finance is a mere tenth as amoral, decadent, and libidinally propelled as films like Wall Street, Boiler Room, 25th Hour, Glengarry Glen Ross, or American Psycho would have us believe... then the keys to the kingdom have been handed to some of the most debased sociopaths ever to roam the earth. This is in keeping with the stories I've heard from folks who've worked within any proximity to a stock exchange. One friend, who used to work at a record store in the basement of the TSX, lost track of the number of times he'd walked into a stairwell or bathroom to find brokers bumping blow or speed, engaged in an act of self-love, or indeed getting each other off. (The gender of either party was of secondary importance to frictional expertise. How socially progressive of them!)

And science supports this view of hormonally-imbalanced psychos snorting lines off the back of our portfolio: Harvard researchers found a literal link between men with elevated levels of testosterone and men who'd willfully gamble away money on a coin toss, enthralled by the sheer fuckoffness of chance. The deeply disturbing next step is to consider, in tandem, that testosterone insufficiently counterbalanced by serotonin is a biochemical hallmark of serial killers. Granted, most notorious murderers are too emotionally unstable to play the clean-cut professional as well as Ted Bundy, but the neurology suggests that a monster like Patrick Bateman is less unimaginable than inevitable.

A lot of talk about the (now obviously & woefully ineffective) bailout has argued that it amounts to a bloodless coup by a fraternity of financial oligarchs. The fatted calf being sacrificed on the economic altar isn't merely taxpayers' money, but democracy itself. The difference between state-corporatism (fascism) & state-capitalism (despotic "communism") and contemporary America is that the locus of the masses' libido is not Dear Leader, but the "free-market" economy. As David Sitora wrote:

We have become a country that has one national religion: presidentialism. That's the religion that says the president is an all-powerful deity - and the Oval Office is a position that is the only one that matters. That this outlook is fundamentally undemocratic and offensive to the principles of our Founding Fathers seems completely forgotten. We have embraced czarism with the zeal of cult worshipers - and now this zeal has global economic forces at its back.

We are trying to economically compete with anti-democratic forces that can make financial decisions without any public input at all. As we saw with the debate over the bailout bill, the transnational corporate elite tell us our democracy and its careful deliberations are hurting our ability to make quick decisions in this global market - and therefore that democracy must be subverted to the will of capitalism.

A noted war criminal once intoned that "power is the greatest aphrodisiac." Hideous though it may be to contemplate, this appears to be vomit-inducingly true - especially when expressed via one degree of displacement through cash-grabs, imperial incursions, sexual debasement, or some obscene confluence of any of the above. No wonder Republican & Tory sex scandals are always the most titillating.

Blood/Lust

1. Black Flag - "Slip It In"
2. The Birthday Party - "Fears of Gun"
3. Jane's Addiction - "Ted... Just Admit It"
4. The Billy Nayer Show - "Billy's"
5. Melvins - "Boris"
6. Messer Chups - "I'm Psycho Bitch"
7. Dudley Nightshade - "All the Colours of the Dark" (Instrumental)
8. Sex - "I Had to Rape Her"
9. Lil Wayne - "Mrs. Officer"
10. Brainbombs - "Lipstick On My Dick"
11. Flying Lotus - "SexSlaveShip"
12. Oxbow - "Stallkicker"
13. David Lynch & John Neff - "Go Get Some"
14. Sonic Youth - "Lights Out"

Songs the Recession Taught Us

1. The Flying Lizards - "Money (That's What I Want)"
2. Madlib - "Pyramids (Change)"
3. The Steve Miller Band - "Take the Money and Run"
4. Mos Def - "Fake Bonanza"
5. Guns 'N' Roses - "Double-Talkin' Jive"
6. Ennio Morricone - "Money Orgy"
7. Tricky - "Money Greedy"
8. The Fall - "Middle Class Revolt!"
9. Hilton Sutton - "I Will Destroy Them Economically"
10. Soul Coughing - "Collapse"
11. The Birthday Party - "Guilt Parade"
12. The Jesus Lizard - "Countless Backs of Sad Losers"
13. Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention - "Can't Afford No Shoes"
14. Enzo Scoppa - "Recesso"
15. Harvey Milk - "A Maelstrom of Bad Decisions"
16. Johnny Greenwood - "Future Markets"
17. Wu-Tang Clan - "C.R.E.A.M."
18. Pissed Jeans - "I've Still Got You (Ice Cream)"

Arise, Inner Redneck!

During my tenure in Hamburg, I had two friends with whom I'd often debate dance culture - and when I say "debate", I'm not talking about gauging whether minimal's hit a wall. I'm talking about deciding if the whole enterprise is kinda jive... which, to be fair, was only my position and is an overstatement thereof. Honestly, we were just interested in picking each other's brains. They're two footloose British lads to whom raving is a birthright; I come from the zen-like oblivion of western Canada, where they filmed Unforgiven and mulleted alcoholics still cruise around with Iron Maiden in the cassette deck of their Chevy Novas. Marathon dance sessions set to a futurist throb and epilepsy-inducing light shows weren't part of the static when I was growing up; complementarily, neither of them had ever watched a band cover ZZ Top on a stage wreathed in chicken wire.

It's not that we don't get along - quite the contrary. We shared many of our favourite directors, writers, and comedians, and are all within an easy arm's-length of one another along the political spectrum. The degree to which we are generally alike makes our musical differences all the more baffling. For example, I think DJs rank just below Reno lounge singers in artistic bona fides, while they think dick-swinging riff-rock like Sir Lord Baltimore is music by & for higher simians only. And on an abstract level, we understand each other. We can read each other's coordinates on the cultural map, but we're still standing on opposite sides of an unbridgeable chasm. I was dumbstruck whenever they'd start bobbing reflexively to any repetitive rhythm, while they refused to believe that I (as someone who doesn't drink beer, uses polysyllabic words casually, and enjoys the films of Fellini & Wenders) am sincerely a sucker for the most meat-headed riffery and have a vaguely anti-intellectual hair-trigger bully reflex.

Well, refuse to believe if you like, friends, but I now offer unto you living proof of all my basest instincts: Breeds With Anything, a brand-new EP available for immediate download totally free, courtesy of the fine folks over at SVC Records.

Y'see, in the midst of writing & recording my next record, I began to amass hooks & lyrical snippets that fell outside the intended aesthetic aegis of the album. What these scraps had in common with each other, though, was a certain midwestern-male-aggro pigfuck musk - and as stray riffs, they weren't half-bad. So rather than consign them to moulder in my closet, I culled the best bits & reconstructed them into this six-song self-exorcism of my inner redneck.

(Perhaps it bears repeating: this does not constitute a new artistic trajectory. This is a detour into the territory occupied by Jon Spencer & Alex Chilton that I've always wanted, but never had an opportunity, to visit.)

So cancel your manicure, throw on an old flannel shirt, grow a moustache, and rock the fuck out. And yes, I'm serious, it's free.

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...

Botox-addled Extraterrestrial Approximation of White Woman Dead

Whoops! Wrong pic. Just a sec...

Damn! Sorry, I know I've got it around here somewhere...

Oh, fuck it.

Meanwhile, Iran is on the precipice of a revolution, eight people died in Iraq on Thursday, Kim Jong-Il is still totally batshit, and China arrested Liu Xiaobo. Until that zombie is poppin' and lockin' on my street, there are bigger fish to fry.

But with the various rumours or doctors, criminals investigations, and chronic addiction to synthetic opiods, I'm calling it right now: assisted suicide. Any takers?

One More Spin Around the Sun

Now that Facebook is whupping its ass, MySpace is returning to its roots as a spam generator: the front page is an obnoxious overlay of banner ads that almost make Shibuya look modest, with gurning pseudolebrities tying products into a Moebius-like infotainment bow. Recently, there was an ad informing me that the chick from the Harry Potter movies is the "new face of Burberry" - which I thought was specific pattern of tartan and shows how much I know about fashion.

Anyway, the point is that I glanced at the pic, glanced again, and thought, "Christ, she's actually kind of a knockout." I then smacked myself across the face because she's the chick from the Harry Potter movies. Gah! Graying though my hair may be, I'm far too bloody young to be an ODB yet. Hell, I'm not even close to old enough to be her father - not even her uncle. Some cold comfort came from a Google search, which confirmed that she is (in the most crass of terms) "legal" and, besides, considering a 19-year-old walking study in cosmetic construction & public-image topiary attractive is hardly perverse.

Still... what with the event of a new Potter film semi-annually for the past decade, the girl's grown up in public. Consequently, my mental image of her is of a blurry pan-adolescent, at once every age between 10 and 20 and all the more grotesque as a result. But Christ, if it's that confusing for me, I can't fathom how confusing it is for her.

One of my sisters told me she always thinks of me as 23, even though she's past that herself. Then on the other hand, I've been nicknamed The Old Man by friends and foes alike since high school. This mantle I wear rather comfortably, if only because I haven't felt like a child (or even a kid) since I could swear in front of my parents without reprimand. Living now in Tokyo does nothing to dissuade viewing myself as a premature curmudgeon: dermatologically gifted as they are, Japanese people invariably look ten years younger than their age, which leads them to assume comparatively that I'm somewhere between 35 and 45 years old.

That said, I sure as shit am not an adult. I'm not even a grown-up. My C.V. would barely be impressive if I were just out of university; what honed skills I do possess are better suited to busking than gainful employment; I'm shackled by no long-term commitments, neither financial, legal, nor logistical. For all I've seen, done, said, and eaten, I still feel very much the way I did when I first struck out on my own in my eighteenth year - though now, my teeth are a bit worse and I can grow a proper moustache.

As it should be, I suppose. Until I've earned a wealth of tried-and-true wisdom and I can beatifically recline and drop knowledge on whoever will listen to an old man, I'm perfectly happy just being... some guy. So my career path looks more like a gravel road to nowhere than a driveway alongside a picket fence - you know what they say about the road less traveled. For most of my life, I'd suspected that much of the métier of adulthood was amassing lots o' needlessly expensive accoutrement & shiny crap, and that the "stoic resolve" of adults was largely a head-in-the-sand disavowal of the panic realized by, well, being alive.

The same sister who imagines me permanently at 23 once made the distinction between most grown-ups - that is, taller, fatter, hairier children with drinking problems - and Real Adults. There are indeed some who carry with themselves a veteran stillness or wizened grit, who seemingly sprang from the womb a fully-formed 40-year-old, balding or with nicotine-stained teeth. These are the people, my sister said, whose seasoned, weathered voice you'd want to explain what shit is hitting which fan and when; whose steady hand you'd trust to chart a course through choppy waters. My sister's archetypal Real Adult was the Don of Canadian broadcast journalism, Peter Mansbridge. My personal exemplar would be someone closer to Tom Waits.

I'd like to think I possess at least some small measure of such worldly acumen and certitude of self. But as I said, for now I'm happy knowing that everyone is basically winging it every day of their existence. Perhaps the highest-karat kernel of knowledge I receive from my parents was when I, at 14 and upset over something undoubtedly more trivial than I could tell, asked my mother if "it ever gets any easier." Without a moment's hesitation and not one hint of melancholy, she said, "No." She didn't even look up from the sink as she said it.

What a lot of drama & worry that one word has saved me. Here's to another year on planet earth.

What Lessons Not To Learn From Iran

Between the increasing horror in the streets and the clampdown on broadcast media, trying to make heads or tails of the post-"election" chaos in Iran is no mean feat. Needless to say, there've been a lot of bunk conclusions drawn and errant dots connected, so let's take a moment to cut the crap out of the discourse.

Myth: Islam and Democracy are incompatible

This is an understandable fear, given that the line in the sand appears to pit democracy squarely against conservative Shi'ites. Moussavi himself has expressed concern that his nation's faith may be fundamentally antipathetic to democracy. Obviously, Islam is not the enemy of democracy: conservative Islam is the enemy of democracy, much in the same way that any intransigent orthodoxy is the enemy of democracy. No matter which monotheistic mania, putting anyone with an unshakable belief in a supreme being in charge of a country is a bad bloody idea, to which the United States is a living testament. Let's also not forget how prominent strident nationalism is amongst Ahmadinejad's rhetoric and supporters. Nationalism, fascism, capitalism (including state capitalism), religious fundamentalism - pick your -ism and odds are it ain't particularly nonsectarian.

Bad Idea: Overthrow the Iranian gov't

Uh, yeah, well - we did that already, remember? And look what it got us last time: twenty-six years of a garish & irresponsible puppet dictator who was dramatically deposed by the original Mr. Fire-And-Brimstone-Upon-America, Ayatollah Khomeini, whose ascent readied the US (to one extent or another) for the rise of Khomeini's Occidental doppelganger Ronald Reagan (and we know how that worked out). Leaving the fate of Iran in the hands of its own people - whether they're clutching ballots or Molotov cocktails - at least allows the country a chance of escaping either an appointed despot or clerical strongman.

Lousy Analogy: Iranians and Republicans in a photo finish at the Oppression Olympics

Are we fucking joking. Speaking of learning the wrong lesson, apparently Republicans have decided that they lost the last election not because they're cryptofascistic spooks, but because they aren't millenarian/imperialist/batshit enough: aside from attempting to resurrect the ol' Cold War standby of Socialist boogeyman and whipping neo-Nazis into a bloodlustful froth, the Republicans are comparing their minority status to being disenfranchised, clubbed, tear-gassed, and shot by Ahmadinejad's thugs. Jon Stewart extended the analogy to its logical conclusion:

And I wonder if the lack of choice in the congressional cafeteria isn't just a little bit like Auschwitz.

But hey, to be fair, perhaps this is actually a kind of political performance art, a metapolitically ironic gesture on the part of the Republicans that manages to both undermine a Democratically elected leader at home, while bolstering a tyrannical theocracy abroad. That'd be heavy, bro.

Glue Factory

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

This is for my DC people...

Who's the responsible citizenry fighting for the survival of their democracy now, bitches?

Bush steals an election (or two):

Ahmadinejad steals an election:

Non-Sequitorial Postscript: Since when did Qaddafi start dressing himself as the missing link between Michael Jackson and Prince? Or is he just taking a cue from *Godwin Alert!* and attempting to make himself more likeable by patterning his appearance after one of the leading stars of the day - in this case, Kanye West?