I've foolishly not written about my very intense love for the first three songs off Disfear's "Live The Storm." Now, as I've overplayed two of the three songs, I feel like I should give at least a nod to how completely caught up I am in this business. Disfear sounds a lot like Tragedy if Tragedy sounded a bit more like Motorhead. Nearly every track is distorted to the point that the riffs take on an atmospheric feeling - any subtleties in the picking or chord structure are completely lost. But the intensity is entertaining, nearly pornographic, and the band never indicates that it sees any reason to not pummel its way through another three minute thrash song. In a weird way, the purity of Disfear's sound, its total commitment to this aggressive chaos, is beautiful. So... I've been listening to this shit a lot.

"Deadweight"

I wrote about the Gaslight Anthem a while back and I included a link to their relatively low budget video for "I'da Called You Woody, Joe." The song is a touching and fitting tribute to the late Joe Strummer. Brian Fallon's weathered vocals have this hauntingly beautiful and forlorn quality about them and they sound like how a lonely night feels. When his subject matter is at all compelling, it's hard for me not to feel some emotional connection. It was especially easy with a song about a musical hero.

Late Night Wallflower posted a video for "The '59 Sound," the title track off the new Gaslight Anthem album, earlier today. I think the album, the band's sophomore effort, is noticeably sadder than their successful debut, which is an interesting progression for a band to follow. It somehow makes the melancholy seem more sincere and not something easily cured by recognition. The album suffers from the same song writing limitations displayed throughout their catalogue, but the group provides more variation this time around and I think the Bad Religion defense applies here: if the formula works, don't change it. That being, some of the group's new highlights are as masterfully crafted and breathtakingly sweet and wounded as any song in the genre.

I'm especially excited about this album but it's too new for me to really articulate it. The problem is, I like it too much to not talk about it. Thus, this blurb will have to do.

Oh well.

Madlib remixed my favorite rap album in forever: Madvilliany (only Ghostface's Pretty Toney Album comes close). It's called Madvilliany 2: The Madlib Remix and it's blowing up the blogs, so I guess I'll jump on the bandwagon. You can download it for 9.99 here. Madlib took the vocals from the original (spit hot like fire by MF Doom) and completely redid the tracks.

This is from the original album (remix is too fresh for videos)


And if that isn't enough of that kind of music (how do you describe this stuff?) check out Oh No's 2007 slept on classic Dr. No's Oxperiment. It came out around the same time as his brother Madlib's (see the connections here, the go deep) Beat Konducta Vol 3-4: Beat Konducta in India, which all about exploring Indian music. Here, Oh No digs through crates full of Mediterainian sounds from Turkey, Lebanon, Greece, and India. None of the 28 tracks hit the two minute mark, so a sample is hard to come by.

Hi Everyone,

Josh asked me to start contributing mixes because I listen to a lot of electronic music that may not receive too much exposure on this blog. Here's a link to the first installment:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/d5nwg0

Tracklist:
1. Wayfarer - Kavinsky
2. Bootstrap - Pluxus
3. I Thought Inside Out - Chris Lake vs. Deadmau5
4. Rez - Underworld
5. H.I.A - Chemical Brothers
6. Good Things End - The Field
7. Feuerland - Justus Kohncke
8. Dummolator - Ricardo Villalobos

These tracks consist of some electro-house, techno, and minimal techno.

While I really like all these tracks, I want everyone to pay special attention to The Field. He is a Swedish minimal techno producer signed to Kompakt, an influential German label. He recently released an LP entitled "From Here We Go Sublime," and I've been listening to it non-stop. His production style takes samples and sounds that would otherwise seem ordinary and recontextualizes them, making them almost overwhelming. The entire LP is beautiful, and I'm sure you'll see more of him in my future mixes.

I haven't been doing the DJ thing for too long, so excuse a couple of sloppy beat-mixes on there.

I really like the singing voice. I really like the voice in general. But I also really like instruments and I really like a lack of a text in music. So I'm often dismayed by the lack of women who don't sing. I listen to a lot of jazz, and it's still predominantly played and written by men. "Pop" music gets a pass because the vocal is the most consistent part of, so pretty much everyone sings, male or female. Though even in pop music, most of the nonsinging women in rock bands are bass players. Where are the women thrashers and tom smashers?



"Classical" music has no lack of female nonsingers. From my unscientific survey of the soloists I've seen in my life, women and men seem about evenly split. But I want more female jazz players.

I was delighted to find 12 Songs by Jenny Scheinman in my collection. I must have read a review sometime and picked up the record but somehow never listened to it. I was browsing my collection and found it late last night, put it in, and was hooked from the first few bars. Scheinman is a violinist who has been making the rounds through the improv New York scene for years and has been wowing audiences (what a terrible expression) all over the world at jazz festivals. But this record is hardly a jazz record. Scheinman writes that she composed all of the pieces quickly and purposely avoided over thinking anything. The result finds us moving from dirges to marches to carnival music to avant-garde jazz (whatever that means). It reminds me of Tin Hat Trio, but with more improvisation and Bill Frisell on guitar.

Aparetly Scheinman also sings, and has a record out now with a mix of American traditional mixed with a few originals. Her voice is nice enough, but it's her playing and her composing that make her special. But even here there's only one other the other female player in her seven person band, the wonderful Rachelle Garniez (on accordian mostly)



(how did I not know I had this record?!)

I'm up a bit later than I originally intended to be and, considering it's not yet 1 am, I've just given a pretty solid illustration of how mundane my weeknights tend to be. I have this weird feeling bed times will never be cool. Oh well. Considering my options, I'll usually choose to be rested.

Late nights (loose definition) can be fun, but now I'm laying in bed waiting for my body to remember that I should've been asleep a while ago. Every minute that passes is one more ounce of exhaustion that I'll be slogging through tomorrow. And yet... I'm not especially tired, maybe just delirious - somehow sedate but attentive.

I sleep on a futon in a large, but mostly empty, room. I have little in the way of furniture because, well, I'm subletting and almost everything I own is on the other side of the country. It's late, I have work early, and I'm at least a little drunk. All I hear is the soft static of my fan pushing air and Black Mountain's "Queens Will Play."

This is one that I always listen to at least twice whenever I stumble upon it.

The last few weeks have found me in a constant state of confusion. My job has plunged me into deeper into philosophy (and I mean in the broad, colloquial sense not the Plato to Kant Rortyian sense) than I've been since the great color crisis of '06 where I spent several weeks pacing madly around my apartment in China, talking to myself about perception and what Mary knows. My current crisis is just as consuming, but I'm getting paid for it, though I think about it for many more than 40 hours per week. I'll not concern my music blog readers with the problems, which have taken me from meta ethics to political theory to epistemology to truth to relativism to philosophy of science. It's been a wild ride and I've never wanted to write a 500 page book detailing how all of these things are important and why everyone is wrong about everything more than right now.

I couldn't take being in my own head anymore. I usually get myself to shut up by working out, but it wasn't enough today. Even my relaxing swim at the pool was interrupted by inspired nonsense that caused me to get out of the pool and scribble this is a notebook:

Science is instrumental. The world is round because that's the best way to predict what happens to things that we perceive. But it's the best way because of the stuff that is the world. Because there's a fact of the matter about the way world is because it is. And so when we say that the world is round we are both describing and predicting. The description is one that can be refined and redescribed, but that doesn't somehow make it only political, it doesn't make it nonreferential and it doesn't mean that that reference isn't true or false in both Rorty's sense and in the sense of objectivists (EVERYONE ELSE!). It is both, one dependent on the other. And at the root is the stuff as stuff.

I was desperate. Of course, because I'm an idiot, my way to calm down was to read a collection of interviews with Rorty (I'm writing about him for my job). Eventually I stopped mid-sentence, put the book down, grabbed my computer, plugged in my hard drive, put in my headphones, and lay naked on my bed surrounded by books while I listened to Nina Simone's Black Gold, an import live album from 1970.

I bought the record because it contains my favorite moment/piece/recording in music of all time: Simone's version of Sandy Deny's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes." I can't write about it because I just can't. There is no one I would want to see more perform live than Nina Simone. Not Beethoven improvising; not Coltrane and Monk; not Callas; not Hendrix; not even Redding. It's all about Simone. And this record, even without my favorite song (I know I said "Running Up That Hill" the other night, but I lied, or I at least meant that's my favorite song, not my favorite thing to hear). Simone has a way of putting everything else in the world in the dark when she sings. I hear her and the pages of text and the gobbldygook of ideas melt away and I'm left with Simone, the most human of humans (see my post for my personal blog).

And tonight I was most affected not by "Who Knows," not even by a piece of music, but by the introduction she gives to "To Be Young, Gifted and Black." She says, in the playful but dead serious and gracious way that only Simone can say, "[The song] is not addressed primarily to white people, though it does not put you down in any way. It simply ignores you. [applause and laughter] For my people need all the love and inspiration that they can get." And for a brief few moments I was able to let go all the way. I didn't have to take her at her word. I've heard the piece many times. Sometimes ignoring her, sometimes considering her. But tonight I took her at completely at her word. I was othered, but I was still human. I was allowed to not be involved for the remaining six minutes and twenty-one seconds of the song, until the final fifty seconds of the record where I was more than happy to give my ovation for the umpteenth time.

Art does many things. Music is transcendent in all the Romantic ways. It can take us out of time and space and let us experience sound and emotion. It can challenge our analytic skills and force to think in relation to other works. It can also keep us uprooted but not in the experience; it can put us in limbo where there is nothing, not even the art. To be othered but not objectified; this is humbling. Simone wasn't acting in bad faith, she was, as she always seems to do, acting like a person being honest about her and mine and everyone else's situation.

I got the new Hold Steady record today. It's good.

Ben picked me up around 5:30 from my house on North Shore. We were making the 45 minute drive from Sarasota to St Pete to see the Florida Orchestra play what would turn out to be lovely classical program spotlighting a guest cellist who snuck in two contemporary pieces that had the conservative audience on their feet by the end (more on the state of concert music in another post). My parents had some extra tickets and we weren't about to pass up the chance to get out of town and hear some Beethoven.

I remember the light. It must have been April. Tampa Bay Aprils rival anywhere in the world for most perfect weather; they are surpassed perhaps only be Tampa Bay Octobers. Driving over the Skyway and listening Cat Power's first dive into soul music on her newly released album The Greatest, Ben and I chatted and admired the beams of light coming through the smattering of clouds, reflecting on the water. It was breezy, but just enough to stir the Bay and the Gulf but not create white-caps.

The nice light continued at the venue. Located right on the Bay, the white pillars contrasted nicely with the green lawn and blue blue sky. It was tough to tear ourselves away for the music.

I'm not sure what happened after the concert. I think we had dessert with my parents, maybe we even had dinner. But eventually we started the drive home. And now Ben took advantage of the evening turned to night and my captivity in a speeding hunk of steel and plastic. He popped in the disc and I heard Craig Finn's voice alternating channels with each line. "She said always remember/never to trust me./Aww she said that the first night that she met me./She said there's gonna be a time/when I'm gonna have to go/with whoever's gonna get me the highest." And then the band kicks in with organ and a big riff. What the hell is this?

There was a vague familiarity with the sound, probably from hearing Lifter Puller while stuck in a friends car or blasting out of a dorm room. But I wasn't ready for this. I couldn't accept it. I didn't hear the reference to "Running Up that Hill," which is maybe my favorite song. It just sounded contrived. I wasn't offended by Finn's delivery. I kind of liked that. But all I could hear was an homage to Springsteen, which I like, and overwrought bar/cock rock, which I'm not a fan of. I told Ben as much, but he insisted that I wasn't hearing it; that I was wrong. And because Ben was in attendance at the last North American appearance of Pavement and had introduced me to Low and Slint, I couldn't deny him. He played "Your Little Hood Rat Friend" twice, but I couldn't get past the bridge of "Banging Camp." Ben piloted us south down 75 and West on University and by the time he dropped me off the disc was starting over and I just shook my head and said goodnight.

I tried to sleep, but rather than dreaming of the sublimity of Beethoven and virtuosic cellists, I lay awake with Finn screaming in my head. "He did name drop Ybor city, where I'd had my first beer as a high schooler." "Maybe they like Springsteen for the same reasons I like Springsteen." "Maybe Ben's right. Finn is a great storyteller and the music is the music that his characters would want sound-tracking the movies about their lives."

The next morning I tricked someone into giving me a ride to Boogie Woogie, bought the record, and listened to it all day. It was on my iPod and sound-tracked the next few months in Sarasota. Saturday morning bus rides to Farmer's Market were narrated by Finn, replacing Deerhoof and Orchestra Baobab.

I air-guitared naked in my room and sung at the top of my lungs whenever I had the chance. The characters became friends of mine. Finn was a genius and I almost missed it.

A couple weeks later I was back on the Skyway insisting that Mary and David need this music. But I knew it was futile in the moment. All I could hope was to plant a seed. I have no idea if it grew in them like it grew in me. But the light sure was nice.

Punk News posted this video not too long ago. This is the first I've ever heard of the Fleet Foxes. They are absolutely not punk, maybe not even rock, but the people at Punk News have amazing taste and aren't going to get bogged down by these silly classifications or the restrictive nature of their URL.

Good for them.

What do you y'all think about the occasional list? I'm not even sure anyone reads this stuff. So here you go ether!

Here are some records that I think sound great. I like the music on all these records, but what really stands out to me is the recording. It just sounds good no matter what their doing. I'm just sticking to rock music for today.

John Vanderslice - Life and Death of an America Fourtraker
This guy might be the must underrated producer in music today. He's got an all analog studio in San Franscico called Tiny Telephones and everything he touches is just gorgeous. Like all great recordings, it's the little things that do it for me. He spaces things like no one else in music these days. You get fuzzed out something and dirty drums next to a synth and nice harmony and doubletracked vocals on "Cool Purple Mist." The analog gives everything a nice punch and the compression is used in the just the right places. For someone who packs so many sounds in a few minutes he manages to keep things organized and never overdoes any one sound. The opening track on the Vanderslice Mountain Goats album We Shall Be Healed is one of the more memorable recordings in the past five or six years (the glass smashing get me every time).



Butthole Surfers - Locust Abortion Technician
Me trying to get folks to listen to the Surfers usually begins with a memory of "Pepper." Then I put this record on and we hear some truly gorgeous ambient and then a little tape distorted vocals of a conversation between father and child and then "Satan! Satan! Satan!" and then the most kickass guitar riff ever. But then they tell me to turn it off and they never here the analog tape work that must have taken a month to do just for one track and then they miss the pretty interludes that break up the baddest guitar riff on the planet. These guys are geniuses and they have some of the best sounding records every made. Ever. Even if you can't get behind the music, they need to be heard by anyone who is interested in recording. I've still never heard anything that compares, and that includes all those stuffy academic musicians who never had live sex during their performances. And it's hard to top their 35 second homage to Weber.



The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin
Speaking of the Surfers, here's the Flaming Lips, who were in their words (and I'm paraphrasing here) trying to rip of the Surfers but sucking to much at their instruments so they just played as loud as humanly possible. But the star of this show for our purposes is Dave Fridmann. He owns Tarbox Road Studios and he's incredible. Unlike the aforementioned Vanderslice, Fridmann is all about digital. This guy practically invented the dirty, one mic drum recording (and is lucky enough to have Steve Drozd to play for him). I can't imagine how many tracks there are on the Soft Bulletin. You can hear it all, but the tracks are as nearly spacious, though the mixing will mess with your head if you have a nice pair of cans or speakers spaced 10+ feet apart. It's hard for me to think of anyone more influential to the contemporary rock sound scape. He almost parodied himself on the Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Even the new Coldplay record has his influence all over it. If you can get four cd players and eight speakers together I highly recommend putting together a listening session of Zaireeka. You'll be amazed that he and the Lips manage to trap you inside a sphere of distorted cymbals; it freaked me out. Fridmann also produced my favorite sounding record in the past couple of years: Low's Drums & Guns. I have no idea whose idea it was to pan almost all the vocals hard, but it worked.



I apologize for this kind of gross video. Just minimize the window if you have to. Plus the hard pans are not to be found in the youtube. Just imagine vocals and organ hard right and percussion and backward guitar solo hard left.



Jens Lekman - "Sipping on the Sweet Nectar"
I'm preety sure Lekman is his own producer. All his stuff sounds great, but this is one of the great headphone tracks. It will almost make you dizzy how much space he creates out of two speakers. The youtube quality doesn't quite do it justice, but it's the best I've got.

I saw The Helio Sequence last year. I never thought I'd say this about a two person band, but they're better live than they are recorded.

This video makes me think about Chicago in the fall and I'm not quite sure why.

I like to listen to music while lying on my bed, alone, my forearm covering my eyes. I also like to listen to music while walking around or in a car. I also like music in my movies and my video games. Jonathan Mak, creator of Everyday Shooter, clearly agrees with music in games. He's an artist with a knack for programming. He did the programming, art, music, and, most importantly, the ideas for this phenomenal, deceptively difficult game.

On its face, Everyday Shooter is just another overhead 2-D shooter (hence the name). You are a little speck in the midst of a bunch of abstract, ferocious shapes. Sometimes launch other shapes at your shape and sometimes they just amble by. But any shapes, other than yours and the shapes that you shoot at the other shapes and small white shapes that give you points, are bad shapes. So you move from level to level shooting and avoiding shapes and collecting points. The action is often fast and furious and there are patterns in each level that make destroying the other shapes easier and more valuable.

But Mak has done more than create and pretty, difficult, fun shooter. He's created a shooter that doubles as a musical instrument. Each level, rather than built around a timer or a set number of enemies (if you can call shapes enemies), is built around a piece of music. Just like everything else in the game, Mak wrote and played all the music. The pieces all quite different and all quite good. I'd listen to them outside of the context of the game (but for the impossibility of doing so, as we'll see shortly). The truly nice part of the game comes from how the music changes based on your play. Every time you pull the trigger and make contact with a shape you make a musical sound. Sometimes it's a synth sound, sometimes it's a single guitar note, blow up something cool and you'll get a whole chord. Mak obviously spent lots of time getting the enemy count just right so that the soundscape never gets overwhelmed, and it all works quite well. You'll have to find a balance between making it alive through the often difficult levels while also trying to blow up the baddie at just the right time to play the chord that you want when you want it.

This isn't really a new idea. Rez famously did this back on the Playstation, but while the music was great in that game, levels often played out the same each time and I never thought it lived up to its potential. And of course chance music has been around for half a century in the world of academic music. One of my heroes, Iannis Xenakis created a piece in which directors battled each other with competing orchestras; using chords and motifs as their arsenal (it even had a scoreboard). And rhythm games are only gaining in popularity. But Everyday Shooter does things just a bit different. You really feel like you're contributing to the soundscape. Mak is in control, but you get to help. Every round is different, and that's great because the game is hard enough to make you sure you'll hear those guitar chords dozens of times.

I don't know much about Plague Bringer. I know Kuma's Corner has a burger named after them and I know that if it weren't for blast beats, they'd hardy have any beats at all. Unfortunately, Wikipedia is silent on plague bringing and their website is just a long, evil-in-the-nothing-is-happening-to-eery-music advertisement for their new album and it ultimately redirects to the band's myspace. Thank God for Encyclopaedia Metallum [sic].

Plague Bringer's listing gives us great insights, like how the group often sings about death and depression (who would have thought?) and that the two members of the group worked on Modest Mouse's The Moon And Antarctica. This is all to say that I don't know much about the band and that I have conflicting feelings about what little I do know (loved The Moon And Antarctica, hate death/depression).

I'm not going to dress this up at all - I really like fast black metal's cartoonishly scary aesthetic and thus I really like Plague Bringer. I don't know what else there is to say.

Plague Bringer's Myspace

I know this is a music blog and all, but music is an art form and the following discussion was sparked by a radio show, which is sound, and music is sound, so there.

Last week I was sitting at O'Hare (actually lying on my suitcase) waiting for Beki's plane, listening to an episode of Studio 360. The show, hosted by novelist Kurt Anderson, says that it is about "pop culture and the arts." And that's pretty much true. It's a good show that occasionally is a bit too latte liberal. But Anderson has good taste in many things and often gets a good interview.

On the June 13th episode they did a story about Fritz Haeg. Haeg has taken to installing fruit and vegetable gardens in folks' front yards. He rips up the grass and pulls out the hedges and helps folks turn their front yards in mini-Edens. It' a nice idea; I'm all about fruits and vegetables. But Haeg doesn't describe himself as a gardener or a landscaper. Instead, Haeg is an artist. I'm not going to dispute whether or not he's an artist; he probably is. But at the end of the piece the reporter asked why the what Haeg is doing is art? The answer wasn't very convincing and my hunch is that it isn't art, it's gardening and landscaping. But we can argue 'till we're blue in the face about whether or not Haeg's project is art; that's not the discussion I want to have. My frustration is with the question itself. Now, Haeg describes what he does as art, so I'm not upset with the reporter for asking the question, but what confuses me and (perhaps unreasonably) makes me upset is the feeling that it's not good enough for the project to be anything other than art. The project isn't described as art, it's justified as art. But why can't it be landscaping? Why is the project more important as art than as landscaping? Why, for the demographic that listens to Studio 360 and its ilk, is craft not enough? It feels as dishonest and ridiculous as the anti-art, anti-education sentiments you find in other cultures in our country.

I'm pretty conservative when it comes to my art theory. I listen to the most avant-garde of the avant-garde, but my feelings about what counts as art, or as good art, strongly favor the experiential to the to the conceptual (I'm sure to the frustration of my conceptual artists friends). But putting that aside, I'm uncomfortable with placing such a premium on "art" that everything is justified to fit that label. At some point (perhaps a point we've already passed) the word becomes meaningless. Lots of people are craftsmen and professionals rather than artists, and their work is incredibly valuable; more valuable then much of what I would classify as art. So my request is that we stop making everyone artists and let people just make what they make. Long live the professional.

PS In that same episode of Studio 360 there's a discussion with Diane Keaton (*swoon*) and Marvin Heiferman about a book on the photography of Bill Wood. He was a professional photographer and by all accounts never considered himself an artist. It's a great contrast to the story discussed above.

And here's some music:

The Clash have rightfully earned the kind of reverence normally reserved for people who can perform miracles on command or have their own line of gym shoes. But, for all of their brilliance, the Clash hit plenty of dull notes and even some of their most renowned tracks keep a couple scars. Exhibit A: "Bankrobber." It's a brilliant song that marries the growing assortment of influences the band frequently called upon. It's essentially a reggae song with a extra serving of reverb and some simple piano. The real beauty of the song is what Joe Strummer does. This song would easily become a train wreck in the hands of a lesser musician. Strummer makes it brilliant, but not to the extent that those low and off-key harmonies become forgivable. They're too flat to add anything to the melody of the song and they are tonally out of step with its narrative. "Bankrobber" is a great song that could be better.

Greg Macpherson's cover is stripped down, remodeled, and shows tremendous self-awareness. Macpherson is at his most effective when he's playing emotive and powerful folk music and singing the stories of the people we grew up with. "Bankrobber" meets the later criteria well and Macpherson was clever enough to make it meet the former. The track sounds like an homage, like a song rehearsed ad nauseam until a permutation is the only way you can continue playing the music you love without completely losing your mind. In addition to trafficking in Machpherson's strengths, I find it endearing for the reason that almost every musician I know has done the same thing. Macpherson's cover may not be a perfect song either, but it often reminds me how great "Bankrobber" is when I can't stomach the idea of listening to off-key humming on a crowded train downtown.

Greg Macpherson - "Bankrobber"

Did anyone listen to this when it came out or am I just really slow?