If you look through your Viewmaster, you can see me and my Panasonic R-70 following Shugo Tokumaru and his trained pelican as they float down the gutter in their waxed-paper boat.
Thanks, Stereogum!
Archive for the 'music' Category
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I saw Retribution Gospel Choir (a side project of Alan Sparhawk from Low) at the Varsity Friday night, opening for Mark Kozelek. Best I could tell, Alan walked on stage already fully possessed and speaking in tongues. Imagine grabbing Raggedy Andy by the sacroiliac and shaking him as hard as you can while he sings about salvation and damnation and nothing in between. It was a little like staring at a flashbulb: a long after-image.
Mark Kozelek and Phil Carney (whom Mark never acknowledged on stage) played two hours of mid-tempo sixteenth-note patterns under Mark’s four-note recitative. Mark has a lovely voice, but all the songs were squeezed into the emotional range between amusement and ennui. As an artifact of marriage and fatherhood, I spend a surprising amount of time in the range between delight and jubilation, with occasional forays into fury and terror. I’m sure I’m still capable of amusement and ennui, but they are low-amplitude signals that get lost way down in the mix. This is the reason I spend so much of my time listening to second line: You and your children and your ninety-year-old aunt all march down the street and raise a finger to death.
I half-remembered this sound as I was driving home from the grocery yesterday, and it took a little digging to find it again. I heard about Pekko Käppi via Warren Ellis’ blog back in March. Käppi has my number. If I had even more ears, they’d be listening to him too.
My mother-in-law won a copy of The Coasters’ Greatest Hits* last Christmas in a white-elephant exchange, and she re-gifted it to me in my stocking. I threw it on in all innocence just now, thinking it would contain anodyne 1950′s R&B. Of course it turned out instead to contain studio confections of the most premeditated kind. Thus false-footed, I misapprehended the album as en eerie artifact from the future:
I. Pre-irony resembles post-irony.
From my generational vantage, nothing is ever so disorienting as the deployment of humor that doesn’t depend upon irony.
I suppose it’s a common characteristic of novelty songs that they contain actors shouting commentary in funny voices, as with the well-known collaborations between Sonic Youth and Mel Blanc. Considering that I wrote my college comprehensive exams on the uses of romantic irony in German literature from 1790 to 1990, a little more romantic irony really shouldn’t surprise me. Even still, I thank god that Clarence “Frogman” Henry doesn’t follow me around all day yelling things like, “You call those shoes?” or “Tongue-tied, mister?”
III. Alien Technology
Advances in digital music production have been accompanied by the near-extinction of instrument-playing studio musicians. Digital simulation and manipulation have become banal, while actual musicianship has become a form of alien technology.
*Those who prefer the formulation “Gnu/Linux” to “Linux” will probably also prefer the formulation “Lieber/Stoller/Coasters” to “The Coasters”. I prefer the term “Gnu/Coasters,” and in particular the old, wooden style of gnu/coasters. Something about the rattling of gnu on a wooden track thrills my heart in a way that newfangled steel-track gnu/coasters can never do.
I’ve been leaving Ryoji Ikeda’s MySpace up and running while I work.
I first started listening to Ikeda when the Microscopic Sound compilation came out in 1999. The rhythmic elements are built out of little squares of white noise, like turning a faucet on and off, or Suicide’s first album, or the old Ice Fever pinball machine. The arhythmic elements (I hesitate to call them melodic) are built out of high-frequency sine waves, basically like sonar pulses, or tinnitus, or icicles falling off your roof.
I enjoy keeping his MySpace up partly because it’s suited to my dime-sized laptop speakers—ideal for reproducing dog-whistle music—and partly because it sounds so neural, like what you’d get if you ran Flanagan’s high-tension tinfoil induction headphones in reverse. When your Swiss Army knife accidentally slices into the 220 volt line, these are the first sounds you hear.
To stop listening to Ryoji Ikeda, please see my Instructable on converting your halo device into a Faraday cage.
On the ectomorphic end of the musical spectrum, Joanna Newsom’s 2004 album The Milk-Eyed Mender showed up via interlibrary loan from West Duluth yesterday afternoon. I’ve been listening to it on headphones and wondering why it sounds so familiar. As track seven, “En Gallop,” began, I figured it out: The harp is similar in timbre to the kora. (I have spent much more time listening to Toumani Diabate than to harp music of any sort.) Newsom even sings (alarmingly) “from the head,” a technique I once saw Baaba Maal describe in an interview. This is meaningless coincidence, but all the same: When I get my three wishes, I’m going to put Newsom in a recording studio with Toumani Diabate and Ramata Diakite.
On the way back from town just now, I opened our mailbox and found a copy of saxophonist John Ellis’ new album Dance Like There’s No Tomorrow, with Gary Versace on organ, Matt Perrine on sousaphone and Jason Marsalis on drums. Tenor/drums/organ/sousaphone: There is a god.
As it happens, my father-in-law built sousaphone-sized speakers into the walls of this house ten or fifteen years ago. I never understood why until this moment.
Geek heaven: Last night while the girls were busy watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks in honor of Halloween (Kiki’s Delivery Service was already checked out), I assembled a pair of speakers I built back pre-parenthood but had never gotten around to wiring, and hooked them up to an ancient, cranky vacuum-tube amplifier I had in the closet. Nothing makes music sound better than a brand-new pair of homemade speakers and the smell of burning dust.
After three hours the amplifier developed a short and blew its fuse (which made an awesome melting-wire noise in the middle of a Mos Def song). But what a great three hours!
After missing my Week Two goal last Friday, I was in such a state of pessimism that I didn’t bother setting a carrot for this week: I figured I’d just take what I could get. As things worked out, though, I have just wrapped up the second half of Act 2 and am ready to write the reveal and roll into Act 3 tomorrow. (None of this is a coincidence: Rachel has been taking care of the girls almost full time all week to let me get caught up.)
So: A Friday celebration! Fortunately, there was a ready-made one waiting for us over at North House: A barbecue and contra dance that the girls theoretically slept all afternoon to get rested up for. The beauty and glee that characterize my family life right now are in bizarre contrast to the cynical vulgarity of the Pismo story—but you’ll find out all about that as soon as I can get a decent edit put together.
