the notes

Connecting The Dots

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:04:00 -0500

thenotes:

Is Stephen King ripping off Steven Millhauser?

Considering that the NYTimes article you linked to mentions that King first worked on this idea 33 years ago, I’m going to assume not. But hey, maybe you’re joking—it’s tough to tell online.

Half-joking. To put it classlessly: I trust Stephen King’s recollections/authorial claims re: pre-sobriety about as far as I can throw one of his two thousand page hardcovers. It’s also possible, as the NYT points out, that he was inspired by The Simpsons Movie.

Julian Casablancas /// “4 Chords Of The Apocalypse”...

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:12:00 -0500

Julian Casablancas /// “4 Chords Of The Apocalypse” /// Phrazes For The Young

I certainly couldn’t dig the hype that attended the arrival of “11th Dimension” in our fair interspace some weeks ago, and the album it appears on is a similarly soul-numbing misfire. But Casablancas has his moments—even on the execrable First Impressions of Earth—and Phrazes does nothing to undermine that fact. See: certain parts of this awkward midtempo carnival epic which are ear-catching if not musically pleasant. Curious how that conditional works.

Forthcoming Music Genres To Avoid Disc-Go Shtetl...

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:33:36 -0500

Forthcoming Music Genres To Avoid

Disc-Go
Shtetl Metal
Whip-Hop
Creamo
Reggaespawn
Nu Post-Core
Grillwave
Blow-Fi
Chubblegum Pop
Fadtronica
Synth-Dad

Connecting The Dots

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:30:06 -0500

Is Stephen King ripping off Steven Millhauser?

yvynyl: Just came across the spaced-out lofi electro of...

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:49:00 -0500

yvynyl:

Just came across the spaced-out lofi electro of Philly-based Deerhaus Collective’s Weird Bangs. Pick up their rad 4-song EP Planetarium free here.

Excellent. The track “East Window” shares considerable DNA with the leathery grind of Crystal Castles, if you ask me, which of course you would.

Download Free Pixies Live EP

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:05:24 -0500

The Doolittle 20th Anniversary Live Sampler is available for the price of a working e-mail address, and if you already own live cuts of “Monkey Gone To Heaven,” “Crackity Jones” and “Gouge Away,” then maybe the inclusion of herky-jerk B-side “Dancing The Manta Ray” can entice you to click anyway.

Shocking Pinks /// “This Aching Deal” /// Shocking...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:15:00 -0500

Shocking Pinks /// “This Aching Deal” /// Shocking Pinks

And with that, What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009 comes to a close. For now. I’ll probably sprinkle a handful of entries in throughout the rest of the year. But hey: Shocking Pinks know how to say goodbye. What sounds like a solo project is actually a cast of various giggers who revolve around New Zealander Nick Harte, who had a hipster haircut before anyone else and goes well with crippling depression. His shambling lo-fi has a serious Phil Elverum/Mount Eerie streak and all the uncomfortable intimacy that come with it. Most of Shocking Pinks, which marked a move from Flying Nun to DFA, bears no mark of the new label, achieving a prickly post-punk whose industrial chill has been swapped out for a naturally cold dawn in frostbitten meadowlands.

How Fiction Works

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:07:31 -0500

agrammar:

I’ve been meaning for a while to say something about reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works, but so much has already been said, and it’s tough to boil down a response to some succint kernel.

One thing that did surprise me was that the “imperious” tone many critics spoke of — the one that had Walter Kirn getting behind on labels and describing Wood as “flash[ing] the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic” — really isn’t about his language or how prescriptive he’s being or any of the usual places you’d expect to locate such things. Wood makes a pretty friendly and enthusiastic case for how a lot of literature really does work, and provides loads of interesting readings along the way. What’s odd is that you’d expect Wood — widely read, a working critic, and actually younger than most — to be completely aware of all the other ways people approach reading and writing fiction. You’d expect that, at book length, he’d either have to grapple seriously with those approaches or just modestly submit that he’s talking about one major way fiction works, but fiction is big and complicated and one great lively thing about it is that someone always sees it differently. The weird “imperiousness” is that he doesn’t do this. He even manages to create the sense that he views different perspectives as foreign and faintly ridiculous; when he bothers discussing them, he summarizes them in ways that seem less like he’s caricaturing the opposition and more like he actually doesn’t get what they’re saying.

And in the end, I honestly can’t tell whether he knows this or not. He spends the totality of the book, for instance, making an unspoken background assumption that the primary purpose of fiction is to represent some kind of reality. It’s not until the final chapter that he acknowledges that — amazingly enough — there are plenty of writers and readers and critics of fiction who are not sure this is entirely the case. His response to this is funny: he reduces that argument to a few 60s academics and William Gasses and funny post-structuralists who allegedly think that fiction is purely a linguistic performance and has no strict relationship with reality. To which Wood, in a tone that would be almost charming if it weren’t so rhetorically feeble, says to the reader: C’mon, buddy! You and I, we both know that’s not really true. You read a book and it portrays something “really” happening, am I right? Buddy, c’mon. And then, even more amazingly, he does a sentimental little dance around this somewhat obvious and vaguely point-missing response — isn’t fiction great, the way it can draw reality like that? — as the curtain closes on the book as a whole.

It’s really kind of weird. It’s no mystery how it enraged so many readers. Which is too bad, because apart from that habit — as a sort of traditionalist spin through the basic techniques and issues of fiction, an incomplete one, a by-no-means-prescriptive one, just a scratch through the main ways Western fiction has operated — it’s pretty good. It’s just too bad it gives off that whiff it does: not really that of someone “imperious,” I don’t think, not that of a prescriptivist or stodgy polemicist or a tweedy blowhard with an upturned nose. It’s more like someone with limited social skills, like the IT guy so enthralled with computers that he’s not quite able to fathom the way other people actually use them, and is too deep in his own approach to really entirely hear when other people try to explain the alternatives.

What’s funny to me about the book is that its failings spring directly from the sort of technique Woods prizes above all others: a whittling, line-editing, sculptural effort toward neoclassical clarity. The fact that he doesn’t seriously address the other ways fiction works (linguistic ballet or otherwise) seems part and parcel of his craving for an elegant simplicity approaching some kind of antique golden ratio he dare not fully articulate. The fact that David Foster Wallace is a recurring aesthetic villain is, in Woods’ own words, because the man’s prose is “hideously ugly” (ha, speaking of that excessiveness Woods abhors—why not just “ugly”?) and too willing to inhabit the trashiness of language as it’s commonly mangled today. So much for creating reality. His precious ears can’t handle Wallace, meaning he treats fiction as a retreat from the tyranny of the garbage-tongued English-speaking world rather than a complex reflection of it, as he contends. In striving for a bit of essence, Woods shies away from and derides most complicating factors—that doesn’t make his analysis particularly shitty, it just makes think this work could be re-titled In Defense Of 19th Century Literature or John Updike Should’ve Known Better or Why I Like The Stuff I Like.

Connecting The Dots

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:41:55 -0500

On the New Order album Brotherhood, as “Way Of Life” wraps up, you can hear a faint echo of Bernard Sumner’s guitar part from Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and it hews in tone toward the modified Permanent mix.

Autolux /// “Sugarless” /// Future Perfect The rest of Future...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:29:00 -0500

Autolux /// “Sugarless” /// Future Perfect

The rest of Future Perfect never clicked with me, but this song is my sophomore year of college. In the sense that I listened to it a dozen times daily and played it compulsively on campus radio, and probably in other, weirder senses too. Just a bodyslam of a track.

(via bg5000)

Modest Mouse /// “Parting Of The Sensory” /// We...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:36:47 -0500

Modest Mouse /// “Parting Of The Sensory” /// We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank

Only Modest Mouse could have released an album this awe-inspiring and have no one give a shit. Maybe it was the “Float On” hangover that kept people from really engaging with this one, but its stomp and sheen quickly made it my contrarian favorite out of their unimpeachable discography. In my head it completes the wasteland trinity, connecting The Lonesome Crowded West and previous infatuation The Moon & Antarctica: the desert in every direction, then ice, then the sea. But no multi-album narrative is needed to appreciate a death rattle hoedown like “Parting Of The Sensory.” Isaac Brock sings that “someday you will die and somehow something’s gonna steal your carbon,” and you can put that on my tombstone, thanks. What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009 has up till now focused on newish bands that seemed to fall through the cracks, but someone has to stick up for such mastery of craft and lyric from a group that’s already been around the block. Don’t bother setting out the laurels; Modest Mouse won’t be resting on them anytime soon.

Fuck Buttons /// “Olympians” /// Tarot...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:36:00 -0500

Fuck Buttons /// “Olympians” /// Tarot Sport

jenrobinson:

hungryghoast and kafka-on-the-shore have pretty much nailed this one. I have nothing to add.

hungryghoast: “like Kraftwerk firing pink noise at the inside of Vangelis’ skull as he composes “Chariots Of Fire.” In Goa.” - Warren Ellis

kafka-on-the-shore: Oh look! Isn’t that me standing on that very crowded platform at Pitchfork station, trying to jump on the Fuck Buttons band wagon? Yes, it is. And I can see that the peeps already on board are looking rather irritated by that sudden influx of button fuckers. Tough shit, I say, they’ll just have to make room.

After listening to Tarot Sport once I knew I’d never listen to Street Horrrsing again. ”Olympians” is easily the crown jewel, a track at first enjoyed as Dead Cities-era M83 material and then, at the 4:35 mark, marveled at as ionospheric Popol Vuh bliss-out. It’s religious ecstasy.

A Sunny Day In Glasgow /// “A Mundane Phonecall To Jack...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:04:09 -0500

A Sunny Day In Glasgow /// “A Mundane Phonecall To Jack Parsons” /// Scribble Mural Comic Journal

What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009 perks up with A Sunny Day In Glasgow, a consistently excellent and overlooked Philly band with a few essential releases to their ray-of-hope name. I’ve gushed about them previously, so there’s not much left to say. Dream pop lost in a funhouse or shoegaze with a stack of twee records in the closet, it’s just instantly, fizzily, giddily good.

The Office & 30 Rock /// Season 6 & Season 4 (Apologies...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:21:00 -0500

The Office & 30 Rock /// Season 6 & Season 4

(Apologies for the TV dump, I just found myself compelled). It’s probably not fair to review these shows together, but it must be said that neither one is doing a great job of holding my attention anymore. The Office held some glimmers of hope after its horrible, horrible, horrible fifth season; now it seems on track to be just another rotating series of low-stakes hookups. I love the shark-jumping move of having Michael date Pam’s mom, yet Pam’s shrill bitchiness on the subject sucked all enjoyment out of it. What happened to that endearing awkwardness we used to love, Pam and Jim? Oh right, now you’re smug married assholes who think that whatever veneer of tolerance you had for your co-workers should now be scrubbed clean off. In the old days we would have seen people squrim under Michael’s ignorance and stealthily evade his friendship—in 2009 they’re calling him a repellent idiot to his face. What about that could possibly ring true? We know the office has some sort of compassion for their loser-in-chief; they can’t just be cruel. Also, when the fuck are we going to stop wasting Dwight, the one character with any real torque? His and Toby’s hard-boiled detective mission was a B-plot with game, and those shouldn’t be so rare. As for 30 Rock, jeez. Jeff Dunham, Betty White and self-deprecating Jimmy Fallon in the same episode. Gay Halloween party. Kenneth compromising his principles. It doesn’t feel at all like this show knows what it wants to be. It’s forcing a lot of top-down mechanisms instead of letting the real chaos of producing a television show give rise to organic premises. Baldwin as Jack as all-too-human God is consistently the most rewarding conceit, and even better when he’s got a nemesis like ~~Gob~~ Banks to play against. Elsewhere, it’s an ever more entropic mess.

Venture Brothers /// Season 4 Three episodes in and this show...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:45:27 -0500

Venture Brothers /// Season 4

Three episodes in and this show still seems to be the greatest single thing on television. Insanely plotted, gobsmackingly hilarious and unrelentingly dark, this bizarro Hanna-Barbera universe is the stuff of Mormon nightmares. Don’t try to jump in now; go back to the beginning of the series and blow the various parts of your mind in the intended order.

V /// Season One A decent enough pilot. An admirable economy of...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:35:41 -0500

V /// Season One

A decent enough pilot. An admirable economy of dialogue and action in setting the ensemble. Far too many lingering, evil stares that basically trade on the viewer already knowing the core premise. One thing that will really push it forward is insight into the Vs own internal strategizing and complications: if we’re seeing a coup in its final stages, it’d be nice to see the consequent tensions and reversals at the very top of the alien hierarchy. Now then, the question at hand: is it anti-Obama? Not really, just pro-skepticism. Other reviewers have pointed out more salient parallels to Ponzi schemes and old-school fascism (there’s already a Hitler Youth plot in motion), but in fact the viral web-marketing aspect of the Vs’ propaganda effort is the most on the nose. If it can be read as an attack on the president, that’s only because A) Obama has successfully branded himself and B) has been labeled as every kind of villain possible. It’d be like calling a History Channel show on Stalin anti-Obama because the Drudge Report is running “Is Obama The Next Stalin?” stories 24/7. Or, to give this version of V way too much credit, it actually cuts the other way, snarkily positing the zaniest conspiracies Fox devotees could dream up (socialist, totalitarian, elitist, fascist lizard people are brainwashing your kids via their own naïve idealism!) and confirming them as laughably deadpan realities. What’s thematically awesome and funny here is that the new recruits to the human resistance are in fact the naturally bigoted among us, who are stuck somewhere beyond a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why? /// “Crushed Bones” /// Elephant Eyelash The...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:08:00 -0500

Why? /// “Crushed Bones” /// Elephant Eyelash

The leadoff track from Why?’s second album is emblematic of a seismic shift. Rap is still self-consciously reflexive, still judged by its verbal athleticism. It may have become the status quo in some respects, but that transition was almost too natural to warrant real interest. What I believe happened, at anticon and elsewhere, is that hip-hop went from being subversive and boastful to wounded and confessional. What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009 can’t ignore the awesome associative power of acts from cLOUDDEAD to Kanye that got introspective and intimate these past few years. Why? of course brings a thicket of analog indie atmospherics to bear on his thorny phrasework, achieving the best sort of cross-pollination: one that grants an entrance to fans on either side of the synthesis. In a world where it’s increasingly easy to retire into an airless niche of very particular sounds, it’s a relief to know artists will keep pushing boundaries for us.

Scoop: Arcade Fire's Third Album

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:40:01 -0500

A very reliable and hard-to-please source of mine recently had a chance to drop by the studio and hear early versions of songs from Arcade Fire’s forthcoming third LP, and he promised to give me a sense of what to expect. These are some phrases he used:

“Fuller”

“More strings”

“More upbeat than Neon Bible”

“There’s a lot of Neil Young in Win’s voice”

“If these tracks were any indication, the album will be very, very good”

Production

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:27:00 -0500

desnoise:

agrammar:

One thing I’d meant to use this blog to talk about is the technical side of music, something reviews don’t often make space for: the nuts and bolts of playing, writing, recording, mixing. I’d nearly forgotten. But yesterday I found myself writing about this stuff on a message board, talking about the big weird thing that gets me with the band Los Campesinos!.

It’s a general rule of recording music that you want to make sure all the different sounds have a coherent spatial relationship with one another. That relationship can be realistic, or it can be artificial in some conventional way people are accustomed to, or it can be weird and unique — but you definitely want to have one. You generally don’t want the drums to sound like they’re booming from the back of a massive cavern while the guitar sounds gently finger-picked in a bedroom and the vocals sound like a basement show. (Unless you do. For effect.) This isn’t some stodgy hidebound convention, just a basic of how to create recordings people’s ears can make sense of. It’s sort of like the visual language of films: you can shoot stuff in a way that feels real, or tap into that vocabulary where we all know a wavy dissolve means “fantasy,” or do something completely new and weird — but you don’t want your camera angles randomly jumping from one side of people to the other, from near to far, with no plan.

Los Campesinos! have a problem with this convention: up until recently, they’ve had two very different singers. One of them, Gareth, is energetic and yelpy and strong-voiced, and backs up off his microphone like a rock signer. The other, Aleks, was small-voiced and soft, and needed to be recorded with a very close mic. Neither of them can jump into the other’s space. Either of them would sound perfectly normal on an indie record — there are loads of guitar bands with soft, close-miced singers, and it’s particularly conventional when it comes to indie. But together, they’re weird. Gareth starts yelping energetically, suggesting the space where the vocals sit. Then Aleks tosses something in, and suddenly she’s close up, whispering in your ear, from a space the production never acknowledged before. It’s like listening to a rock band get interrupted, occasionally, by a voiceover. It’s like watching two people have a conversation in a movie, except one is shot at medium range and the other is filmed only in close-up. The band actually use that dynamic pretty well: Gareth freaks out and Aleks talks calmly down at him like she’s the narrator.

Thinking about this small thing made me wonder about some bigger ones, though: it got me trying to identify what, over the past decade, has struck me as an actual substantive new thing happening with production. I don’t mean the top-level aesthetic stuff, the gloss or texture or feel of it. I’m thinking more of the really core stuff: the method of it, the way sounds are arranged, the base philosophy of it. The first two things to mind, interestingly enough, had to do with compression, in two very different directions.

There’s that whole loudness issue, which really does carry an aesthetic along with it: a lot of modern rock music has started framing itself with this overloaded, face-against-the-glass production, trying to make it sound like the music itself is too much for your speakers, and is all clawing and bursting its way out wherever it can.

There’s also indie hip-hop (and, to an extent, stuff like dubstep), which has done some pretty odd things with the arrangement of sounds — often making electronic, sample-based music that feels somehow woozy and corroded and rich. One good example, compression-wise, is Flying Lotus’s “Tea Leaf Dancers,” which works the hell out a common effect — whenever the kick drum sounds, it occupies so much room in the mix that everything else ducks beneath it. On this song, that hits an extreme of weird, unnatural pulsing — everything, vocals included, peeling back and ducking the kick, as if someone’s standing around futzing with the volume knob on your stereo — to a point where I often find it difficult to listen to: I get the feeling lots of people who’ve tried to learn how to use compression “correctly” would have an uncomfortable, seasick reaction to this track. In smaller applications, though, it’s an effect I love, and one that seems genuinely new: that lurching, watery, blunted feel in a lot of Madlib productions seems to come from a similar place.

There are plenty of other things, some of which I’ll probably write about later; right now it’s interesting to think through quite how deep or significant they feel to me. (One that feels more meaningful than it might sound is the embrace, in a lot of British dance music, of the sounds of software synths — the really grainy, unadorned, slightly hollow tone of them in things like funky house, and the particular modulations, slides, wobbles, and filter changes that the software around them leads musicians to.) For the time being, though, I’m curious if anyone else thinks much about this, or has any artists or genres they’d suggest were doing interesting new things in this realm. Anyone?

Reblogging in full because everyone should read this, and because I wonder if anyone has good answers to the question at the end. I have to admit I’m not used to thinking about recordings in quite this way— perhaps because of my limited visual vocabulary— although as soon as he explains it, it all makes perfect sense to me, especially the Los Campesinos! example. I’d be interested to hear where Deerhunter/Atlas Sound or the Sincerely Yours crew fit into this, but I’m not sure I can come up with any examples of my own I’d be confident saying are breaking new ground here (Sleigh Bells, maybe?). I’ll keep thinking. And I hope to be reading other people’s responses.

I’ll admit a certain fascination with records as macro canvases that can kneecap any in-depth discussion on the quality of brushstrokes used, and I think this imbalance speaks directly to the node of music history we’re straddling right now. To further the imperfect painting analogy: what if a computer program gave you the ability to make your oils and pigments resemble anything you wanted? If you were able to achieve Seurat’s pointillist style through artificial means, the way a hopeless drummer could design a solid rock rhythm on GarageBand? Well, for one, the art critic’s focus would change. No longer do we much care about the physical process—if you had some randomized fractal-generating software that churned out perfect Pollock forgeries, we’re not likely to picture you hunched over a laptop the way we see Pollock leaping around his shed/studio with a toothbrush.

Suddenly the artist’s vision dominates interpretation, and the age-old intentional fallacy is dragging us down by the ankles into serious muck. Why else would something as innocuous as autotune yield such blisters: we don’t like to think of our pop stars as people who need to have talent created for them, because then we’re wondering what gives them the right to celebrity status in the first place. The only tolerable explanation for such injustice (why not me?) would be that these people are essential auteurs whose next-level pop ideas are somehow limited by their performative skills, and though that may be Kanye in a nutshell, it’s a tough pill for many to swallow.

Or is Kanye even limited? Maybe he can’t sing without autotune, but nobody said he could, and it’s not like autotune masks its artifice—quite the opposite. Does the current state of recording and audio technology honestly misrepresent the state of musical talent and innovation today? Of course not; it only misrepresents how the band will sound in a live venue. But I think we feel that dissonance keenly. We feel that if a group can’t faithfully recreate their sound in person, there is deceit floating somewhere in the album mix. That’s a wrongheaded and instinctual response in the era of recorded music, and plenty of music critics (guilty) want to escape the messiness of recording and production since it calls into question these tangled issues of ownership and teamwork and elusive alchemy that subjectivize our opinions. If a band I love makes a terrible album, it’s all too easy to blame a new hot-shit producer they brought to the table or their decision to record in a barn in Quebec.

These details incorrectly come to be seen as distractions in our effort to get a handle on the finished work, ones that will elicit all sorts of rock geek arguments that are insoluble precisely because we’re only guessing at the control Frank Black has over Art Brut, or whose idea all the overdubs were, or what exactly that not-quite-a-vocoder instrument is. This is the can of worms that “the nuts and bolts” present. Most of us would rather say: “Here’s how it came out, and here’s how I responded to it.” To make it sound less like criticism in a vacuum, we draw comparisons, we sketch genre arcs and career trajectories, we bring personal experience to the songs. No doubt we also do this to obscure our unwillingness to touch the technical side, our hesitancy to own conjectures instead of assured, comfortable and presumptuously written historical narrative. Advanced technology gives us just another excuse to bypass that whole creative process angle: we throw up our hands as if to say: these days anyone can code these sounds—all that matters is how they’re used, and in the service of what. When it comes to framing music, critics find the big picture coziest.

Azeda Booth /// “In Red” /// In Flesh Tones Last...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:03:57 -0500

Azeda Booth /// “In Red” /// In Flesh Tones

Last year, rather quietly, Calgary three-piece Azeda Booth conjured a supple and fascinating cycle of experimental glitch-pop with In Flesh Tones, earning their way into my list of What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009. Their curious textures and laptop precision have obvious forebears, but rarely have such aspects informed a severe whisper rather than abysmal alienation (Radiohead) or ugly, abrasive dance tracks (too many to name). Their melodic gestures roll off the base composition like bath bubbles; sprinklings of recognizable instruments create shine like a stroke of white paint on a still-life apple. A worthy follow-up, the Tubtrek EP, is being offered by the band as a free download and includes an essential remix or two: I suggest you grab it and spread the word.