“I Get A Little Taste of You” – Z-Rock Hawaii (download here)
from Z-Rock Hawaii (1997)
released by Nipp Guitar (buy)
(file expires March 7th)
Even now, some 10 years after they recorded, Z-Rock Hawaii — a one-time collaboration between Ween and The Boredoms — seems like an impossible supergroup, both in theory and practice. But I guess weirdness crosses international boundaries. Hey, those post-Nirvana alt-rock years were heady times, nyet? Z-Rock Hawaii fares better in the accessibility department than TV Shit, the yowl-happy 1993 crossing of The Boredoms and Sonic Youth. But so would most free jazz.
That said, the good parts of “I Get A Little Taste of You” seem to be all classic Ween — which is to say, except for Yamantaka Eye’s bug-outs during the middle eight, it’s just a great semi-lost brown nugget. “Sometimes I feel so good, sometimes I feel so bad,” Gener rhymes in a infectious sing-song. “Often I get mad, even when I’m glad,” he croons, in a 20th century love ode that’s so right that it (almost) doesn’t matter when some dude starts tweaking for no apparent reason. (Eye makes much better contributions elsewhere, like the orchestral noise of “The Meadow” and the gas fumes electronics of “Hexagon.”) For the bottom of your iTunes library, Z-Rock Hawaii.
o Jonathan Lethem’s awesome Harper’s essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Oddly — or not, given the theme of the piece — the section that I quoted the other day was actually lifted/appropriated/borrowed from David Foster Wallace.
o My ex-roomie’s aweosme clap clap blog has relaunched as clapclap.org, including an incisive deconstruction of freak-folk’s relationship to pop.
o Samantha M. Shapiro’s fascinating overview in the Sunday NYT magazine about the gray market that has sprung up to accomodate bootleg mixes. It centers on the Aphilliates’ recent bust, though never really gets into the meat of why there was a sudden crackdown.
Not reading, but:
o Lullabyes.net posted a lovely solo acoustic soundboard of Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes playing, uh, the other day at Good Records in Dallas. A few nice covers are included, notably Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” the Beatles’ “I Will,” and a bit of the Olivia Tremor Control’s “Green Typewriters.” Thanks!
Forays into alien terrain…
“Say It Right” – Nelly Furtado (download here)
from Loose (2006)
released by Mosley (buy)
(file expires February 26th)
week of February 24, 2007
#1 this week, #2 last week, 14 weeks on chart
“Say It Right” is such a cohesive construction that its principle charm seems to be its atmosphere rather than its melody, at least until the chorus drops, and the vibe suddenly becomes epic and distinct. Specifically, for me, it conjures the set of a video. Which is odd. Songs usually trigger something, y’know, real, even if it’s just the proverbial dance floor. But the only place in which Timbaland and Danja’s production sounds organic, where the echoing of Timbo’s voice between murky digi-trees and the subliminal gurgle of water makes sense, is an artificial world. It would sound diluted if even the best live band arranged it. Yet it employs naturalistic cues throughout: bells playing a stereo-panned ambient counterpoint to the chorus, a woman’s voice (Furtado’s?) counting off an overdub, and (a few seconds later) the shimmering of an electric guitar during the outro that almost becomes a solo. So, even if the music exists firmly an imaginary world, it also sounds impossibly comfortable there. Totally mature, but I wish I liked the chorus more than I do, though I usually don’t at first listen.
“Moment” – Akron/Family (download here)
recorded 15 November 2005
Brick House, London, UK
(file expires 23 February)
Saw a great show in Greenpoint last night: Akron/Family, who I’ve been keen to catch for at least a year. Acting on my new resolution to steal global and buy local, I walked away with the A/F’s latest $10 tour CD, a live set recorded in London in November 2005. It pretty well captures the spirit of last night, too.
The third main thing I love about “Moment” is that its structure is reversed: it begins with chaos, resolves into a verse, and — eventually — gets to the simplest, most stripped down statement of the song. The second thing I love is that the arrangement — both on the CD and live, last night — is still at the stage where everything is tight enough to be blistering but still new enough to implode. Of course, that’s the main effect of Akron/Family, controlled chaos, underscored by their all-hands-on-deck vocals. If they keep going (and it seems like they’ve got all the proper momentum), I’ll be curious to see if they can keep up this particular energy.
And, really, what I love about “Moment” is all the different sections. They fit together in a most pleasing way, especially the drop from the wall-of-noise intro to the first verse. Then, more chaos, a noisy jam-jam (and, man, there’s nothing post- about this jam) and that lovely coda. It’s just dramatic. I’m not sure if I can really get behind the hippie-dippy lyrics (about, y’know, the Moment), but they recover quickly with a line about old friends and new clothes, and glide out on the indie-brand Beach Boys harmonies. It’s all the fun of Animal Collective, without (most of) the foreboding inaccessibility. Dig it.
“Toc” – Tom Ze (download here)
from Estundando o Samba (1975)
reissued by Luaka Bop (buy)
(file expires February 22nd)
Here, just in time for Presidents’ Day, is the second installment of Dad’s animation, Face Film, which is all about resolution. Literally. I’ve posted Tom Ze’s “Toc” before, but it makes such a swell alternate accompaniment to this that I’m posting it again. Go on, try it!
1. “Glückugel” – Bruno Spoerri (from Glückugel)
2. “I Get a Little Taste of You” – Z-Rock Hawaii (from Z-Rock Hawaii)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Dashboard” – Modest Mouse (from We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank)
5. “+81” – Deerhoof (from Friend Opportunity)
6. “What Light” – Wilco (from 7/16/2006 Pines Theater)
7. “Green Valentine Blues” – Allen Ginsberg (from Holy Soul, Jelly Roll)
8. “If Not For You” – George Harrison (from All Things Must Pass)
9. “Something” – Booker T & the MGs (from Stax singles collection)
10. “Center of Gravity” – Yo La Tengo (from I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One)
11. “Wraith Pinned to the Mist & Other Games” – Of Montreal (from the Sunlandic Twins)
12. “Not At All” – Claudia Lennear (from Some Bad-Ass Bitches 1968-1978)
13. “Go Where I Send Thee” – Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet (from Gopsel Music)
14. “Green Typewriters (Outer Themes and Explorations)” – The Olivia Tremor Control (from Jumping Fences EP)
15. “The Diamond Sea” – The Yeah Yeah Yeahs (from iTunes Sessions EP)
16. “The Way I Feel Inside” – The Zombies (from Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou ST)
For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction’s seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
In the fall, I read Bruce Wagner’s Memorial, which is full of passages like this:
After the make-out session in Griffith Park, Chess shared some memories of his dad. Laxmi enthusiastically echoed how The Jungle Book was a favorite of hers too, from girlhood. (She meant the version with John Cleese.) A few days later, she brought over a Netflix of the original Disney.
Memorial was a thicket of references, both high and low. Dutch theorist Rem Koolhaas, art-rockers the Fiery Furnaces, and David Wilson’s Center for Land Use Interpretation all got name-checked, but so did plenty of McDonald’s slogans, Oprah episodes, and Viagra side-effects. Reading it, I picked up on some, and missed a ton of others.
One’s experience of a book comes in two main parts: the actual real-time reading, and the long-tail memory of it. That is, although I remember Wagner’s methods, what really sticks with me when I think about the book are the peculiar emotional climaxes and plotlines that had nothing to do with the dressings. Though I was involuntarily disgusted by the abundant pop culture references, and didn’t really dig much about the book in general, my brain still filtered it down to the Platonic Always.
I think, maybe, we automatically look for this when we read. In fact, the idea that a given story has a broader meaning to people besides its characters is basically the unspoken contract we have when we begin to read a story. Regardless of pop culture references, then, we fit it into some world that makes sense for ourselves. You know, the imagination. It would take a critical density of allusions to derail that. But it still feels wrong to me.
“Basically Frightened” – Col. Bruce Hampton (download here)
from Arkansas (1987)
reissued by Terminus (buy)
(file expires February 19th)
For all his ballyhooed weirdness, Col. Bruce Hampton’s two albums with the Aquarium Rescue Unit sound remarkably straight in retrospect. His four ’80s records on Landslide, reissued a few years ago by Terminus, are anything but. Like a lo-fi Captain Beefheart, a good deal of it is virtually unlistenable to most, however fun to others, but 1987’s Arkansas is a masterpiece. Many of the bizarro orchestrations are lashed to the decade by excessive synth use, but the studio rendering of Hampton’s perennial staple, “Basically Frightened,” is gloriously unadorned. Though it would later be a jazz boogie for the ARU, here it’s just existential blues: acoustic guitar, bass, and cosmic lamentations. Some make no sense. Hampton, for example, is basically frightened of “Young men in helmets who are occupied for women in–” and Hampton coughs. But, his surreal index occasionally strikes notes that are, well, real: “I’m afraid of losing bookmarks and, of course, politicians with no hobbies,” Hampton moans. Aren’t we all?
It is cold, and there is still no snow. But, a week from today, pitchers and catchers report to spring training. From there, it is easy to imagine new beginnings: some bit of life, however feint, in the bitter air.
“Metal Machine Music, part 1” – Lou Reed (download)
from Metal Machine Music (1975)
released by RCA (buy)
(file expires February 15th)
Being time for the annual, brain-cleansing airing of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, I got to thinking about a passage from Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach:
Achilles: …If any record player — say Record Player X — is sufficiently high-fidelity, then when it attempts to play the song “I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X”, it will create just those vibrations which will cause it to break… So it fails to be Perfect. And yet, the only way to get around that trickery, namely for Record Player X to be of lower fidelity, even more directly ensures that it is not Perfect. It seems that every record player is vulnerable to one or the other of these frailties, and hence all record players are defective.
If there was any piece of music in the universe that might be subtitled “I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X,” it’s Metal Machine Music. In that regard, maybe MMM is less effective now that the easily-disruptable turntable has been supplanted by the quietly humming mp3 box. Certainly, it sounds less scary now, its standing as a piece of music with overtones and melodies and movement a little more obvious.
But its actual musical effect, delirious overload, is no different, and that is because the “Record Player X” in question isn’t a record player at all, but the listener’s brain. MMM still can’t really be played, at least if the listener is trying to do anything else while listening to it — like, say, writing a blog entry. Or probably reading a blog entry, too. This means, of course, that it’s time to turn it up.
