Raccoon Audio

aught music : 2001 : "tonight was a disaster" and "number ten" by casiotone for the painfully alone

2009-07-03T07:41:00.000-07:00

Some folks will tell you that the saddest instrument in the world is perhaps the Spanish guitar, but I know better: the saddest instrument in the world is the thrift-store synthesizer. As Exhibit A, I present you with "Tonight Was A Disaster," by Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, the solo project of Californian depressive Owen Ashworth. The instrumental bridge that commences right at the track's midpoint is probably the most plaintive forty seconds 2001 has to offer; pathetic in a classical sense.

As a bonus, I'll throw in "Number Ten," a song which concludes with a uniquely heartfelt usage of searing circuit-bent noise. It sounds pretty much like a dental drill banging around inside a washing machine, and yet it's also unmistakably the sound that rages in your skull when you're in the middle of having your heart broken.

Listen: Casiotone for the Painfully Alone >> "Tonight Was A Disaster" & "Number Ten"

aught music : 2001 : "i want wind to blow" by the microphones

2009-06-29T07:32:00.000-07:00

Music from 2001 is currently being reviewed over at the Aught Music blog. Here's my seventh post for that project (my third for 2001).

Readers of this blog may have notes that it's at least in part devoted to celebrating those clusters of memories which indelibly link specific albums to specific times and places. A partial listing of my own albums that feature in such memories might include Patti Smith's Horses (the soundtrack to my first apartment in Tucson) and Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die (the soundtrack to my final apartment in Tucson). By 2001, however, I'd left that city for the crumble and overcast glory of Chicago, and one of the first albums I listened to death there was The Glow, Pt. 2 by the Microphones. Its ramshackle song structures, ultra-low-fi production, and mumbled lyrics ("The sound of cars / the smell of bars / the awful feeling of electric heat") still evoke the feeling of being in that cramped apartment, surrounded by compact discs and books, looking out the window at the wires and brick of North California Avenue, feeling wistful for relationships that had ended, and generally being a man in my late twenties in every possible way.

—Jeremy Bushnell

Listen: The Microphones >> "I Want Wind To Blow"

aught music : 2001 : "a raga called john" by pelt

2009-06-25T07:16:00.000-07:00

Music from 2001 is currently being reviewed over at the Aught Music blog. Here's my sixth post for that project (my second for 2001).

The music world, collaborative and promiscuous by its very nature, tends to generate its share of "strange bedfellows"-type alliances. A good example could be seen by those who kept an eye on psychedelic music throughout the Aughts: early in the decade that scene was characterized by a lot of heady cultural exchange between the free folk subculture and the drone subculture. This fecund blooming of partnerships between two microgenres of music that didn't look that similar on the surface was puzzling: both groups were obviously interested in prying at the doors of perception, but was there really a meaningful sonic kinship, or were these just folks who got along because they liked the same drugs? For my money, this is still an open question, but it's helpful, now as then, to have the band Pelt to gesture at as an illustration of the potency of the allegiance. Everything seemed to flow into them—Fahey-esque Americana guitar, Indian raga structure, ethno-drone instruments from around the globe, acid-trip logic, the blasted-out hum of post-Sonic Youth rock amplification—and from this nexus materialized this campfire apparation: the 2001 double album Ayahuasca. This album maintains real value for me as an awesome synthesis of disparate influences.

Listen: Pelt >> "A Raga Called John, Part Three"

aught music : 2001 : "love with the three of us" by stereo total

2009-06-23T07:05:00.000-07:00

Music from 2001 is currently being reviewed over at the Aught Music blog. Here's my fifth post for that project (my first for 2001).

"Love With the Three of Us": if there was a better song written about the practice of menage a trois this decade, I'm pretty sure I didn't hear it.

Actually: can anyone claim that there's been a better song written on this topic? Like, ever?

Listen: Stereo Total >> "Love With the Three of Us"

aught music : 2000 : "var" by nils okland

2009-06-18T07:54:00.000-07:00

Music from 2000 is currently being reviewed at the Aught Music blog. Here's my fourth post for that project:

No discussion of the music of the Aughts is complete without reference to Norway's Rune Grammofon, perhaps the single most consistently intriguing label of the decade.

One reason this label's releases appealed to me so strongly was because of their eclecticism. They adhered to no particular genre stricture, and consequently they were free to romp across an intimidatingly broad expanse: their discography includes albums of electronica, modern composition, cerebral jazz, stark drone... They seemed perhaps happiest releasing albums that violated genre boundaries in and of themselves, or otherwise proved hard to classify. As evidence, one need look no further than their very first album, Supersilent's 1-3 (1998): a three-hour, three-disc set consisting mainly of free improvisational pieces that unexpectedly melt down into passages of electronic abrasion.

But today I want to talk about something prettier. Specifically, Rune Grammofon's 15th release, Nils Økland's Straum (2000), an album consisting primarily of fiddle music. It's very lovely, but no less of a damned thing in terms of classification. This track, "Var," for fiddle, piano, trumpet, and voice, is airy and drifty enough that it could fit on a New Age sampler without incident, and yet it's impossible to listen closely to the piece without noting its roots in jazz and improvisation. And Økland's playing the Hardangar fiddle, a traditional instrument of Norway, so maybe we should be talking about it in terms of "folk music?" Or should he be treated as a composer for the fiddle, creating something that fits that oxymoronic category, "modern classical?"

Sigh. One really shouldn't agonize over something this beautiful.

aught music : 2000 : "feel good hit of the summer," by queens of the stone age

2009-06-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

Music from 2000 is currently being reviewed at the Aught Music blog. Here's my third post for that project:

Queens of the Stone Age is a band featuring the guy who used to be in Kyuss, which is kind of a dubious pedigree as far as I'm concerned, and I wouldn't say that they were a great band. But I'm glad they existed, if only for "Feel Good Hit of the Summer," a song in which the lyrical content consists entirely of a list of recreational drugs, repeated unto excess. Should you appreciate it as a song built around a formal constraint? Or as a uniquely explicit representation of the Dionysian linkage between substance abuse and rock musicianship? Uh, sure, but for my money the song's real value simply inheres in the way it evokes a lifestyle so hedonistic that it would kill the most of us very quickly, were we to adopt it. This ignites a special kind of vicarious pleasure in the listener's head, and I'd argue that that type of pleasure is one of the fundamental reasons popular music even exists in the first place. Enjoy!

Listen: Queens of the Stone Age >> "Feel Good Hit of the Summer"

aught music : 2000 : "sweepstakes prize" by mirah

2009-06-06T07:51:00.000-07:00

Music from 2000 is currently being reviewed at the Aught Music blog. Here's my second post for that project:

Most anyone who has spent much time making mixes has made at least one mix that was intended for a person who they were romantically interested in. To really make a "courtship mix" with the requisite fervor, one must believe that certain songs possess an almost magical capacity to seduce the listener. People who believe this, of course, are themselves not immune to the seductive capacity of song, and may in fact be even more susceptible to it than the average person. And so, every once in a while, a mix-maker comes upon a song that causes them to fall into swoon, and they can only hope that this song will never be aimed at them with seductive intent, for they know in their bones that they would be helpless to resist whoever wielded it. To many people, Mirah's 2000 track "Sweepstakes Prize" may simply be a run-of-the-mill indie-pop confection, but when I first heard it I knew it was a song that was personally irresistible, and I reacted to my discovery of it with a sort of hideous chill, the same way one might react to discovering a bullet with one's name engraved upon it.

Listen: Mirah >> "Sweepstakes Prize"

aught music : 2000 : "mountain music," by momus

2009-06-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

Music from 2000 is currently being reviewed at the Aught Music blog. Here's my first post for that project:

Rich Thomas and I occasionally debate which music-related events from the 1990s cast the longest shadow over the music of the Aughts. At the top of my list is usually the 1997 reissue of Harry Smith's great Anthology of American Folk Music. Pretty much everyone who bought a copy of the reissued Anthology immediately went out and bought a banjo or a fiddle, and would end up doing at least a short stint in a freak-folk band by the end of the decade. Needless to say, this also led to a lot of engaging head-clutching about issues of authenticity and fake authenticity: i.e., is is OK to go around emulating the music of (say) hardscrabble West Virginian working-class people if you're (say) a white kid from some middle-class suburb somewhere? But issues of authenticity are awfully tricky, and this fact is nicely pointed out by cultural wag Momus on his 2000 album Folktronica. This track, "Mountain Music," points out (and embraces?) the oddity of appropriating old-time music for a modern context while simultaneously critiquing our entire notion of authenticity, pointing out the ways in which it's a distorting (and comforting) illusion. Representative verse: "It never was so simple / it never was so pure / the folks who made it never were / so ignorant and poor / They traveled round the world / and never stayed where they belonged / and if they had we'd never have / these lovely mountain songs."

Listen: Momus >> "Mountain Music"

the aesthetics of triumph

2009-03-22T07:34:00.000-07:00

If I were ever to find myself in a position in which I needed to commission artists to write the score for a video game, one of the first people I might turn to would be Parts & Labor keyboardist Dan Friel. The noise-pop miniatures found on his solo release Ghost Town don't make direct use of 8-bit "chiptune" samples (there are enough other people doing that already, often to great effect) but a track like "Buzzards" nevertheless perfectly captures the essence of old-school video games, evoking an aura of propulsion, navigation, collection, and triumph.

geek apotheosis

2009-02-28T16:19:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week:

...and, well, I meant it. Take "Red F," for instance. For the first two minutes it's a pleasing blend of frenzied drum programming, synthesizer noise, and geek anthemics—which already hits my pleasure center pretty hard—then, just before the 2:00 mark, it gives one final push into the transcendent. If this is what my God looks like, then this track is what my angels sound like.

Caution: loud.

top ten 10 albums from 2008

2008-12-29T10:04:00.001-08:00

Top 10 Albums of 2008

10. Juana Molina, Un Dia

Is Juana Molina the Latin American Bjork? Er, probably not, but fans of exotic elf-women might will find a lot to like in Molina's vaguely alien song-constructions. (Plus, check out this album cover, my favorite of the year.) And, at the risk of essentializing, Molina's palette is distinctly sub-equatorial: it's sometimes classified as electronica, but it's driven at least as much by its Rioplatense vocals, Argentinian rhythmic elements, and loops of acoustic guitar. Warm, weird, and lovely. On Domino.

Listen: Juana Molina, "~~Vive Solo~~"

9. Cloudland Canyon, Lie In Light

A lot of bands lately have returned to drink from the well of 70s-era German progressive music, but Cloudland Canyon stands out from the pack. They approach the ecstatic, psychedelic pastoralism of that era less as a source to be emulated and more as an open-ended experiment that they have made it their mission to complete. Their 2004 album Requiems der Natur was an intriguing curiosity; this year's Lie In Light is a minor masterpiece. Thanks to Chris P. for tipping me off to these guys. On Kranky.

Listen: Cloudland Canyon, "~~Krautwerk~~"

8. Pocahaunted, Island Diamonds

The best way to imagine Bethany and Amanda, the two women who comprise Pocahaunted, is to imagine them calling to you, in their wordless sirenlike style, as you are descending deeper and deeper into a drug-induced coma. (It might even be worth waking up in the hospital just to hear these sounds.) They've been releasing a fairly steady stream of releases in obscuro formats; this one gets the nod because it benefits from its (comparatively) high-profile release on the Not Not Fun label, and because the presence of drummer Bob[b?] Bruno gives it a dose of extra structure and urgency.

Listen: Pocahaunted, "~~Riddim Queen~~"

7. Scott Tuma, Not For Nobody

Back when I lived in Chicago, I saw Scott Tuma perform a bunch of times as part of the exemplary Good Stuff House trio, so I knew he was one of the more interesting experimental guitarists out there. But that didn't adequately prepare me to expect him to release this beautiful and curiously moving album of Americana folk guitar. It retains its "experimental" status by including a few left-of-center gestures, but it's more heartfelt than it is cerebral. Thanks to Chris M. for sending this along.

Listen: Scott Tuma, "~~Fishen~~"

6. Brightblack Morning Light, Motion to Rejoin

As a guy who loves his Internet, I find Nathan Shineywater and Rachael Hughes' back-to-nature / get-off-the-grid / Native-Americans-had-it-right trip a little hard to swallow at times, but listen to the music and you have to admit that they might be on to something: this bit of laid-back, smoked-out, electric psychedelic desert blues is a pretty mesmerizing piece of work. The best album Matador has put out since Matmos' The Civil War (2003).

Listen: Brightblack Morning Light, "~~Hologram Buffalo~~"

5. Natalie Portman's Shaved Head, Glistening Pleasure

Earlier this year, I described these guys as "hipsters who have learned that dance music is fun and sexy, but who feel just enough doubt about the enterprise that they're forced to add generous helpings of irony and absurdity lest anyone think that they're going about it straight-faced." That sounds like something that might wear thin after a few listens, but this album became one that I found myself returning to again and again, and growing more enamored of, not less.

Listen: Natalie Portman's Shaved Head, "~~Slow Motion Tag Team~~"

4. Jamie Lidell, Jim

There's an appropriative aspect to the whole "blue-eyed soul" thing that often makes me a little squeamish, so I'm a little embarrassed that I enjoy pasty-white geek Jamie Lidell's barn-burners as much as I do. On this album, Lidell's third, he strips away some of the electronic frippery and analog burble that he used to ornament his earlier albums with and plays it instead as a straight-up revivalist act. And why shouldn't he?: he's got the charisma, pipes, and songwriting chops of any one of the greats. (If you're really feeling guilty about the appropriative element and want something a little more authentic, round out your purchase of this record with a purchase of this year's fine compliation Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia.)

Listen: Jamie Lidell, "~~Another Day~~"

3. Rameses III, Basilica

Last year, Rameses III released Honey Rose, an modest yet perfect little driftwork which ended up slipping onto my Best of 2007 list. This year's Basilica shows them growing both more assured and more ambitious, releasing a suite of astral-plane drones that evokes majesty without sacrificing their characteristic gentle lull. Imagine the broadest dawn you've ever seen and you've got the recommended visual. Includes a second disc of "remixes" by drone-underground stars like Robert Horton and Neal Campbell as a bonus. On Important.

Listen: Rameses III, "~~Origins V~~"

2. The Dodos, Visiter

Two dudes, one on guitar and one on drums, one of them singing, and a female vocalist who occasionally joins in—sounds like an indie-pop formula that's pretty much been done to death. But the Dodos approach it with a zeal and urgency that make it seem brand new. Part of it is the emphasis on percussion: drummer Logan Kroeber works overtime to provide unusual timing for each song, providing sonic interest without devolving into wank, and guitarist Meric Long follows suit, exploring the potential of the guitar as a rhythmic device. The end result is little indie gems that also provide amazement and pleasure simply as kinetic or propulsive constructions. Endlessly listenable.

Listen: The Dodos, "~~The Season~~"

1. Fuck Buttons, Street Horsssing

In my imagination, the story goes like this: a couple of kids from the Bristol noise scene sagely decide to try to use structure and rhythm to harness some of the energy and intensity of noise music, in the interest of getting it to yield something amazing. And the amazing yield in question proves to be nothing less than—ecstatic beauty! Wild success. Interestingly, substitute "punk music" for "noise music" and you can see that acts like the Boredoms and Black Dice have also attempted a version of this experiment and attained identical results—indeed, look at Street Horsssing next to the Boredoms' Vision Creation New Sun and Black Dice's Beaches and Canyons.and it looks like nothing less than the disc that completes this decade's most awesome trilogy. Thanks to Nancy P. and Steve F., who both correctly intuited that I would like this album.

Listen: Fuck Buttons, "~~Bright Tomorrow~~"

the overdriven landscape: summons of shining ruins

2008-12-02T07:20:00.000-08:00

A nice album from 2007 that crept under my radar until I stumbled upon it a few weeks ago is the self-titled debut release from Japanese one-man band Summons of Shining Ruins [MySpace]. The pieces are mostly made with guitar drone and tape echo, which puts me in mind of acts like Rafael Toral and Area C (and anyone who likes those acts should definitely check this out), but this album also has a melancholic sweep and grandeur that sets it apart. You could almost imagine it as having been cut from the same cloth that makes up M83's overdriven electronic anthems, although you'd have to imagine viewing that "cloth" under an electron microscrope, blown up from a detail into a texture into an infinite landscape.

Or you could just click this link to hear an eleven-minute piece with a lyrically unwieldy title: "~~Facade was burned down, glass cracks innumerably and diffused reflection, How did I come here?~~"

The Summons of Shining Ruins debut is available through Moufu-Rokuon, as is this year's "sequel release," entitled "Summons of Shining Ruins 2." Also available is a collaboration (dated 2009?) between the Summons of Shining Ruins dude (Shinobu Nemoto) and another gentleman, Brian Grainger, who some of you may know as a result of his very fine release Autumn Soil Feedback (2008).

what high school kids are up to these days

2008-11-13T16:16:00.000-08:00

You know that LCD Soundsystem song "Losing My Edge," when aging hipster James Murphy remarks on kids who are full of "nostalgia for the unremembered 80s?" If you imagined a band entirely composed of those sorts of kids, you might have "Natalie Portman's Shaved Head," an unfortunately-named and yet shockingly entertaining band out of Seattle.

Their 2008 album, Glistening Pleasure, is the sort of album made by hipsters who have learned that dance music is fun and sexy, but who feel just enough doubt about the enterprise that they're forced to add generous helpings of irony and absurdity lest anyone think that they're going about it straight-faced. Ultimately what they've delivered is the best party-album parody since Beck's Midnite Vultures (and maybe better, since Glistening Pleasure doesn't seem to have the queasy racist undercurrents that mar Vultures' good-time vibe.)

Listen: "~~Me + Yr Daughter~~," by Natalie Portman's Shaved Head

For added fun, here's a pretty astonishing video. Godspeed, high school kids:

natalie portman's shaved head - sophisticated side ponytail from thatgo on Vimeo.

this is the hammer that killed john henry, but it won't kill me

2008-10-23T15:45:00.000-07:00

Spent some of the day today working on cleaning up and improving the Wikipedia page for Harry Smith's fantastic illegal masterpiece of curatorial preservation, the Anthology of American Folk Music... the page is still imperfect, but a lot better than it was when I got there.

Anyway, it gave me the opportunity to go back and listen through a few of the Anthology discs, and since I'm trying the annual experiment of posting more frequently to this blog, I thought I'd pick out a track to pass along... so here's Mississippi John Hurt's "Spike Driver Blues," sung from the perspective of a railroad worker who, (understandably!) reluctant to end up like the great (but dead) John Henry, quits the spike driving business and heads back home. This slice of back-roads Americana dates back from 1928, but aside from the old vinyl noise I think it could pass for a contemporary piece of blues-inflected folk. Enjoy.

Listen: Mississippi John Hurt, "~~Spike Driver Blues~~"

you seemed so nice

2008-10-17T19:48:00.000-07:00

This Dodos track (from their very fine album Visiter) could, with only a few minor stylistic tweaks, be a an outtake from the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs project. It's one of those songs that seems on first blush to be a rather standard love song, but as the lyrics begin to develop, the song's relationship towards the beloved one descends into ambiguity, and finally it settles into a very Stephen-Merritt-ish form of infatuated contempt.

Listen: The Dodos, "~~Winter~~"

blue like the fingernails she wore

2008-05-08T07:04:00.000-07:00

I'm generally a believer in the idea that artists should grow and change through time, continuing to experiment and try new paths. So the fact that the songs that Mark Kozelek is currently recording in Sun Kil Moon are essentially indistinguishably compatible with the songs that Mark Kozelek was recording ten years ago with the Red House Painters should at least theoretically come as a disappointment.

On the other hand, in times of great change and personal upheaval there's a certain reassurance to be found in constancy, and the fact that I'm going through such a time right now should suggest that I could find these new songs to be a comfort.

But then again this is Mark Kozelek we're talking about, whose songs, although often calm on the surface, are not known for their psychologically uplifting qualities.

Listen: Sun Kil Moon, "~~Moorestown~~"

track of the week: "ambiguity song," by camper van beethoven

2008-04-18T06:45:00.000-07:00

I've never really loved the use of "Indie" as a genre designator: I do use it, in my obsessively-maintained iTunes taxonomy, but its connection to the commercial dimension of the music world has always made it function a bit uncomfortably for me. The R.E.M. that produced Document (for independent label I.R.S.) sounds pretty much the same as the R.E.M. that produced Green (for major label Warner Brothers), so are some of those tracks "indie" and not others? What about the fact that I.R.S. itself was bought by EMI in 1994? And today's climate, teeming with subsidiary labels and imprints, makes it even harder to keep score, and if you were attempting to be rigorous in your use of the designator you'd drive apart bands who were making essentially the same style of music.

The option iTunes suggests, "Alternative & Punk," is another genre designator I've never loved, for reasons that don't require further explanation here. If I had my way, I'd go back to a label that seems to have fallen into disuse: "college rock," which I mainly remember from my own pre-college days, looking over the "Charts" page in issues of Rolling Stone, back in the late 80s.

That brings us to today's track, by quintessential college rock band Camper Van Beethoven: "~~Ambiguity Song~~." I'm feeling myself to be in a pretty ambiguous space lately, and so this song nicely captures my head-space some days. Unlike the concepts of "college rock" or "indie rock," the concept of ambiguity is one that does not quickly grow dated.

10 albums from 2007 (#1)

2007-12-31T13:40:00.001-08:00

1. Akron / Family, Love Is Real

The latest entry in the attempt to write the great American psychedelic folk roadtrip album, and one of the most successful I've ever heard. This album is the triumphant album of experimental folk-rock that acts like Califone, Wilco, and the Flaming Lips have been almost-making for a decade now (and that Camper Van Beethoven were almost-making 20 years ago), but it also breaks from that framework periodically, expanding into ecstatic mind-expanding jams -- jams that locate the choice middle ground between the sloppy, shambalic, "No Neck Blues Band" type and the more polished, technically-efficient, "Phish" type, and consequently are more effective than either. Mystical in orientation, singular in vision: at its best, it's like a backwoods Americana version of the Boredom's Vision Creation New Sun. Essential.

Listen: Akron / Family, "~~Ed Is A Portal~~"

10 albums from 2007 (#2)

2007-12-30T11:54:00.000-08:00

2. Fennesz / Ryuichi Sakamoto, Cendre

Ryuichi Sakamoto, perhaps best known for his film scores, has been quietly making a name for himself over the last five years or so as one of the traditional musicians best able to collaborate with laptop-types. His airy piano lines create a sense of nearly architectural spaciousness, allowing room for the textural subtlety of his collaborators to be heard: his albums with uber-minimalist Alva Noto provide forceful (and lovely) demonstrations of this. His earlier album with Fennesz, Santa Sala Cecilia, didn't work as successfully: it was an effective enough swarm of MSP noise, but there are a lot of those around, and from collaborators of this caliber, I had expected more. Cendre is precisely the album I wanted: ravishingly delicate playing from Sakamoto, kept rough-edged by the contribution of exotic, fine-grained silts and drones from Fennesz. A grand, beautiful, flawless record.

Listen: Fennesz / Ryuichi Sakamoto: "~~Cendre~~"

10 albums from 2007 (#3)

2007-12-28T16:54:00.000-08:00

3. LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver

On my top ten list from two years ago, I praised the LCD Soundsystem debut as being deeply enjoyable but mostly devoid of anything resembling significant content. Perhaps the exception on that album was "Losing My Edge," a song that got simultaneously funnier and more sobering the more you were able to recognize the aging hipster's lamentations as your own. Sound of Silver takes this intersection between irony and melancholy its central emotional ground, and it inhabits it brilliantly, crafting songs that are wry, moving, melancholy, and still (relatively) dance-floor friendly. If there's ever been a better pop album about adulthood, it's not coming to mind.

Listen: LCD Soundsystem: "~~All My Friends~~"

10 albums from 2007 (#4)

2007-12-27T08:11:00.001-08:00

4. White Lichens, self-titled

A great pregnant thundercloud of a record. Each of the five drones collected here brood and surge and bristle, although spend enough time navigating their fields of electrical menace and you'll find nothing but mystic peacefulness at their center. A perfect soundtrack for some kind of as-yet-unrealized Tesla biopic. This disc represents a collaboration between Lichens (aka astral child Rob Lowe) and the heavy guitar duo White/Light: excellent acts in their own right, although neither has ever sounded better (and—full disclosure—I say this as one of the people who released the White/Light debut album a few years back).

Listen: White Lichens, "~~Belial~~"

10 albums from 2007 (#5)

2007-12-25T11:03:00.001-08:00

5. Stars of The Lid, And Their Refinement of The Decline

It's true that each subsequent SoTL album grows softer and more edgeless, to the point where my associate D. Bauler can claim that they're now essentially making music for car commercials. But I'd be remiss in not including it in my list: it is two discs of grand, sad fanfare, in a year where grand, sad fanfare seemed all too appropriate. This is a music that makes failure into a kind of dignity, and that alone makes it a document of enormous value. Happy holidays.

Listen: Stars of The Lid, "~~That Finger On Your Temple Is The Barrel of My Raygun~~"

10 albums from 2007 (#6)

2007-12-24T05:32:00.000-08:00

6. M.I.A., Kala

It may lack the revelatory force of her debut, and it doesn't exactly shine light on her famously slippery politics, but M.I.A.'s Arular follow-up contains enough head-scratching WTF moments to make it one of the year's most engagingly anarchic releases. A song about bird flu? A guest appearance by Timbaland? A guest appearance by a group of preadolescent aboriginal Australian rappers? Covers of the Pixies and the Modern Lovers? Sure, why not.

Listen: M.I.A., "~~Hussel~~"

10 albums from 2007 (#7)

2007-12-23T06:53:00.000-08:00

7. Rameses III, Honey Rose

Using a restrained and gentle palette (including steel guitar, banjo, hushed vocals, and what I'm pretty sure is a flute preset on a synthesizer), these British free-folkers produced a pastoral drone suite that became one of the discs I most frequently returned to over the course of the year. The five "themes" that comprise the album are built around a single, simple melodic motif, but it is elaborated on with such patience and confidence that the end result takes on a gravity that is both sombre and strangely lulling.

Listen: Rameses III, "Theme II

10 albums from 2007 (#8)

2007-12-22T16:51:00.001-08:00

8. Amy Winehouse, Back to Black

No one would claim that Amy Winehouse is a radical innovator, but her decision to dust off the girl-group / soul-diva song forms of the 60s and 70s is genius in its way. Call it homage or call it exploitation: either way, it turns out that a substantial amount of power still resides in those forms, and within the first thirty seconds or so of its opening track (the unavoidable "Rehab") this album has demonstrated that point swiftly, conclusively, and indelibly. The fact that the album maintains something close to that level of quality throughout its entire duration suggests that Winehouse may be a real talent to watch.

Listen: Amy Winehouse, "~~Rehab~~"

10 albums from 2007 (#9)

2007-12-21T13:02:00.000-08:00

9. The Bird Names, Wooden Lake / Sexual Diner

Flat-out the oddest album I heard all year, which is saying something given the amount of odd music I listen to. Twinkly little bits of clockwork exotica, cartoon-falsetto sing-alongs, ramshackle pop structures, a Shimmy-Disc-esque drug haze pervading the lo-fi production: imagine the Residents importing some rubber-limbed anthropomorphic animals from an old-timey Max Fleischer short, and some self-replicating machine elves from one of Terence McKenna's DMT trips, and you're in the neighborhood. Refreshingly strange.

Listen: The Bird Names, "~~New Mexico~~"

10 albums of 2007 #10

2007-12-20T07:23:00.001-08:00

End of the year is approaching, and that means it's time for end-of-year lists... I'll start with my albums of the year, which I'll try to stretch out over ten posts to build suspense.

10. Various Artists, Untitled

The idea of a three-disc, sixty-artist noise compilation might call to mind the old Monty Python sketch "Crunchy Frog"—that's the one that features a sampler of sadistic chocolates, each more violently unpleasant than the last. And it's true that for each track on Untitled that works with subtlety and restraint (like, say, Jason Zeh's "Scant"), there's another one that brings the pain: full-bore mind flayers like Teeth Collection's "1 Untitled Track." But the low barrier to entry plus an insatiable zeal for networking have made the noise scene one of the most fertile and relevant musical subcultures of the last half-decade—a big compliation like this one represents the perfect snapshot of that scene's richness, stylistic diversity, and occasional unevenness. A perfect place for newcomers to jump in.

Listen: "~~Scant~~" by Jason Zeh

Listen: "~~1 Untitled Track~~" by Teeth Collection

"if we can land a man on the moon, surely i can win your heart" by beulah

2007-11-27T11:47:00.000-08:00

As you might imagine, I've accumulated a lot of CDs over the years, enough that storing them has become something of a challenge. This problem is accentuated by the fact that probably 98% of my music listening these days is on the iPod, and so the actual CDs go mostly unused: their cases serve as room decor at best and extraneous wrapping at worst.

At this point, I've run out of room for more CD racks (plus I can't get to Ikea) and so I've been forced to begin the process of packing them up into boxes and putting them into storage. Choosing which go and which stay is something of a challenge, although I'm aided by the fact that since 2001 I've created a top-ten list of albums released that year (for the curious: 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006). This provided a sort of happy solution: there's not enough room to store everything I buy, but there's definitely enough room to store a measly ten a year... plus those are the ones I most want to have at the ready / on display anyway...

But it got me to thinking about those pre-2001 years... the Nineties (and beyond). In order to properly follow through with this project, I should, in theory, need to go back and figure out a list of the Best Nineties Albums.

So I've spent some time, over the last few weeks, looking over the shelves, and trying to make some preliminary list of 100 CDs. It's a decade with a lot of good music: including (for me) canonical college-soundtrack stuff (Nirvana's Nevermind, the Beastie Boys' Check Your Head; Beck's Odelay); landmark electronic / dance albums (DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works, Portishead's Dummy, Tricky's Maxinquaye); a really strong selection of albums from labels like Matador (Pavement; Liz Phair; Yo La Tengo; Cat Power) and, later in the decade, Thrill Jockey (Tortoise; Oval; Town and Country). Then there's the rise of the Elephant 6 Collective, who released some albums that were pretty key for me back then (Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea). Today's track, "~~If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart~~," is from the lesser-known Elephant 6 project Beulah, from their very fine album When Your Heartstrings Break (1999). It's perhaps the best song ever written on the topic of "selling out," a topic which as of today seems, in its way, very 90s.

I'm eager to receive additional suggestions for great 90s albums: feel free to use the comments field.

track of the week: " f/b (e) electric," by derek bailey

2007-11-16T08:02:00.000-08:00

Anyone who comes to this blog for the music should already know Derek Bailey (1930-2005), famous for his idiosyncratic approach to free-improvisation guitar. Bailey spent his entire life relentlessly developing and re-inventing this approach, but ask someone to define Bailey's "signature style," and they're likely to describe something fragmented, discontinuous, flinty, and angular, like say, for instance, ~~this track~~ ("M9") from his representative 1975 album Improvisation.

But the Bailey catalog is forty-odd years of documentation of an especially rich creative process: consequently, it's also full of oddities, left turns, and intriguing digressions. One of the most compelling of these, for my money, is the 2000 album String Theory, a suite of experiments exploring the potential of guitar feedback. ~~This track~~, "F/B (E) Electric," explores the dynamics of long sustained tones as finely as any drone I've heard, and would fit sublimely on a playlist of stark minimalist electronica.

"i," by so

2007-11-09T10:55:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, I suffered through a pretty difficult period of depression-influenced musical disinterest: I wasn't seeking out much new music, and I wasn't listening to much of the music I already owned. Fortunately, the pendulum appears to have swung back the other way, and I've been back to picking up new stuff, listening through lesser-heard old stuff, swapping mixes with folks, etc.

So, this has led me to dust off the old policy of posting some notable track here every week. As a discipline, I've rarely followed this for more than a few weeks at a time, but hope springs eternal.

This week we visit So, an under-rated 2003 collaboration between Oval's Markus Popp and an enigmatic woman known only as "Eri," who hails from Mito-City, Japan. Fans of Oval's glitch-based electronica know that noise contains its own dimensions of sensory delight, and the So collaborations reveal this even more markedly by grafting Popp's brightly-colored, coding-error aesthetic to something more traditionally lovely: a female voice engaged in song. We fret, sometimes, about the monsters that may emerge from a fusion of the human and the technological, but a track self-evidently jubliant as ~~this one~~ ("i") reveals that that fusion may be just as likely to yield forms of beauty. Remember Donna Haraway's claim in her "Cyborg Manifesto": there is a pleasure in the confusion of boundaries.

mutts

2007-09-19T18:58:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I posted my "musical eclecticism" score—87/100, I'll remind you all—but, if the truth be told, technologies of the last ten years have made it easier than ever before to have a vast collection of music, and to enjoy the accompanying eclectic taste. (A partial list, roughly in the order of my experience with them: CD burners, file-sharing networks, the iPod and other MP3 players, MP3 blogs, MySpace, the iTunes music store, Last.fm.)

I do believe that the ability to randomly access a huge stockpile of cultural material, literally at the press of a button, has begun to yield a generation of listeners for whom strictly drawn genre lines hold no authority or appeal. Which maybe goes part of the way towards explaining the preponderance of unusual genre-crossing guest stars that have been cropping up in my listening this year.

A team-up like MIA and Timbaland (on "Come Around," from Kala) elicits a little bit of head-scratching, but they're basically operating at different points of a single genre continuum: it's exactly the same bit of insider patronage that inspired the Missy Elliot / Lady Sovereign pairup from last year. You need to make that genre continuum even broader to make sense of "Flashlight Fight," a Go! Team track featuring Chuck D (which functions downright beautifully and instantly reduces the distance between the two to nothing). But there's no genre large enough to legitimate the pedigree of "Poisenville Kids No Wins," which pairs apocalyptic Def Jux rapper/producer El-P and depressive indie-rocker Cat Power. But the muttishness of it works sublimely: although she's reduced to sample-status in the first half, she emerges as a Shirley-Bassey-level force around the piece's midpoint.

Listen: ~~Poisenville Kids No Wins / Reprise [This Must Be Our Time]~~ (edit)

willfull obscurity

2007-09-18T18:08:00.000-07:00

So I've been playing around with Last.fm enough now that it's begun to serve up recommendations for me... But take a look at this list:

The near-total lack of signifying language here delights me, even as it reveals something about my lifelong pursuit of oddity.

It is also perhaps worth noting that I recently took something called the "Eclectic" quiz, which uses a script located here to take the top 20 artists in your Last.fm profile, and then collect the top five "similar artists" of each of these 20. Combining any duplicates, the resulting number of unique artists is your quote-unquote "eclectic score." Since this post is obviously shaping up to be a brag, I don't hesitate to post my results here:

87/100

The script is kind enough to print out the full list of "similar artists" that pops up: the 87 related artists for my profile are:

!!!, Aaron Dilloway, Aen, Aki Tsuyuko, Animal Collective, Antony Milton, Avarus, Belle and Sebastian, Ben Reynolds, Birchville Cat Motel, Boards of Canada, Braspyreet, Broken Social Scene, Burning Star Core (2), Caribou, Cat Power (2), Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, DJ Danger Mouse, Daft Punk, DangerDoom, Dialing In, Diplo, Directing Hand, Double Leopards (2), Feist, Fonica, Four Tet, Fourcolor, Fursaxa, Go Home Productions, Hala Strana, Hot Chip, In The Country, Iron & Wine (2), Islaja, Joanna Newsom (2), Junior Boys, Keijo, LCD Soundsystem (2), Lady Sovereign, Lau Nau, Lenlow, M. Ward, M.I.A., M.I.A./Diplo, MF DOOM, Madlib, Manitoba, Massive Attack, MoHa!, Mouthus, Naph, Neutral Milk Hotel, Noah Opponent, Okkervil River, Paavoharju, Peter Wright, Phonophani, Pilchard, Quasimoto, Ratatat, Rilo Kiley, Röyksopp, SPUNK, Sack & Blumm, Sawako (2), Seht, Sogar, Spank Rock (2), Spoon, Sufjan Stevens (3), Svalastog, Taurpis Tula, Taylor Deupree, The Arcade Fire, The Dead C (2), The Decemberists (3), The Knife, The Rapture, The Shins, Thievery Corporation, Viktor Vaughn, Wolf Parade, Xiu Xiu, Zero 7, dj BC, of Montreal

Boldface means I never heard of them.

full of pastoral dreams

2007-04-01T15:36:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I went out to Chicago's newest good record store, Permanent Records, and picked up a bunch of stuff, including Honey Rose, the newest record by Rameses III.

I'd been introduced to Rameses III from the fine track they contributed to the three-disc Gold Leaf Branches comp from Foxy Digitalis (2005), but that didn't really prepare me for the sheer loveliness of the this very fine short disc.

Give the second track, "~~Theme 2~~," a listen: it's mighty in its hush and drift. Rameses III are sometimes grouped in with the "free folk" crowd, but to my ear this music is less folk and more shoegazer: it's like My Bloody Valentine, if My Bloody Valentine wanted nothing more than to lull you into a warm, lovely sleep.

Honey Rose is available for purchase on Important Records.

wake up wake up

2007-02-21T11:59:00.000-08:00

Getting up in the morning can sometimes be a challenge. And this challenge is complicated by the difficulty of finding the right sound to wake up to. I don't like the harshness of alarms, and the radio's not really an option either: I can't stand waking up to commercials, and the commercial-free alternative provided by NPR is... well, that's really a whole separate rant, that I'll spare you for now.

Determined to wake to music, I picked up a CD-playing alarm clock a few years ago, which kicked off a whole investigation of which CDs are better to wake up to than others. Recently, I've really been enjoying waking up to albums by the duo Lullatone.

As the name implies, this track, "Wake Up Wake Up," (from 2004's Little Songs About Raindrops) is just about a perfect song to hear first thing in the morning. It is absolutely gentle in every way, but it won't put you back to sleep either: it has an electronic glitchiness about it that delicately stimulates your ear until you're ready to rise.

Lullatone's newest release, Pajama Pop Pour Vous (2006), goes it one better by beginning with "Good Morning Melody," which has all the same strengths as "Wake Up Wake Up" only with the addition of breathy vocals, sung in Japanese-inflected English, about getting up and starting your day. It is so cute it makes me just about want to die of pleasure: your mileage may vary.

hot soft light

2007-01-27T06:25:00.000-08:00

When I think of the Hold Steady, I think back to something music-journo Justin Farrar wrote about the rise of the band Comets on Fire: he calls them a bar band, in fact "the best bar-rock band ever known to man," but something about their acceptance as "in-the-vanguard, underground artists" doesn't sit well with him. His conclusion? It's because Comets on Fire are "all instruments and no storytelling." He, in fact, presents this as the very thing that relegates them to bar-rock status, arguing that bar-bands, by definition, lack storytellers.

I thought this was a pretty good axiom until I heard the Hold Steady album Separation Sunday, an album that rarely strives, sonically speaking, to provide anything more than old-fashioned bar rock, but which lyrically functions as a song cycle roughly on par with The Mountain Goats' All Hail West Texas ("fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys"). The characters on Separation Sunday are born-again Christians or drug-addled burnouts or both, and although the title of the new album, Boys and Girls In America, reveals that the Hold Steady guys are taking aim at bigger themes, the general air of dead-endedness and clutching desperation still permeates.

For instance, this track, "Hot Soft Light," which basically describes the trajectory of every Hold Steady song ever written by rhyming "recreational" with "medical" and then with "tentacles" (later "manacles").

[Available at Amazon]

best of 2006: a top ten

2007-01-01T06:28:00.000-08:00

10. Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere
Flawed and occasionally indulgent, but St. Elsewhere earns major points for managing to be both a record that I heard or played at just about every party I was at this year and an album-length meditation on mental illness and the fragmentation of [black] identity. Improbable, but the unsettling lyrical content consistently fit perfectly into the alluring vibe generated by Cee-Lo's charismatic croon and Danger Mouse's warm grooves. The most obvious manifestation of this trick can be seen in the way they took a song explicitly about madness and disintegration ("Crazy") and got it to pass as the feel-good pop hit of the year, but the pattern is repeated everywhere on the album, from the inviting cover of the Violent Femmes' menacing "Gone Daddy Gone" to "Necromancing," an ode to necrophilia. Impressive, fascinating. On Downtown (and distributed by Atlantic).
Listen: "~~Who Cares?~~," by Gnarls Barkley

9. The Rapture, Pieces of the People We Love
Aside from "45:33," there wasn't a new LCD Soundsystem release last year, but this indie-dance release by the Rapture served as a decent stopgap, as long as you were willing to substitute Luke Jenner's sleazy charisma for James Murphy's subcultural wit. Pieces essentially updates the ideas of the disco-inflected post-punk era for an audience weaned on 80s power-pop: something like Loose Joints reinterpreted by Ric Ocasek. No claims to high significance, but definitely the most fun album I heard all year. On UMVD (aka Universal Music and Video Distribution)
Listen: "~~Whoo! Alright—Yeah...Uh Huh~~," by the Rapture

8. Keiran Hebden and Steve Reid, The Exchange Session, Vol. 1
Many, many talented people have attempted to integrate free jazz and electronic music, with outcomes that have ranged from the blandly respectable to the utterly dreadful. This disc, made up of three improvisations between sample-manipulator Keiran Hebden and longtime jazz drummer Steve Reid, avoids these fates, managing to at least partially scale the peaks that characterize the best of ecstatic '60s jazz. Hebden's body of solo work (as Four Tet) is impressive, but he seems especially freed up here by being able to hand off the rhythm duties to Reid; this allows him to stretch out and focus on the role that would normally fulfilled by an especially "free" saxophonist, namely, providing squall and color and noise. The album isn't perfect—there are moments when the pieces lose their way—but this disc provides the most substantial piece of evidence to date that these two branches of music can be successfully wed. On Domino.
Listen: "~~Soul Oscillations~~," by Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid

7. Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura, Between
One game you can play, if you're a music geek, is trying to determine the point where "free improvisation" became officially detached from anything resembling jazz. A related game is trying to determine the point where one bifurcated tendril of free improvisation again crossed the territorial lines of genre to become avant-garde electronica, renouncing even the tools of jazz in favor of rewired mixers, detuned radios, dismantled guitars, and repurposed iPods. Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura are among the most interesting practicioners of this branch, producing stark fields of abstract electronic texture that defy easy categorization but which compel forcefully on their own terms. The two CDs comprising Between resemble not music so much as they resemble the sounds you might hear if you could tap into onboard recordings made by an interplanetary probe as it descended through a toxic, static-riddled atmosphere. On Erstwhile.
Listen: "~~13630 kHz~~," by Keith Rowe + Toshimaru Nakamura

6. Vampire Can't, Key Cutter
This disc represents three sorts of noisy music fused into an improbably well-oiled hybrid: free-jazz drumming from the ever-astonishing Chris Corsano, abrasive scuzz-rock guitar from Bill Nace, and circuit-bent squee from Jessica Rylan and her homemade machines. The on-paper incompatibility of these modes would seem to dictate that these tracks explode on the launching pad, and it's true that fully half of the songs on the disc last for under two minutes, but the fearsome blazing singularity that they attain in their short and furious lifespans is like something that came straight from the mind of God. On Load.
Listen: "~~War Lips~~," by Vampire Can't

5. Girl Talk, Night Ripper
Momus once described mash-ups (here) as "Everything that ever sold a record, all on one plate," and I think he meant it pejoratively, whereas I see it as something of a grail to strive for. We haven't quite gotten there yet, but this album from Gregg Gillis might represent the most successful attempt yet. Night Ripper jettisons the conceptual rigor that undergirds other notable mash-up albums (say, the Kleptones' Night at the Hip-Hopera, or DJ Food's Raiding the 20th Century), replacing it instead with an understanding that increased density equals increased enjoyment. Highest pleasures-per-second count of any album this year. On Illegal Art.
Listen: "~~Hold Up~~," by Girl Talk

4. Mrtyu!, Blood Tantra and With Throats As Fine As Needles, s/t
I know that putting "ties" on year-end lists is kind of a cop-out, but these two discs complement one another so well that by year's end it was difficult not to think of them as a unit. They showcase two opposing sides of dronemaster Antony Milton's technique: on Blood Tantra, he submerges the listener into the cauldron of Metal's deep distortion and roar, whereas on Throats Fine As Needles he and his cadre of NZ experimentalists (Campbell Kneale, James Kirk, and Richard Francis) work with quietude and stillness, their palette built largely out of cheap electronics humming softly in subterranean darkness. Look beyond the differences in surface turbulence, though, and both discs reveal themselves as similar investigations, exploring stasis, modulation, tension and release. On 20 Buck Spin and Digitalis, respectively.
Listen: "~~The Worldy Skein~~," by Mrtyu!

3. Mountains, Sewn
For the past five years, Brooklyn's Apestaartje label has released a cool twenty discs of pastoral drone, organic noise, and sound art. I own about half of them and there's not a dud in the bunch. Mountains is an Apestaartje "supergroup" of sorts, representing a collaboration between two one-man acts, Anderegg and Aero, who have each recorded albums of abstract electronica which are individually superlative. Together, though, they seem to reinforce one another's strengths, and this album--a combination of pretty acoustic passages and warm electronic texture--is as fine as anything the label's ever put out.
Listen: "~~Sheets~~," by Mountains

2. Ghosting, Why Not Be Utterly Changed Into Fire?
The single track that comprises this album spends a half hour exploring the title question, using distorted guitars and squealing machines to conjure a circle of angelic flame around the listener, threatening to consume but also promising to transfigure. This could certainly be described as a noise album—it spends a lot of its time channeling a storm of white-hot needles through the open spaces of your skull, and the experience is undeniably harrowing—but remember that the goal here is transcendence and the methods suddenly invert, seeming magical instead of menacing. No MP3 of this one, as the disc's only track is single-minded in a way that fundamentally resists excerpting. On Jyrk.

1. Sunn O))) / Boris, Altar

Before I say anything, I should acknowledge that a fictional version of this album (accurate down to the participation of Dylan "Earth" Carlson) appeared in the 2005 April Fool's Day edition of the Aquarius Records newsletter, in which the album consists of a single E chord, with each band contributing a single note.

Pretty funny. And there's truth to the fact that this record could have been made with about that much investment of effort: since both Boris and Sunn O))) have rabid fan-bases, both acts could have come together and operated more-or-less on autopilot, piled up by-the-numbers guitar drone, and they probably would still have made bank (it's not for nothing that the title of the fictional parody album is Reserve Not Yet Met). So the fact that the end product isn't content to rest on its laurels is all the more amazing.

There are the requisite "heavy" pieces here: the opener ("Etna") and the closer ("Blood Swamp") are pretty much what you'd expect the collaboration to produce, which is not to say that they're not accomplished pieces of monolithic roar. But the album's real achievement is in the way that the intervening tracks diverge from comfort zones and expectations, and produce four tracks of genre-defying occultist weirdness: "NLT" is a gong-and-bass soundscape, "The Sinking Belle" is a Metal-inflected ballad (with vocals by singer-songwriter Jesse Sykes), "Akuma No Kuma" is an electronic anthem full of messed-up vocoder'd vocals and bombastic horns (maybe the soundtrack to a Conan movie set in Kirby-esque deep space), and "Fried Eagle Mind" is a trance-inducing bit of opiated ambience and static. The bonus disc, featuring Dylan Carlson wrangling daemonic Telecaster all over it, is just plain icing on the cake. This is the only album I bought this year on the day it was released (also the only one I bought at Metal Haven) and the only album I was eagerly anticipating that did not disappoint me (hello, Joanna Newsom and Lady Sovereign).

Listen: "~~Akuma No Kuma~~," by Sunn O))) and Boris

let's boogie to the elf dance

2006-12-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

For each of the past five years, Sufjan Stevens has released an EP of Christmas-themed songs, both traditional carols and originals (now collected in the Songs For Christmas box set). I heard a few of these last year around this time, and was struck by the way that they play up Stevens' central strength (his skill at composing unusual arrangments) while completely sidestepping his central weakness (his tendency towards pretention).

Take, for instance, today's track, "~~Let's Boogey To The Elf Dance~~." Its palpable aura of casual goodwill and all-around lightheartedness are so winning that I find myself preferring it to nearly all of the more (self-consciously?) "important" tracks on [Greetings From] Michigan and [Come On Feel the] Illinois[e].

[Related: I often have a hard time stomaching material by The Decemberists, whose tendency to indulge in twee anachronism is by now so shtick-y that you could essentially make a drinking game out of it (1 shot each time Colin Meloy mentions a European place-name; 1 more each time he mentions an occupation that existed in the 19th century). It is for this reason that my favorite Decemberists song is "~~Apology Song~~," about something as modest as a stolen bike.]

Thanks to Ray and Rich T. (respectively) for gifting me these tracks.

rag for william s burroughs

2006-12-05T06:34:00.000-08:00

So if you were to ever make a 10-minute film about the life of William S. Burroughs, you could use ~~this Matmos track~~ as your soundtrack. Gunshots, adding machine sounds, Jajoukan pipes: this cut has it all. (If I were to quibble, I'd say they should have faded out into the sound of purring cats in the final minute, but otherwise, spot-on.)

From Matmos' new(ish) album, The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth of A Beast, which is a suite of ten songs, each dedicated to a different deceased queer.

ornate tangles and grubby drones

2006-08-17T07:03:00.000-07:00

Growing, "~~Fancy Period~~"

This inspired number starts off by cultivating a field of acid-trip patterns into an impossibly ornate tangle which threatens to blot out everything behind its whirling calligraphic streamers. Like all barriers, though, this one is illusory, and around minute four you slip through into a totally different landscape, where pseudo-Zimbabwean filligrees float beatifically over funky bionic stutter. Ambitious!

Vulture Club, "~~Untitled~~"

I don't know much about Vulture Club other than the fact that it has released an album full of heavy guitar drones in their most concentrated form: no riffs, no melody, no Julian Cope poetry, just sweet sweet room-shaking low-end, with the tiniest bit of occasional modulation serving to hold interest. This track is for anyone who finds unadorned amplifier hum to be strangely lulling and comforting.

Vampire Belt, "~~Snake Out~~"

Mixtape-makers take note that that Vulture Club track flows nicely into this piece, which commences with a few seconds of grimy hum before busting out into some of the finest splattering skronk I've ever heard. Chris Corsano has been earning so much praise for his inventive improv drumming that people forget that he can also do straight-up hardcore pounding when paired with a player who demands it: Bill Nace is that player here, providing inspirational art-damaged guitar-work that is very finely mangled indeed.

what happened to the levees

2006-08-13T07:04:00.000-07:00

The Coup, "~~Laugh, Love, Fuck~~"

This song features a refrain that goes: "I'm here to laugh, love, fuck and drink liquor / and help the damn revolution come quicker." What more do I really need to say? Will it help if I say it also features a cheesy clap machine?

DJ Drama and Lil' Wayne, "~~Georgia... Bush~~" [edit]

Chuck D once famously referred to hip hop as "black America's CNN," an assertion that was questionable then and remains questionable now. But the statement feels relevant in reference to this song, a chilling little bit of post-Katrina reportage from 23-year-old New Orleans native Lil' Wayne. Anger and sorrow tangle here with conspiracy-theorizing and good old-fashioned Bush-hammering (although it's worth noting that Ray Nagin takes a solid hit as well).

for good selves and bad

2006-08-11T07:06:00.000-07:00

Ladytron, "~~Destroy Everything You Touch~~"

A better summer would not have featured this song playing over and over again in my head. But instead of the better summer, I am having the one in which I am blundering through the landscape like a grief-maddened Godzilla, leaving a trail of bent wreckage and disappointed people behind me. The gap between this song's upbeat bent and the bleakness of its lyrical content conveys a certain fuckheaded resoluteness: that desire to confirm one's own worst suspicions about oneself, and the feelings of idiotic satisfaction and cynical glee when this dubious goal is achieved.

Kimya Dawson, "~~My Rollercoaster~~"

I'm not sure who brought the Kimya Dawson tunes to Spring this year, but I stood in the kitchen by myself on the final night and listened to this song and it brought tears to my eyes. This song is goofy and dorky and exuberant and tender: these are the ways I like to think of myself when I'm not thinking of myself as a maddened Godzilla, v. sup.