"Alt Canon" Interlude

Who remembers this Bostonian lot? Anyone?

Can't say I paid 'em much attention at the time, and the only reason I’m prompted to remember them now (seasonal serendipity aside) is in the context of some bantering assessmental blahblah Simon & I have been having. Simon recently returned to the topic of what he’s previously dubbed the Era of Bad British Music, circa the mid-1980s. Simon remarks that he might follow it up by switching shores and reflecting on the “college rock” phenom in the U.S. during the years in question.

Which is why I thought of the above, because they were very much of that era. If memory serves, the debut LP made them critics’ darlings -- enthusiasm issuing forth from major and minor publications alike, from Rolling Stone to Forced Exposure, making them candidates for the Most Promising New Indie Act of the Year. But the tide turned sharply, and their follow-up album was unanimously panned by the same publications, and the critics’ affections gravitated to (say) Galaxie 500, instead. The band would, I believe, soldier on for a few more years before morphing into '90s loungecore outfit Combustible Edison.

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Straight Off The Philip K.

At some point, someone eventually uploaded the full clip of this thing, with only bits & pieces of it turning up on tubeage before. A dozen year hence, and it seems a peculiar doco of a time and the times since.

For starters, a time before the music industry changed radically, and it was still possible to run such a by-the-seat-of-one’s-pants label, forming a network and forging a closely-knit alliance with like-minded artists and collaborators, getting the product made and out on shelves and into eager hands, etc..*

Secondly: El Producto who initially seems a little nervous and unsure about what to say to a Dutch film crew invading his home studio.

But mainly: 2002, and the sound of the times. El-P had been developing a certain sound for several years -- dark, heavy, laden with off-kilter bumps and lo-res atmospherics. Sounded like a offspring of 1990s NYC “illbience” at its most dusted and paranoid; sounded like what would’ve happened if the unlikely collab of Throbbing Gristle hooking up with DJ Premier had ever transpired and been disseminated via 2nd-gen cassette bootlegs. But it eventually ended up sounding like the most appropriate background mood music for post-9/11 New York.**

First Rule of the Krump Club is That Nobody Talks About the Krump Club...

Given, most of what the early-mid/best Autechre came down to was: "Listen ye, what Mantronix hath wrought."

Una Mas

Or, perhaps: "Abraxalyptic Interlude, Bonus Beat Edition"...

Not sure why I bothered, but here’s an offhanded post I banged out & posted for the pretty-much-moribund ‘70s blog. Blahblahblah armchair-ethnomusicological glossolalic overthinkage, when (don't mind if I do) dancing is the much more appropriate response. Toward the end of which I draw some parallels between the music of Manu Dibango and the then-contemporaneous Afro-Caribbean fusion of Carlos Santana & his crew, mentioning how – once upon a time – the latter served as an inspiring force for a variety of “musicians...be they black, brown, beige or white.”

By which I primarily had in mind the “Chicano rock” upsurge of the late 1960-early ‘70s, however peripheral and fleeting it may have been. But above is a selection of some favorites, all of the same vintage. The question of direct influence might be tenuous or – given the geographic distance between the acts in question – nonexistent. Whatever the case, the idea of artists scattered across the globe striking up in such a similar groove at roughly the same time is enough to make you wonder what common influence set it into motion. So atop we begin with an oft-noted crew of stateside Latinos who managed to make it high into the pop charts with their (much-improved) cover of a Gerard Wilson tune. And in descending order from there: A group of African expats gigging in London, a fly-by-night outfit from Nicaragua, and a sibling act hailing from the Bahamas.

Pedagogical Interlude

Object Lesson I

I have to hold my tongue a lot. Or I try to, but I'm often sure I don't do it nearly as much as I should. I'm sure people who know me these days can predict my responses to certain things, can rely one show me to forego saying anything positive; but instead deferring to some other restaurant meal, or some other band, or selection of goods on offer or whatever -- to something better I'd eaten or cooked or seen/heard before, elsewhere. Ever the jaded city sophisticate, having lived in a heart of civilization for some two decades, and who therefore has a broader frame of reference/experience. Not that I scoff or snort dismissively or shrug it off "meh"-ingly. Most often, I just pass on saying anything that remotely sounds like any sort of a judgment call and defer to prior experiences. Which is probably even more annoying than being firmly, brusquely opinionated.*

I only mention this because this past weekend I went to a record show this past weekend; one held in my new locale. Vendors from a number of places, one have come from as far away as Detroit. His selection was much like that of the other sellers -- lots of stuff from the last days of vinyl, meaning: crates full of shitty rock and r&b from the 1980s. Dross and dregs. Not that it mattered much to me. I have enough records, thank you. Enough so, that many of them are still boxed up in storage while my wife and I inhabit a small short-lease place as settle into the new environ. So I'm not in the market in the market to compulsively buy LPs like I used to. It wasn't even my idea to go to the event, it was – for reasons I still don't fully understand – my wife's. If anything, it was a good excuse to stroll around the historic district of downtown now that some spring weather has finally begun to teasingly set in. One seller starts a conversation with me over the merits of the Temptations' Psychedelic Shack. He's a nice enough guy, and it turns out he runs a music shop in a neighboring town. From him I learn that Simeon of Silver Apples currently lives in the neighboring town in question.

Anyway: The other reason it didn’t matter was because the prices – for records both crap or worthy – were absurd. On which you can maybe blame the increasing scarcity of the format in question, as well as showroom mark-up. I walked away with a copy of the item above, which was in very good condition and priced at about 10% its usual.

Which brings me back to my starting point: If I scoff at the pricing, it's mainly because of nearly two decades of experience spent thumbing through in used record shops on the south side of Chicago. Seeing things I was used to see going for a few dollars now being slapped with asking prices ranging from $20-40. Or at least tempted to scoff, but more often snickered. Because yeah, record shops on the southside were good for certain things. You could go downtown to the Jazz Record Mart where you’d see an old copy of Grachan Moncur III’s Some Other Stuff, a copy on which the prior owner’s offspring had totally gone to town on the front cover with red and purple crayons, but which would still (apparently) command an asking price of $50. Or you could stick to the southside, where you could stood the chance of walking out with a copy of something like the below for ten dollars or less...

Some Straggling Endnotes

A couple of clarifications re that last post:

1) Discharge, Pussy Riot, Banksy, Hirschhorn...are not artists that I have any strong or firm opinion on, one way or the other. So none of what I wrote should be construed as a defense of or attack on any of those cited.

2) That Spectator blog article: Aside from the pointless of the piece itself, what I find much more deeply amusing is the matter of a British/Western/Outsider party posing the question of artistic merits in this instance. Because anyone the least bit familiar with the history of Russian punk knows that it has its own peculiar history, that it developed under artistically insular conditions, and that it in many ways has broadly departs -- stylistically & etc. -- from what constituted "punk" elsewhere. (The same could be said -- altho' to a lesser degree -- for the evolution of jazz and electronic music in Russia, as well.)

Case in point, the crew above. They probably wouldn't rank as "good" in many peoples' books; but there are at least a couple of DJs at WFMU who think they're brilliant. And, really -- what's not to love?

Autrestitial Outerludes

A couple of recent affinities...

The second: Drummige supreme! And natch the whole thing bears all the usual trademarks of the David Axelrod sound -- the centrality of drums and bass serving as the linchpin, from which so much else in the piece pivots. Chief difference this time out being that Axelrod has relegated the vibes to a more subtle role, mostly using them to provide some riddmic & tonal underpainting. The word "expansive" was among the first that came to mind.

The first: From a concert in Cologne, c. 1975; rumor has it that it never released because Cherry's trumpet distorts on the third composition. Didn't know it existed until recently. Much more interesting and hypnotic and deeper stuff than the trial studio sessions (also circulating in bootleg form) that the two recorded in Copenhagen some 5 years previously. The opening moments of this one have me thinking of Sun Araw -- possibly explaining the difference between his first couple of efforts (which didn't have much to say other than, "I really, really, really, really love Spaceman 3"), and the darker, more exotically enigmatic territories he struck out into with Heavy Deeds.

Percussive Interlude

Because the instrument (piano) is as percussive as it is melodic & etc. Can be, or becomes very 'is', when under the proper pair of hands.

In this instance: Equal measures of delegating and elegating. Letting the others have their say; while just hanging back, and punctuating from the periphery. A diffusion of hammerings. Asymmetrical counterpointage, vs. a guiding beacon vaguely sighted through fog. The sound of mirrors and purviews splintering apart, and then coming (being brought back) back to together again, many times over, each time as if nothing happened when you weren't looking/listening.

The Past is a Deleted Postal Code

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Homage to Nathanael West

Starring Ben Vautier and Ed Ruscha.

Footnote No. 5: The Division of Labor

The FBI’s special agent in charge
(SAC), R.B. Hood, compiled
a dossier on                                                      
                                                                             The Master Race –
noting the portrayal
of a sympathetic                   Russian officer and the various
                                                     red participants
 in the production                                    

                                   – and sent it to J. Edgar Hoover
                                   in case the FBI director was called upon              
                              to detail                    communist propaganda             
 in the movies.

Hoover disagreed with Hood
with the reasonable objection
                     that the FBI agent had
                     no particular expertise in
                                                                                      content analysis
                    and no way of knowing
                 what effect, if any,
            such propaganda
        might have
  on an audience.

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Text taken from J. Hoberman's An Army of Phantom:
American Movies and the Making of the Cold War [2011]

E Unibus Pluram

(Or: The Common Culture, in No Particular Order)

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Credit roll: Odds |||| Evens

Further Tales from the Rural Electrification Files

Of course, Les Paul gets all the credit for having invented the electric guitar; which is true if you're talking about the electric guitar as we know it -- the common solid-bodied variety. But as to who first had the idea of rigging a standard acoustic idea with juice and amplifier, accounts differ. Charlie Christian wasn't the first to pick up an electrically amplified acoustic model, but history has him down as being the person to popularize it; as the one who proved that it could serve as a lead instrument in a large ensemble.

For those who might not know him, Charlie Christian was a guitarist who notably worked with jazz swingster Benny Goodman. During the height of the swing craze, Goodman’s manager John Hammond talked him into taking the bold step of "integrating" his band. To this end, Hammond brought in the talents of other artists he managed or had worked with – Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Cootie Williams, and eventually Christian. Hammond had come across Christian in Oklahoma City as he traveling throughout the Midwest looking for fresh talent. He was supposedly skeptical about the novelty of the electric guitar that Christian was playing, but was wowed by the kid's sound and technique. Hammond not only thought it work in a loud ensemble like Goodman’s, but the also thought Christian possessed exception skills as an improviser.

Painter Man (Can I Join Your Band?)

"I hate music. I always have."    - Don Van Vliet

Interlude (Broca's Aphasia Edition)

Hadn't encountered this clip until this past week. Was pretty much floored by the first four-plus minutes of the thing, with the build and Wyatt's vocalizations, before the band launches into the song(s) proper. Reminds me of how Wyatt once said that he'd always been rough on himself as a drummer, because the drummers he admired were the likes of Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, et al. Whereas he never had anything he was particularly aiming for as far as the vocals were concerned. Which maybe explains why -- in Soft Machine's early stretch -- he initially settled into the default blues-rock Janis-Joplinesque causasian wheeze that had the reign of the day, soon progressed to something more richly nuanced soon thereafter, and by the early 1970s was beginning to get all experimental on occasion, doing things that that really didn't have many contemporary parallels, unless you reach for Tim Buckley's "Starsailor" or some of Yoko Ono's more extreme excursions.

The other things that came to mind was that for a brief moment it's almost like Sun City Girls many years before the fact. But maybe that's just because of the headgear.

When Surface was Depth

"Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced with those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. ...But the future has no such reality (as the pictured past and perceived present possess); the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought. 

...When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntary sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines! 

Man-made objects, or natural ones, inert in themselves but much used by careless life...are particularly difficult to keep in surface focus: novices fall through the surface, humming happily to themselves, and are soon reveling with childish abandon in the story of this stone, or that hearth. I shall explain. A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish."

- Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things

An addendum of sorts, brought to mind by the prior post.

Interlude (Chroma Agnosia Edition)

Notes on posterity:

What would you be if you weren't a musician?
"I'm not sure. I would have probably gone to art school to do sculpture, but I don't know what afterwards. I may have made commercially unsuccessful but very influential pots."

(Tangential gratuity prompted by the prior post.)

Citizens United (aka, Monetized Content Interlude)

credit roll: 1-2, 3, 4-5

Abstractions. Other frames of reference.