NOISIER THAN THOU

2009-07-27T17:12:00.003-05:00

I'mm puttinggg onn aaa musiccc fessstivvval.

Herrrrre's theeeee Linnnnneup:

Nodzzz

Lovvers

Wavves

Mayyors

Seeeeeee Youuuuuu Therrrrrre!!!!!!

Mayyors @ SXSW from FFT on Vimeo.

2009-06-21T09:59:00.003-05:00

A eulogy for for the future...

Autotune is dead. Long live Autotune.

T-Pain and Kanye are doing their damnedest to to take a self-aware stance in the wake of the backlash.

Yep. It seems the musicians most associated with this particular device are the one's most aggressively committed to throwing it under the bus, Kanye having lent his self-professed genius to this coffin nail:

Damn right Jay Z, autotune is faggy, bring on the fucking oboe.

Aside from Kanye's own history of messing with the human voice (Re: chipmunk soul), the history of vocal manipulation in music that led to autotune is pretty interesting. It all seemed to begin with his obsession with Daft Punk and other french house, a genre that is in turn hugely influenced by electro soul and prog-damaged pop of the late seventies/mid eighties.

Talkbox soul from Stevie Wonder:

G-Funk innovator Roger Troutman of Zapp & Roger:

Vocoded elctro funk from Midnight Star:

Classic Electro courtesy of Jonzun Crew:

And Jean Michel Jarre worshipers Space (Remember one post ago?):

Now, I'm as tired of Wal-Mart trance / ringtone bullshit like this as the next guy, but do we really need to revert to scowling hard talk and jazzy breaks? No thanks. Fucking sick awesome masculine oboe hook not withstanding, DOA: Death Of Autotune seems to be humorlessly whipping the dying horse that I'm On A Boat and Sensual Seduction already mortally elbow dropped.

Ah well, until the Great Autotune War blows over, I'll be in my penthouse/bomb-shelter, huddle over my radio listening to this:

2009-05-21T17:47:00.005-05:00

You have the right to go to outer space....

When I was little, my dad was known to occasionally break out his home-planetarium kit. A tiny black orb etched with pin points through which lights shone, illuminating a beige starscape on the living room ceiling. My dad would talk us through the various constellations, using a pointer that, working on the same principle as the bat signal, was simply a little flashlight with a red arrow stuck over the lens. A good night's fun for a family with no TV.

I also remember the trips to local science museums, the moments of anticipation before the planetarium's dome darkened and filled with the deep resonant monotone of narrators elaborating ancient celestial dances. In the dim light before the show, the planetarium echoed with whispering synthesizers, phasered bells, and vocoded soft jazz. A melancholy calm enveloped my excitement, as I waited to lose myself in the darkness between the stars.

Now, in some way in homage to those evenings, I find myself drawn to the quaint futurism of the music below. Dance to the sounds of hearts beating out a rhythm into the lonesome infinity of deep space.

Here's some evocative planetarium disco.

Not to be confused with this.

2009-05-21T16:27:00.003-05:00

Beeping and weeping....

Clara Rockmore could be the moniker of late 20th century B-Girl in the vein of YoYo or JJ Fad. In actual fact, it's the name of a devastatingly talented Lithuanian-born theremin prodigy. So, names can be deceiving.

Rockmore's 1976 performance of Tchaikovsky's Valse Sentimentale is a piece of music guaranteed to send you into a misty-eyed reverie.

The theremin's electronic ice flow of sound is thawed by her elegant human touch.

And as the picture in the video attests, she was also a pioneer of electroclash fashion.

Here you can see Rockmore at work. Elegantly marrying Old World sentiment with Futurist technology while her circuits gently weep...

2009-05-21T15:51:00.002-05:00

Sexual Harassment...

Well, here's one take...

Wow. Pretty stilted and uncomfortable, right? But if you're a person truly worthy of the name GERALD D. ALLGOOD, this is the only Sexual Harassment you need be privy to...

2009-05-07T15:51:00.006-05:00

I get SPRUNG....

Spring has arrived, and with it light jackets, lime-infused ales, and impromptu taco cookouts.

Here in Chicago, the sun's return is met with appropriately orgiastic pagan ecstasy after the blighted winter months have all but crushed our spirits.

In short, it's time to bask in the Sound of Rimini*. It's the musical equivalent of wine cooler.

I understand that in a way this is terrible. Kasso's tropical, light-disco chiller wouldn't sound out place bumping out of the department store speakers in the khaki-and-teal aisles of Ross Dress For Less. Nor would it jar you out of an afternoon reverie as you sit in a hot minivan back seat after a day of water-sliding the public pool. That's why it's great. It's the sound of mellow nostalgia, all wrapped up in a time capsule of TV-theme pianos and swaying palm fronds.

Here's some more deliciously sun-dazed Kasso.

There's just something about a white piano on a beach.

*Rimini is a resort town on Italy's Adriatic coast. We Italo like that.

2009-04-16T19:26:00.007-05:00

Your new favorite band is your other favorite band...

I just picked up an album by the band Cybotron. You know, the pioneering Australian prog-electro band? Wait, I mean the pioneering Detroit tech-electro band. No no no no no. The AWESOME Cybotron. Wait. Which one do I mean?

It's pretty rare that two bands that knock you on your face have the exact same name. But, in a world with a finite amount of prefixes and suffixes suggesting a totally rad future, I guess there was bound to be some overlap.

The Detroit Cybotron is already enshrined within the lucite pantheon of electronic music. Vacuum-sealed, ice-cold, breakdanceable, afro-futurist bliss. Their tunes are as "classic" as anything less than 30 years old can be. Clear is the most famous song, having been homage/sampled by the likes of The Rich Man's will.i.am.

Right now though, I'm feeling Cosmic Cars.

The automobile-worship makes it a sinister Detroit auto industry counterpart to the Germanic beauty of Kraftwerk's Autobahn. (Cybotron's Juan Atkins would go back to this well again with his other band Model 500.)

Speaking of Kraftwerk, the Australian Cybotron may as well be a krautrock group. They'd be neatly filed beside Ash Ra Temple and Tangerine Dream. Instead of urban futurism of the other Cybotron, here we have a spiritual ecstatic dreamworld filled with allusions to classical mythology and Frank Herbert's Dune.

Here's Colossus. It will crush you

These guys had the name first and apparently resented the americans for using it. Let's reconcile everyone! Sometimes great minds just think alike!

2009-04-10T16:22:00.007-05:00

Mystic Lady / Olden Sleaze Mash-Up

The Mystic Lady employed for erotic commerce: The music of Joanna Newsom's "Sprout and the Bean" is featured in a Victoria's Secret ad.

Lingerie is one thing, but if you wish to improve your sexual potency the old fashioned way; by employing arcane mystical lore, I invite you to listen to Louise Huebner. Oh, she's the "Official Witch of Los Angeles." This is from her 1969 spoken-word album "Seduction Through Witchcraft." Use at your discretion.

2009-04-09T14:21:00.008-05:00

Heading for the 90s!

The long-flogged dead horse of eighties revivalism still has some meat on it's ragged bones.

But the nineties are closing the gap! Now that almost every teenager alive was born in the 90s, full scale revival will be hitting Walmart shelves some time next year. Until then unholy chimeras like this will guide us through the netherealm between nostalgic decades:

Every critic immediately noticed how Get Your Boots On was a throwback to 90s schlock-rock U2. 5 seconds later, everyone gleefully realized that it was exactly the same as Escape Club's Wild Wild West. Cue the tape:

Now a new Justice Remix of Get Your Boots On is on the interwebs. Listen to it here.

It's too perfect! Justice dress like Escape Club, and the remix teases even more of those Late 80s/Early 90s ticks.

That Trent Reznor beat! Those house pianos and synth strings! Someone's been reading the Crystal Waters playbook! I need to dust off my Dwayne Wayne glasses.

2009-04-06T20:44:00.007-05:00

In My Room....

30 seconds into an Ariel Pink show at the Empty Bottle a couple weeks ago, Ariel stage-dived into a crowd that wasn't there to catch him. Our heart goes out to Ariel and his jacked up ribs.

But it also seems fitting that an artist who has become synonymous with solitary, no-fi home recording would end wounded in a vulnerable venture out in the big wide world. Ariel Pink is one of my favorite pop musicians, one of the best of a genre that I like to call "Shut-In Pop."

Shut-In Pop is built around a production style that balances glistening pop aspiration with the emotional heft of compulsive home recording. It's the sound of AM Gold filtered through the monastic solitude of parent's basements and crummy tape decks. It's the sound of social misfits who find confidence controlling a personal musical world.

That is, it's the sound of the ultra-prolific R. Stevie Moore.

It's easy to write-off the Shut-In Pop of today as a Moore rip-off, feigning social disfunction for "authenticity." But they, like we the listeners, find this sonic space to be one of creepy intimacy that touches the depressed, romantic, arrogant, adolescent in us. So why not keep exploring it? Stay inside. Stay weird.

Here's some of the new breed of Shut-Ins:

2009-04-06T18:38:00.005-05:00

Mystic Lady

The musical persona of the Mystical, dare I say Witchy, Woman has made a huge comeback recently. While ol' Stevie Nicks is probably the most famous pioneer of this sort of style (drug-damaged and ethereal, a sort of hippie version of the femme fatale), I prefer Kate Bush.

Wild eyed to the point of seeming possessed, draped in modern-dance widow's weeds, in the gauzy light of this video she appears as a wraithlike cunning woman performing weird musical spell-casting. It's a powerful feminine persona, a pagan spiritual alternative to the futurist androgyny of a Patti Smith or Laurie Anderson.

Compare "Babooshka" to the brand new "When I Grow Up" by Fever Ray.

The same disheveled drapery, possessed/wounded robot dance moves, and over all, the same mysterious mystic aura. (This time married to Laurie Anderson's vocal distortions). She'll put a spell on you. Compare also:

Bat For Lashes

Gang Gang Dance

Ladyhawk

etc

2009-03-06T13:09:00.004-06:00

Still Eurotrashed...

I'm flying to Austria today, then it's off to Brussels and Rotterdam. It shall be days of elegance and refinement, after which I shall return to being the only place on the internet that posts YouTube videos.

Auf Weitersein! I leave you with Europe's all-time most important cultural contribution:

Stay Gabber!

2009-03-06T11:53:00.003-06:00

All your favorite sounds...

I swoon to hear the Annenberg trust logo:

Three beautiful synth drones ooze together in ocean blue harmony.

It's a 4 second soundscape that gently opens your mind and while you open your tapper keeper. It's a sound that says: Get ready to learn!

Enter 60s Moog Maestro Mort Garson. Mort created cosmic soundtracks to the Zodiac, National Geographic films, uh... plants, and a bunch of other stuff you can only find in the musty, dark, old-record section of your public library. The sounds he coaxed from his keyboards, like the Annenberg jam above, have a cerebral, innocent, utopian mood perfectly suited to the classroom.

Lucky for us nerdlingers, there's an entire subgenre of contemporary electronic music that specializes in a revival of this tone.

Damn, here's a whole label devoted to it.

Science class electro. Bump it at your next alumni meeting.

2009-02-26T16:07:00.006-06:00

Olden Sleaze....

This voiceover sounds like it was written by a sexual predator with a rhyming dictionary and delivered from a waterbed:

Whether you're a sweet petite, long and lean or in between, here's another Chic to fulfill your dreams.

Put this one in your Hobo Bag....

2009-02-24T23:11:00.005-06:00

Your new favorite song is somebody's old favorite song...

Have you two met? Let me introduce you to Ken Laszlo (born Gianni Coraini). Ken's nom-de-disco was apparently inspired by Victor Laszlo the Czech Resistance leader who's on the run from the nazis in the film Casablanca. Ken apparently related to it because a disco singer like resistance fighter is hiding in plain sight: an anonymous voice on any number of pop tracks.

Well, Ken likes phones, sunglasses, the color white, "menicures," and feeling the groove. I think you two have a lot in common:

For extra fun, and to drive home the idea of the anonymous disco star, here's a television performance of Hey Hey Guy by a model who lip-synched as Ken Laszlo for live gigs. This version includes the completely baffling phone conversation from the beginning of the track.

Catch that? Here's a transcript:

Ken: "Hallo"
French guy: "Hallo, ??"
Ken: "Oh dear, you have phone"
French guy: "Yeah, hey guy, tell me about your menicure"
Ken: "I love you and feel the groove"
French guy: "Tell me about it, is it the true"
Ken: "It's true, yes, it's true"
French guy: "Don't fool out, it's dangerous"
Ken: "Don't worry, baby gold"
French guy: "Everything is same as all"
Ken: "Everything is the same"
French guy: "Oh, I love you"
Ken: "Me too"
French guy: "I love you"

"Oh dear, you have phone." Thanks for noticing!

2009-02-24T20:04:00.003-06:00

All In Together Now...

Now that European Socialism is our official form of government and the most popular band in teh internets is a "Collective." I wait in breathless anticipation for a full scale revival of that most euro-socialist form of pop: EBM (Electronic Body Music).

America is a machine and we are its gears and wires:

I saw Nitzer Ebb a couple years ago. They look and sound exactly the same. It's uncanny. Dancing to this music turns you into an ageless peoplebot. Also a EBM revival is in the works according to this. I don't know if I'm convinced.

2009-02-24T19:07:00.006-06:00

All Good Things...

Ahhh Vangelis. How I love thee. Fairweather favorites come and go but the sensual, melancholic synth brilliance of his Blade Runner score will have a place at the summit of the Top Ten List that shall be chiseled upon my pink marble tombstone.

Many put Vanglis down as a Yani-esque new age ding-dong, The Greek Rick Wakeman, or cheese purveyor. Something that's difficult to dispute if anyone's heard the Enya meets Air Supply space-yacht-rock of Vangelis and Jon (which I still like).

Less a pleasure of the guilty variety is Vangelis' old Greek garage-prog group Aphrodite's Child. Check out Magic Mirror, a terrific Proto-Metal tune in which the vocals play Echo to Vangelis' organ's Narcissus:

Aphrodite's Child had quite the apocalyptic streak. Their first album is entitled "End of the World" and their swan song, the cult epic "666" is a psychedelic concept album about the book of revelations. Here's an awesome track off it (which proves that even back in the early seventies Vangelis loved him some echoed-out tinkley bells) accompanied by a video apparently made by someone in a high school computer science class in 1995:

2009-02-24T14:43:00.011-06:00

Heavily Armed Military is Necessary

After a brief talk about the Nick Cannon opus Drumline at the airport the other day (how do you spend your Mondays?), I started thinking about the idea of militarism in music. Drumlines hark back to the days of "genteel" rank-and-file warfare when the disciplined and clipped precision of group maneuevers were a strategy of group control and a tactic of battlefield intimidation. It's a technique that stretches back to the roman phalanx, a mass of individuals moving as one body, seeming to share the same mind. The drum corps was a part of this psychological warfare (synchronized movements accompanied by the thunder of drums) and also a practical method of keeping people moving in lockstep.

In these days of insurgent warfare, field maneuvers are relic of "civilized" battle, which are used more as way of indoctrinating recruits into the group mind. Recall the first half of Full Metal Jacket where the young soldiers who will soon be running through the jungle are being drilled though obsolete about-faces. However, on the domestic front, this style of battle is alive and well during protests and riots. Before an all-out melee happens to break out, police use the same intimidation tactics used by the warriors of yore: the massed phalanx moving as one.

Getting back to drums. The aura surrounding them is naturally suited to the riot and the battlefield. You beat the living shit out of them, the rhythm they create boils the blood, imitates the quickening pulse, creates nerve jangling tension and release. They were useful in battle for the same reasons they are useful on the dancefloor, and countless artists have used them to evoke the atmosphere of the warzone.

For the purposes of this post however I'm interested in those who have used drums and rhythm produce military force for the purposes (intentional or not) of satire.

Watch this performance by James Brown (with no less that two full-kit drummers) and remember that it was recorded a year after Dr. King's assassination.

This was a time when anyone with a social conscience had the images of the southern civil rights protests and the Democratic Convention seared into their brains. It was a time when "clean" crew-cut conservative reactionaries were pitted against the "unkempt" forces of progressive social change.

James Brown and his band appear onstage like an army, even donning a weird sort of uniform somewhere between Judo master and Jedi knight. The locked groove they beat out is more clean and tight than a marine corps marching band. On top of this unbelievably precise human-rhythm machine (many-as-one) The Godfather of Soul opens fire. It all closes with the staccato bob-and-weave interplay between bandleader and saxophone in an breathless climax. The martial sounds and images have been swallowed up into James Brown's spiritual-sexual ecstasy. He has transformed the coup-de-grace into the petit mort.

For an even more overt example of this same idea, listen to Zombie by Fela Kuti and the Africa 70. Each instrument and voice interlocks in a head-spinning polyrhythm. The percussion becomes fluid then shocks the listener when it abruptly halts with a thunderclap snare hit. Fela steps up to the mic not as singer but as drill sergeant, leading his band through a cadence of military orders worthy of R. Lee Ermey. The band follows with frightening discipline. Fela Kuti continually spoke and sung against the corrupt military government of his native Nigeria that raided his home, imprisoned him, and killed his mother. Perhaps nowhere is his criticism of militarism more devastating than in Zombie. The lyrics sardonically describe a soldier who has surrendered his will to his superiors, whose training has rendered him one of the "walking dead". However, it is the percussive music itself that contains the most incendiary attack. By reimagining his band as a paramilitary organization Kuti reveals their musical precision as a threatening artistic parody of military might.

Band as army. Drums of war.

2009-02-08T13:02:00.020-06:00

In ancient times there was ....

which begat....

Then came...

Behold!

I'm not really trying to compare these two cultural jack moves in terms of quality. What interests me more is the Euro -to - America flow of influence, since the sonic palate of Eurodance has been owning Rap for the past year or so now. Flash from the Aughties to the Eighties: Afrika Bambaataa was playing with Kraftwerk's teutonic synth squelches as a way creating a "music without boarders" fitting his envisioned global community of the Zulu Nation. Ethos aside, you can dance to it, Numbers was a breaking tune before Bambaataa got ahold of it. Today Kanye dosen't seek to unite a world community by joining seemingly disparate cultural threads (Berlin and the Bronx). He's counting on a global market and going for mass appeal. "Stronger" begs the question: when does a song based on a sample of a tune simply become a glorified cover of that tune. (Especially since Daft Punk's song is built around a sample of American Edwin Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby." ) Kanye obviously loves his source material, but he's also counting on you loving it. Gone are the days when DJs sought to mask or bury their samples. Now, producers like Kanye build songs onto a pre-existing hit, banking on the audience's thrill of recognition. (Right, Girl Talk?) All the same, these homage-tunes are part of a continuum of dialogue between Europe and America. Two genres are quickly merging into one coked-up keytar-weilding neon Chimera. In shutter shades. The Auto Tune craze flows out of this, as does such bonkers EuroRap hybrids as TI's use of Numa Numa. Alls I can say is, I'll be first in line to shake the hand of whoever cover/samples Alice Deejay first! Smart money's on Birdman.