(i'm on a) kick against modern jazz

...getting back to my irregularly scheduled deprogramming. in the post-valentino genre-fest, we're up to:

5 with love Y charles tolliver big band

not too much to say about this, really - it's big and brassy and exciting, pleasingly complex and contrapuntal but hardly groundbreaking. it sounds but exactly like (i)'d expect from modern big band jazz, which is this funny thing because i'm not sure the definition or sound "modern" jazz has changed all that much since the 1960s. i guess the touchstones are thad jones/mel lewis, and before that maybe mingus, though it's really that out there.

so, unlike the moran album, this one doesn't offer very much conceptual content to talk about. i guess the thing would be solos and musicianship, but that kind of thing - instrumentalism in general - doesn't tend to interest me very much at all, on an intellectual level anyway. well, if there's something especially noteworthy going on in the solos here, it's not jumping out at me.

not that there's anything wrong with any of this - well-executed renditions of familiar forms are perfectly fine in my book, in fact it's nice and maybe even necessary to have some (but not too many) of them around; more than anything for the possibility of seeing them live. (and i'm sure tolliver's band would absolutely smoke live.)

but at what point does the making a "normal-sounding" jazz album (something that, again, has not changed very much at all since the early-mid '60s - pop-jazz and fusion aside - hence the phrase "post-bop," which as far as i can tell denotes the era we're still living in) become tantamount to performing a "genre exercise." and(/or) at what point does that phrase take on its negative connotations? on the surface, a straight-ahead modern big-band album like this wouldn't seem to entail the knotty theoretical concerns of someone like sharon jones. (for instance, would we ever get nick s. referring to a jazz artist as semi-fascist? possibly, but only if they were aping, like bix beiderbecke or something.)

possibly because jazz - so far out of the main stream of contemporary socio-cultural concerns - seems likewise to be in a sense outside of history. or rather, it's because lack of formal innovation has become the overwhelming norm in the jazz of the past few decades; that is, not sounding new is hardly news.

i should be careful here, because this argument is veering dangerously close to "gee, all jazz sounds the same to me" territory. except...well, it sort of does. and that's not because i haven't listened to plenty of it. it may be because i don't have a lot of patience for gleaning individual players' soloing styles and what-have-you, unless they're really striking (like bill frisell, for instance - but in that case it's more of a sonic/textural issue.)

[actually, there is something else going on - a bigger question, which i can't start to tackle right now, about how much i conceive of music metonymically, as it were - listening to/considering albums as exemplars of their particular genre/style, rather than in and of themselves. it's sort of an art/craft distinction, and sort of an issue about the individuality/specificity of artists/performers. mmmm...remind me to talk about it later.]

so what we're left with, perhaps, is two possible directions for "modern jazz," exemplified by the jason moran record (high-concept, self-aware, gimmicky) and the charles tolliver record (musically "pure," straightforward, unoriginal.) i happen to like both of these albums, or in any case i actively enjoy listening to them, which amounts to the same thing. but i'm not necessarily crazy about either of these as primary moduses operandi for contemporary jazz, and i have the sense that i might not actually like them as much if i was more familiar with lots of other records that i presume are out there doing similar things. can't say for sure though. and in any case, there are other things going on in jazz. maybe i'll get to that in another week or two.

preEMPtive [prehistory edition]

[because i already used that title once before, but it's too good not to recycle. which they're probably all about in seattle anyway.]

so. EMP panels are posted. (finally!) which means i will start thinking about actually making plans to attend (since until now i couldn't be entirely sure the conference was even going to happen.)

some general preliminary reactions:

• they really ought to have someone fix up the abstracts so that the quotation marks and hyphens don't all show up as ??s; it's really annoying.

• i feel like i'm going to have to make a mix cd (or three) of all the songs being focused on by various papers. (maybe i'll make a bunch of copies to distribute as a public service act of love.)

• i'm strangely underwhelmed by this year's batch of paper topics - not sure why, but there aren't nearly as many really exciting ones as i'd hope/expect. even though there are four panels per time slot this year (instead of three), almost all of them with four presenters, i'm not seeing a lot of cases where i'll be really torn in choosing among them. which is good, i guess, but it's definitely not the way it oughtta be.

• there are a lot papers that look way less interesting (and relevant) than my proposal. (grumble grumble - but that said i don't have too much of a grudge; i've already chalked my rejection up to bio-based bias, thereby further solidifying my general undercredentialed outsider self-image.)

• a lot of the papers seem to have nothing, or very little, to do with the ostensible theme of the conference. this is somewhat to be expected, but it seems like the organizers were especially lax about that this time around. to be fair, i guess that i had been mostly thinking of the theme as "history," but there's also "time" and "place" in there, and a number of the papers are related to place, especially, in ways that don't necessarily have much to with history per se. still, a whole lot of them - a majority, maybe - only seem relevant in that they're telling histories - that is, narrating stories about various pieces of pop/rock (artists, songs, styles, etc.), past and/or present; which i would say is not really enough to make them "about" history, time, or place. you know?

of the several vague suggestions in the original call for papers, this was probably the most intriguing to me:

*Evolving notions of musical revivalism: retro culture, questions of periodization in music, and the validity of the concept of youth culture as a sign of the times.

that is, to make it even broader, music historiography: discussions about the ways we writers/thinkers conceive of (and interact with) pop music history, and also the ways that musicians (conceive of and) interact with that history in their music. doesn't seem to be a whole lot of that going on.

this one - *How dichotomies of nearness/experience and farness/history affect music fanship, music writing, and music making. - gets a little more play. and i'm definitely interested in these questions. but get much beyond that and "place" can become a metaphorical abstract to the extent that it's basically meaningless as a "theme."

anyway. some specific things that are exciting/intriguing. (aka, which panels i would choose if the conference was tomorrow.) in chronological (future-historical!) order:

Thursday April 19
>> Keynote: Jonathan Lethem
i'm definitely sort of fed up with the way fiction/literature writers get to do high-profile sidelining "amateur" gigs in muso-dom (writing music columns in major periodicals; editing the da capo best music writing series; giving keynotes at EMP) more or less on the basis of their celebrity. that said, lethem's topic, even though it is pretty much completely irrelevant to the "theme" (y'know!?), is definitely quite relevant to me specifically (as well as to him specifically, as i just got done grumbling about) and to the current state of things in general (which seems to a more consistent topic across the board) - especially given the wide range of activities he places in the spectrum between fan and "professional." should be interesting.

Friday April 20

9:00 - 10:45

>> Year Zeroes

total no-brainer about which panel to attend firstfirst, mostly because of the irresistable star-power of alyssa's boyz (sasha and joshua), but also some pretty enticing subject matter - sf-j's paper maybe in particular, an examination of the changing (or not) nature of r&b, among other things. also interested in hearing about the '80s (especially the late '80s), definitely still the phase of pop history that i feel like i know the least about. plus: soul power!

(on the other hand, dom leone's abstract is pretty appealing; it's certainly a resonant an useful topic. but there is a lot of talk about the internet etc. effect on music listenership etc. anyway it's cool that dom will be there, i'll be interested to see what he's like.)

11:00 - 12:45
not too much standing out in this time slot. except maybe this one:
“Is Rock Criticism Part of Intellectual History?”
eh? good question.

>> Lunch Session - Ellen Willis Tribute
right on.

2:15 - 4:00

Michaelangelo Matos, “A Matter of Trustafarians: Behind the Bob Marley Poster on the Dorm Room Wall” got the heads-up on this from bedbugs. sounds like a promising piece of potentially enlightening entertainment - and matos' supremes paper last year was fantastic.

the other papers in that panel - on rock t-shirts, "selling sad" and american idol - are reasonably enticing too. even though it would also be interesting to hear tim hecker talk about glenn gould. and i don't know what to think about this:
"Anticipating The Re-Emergence of The Pre-Temperate Aboriginal Drone Form as The Root And Dominant Figure In Rock Music."

4:15 - 6:00
>> The Color Line
pretty easy choice - mostly for doug wolk's, which promises to be very illuminating (i've never heard of clydie king) - he seemed very cool last year too. i'm also very interested in the good night, and good luck. paper. on the other hand, the papers on the pet shop boys vis-a-vis aids and on cliches are also pretty appealing ("people act like clichés are overused." is a great way to start that abstract.) though who knows what the hell is going on with a panel title like "songitudes."

better stuff on saturday.

9:00 - 10:45
easy to pick christgau, though i'd likely just stay for his paper (which should be relevant as well as enjoyable) and then skip out (daphne brooks on tvotr? another piece about katrina/nola? no thanks. btw, katrina wasn't last year.) though not sure which for. the women's rooms one seems potentially intriguing, though maybe not as much as "conjuring the trickster in the church of crunk." (!) also, that's an organized grad-student panel, which makes me want to go both because it's nice to see grad students and because last year's (the UW girl group panel) was definitely the highlight of that conference for me.

11:00 - 12:45
>> A Seventies:Moment
is that punctuation intentional? again, not hard to go the obvious route with the holy greil, even if i don't particularly think i care about rod stewart (no - in fact i should go for that very reason - even the abstract gets me curious about his early albums.) yuval taylor's paper seems very promising. otherwise, i wouldn't mind seeing franklin bruno, tim quirk, or nate patrin, but none of them are talking about things of especial interest, except maybe quirky quirk.

the lunch session is much harder to pick - would be sweet to see joe bataan, but i think i'll have to go with my man carl wilson (especially since he's not doing a paper this year, sadly), and come to think of it, i am absolutely interested to talk about local music scenes.

2:15 - 4:00
biggest conflict of interest so far, and it's not a very big one. on a purely genre-based level, the techno/dance panel and the country-soul panel both tug at my allegiances. certainly it would be nice to catch simon reynolds and michael daddino (both of whose topics sound awesome), but sadly they're both slotted first (at least for now), which means i'll probably miss them both in favor of seeing my friend (maybe?) charles hughes, whose paper is most directly relevant to my professed interests. well, we'll see.

4:15 - 6:00
hmmm. not sure here either. joe schloss and o-dubs make an appealing tag-team. jd considine rubbed me the wrong way a little last year, but his paper should be interesting (unless it's boring, which is a distinct possibility.) however, the janet weiss-keith-moon paper is no-way gonna be boring. whoa, that gal went to elementary school with joanna newsom!

that leaves sunday - which is still up in the air for me (whether i'll get to be there for it) b/c there seem to be no plane flights leaving in the afternoon, which is what i'd need, unless i took work off on monday. it wouldn't be the worst thing to skip it, but...this in particular is hard to pass up:

�Why the Four Seasons did not and could not have a story until 2005.� his answer is really interesting, and theoretically challenging to grapple with. my question would be, though, is it the case that they now do have a story that anyone's interested in hearing? does anybody care about the four seasons these days? because i sure do: i've recently acquired three of their albums, and they are slowly but surely blowing me away.

>> The Future of Thinking About Music for a Living
obviously a big-deal topic, for most of the people involved at the conference. me included ( i hope.) might be tired of talking/thinking about it by this point however.

i do think it's weird that they scheduled another session opposite this, though i guess it's appropriate that it's "displaced listening" - the unfortunate thing is that all three of the papers in it seem worth checking out; especially maura johnston's on listening to freestyle at home and loneliness in dance music lyrics.

so that's that. now what?

a marriage made in arts non-profit heaven

i do know a fair amount about jazz - at least, a fair amount considering that i'm a pop-obsessed, indie-rock-bred music blogger. and i've got some things to say about it - but i know they're going to get bigger and hairier than i feel like dealing with right here and now, so i'm going to try to limit my scope to this perfectly lovely jason moran album, and more specifically to this song:

6 milestone Y jason moran and alicia hall moran

it was an easy valentine's choice, because it's an artistic collaboration between husband and wife, and it doesn't get much more romantic than that. alicia, who wrote the tune, sings as the "jazz wife" (as jason puts it in the liner note, "musing about the whereabouts of her traveling husband.") there's a nice little self-contradiction in that she's not actually sitting home and waiting, she's participating performance.

back when she was just alicia hall, she wrote a rapturous treatise on love as the "soul of genius" for the liner note of moran's 2002 solo piano album modernistic: "listen and you will do more than sense his genius - you will hear his life." [she also says that "it is the element of love that ciphers the query on genius"... but i'm not going to go there.] along these lines, "milestone" might be construed as not just about their marriage (presumably) and a function of their partnership, but actually literally constituting their marriage.

certainly, more broadly, it's a stylistic marriage of jazz (his milieu) and classical (hers), through the juxtaposition of classical vocal technique and a jazz quartet setting, with his pianistic approach containing aspects of both traditions. of course, in the contemporary art music world this recording absolutely inhabits and exemplifies, and very probably in their respective artistic careers, the boundaries are hardly that well defined. there are other elements of classical and academic music throughout this "jazz" album: in the nostalgically respectful reading of carl maria von weber's "cradle song," in the self-conscious avant-gardeism of "break down" and "artists ought to be writing" (both of which sample the voice of art theorist adrian piper, and, for me, resonate strongly though probably unwittingly with the work of the books, similarly intellectually-inclined musicians who tend to travel in rather different circles), and in the minimalist compositional structure of "RAIN" (a piece inspired by african-american slave culture.)

moran's piano-playing itself (at least as i've experienced it) tends to reside fairly far from the fluid, earthy vernacular we're used to hearing from more traditionally-oriented jazz pianists.
still, it doesn't feel overly clinical or dispassionate. there's plenty of personality discernable even in the less conceptually-anchored pieces, and the intellectual components of the album are nicely tempered by a distinct, sentimental emotional aspect. this is significant - it lends "milestone," for example, a warmth and tenderness that's mostly absent from don byron's similarly-minded but rather glib album a fine line. [a fine line is a sort of conceptual record about arias and lieder, for which byron collected melodies from the likes of roy orbison, puccini, and leonard bernstein, setting them for various small jazz ensembles, some instrumental but in several cases with a classically-trained vocalist.]

it is extremely pertinent that artist in residence is an album of material culled from three separate commissions by prominent arts organizations; which is to say this music is fundamentally borne of the institutional, non-profit arts world. i take the "in residence" of the title to suggest that moran is a resident of that community, and in a more permanent sense than the phrase usually indicates. this isn't to say that he or this record are entirely divorced from a/the more "pure" jazz community: especially these days, there's an awful lot of overlap.

whether that overlap is a good or bad thing for jazz (as an art form? as a cultural tradition? as music?) is an open question - without attempting to address it, i would hazard that it opens up certain possibilities while limiting others. in some ways moran seems to be doing something analogous to how i described matmos vis-a-vis contemporary electronica a few posts down - that is, he's taking a conceptual approach to his parent genre - or maybe better said, using (in his case) jazz as a tool to explore concepts outside of its normal ken - in a way that, while technically remaining within the parameters of the jazz tradition, challenges those parameters to the extent that he sometimes seems to be more properly situated on the outside looking in.

"how can an abstract jazz artist say clearly how they feel and make an audience understand?" in his liner note, moran poses this question and asserts that this work "centers around exploring possible answers to the question." adrian piper provides one possible answer in her sampled speech - "artists ought to be writing about what they do" - and moran takes this to heart, offering a fair amount of explication in the booklet. but there are bound to be even more satisfying answers out there as well. his choice to cover the "negro national anthem" hints at another possibility, one based as much in culture resonance as it is in intellectualism. regardless of how adequately he feels he's been able to address these concerns, it's pretty clear that he's got a firm awareness of something which is vital to remember in the highly theoretically convoluted context of contemporary arts institutions - that to be intellectual doesn't have to and shouldn't mean to be unemotional or impersonal, and that art can and should strive to be both.

rudie got soul

would you believe that these two men are actually the same size? one of them only looks taller because of the mystical transformative optical power of wisdom, music, and transcendental love.

i don't know much about reggae. even though i generally enjoy listening to it, i've never made it a point to really investigate it. indeed, i feel like i still have a ways to go in clearing up some misconceptions i have about it, such as my sense that it completely predated the american r'n'b/rock/pop [from the late '50s/early '60s, as i know it from oldies radio], developed independently of it [until it was suddenly revealed to the rest of the world by bob marley in the '70s], and therefore belongs more properly to an "authentic" or "folk" tradition (like bluegrass, gospel, and folk) unlike the more individualistic (and, obviously, commercial) art forms of pop, r'n'b, etc. [this is, of course, a false dichotomy as well as faulty historiography, although it's not entirely groundless oversimplification.]

but i did have an idea about reggae recently, which is that it could be construed as a subcategory of r'n'b, and more specifically, as a form of soul music. considered this way, it suddenly becomes a lot more interesting to me. the direct impetus for this idea came from listening to this cd, which contains two of toots and the maytals' early '70s albums. i was familiar with some of the songs, especially "pressure drop" (which is mostly what made me decide i needed to own the albums), but i don't think i was prepared for the full magnitude of greatness on display here...it might be some of the most essential music i've ever heard. anyway i can't stop smiling whenever i put it on. it's reggae, but pretty hard to deny it's soul too.

so i've been trying to figure out what to do with this (hardly revolutionary, but still significant) connection. who else made music like this? bob marley, for instance, is fairly soulful, but his music never struck a chord with me in quite this way (though i should probably check out some of his earlier stuff.) i think i need somebody to explain what roots and rocksteady mean, exactly. (and bluebeat?) maybe wikipedia will do it. (hmm, sez that the maytals play "a unique, original combination of gospel, ska, soul, reggae, and rock"...well that's not helpful!)

in the meantime, i'm checking out this album, widely and unanimously raved about as a classic, albeit one that almost nobody knew about for over two decades. at first i was underwhelmed, because it just sounded like typical, dubby reggae to me. (and, well, because it didn't sound very much like soul.) perhaps i should have expected as much - turns out i actually already had one of the tracks from it on the lee perry arkology box which i've intermittently enjoyed but probably never made it all the way through. upon repeated listens...i am growing to appreciate it more; there is some lovely subtlety to the production, and some of the songs are growing on me (that was probably the biggest disappointment on first listen.) it's clear that the primary emphasis here is not on pop song structures, memorable melodies, or emotional vocal performances (elements that i'm especially interested in these days, be they in '60s soul, '70s power-pop, and '00s dance-pop) - though there is, naturally, plenty of rhythm. of course, this is from 1977, by which time soul music itself had basically dried up, and/or developed into other things.

more relevant to the issue at hand, though maybe something of an exploratory cul-de-sac, i've picked up this fantastic compilation. it demonstrates a very strong reggae-soul bond, to the extent that the music it contains - despite being the work of jamaican ex-pat musicians, is far more readily identifiable as funk and soul than as reggae.

7 i believe in music Y bob and wisdom

this track is a pretty good exampe - it's actually one of the three or four most reggae-like cuts on the cd, but what it most resembles is muscle-shoals-style gospel-soul. (there are only two tracks that i would call relatively straight reggae.)

it's also stunningly beautiful; both the musical performance and the lyrical message. it made me melt a little the first time i heard it (standing alone waiting for the subway.) i like having this message on valentine's day, because i think it's important for the holiday to be able to be about generalized, universal love, as well as just romantic love. interestingly, on the evidence of these three reasonably diverse cds, romantic and sexual love would seem to be a much less common topic for reggae than they are for soul, rock and pop. (i was considering including the deathly funky anti-war burner "love is the answer," by ram, instead of this one, but that will just have to wait...)

anyway, "music is love and love is music" is as good an explanation as any as to why ross is "of love."

and: "people who believe in music, they're the happiest people i've ever seen." 'nuff said.

pan the riot

seems like as good a time as any to talk about going to see some local bands play last night. a fair amount to think about; i'll try to think it quick though as it's late late late. went to danger danger, a nexus of the local underground/diy music community, for the first night of their aquarius fest. i only ended up seeing three bands, as i was offered a ride home at that point and my other friends were leaving or not coming; that was okay, though i was curious to see if the rest of the bands would be in a similar vein or if there would be more variety for the rest of the night. the ones i saw were probably the ones i was most interested in: bear is driving, who are friends of mine, but whom i haven't seen perform in a long time; grandchildren, who i've been hearing about for a while (and are friends of matt, who used to live in the house - as do all the members of grandchildren), and normal love, who i think matt said are his favorite philly band.

all three, i would say, played progressive rock music; or progressive punk rock might be even more apt. bear is driving have a harder, metal-ish edge, and normal love are extremely abstract and have a violinist (and play written-out compositions - i could barely see through the crowd but i did make out sheet music on a stand in front of the drummer, which is impressive.) grandchildren were a little harder to get a sense of - they were the most song-oriented of the three (the only one with vocals, but they were almost impossible to make out), though not everything they played was very song-like. in general, all three groups had a pretty similar musical approach; complex, mathy, aggressive, guitar-heavy, fairly abstract and non-melodic.

i liked it - i mean, i enjoyed myself - BiD were definitely my favorite, and had the most distinctive and memorable pieces; the compositions are intense but accessible, with fun mathy polyrhythms and some very powerful grooves. they're also extremely tight and technically exciting players (and they just sounded better than the other groups, which was probably not the other groups' fault, considering the circumstances of the show.) grandchildren i had been expecting to be more folky, and they weren't at all (although their myspace songs are); i feel like they didn't come across very well in that setting, but they still rocked out pretty well. normal love were a disappointment; to some extent they're just not my style, but i think it was also not the best environment in which to appreciate them (particularly not being able to see them.) i hadn't realized it would be that abstract and aggressive.

anyway. i know that not all of the other bands playing at the fest were as much in the progressive/math camp as those three, although i imagine a lot of them were more or less punk, probably quite a few were fairly aggressive, and not many were very poppy. that's just my assumption. and that's okay. i don't necessarily think that the danger danger folks have any illusions about booking a truly wide range of acts - but i do also think there are some (probably largely unspoken) limitations to what kinds of groups are likely to be accepted in that community. for example, i've never really heard about any singer-songwriters or similarly-oriented bands playing at danger danger or any of the similar houses in west philly (though to be fair i'm not hugely aware of what's going on in that scene.)

i don't mean to put this just on the people who book the shows - i'm sure there are similar self-imposed limitations set by the people that would think about forming bands and wanting to play in this scene. (i'm also not condemning any of this - i definitely don't have a firm basis for doing that, but i'm not particularly interested in doing so anyway.) but it would be interesting to think more about this phenomenon and its ramifications. (apparently there's somebody at penn writing his grad thesis about danger danger.) in some ways, i guess it's a little disappointing that an independent, youth-based, community-oriented music scene would have their primary focus on a relatively narrow range of musical styles, since they have the freedom to set the parameters as wide as they want (whereas more established musical outlets, beholden to sales and marketing concerns, would have less freedom.) punk rock is the foundation of - and synonymous with - the DIY tradition, but nothing says it has to always stay that way, especially now that the generally held conceptions about genre that fomented and undergirded punk at its outset have been almost completely exploded.

anyway... one of the local bands that was not among the twenty-several acts on the bill for the aquarius festival is panda riot, whom i mentioned a little while back. i like them a lot - on the basis of having listened to their cd a bunch of times and knowing them pretty tangentially. it's not hard to peg them as indie/shoegaze (though the triphop/portishead references are way off, drum machine and chick singer notwithstanding.) they call themselves dream-pop/swirl-pop i'd said that the cocteau twins are the best point of reference, but maybe it's mbv after all - i'll need to go listen to my ct albums again and reconsider. it's kind of uncanny how accurately they channel the sound of the early nineties - more so when i actually think about it, since otherwise i might assume that that would be some kind of "default" setting for bands to sound like, since it was what they sounded like as i was coming of age and shortly thereafter. in fact, it must be extremely intentional - and since not nearly as many bands are doing that as you would expect - or at least, i don't come into contact with many (which i guess is not surprise)... - i think it's pretty cool of them.

not sure which is my favorite track on their disc: song 3 is pretty sweet, and the one about andy warhol is catchy, though the best half-hook is probably the one that goes "hey! lookout" (though the rest of the chorus after that is not as good.) and the opener does this really sexy (very cocteau twins-y) disembodied vocal loop thing at the end and for a split second at the beginning (unless it's a synth that sounds like a vocal)

8 ["yours was the face on the tip of my tongue"] ♥ panda riot

but this is the one that seemed most appropriate for valentimes, even though i'm not 100% sure it's a happy love song and not a regretful or sarcastic or ironic one. but that repeated line (i'm not sure what the title is) is simultanously dirty and sweet enough to be exile-era liz phair. and rebecca's vox really do sound like an early, bored (yes, pre-sellout) liz.

sometimes genre can be your friend.

totalizingly wired

so now i'm meant to talk about isolée? nope, just to say something about dance/idm/techno or whatever it is; this is meant to be a series of musings on genre, not just an albumist smorgasbord.

i'll say this: electronica can be hard to write about. partly because it can be hard to focus on - listening to it tends to make me want to do other things: dance, or groove, or zone out, or bob my head distractedly. also because there's not usually much you can say about meaning or concept - despite its pragmatic aspects, it's fundamentally fairly "pure", which is part of what makes me want to align it in some ways more with classical or art music, or at least jazz, than a lot of pop/rock. and there's often not much to say about the people making it either. more significantly, though, it's hard to write about because it's hard to find vocabulary that conveys much that's meaningful about the music. this - as well as the often trendy, exclusionary, and obscurantist culture that surrounds the music - may be why electronica has seen such a proliferation of sub-genres and sub-sub-classifications, perhaps more than any other realm of music.

there used to be a good deal of sense to it - at least, in the late '90s i felt like i had a pretty good handle on IDM and ambient, trip-hop, big beat, jungle/drum 'n' bass [which nobody is ever going to convince me are two separate things; i've had this discussion way too many times], trance and house (though those last two did at times seem fuzzy, a distinction occasionally based more on socio-cultural value judgments than actual musical criteria.) now big beat is more or less dead (though...more on that later); trip-hop has been diffused and subsumed into so many other forms that it's effectively gone, or else it's just called down-tempo now; d'n'b has given way to two-step and now slowed down into dubstep, supposedly; meanwhile house, trance, and IDM have all fused together and/or disintegrated into a bewildering array of labels that have more or less stopped being useful, certainly to me, but i get the sense even to the people that actually pay attention to the various german and scandinavian and south american microcliques of techno production.

this is not a bad thing: despite having its forebears and pioneers like any other genre, electronica seems somewhat ill-suited to traditional narratives of stylistic development and pigeonholed categories. there have of course been discernable "scenes" centered around certain stylistic substrata (and often geography - detroit, chicago, bristol, paris, ibiza) but i feel like this is due to patterns of trendiness and influence within very small and close-knit artistic communities, as opposed to the arguably more gradual, but also more sweeping, across-the-board shifts that happen in genres with more formal coherence and discernable lineages of stylistic progression.

that is, with the possible exception of specific scene-based movements like trip-hop and jungle, which have fairly well-defined aesthetic parameters and are fairly self-contained, electronic music seems to have a variety of strains or tendencies, between which it is always fluctuating, but all of which are active, to a greater or lesser extent, at any given point. it can have prominent dance beats, or frenetic, hard-to-dance-to beats, or mellower beats that don't really inspire you to dance, or be entirely beatless; it can be highly melodic, or harmonic, or neither; it can have lush synthesizers, or plinky or squiggly ones, or harsher industrialish sounds; it can be structured in clearly defined sections, or gradually evolving progressions; it can have few elements or many; etc. etc. - people are making electronica with pretty much any possible combination of these qualities today, and i think that if you go back to the early 90s or maybe even the late 80s or earlier, you'll find music that fits into all or most of those combinations then as well.

in rock, jazz, country, song-based dance forms, or most other genres you could think of, there is certainly plenty of recycling and variation between extremes and of course there are multiple strains coexisting at any given point, but there are also clear, broad historical progressions and overarching shifts and trends - and when these double back on themselves, as has been happening plenty lately, in rock particularly (and has happened so much in jazz in the last few decades that many people question its vitality/viability) it is manifestly evident that that's what they're doing. not so much, i would argue, in electronica - the recent upsurge of interest in italo disco, for instance, has revealed how much the last five years or so of microhouse, minimal, and what-have-you have borrowed from records that are sometimes over two decades old. now, the people making the music may have been aware of this, but i wasn't, not particularly, and even when i am now, the new stuff still sounds extremely modern.

perhaps another way to get at what i'm trying to say - or maybe just a related point - is the realization that there is little or no formal and musical vocabulary inherent in the way electronic music is produced. whereas most instruments have traditional styles and techniques that are usually passed down from teacher to student, changing only gradually to fit the trends of the day until some innovator comes along to introduce new dimensions - as well as physical parameters that make certain kinds of playing, and even certain melodic and harmonic choices, more idiomatic - the tools for making electronic music offer a much wider range of possibility without requiring a corresponding degree of technical proficiency.

i don't mean to underestimate the effect of learning to use the tools and programs - i'm certain that lots of great electronica has been the unwitting result of trying to get the machines to do something else, and that, of course, very proficient techno producers who really know their programs/equipment are far more effective at realizing their compositional goals. (same goes for those who are willing to put in a lot of painstaking work - squarepusher comes to mind, for example.) but there is a sense in which - especially with the present technology - creating an innovative or just plain interesting piece of electronica requires, first and foremost, simply concieving of it, and that being able to then actually create it is a secondary part of the process. (this is unlike a lot of music, where much more emphasis is put on the performance aspects - instrumental and vocal - of musical creation, and where recording and production may be valued very highly, but are not necessarily considered integral to the music in quite the same way.) on the other hand, this view of electronic composition belies the extent to which a lot of the music is probably composed through the very process of creating it, perhaps without much of a preconceived idea of how it will turn out. the composer is the producer is the performer, because all of these functions can be collapsed into one activity. (along these lines, it's pertinent that most electronic music is made by individuals rather than groups.)

this has been a long and hard-argued tangent that i hadn't anticipated taking, but was hopefully worthwhile. where i was at one point headed is the observation that by throwing out a lot of the genre subdivisions that once permeated thinking and writing about electronica, it becomes simultaneously harder to know what to say about a particular piece or artist's output, and easier to identify what is significant or salient about it. it's gotten so hard to know whether a techno sound in the '07 is minimal or neo-disco or neo-trance or whatever (and so irrelevant) that all that really matters, basically, is whether you think it's any good. whether you want to dance to it or fall asleep to it, whether you're compelled to listen to the intricacies of its arrangement or get its poppy melodies stuck in your head. most importantly, i guess, whether or not it stands out from the overwhelming output of modern electronica you may or may not have heard, demands your attention, and sticks in your memory.

(there are certain artists that fall somewhat outside the scope of this discussion - conceptual provocateurs like matmos and the books, song-centered popsters like richard x and the knife, perhaps unmistakeable sonic-signaturists like ratatat and cornelius - all of whom are electronic artists to a greater or lesser extent, but none of whose work is especially "pure" from a genrelogical perspective, which is all for the awesome in my book - on the other hand, you could just say that means they've found a way to resoundingly fulfill that last criterion.)

i give up on electronica. there's so much of it and so much of it seems to be relatively inaccessible (i mostly mean that in logistical terms.) i know some things that i like; i'll be happy to check out anything i hear good things about, provided i can get my ears on a copy; i'll keep trying to find artists that seem worth developing a relationship with. but i give up on trying to understand it in any kind of overarching and cohesive way. let's remember that whenever we try to do that with any music, we're mostly deceiving ourselves anyway.

9 pictureloved Y isolée

so there's isolée. honestly, i put this track on the 'cast mostly to demonstrate how fluidly the justin timberlake song functions as electronica, and also 'cause it's hard to find electronica songs about love. [except it's not really as hard as you might think - shoot, actually i had at one point intended to include the field's "action," which is the part of a 12" side called "love vs. action" - and which interpolates, i guess - doesn't actually sample - the four tops' "reach out i'll be there" - which would have given us something to talk about. oh well, maybe next time.]

anyway, isolée fits well here because i really have no idea what to call his music. before i heard it i thought it was going to be like IDM, and then i thought it was going to be microhouse, and i guess it is sort of like both of those (way more danceable than most IDM, but more structurally involved than most microhouse, and it's generally song-like in a way that both of those can be but not as a rule.) it's definitely melodic but not especially poppy; it's very warm and has a lot of unusual and interesting sounds as well as plenty of more standard ones. it's got guitars (as a lot of electronica does! - we shouldn't forget that) and voices doing things that aren't singing. basically it sounds great and has a lot of personality. but i don't know what to compare it to.

the only other similar record that i've felt this good about in the last little bit is lindstrøm's it's a feedelity affair, which is somewhat easier to describe: it sounds like disco, for the most part; electronic, obviously, so mostly like italo disco; it's somewhat but not overtly song-based; a lot of the tracks are somewhat epic and spacey - so that's why they call it "space disco." makes sense. the first time i listened to it it made me giddy from the first notes. it doesn't quite live up to that the whole way through, but it does have "i feel space," which is so, so achingly beautiful and majestic that i really have a hard time conceiving of anybody disliking it.

but i'm sure that some people would or do, because there are some people that "don't like electronic music." well, fancy that.

(but those people probably don't even like "i feel love")

lovesex/futuresounds, more like!

that's right, justin, disco sucks! smash it smash it!!
oh, and what's that you say about your ex/love?

meanwhile, just as i've been falling under the starry spell of love, pain, i've also finally succumbed fully to the charms of futuresex/lovesounds. keith urban and justin timberlake both present themselves as lovermen first and foremost, but it's been interesting to consider the contrasts. it's hard to ignore the differences in their real-life (or at least gossip page) public faces: we know that urban is recently married, and from all evidence blissfully happy about it, while timberlake has gone from one much-publicized romance that turned out to be little more than a summer fling to making waves by macking it with the world's sexiest woman and then killing her off on video. and compare keith's liner note love letter to the glaring lack of thank you's in the futuresex booklet - almost unheard of in contemporary top-40 productions.

i had thought "my love" (inspired by cammy, or so we were told) was quite sweet and endearing, but now i feel a little bit exploited. it bears noticing that only maybe three other tracks on the album have similarly romantic sentiments (including two sappy ballads tucked away at the end); the rest are mostly boastful/lustful nightclub narratives in the paris vein. which is fitting: fs/ls gives paris stiff competition as the most inventive and exciting dance-pop album of last year - it's definitely not as consistent, but musically it's at least as inspired if not more so.

i know that some of the popist cabal have questioned why justin has reaped credibility and acclaim from the wider (and especially, hipster) music community while his closest musical peers continue to elicit disdain. (although that's not exactly true in terms of his teenpop-alumni contemporaries: britney's pretty much got the thumbs-up at this point, and while christina's latest wasn't raved about, it certainly wasn't mocked.) i'd argue that justin really is doing something markedly different from standard mainstream dancepop. actually it's timbaland doing it - or at least they're doing it together - but ultimately fs/ls functions almost as much like a hip hop or electronica album as a pop album. or rather, it's a little like all three and ends up being something fairly unique.

timbaland's still-stunning production aside, the album's most striking feature is how fluid its structure is - there are discernable songs, of course, but their songness is pushed and pulled almost to the breaking point, as they stretch beyond standard pop formats into extended breakdown sections, bookending preludes and interludes, flowing and mutating into one another. the clear musical breaks seem to happen in the middle of tracks as often as the end. even though most of the songs have verses and choruses, these are often subservient to the structures established by the groove, production, and orchestration: witness "sexyback," whose lyrically delineated structure ("take it to the chorus") hardly convinces us that it's anything other than a monolithic minimalist groove. (it gets much better when you start thinking of it as an house track rather than a pop song.)

then there are the true epics, the album's twin centerpieces (and masterpieces.) a lot has been written lately about "what goes around...comes around" - suffice to say it's possibly even greater than merely a (pretty damn great in the first place) resurrection and synthesis timbo's past glories: the stutter-beats from the late '90s, the 'eastern' hook c. 2001, and of course the synth symphony of "cry me a river." its less vindictive predecessor is the one i put in the 'cast:

10 lovestoned/i think that she knows Y justin timberlake

i've discussed some of its idiot-savant lyrical subtleties elsewhere - essentially, it's a dancefloor fantasy on par with loose joints' "is it all over my face." and fittingly, while the song part is sweet, it doesn't really take off until three and a half minutes in with a bongo breakdown that spends almost a minute practically begging to launch into full-on beardo space jam territory (there's gotta be a 15-20+ minute edit of this somewhere) before it remembers that it's ostensibly on a pop album. then it unexpectedly switches gears with some micro-emo guitars that usher in the convulsive yet harmonically rapturous "interlude" (if the breakdown was a bit longer, you could almost call it a reprise.)

if the album can't quite sustain the glory of these two back-to-back epics (next to which the first four tracks - including the first two singles - feel almost like preperatory intro material), it still maintains the sense of nearly limitless possibility, its dance-hip-hop-electro-pop love-in persisting even through the two decent but comparatively pedestrian slow jams and the gorgeous, sobering addiction parable "losing my way." in between, we get a pair of hip-hop/r'n'b joints which seem almost run-of-the-(endlessly-innovative-modern-rap)-mill until you consider what they demonstrate about justin's range. and then there's the breezy late album highlight "summer love," which almost approaches the heights of "lovestoned" and "my love," and would have fit perfectly on gold star for robotboy if i had listened to it in time.

it's taken me a while to get a handle on this album, i think because its unorthodox structure doesn't offer many clues about how to proceed. and while i wouldn't say it's flawless or necessarily destined for classic status, i do think it's a stunning piece of work, and a major statement. it's self-assured, but not always sure what it wants to be. in some ways it's a perfect pop record for '06/'07, as the lines between genres and audiences continue to blur and disappear. quite a bit like paris, in fact, it reaches out to many of the best aspects of modern dance music, and brings them together to create something undefinable but vital; experimental in the best sense of the world, an exploratory and open-ended whole. and i can only hope (and trust) that it helps to continue to break down the barriers it so engagingly transgresses - and since justin, for better or worse, seems better positioned to do that than paris is at this point, it's good to know he's on our side.

goddamn i am so excited for the new timbaland album.

let's get {u} into this co ntry

"i've got a U-shaped hole inside me/it gets deeper by the day," says keith rban, country-music-star-turned-celebrity-husband. n.b. that, evidently, the hole is not U-sized, as presumably your size is reasonably constant.

so i kind of can't stop listening to this keith urban album.

er, this one:
which "crazy" thing was that again? actually, this might have been an appropriate title for a concept album about gnarles barkley (which would surely be more interesting than st. elsewhere.) as it happens, the emphasis is very strongly on the first item in that list: above all else, this album's most salient quality is that it is vehemently, brazenly, wholeheartedly in love. crazy in love, you might say. that's probably why i wanted to write about it on valentine's day.

there is one song called "used to the pain," but the pain in question turns out to be that of "givin' in to love," so it's sort of a red herring. otherwise, apart from the handwringing, backwards-looking "stupid boy" [the only lyric on the album in past tense - and, notably , one of the few not written by urban] and "raise the barn" [a southern pride anthem, but of the anti-bush variety ("the boss man don't seem to care"), whose list of red-state institutions includes dixie cups, paper plates, and what's apparently referred to as the "cotton-eyed joe"), every single song on here is dedicated expressly to explaining just how much keith loves you, wants you, needs you, is going to take care of you and support you and not let you down, etc. etc.

and, you know, he's earnest and ardent and reverent and self-confident, but he's also sensitive and considerate and clearly has a sense of humor and knows how to have fun... and basically he's just so big and strong and compassionate and manly, gosh, he kinds of makes me feel like a teenaged girl. of course, unfortunately (for that girl) (or maybe not), "you" in this case is not actually you, but nicole, or as the liner thanks put it: "my wonderful wife - you brought out the sun and the colors and you are SO love - can you hear it? you resonate through my heart and this album. joyous spirits chasing butterflies are we." awwwwwwwww!

point being, i guess, that this is easily the most thematically unified album i've listened to since, well, paris. which is exciting for the albumist in me. and also it's refreshing to hear someone who's so unabashedly happy and self-assured about love, and keith makes it convincing and genuinely moving; partly because of his acknowledgment of light and dark shadings, but largely because of the dogged consistency of his theme, no matter how brilliantly unsubtle and over-the-top it admittedly is.

of course, all of this is so effective because it's evident not just in the lyrics, and the vocal delivery, but in the music itself, which is similarly, fittingly, passionate, earnest, dynamic, often bombastic, frequently playful, and just plain great enough to make you want to believe anything he says. i've almost forgotten to mention that this a mainstream pop-country album, for whatever that tells you; it's also the first such album i've ever paid attention to, much less loved. so i can't speak from experience for the rest of the genre, but i can say that while melodramatic lyrical sentiment and music to match are perhaps to be expected, here at least they absolutely feel earned - which is to say, i guess, not entirely melodramatic.

it's hard to discuss this record in terms of country music, not just because i'm pretty unfamiliar with modern country (though obviously not with its reputation in various circles), but because it doesn't sound especially country to me. i'd say its most pronounced country attributes are its glossy, big-sounding production values and an occasional, slight twang in urban's voice. there are some fiddles and pedal steels and whatnot, and some of the songs have more typically country grooves - but none of that is any more overt than on plenty of "rock" albums. ryan adam's gold comes to mind, for instance, as a more strongly country-sounding album (and that's far from adam's most country-influenced album.)

the observation that (at least some) modern country is just mildly inflected pop-rock is not news. nor does it bother me - indeed, the idea that nashville has become a refuge for rock songwriters no longer relevant to the rest of the pop milieu makes the notion of getting further into country all the more intriguing. it seems evident that at this point "country" is defined more significantly by its consolidated artistic community than by its musical characteristics (and also, of course, as a marketing category) - but that's also something i don't know much about. (though it's a very familiar trope; artists being categorized by social position rather than music.)

all i can say for now is that this album has huge pop hooks and big rock guitars and varied, inventive production, and as much emotional heft as pretty much anything. lead single/opening track/exhibit a "once in a lifetime" is a straight-up power-pop nugget that should make frank kogan stop saying that john shanks does all of his best work with ashlee and lindsay (if things were different, i'd suggest that mr. shanks put keith in touch with ash, who last i heard was looking for someone to catch her when she falls.) the first six tracks are solid rock gold - then there's the brooding ballad "stupid boy," the album's lengthy centerpiece and biggest single to date (though one of the least interesting cuts, to my mind.)

in the latter portion things get even more varied (and somewhat more country), with the slightly creepy anthem "god made woman," which starts with a choir (thom jurek says it "celebrates -- not objectifies -- women" - i'm not quite convinced that it's not doing both) and the groovy two-step "tu compañia" (which is not actually latin-flavored, though it tricks me into thinking that - even though there's nothing in the lyric to suggest this, i imagine it as being adressed a different woman from the rest of the album...but that's just not possible, now is it?)

my favorite tracks, the ones that have been constantly rotating in my head for a few weeks now, are "faster car" - the album's funkiest and most rocking moment and possibly its best pop chorus - the driving "i told you so" (as in "i won't say..."), whose rhythmic cadence, especially in the big stompy bits after choruses, makes me think of talking heads' "road to nowhere" (even though it's probably supposed to make me think of celtic jigs), and the sweepingly romantic "i won't let you down." that one's on the mix:

11 i won't let you down Y keith urban

it has my favorite single moment on the album, the break-down-and-build-back-up after the bridge (starting at 2:41, or 37:26 on the mincecast), when the huge production gives way to just bells and plinky piano under the beginning of the chorus hook, and then the rock band bursts back in. i can't hear it without thinking of jon brion.

okay, i think i've gushed enough. i still don't quite know what to make of the way this album has clearly struck a chord with me. obviously one thing it suggests is that i ought to explore contemporary country further, as i would like to do and had already intended to get around to at some point. i'm just not sure where to go next, exactly. also i'm a little worried that i won't find anything to live up to this - thom jurek (who's clearly as excited by this album as i am) calls it "something that hasn't been heard in the country genre in this way before." but, you know. i'll figure it out. here's another picture:

valentine's passed

o valentine's. like any holiday, or i guess any annual occurence, it can end up as much about the past as the present, a familiar, evenly-spaced milemarker for easy reference. there was the valentine's that i saw beck at maxwell's (and lost some love for him), and the valentine's that hannah and i broke up, and the valentines i made for rabi. well, as it happens, those were all the same year (two-thousand-and-three, wouldn't you know, maybe a harbinger for that sea-change year of years.) i'll tell you more about that later. then there was the one when ester and i had watched american splendor and played poker, and then one when i was in sri lanka - i can't remember whether i had flowers sent or not. in high school i recall making blue-green chocolate chip cookies and passing them out with hugs, playing "my funny valentine" with brushes on the cookie tin.

in my senior year of college, i made little 3" cd-rs valentines for maybe eight or ten of my loves, each with customized artwork and a personally tailored (and non-overlapping!) little thematic mix. (i remember: movies for lillie, boys for ester, frenchyness for laura, tic-tac-toe for kat) they are destined to go undocumented, or at least not fully, but with hope they are still being enjoyed. (like some other things, those were inspired by rabi's 3" valcds from the previous year - i've still got mine somewhere.)

well, a year ago i quietly made this little mixtape for myself. it was the post-post after-the-fact realization of a concept i'd come up with maybe even a year earlier, when i still might have needed the catharsis; at this point i made it more from a sense of obligation to my past and to the idea. i guess it's a similar sense that inspires me to put it here now. anyway the titular "past" is that aforementioned '03 massacre, or more properly its aftermath, and i parlayed uncertainty about how/why to apostrophize the title into a not inappropriate ambiguity.

Title: a ghost of valentine's past
Format: 60-minute cassette
Date: 7 february 06
Packaging: labelled in lower case with a blue pen; short enough to fit on the front of the card.

side one
["she said always remember never to trust me..."]
your ex-lover is dead - stars
let it die - feist
pearl - new folk implosion
summer's gone - aberfeldy
a little bit more - jamie lidell
if not now, whenever - the books
the delicate place - spoon
modern girl - sleater-kinney
the suitcase song - nellie mckay

side two
a fond farewell - elliott smith
this time it will - jeff hanson
out of time - blur
when the angels play their drum machines - hefner
the only answer - m. doughty
dearly departed - daedelus
love love love - the mountain goats
if you ever need a stranger to sing at your wedding - jens lekman
there will always be - adem

so. it tells its own story well enough, which may or may not be mine. if nothing else, it presents a certain image of my listening habits at a certain point. (if i made it last february, i'd certainly been saving up many of the songs for close to a year; i know at one point "i summon you" was slated for this, but then it was deployed to october instead.) as you might expect: these songs are so sad and beautiful.

around the same time, but later, and delivered belatedly as i recall, i made this; not so much a valentine's mix as a valentine in mix form, for angela:

Title: The Vulpine Valentine
Format: 90-minute cassette, plus extra bonus 90-minute cassette ("Bonus Beats Me")
Date: February 2006
Packaging: construction-paper-covered slip-case (formerly a condom box) with a heart and banner on one side and a lovestruck fox on the other (see below), containing two cassette cases, with the tracklist of the primary mix in typewriter and colored-pencil rebus-style drawings on pink index card.

"a term - is't endearing?" (side one)
1. my angel rocks ))<>(( back and forth - four tet
2. angela - john vanderslice
3. she's an angela - they might be giants
4. thank you for sending me an angel - talking heads
5. good weekend - art brut
6. let me go home - camera obscura
7. heartbeat - annie
8. what i'm trying to say - stars
9. flowers - cibo matto
10. secret heart - feist
11. ways + means - m. doughty
12. love is an arrow - aberfeldy
13. l'amour et la morte - (the real) tuesday weld
14. if you find yourself caught in love - belle and sebastian
+ cheese grater - ed's redeeming qualities
"everytime i see you it's happy something" (side two)
1. every time she turns around it's her birthday - manitoba
2. digital love - daft punk
3. sleep like a dream - tears in x-ray eyes
4. good dreams - superchunk
5. she goes to bed - jason falkner
6. pillow - capitol k
7. here in the night - kelley polar
8. in a star orbit - rebecca gates
9. sleep late my ladyfriend - harry nilsson
10. sunday morning - margo guryan
11. sunday kind of love - etta james
12. in the lost and found - elliott smith
+ easy to love - edith frost

mmmm... a very nice mix, i think. it hits that balance of songs chosen for being appropriate to the mix but also for just being fantastic songs. which is to say that just about all of the songs are both. this tape also tells a little story, over its two sides - which is also our story ("good weekend," more or less) - about going out dancing, going to sleep, and waking up. there's also the part at the beginning about angels, and a group of songs about saying "i love you," which is a pretty good subject for a song.

here's the fox, by the way:

the second cassette ("Bonus Beats Me!") went a little something like this:

FRIENDS OF MINE - of montreal/FOLDING DIRTY LAUNDRY - radioinactive+antimc/ONE CEX - cex/YOU (BETTER LET ME LOVE YOU x4) TONIGHT - richard x f. tiga/JUST CAN'T GET YOU OFF MY MIND - spinners/JULIE (RMX) - jens lekman/ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES - los lobos/DISTORTED ANGEL - elvis costello+attractions/(THE ANGELS WANNA WEAR MY) RED SHOES - hem/WALK AWAY RENEE - billy bragg/UPSIDE DOWN - yo la tengo/NO SKY - guided by voices/RAZORBLADE - the strokes/WALK AWAY - franz ferdinand/NOW AND SLEEP - daedelus/I BUILT THIS CITY (MICHAEL MAYER MIX) - baxendale/NO FUN - vitalic/U DON'T KNOW ME - armand van helden/SUGAR (GIMME SOME) - trick daddy f. ludacris + cee-lo/TAKE CARE OF BUSINESS - danger mouse and gemini f. j-zone/WE GOT PANACHE - princess superstar/I'M A SLUT - bis/SUBURBIA - pet shop boys/SIDE STREETS - st. etienne/ON THE WAY TO THE CLUB - blur/PUNK AS FUCK - american analog set/SNOW - jesse winchester/SNOW SHOWERS - trembling blue stars/THIS LITTLE UKELELE - stephin merritt

this was a much looser and obviously wide-ranging mix that only lives up to the promise of "beats" about half the time. a couple "significant" songs; the rest just whatever seemed like a good idea. the first part of side two (basically all the techno and hip-hop stuff) was one of my earliest attempts at live-to-cassette continuous-mixed djing, and was done on the fly and i think in one take. [i only regret not putting "our little angel" instead of "distorted angel" (because it's a really nice song that i haven't already used on a bunch of mixes, and maybe other reasons), and maybe i regret using that dm+gemini song, although i guess it's interesting that danger mouse and cee-lo are sequenced together like that.]

so. none of these are just straight-up valentine's day, love-themed mixes. and neither is the li'l mix/podcast i put up yesterday that you're probably (hopefully?) listening to now, which is probably called "genrephilia" (it's not called "this boombox loves you," that's just a message from the boombox.) it might seem like it, and it is in part, but it's doing double duty in order to set up a series of posts which i guess is commencing with this one (though the others will be different) about various things i've been listening to and thinking about, but mostly about genre, that fave bugbear of mine, each of which will take up one of the songs from the 'cast as its "keynote," if you will. in the order listed, which is to say the reverse order from the mix. (just to make you more confused, though it will all come out right in the end.) i'm being a cock-eyed optimist by saying this, but i'll hope to get them all or mostly up by the end of this weekend. let's just assume that, unlike christmas, the valentine's season starts on the day itself and extends for a while after.

most of my mixes, like most pop songs, are already basically about love anyway. which makes sense; it's both practical and fun, with lots of interchangeable approaches to the same few familiar situations. recently, both gold star for robot boy and liquid crystal slivers are overtly love-themed, the former prob'ly more appropriate for valentine's, as the latter's somewhat somberer. [v's day is about happy love, i'm pretty clear - not necessarily happy romantic love, especially if you haven't got it at the moment; in that case you can substitute broader, general, elemental, humanward love. which happens to be the special province of mr. ross of love.]

if i had made a lovey-dovey mix, it probably would have wanted to have some of the songs from those, and the others documented above - it just would have been somewhat boring and redundant, generally - and certainly some of the things from this next, which still contains most of my favorite love songs despite being five years old now (!) [lately i've been thinking "you send me" might be the ultimate.] it's not a mixtape, although it has become one; it was a radio broadcast that we have a cassette recording of. it's sort of embarrassing to listen to, not just for the usual reasons but also because i think i'm being obnoxious and a little bit nasty towards alyssa in our bantering. hopefully i'm not like that anymore.

Title: Reality is Lubricated, special Valentine's edition
Format: two-hour radio show (also on 120 minute cassette)
Date: 14 February 2002

tracklist courtesy of reminced archives:
Oooweeoooh! Oooh! Oooh! [i.e. "Welcome to Tokio Otis Clay" by Clinton; our theme music]
“Grandpa” Myron (Mike) “The Moose” Cantor - As Time Goes By

Blur - Tender
XTC - I’d Like That
Björk - Like Someone in Love
[flubbed announcement - mic set on cue] [radio silence]
Paul Simon - For Emily, Wherever I Will Find Her
[apology to the listenerhip, repeat of set rundown]

The Old 97’s - Question
The Beach Boys - God Only Knows
The Kinks - Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy

The Fairways - Close to Me
The Pixies - La La Love You

The Sam Cooke - Medley: Try a Little Tenderness/(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons/You Send Me (live)
Prince - Kiss
[clarification from Alyssa about it being a song about sex]
Randy Newman - Falling in Love
[A n ODE to WSRN]
Joni Mitchell - A Case of You
Plastic Fantastic Machine - Love is Psychedelic
Jeff Magnum - I Love How You Love Me

Joe Jackson - Be My Number Two
R.E.M. - At My Most Beautiful
Pain - One-Legged Girl
[a little show here for people from Alyssa]
Kings Of Convenience - I Don’t Know What I Can Save You From
Pizzicato Five - Baby Love Child

The Moldy Peaches - Anyone Else But You
[apology to all the non-{Moldy Peaches Fans} in the audience]
The Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)
Joe Henry - Scar
The Shins - New Slang (When You Notice the Stripes)

Buddy Holly - True Love Ways
The Yo La Tengo - The You Can Have it All
Jonathan Richman - When She Kisses Me
Ella Fitzgerald - Something’s Gotta Give
Chet Baker - My Funny Valentine
The Big Star - I’m In Love With A Girl
[Alyssa's declaration of love]

Nat King Cole - The Very Thought of You
Billy Bragg - Valentine’s Day is Over

so that's that! somehow, amazingly, neither that show nor any of the tracklistings i posted above include the elvis costello rendition of "my funny valentine," which is an absolute staple of the season for me. me being me. (as is listening to that billy bragg song on the 15th.) ["mfv" is admittedly sort of a silly song (in particular the lyrics to the middle-eight) - but it's still great.]

however... it is on "genrephilia"!:

12 my funny valentine Y elvis costello

so there you go.

genrephilia

12 my funny valentine ♥ elvis costello
11 i won't let you down ♥ keith urban
10 lovestoned/i think that she knows ♥ justin timberlake
9 pictureloved ♥ isolée
8 ["yours was the face on the tip of my tongue"] ♥ panda riot
7 i believe in music ♥ bob and wisdom
6 milestone ♥ jason moran and alicia hall moran
5 with love ♥ charles tolliver big band
4 i got you babe ♥ etta james
3 stay after summer ♥ margaret berger
2 yes! you love me! ♥ acid house kings
1 love goes on! ♥ the go-betweens
0 happy valentine's day ♥ outkast
-1 collage of digital passion ♥ the exposures / jan jelinek

bonus livestock...moooo

i spontaneously and radically saw lily allen tonight. sold out show at the tla, didn't even know about it until the other day. kind of amazingly, nobody had an extra ticket to sell me (only two other people were even looking for tickets, a couple of middle-aged guys.) but i stayed by the door and could hear plenty clearly as lily started her set with "ldn," "nan you're a window shopper," and "knock 'em out." i was feeling pretty good about not paying [$20 face value ++?], getting to hear those songs - very probably her three best tunes ("nan" is my current favorite; glad to see that it's included on the us version of the album) - hanging around outside (it wasn't even very cold), and then taking off and making my early bedtime.

but as luck would have it (or not), at that point one of the bouncers decided to just let me in. which it's hard to complain about. i went to the balcony, where the more seasoned, judgmental audience-members go to look down on the performers. (i think i've only been there once before, the last - third? - time i saw the super furry animals.) the crowd was fairly age-diverse, but mostly skewing older than you might think (judging not just from the balcony but the folks going in the door.)

seven-piece band, incl. three horns who didn't have much to do. lily just sang and occasionally triggered sound-effects samples. they did most of the album (but not "alfie"), "cheryl tweedy," a couple new ones (i think? "absolutely nothing" was pretty good), and an "acoustic medley" of what was apparently a keane cover (probably makes more sense in england?) and "naive" (which i didn't realize is by the kooks.) first encore was a specials cover, then i left.

so. it wasn't a particularly good show. lily has a nice voice, but she's not a very good performer - not at all polished, with not nearly enough charisma to make up for it. she messed up a few times and was generally awkward. she giggled (drunkenly?) almost as much as ashlee, but with none of ash's goofy girlish appeal. as far as i can tell, her personality consists of the snarkiness evidenced in her lyrics (which is not nearly sophisticated or earned enough to be cynical, it's just whiny and bratty), and having a british accent. oh right, and she was wearing a badly fitting dress (more of a smock) over jeans and high-tops.

i guess it's supposed to be spunky, or fresh, or something, but her negativity really turns me off to her music and her in general. she doesn't seem to have anything nice or sincere to say. (well, she did say the specials were amazing, and that we should all buy one of their albums if we don't have any. but the other songs she covered she said were not as good as her own songs.) she made some not-funny jokes about drinking and how she couldn't say certain things because there were "kids" there.

i do think what she's doing musically is vaguely interesting - people shorthand it off "pop," but it doesn't have much to do with any other pop these days. the closest parallel is probably no doubt (not current obv.) - with a bit more hip-hop influence, but a lot of her songs are fairly straight rock-pop too. none of the punk side of it though. anyway, that's that. the whole phenomenon is still sort of a mystery to me. nitey nite.

[eta: lily seems to be down on paris - at least, she resents being compared to her - not that that's a surprise. meanwhile the pipettes give lily mad props. hmph - can't find the post they're referring to, so no comment i guess. on the scale of vaguely revivalist british gals, i'll take pipettes > amy winehouse > lily. also nellie mckay over lily on the pre[coc/tent]iousness scale.]

taking (live)stock

yee-haw, it's for a concert round-up.


i saw akron/family play at olde club the other night. man, olde club is on fire this semester, it's almost like them glory days of old before your time (or mine), though it's too bad they don't book three or four acts for every show, like time was. no deal this time though 'cause these crazies played for like two hours, at least! i kept thinking their set was about to be over, but, nope.

even before they started with the flat-out jamming (around the middle hour or so of their set), i kept thinking about phish, perhaps in part because de facto main dude seth olinsky (on the far right in that photo) has a definite
trey anastasio thing going on. (on the other hand, since phish were in some ways the first contemporary rock band, i may be predisposed to find their resonances in other groups - for a long time i mentally conflated trey with steve malkmus.)

well, sure, call it hippie music if you like. "jam band" is such a loaded term at this point that it's hard to use it profitably in any context. "experimental" is even more meaningless, especially when it's used to mean the same thing (in which case it's more a value judgment than anything.) and they certainly have this almost adorable mystical/spiritual bent which is not what one expects from indie rock these days. in any case, a/f put on a cracking good show, and i think got everyone in the room to relax and just enjoy it in spite of themselves. you could say that they never let the noise/"skronk" go on for too long without injecting some sweetness and melody (and harmony!) - though at the beginning of the set i did think that balance was a bit off - but i think it's more apt (and more impressive) to note how they gradually allowed the chaotic and potentially off-putting aspects of their music to develop into something approachable in their own right, without toning down their intensity or lunacy.
it takes guts to do little more than bang out an unadorned "tribal" rhythm for upwards of thirty minutes; it's the kind of scenario where either the crowd follows you all the way through sheer force of will, or else you're just sunk. hard to say what, but these guys know what they're doing, and they do it deliberately, playfully, intelligently and - this is so key - lovingly. after over an hour of slowly mutating jams (which on one or two occasions unexpectedly imploded into group chants and other clearly precomposed segments), they kept right on, returning to more folky, song-oriented material, notably "a song about their t-shirt," the quietly anthemic "love is simple," and eventually inviting much of the audience onstage to dance and play maracas, recorders, finger cymbals, etc.

crowning loveliness of the night, however, was getting a hugely helpful ride back to philly with panda riot, whose opening set i had unfortunately, unwittingly missed. they gave me their cd, which i listened to all day yesterday, and it is fantastic - highly redolent of mbv, "pre-sellout liz," and, most especially, the cocteau twins (conspicuously absent from their "influences" list), but fantastic nonetheless(?). i highly recommend you check out the tunes on theirspace. i shall endeavor get them to play at totally wired in the coming months.


the night before that i sawr jonathan richman and tommy larkins at johnny brenda's, with my mom and then tara (after the first five or six songs, at which point my mom couldn't take the exhaustion and heat.) always great to see jojo of course, this was time no. 4, and right up there though not as thrilling as SF '01. (couldn't have hoped to be, so that's no problem.) i do think he's getting more and more eccentric every time i see him. and he's pretty eccentric to begin with, so...

in general, no surprises. he did more modern lovers songs than i'd ever heard: "pablo picasso" of course, and "girl fren", and also a substantially reworked "old world." "her mystery," "springtime in ny," "lesbian bar," "the world was showing it's tricks," "give paris one more chance" - no surprises. (except i'd never thought before about how we ought to be appropriating the title of that last one.) some great new (to me) ones though, notably "love and hate" ["i too inspire love and hate/first i charm, then i irritate"] and "stupenda e misera citta." one song each in italian, french, and spanish - but the definite high point of the whole thing were his virtuoso polyglot characterizations of a jilted boyfriend and his defiant ex (times four different languages and cultures) in the middle of "let her go into the darkness."

last weekend alyssa and i saw david byrne and company at carnegie hall, performing music from david's new project with fatboy slim, here lies love, based on the life of imelda marcos. at this point it's essentially a narrative song cycle, with (in this case) byrne providing some necessary exposition in between numbers, but ultimately it wants to be "something more theatrical," which is to say a musical. as this article suggests, the work is decidedly still unfinished; hopefully a further realization will do a better job at fleshing out the narrative. i felt like too much of the running time was devoted to the early days, which were fairly conventional bio material (country girl grows up, moves to the big city, falls in love) and it took way too long for the darker elements of the story to appear.

the music was reasonably effective but also seemed somewhat conventional, like competent "traditional" or i guess music-theatre-style songwriting (except for the dancy rhythmic emphasis, which i enjoyed even though it sometimes distracted from understanding the songs themselves), along the lines of some of the more straightforward songs from grown backwards. (this was particularly notable on several songs where mauro played marimba, and even more so when an orchestra joined for the last few numbers.)

on the other hand, the few songs on which david took the mike really shined. he tends to write a lot of short phrases, which the other two singers didn't necessarily do much with, but he knows how to draw them out and make them really soar. plus his voice is really distinctive and enchanting and powerful. and they might not have been miked very well.

specifically: "a perfect hand," sung from the perspective of ferdinand marcos, probably the catchiest and most dynamic number in the show, david's encore rendition of a song that we'd heard earlier, "the rose of tacloban," which is a sweet and simple folky-sounding song that includes lyrics taken from imelda's high school yearbook, and the set-closing reprise of the title tune, whose chorus melody sounds a lot like some pop or possibly country song that i still can't place.

anyway, it was fun to be there (way way way high up in the balcony) and amusing to see david so jittery and nervous, and it was neat to see this stage of the creative process, but it definitely made me want to see it revised and broadened and presented in a more finished form. so hopefully that will happen.

i also saw camera obscura recently, at olde club. they were as adorable as you'd expect, an probably even more convincing/commanding as live musicians. (even unassuming as they look.) they played everything from LGOOTC ("country mile" as an encore) and most of my favorites from the earlier record, but not "books written for girls." they seemed open to my request, but traceyanne said, "what, do you want to depress everybody?" and i sort of shrugged and the crowd murmured dissent, so they played something more upbeat, but they promised me they'd play it next time.

mystic crystal revelations

better do this before i get too far behind / ahead of myself:

Title: liquid crystal slivers
Format: CD-R
Date: december '06-january '07
Packaging: jewel case with navy and silver artwork made from cut-up folder and aluminum foil, with typing on the foil, and a line drawing (from my headphone instructions) of a headphone-wearing dj-boy with no pupils crying a big silver tear.

(maybe we'll get an image of the cover here sometime. [eta: eventually!] for now, these crystals are silver, a word i left out of the title because it was redundadant.)

Made for alyssa. because there was no one better to make a mix for. because there is no one better to make a mix for.

my mixtape muse, if i have such a thing.

eye-tunes:
[1] Sensuous 4:18 Cornelius
[2] Love Knows (No Borders) 3:22 Howe Gelb
[3] Since K Got Over Me 3:47 The Clientele
[4] Turn On Me 3:35 The Shins
[5] If It Weren't For The Words 3:35 Edith Frost
[6] I'll Walk Away 3:59 James Hunter
[7] Black Flowers 4:24 Yo La Tengo
[8] The Grass Is Always Greener 4:39 Barbara Morgenstern
[9] I'll Keep My Baby Warm 3:47 Charles May and Annette May Thomas
[10] Moodswings 3:09 Charlotte Church
[11] This Piece of Poetry is Meant to Do Harm 3:26 The Ark
[12] Accident & Emergency 3:12 Patrick Wolf
[13] With Every Heartbeat 4:13 Kleerup ft. Robyn
[14] Broken 3:56 Bertine Zetlitz
[15] Just Like A Woman 4:47 Bill Frisell
[16] When the Deal Goes Down 5:04 Bob Dylan
[17] It Can Only Get Better 3:27 Amy Diamond
[18] I Don't Know What You Got But It's Got Me 4:05 Little Richard
[19] FM 5:46 Junior Boys
[20] Indefinite Leave To Remain 3:08 Pet Shop Boys

started out more as an informal, informe, mix/playlist (concurrently with gold star for robotboy, sort of as a repository for songs which wouldn't fit there), and gradually became ambiguously but decidedly for/about you, much as this entry started out as impersonal reportage and is turning into a direct address. hard to say what i mean that it's about you, cuz it's hard to say (except in the case of "if it weren't for the words," which has always reminded me of you.) eh, you're probably not even reading this.

i guess the mix speaks well enough for itself. it's mellow, it's about love, like music is. it's pretty much just the songs. i think every one of these songs is beautiful, and i think several of them are astonishingly beautiful.

oh,
p.s. the reference in the title is at least as intentional as the references, in the shins and clientele tunes, to which it refers.

p.p.s. peter guralnick calls that little richard song (which doesn't sound like any little richard song you've ever heard before) "the mount rushmore of soul." i didn't read that until after i'd made the mix, however.