Damn it, grindy there you go spoiling my surprises! (The DSotMoog box set is also on its way to my doorstep.)

(Awesome now playing, btw.)

That's correct. I've always built my own towers for my server, and I honestly thought that CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drives disappeared YEARS ago. I recall from my days working in an office supply store about 5 years back when software companies stopped putting their content onto DVD discs and instead printed a download code in each box. (It really drives home how mentally handicapped you have to be to buy software in a store when they're going to make you go download it anyway!)

I know the few big box cartels are still selling CDs - Walmart and a few others, but I really can't fathom why PCs would be sold with such a drive in 2016.

I'm seeing really great things happening in the micro PC world - that really seems to be where its at. PiMAME is a brilliant and low-cost gaming center, and Raspbmc is equally great for home media servers.

It's an incredible time to be alive for computing. I just don't see any reason to have a CD or DVD player in the 21st century.

(invites the snide reply: "This from a dude who spend several grand on a RECORD PLAYER!")

Precisely. I recognize the cultural significance/importance of the work, particularly in the sphere of ambient music, and the physical artifact is a fitting specimen for my collection.

*strokes white cat*

I also wanted to support the continued work of Carpe Sonum and to honor Pete Namlook.

Entertaining Foolish Notions
 

Over the past few months, a few people have put a crazy bug in my ear about my publishing a book. The problem with such a project is that, at the outset, I tend to write in short, blog-length bursts, and as such I'd dismissed the idea of a novel as pure fantasy.

Then this afternoon I was tidying my Google Drive and quickly discovered that I had a small stockpile of unpublished op-ed critical essays on culture, music, and the media. Suddenly the notion began to seem bizarrely feasible - not a novel but simply a modest collection of thought-pieces.

I collected them in a folder and needed a working title, so I quickly banged out the phrase:

The Media Mind - Frustrated Blatherings of a Pretentious Knob (24 Curmudgeonly Essays)

...I would buy that shi*t.

I would totally buy it too. Looking forward to reading it at some point :)

2016: A Music Odyssey – DISCOVERY ONE: Explorations of the Innerspace Archives
 

I had a nice afternoon to myself today so I got comfortable in bed with great tunes on the Hi-Fi and started revisiting my copy of Simon Reynolds’ RETROMANIA: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past.

I was grabbed, yet again by a chapter on collector culture, addressing vinyl fetishism, and the impact of the internet on collectability. Reynolds explored the psyche of the collector. First, how collectors identify themselves as somehow more noble than common mall zombies in that they are discerning and well-informed consumers. Their collections serve not their own interest, but act as professional research material to enrich their understanding of music history.

Then comes the pivotal moment when the collector realizes his/her collection may have exceeded the actual capacity they have to consume it in their limited life time. “Those potential pleasures stacked on the shelf stop representing delight and start to feel like harbingers of death,” Reynolds writes.

He goes on to identify the collectors’ need for constant craving, and that the one elusive missing album is always the most important, (until it is inevitably replaced with the next of holy grails). This sort of niche activity was a fringe interest for decades, but at the turn of the millennium advancements in distribution technology made budding collectors of us all.

Still, a burn-out was inevitable at this rapid pace, and it came with the iPod. The chapter addressed the digital hording that takes place for so many users who discover that they can have all the world’s music for free, and the failure of such a model to satisfy the psychological anxieties previously fulfilled by the physical incarnation of collector culture.

The little white box, Reynolds notes, is a remarkably anti-social device. No matter how much music you pack into it, there is no personal memory attached to newly-acquired recordings. And earbuds isolate your musical experience, shutting out a world of potential participants.

And with no investment attached, the music is stripped of any potential significance. Hundreds of thousands of tracks might sit dormant on a player, unlistened or deleted entirely, with little to no consequence to the consumer.

Perhaps that very burn-out – the inconsequence of the music I compile has led me to start investing in exceptional works, like the several limited edition deluxe box sets I’ve ordered in the past month. After throwing a hundred dollars at a special collection, you’re damn right I’m going to set aside some time and actually LISTEN to the thing.

By the chapter’s end, I found myself back in my office taking notes on large collections I’d compiled but never explored after the initial acquisition. Given my own hording tendencies and the looming mortality such a collection bears, I made a personal resolution this afternoon to set aside dedicated listening sessions with a checklist of works to survey in the weeks ahead.

It would be like “the old days” when I’d saved up $16 for a CD and played that one disc a hundred times until I knew every note by heart.

I’m reclaiming my music.

http://i.imgur.com/lhb0OPHl.jpg

Barbara, Barbara, We Face a Shining Future
 

http://i.imgur.com/akr80rzl.jpg
Underworld portrait © Perou / Courtesy of the artist

For thirty-seven years, Rick Smith and Karl Hyde have been creating their own unique flavor of music, ranging from New Wave (with their first effort, a one-off single sold from the boot of Karl’s car as the Screen Gemz), to synth pop as Freur and Underworld Mk1, to progressive house experimentalism with their breakthrough self-reinvention on the album, Dubnobasswithmyheadman. From there Underworld’s sound grew infinitely richer and more adventurous, with everything from dancefloor anthems to ambient scores for film and the stage, to providing a soundtrack for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

By the present day, their catalog boasts an impressive tally of 510 albums, EPs, live releases, collaborations, solo efforts, and singles. At 56 and 58 years old, the duo have been producing music longer than many of their listeners have been alive. Releasing a new LP, the band’s first new recordings in six years, would be a daunting task for any artist. But instead, as Ian Mathers notes in his review for PopMatters, “this might be the most relaxed, subtly confident record they’ve put out in Underworld Mk II’s history.”

True veterans of electronic music, Barbara is artful and inventive and easily the freshest-sounding album I’ve heard all year thus far.

Casual listeners hoping for an album of “Born Slippy”s be warned - this is instead an intimate and reflective album capturing the emotive spirit the band has past-exemplified in their more meditative and mid-tempo tracks and, as Mathers notes, “is more of a slow burn, a ‘Banstyle/Sappys Curry’ instead of a ‘Pearl’s Girl’."

Slant Magazine revealed that “the album's title came from the mouth of Smith's dying father, being among the final words he uttered to his wife.” And Spin Magazine adds that the album’s “stirring background vocals over ever-turning arpeggiated synths are provided by Smith’s daughter, Esme, and Hyde’s daughter, Tyler, carrying the torch (almost literally) for future ravers.” This is what four-decade veterans of electronic music sound like in their most intimate and thoughtful moments.

The opener, “I Exhale” sets the pace for the record - steady and patient, with a subtle energy harkening back to the halcyon days of their electrifying floor-stomping live performances. Karl’s familiar spoken-word vocals are welcome here, a signature sound of the band’s indelibility.

The melodic hook that picks up and builds at the three minute mark of “If Rah” and returns to close the track is elemental to the structure of countless progressive house classics. And the abstract and sometimes stream-of-consciousness lyrics which accompany it fuse the formula into that which is unmistakably Underworld.

The instrumental, “Santiago Cuatro” is an intimately organic and fragile departure from the tracks which preceded it, and it serves as the perfect transition to the magnificently radiant “Motorhome.” Relinquishing bass-heavy electronic percussion, the listener is left with a simple lyrical phrase accompanied by a curiously active meandering melody and delicately placed traditional piano tones. Brian Eno's influence from their recent collaboration certainly shines here.

And true to form, the album closer, “Nylon Strung” is an empyrean ascent to unabashed bliss. With its recurring lyrical plea, “Carry me… open me up… I want to hold you… laughing…”, the duo invites us to share in their resounding joy.

The theme of the record approaches the shimmery, reflective territory Karl explored with an early edit of “Always Loved a Film”, (then dubbed “Silver Boots”) broadcast only once - on May 19th 2006 from the band’s Lemonworld Studio. The track has long been a stand-out favorite with its four on the floor beats delicately balanced by more complex and thoughtful elements which reveal themselves over the eleven minutes of the song.

And ever-present are Karl’s trademark vocals - stripped bare of effects and showcasing curious conversational fragments expertly-described by Jon Dennis (of the Guardian) as “affecting, fractured evocations of the disorientations of modern urban life.” Karl speaks, “Maggie’s a doll and I’m a big sister / She’s a little girl and I’m a little princess / These are the weeds that live in the cracks / and these are the rails at the edge of the world.” The phrases are puzzling and disconnected, but function beautifully in an abstract sort of elegance. This is what Underworld does best - and precisely what they’ve achieved with their wonderful new record.

A Matter of Taste
 

Dear MB readers - I want to pull on your coat a moment.

Someone I know (with whom I have many shared family friends) tagged me in FB in a post celebrating aggro-rockers, Disturbed for their apparently "outstanding" nu-metal cover of "The Sound of Silence". She and her friends praised it as being "vastly superior" to the original.

I felt that I had a responsibility, both as a critic and as a cultural custodian, to inform them, as unpopular as it will surely make me, that they have really ****ty taste in what is quantifiably and objectively a load of dingo's kidneys.

So I did. As expected they all whined about it, one going so far as to say, "I saw S&G perform this live in the 60s, but this new metal cover is so much angrier and that's what the song SHOULD have been."

I'm not going to apologize for being insensitive of their poor taste. I don't set out to be pretentious but this is a really extreme example of bad taste.

What do you think? Should I curb my high horse to spare people with low artistic standards or am I right to call them out for being the bottom of the cultural barrel?

I want to be a likeable and sensitive individual. This just "grinds my gears" and I'm sure I'll face similar situations in the future.

What do you think?

Did you listen to it and how do you feel about the original?

I constantly find myself coming into similar scenarios with friends of mine. I'm a touch too opinionated to sit back while others' speak, and whenever someone makes a statement I disagree with, I feel the need to interject. I think in your scenario, much like any of the ones I find myself in, it matters not what you say as people won't back down from their opinions, even though I find that often times they fail to back up their stance. I've gotten into countless arguments about why I don't like x musician, and whenever I ask the person I'm discussing with to explain what they like about the act, they just reply "it just sounds good" or "I just like it."

At the end of the day, I don't think telling someone that they have shitty taste will ever go over well, nor will it cause any change, but I know personally it never stops me from saying something, so I don't blame you.