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Friends, I'm proud to share my first published article as a music journalist for Queens Free Press in NYC! The article is live on their website and will appear in print as well. And I'm already at work on a follow up piece.
CHECK IT OUT! Pirates to the Rescue: Giving the Listening Public What Commercial Services Will Not https://imgur.com/A86MUrt.jpg Jon Aslund |
Flood while you wait.
More exciting limited edition import LPs have hit my doorstep, and there's another one coming this Thursday! You'll have to wait a few for those, but for now...
They Might Be Giants just quietly released a live version of their seminal album, Flood, recorded in Australia, for free. http://i.imgur.com/M6vgl0J.jpg |
Congrats on the article!
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Public Service Broadcasting - Documentary Rock
Public Service Broadcasting is a London-based duo who create retro-futuristic electronic music much in the spirit of classic krautrock. They use samples from old public information films, archival footage and propaganda material, to (quote) ‘teach the lessons of the past through the music of the future’. PSB combines classic synths with banjo, ukulele, sax and trumpets all propelled by a nearly-motorik beat.
PSB is a project of J. Willgoose and Wrigglesworth from London. The association with Jellyheads and fans of Sundae Club is instantly apparent – their music is electronic, but with a uniquely organic (and perhaps an emotive) element that separates it from the countless electro-pop artists of the day. And their use of old public information films makes them fit well in a playlist of Found Sound Orchestra and Future Loop Foundation recordings. The result, when paired with their minimalist geometric album packaging, is a krautrock-flavored mechanical sort of BBC documentary music, if you can imagine such a thing. I enjoyed their INFORM • EDUCATE • ENTERTAIN LP, but was most impressed by THE WAR ROOM EP. Just one look at the album jacket and anyone who follows my postings with any frequency will instantly understand why I just had to acquire this glorious disc. http://i.imgur.com/smssQQS.jpg See if you can detect traces of the metronomic percussion of Neu!’s “Hallo Gallo” in PSB’s music, or a touch of Kraftwerk inspiration in their packaging design. Spoiler for Check Out "Spitfire" here!:
http://i.imgur.com/5vtXUhC.jpg A huge fan of the band, I pre-ordered their latest release – The Race For Space the moment it was announced. The new record arrived yesterday afternoon. This is the limited clear-vinyl edition, featuring brilliant packaging design consistent with their previous releases and an 8-page booklet. http://i.imgur.com/W3Mh3uO.jpg http://i.imgur.com/nC0Zjw8.jpg And this morning PSB posted their first video for the record – “Go!” loaded with footage and audio from the Apollo 11 mission. Spoiler for Systems are "Go!:
Love it. |
Public Service Broadcasting is awesome. Thanks for sharing. I might be biased because I'm a total krautrock junkie, though.
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Airside and Lemon Jelly - Where Music Meets Design
Two of my greatest artistic inspirations are both musicians and design firms. The first is Underworld and Karl Hyde's Tomato art collective. The other is Lemon Jelly and Fred Deakin's design firm, Airside.
After the release of Lemon Jelly’s first three EPs, Lemonjelly.ky debuted in 2000 as their first proper album. A declarative sticker on the cover proclaimed, ” if you already own these EPs there is NO REASON for you to buy this product.” Reviewers often compared their blissful electronic sound to the likes of Zero 7, Boards of Canada and Mr. Scruff, but what separated Lemon Jelly from other groups was their creative edge and the fact that you just can’t stay in a bad mood when listening to them. The packaging for each of their albums and singles were designed by Fred Deakin (half of Lemon Jelly) and his award-winning design company. Their colorful style is instantly recognizable wherever it appears, from print ads to MTV commercials to music videos. Below: The glorious triple-gatefold art of Lost Horizons. http://i.imgur.com/SJnPYq3.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Qnm77aR.jpg Upon hearing one of their tracks playing in an indie record shop back in 2002, I promptly purchased both their Lost Horizons LP and the EP collection, Lemonjelly.ky. Over the next ten years I’d add to my collection their DVD, 90 of their live shows, custom-packaged 7″ singles and prints of their work. The triple gatefold artwork was originally available as a beautiful 50″ print suitable for framing. I hope to one day have it beautify my studio. Here's one of their uniquely-packaged singles - Rolled Oats. http://i.imgur.com/AvQa4.jpg For a taste of their style both musically and graphically check out Airside’s video for the song I heard in the shop – “Nice Weather For Ducks.” Spoiler for Check out the Ducks here!:
Lost Horizons was followed by the album and DVD project, 64-95 in 2004. The album's title comes from each of the tracks' sampling of various recordings released between 1964 and 1995. The DVD featured a creative video by Airside for each track presented in the form of a concept-art film. Perhaps the most memorable of which was the video for the single, "Stay With You." Spoiler for Tune in and let it build.:
In 2011 after the retirement of Lemon Jelly, Fred Deakin quietly released several hand-printed die-cut singles under the name "Frank Eddie." One of the track's videos was the particularly stylish, "Let Me Be the One You Call On." The single is a reworking of the song “Fix” by Blackstreet from 1996. Samples from both the original mix and the remix which featured Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Slash are detectable throughout this new version, with the lead vocal pitch shifted to befit the bizarre feminine "thing" singing in the video. Spoiler for A curious and mesmerizing video.:
The video for Frank's final single, “Stay Another Day” was offered as a farewell from Airside, as they announced the closing of their doors in March of 2012. The video showcased highlights from many of their favorite design projects, and no one can turn a cheesy Brit-pop boy band tune into a Balearic anthem the way Fred Deakin can. Spoiler for Boy bands gone Balearic!:
The early 2000s were an exciting time for graphic design, and Airside's carefree animations were the perfect complement to the music of Lemon Jelly. Highly-recommended for fans of summery downtempo or exquisite design. |
Adventures in Music Lit
Greetings dear friends! It is a wonderful day - the weekend just hours away, spring is just around the corner, I'm tracking a wonderful surprise LP in the post, and more music lit has arrived at my doorstep.
I'm into the first chapter of a book that I believe I found while exploring titles from Goodreads.com's recommendation engine. (If one of you actually suggested this title in a forgotten conversation, please let me know and I'll correct my statement!) David Toop's Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound, and Imaginary Worlds is a wonderful examination of the ethereal culture which developed in response to the intangibility of 20th century communications. It reads like a Bradburian recollection of fleeting sights, sounds, smells and sensations - disconnected and fragmented memories expertly-woven together much like the subtle and indistinct tones of an ambient composition. The author's aim is to demonstrate a different way of listening - an enjoyment of the sounds of our environment, whether by pneumatic drills, police helicopters or the distant croaking of tree frogs at night. The Sunday Times praised Troop for his "rare instance of a music book which is about music, but WORKS", and The Face called it, "a Martian Chronicle from this planet Earth." I'm looking forward to spending these first days of spring cozily drinking it in. And for further examinations of musico-cultural history I am delighted to finally have a physical copy of Simon Reynold's book, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. Reynolds is perhaps best-known for his coining of the term, “post-rock” but is also regarded for his incorporation of critical theory in his analysis of music. Retromania was my first encounter with his writing. “I recently read Simon Reynolds’ Retromania and it was so spot-on as far as our current attitude to music and its history. For my money he’s one of the most intelligent music writers in the last two decades”Retromania turned out to be much more than a critical examination of popular culture’s fascination with its past. It was a revealing study of my own approach to culture, trends, styles, and music. And I’m certain that I wasn't alone in this discovery. Like most readers who made the personal decision to read 500 pages of cultural analysis by a music critic, it demonstrates the emerging and growing demographic of cultural curators. Brian Eno noticed the rise of the curator and grasped its implications way ahead of the pack. In 1991, reviewing a book on hypertext for Artforum, he proclaimed: Curatorship is arguably the big new job of our times: it is the task of re-evaluating, filtering, digesting, and connecting together. In an age saturated with new artifacts and information, it is perhaps the curator, the connection maker, who is the new storyteller, the meta-author.’ The new century is rich with metadata and globally-accessible archives of content from all cultures and eras. Youtube alone adds 100 hours of new video content every minute, and the emergence of music streaming services have only further-accelerated the accessibility of media, old and new alike. This raises perhaps one of the biggest questions of our era: can culture survive in conditions of limitlessness? Chapter 4: The Rise of the Rock Curator was the first glimpse into my own rationale as a cultural custodian. It begins with the New Musical Express’ weekly column in the early 1980s – ”Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer.” Several rock groups of the decade presented their music with a kind of invisible reading-and-movie-watching list attached, conveyed through literary references within their lyrics of images depicted on their album jackets. (Sgt. Peppers is perhaps the best-known example of this execution.) Reynolds writes that “being a Throbbing Gristle or Coil fan was like enrolling in a university course of cultural extremism, the music virtually coming with footnotes and a ‘Further Reading’ section attached.” As the decade progressed, this curatorial baton was passed from the artists to their fan-base, who began, (whether consciously or unconsciously) to compile not just their favorite artist’s records, but the films, novels, and art which inspired their recordings. The book goes on to explore the nature of collector-culture in the digital age and touches upon both the decisively retro action of record collecting and the inherent merits and dysfunctions associated with the activity, as well as the hoarding habits of media collection with respect to digital music. But it was in a chapter on the 60s’ embrace of revivalism that I found the greatest revelation regarding my own bizarre fascination with music, art, and culture of the past. Reynolds writes - Remember the Pop Boutique store in central London with its slogan ‘Don’t follow fashion. Buy something that’s already out of date’? Just as vintage can have an undercurrent of recalcitrance towards fashion, similarly it is possible for rock nostalgia to contain dissident potential. If Time has become annexed by capitalism’s cynical cycles of product shifting, one way to resist that is to reject temporality altogether. The revivalist does this by fixating on one era and saying: ‘Here I make my stand.’ By fixing identity to the absolute and abiding supremacy of one sound and one style, the revivalist says, ‘ This is me.’ Retromania is a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening read. In a simple skimming of the book’s index, I found what was effectively a list of the contents of my own studio. The book examines: After reading the eBook I promptly ordered a physical copy for my office. I'm now reading it again and this time - I'm taking notes. Happy spring everyone! |
The Renaissance of Vinyl Records in the Digital Age
This is, undeniably the second Golden Age for music collectors. The industry has finally acknowledged the massive resurgence of the vinyl format as a cultural response to the first decade of non-physical digital media. A growing percentage of the listening public are re-claiming the participatory listening experience of the vinyl era. And the undeniable consumer demand is most visible with the format’s own holiday - National Record Store Day.
There has been a tremendous shift over the last 10 years in the availability and selection of vinyl. Where once buyers had to dig through innumerable copies of Firestone Christmas, Barry Manilow LPs, and Sing Along With Mitch to find a hopeful grail, local new-and-used record shops are once again staples of every major city. Of course, the independent record store never really disappeared, but vinyl’s new-found popularity has drastically affected the stock you'll find at your local store. The compromise is of the "hip" exclusivity of the format. Once-rare and prized LPs are now flooding the shelves of every local record shop. The Jesus and Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, The Stone Roses, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream… nearly every critical album of the 90s is being repressed by the thousands, and many for the first time on vinyl. The market is approaching a level of absurdity as even the least-likely candidates for what was once an audiophile market are now being issued as “limited edition” colored-vinyl exclusives. The soundtrack to the Nickelodeon series, The Adventures of Pete and Pete is scheduled for an upcoming release as is the soundtrack to the movie, Clueless (available in special yellow-plaid vinyl.) The market was further impacted by the emergence of Discogs.com. Launched in the year 2000, Discogs raised the bar and revolutionized web-based record sales. The site's users have cataloged 5.7 million pressings of over 800,000 community-contributed albums. This crowd-sourced system has made Discogs the ideal place to buy and sell music and democratized record values to a single global standard. This marks a potentially-dangerous turn for the format, where abundance of supply may result in a supersaturation of the market, and the flood of “nostalgia-vinyl” may cripple the perceived value of these novelty LPs. Where dedicated collectors previously drove city-to-city crate-digging for scarce acetates and private press LPs from special collections, the market was rapidly-transformed by web-based services offering global-accessibility to even the most elusive recordings. Now labels are repressing anything and everything that might tug at the nostalgic heartstrings of a budding collector, further changing the market landscape. In the last decade, countless buyers shelled out an average of $95 to claim a hallowed copy of Aphex Twin’s classic, Selected Ambient Works Volume II. They likely paid an extra $20 to import it to the States. The scarcity of the record made it a grail for many lovers of electronic music. Fortunately for hopeful fans around the world (though not for the original buyers) WARP Records widely reissued the album and copies are available in malls across America for just $29.99. The lesson of this example and of thousands of others like it is that rarity-inspired purchases are a losing game, more so now than ever before. But in this new buyer’s market, collectors should celebrate it as a wonderful time for music lovers everywhere. Listeners can have all the classic albums from their youth, or deluxe editions of classics from decades past - available right in their neighborhood and at an unbeatable price. But whatever you do, buy first and foremost for the love of the music - a return-on-investment that will not be shaken by the ebb and flow of a fickle consumer market. Free your holy grails from their sleeves and spin them. Your music is waiting to be played and enjoyed. And today, you can have it all. |
A Bit of Eno.
I'm so very excited - just a few days ago I was browsing Discogs and by a sheer stroke of luck happened upon the newly-released first-ever vinyl pressing of Fripp & Eno's Equatorial Stars.
Recorded in 2004, the album marked a 30-year reunion for the two musicians, who last collaborated on the Evening Star LP in 1975. Evening Star was the follow-up to their premiere frippertronic album - the monumental classic, (No Pussyfooting.) http://i.imgur.com/CXd6MNc.jpg My Eno LPs to date. Brian Eno is an incredible hero of mine. From his genre-defining masterpiece, Music for Airports to his 77 Million Paintings project, from his zen-like Oblique Strategies deck to The Long Now Foundation, I've been following his work for more than 15 years and loving each new discovery. One of my favorite (and sadly lesser-known) works by Eno was his January 07003 / Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now which features chimes for a timepiece that operates with minimum human intervention for ten millennia. I'm still missing a few of the albums from Eno's primary discography on vinyl, such as Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, Music for Films 2 and 3, and Thursday Afternoon, but I do maintain a 64-album digital discographic archive for added accessibility. Eno's recent collaborative projects with my other hero, Karl Hyde were a dream come true. Both are highly-acclaimed visual artists as well as musicians and have been wonderful inspirations for my own creative ventures. Their collaboration drew inspiration from the repetitive minimalism of my other favorite composers like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, and from the polyrhythmic music of Fela Kuti and funk. Check out the fractured groove of "DBF." At age 66, Eno has no intention of slowing down, and I look forward to his next innovative project. |
Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds
This evening's feature is one of my all-time favorite music biographies - John Higgs’ book – THE KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds.
To quote DJ Food, who blogged about the book in October '13: “If there’s one event that the book centers on it’s the burning of a million pounds and from there he draws clear lines to Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea, Alan Moore, Ken Campbell, the number 23, Dr Who, magical thinking, The Dadaists, the Devil, Discordianism, the assassination of Kennedy, Wicker Men and the banking crisis of the late 20th Century.” I had a copy delivered the day it hit the shelves, and I was happy to create an entry for the title on Goodreads and to provide its first review. I’m 3/4 through this brilliant book and with each new chapter I am amazed how much this humble little paperback reveals about global events and cultural responses of the 20th century. For example, Chapter 12: Undercurrents examines the quiet death of 20th century culture – the forgettable early-to-mid 90s. The chapter summarizes the beginnings and endings of cultural climates, citing key events beginning with Darwinism’s impact on the pillar of faith in the late nineteenth century to The Great War, the conflict of the 40s, the conformity of the 50s, the liberation of the 60s, the hedonistic self-indulgence of the 70s, and the shift toward material wealth in the 1980s. All of this lead to the 90s – the point where culture simply burned out. “They were out of ideas.” Slacker became the iconic low-culture film of 1991. Nihilism peaked in 1994 with Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the KLF’s burning of a million pounds, and the death of Bill Hicks. And with these events, Higgs declares, “this was the point when the constant creation of new musical genres that had characterized the 20th century came to an end.” Higgs refers to 1991-94 as the “Age of Extremes,” bracketed by the end of the Cold War and by the birth of first popular web browser. The chapter also touches upon Surrealism, Situationism, Anti-capitalism, Communism, Fascism, Dadaism, The Cabaret Voltaire, Generation X, Tony Blair, George W Bush, The Spice Girls, and how all of these lead us to the new millennium. Other chapters are equally rich in content. Chapter 4: Magic and Moore, (specifically pp 80 – 89) examine the nature of consciousness, Carl Jung, Alan Moore’s concept of “Ideaspace,” and reality, itself. A thoroughly exciting book, I had to put it down mid-chapter just to collect my thoughts. One thing is for certain – Higgs’ book will give you more insight into the mysterious entity that is the K-Foundation than you could ever have asked for. |
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