Tindersticks - Claire Denis Film Score 1996-2009

Tiny Mix Tapes


Tindersticks had two albums of largely downtempo chamber pop under their belts when French filmmaker Claire Denis approached them after a concert to ask about recording a soundtrack for her 1996 film Nénette et Boni. It turned out to be a fateful meeting, as the collaboration has yielded positive results for both: working on instrumental music arguably helped change how the band approached their studio albums, and many of Denis’ films derive a great deal of their emotional thrust from Tindersticks’ music. Members Stuart Staples and Dickon Hincliffe have since recorded three more soundtracks for Denis together and two more separately. All six of these works have been packaged together by Constellation in a box set entitled Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009, which shows a much more varied and exploratory side of the group than the studio albums alone. It might also win them some new fans.

Although the band seemed to be in sync with Denis from the beginning, with music that seamlessly matched the alternating playful and serious tone of Nénette, listening to the albums in chronological order reveals how much more innovative and exploratory they became with each film. While the first two, Nénette and Trouble Every Day, sound the most like other Tindersticks albums — especially when the former incorporates a song from their second release — Staples’ music for 2004’s L’Intrus is distinctly his own. By 2009’s White Material, most traces of the group’s early romantic lounge act have disappeared. This is indicative of how comfortable and assured the director and musicians must have felt working together. And even at their most Tinderschticky, the soundtracks have a personality all their own, appropriately matching the films’ varied themes: Néntte is romantic, nostalgic; Trouble Every Day eerie and stark; Vendredi Soir lush and passionate; L’Intrus mysterious and sinister; 35 Rhums tender and a bit melancholy; and White Material tense and foreboding.

As standalone works, they’re enjoyable to varying degrees. For me, the two most recent soundtracks, 35 Rhums and White Material, stand up best divorced from their original context. One potential problem with soundtrack releases is their repetitious nature and lack of diversity. This is standard for film music, where if it’s doing its job properly, we rarely notice the restated musical themes and motifs as we watch. But listening to such music independent from the film can sometimes be a bit of a slog. This isn’t so much a problem with shorter works like Vendredi Soir, which clocks in at 23 minutes, but three takes on the main theme during the more than 40 minutes of Trouble Every Day is demanding, especially when echoes of it are found elsewhere on the album. While White Material is almost as long, it avoids this grating repetitiveness through more diverse ideas and creative application of instruments, stripping away the orchestration and full band to rely on the subtle use of electric guitar, feedback, droning organ, and mournful violin.

Even more unique is L’Intrus, which for its scant 23 minutes repeatedly returns to a sinister guitar riff underscored by brooding ambient keyboards, occasionally augmented by mournful trumpet and impressionistic drumming. And although it's by far the least diverse, most repetitive soundtrack here, L’Intrus’ single-mindedness gives it a conceptual feel that makes it stand apart from the others, while its haunted tone and minimalist quality also make it the most hypnotic and unforgettable.
Denis’ use of music in films is never less than appropriate, and very often surprising and inspired. (Her use of pop music is particularly affecting.) It’s the mark of a great filmmaker that her soundtracks are never obtrusive or obvious, yet we remain aware of how well they’re working when things are going well. Though, it wasn't until I heard this music apart from the images when I realized not only how evocative it was, but also how essential Tindersticks are to the effectiveness of Denis’ work. It’s impossible to hear the opening melodica theme of 35 Rhums and not imagine Alex Descas steering a train through Paris, or “Rumba” from Nénette et Boni and not imagine Vincent Gallo and his wife in their bakery. The music from L’Intus calls up any number of stunning images from that odd, dreamlike film.

Although the limitations of Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009 will make parts of the collection appear inessential for casual listeners, this music will certainly be welcomed by Tindersticks fans and soundtrack buffs. For Denis devotees, it will likely be a testament to one of the great contemporary sound and image collaborations. Indeed, if there was any doubt, this set helps secure their place in the pantheon of great composer/director pairings.

Catching Up

I really wish I was as diligent about keeping up with this blog as this guy is with his. He's all over it, with copious photographic documentation an everything. I look in on him ever so often because he's offering a glimpse of a Knoxville I have so little contact with. To him, so many of the things in this city I consciously ignore or find annoying are fascinating, things that make the place livable and great. I have to admire his spirit and commitment, especially since he doesn't appear to be getting paid for such blatant boosterism. I especially love how star-struck he gets at something as provincial as an RB Morris show. If I voted in Metro Pulse's readers' poll, I'd probably vote his best blog. My other local favorite, the Wigsphere, doesn't post nearly so often, and there's over half a dozen people over there. (Plus they've participated in some of the "OMG-Knoxville-is-so-like-Brooklyn-in-x-way!" chatter that is plaguing this city.)

Anyway, some of my highlights in the last week or so:
The Exene Cervenka show, in which she gamely executed a lengthy and engaging set despite some obvious fatigue. At one point she abandoned a song she was having trouble getting through to launch an impromptu rant against corporations, union busters, vapid tv viewers and other usual suspects. As she said at its conclusion, "I mean I know you all know this, but it can't be said enough." Damn right, and it's always good to be in a room full of people cheering such sentiments on, reminding you you're not alone or going crazy, as can so often happen when you read the news. It was a night full of positive sentiments and goodwill, and that even includes Will Fist's opening solo acoustic set of drinking songs for broken-hearted lovers.

Speaking of Will, Three Man Band played possibly the heaviest set I've heard them perform opening for Apache Dropout, who are always a pleasure to hear live.

Ampient Night at PL was a bit shaky, but that's the nature of improvisation I guess. Travis Gray and BJ A's set was especially good, but word is they actually practiced beforehand. Not a bad idea.

I'm sure some other fun things happened recently, but I can't recall them right now.

Skull Defekts

A rush job, not one of my better efforts, but you'll have that. Metro Pulse went with "noisy guitar bands" instead of "pigfuck," something I understand and am totally fine with, and I wouldn't have tried to put it in a family-friendly Scripps publication except it was the best word choice. I'm not a fan of gratuitous profanity, but I love that word. Has a genre tag ever been so amusingly evocative?

Metro Pulse original here.

These days, it seems like every musician is in multiple bands. It’s not unheard of for a rock group to find itself with members moonlighting with electronic, folk, metal, or ambient projects. But some bands, like Skull Defekts, scratch their collective exploratory itch by not limiting themselves to one particular sound. Veterans of numerous rock, electronic, noise, post-punk and harder to classify bands from the Swedish underground, Daniel Fagerstroem, Jean-Louis Huhta, Joachim Nordwall and Henrik Rylander coalesced their wide-ranging interests into one all-purpose unit.
Since forming Skull Defekts in 2005, they’ve busied themselves with an eclectic array of recordings, and are receiving their most attention stateside yet with their new Thrill Jockey album Peer Amid, thanks in part to the addition of vocalist Daniel Higgs. Higgs, the singer for revered Baltimore band Lungfish, is also something of an underground cult figure, known for his multiple quasi-mystical musical and artistic ventures. (Lungfish fans will be pleased to know the opening act for Skull Defekts’ American tour is Zomes, the project of former Lungfish guitarist Asa Osborne.)
“We were all fans of Lungfish, and a few years ago our Daniel met Daniel Higgs at a festival, then Joachim met him soon after that,” explains percussionist Huhta of how Higgs hooked up with the band. “When we played Baltimore on our first U.S. tour, Daniel came to see us, then the next night he and Asa drove to D.C. to see us and we asked him to sing the opening song with us. It worked really well and it just took off from there.”
It’s one of those pairings you’d probably never imagine happening—Skull Defekts doesn’t sound much like Lungfish or Higgs’ other work—but now that it has, it makes perfect sense. Higgs’ chants, moans, and evocative singing fit perfectly within the driving, droning format of the band. Incorporating a new member into a group, especially a vocalist, can be a delicate situation, sometimes requiring a tentative adjustment period. It can also add unexpected energy and purpose to a course already charted, as it did recently with Amsterdam’s the Ex, a band Skull Defekts are often compared to. Huhta says the band’s open-ended working method allowed Higgs to ease comfortably in as a frontman in no time at all.
“Most of it came together on the spot, which is how it usually does,” he says. “Our process didn’t really change things, we all just blended into usual Skull Defekts mode, which is to work quickly and spontaneously in the studio.”
It also probably helps that, when in their rock mode, the band has a well-defined template from which they rarely deviate, creating a repetitious, rhythmic powerhouse of a sound created by two drummers and two guitarists, with everybody taking turns adding texture with electronics and synthesizers. While the drums maintain a motorik, krautrock-style beat, the guitars produce a harsh tone reminiscent of the noisy guitar bands of the late ’80s and early ’90s—bands like Scratch Acid, Sonic Youth, Big Black, Jesus Lizard, or Rylander’s old band, Union Carbide Productions. The effect is almost menacing, but Higgs’ vocals serve as a sort of reassuring guide through the swirling bad trip of the music. And while Skull Defekts aren’t exactly a metal band, their crunchy riffs and heavy sound have attracted attention from metal fans.
“The music we do is very simple and doesn’t want to be complicated,” Huhta says. “We want a more direct and primal feel. It’s our interpretation of basic rock ’n’ roll, just this powerful force.”
That’s when they’re doing the rock thing. True to their individual histories, the collective band has several sides, working in improvisational, electronic, and noise forms, and collaborating with the likes of American noise punks Wolf Eyes, Finnish electronic wizards Pan Sonic, and Swedish jazz terrorist Mats Gustafsson. A brief tutorial in just how different the various styles of Skull Defekts can sound can be had by comparing Peer Amid’s “Gospel of the Skull” with an orchestral version of the song they recorded with the Göteborg String Theory, available as a video on the band’s website.
This is the band’s second trip to the States, and Huhta, speaking from St. Louis, is enthusiastic about the tour so far. Even though touring in America is a bit more hardscrabble than in Europe, he says, it ends up being a great experience for them.
“Touring here is different than in Europe, where it’s more organized,” he explains. “There you know you’re going to have your hotels, food, drinks and a proper sound check taken care of. Here, at least at the level we’re touring at, you never know what will happen. Last tour we played in a lot of people’s houses and in some basements. But you meet a lot of interesting people and maybe stay at their house. I think its fun.
“Of course, next time it might not be so fun.”

Pakistan Folk and Pop Instrumentals

From Metro Pulse.

Various artists

Pakistan: Folk and Pop Instrumentals 1966-1976 (Sublime Frequencies)
In the late 1960s, a restrictive military dictatorship in Pakistan was overthrown, which led to relaxing censorship and allowing more personal freedom. Long hair and hashish became popular, and instrumental bands inspired by Western pop music began playing in Karachi’s nightclubs. Few of these bands were recorded, and most of those that were got a chance to release only a single or two. Fortunately, venerable British label EMI released a number of these records, and it’s from their well-preserved masters that the 22 songs on this Sublime Frequencies compilation originate.
The American and British influences are obvious from the band names alone: the Panthers, the Mods, the Bugs, the Abstracts, the Blue Birds. In addition to note-perfect imitations of their Western counterparts on some tracks, these groups retained a strong regional sensibility, incorporating traditions from Iran, Afghanistan, and India. Reverb-heavy surf guitar and organ are the dominant sounds driving these songs, but the tone is often higher, and the tempos faster, than what you’d normally expect from surf music, abetted by the sitars and tablas that make frequent appearances.
Some singles, such as the Panthers’ “Malkaus” and the Fore Thoughts’ “Jungee,” sound nearly indistinguishable from a beach-party record an American band might have released, but the B-sides are more bhangra than Baja. The Panthers’ “Bhaivri” opens with a distinctively mournful Middle Eastern-sounding figure, which turns into a Dick Dale-style slow burner that fades just as a keening vocal, the only singing on the album, launches into a lament. The Mods’ “Spring Dance” sounds like a pop take on a traditional Pakistani folk song, much in the way British and American bands reinterpreted the folk-blues classics “House of the Rising Sun” or “Stagger Lee.”

Indian and Pakistani film music also adds its inevitable stamp. Two tracks by the Blue Birds are taken from soundtracks, and two older film composers are represented by a song each, adding more elaborate textures and indigenous flavor to the primitive template of the younger bands. But just when you’re getting accustomed to the exotic nature of these recordings, the drummer for the Fore Thoughts lays into an Incredible Bongo Band-style beat that’s ripe for sampling, as a funky organ jam dances across the top.

Sublime Frequencies has been criticized for their skimpy, sometimes even non-existent, liner notes, which detractors say do not show sufficient respect for the musicians or their culture. Co-founders Alan Bishop and Hisham Mayet have defended their approach, saying their method requires more from the imagination and ear of the listener. (Never mind that extensive documentation or reportage by outsiders can come off as Westernized exoticizing of these cultures, Orientalism all over again.)
Complaints about the label’s failure to distribute royalties are harder to overlook, but Bishop and Mayet insist that finding some of the musicians who played on decades-old recordings from remote countries is impossible. Plus, any profits from sales go right back into finding, recording, and releasing the kind of overlooked world music no other label will deal with.

Bishop and Mayet seem to have taken some criticism to heart, though, as recent SF releases have contained a bit more info, and here they let us know this collection was 10 years in the making, in part because compiler Stuart Ellis tracked down most of the musicians. Considering how difficult it is to find detailed session information about lots of one-off singles by American soul or garage bands from the ’60s and ’70s, and that many Pakistani musicians fled the country after another military takeover and the imposition of Sharia law in 1977, Ellis’ detective work seems an impressive feat. Still, information about each band remains scant, certainly much less than you’d get from Smithsonian Folkways or other curatorial-type labels. In a way, that serves to highlight how intrinsically accessible and alive this music remains, way more fun than a curio or museum piece.

D.C./The Ex

Well I've just been terrible about keeping this thing updated. No surprise there. A few days after my last post, Stephanie and I went up to D.C. for four days, and the weather was so nice for so long after that I wanted to limit my time in front of a computer as much as possible. Those sunny, near 80 degree days took a turn for the bleh recently, though, and it's been chilly and rainy and/or overcast the past few days. The return to a more or less normal Spring is dispiriting following the unseasonably warm one, but at least we're not in the North or Midwest, where they're still getting snow.

The trip to D.C. was scheduled around Steph's Spring break from her job at Montessori, and it just so happened to coincide with The Ex playing The Black Cat. It was also a few weeks before our friends Tre and Sarah and their son Eli would be moving from the suburbs of Reston, VA to Ithaca, NY, and we wanted to visit with them a bit. Washington is a great place to take a trip if you don't have much money, because most of the museums and touristy things are free, and decent hotels are reasonably priced. We ate lots of good food, which wasn't as reasonably priced, but I have to chalk that up in part to not knowing the city well enough. Still and all, food was our one splurge and it was well worth it. Turkish tapas, Spanish tapas, dim sum and smoked lamb and quinoa soup from the Museum of the American Indian's surprisingly good (if pricey) cafe were the main highlights. (And btw, why is it the Museum of the American Indian instead of Native American? Seems kinda un-PC.) I know it's easy to hate on the small plate fad, and you can run a tab up pretty quickly eating that way, but it makes total sense to me. You get to try several different dishes, usually very flavorful ones, at one sitting. If you enjoy food, why wouldn't you want to do this? I guess the main problem is when mediocre restaurants, which Knoxville is lousy with, try it. But D.C. has lots of interesting restaurants, so odds are good you'll end up somewhere decent. My main food regret is coming across a Korean bbq truck right after we'd eaten, and I wasn't even hungry enough for one measly taco. We'd just had a breakfast with fresh fried fish, something I haven't had in ages, and I forgot how good fish could be with eggs, potatoes, toast and coffee. Why am I talking so much about food? I hate foodies. I even hate the word. I want to punch that word in the face. At least I won't be putting up pictures of food.

I'll keep the sightseeing details brief. You probably have a good idea what's in D.C. I will put in a good word for The National Gallery, which alone is worth hopping a Megabus for (more on that later). Not nearly in the same league as The Met, it's much less crowded and more manageable than that behemoth, but you can still spend an entire afternoon there. And it's probably the building on the Mall with the least amount of kids, always a plus. A bit off the Mall, the Folger Shakespeare Library is the place with the least amount of people in general. There were about five other people when I stopped by for a tour, excepting the 20 or so actors there to audition for a role in the Library's next dramatic production. I also got a library card for The Library of Congress, a neat but ultimately meaningless act, since I'm rarely in D.C. Still, it made me happy, even though I don't look it in my photo.


The highlight was seeing The Ex, of course, who don't make it to the U.S. all that frequently, and to the South hardly ever. Of course it was one year ago almost to the week that we saw them in town at the Big Ears festival, but that was an unusual event. I love the three guitar and drums lineup. They're basically three rhythm guitarists, playing repetitive riffs without a real lead player. It's amazingly effective and engaging, and of course Kat's drumming is always impressive. Every few songs they'll have something of a dual where two or sometimes all three of them freak out and show off a bit, best exemplified during "Double Order." Here's a video giving you an idea what that's like: http://vimeo.com/8060711. I love this band, and though what they're doing now is a pretty simple concept, they're doing it very well and I'd see 3 or 4 of their shows on this tour if I could.

Anecdote: I met up with old comrade James Henry at the Black Cat before the show. We were downstairs in the little restaurant part and he was telling me about life in D.C. He was talking shit about Fugazi and particularly Ian MacKaye, and I thought it was funny because he lowered his voice to do so. "You never know who might be around," he said. "What a paranoid, dude," I thought. We got up maybe 5 minutes later, and I saw Ian hanging out in the kitchen, about 20 feet from us. I think he could take James, too, so his discretion was warranted.

Merle and Kris

I really wanted to make it out to the Prince Rama show at PL Monday night, but I've been fighting a cold and we're going to D.C. this weekend so I wanted to get some rest and avoid potentially blowing out my always perilous immune system with another late night and the always perilous threat of too much imbibing. Too bad because word is it was great. Maybe next time.

Instead, Tuesday night I went to a show that was probably the exact opposite in almost every way imaginable. My brother-in-law bought himself, my dad, brother and me tickets to Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson at Tennessee Theatre. That was nice because I only see my dad and brother, who live on a farm about an hour's drive from Knoxville, maybe nine or ten times a year, usually at holidays and birthdays. It was a good chance to socialize with them in a way we never do. My dad said he hasn't been to a concert in decades, and I'm sure my brother hasn't been to one in at least 10 or 15 years either.

I grew up listening to a lot of country, my mom preferring the more-pop-than-country sounds of Kenny and Dolly and Juice and Sylvia, my dad going in for Waylon and Willie and the boys. Merle was his favorite, and I always liked him, too, because his music seemed less shit-kicking, and often had a melancholy devoid of the melodrama so plentiful in country music. Plus he had that great song you could sing along with and get away with saying "hell." And that song was probably the first place I heard about this "Nixon." I'd seen Merle twice before, once at the Kentucky state fair about 8 years ago, and once at the Tennessee Theatre about 2 or 3 years ago. His concerts are basically greatest hits affairs, which is great because you're reminded how many hits he had and how great a songwriter he is. He's easily my favorite living country artist, and I'd probably put him behind Hank Williams as my second favorite. All due respect to Willie, Waylon and Jones, but they just never wrote as many great songs, Merle's voice has held up remarkably well and he incorporated more Western swing and jazz into his music. Willie's still a more interesting guitar player, but Merle's a good picker, too.

I thought the evening might be split between an hour or so of Kris and an hour of so of Merle, especially after Kris came out and did a song alone with acoustic guitar. His voice sounded rough as he croaked along. He apologized, saying he'd been sick, then reminded us his voice had never been that great to begin with. Then Merle and the band came out and the two swapped songs the rest of the night, Merle doing about 3 for every 2 of Kris'. It was a startling contrast not just because Kris' voice was so ragged and Merle's so smooth, but Kris' tempos were all slow, and most of his songs downers. The vocal problem actually wasn't so bad, because the songs he chose to perform came off like they were written by a world-weary older guy; it was as if voice had grown into his songs. I sat between my dad and this 80-ish year old woman who sat very prim and proper and didn't make a noise the whole night, until she sang along with "Sunday Morning Coming Down." That was sweet and weird.

(Speaking of which, there was more than one walker with wheels in attendance. Who knew so many older folk like songs about alcohol and misery? I guess the tunes are familiar, and the melodies are so pleasant and hummable.)

Like I said, with Merle it's a greatest hits revue, so he played about everything you can imagine except "Are the Good Times Really Over." I guess the question the song poses has been answered, since things are so much worse than when he recorded the song back in 1981. Too bad. It's a crowd pleaser. He did do "Okie From Muskogee," making the requisite pot jokes beforehand letting you know he was down, that you shouldn't take the song too seriously. He even let Kris sing a verse of his version, making fun of the original. I've never been sure how seriously we were supposed to take the song, and as he introduced it, Merle said he wrote it for his dad, who's from Oklahoma. Whether or not he personally shared the point of view of "Okie's" narrator is beside the point; he accurately and poetically depicted the point of view of that small town mindset. And with a great tune. That's part of what makes Merle such a unique songwriter. He can write songs for and about the jingoistic patriot and the disenfranchised rebel, the counterculture and the blue collar working man. Maybe not so much the middle class, but they're already overrepresented, plus their art is generally lousy anyway.

The last song they did together was "Poncho and Lefty" and it's a tribute to how great that song is that the punched-up, bright keyboard mariachi version they did didn't make it any less compelling. Again, Kris' voice made his (originally Willie's) parts that much more tragic.

Fine Peduncle

Article here.

And here:

Though it sounds like a word used to describe a creepy older relative you don’t want your kids around, “peduncle” is actually an anatomical term referring to various types of connective stalks found in plants, fish, insects, arachnids, and human brains. For Cole Murphy, the term’s multiple uses and its relation to both insects and humans make it the perfect choice for his musical project, a one-man electro-soul R&B show he calls Fine Peduncle.

“Since I was a kid I’ve had an interest in insects, and I keep a lot of arachnids now,” he says. “I relate them to the more mysterious aspects of my sexuality and spirituality, and from that I’ve developed my own spiritual system that’s reflected in my music and art.”

Murphy makes the kind of bedroom pop only possible in an era of advanced home-computer recording software. Building tracks based on beats and loops that he’s fashioned from recordings of himself playing bass, guitar, keyboard, and even some banjo and violin, he then harmonizes with himself to create a surreal vocal persona with a one-track mind. Fine Peduncle’s music often recalls the blue-eyed funk of Midnite Vultures-era Beck and the freaky sexploits of R. Kelly and Prince, with playfully suggestive raps worked in. The stacking of Murphy’s multi-pitched vocals, which makes frequent use of his arresting falsetto, especially brings the Purple One to mind, though Murphy says he never listened to Prince much until someone made the comparison after one of his shows. In fact, despite the prurient content, he claims the main influence on his singing is the music from which all R&B originates—gospel.

“Gospel is at the root of what I do,” Murphy says. “I get a lot of the vocal ideas from studying music at the Southern Baptist church I went to growing up, where I sang in the choir occasionally.”
Having recently graduated with a degree in printmaking from the University of Tennessee, Murphy is now concentrating on music as much as visual art and says he sees the two as intricately linked. He released the Glen EP last October (available for download via SoundCloud), and he will have a new six-track EP available at his March 4 Pilot Light show. But live shows are where the Fine Peduncle concept really takes off. Murphy’s performance is a hyperactive affair; he sings and talks to the crowd as he dances, usually shirtless, all while trying to keep his vocals and loops lined up.

“I guess some of the actual music is kind of simple, but it’s not easy to perform live,” he says. “There’s a lot of headwork involved. I have to always be thinking about jumping to this numbered channel in this many measures. And I always want to keep it danceable.”

Lyrically, Fine Peduncle’s songs are crowded with references to Michael Bolton, Usher, Friends, and Reading Rainbow. “I Carey a Ludacris Fantasy” melds Ludacris’ “What’s Your Fantasy” with Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” while “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” turns the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood theme song into an NC-17 sex fantasy as imagined by someone who watches a lot of Cinemax. It might seem like a crazysexydorky conceptual project, but Murphy’s impressive vocal prowess convinces you it’s not meant to be an ironic take on R&B, and he insists there’s more going on than appears at first glance.

“I like the idea of having something easily accessible on the surface—like the sexual imagery in R&B—having another, underlying meaning,” says Murphy.

As an example, he compares the act of taking his shirt off during performances to the molting of a tarantula, adding another context to the conventional R&B seduction boast he sings while disrobing: “Gonna undo all my buttons/Take off all my clothes/Show you something you ain’t never seen before.” And watching Murphy, with his rather diminutive frame, belt out goofy, risqué lyrics can seem like an attempted subversion of the exaggerated masculine pose found in much hip-hop and R&B.

Murphy also considers Fine Peduncle a way to explore and explicate his spirituality, a customized system drawing from Chakra, Jewish mysticism, and entomology that may be made a bit clearer when Fine Peduncle enters its next phase.

“I’ve already got the next CD planned out,” Murphy says. “It’s called The Entonomicon, and the songs will be based around the 10 spirit guardians associated with energy systems in my body. I think a lot of the ideas will also be made more obvious when I incorporate the new type of performance I want to do. I want to make a far more powerful, theatrical show that has a performance-art aspect to it. I’m making some videos right now using stop-motion techniques that I’ll probably end up projecting. Sexy live dancers are a possibility and strange, grotesque sexual things kind of like GWAR do might be played up in the future. Whatever I can do to pump up the live shows.”

Mountains of Moss/Cloudland Canyon/The Mutations/Big Bad Oven/NDN/Dumb Lunch/Fine Peduncle

All the above bands in two nights at Pilot Light. Quite a different atmosphere/sense of purpose/audience between Thursday and Friday nights, though there was some audience overlap. And if you consider Cloudland's Kip Uhlhorn is a former Knoxvillian, both nights were all-locals affairs. Some serious sounds going down all around.

Thursday's show actually felt more like two different shows, an "early" (start time @ 11:10 p.m. for a four band bill - that's pushing it even by PL standards) dreamy, droney set and a late rock set. I'm assuming Cloudland Canyon were dreamy and droney, they were the last two times I saw them, but I missed them this time around, as some of us were over at Backroom with former Knoxvillian, current Washingtonian (what a word) and soon to be Ithacan Tre Donn Berney, who was in visiting for a spell. I did catch Mountains of Moss' opening set, and wow but it was good. It always is, of course, but seemed to be especially so this time. The great thing about a set by Adam Ewing is you know it's always going to be worthwhile, but you never know exactly what he's going to do. It opened with the other current member of MoM, who I know I've met but whose name I'm ashamed to say I can't remember, laying down a nice drone while Adam fingerpicked a bit. The dual vocals sounded great, Adam's high-pitched keening blending well with the other guy's baritone, and other guy even sang one himself. I don't know if it was a song he wrote or not, but this performance felt more like a collaborative effort than a lot of past MoM shows have. Great stuff.

The Mutations are a new band with Cuts/Cheat/Dude Fuckin Whatever guitarist Harold Heffner and some other guys whose names I don't know. It was their first show but they already sound so good you'd never have guessed it. Granted it's not too far afield from the surf rock kind of stuff Harold's been doing for years, but I guess it's so second nature to him now it seems effortless. Not to single him out, the whole band was great. I especially like the slower number that sounds like it would fit comfortably on the Grease soundtrack. I so don't mean that as an insult.

Big Bad Oven burned the place down, of course. It was Josh Wright's birthday and everybody was in just the right mood for BBO's kind of mind melting activity. Could a trio of drums, saxophone and homemade lap slide guitar be the best rock band in Knoxville right now? Some nights, yes, and Thursday night was one of them.

Friday night was a whole other affair. I showed up around 11:30 and NDN was on stage. People were talking pretty loudly and I myself got caught up in a stop and chat by the front door, so I couldn't really hear what he was doing. I think he was rapping, or somesuch.

Dumb Lunch. Wow. What to say about these guys. They're a sort of conceptual prankster take on Top 40 hip-hop, and while the raps, all centered around blunts, drinking, more blunts and an egregious amount of anal-insertion references, were briefly amusing in a so bad it's good kind of way, they got old pretty quick for me. I mean some of Lil B's stuff is along those lines and he's not trying to be funny, plus he can actually rap when he wants to. Besides which the greatest parody of a thing is itself, so what's the point? But I dug the music, which was four guys playing some combination of laptops/iPads/drum machines, I couldn't really see because they were sitting on the floor, but even the higher tech stuff sounded kind of primitive. I though they were improvising but Chris Rusk, who played with them, swore they were pre-arranged songs. It sounded like a holy mess to me, in a good way, not in a noise for the sake of noise, tripping all over each other way, but a weird, loosely connected exploratory way. It reminded me somewhat of Black Dice's last couple of records or even parts of Royal Trux's Twin Infinitives and Hand of Glory. But mostly I didn't have much of a context for it, which is usually a good experience.

Fine Peduncle closed out the night. His recordings are great, but his live show makes what he does so much more impressive. If you haven't seen Cole Murphy perform, you can get an idea about what he does in my Metro Pulse article, some parts of which I already have second thoughts about, which I'll get into in a later post. But his voice is flat-out incredible, and last night he played a batch of songs from his new EP, which demanded a lot more from his falsetto than normal. It's amazing to watch, and I wonder how often he can do that and keep his voice intact. Like if he ever goes on tour, can he do that night after night? We may find out soon; I've never heard so many people independently of one another so convinced that someone local is destined for great things, especially someone who's only been performing about a year. If the right well-connected person hears him, or he gets a bigger platform, like Bonnaroo or Moogfest, he's bound to get national attention. Soak it up now while he's still playing PL to sizable but still comfortably manageable crowds.

A stupid question

They say there's no such thing as a stupid question. But that's stupid. Here's one: "Is there such thing as a stupid question?" Of course, stupid! Anyone who is in retail or, say, an American hears multiple stupid questions every day. And kids ask stupid questions all the time, because they're inherently stupid.

Here's another one: If digital recordings are made up of a series of 1s and 0s, is it possible to remove all of the 1s or all of the 0s from a recording? What would Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" sound like with every third 1 removed? Like a skipping CD? A remix by Oval? What about replacing "Billie Jean's" 1s with "Black Dog's" 0s? Will there every be an app for that? The Plunderphonics app? Are silences in songs — like the silence after the opening guitar noises in "Black Dog" — registered by 1s and/or 0s? Is silence more 1-is or 0ish? Is there such thing as an absolute silence? Maybe these questions don't reflect stupidity so much as my ignorance as to how digital encoding works. An ignorant question, then. But aren't all questions based in ignorance? Yes, except the stupid ones.

It's like it was 10 years ago or something!

A few weeks ago I was saying how I've not been going out to Pilot Light much lately but that must have been a phase that's now winding down. It may have something to do with this unseasonably warm weather making it nicer to venture out, but I was down there five of the last eight nights. Last week was a particularly eclectic week for PL, and March is a particularly busy month that provides an excellent case as to why that place remains vital to Knoxville.

Here's what went on last week, February 20-27:

Sunday - Junk Culture w/ Kunniggulus
Recent Illegal Art signee Junk Culture wasn't really my thing but it brought out a couple of dozen youngsters who probably hang out more at Valarium or Cider House than PL. Locals Kunniggulus returned with their laptop shenanigans, and even projected a pretty boss DVD of a '70s-era home video chopped and screwed by Kunniggulator Dugan.

Monday- Thank You w/ Yung Life
Baltimore's Thank You were way better than my memory of their debut album which I haven't heard in years would have me believe. A trio playing repetitive minimalist rock grooves with multiple guitars and analogue synths, they're kind of like a less punk, more melodic Oneida. Local trio Yung Life get better every time I see them. Totally great proggy take on 80s synth-pop, but way more interesting than that description would have you believe.

Tuesday - The Civil Wars w/ Mountains of Moss
Not even my great love for Adam Ewing's Mountains of Moss could overcome my indifference to the Jay Leno-approved Civil Wars. I've heard approximately 45 seconds of music from this duo, and that snippet combined with their general appearance and press kit convinces me their music is not for me. These guys look like they play the industry game so expertly it's as if their band is a Masters thesis on How To Make It as a Band in Nashville and L.A. They were by all accounts nice folks, though. There were apparently almost 100 people turned away and ridiculous bribes offered for entry at the door, making this the largest non-Halloween night in PL history.

Wednesday - What happened? Bar night? All I recall is I wasn't there.

Thursday - Matta Gawa w/ Double Muslims and Newark Sextets
A last minute show added a few days before, this was the surprise of the week in many ways. Matta Gawa were described as an improv noise guitar/drum duo, and that description always makes me leery, but these guys were awesome. Some old school improv with more jazz influence than noise, both musicians were amazing and very busy on their instruments. It's the kind of thing I don't hear nearly enough of live these days, and I wondered if groups like this don't seem to young Junk Culture/Girl Talk fans like hippies did to Jesus Lizard/Sonic Youth/Big Black fans 20 years ago. Like weirdos fighting a lost cause. Newark Sextets is Kunniggulator Dugan doing solo laptop work with an even more abstract video projection from the same home movie source. The Double Muslims performance was something of a warm-up, a peek at the new incarnation, with Maggie Brannon lending vocals to Jason Boardman's drums and Eric Lee's guitar dup. If you've heard DM, it might be hard to imagine them with vocals, but Maggie did great work improvising, and at least one piece was obviously a song they've been working on. This was a more explicitly rockist version of the band than we've heard in a while, and Damion Huntoon and Tyler Mucklowe from Woman are making some noise with them down in the practice space. I can't wait for the full-on debut of this lineup.

Friday - RB Morris and Angela Faye Martin
Don't know much about Nashville singer/songwriter Angela Faye Martin, other than Mark Linkous produced her last album, and I showed up too late to hear her. Arriving a little before midnight, I caught the last 5 or 6 songs (Early crowd!) by local hero RB, who I haven't seen live in several years. He was backed by Tim Lee and Greg Horne on guitar, Susan Bauer Lee on bass and somebody I didn't know on drums, and they sounded good. I've been listening to Warren Zevon's first two albums a lot lately (?!) and maybe I wouldn't have made this oconnection otherwise, but this group seemed to me to share an aesthetic affinity. Guitar greats Lee and Horne can come a little close to being too tasteful for my tastes, but they kept it loose and rocking enough most of the time.

Saturday - Vaygues, Die Job and Unicobra
I unfortunately didn't make it out for this one, an excellent line up of for a Saturday night local rock show. I'm told Vaygues drummer Graham gave an amazing, near-perfect performance that will be talked about for years to come, due to the heroic amounts of alcohol he had consumed earlier in the day that would have rendered most other musicians useless but seemed to faze his playing not one bit. I was sorry to miss this one, but Die Job and Vaygues play quite a bit, and Unicobra will no doubt play again soon.

Sunday - Going away gathering for Leslie Hatten
Yet another UT art graduate answers the siren call of NYC, the only place in the United States in America where "art" is taken "seriously." A bunch of people hanging out drinking, bullshitting, listening to some awesome classic and recent hip-hop and bidding farewell to a friend.

Every Knoxville ex-pat involved in the art/music scene is sorely missed, but who can blame them for moving on? Certainly not me, and the above week probably seems pretty paltry if not boring to our friends in NYC, Chicago, Austin, Prague, Portland, Seoul and wherever the hell else, but one of the things they're leaving behind is the fun and and the love unique to the place. Like on Thursday when Jason bought the 10 or so people who showed up for the show a round, and Will Fist ended up emptying his tip jar to buy multiple cans of Jeremiah Weed so everyone could try it, and then bought more beers for people to keep the night going, as everyone discussed the merits of Queen's Jazz album (which was playing because Eric Lee and/or Maggie are on a Queen kick, and though it could be annoying it's actually kind of endearing how people end up obsessing over the same band or record for a while*), and the out of town band showing genuine disbelief and appreciation about how nice everyone is and asking lots of questions about Knoxville. Or Sunday, when different groups of people who didn't know one another well or at all showed up to say goodbye to a mutual friend, maybe a little envious or sad or hurt that she was leaving us all behind, but knowing the good times are always going to be here for us if we just keep showing up. Not that this kind of thing doesn't go on everywhere, but this is a small community with solid roots whose members depend on one another to maybe even a not altogether healthy degree, and not that chasing a good time should be one's purpose in life, but somehow enough people around here keep making it worthwhile. We also generally have to make our own fun, which is a good start in ensuring the good times will always outweigh the bad.



*That reminds me - when Keith Wood of Hush Arbors played here several weeks ago, Eric Lee was bartending and played Fleetwood Mac's Tusk on the stereo, a carryover perhaps from when everyone was obsessing over Rumours (the younger folk) and Tusk (the slightly older folk) a few years ago. I was asking Keith about playing in Current 93 with David Tibet, and he told me after Ben Chasny recommended him to Tibet as Ben's replacement, the "audition" basically consisted of Keith hanging out with Tibet in his home, getting high and bonding over their mutual love of Tusk.

Earth - Angels of Darkness, Angelzzzzzzzzzzzz

As skimmed in MP.

Earth

Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 (Southern Lord)
After basically inventing the droning, slow-motion metal riff aesthetic that so many bands would go on to emulate, Earth frontman Dylan Carlson took an almost decade-long hiatus before reconfiguring the project in 2005. That year’s Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method had Carlson adding melody, pedal steel, and a Spaghetti Western sensibility to Earth’s cleaned-up sound, while drummer Adrienne Davies kept a Percodan-paced beat behind it all. It was a relatively simple but evocative and addictive style, one so successful they basically repeated it with minor adjustments for 2007’s Hibernaculum EP and 2008’s The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull. If you were into slowcore metal displaying a more scaled-back kind of epic Romanticism, these albums were great, if lacking somewhat in diversity. Now comes the supposed new direction of Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 and it sounds… like another Earth record.
More of more or less the same isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, from a group with such a distinctive, purposeful method as Earth, and there are some new ideas to be found on the album. The addition of Lori Goldston’s cello is the most crucial difference, and it blends so naturally with the Earth aesthetic you wonder why Carlson didn’t think to add the instrument sooner. With the melodic, sonorous strains of the cello filling out the sound, Carlson is free to loosen up somewhat, applying more tremolo and reverb to add a tinge of warbly psychedelia to his guitar. And while duration has always been central to Earth’s process, it’s hard to imagine the 20-minute closing title track executed by an earlier incarnation. There’s a sustained sense of control and focus that the previous albums might have just been warming the band and audience up for. It’s undeniably epic while remaining improbably intimate.

The Dirtbombs - Party Store

As read in TMT.

It’s more common for electro-oriented artists to cover rock songs than for rockers to repay the compliment, a natural enough thing given rock’s deeper history, but the reverse does occur from time to time. Uwe Schmidt’s recording of Kraftwerk songs in a Latin style under his alter ego Señor Coconut stands out as one of the more imaginative of these efforts, but despite their reliance on synthesizers and bold declaration that they are the robots, Kraftwerk holds a secure place within the rock canon. Their songs have a more or less traditional structure and can be easily played on stringed instruments and drum kits. And while younger generations have fully embraced the idea of using machines to make music, techno still has a much tougher time getting respect from old-school rock fans. If a lot of these moldy figs listen to newer bands, they’re usually along the lines of blues-based, classic rock-loving acts like The White Stripes or The Black Keys. If they ever had a chance to hear them, the same people who love those groups would probably (hopefully) like the scads of lower-profile groups operating with more traditional forms of rock and soul, of which The Dirtbombs are one of the leading exemplars. What those listeners would make of Party Store, the band’s take on classic techno, I’m not sure.

The Dirtbombs aren’t the most immediately obvious band to record an album of techno covers, but when you both consider Mick Collins’ allegiance to his hometown of Detroit and recall Ultraglide in Black, the band’s 2001 collection of soul/funk covers from Collins’ youth, it makes more sense. Living in Detroit in the 1980s, when the songs selected for Party Store were originally produced, Collins heard cutting-edge tracks like Juan Atkins and Cybotron’s “Cosmic Cars” and Inner City’s “Good Life” long before the rest of the world took notice. And whether or not he was fully on board with the sound back when he was playing in his seminal punk blues band The Gories, he was certainly likely to have given it more consideration than the majority of his rockist peers must have. This recording also doesn’t seem so odd when you think about how much funkier and more concerned with rhythm The Dirtbombs are than a lot of rock bands. Although guitars certainly figure prominently on Party Store, especially on the extended freak-out in the middle of the 21-minute “Bug in the Bass Bin,” the album is dominated by improbably tight drum and bass patterns that mimic machines. It’s not unlike what bands like Gang Gang Dance or Teeth Mountain do, basing much of their aesthetic on their ability to produce marathon rhythmic workouts using multiple drummers, but coming from The Dirtbombs it’s a bit of a surprise and, not so surprisingly, has more of a groove.

“Bug in the Bass Bin” is something of an anomaly for the album, the most radical reworking of an original track. The version by Carl Craig’s Innerzone Orchestra was already less structured than the typical dance-oriented techno track, allowing for jazzy improvisation, and here the band stretch it out to twice the length of the original. It’s a bit jarring the first time around, and you may wonder why they let it go on as long as they did. But heard as the band’s take on an extended mix in the style of club music, it works well, even if nobody will be hitting the dance floor to this; it’s more a rock translation of the style than an attempt to ape it. Craig himself adds modular synthesizer to the track, and he tries to match Collins’ wigged-out solo with his own psychedelic sounds that seem more ELP than EDM.

Despite working with two drummers, the mechanics of some beats proved difficult to emulate, and drum machines do make appearances on a few tracks, most notably Derrick May’s “Strings of Life” and closing track “謎のミスタ-ナイソ (Detroito Mix).” The latter is the most identifiably techno thing here, a song the band has stripped of almost all rock elements and allowed synthesizers to dominate. If they had attacked the entire album in this style, it would have come off as more of a novelty, not nearly as fun or likely to stand up to repeated listening. Having said that, the conceptual nature of Party Store makes it the least all-purpose Dirtbombs record yet. Despite its title, I suspect it won’t become their fans’ go-to record at parties.

But The Dirtbombs are an easy band to like. They have a charismatic singer/guitarist with enviable swagger and unimpeachable street cred, superb musicianship that rarely gets showy, and excellent taste that comes from an obvious love for and knowledge of a wide range of American popular music. An unexpected album like this makes them even more admirable. Hailing from a city forever linked with some of the greatest pop and soul music, Collins and crew are also wise enough to know how large a part techno plays in the city’s history. They know that a sound so anathema to many rock and soul fans as anti-human or soulless may have been created on machines, but it was the left-field creativity and forward-thinking imagination of a few of his city’s citizens that helped to change the sound of popular music.

Bitch Magnet - Ben Hur

Ah, the late 80s/early 90s. This is a textbook (textrecord? that looks and sounds so wrong) case of what a small sliver of those years sounded like. That sliver would certainly expand and encompass a lot more territory, but 1990's Ben Hur captures that transition from hardcore to not quite math but math-y prog-like rock quite well. Shades of Rapeman, Jesus Lizard, Bastro, Crain, Shellac and yes, Slint, are apparent in this record. I heard Bitch Magnet years after I'd heard those other bands, even though they preceded many of them, and they now seem to be kind of a footnote in the evolutionary history of post-rock. Fair enough, I guess, this record probably won't blow your mind if you're familiar with the other bands I mentioned, but it's solid and enjoyable throughout, and if it sounds like a product of its time just remember these guys were in the front end of that time, and not chasing an already well-defined sound. Deluxe reissue/reappraisal coming soon?

Lead singer and bassist Sooyoung Park went on to form Seam with Mac from Superchunk, Orestes Morfin (holla) drummed for Walt Mink, a band I have no recollection of ever hearing, and you know what happened to David Grubbs. Bastro was up next for him, and though BM didn't have the chops of that band, they were already pointing in that direction. Cool cover art and a bonus 7-inch add extra joy.

Link hijacked from this guy.

33 1/3 - Slint's Spiderland

There are some music and film books I don't want to read because I don't really care to know that much about the background of certain albums and movies I love. This runs contrary to my nature, which is to gobble up as much context and history as possible about art and literature I enjoy, but some things are so magical bordering-on-holy biographical detail isn't necessary, and I'm even afraid it might ruin something for me. I don't think I'll ever read a book about Astral Weeks or Andrei Rublev, for instance. I can't decide if this is a childish way to think and if I'm consciously deluding myself about the nature of art, but I'm mostly fine with this attitude. So little mystery exists anymore, I'm happy to preserve what little remains.

Spiderland has always been a pretty mysterious album, especially in the first few years after it's release. With so little information in the limited liner notes, and not much written about it, all we had was the music itself. Former Slint members would pop up in other bands we liked, and that somehow added to rather than clarified the mystery. I was a bit apprehensive about reading this book, and when I first saw it was being published I assumed I'd never read it. But the album came up in discussion with a friend a few weeks ago (as it's wont to do), and we both were talking about how we had no real information about the background of the recording, and how that was just a given, so little was available you didn't necessarily want any. But then it occurred to me that the album is such a strange, singular thing, there probably could never be any explanation or history of it that could mar or alter my enjoyment of it. Those guys were so young when they made it, and it seemed to have no precedent, so even a great writer couldn't elucidate the mystery of how they came to make it. So I read it.

I was right about that supposition, and Scott Tennett even admits something to this effect in the beginning of the book. He just loves the album and wants to write about the history of the band that made it, knowing he can never fully explain the strange power it had on listeners who encountered it in the '90s. It's more a history of Slint than Spiderland, often funny and surprisingly low on nostalgia-baiting, though it did make me want to listen to a few bands. I had revisited For Carnation's small discography about a month before I read this, but already want to listen to it again. In lieu of a personal reminiscence a la my last post, I may have something on Bitch Magnet's Ben Hur once I dust it off and give it a whirl.



Edit: I chose Andrei Rublev as an example of a film I'd never want to know too much background about because it's probably my favorite film ever, and retains qualities of mystery no matter how many times I see it. Thinking about it, though, of course I'd want to read a book about the making of it: A Russian historical epic that took over a year to shoot in remote locations during awful weather conditions, the incredible raid sequence resulting in injuries to actors and the more or less torture of animals, with several scenes cut and the film forbidden to be shown in its home country once completed. And it was only Tarkovsky's second film. I want to read as much about that as possible. Let's leave the mysteries to some other favorites, likw Mulholland Dr and Wizard of Oz, the former I'm convinced Lynch made up much of as he went, a suspicion I never care to have confirmed, and the latter so full of imaginative effects and camera tricks that would now be done with ugly looking CGI that the film seems like a minor miracle of human ingenuity and imagination, imbued with no small quality of, no kidding, magic. In the old school, non-Disney sense.

33 1/3 - It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

Just read Christopher Weingarten's 33 1/3 book on Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. It's a great example of what this series does at its best, giving a decent background of the history and cultural context in which the album was recorded, and offering a fairly detailed description of the recording of the album. Though I enjoy the more abstract titles in the series, like Carl Wilson's already classic Let's Talk About Love, Erik Davis' magick-drenched Led Zeppelin IV and Marvin Lin packing in a wide range of musings on cultural topics and music theories in his recent Kid A, I appreciate the more generalized classic journalism/biography approach most of these books take. Weingarten also steers clear of the understandably-important-to-the-author but more often than not boring-to-the-reader personal experiences a lot of the writers like to cram in theses books. Since this is a blog and not a book, however, you will not be spared such a fate, and I'll be sharing a personal story after a few more comments on the book.

Though much of the information in this book, particularly a list of the samples used, is available on the internet (look at all the samples used in the 3 minutes and 14 seconds of "Baseheads"), Weingarten make sure we understand the reasoning and context behind The Bomb Squad's decision to use certain samples in specific songs, other than just for their sonic quality. The lengthy section on the Wattstax film and album is particularly interesting, as is the ongoing discussion of the influence of James Brown, Isaac Hayes and P-Funk to the album's sound. These are the most obvious sources and inspirations, and the book details many more. One thing that's fascinating was how much Def Jam honcho Russell Simmons hated PE. The first time he heard a tape of them, he took it out and threw it across the room. Cohort Rick Rubin had to convince him of their merit, and Simmons' told him, "Rick, I don't even know why you're wasting your time with this garbage. No one is ever going to like this. This is like black punk rock." (Weingarten quotes from Ronin Ro's Raising Hell: The Reign, Ruin and Redemption of Run DMC and Jam Master Jay.) And this quote provides a nice segue for my personal story.

I first heard the album in April, 1989, about a year after it was released, when I was 15 years old and living on the East Tennessee farm I grew up on. Although my siblings and I were too old for Easter baskets, our mother still bought us an Easter present, an idea that now seems incredibly absurd. I suppose it was supposed to be like Christmas-lite or something, equating receiving gifts with religious holidays so you'd associate church with getting stuff. I certainly wasn't critical of it at the time, because it meant getting a moderately priced present or two of your choice. I had been getting more and more into rap in the past year, and asked for a tape of Ice T's Power. Instead I got Nation. My mom took one look at the cover of Power and decided no way was he getting this for me. (And she didn't even know what the album's "L.G.B.N.A.F." stood for. At least I don't think she did.) So she asked a clerk at the Camelot store in the Morristown Mall for something like it but not dirty, and the guy had the wherewithal to hand her Nation. I have no idea what she thought of the cover picture of an angry black man and weird looking black man with a clock around his neck glaring out at the camera from behind prison bars, or the military style logo next to a silhouette of a man in crosshairs, or if she noticed song titles like "Countdown to Armageddon," "Mind Terrorist," and "Prophets of Rage," but I'm eternally grateful that her Methodist sensibilities preferred that to a cover of two black men standing next to a woman in a swimsuit holding a shotgun. (Several years earlier she refused to buy me a Culture Club tape because it contained a song called "Church of the Poisoned Mind." ((Plus for some reason my dad didn't really care for Boy George.)) What did she get me instead? The probably-Satanic-but-at-least-not-gay Bark at the Moon. Score two for mom!) I'm also glad that clerk was hip enough or at least had the sense of humor to recommend the album, because who knows how late I would have been coming to it otherwise. Because the first time I listened to it, it was the weirdest thing I had ever heard, and I hated it.

Thinking of Simmons' "black punk rock" quote, it occurs to me I was exposed to Nation before I'd heard punk rock. The speed and aggression of Black Flag and Husker Du, poetical-political lyrics of Minutemen, and the noise-as-texture watershed that Daydream Nation provided lay several months ahead for me. The strangest things to my ears up to that point were probably Dark Side of the Moon and "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)". (Actually I still find "1983..." pretty freaky. Dig those crazy voices!) Nation blew my farm-bred mind. I was put off by Chuck D's speed, cadence and haranguing voice, and anyway couldn't make out half of what he was saying, and I didn't understand much of what I could make out. I found the screeching noises annoying and, like Simmons, initially couldn't get past the general cacophony of it all. I was accustomed to the clean annunciation and rap along-ability of LL Cool J (just about every one of my guy friends could rap along with "I'm Bad" and "I Need Love" in its entirety) Slick Rick (ditto "La-di-da-di"), Too Short ("I Ain't Trippin"), RUN DMC (several tracks) and Beastie Boys (take your pick, though the soon to be released Paul's Boutique would be even more inscrutable than Nation). Chuck D's rhymes were harder to get your ear and mouth around. The dense liner notes didn't help things, the fold-out sheet of transparently thin paper with tiny print listing a bunch of names I wasn't familiar with, extremely lengthy song lyrics and pseudo-revolutionary jargon I had no idea was either pseudo or revolutionary at the time. I had very little context for any of it, even though I had more or less grown up with rap ever since my older brother brought home a copy of "Rapper's Delight" in the early '80s (he hated it, and I was young enough that all electro-oriented '80s pop music sounded both strange and perfectly normal). And of course Licensed to Ill and Raising Hell changed everything for teenagers. But this didn't sound like anything I'd heard when I'd gone to the theater to see Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.

After maybe two listens (and at @ an hour it was a long album by 1989 standards), the tape was put away for a while. I don't remember exactly when and how I finally "got" it, but I suspect it wasn't a eureka moment, that it was a gradual thing. Surely helpful was almost obsessive listening to NWA's gleefully vulgar Straight Outta Compton* later in the year, the first punk album I connected with (and interviews with white boys in suburbs and farms all over America falling in love with that album is a mini-documentary waiting to happen), as was my eventual introduction to the attitude and noise of punk rock and, ahem, grunge. On a more subconscious level, possibly, Nation helped prepare me for those albums. It also contained the most intricate sonic collages I'd heard, well before plunderphonics and Negativland were on my radar. Equally important, that album contained the most overt political music I knew of at the time. Fear of a Black Planet would take the sonic collages, noises and politics even further, and by the time it came out I was totally on board, but Nation helped break down some resistance and prep the mind for the sea change it would help bring to hip-hop and pop music in general.

Nation sits alongside Astral Weeks, Daydream Nation, Damaged, Loveless, Straight Outta Compton, Trout Mask Replica, Bitches Brew, Moment Precieux, and a Haters 7" with some of the music that helped rearrange my mind and open my ears as a teenager. Aside from the Haters and maybe Braxton/Bailey, that list looks fairly pedestrian and is full of accepted classics, but in pre-Internet farm land, where we didn't even have cable, Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Griff and The Bomb Squad really were mind terrorists, and I've had Stockholm Syndrome sever since.




*NWA anecdote: The first copy of Straight Outta Compton I had was recorded over a copy of ...And Justice For All, after I decided I didn't like metal anymore. It was dubbed on a crappy Emerson dual tape deck, and Metallica's riffs could still be faintly heard under NWA. It caused this constant high-pitch buzzing to run throughout the album, and I remember a particularly awesome guitar solo kicking off during one of the silence between songs. I eventually got a genuine tape myself, but for a few months I listened to the album with Metallica as a backing band buried in the mix. If I still had that tape I'd try to release it on Not Not Fun.

Bonus 7" - bonnie prince billy sings 'black dissimulation' and 'no such as what i want'

Both of these songs are great, and I rank "No Such as What I Want" as one of my all time Oldham faves. Released a year before Get On Jolly, Mick Turner is featured in the track, alongside Brother Jim White on drums, Colin Gagon on accordian, David Grubbs on electric piano and Tiffany White-Pounder on vocals. I tagged it on to the end of a cassette of a Silver Jews album and wore it out driving around Austin and its outskirts as a courier in the late 90s. It's a great driving song. I've probably heard the song well over a hundred times and still get a thrill from it. Great vocal performance by Will and Pounders-White, great drums, sweet sounding accordian, beautiful guitar and intermittently scrutable, fun to sing along with lyrics. The song has some of the feel of the Jolly recordings, but more robust. So good.

Black

Records of the day - Bonnie Prince Billy and the Marquis de Tren - Get On Jolly & Get the Fuck On Jolly Live

Speaking of Will Oldham, I like his newer music, but in the '90s into the early '00s I was high near obsessed with him, buying everything he released that I could find. I still think his run of albums from the Palace Brothers debut to I See a Darkness, plus all the singles and EPs that fall in there, are uniformly great. There's not a body of work quite like it in American music, nor one nearly so solid from the last few decades, and it's pretty remarkable how different each of those first six albums are. I can go on and on about him, and may do in the future, but I wanted to single out these two relatively overlooked recordings, Get On Jolly and Get The Fuck On Jolly Live.

I had them on my mind recently, probably because the sparse quality of the music always seems to work best in cold, dreary weather. Or so I thought, until after listening to them a couple of weeks ago during such weather, I was struck by the desire to hear them last weekend when we had an unseasonable 70 degree sunny Sunday afternoon. They sounded just as perfect then, too, their more buoyant charms complimented by the weather.

The songs here are derived from the Gitanjali by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. I know very little about Tagore, other than what I read here, in Yeats' introduction to the author's translation. (And for some reason I think his poetry was somewhat fashionable in the '60s and '70s, probably mainly among hippies.) I've never read the poems and have no future plans to do so, primarily because the song versions of them on these records work so well for me. I can't imagine reading them silently and I certainly don't want to read them out loud myself. That's probably not the best way of getting the most out of the poems, or hewing to their true spirit, but I'm far more concerned with this musical translation of them than I am the poems themselves. The ones selected by Bonnie and Tren are all love songs, very romantic poems evoking pastoral and animal themes, with a healthy dose of self-reflexive content about sitting around singing, composing poems, wooing and getting drunk.

The Marquis de Tren is inimitable Dirty Three guitarist Mick Turner. If you're familiar with that band, or more specifically Tren Brothers, Turner's duo with D3 drummer and all-around badass Jim White, (or even more specifically, Turner's solo records), you have a pretty good idea of what the Jollys sound like. The music is lightly brooding but romantic, atmospheric and just in general very, very lovely. The kind of stuff you imagine a modern Young Werther might like. And you know what Will's singing sounds like. Relying more on emotive resonance than technical proficiency, his vocals have become a bit more palpable to the normal human ear in the past decade, and it's not difficult to imagine some sort of training is to be blamed/thanked. (Some reviewer, in Puncture I think it was, wrote they always pictured Huckleberry Hound when listening to him, but that person was probably a sheltered Yankee.) But these two recordings, from 1999 and 2001, catch him in what I think of as more or less his vocal prime, shorn of much of the warble and strain of his first few records, but not so clean as of late. Honestly, a casual listener might not notice much difference between now and then, and it's the kind of voice that will only ever speak to a limited number of listeners, which is why I always found it amusing he begins both Jolly recordings with the lines "When you ask me to sing, it feels like my heart will burst with pride" before continuing "I know you take pleasure in my singing," kind of howling the "knooow" a bit. It's funny, but also absolutely perfect, because Will's lyrics and music tend toward the romantic anyway, so it's easy to imagine him wooing someone by singing these poems, and if you're a fan, you do take pleasure in his singing, and you know that he knows he has a fairly limited vocal range. It also brings these occasionally perfumey poems down to a less courtly, more pedestrian setting. To illustrate that thought, imagine what drama queens like Celine Dion or Streisand or even Nick Cave or Antony would do with these songs, and compare it to Will's more approachable approach. If, like me, you're always hopelessly out of tune, it's perfectly ok to sing along with him and not sound so off. In fact, using his as a guide vocal, it's fun.

Get On Jolly is a studio-recorded EP, while Get the Fuck On Jolly Live is, as its title makes clear, a live recording that's a bit lengthier. I prefer the EP, not only because I think Will's voice sounds better on it, but also because I listened to it constantly during a sad, lonely and impressionable time of my life, and though I know its limitations and dangers, I can be a sucker for nostalgia. It's the kind of music that makes being lovelorn bearable, offering an idealized impression of what it will be like when you get to be in love again. I suppose I could try to make an aesthetic argument for it, but really I don't even want to try. Some things work best on a personal level. One great thing about the live recording is it features a few songs not on the EP, including the immaculate "LXXXVI" (all the titles are the poem's numbers in the text), in which Will ecstatically repeats "I found a new way of living, I found a joy of my own" while Mick works his magic on guitar and harmonium.

But both recordings are truly special, and would make perfect Valentine's Day listening. Or, if you want, you could learn the songs and sing them to your special someone. I doubt you'll improve on Will and Mick, but if you lie and say you wrote these songs for your adored, you're guaranteed some action.

Will and Kels

For me, the most surprising thing in Will Oldham's interview of R Kelly is that Will watches 30 Rock. It's just hard to imagine him doing normal people thing like watch television. Do you think his favorite character is Kenneth? My favorite part of the interview is when Will tries to ingratiate himself to R by telling him he covers a few of his songs and R responds cordially before going completely non sequitur on him:

OLDHAM: I love that song “The World’s Greatest” as well. We perform that song onstage sometimes. We do sort of like a country version of it.

KELLY: Yeah? I would love to hear that. You know, I took the Queen Mary to Europe once because I didn’t want to get on a plane . . .

If you're in the mood for more celebrity on celebrity action, here's Kanye Wets interviewing Rihanna. If not, allow me to share a few of my favorite moments from the interview.

RIHANNA: Hey. How are you?
WEST: I'm good. I'm just out here in this retarded-ass studio- Peter Gabriel's studio.

*

WEST: How does it feel to know that you could have any man in the world? Or woman. How does it feel to know that you can turn straight women gay?
RIHANNA: Is that a real question?

*

WEST: Why you drink so much Red Bull?

*

WEST: Do you know any famous people now?
RIHANNA: Huh? [laughs]

Not another post about Egypt!

It's hard not to be fascinated by the events in Egypt this past week, and there's no end to internet articles on the subject. Egyptian citizens have unwittingly provided a laboratory setting to observe the dreaded "instant expert" disease which is an unfortunate by-product of life in the information age. It's not just your "friends" on Facebook who are graciously subjecting you to their informed opinion because they visited Egypt for a week a few years ago, or worked with a guy from Egypt once. This has infected much larger and "most trusted" sources for news and, more to the point, opinion. The few Westerner scholars and Arab world ex-pat experts news organizations keep on ice until something happens in places like Tunisia or Egypt are being thawed out, but not everyone has one handy. I certainly knew very little about Egypt society and government before last week, and so did you. We all did. But after a weekend of late nights with Google, suddenly everybody knows what's happening, why it's happening, and what should happen there. Granted, some of that is a no-brainer, and a simple "the people vs. a despised leader" narrative works to a point. It's the overall context and nuance of the op-eds, as well as the discussion of the future of the nation, where things get uncomfortable, especially since it all seems to be coming from the point of view of what's best for the United States.

I'm doing the same as everyone else and visiting all the usual news haunts, in my case the NYT (I know, I know), The Guardian, NPR and ZNet. These organizations have the resources and history with the region to do a fairly reliable reporting job, bearing in mind obvious biases and viewpoints. Al Jazeera is obviously the best places for expanded coverage and context, though I have to admit I only visit their site when something extra crazy is happening in the Mideast. The network was apparently blacked out across much of the U.S., but their website seems to be having no trouble at all. After spending time with the site, it all but renders the others I mentioned obsolete. I like peeking in and roaming around other sites, too, ones that don't seem as well-prepared to report from or comment on Egypt. I restrained myself from the voyeuristic/masochistic exercise of looking in on Fox, even after that ridiculous map they created in 2009 started showing up everywhere. Making fun of Huffington Post is like picking on a well-meaning classmate with limited intelligence and reasoning skills, but I have to hand it to them for straight up admitting they had to go to the ever-reliable, always thorough New York Review of Books for years of context. There's so much competing for our attention on this subject, NYRB seems to be a sober one-stop shopping source for a brief history lesson.

Big Fan

I watched Big Fan last night in the comfort of my own home, and while watching it I was amused and bizarrely pleased at the thought that people who saw it in the theater paid around $10 to watch Patton Oswalt (pictured above) not only masturbate once, but later attempt to masturbate and fail. That's as gutwrenching as anything you'll see in Romanian cinema. Please don't let that spoiler keep you from watching this movie, which has many more psychologically disturbing things happening in it, an uncomfortable look at homo-erotic sports and celebrity obsession, and a fairly dismal view of large swaths of American culture in general, but still manages to be funny and empathetic toward people you wouldn't want to know too intimately in real life.

A different kind of grind

Wow. Look at this album cover I came across while looking for an image of The Other Jody Grind's album cover. I've never heard of this band, but for some reason there's not that many good hi-res images of The Other Jody Grind, and the interweb is lousy with pictures of this album. I'm tempted to spend 30 seconds researching them or even downloading the album, but after accidentally glimpsing a site that stated they were a UK prog band who Robert Fripp almost joined, and do a long version of "Willie the Pimp," I think I'll just enjoy the album cover. If it's not good enough for Fripp...

All this has made me curious as to the origins of the term Jody Grind. I know it's a Horace Silver album, but it must have a source other than that. I know Jody's a backdoor man who loves grinding, is that what it's all about? Does the term originate in the UK or is that another thing they've stolen from us? Curiously the know-it-all internet will not reveal its secrets after a (very) brief search.

Record of the day: The Jody Grind - One Man's Trash is Another Man's Treasure

Like most people who have ever heard her sing or enjoyed her witty banter with Neko Case onstage, I love Miss Kelly Hogan. (Or as she was known at the tome of this recording, Kelly Hogan Murray. What's the story there? Ex-husband? "Kelly Hogan" just sound better?) My first exposure to her was in the mid 90s, courtesy of a dubbed tape of this 1990 album released on DB Records. I think it was somewhat beloved by a few folks I knew in Knoxville at the time, and someone must have made me a copy, but for the life of me I can't remember who. I liked it well enough, but there was something nigglingly Adult Contemporary about it to my ears, which at the time were more attuned to free jazz and pigfuck music. Things like the covers of the "Peter Gunn" theme and "Wishin' and Hopin'" always made me feel a little uncomfortable. As music, too comfortable with its effervescent state of being, perhaps. So I lost the tape sometime along the way and didn't think much of it again, until a copy of the album turned up at Hot Horse a few months ago.

It was from some radio station in Athens or Atlanta, I removed the label and can't remember which, but since the band and label were from Atlanta that makes perfect sense. I left a sticker on the back with bore the handwritten declaration "Folk Shit!" which I find amusing because whoever wrote that couldn't be more wrong. It's more of a jazz/lounge/torch song type of thing, with more rock influence than folk. Though there is a banjo on it. But guess who plays that banjo (along with guitar and pump organ)? Bill Taft! Of Smoke non-fame. I love love love Smoke*, and have a more difficult but still rewarding relationship with his latest band Hubcap City. I had no idea he was in The Jody Grind. Well I listened to One Man's Trash and now love it unequivocally. More so, in fact, than Kelly's solo albums, which I must confess my present state finds a bit Adult Contemporary. On her album Beneath the Country Underdog, she does do a devastating take on Willie Nelson's "I Still Can't Believe You're Gone," and achieves the near-impossible task of doing Richard Manuel proud on a version of The Band's "Whispering Pines," which to my mind makes her a national treasure, but some of the instrumentation and arrangements on her albums make me feel uncomfortable in that old familiar way. I'm sure I'll grow into them some day. But One Man's Trash is a lot of fun, Hogan is her usual big-throated sultry self and there's a good mix of torch songs and more upbeat tunes. Although there was a lounge revival coming down the pike in the 90s, this album doesn't sound at all dated and has little relation to something that would fit well with a Gap commercials that used Matrix effects.

*Reminder to self to tell my Smoke/Cat Power anecdote.