Hot Hot Hot Boulder

On today, February 28th, it is 75 degrees. For someone who grew up in, say, Truth Or Consequences, this is not a big deal. For a life-long Snow Belter, this is akin to owning a winter condo in Hades.

In Eastern Standard Tribes, Corey Doctorow envisions an interesting remix for future demographics: loyalties based on timezone, rather than national or cultural similarity. I'd take his "longitudinal affiliation" a step further: cross-cutting all loyalties by both timezone and climatic distance from the Equator, creating, in essence, a grid of collective sympathies.

The Eastern Time Zone, then, unites everyone from Phoenix, NY, to the Peruvian coastal region, yet subdivides them into binary latitudinal unities, which concurrently unites people across temperate zones. This mad scrambling of physical identification may be all we need to at last find some form of global unity-in-diversity (as it supplants commitment to ethno-idealogical positions with something far more fundamental), transcending our historical divisions by falling into alignment with newer, more arbitrary sympathies.

Irregardless my trans-geographic fantasies, needless to say this weather is scrambling all notions of what constitutes "proper activity" given the time of year. I've spent months gradually paring down my actions to all things indoor (I don't ski, thanks), only to find the summertime doors blown open with the mountain breezes of unexpected emo-swinging, like a man in solitary confinement flung suddenly into the outer reaches of space. Yeehaw.

Quote of the Week

[Thank you Heidi.]

"One should only read books which bite and sting one. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, what's the point in reading? A book must be an axe which smashes the the frozen sea within us."
--Franz Kafka

On Analog Mash-Ups

Often I find our conception of "electronic music" to be woefully literalist. This is often taken to mean anything created on a computer, anything using samples or vinyl scratches, anything with bloops and bleeps and remix value and feathered digivocals. This forgets another capacity for which electronic culture -- as exemplified by the Internet -- is useful, namely, information.

Lost in the hype over ambient electro mashup techno ravestep dubhop meta-vibratio spacebeats is the sudden ubiquity of certain simpler, older school music datastreams: namely, lyrics and chords. Go to any of the Net's 8 billion lyric or guitar tab sites and be stunned with how easy it is to get the words and harmonic progressions of any pop song ever written. Go from Modest Mouse to Gladys Knight to Queen to Prince in a matter of mouseclicks: it's not only sampled sounds that the digital age makes ubiquitous, but the older codes of scores and symphonics.

What I'm getting at is this: why is it that sample-monkeys enjoy such prestige as the archons of digital sound? What about ordinary guys with ordinary guitars, plunging the instant depths of humanity's chords and lyrics with a networked laptop resting on their music stand, strum-mixing LIVE improvised pop tunes in real time, using the analog hardware of voice, hands, and wood-string mechanism?

Here's hoping.

Christmas Comes Way Early: a New LIARS Album!

I hate to ride Pitchfork's jock, but this has got me more excited than usual about music, especially with K-punk's endless "death of" postings. Liars came out in the early naughties with one of the best NYC-scene "dancepunk" albums ever heard, then followed it up with something completely different (flogs and witches?) and now... Drum's Not Dead, which single-handedly ups the ante for music acts everywhere by including:

[A] DVD with three film versions of the album, Drum's Not Bread (directed by Julian Gross), The Helix Aspersa (directed by Angus Andrew) and By Your Side (by award-winning filmmaker Markus Wambsganss). Each film comprises of videos for each of the tracks on the album: that's 36 videos in total. From backstage travelogues to surreal animation and mini sci-fi epics, Liars document the process of recording, touring, then visually reinventing each track. It's an ambitious and groundbreaking expansion of the album format, throwing down the gauntlet for other creatively ambitious bands to follow suit.

This seems to me to be a natural progression for LPs now that the music itself can be had for about 5 minutes' work on Limewire (until, of course, all the videos are available online too).

ps
I've been thinking of just turning this into a straight-up music blog (or just off-loading all music thoughts onto a new music-only blog), fit for reviews, diatribes, recordings of my own, and news items like this. What say thee, loyal underfed peanut gallery?

Stop AOL's Email Tax!

Bunch of jerks.

Do Not Let the Previous Post Fool You

...as I kinda dig this town. It is older, dirtier, and stinkier than the previous hippie-havens I've been known to frequent: Eugene, Ithaca, Boulder -- here the stains of history ru(i)n much deeper, and we can ill forget out connections to the more painful rivers of time, the ones which the unrealistic "hippie break" seems prone to mismanage and confuse...

Live Music as Fermented Dairy Product

So, Austin. "Live Music Capital" of the world. I am... unimpressed. Or rather, unhinged by the pressurized hopes I once held out. A Spoon riff echoes in my head, and I swear I hear the howls of And You WIll Know Us By the Trail of Dead duking it out with the ghost of Bill Hicks.

I understand now his obsession with ATF vs. Waco: highway signs for the beleagured town (the Midland, TX of its day) are posted all over this timezone.

The belchstinkfart of hippies vs. punks vs. yuppies vs. college Anglos: every bar had a cover charge, and you will pay dearly to be within The Center of it All, at least the All that is this far away from Williamsburg and Silver Lake. And Wicker Park. And East London. And...

How does a scene get born? Is it caused in mass reaction to the trad pre-ironic coverings of late-90s modern rock jukebox bands? In sneering mid-finger protest to mispelled Texas T-Shirts, bad beers with single star labels, expressive bloggers too suburbo-clueless to mistake a stolen cowboy for real authenticity?

The Armadillo Man thinks not.

Instead, we stop by by the side of the road for the Big Tex 5-for-1 fireworks special. We recognize the rolling hills of King of the Hills' Arlen, and dream dreams of Propane Tanks ablaze with heavenly fury, a venge-fire to purge the ranks of rhythm guitarists and overbiting bass players alike, wherein drummers -- and only drummers! -- are allowed to scale the walls of the capitol bldg and every major office park, and to plunge in an 808 thump-thump-thump base jump pump which shocks the world the way replays of ice dancing mishaps shock the ranks of the bluehairs knitting to the sounds of Bob Costas.

If we are plaintive, it is as if we use that non-quality as a weapon, a Phalanx salvo from the decks of a Nimitz-class carrier, where the mitre boards of the dispossessed slice the clouds with the promises a self-indulgent misspent 20s, where every guitar chord was as though so much gold, and the stolen Gang of Four bass riffs were the working-class underbelly/garments of the

rock

rock

rock

your dirty ball-gag socks off.

Vincent Vaughan, we command thee: swoop down from the Harrier jets of greased money, whip these bands into shape, and allow the skies to once more be patrolled by the inchoate pregnant soundwaves of the Tomorrow we left in between our magazine stacks and the old burnt-out cigarette ash trays.

A pack of guitar strings molder-fuses with an Atari cartridge, and a new sound-daemon slowly slinks its way to BablyonFM, waiting in the ear canals of beastial beercan agony to be postromantically born in 4/4 time... to the 10th power....

Blog-O-Mix

Today during a work break I messed around with reading an old blog post into a redirected head phone, set to chopped-up loops in Garage Band. Hear the results.

Postmodern Indie Rock is Killing Musical Invention

For the last two weeks I've been watching a very interesting conversation on K-punk and other blogs concerning the meteoric rise of the hopelessly derivative Arctic Monkeys, the latest band-of-note in a newly ascendant indie rock. Now, part of me is tickled pinkish-brown knowing that bands that sound like the bands I listened to growing up are supplanting the aesthetic twin horrors of Nu Metal and Teen Pop that have plagued our airways for almost a decade. But that's the problem, according to K-punk: I should demand more.

What fascinates me about the White Stripes, the Strokes, the Killers, etc. is not really the sound of these bands themselves, but the context in which an old sound now finds itself: mainstream popularity. In college, I would have scoffed at this as a sure sign of selling-out, but now I find some comfort in knowing that the indie rock "sound" I dig is available for free on the airways. And again, that's the problem.

Pop has not advanced any: it moves now laterally, endlessly rehashing the past (the aforementioned bands are rotten with replicant-references to bands 20 years their senior), a "wheel of non-life" more viewfinder than ant farm, a loop of fashion that breaks no new ground and never demands to change things as they exist, but only to "express itself" within the accepted boundaries pop once raged against. "Everyone gets a chance to sound like their favorite band," goes the thinking, and popular music will oblige you with your chance in the 3-chord spotlight and a Myspace page.

So what about genres, subcultures? Would not these provide ample future-fodder? Not so, K-punk reader Alex Williams would argue. The problem is an economic one: with so many "genre" publications covering micro-scenes, mainstream publications shrink to their "core values" of 4-man guitar rock, over and over and fucking over again. This self-ghettoization, while fostering the further development of the genres, allows for very little cross-breeding.

Postpunk... continually put into question the very notion of what a record is and what it could be. Each new band, or each new record by a band, each new style, posed that question differently and made new posings of the question possible. [T]he postmodernity to which the Arctic Monkeys belong is delimited-defined by a series of closed prescriptions. They belong to a stable genre which forms part of a resolved cultural scene in which the status of cultural objects like records is (ostensibly) settled.

K-punk's solution to this rancid self-immolation is a revisitation of the Modernist concept of the radical "break" from the current situation, where "the Possible shatters into a million previously unimaginable possibilities. There is nothing determinate 'in' this moment; it is a kind of pure emptiness, a nihilation."

This may break down into a new exploration of cross-genre splicing and breeding (much the way Gang of Four brought dub reggae into punk) with contemporary genres in a way that avoids the usual "throw a beat on top and call it remix" way of generic, meatheads-with-turntables electronica. The endless sonic invention of grime, for instance, provides one promising line-of-flight. Another is the burgeoning noise scene of Lightning Bolt, Erase Errata, etc. Where might a two-man band go with 108 bass pedals and stack full of Dizzee Rascal CDs?

Let's try it and see.

The Devaluation of Music

No surprise here: the University of Leicester has just released a study noting the dulling of music appreciation. Quote:

"In the 19th century, music was seen as a highly valued treasure with fundamental and near-mystical powers of human communication: It was experienced within clearly defined contexts, and its value was intrinsically bound up with those contexts.... [T]he degree of accessibility and choice has arguably led to a rather passive attitude towards music heard in everyday life: The present results indicate that music was rarely the focus of participants' concerns and was instead something that seemed to be taken rather for granted, a product that was to be consumed during the achievement of other goals. In short, our relationship to music in everyday life may well be complex and sophisticated, but it is not necessarily characterised by deep emotional investment."

Jeez, what a great time to start a band!

THIS is f--king insane.

Girls Gone Wild meets milk commercials, i swear.

Post-Ironic Quote of the Day

From Maud Newton's interview with WIRED editor Chris Baker:

Q: What do you think of Vice Magazine?

A: At the next Nuremberg trials, the defendants won't say, "I was just following orders." They will say, "I was just being ironic."

Snap!

Fiery Furnace News Redux

From the 'fork:

Good News: They've set a release date for the new album: April 18th!

Bad News: They're NOT playing Denver! Grr...

Book + Blog = Blook!

Of course! This idea has been on the tip of my tongue for a year now, leave it to a horror writer to fully articulate it. Read this interview with I, Death author Mark Leslie, which consists of a 1/3 to 1/8th of a chapter of his book released every day, which you subscribe to via RSS. Also peep Hackoff, another mystery working the same angle. Are we witnessing the exact moment where a new form of literature begins to supplant an old one? Time (and not much of it) will tell....

ADDENDA: While we're on the subject, some thoughts. First, the Internet is in danger of a corporate stranglehold. While I'm hopeful about radical free WiFi initiatives like FON (basically, you get their router and start giving your wireless to your 'hood for free) and post-Internet technology like the NeteraNet and "lightpaths", we could face the very real possibility of an internet banalization within the next five years, squelching our collective info/media landscape into something just slightly more exciting than late-80s network TV. To fight back, consider this: an endless WiFi "fictionsphere" of serialized RSS blook-stories (and serialized video blog movies, audio blogs concept albums) further blurring the already-contingent fiction/nonfiction beachhead, a vast text-churn of fictions making-themselves-real before our very eyes, available everywhere on your handheld. Wicked, man.

Technorati Tags: internet blogging technology

How to Be a Failure

From the newest addition to our office library, The Big Moo:

How to Be a Failure:

1. Keep secrets.
2. Be certain you're right and ignore those who disagree with you.
3. Set aggressive deadlines for others to get buy in -- then change them when they aren't met.
4. Resist testing your theories.
5. Focus more on what other people think and less on whether your idea is as good as it could be.
6. Assume that a critical mass must embrace your idea for it to work.
7. Choose an idea where #6 is a requirement.
8. Realize that people who don't instantly get your idea are bull-headed, shortsighted, or even stupid.
9. Don't bother to dramatically increase the quality of your presentation style.
10. Insist that you've got to go straight to the president of an organization to get something done.
11. Always go for the big win.

The 90-Day ILP Challenge

Folks, let's face it: I'm not doing too well. Scatter-brained, tired, back hurts... it's clear I need to stop working so hard. So, in a crass marketing scheme that neatly dovetails my personal needs with my day job (see below), I've decided to try this "Integral Life Practice" thing for 90 days, to see if it actually works. Check out the ongoing blog of that endeavor here, with a mirror on Zaadz here.

Edward Hopper's "House by the Railroad"

This is a formal complaint registered at the behest of a modest, great painting, Hopper's "House by the Railroad", 1925. A few floors above the swirling crowds marvelling at MoMA's new Pixar installation, this little painting sits at the tail end of the Painting and Sculptures I gallery, right where swooning congregants are disengaging from rooms full of Picassos and Matisses and Manets and considering their bathroom options. Yet the fact that this American Contemplative masterwork is rushed by may have nothing to do with the fact of its location, and everything to do with the fact of its haunting nature.

It's a simple painting, really, of an old French-baroque house, unbuffetted by trees, surmounting an unused railway in the foreground. The light is raking, the colors muted, and the composition oddly centered. And I can't take my eyes off it.

What more, really, could be said about the last 200 years that isn't contained in this painting? An empty, aristocratic house. An occluded earth. A modern infrastructure, heaped high with defeated dirt, laying in wait. A cloudless, hazy sky. If this were a photo, it could have been taken anytime from the late 1800s to present day. It speaks of social upheaval, upended class conventions, the coming and going of technology, the usurpation of proud individuality by the "wisdom of crowds", paradoxically abetted by the triump of the idiosyncratic Hero surveying the lowly mass transit system. That the background is hidden -- the yard the house sits in, the town it is located in -- is even more horrifying: this could be a stage set, a model train set-up, a house on stilts surveying a floodplain, even the decorative hood ornament of a city-sized Cyborg-Aggregate sneaking up on a railway leaf to eat a passing train-bug.

Yes, it's nothing new to attribute some sort of genius-level appraisal to Hopper. He did, as it were, find a way to meld the emerging form-obsessed conventions of Modernism with the decorative realism of the past. But it is the surly, contemplative light which suffuses everything in his geometric tableus of worldviews in conflict, subtle and crazed where a painter-jock like Alex Grey is overblown and linear, that is Hopper's gift to the 21st.

The ILP Kit: my little baby is all grows up!

As most of ya'll know, my day job is as a graphic designer for Integral Institute. This past week we started shipping our Integral Life Practice kit (please order one here if so inclined), which I did all of the graphic design for. The ILP Kit is basically a mix-and-match personal growth kit for the Internet generation, with a real emphasis on quick, bite-sized "one minute modules" which you can fit into your busy schedule. Ironically, in busting my ass with a month+ of overtime to bang this product out, I all but stopped doing any sort of exercise of any kind. Time to use my kit to turn things around...