Finland!

Packing up for a week in Finland today (read: thermal britches). A few days in the countryside and then off to attend a music festival in Tampere. Expect updates about the music scene (beyond Kemialliset Ystävät and Pan Sonic) to follow.

notebook beta

Originally, I merely wanted to swoon over this description of the San Bernadino Valley mental state as sussed by Joan Didion, wherein "a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity," but as I recently catalogued a giant trunk filled with pen-scratched notebooks of mine, dating back to a college course wherein we were required to keep a journal/ notebook (something I've done ever since), this musing by Joan Didion resonated with me instead:

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself... Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss...our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable "I."

betalmodovar

While I still haven't figured out a way to attend the New York Film Festival proper, I was able to watch an in-person interview with Spanish director Pedro Almodovar last week as part of the festivities, regarding the man as he espoused on the connection between motherhood and divas, how he detests fast, slapdash edits and prefers the long takes.

"Cinema helps us to explain ourselves, our troubles, our situation better than our own words," he explained, gushing about American b-movies, Spanish melodramas of the 1950s, and most surprisingly, expressing his lifelong devotion (as "a humble student of") to the film works of Ingmar Bergman and John Cassavetes. Recently re-watching scenes featuring men with great tits snorting heroin amid campy wallpaper, those are not the first two names that spring to mind. (He also mentions Douglas Sirk though, which does make sense).

He then proceeded to show how he paid homage to John Cassavetes' Opening Night (detailing that the film was ravaged by NY critics and only ran in one theater for a week before closing) by lifting a scene from the film for All About My Mother. He then did the same for Bergman, comparing a scene from Autumn Sonata with his own film, High Heels. I kept hoping he would do the same with Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and Jean Renoir's La bête humaine, since both posters appear in the cinema for a crucial scene from Bad Education, but we would have been there all day.

finally!

Nearly two years ago, I wrote an appreciation on the films of John Cassavetes for the Idolator website, focusing on this curious soundtrack I found for his 1967 film, Faces. In it, I lamented that one of my favorite Cassavetes films, 1970's Husbands, remained out of print, never ever released on DVD. Thankfully, that has finally been rectified (though seriously, it's time to get the man's swan song, Love Streams, out in the 21st century). To celebrate, I am re-posting this sodden, totally ridiculous mess of an interview (prank?) between Dick Cavett and the film's stars.

Linda Perhacs video interview

Funny how things work. Last October, I found myself in Los Angeles interviewing the lovely Linda Perhacs (I also found myself in a four-hour traffic jam...but I digress). A year on, I get an email stating that the video interview I conducted with Linda Perhacs is now streaming over at Anthology. Watch me scratch my beard and nod my head in her presence. And via serendipity, I will be back out west for her first-ever performance!

beta's mess

Random things I've lost recently:

• the packaging for the new Tinariwen CD (scant seconds after importing)
• headband (for gym purposes)
• checkbook for writing the rent check
  
• Boney M's Love for Sale long-playing record
• power cord for a Chinese DVD player
  
• a journal dated April 17, 2003 through August 25, 2003
  
• Yasujiro Ozu's Late Ozu DVD box set
  

David Byrne interview

When I worked at Pitchfork (well...define "work" where there's no pay), I was odd man out when it came to hyping The Arcade Fire and placing the Talking Heads at the top of OMG! greatest bands evah lists. For most of my life, the Talking Heads and their brand of quirky, twitchy, intellectual pop left me cold. It's only been fairly recently (and primarily through TH side project Tom Tom Club and their embracement of early 80s NYC disco culture and vice versa) that I've come to appreciate a few of the band's dancefloor cuts (that said, the Staples done stole "Slippery People" and ain't never giving it back to Byrne).

That said, after reading his new book, Bicycle Diaries, I've become a fan of David Byrne and his outlook on life, art, and culture. When I wound up seated next to him at the Björk/ Dirty Projectors brouhaha a few months back, we got to exchange a few words about spacy disco dubs and the like, which was kinda fun. Anyhow, Nylon asked me to conduct a Q&A with the man via email a few months ago, so I'm posting the entirety of the exchange here. Now to go out looking for a new bike...

I’m told that you are traveling at the moment and so my first question is if your bike is with you and how the urban terrain is there (wherever that may be)?
 
There are 7 bikes with us. 2 are mine, one of which I loan to whomever wants it and there are also a bunch of folding bikes I bought in Greece for the band to use. Where did I ride recently? Ferrara, here in Italy, which is small and flat and everyone rides bikes- gorgeous women, grandmas and Tony Soprano.


 
Ferrara is in the north of Italy, where quite a few of the (smaller) towns are filled with bikes and few cars (notice there's only on car in that photo). The towns are, for us, strangely, peaceful, quiet, comfortable (one isn't likely to be mowed over) and the air even feels different. Granted, some of these towns even must have outlawed motos and scooters from their old centers, otherwise the streets would be abuzz with those lawnmower engines on wheels.

A few of us rode around Rome as well the other day- which is quite another story. Generally as you move south in Italy the chaos increases exponentially- though there are always surprises, like Locorotondo which a local described as "Zurich, compared to Napoli". Even Roma, believe it or not, was bikable- I rode around the old part of town, over to the Vatican to get someone a "Popener" as a gift, and around Borghese Park to see the modern art museum- which mainly had 20th century Italian art- Futurism and such. 

What was the genesis of Bicycle Diaries? Have you kept such notes over the years and finally collated them after all these years or was the book idea the impetus to start putting such musings down?


I've kept tour diaries ever since I started touring in places where I wanted to record my observations and whatever happened to the tour- places like the Balkans, South America, Asia seemed worthy of remembering more than, umm, Sacramento or even Atlanta. I began writing them around 15 years ago with no thought of publishing any of it....though I'd show bits of them to friends and more recently I began posting some of the diary entries on my blog....which became an incentive to post the entries semi regularly. I've used a bike to get around NYC for 30 years, simply for pleasure and for practicality. So, it isn't something I only do when traveling. In other cities (mostly when on tour) I bring a full size folding bike and spent the afternoons exploring.
 
In the last few years it has seemed to me that biking as a way of getting around- even in the USA- is becoming more acceptable. I noticed I wasn't the only one out there besides some messengers anymore- so I became a tiny bit more of an advocate, but not, I hope, in a dogmatic or hectoring way. It does seem that other people might be willing to consider getting around their towns on bikes now too, and that local government might be willing to make a space for them as well. It's one of those tipping points we've heard about. 

The tone of the book throughout is one of peregrination, of musing and alighting upon ideas and thoughts (without nec. unpacking them fully) and I was wondering how closely it mimics your train of thought as you ride.


It's pretty much exactly a mirror of the experiences I have- I pass something or some place and wonder how it got to be the way it is....I visit places that to me raise a lot of questions (Stasi Headquarters, for example). It's incremental- and as these increments accumulate sometimes conclusions are reached. I'm generally fascinated by towns and our physical man made environment- how they mimic what we consider to be important in our lives, or how we get seduced by convenience and what that has done to our cities and to ourselves. 

What cities do you long to bike in? Have you ever been able to bike about in China?


I've biked in Guangzhou, which used to be called Canton. It was scary - like driving in rush hour freeway traffic.  If you're in the left turn lane, you'd better not be thinking of going straight. I've heard that things are changing in China, as more folks can afford cars, which might not be a good thing from a global perspective. But can you blame them? we've all got cars (well, I don't) so they must feel why shouldn't they have them too? 

In the book, you are often apologetic and/or cautiously optimistic about the political mindset/ climate of the US amid your travels. As you travel about now in the post-Obama age, have you discerned a change in how others now perceive us?


I think the jury's still out, as Bush and his predecessors did an unbelievably good job of destroying the US reputation around the world, but I sense folks around the world are willing to have some faith in Obama, and so far much of what he says (his Egypt speech was SO smart- it raises the possibility of undoing decades of meddling and bungling!) is about repairing that damage. It's pretty amazing how much of a turn around there has been- how he has given people all over the world an opportunity to believe again in what the US stands for....which is NOT torture, squandering resources, Blackhawks, Blackwater and Black Sites.
 
But, the jury's still out, there are a lot of Cheney's men and right wing fundamentalists still keeping the faith around the world and at home, and the damage they've done, and are doing, will not be undone overnight- but, amazingly, folks are willing to give us the benefit of the doubt.
 
That says something about peoples' innate willingness to forgive and believe that people can change for the better given the chance. 

In the epilogue, you hint that some of the cities visited herein might disappear within our lifetimes. What cities seem most susceptible to such a fate?


Detroit is returning to farmland as we speak. Let's see, which cities are simply and clearly completely unsustainable? Phoenix, Las Vegas, LA for starters- they've been stealing water for decades and soon it will become too scarce and they'll have to close up shop. This, to me, is not some apocalyptic paranoid vision, it simply the facts on the ground. those cities are unsustainable and are too entrenched, structurally and in their lifestyles, to change in time.

 

Knowing how hands-on you’ve been with the city of New York and their transportation problems (not to mention designing bike racks for DOT), what single change here would have the greatest effect? More bike lanes? Turning a major street into a pedestrian thoroughfare? Increased fares for cars (rather than for riding public transportation)?


I'm not an expert in how these transitions work. Jan Gehl, who has advised quite a number of cities around the world, is more experienced at recommending how these transitions take place. He believes in incremental change- he's against quickly importing the Velib bike system from Paris to NY, for example, as he believes that structurally and otherwise NY is not quite ready. Close maybe, but not there yet.
 
A street closed here, a dead auto zone turned into a pedestrian zone, a safe secure bike lane added here- they gradually add up and people get used to them. We incrementally change our habits based on these infrastructure changes- I ride down 9th ave to work more often than I used to, now that it is safe....and I have friends and family that ride where they wouldn't have dared in the past.
 
It's not really about bicycles, it's about are we going to take control of how we live? of the quality of our lives, or will we let what used to be called Detroit, Big Oil and Big Food etc tell us what is possible in our lives. I am disappointed that GM is hanging on- their demise would be something to celebrate. 

How do you think the whole mortgage meltdown might be beneficial in the short- or long-run in terms of preserving urban neighborhoods?


Well, from what I've heard the meltdown has allowed people to question the values espoused over the last couple of decades- the myth of the market policing itself has been revealed to be the lie it always was. People, for the moment, are willing to rethink their priorities- mostly because they have to. It's a moment when that cliched word, change, is indeed possible. 

Will Big Pharm and the medical and doctor lobby win and defeat a sensible health plan for the US once again? They might, but as more people drop through the safety net in the event of any medical emergency- losing their homes and savings as a result, they're more likely to stand up to the doctors and the drug companies.

betATP 3

Fun games we played while at Kutsher's Country Club for ATP:

• Watch Nick Cave Engaged in Normal Activity: eat breakfast, play arcade games, munch snack from vending machine, etc.
  
• Did I Flush This Toilet? Or is the water always this yellow and cloudy?
• David Cross Dance-Off: Deluxe "My Girls" Version: not to be confused with David Cross: Make Me Laugh game
• Louder Than Loveless: this year's winner was Black Dice
• Men's Bathroom Barf-Out
  
• Hock a Bigger Loogie Than The Jesus Lizard's David Yow: just kidding, it's actually physically impossible.
• Stay-Up with Todd P.: Special Three-Day/ Three-Night Weekend Edition 
• Black Mold Bonanza
• How Many Weakling Boy Arms Does It Take to Crowd-Surf at Animal Collective?
• Kid Millions vs. Drum Machine

Special Extra Credit Question

Match the following substances and the exact order they should be taken in with the appropriate band:

Substances:
Vending machine coffee
Jameson's neat
Cocaine (line)
Ecstasy
Xanax
Coca-Cola
Allergy medicine
Oh! Henry candy bar
Bud Light (cold)
Emergen-C packet
Joint (fatty)
Irish coffee
Combos (pizza flavor)
Mushroom-laced chocolate
Chicken souvlaki sandwich
Cocaine (key bump)
4 Advil capsules
Bottle of red wine
This blue pill some kid gave you
Jameson's on the rocks
hot dog
Tylenol
Joint (kinda crooked)
$3 bottle of water
Bud Light (warm)

Bands:
The Melvins
Jim Jarmusch Q & A
that girl playing the piano in the back lobby

betATP2

 

Pic from the way sweet Sam Beam-Sufjan-Akron/Family chorale.

My ATP coverage wrap-up for Spin, touching on the Flaming Lips' glowing beaver shot entrance, the man-machine stamina of Oneida's Kid Millions, and a few other thingies. Another wrap-up to follow.

betATP

 

Tomorrow, I'll be back at the Dirty Dancing meets The Shining resort that is Kutcher's Country Club for another round of the ATP Festival. In preparation, I'm packing up: one notebook, one pair of earplugs, a change of clothes, sleeping eye mask, as many bottles of Maker's Mark and Jameson as will fit in a styrofoam cooler, a power strip and three-prong converter, an electric kettle, and most crucially, a portable dialysis machine.

DJ Harvey Interview Mk. II

Capping an inadvertent week of interviews, I conducted my second interview with DJ Harvey for Resident Advisor, in anticipation of the man's appearance at my absolute favorite outdoors dance party (scant blocks from my home), Sunday Best on the Gowanus Canal.

What's hilarious is that right as I handed in the piece, I had a comment posted on my original interview with Harvey from winter 2007/08:

DJ Harvey? OMG is he still alive?

I first heard him play in London at the Gardening Club and I have to say he was great. But I'm amazed by what I read about him being so influential in England. He really wasn't. He was a relative nobody on the circuit and his early compilation for Ministry was the only high point on a pretty useless DJ career.

It seems that he's got the yanks thinking he was a big cheese in London, but sorry folks, it just wasn't so. I'm happy that after he failed to impact Europe he found some love in America and no doubt was fresh and cool to people who have generally been behind the times in terms of house music. But don't kid yourselves, DJ Harvey was one of several thousand unknown, talented DJ's playing across the UK every night and the only reason I even remember him was because he tried to pick me up that night at GC.

If Harvey's a pioneer to you guys, then well done him for finding a bunch of gullible newbies and making a living from it, because he sure faded fast in England, not that there was much to fade from.

One thing's for sure though, you won't find people flocking to see 'DJ Harvey' play anywhere in Europe. Maybe that's why he moved to America.

Enjoy!!! ROFL

Sour grapes much?

fenn o'beta

Twice this year, I've had massive, highly-anticipated interviews fall-through. The first was with Christian Fennesz, slated to run in The Believer. There was a back and forth with both him and his manager arranging a time to chat, either in Vienna or when he was in the States for a festival. Abruptly, the dialogue lapsed on their side and a month on they informed me --via a temp underling for an out of town publicist-- that Mr. Fennesz could no longer do it. So all those notes got scrapped.

Last month, with the release of a new Jim O'Rourke solo album, The Visitor, I arranged to have a chat with a gentleman that I have long esteemed and respected (and defended to naysayers). It's hard to imagine that I would be into nearly as much music as I'm into were it not for Mr. O'Rourke's example, deftly mixing and referencing both the popular and the avant-garde in his music and productions. (That I would sooner listen to Scott Walker's Climate of the Hunter, This Heat, and Luc Ferrari more than his Brise-Glace album should not detract from his influence.)

Originally, he would only agree to talk about the new album, nothing else, but I lobbied for a chance to speak about other matters, be it Nic Roeg and Jack Nitzsche or Italian prog, swearing that I wouldn't just ask him about Sonic Youth and Wilco (not because of the work contributed, but I couldn't imagine dredging up all of that for the sake of conversation). That too, was heading to The Believer. Yet within a 24 hour period, the interview was both confirmed and then canceled.

What makes it all come round is that when I first started doing music writing, back in the late 90s, my dream was to interview Peter Rehberg, as I was obsessed with his 1999 album, Get Out. We corresponded a bit by email, until one day he fell off the face of the earth as well. Which is to say, it took a decade to happen, but I just got dissed by the improv laptop trio of Fenn O'Berg.

Wizz Jones interview

A minute or so ago, I conducted an interview with obscure/ obscured British folk guitarist Wizz Jones, right as many of his contemporaries were passing on, be it Davy Graham or John Martyn. The piece wound up on the backburner over at Anthology Recordings (and lord only knows what happened to my video interview with Linda Perhacs), so it's only just now seeing pixel light.

jane b.

Interviewing Jane Birkin tomorrow morning. As one might imagine, I'm really looking forward to it, even if I can't find a translation for "Mon Amour Baiser" and its list of twenty-one kisses, or for "Help Camionneur!" which --according to A Fistful of Gitanes-- is "about a female hitchhiker with fantasies of being fucked by a heavyweight trucker in his refrigerated lorry."

print bedia

In the August issue of SPIN, I contributed a few entries to their feature, "100 Greatest Bands You've (Probably) Never Heard." While I wasn't able to place acts like Sinamon, Dettinger, Ludus, or Gino Soccio, I did write about two favorites from South Texas and my favorite femme-noise band.

BAND NAME: Knife in the Water
Named for Roman Polanski’s debut film, this Austin band actually hewed closer to the Coen Brothers’ dark vision circa Blood Simple. Based around the haunted boy-girl harmonizing of guitarist Aaron Blount and organist Laura Krause, Knife brought a cinematic scope to their murder balladry in the late 90s, touching on everything from pill-popping to dead trannies. But even with 2003 reissues featuring testimonials from the Trail of Dead and Silver Jews’ David Berman, they fell on deaf ears.
WHOSE CAREER THEY COULD HAVE HAD: Low


BAND NAME: Big Drag
A trio from San Antonio who embodied neighboring Austin’s slacker ethos to a fault, the band melded the Jesus and Mary Chain’s fuzz and the Ramones’ three chords to sunny surf pop to create three-minute koans in the early 90s. Making believers of Yo La Tengo when they rolled through town, YLT appropriated Big Drag’s cover of the Beach Boys’ “Little Honda” (right down to the one-note guitar solo) for their own I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One.
WHOSE CAREER THEY COULD HAVE HAD: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club


BAND NAME: Ut
New York no-wave scenesters who had far more success when they packed up and moved to England in the 80s. The trio of Nina Canal, Sally Young and Jacqui Ham raised an unholy din not unlike other female groups like the Slits and the Raincoats until breaking up in the late 80s. In Gut’s House and the Steve Albini-recorded Griller remain their watermarks and if anything, Ut helped mind the gap until the Riot Grrrl movement taught a new generation of girls to rage.
WHOSE CAREER THEY COULD HAVE HAD: Sleater-Kinney

DJing tonight at Stanton Public

Tonight, I'm filling in for my friend Gerald (Other Music) at Stanton Public in the LES, which should be fun. And free. And crispy cool. And featuring a pretty sweet subwoofer to give it all some boom. I myself am a fan of cask beers and drinking Dogfish Head on tap. Though last time there, they were showing American Psycho (in black and white no less!). Kinda hard to play 80s-tinged dancing tracks knowing that up above his head, Christian Bale is espousing the virtues of Huey Lewis and the News.

r.i.p. jim dickinson

Generally, I distance myself from my early internet writings (especially for Pitchfork with their "go steal the record off of Soulseek and review it for us for free" editorial advisement, resulting in poorly-edited biweekly 800 word heavily-padded snarkfests), but I'll always have a place in my heart for the piece I wrote about James Luther Dickinson's Dixie Fried from back in 2002. Rest in peace, big papi.

animal collective after-party

BTDubya, on Saturday night I'll be DJing a stack o' sweet tracks for the Animal Collective After-Party at The Bell House starting at 10:30 or so. Later on, the AC crew themselves will hop on for a bit of round robin action. Alas, my guest list is closed but it's only $5 for entry (free with yer ticket stubs) so don't miss out.

idjut boys (and dimitri from paris) interview version 2

Part Two of my Idjuts interview, stemming from my Skype chat with them and Dimitri From Paris that ran as "Paradise Garage Regained" in the Voice a minute ago.

When’s the last time you were all in New York City?

Conrad: That would be last World Cup finals.

Dimitri From Paris: We were together.

Dan: It was great. We finished the day with some French people and Alex from Tokyo, in a little Italian restaurant. It was fairly amicable. There was a fair amount of liquor drunk and music poorly put together.

When you think about NYC at the time, as opposed to London and Paris, what separated it musically? Why did disco happen here rather than in another urban center?

DfP: As far as I’m concerned, my whole musical influences started from New York. I was a fan of all the dance music coming out of there when I was 17. I always lived in Paris, that was in the early 80s, where I started noticing that all the music I was liking was produced by some New York guys. The first time I went here was in 1986, I was already collecting music and Djing in ’82-’83—so I was just hoping I would go there and see how it was. It did play a very strong part with mythical clubs and mythical producers. I didn’t go to Paradise Garage, the one I would’ve like, as it closed down sadly a month before I first went to New York. The rest are legends I read about. But I experienced Better Days, the Palladium, Area. So the first time I went to clubs in New York, I realized just from the technical point of view, it was just another world. It actually sounded good, people were there for the music, they were dancing, there was a whole different vibe. It made sense with the music coming out of there. It did live up to the New York of my mind. I met Arthur Baker, Shep Pettibone popped in, The Latin Rascals. For me, I was a kid in a candy store. There was a real energy you could feel.

Idjuts, you had a chance to see Larry Levan in the early 90s.

C: Same thing as Dimitri, I guess, digging a lot of music of that era in the 80s and then years later finding out more about it. We never went to any of the clubs. The music that was popular in the clubs there that crossed over here, things were happening even though the clubs were very different. The gay scene of New York was integral in that. In a similar way to Dimitri, in the music we played and the music we make that aesthetic, New York was an influence on that and the obvious ccharacters from that. We’ve seen Francois K. play years ago in London. That was mind-blowing, seeing someone with a reel-to-reel. We went “Wow,” that’s a different way to DJ.

D: Maybe that the ethos of this music, it being drawn from many different sources and put into a melting pot, I think that’s what’s lasted from then till now anyway, the fact that ---even though I’ve never been to the Garage—it wasn’t the pounding kickdrum all night, the music would be varied and go different places. We were into Harvey and his parties and musically they were like that. We got to see Kenny Carpenter and Tony ____ when they came to London. That’s how I got New York from the DJs. The freeness in the music if anything else really.

So many ethnicities and minority parties come together. Maybe New York could foster it where other places didn’t.

DfP: I don’t really know what was so special about New York and why we were so influenced by it. We didn’t know anything about the city, we were only getting the music. Dan mentioned Francois Kevorkian. On record labels I was reading his name and every time I listened to his production I went “Wow, this guy is amazing.” And more than anyone else I would read his name. I had no idea who this guy was other than he had a French sounding name. I didn’t know he was a DJ. There was no information we could really get. It was primarily the music that made us like New York rather than New York made us like the music. It’s a big difference from how things evolved in clubs. Clubs became more of a place to party rather than a place to listen to music. I guess the music was of a quality that really appealed to us. It was diverse and creative, there was a lot of creative things. How those guys were DJing was like no one else we heard before. Same goes for me when I first heard Francois, and he still DJs like no one else I know. And he’s nearly 60 years old! Primarily, it’s the music.

How hard was it to come across these records? Before the internet and finding everything.

C: (Tittering) We ended up in a garage in San Francisco that was owned by a record rack. We spent two days in there amid piles of records.

D: Mid-90s. We have been to secondhand shops in London. Traveling around is a good way to consume music. You find different stuff in different places and that’s always been a winner.

C: The music that was popular in New York was bought, imported, it was all here secondhand, lots of it. Unfortunately, or fortunately, as the case may be, it seems to be endless.

DfP: I agree on this.

C: You’d know, man. It’s easier now, man.

DfP: There’s eBay now. A lot of people just got into selling records because it was a lucrative business. There are good and bad things about the internet. Traveling was a huge chance for us to buy records. Wherever we were, or if there was a thrift store. I would wake up early in the morning just to go to record stores. We are really record freaks. It was just vocal exchanges of information. The first time we met, we just chatted about record “Do you know this? Do you know that?” And I went back home with like ten new songs I didn’t know. And then you start searching for that. People who thought alike would meet eventually and exchange what we know. And that’s how the information circulated.

Disco and dance music, it’s not like there’s this centralized knowledge or this canon. You have to go out, you have to see DJs play this record. Did any tracks surprise you when Dimitri handed you the masters?

D: It goes without saying, Dimitri has always been a source of great music. I didn’t know a couple of tracks. What was fun about it was that there were tracks we'd hammered, played lots over the years. It was nice to be asked to do it. Obviously, a lot of that music was dear to me. Wuf Ticket “The Key,” it’s difficult not to take that when you travel to DJ. There’s great tracks all over.

C: Serious Intention's “You Don’t Know,” I’ve worn out two copies of that record. The Rah Band we didn’t know.

D: We were Rah Band virgins.

DfP: That’s a good example. I owed it to this other DJ, P Wax. I used to hate that song. I really didn’t like it and then he started playing it and I went “What the hell is that?” I wound up liking something that I used to hate. That’s the beauty of remixes. That’s also why I put Wham! in there because everyone goes “it’s impossible, they cannot be good.” Just open your ears and listen for yourself. When some guy gets inspired by what he finds on the master tapes, you can just make magic. Rah Band and Wham are great examples of how you can turn cheesy pop songs into something that is really ground-breaking.

Why did you pick Dan and Conrad?

DfP: I did this compilation and while I love dub, I don’t play this as much as they would do it. I play clubs that are more “Saturday night” and I felt they did it much better than me. I knew from the history we had together that they would be into some of those tracks. I just asked them and it just happened. We had discussed it in a club in Japan kind of casually. Like Idjut Boys said, Serious Intention and Wuf Ticket indeed. If you do that, you cannot bypass those tracks. It is impossible.

Let’s talk about dub reggae and how it got infused with New York disco and the resultant odd mutation, those effects made to bear on this music.

C: Yeeeeah. We had a track we had done for something. Yesterday we listened to it without all the effects. We can really overdo it, and often do. It’s the element of space… and you confuse many different kinds and juxtapose sounds and genres together, and when it’s fed through delay and reverb, and it freaks the music out. And we like the freak, to be honest. I guess that’s why it stays.

DfP: We get some echo and feedback on this and it’s perfect.

D: Sometimes a man can turn too many knobs. Don’t play with your knobs too much. When you first encounter that kind of music, be it reggae or electronic synthesizer music, dub music, or the music here, when I first heard that in the club, sonically it had so much more resonance than some of the other stuff that was played beside it, simply because of the space the effects put into it, a drama accentuating various points on the record. Obviously, someone who is the master of that and as a DJ is François, if you want to reference how to do that, and he’s done that on all manners of music, not just on this compilation. He’s done it for rock bands and a lot of it. Obviously, since we’ve known Dimitri as well, a lot of his productions apply that. He does great edits and manages to do it but not do it excessively.

DfP: I would like to add about Francois… He’s been playing at Cielo every Monday. Every time I go to new York, I make a point to go there and sit down to listen to him. even if he plays music I don’t like, the way he plays it is striking. It’s like I’m getting a lecture in music from him. I love it. He’s like those old African tribal guys, who passes the history on to the younger kids orally. He’s one of those guys.

So how did you guys meet?

DfP: Paris is Burning. It was the second Respect party, in 1997. Respect did the first one with some annoying kids called Daft Punk and I was asked to do the second one. I think Daft Punk booked Maurizio. My choice was Idjut Boys, as I loved their U-Star label. It’s in Japan that people played them the most. They had that dub sound that I loved and I never heard anyone do it like this before apart form the original guys. They came to play Respect and we talked shop for hours and that was it.

You guys want to talk about the live mix?

C: Pretty much. We got BBE to hire a Pioneer mixer and two CDJs. To be honest it was interesting as we don’t play off CD, so it was a bit of a learning curve. We just wanted it to sound like playing records in a club. We did it at night in our studio and turned the lights down and had a few drinks and just went about it as if we were playing these records out. To be honest, that seemed the most appropriate thing to do rather than make it tight.

D: We played with Dimitri in LA a few years ago. We had our usual 15 bags of records. Dimitri shows up and is --if you didn’t already know— a fierce record collector and says “I only play CDs now” and proceeded to play seamlessly a load of disco to a big room. It’s only taken about another five years for us to get on the CD revolution. We still play lots of vinyl. A lot of places we go now, more clubs are geared towards CDs now. It’s easier than breaking your back toting records.

DfP: I wanted to add something about the mix. I was happy that they did it. I know I’m a little bit more anal and would’ve spent hours taking the life out of it making it perfect. They made it exciting and it goes together with the way those records were made back then. You had to do the FX as the tracks would go. That’s on the records we hear today because of that vibe and they replicated that vibe on the mix.

Final thoughts?

DfP: The whole club scene hasn’t been about music and hasn’t been in awhile. I think these are historical pieces that were only available as B-sides of vinyl 12”s. They’re not so easy to find but they’re not the most obscure either. If you are just a music lover, you’ve probably heard such things before. This music is quite influential now, like the Norwegian guys and snippets in the music of Metro Area and Justice and the new French punk-electro scene. I felt it was the right moment to show up with these and say “Listen to this.” Music is always repeating itself, but sometimes you don’t now what it is repeating unless you are a proper nerd. It’s something that non-nerds can enjoy.

idjut boys interview version 1

2009 has been a fairly resplendent and wondrous year. Somewhere in my Top 100 greatest moments of the year thus far is the fact that I was able to conduct two interviews with the rather reclusive Idjut Boys. Dan Tyler and Conrad McDonnell have been ignoring the lines between disco, psychedelia, house, jazz fusion, balearic, Italo, dub, techno and whatever else you got for well over a decade now. This year might be something of a watershed for the Boys: they dropped their inspired collaboration with Norwegian producer Rune Lindbaek as Meanderthals, remixed the Dimitri From Paris early-80's edit set Nightdubbin' and to top it off, just dropped a bonkers new twelve, "Jammy Dodger." So here is my first interview with Dan and Conrad, conducted over email and answered in this sort of groupspeak for this feature.

First thing is some boring bio stuff: how you two met, what drew you to the other.

Idjut Boys: We met in Cambridge, mutual friends, going the same parties in peoples' houses, tonka events wherever they happened...moved to London, ended up at a later stage living together in a flat with our good buddy dickie P...weekends involved the going out ritual, filling the flat with people and listening to music whilst blitzkreiged...used to go to alot of the clubs and one off things ocurring at that time...enjoyed the ambience of the acid house as a relaxing pastime...heard and enjoyed Harvey play alot, got to understand the notion of everything having a place. Listened and dug out some of the music mixed by the likes of François and the other guys mixing in that era and realized that ...well bent is better than straight up, on most occasions..at that time there was great house music from everywhere, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Italy, here...disco, whatever being played. Not really any specific LP/12, just going out dancing to a varied soundtrack in various states.

What always strikes me with all the edits, remixes, and by Desire Lines most recently, is the massive sense of 3-D space inside everything, so I’m curious about creating such a sensation in all the tunes.

IB: Old habits..like using effects... random ocurrences, mixing live with a board,using outboard processing, rather than everything
automated...things happen live, for better or worse that we won't get programming.

Were you into rock music before turning onto disco and dance stuff? Was it a natural progression for you? Was liking disco a contrarian thing, in that punks weren’t supposed to like disco?

IB: It was a hard, strict growing up regime in both cases...once church going abated and balls dropped it was a natural progression to the mosh pit followed by the flowing mullet.

Judging by titles of the album with Quakerman and the like, it seemed like you were trying to make the UK house scene loosen up a bit at the time. Was it proscriptive and uptight in that way?

IB: Deeeeeep.

As the Frank Zappa question goes, does humor belong in music?

IB: Yes Sir Mr Zappa... We just like to precede being laughed at by laughing at ourselves first, seriousness comes too close to head arse fusion..the only plan ever in force is to get to do another record and avoid the job centre...obviously we want to be really hip and make piles of money and indulge in a mirage of warped fantasies whilst having rightfully claimed to have invented hip hop but that doesn't fit with the no-strategy walk.

Did you get to see older NY legends like Larry Levan and François K. when they would come over? Who remain your favorite edit makers?

IB: Harvey's always been great, Maurice Fulton, Thomas, Markey Mark, Chris Rhythm Doc, Gerry Rooney...heard Francois a few times, mindblowing in the right environment with a proper set up to manipulate..heard Larry at Moist only but it was great....you can't beat Francois for production, he's been involved in too many serious records and he's still standing with what seems like the same enthusiasm...Maurice is a great producer too, nobody sounds like him.

Rune talked about how records like “Jazz Fook” were big in Norway at the time and how crucial it was to that country’s subsequent “space-disco” sound. When you would DJ up there, were you at all surprised by how the scene had been influenced by your tracks?

IB: Wasn't aware of anything like that...being involved you're not really aware of that, it's nice of anyone says that was the case because there's been some great records from the people there..went over there alot and there were some great parties and some painful next days...they were already into stuff, Pal Strangefruit, Rune, Erot, Bjorn Torske, Ole Abstract..later we went over and played with Thomas, who played great music and met Terje..We obviously taught them nothing except the drink till you barf fitness regime..they are viking so it's a sport they took to with ease.

What was it about Rune’s productions made you decide to work on tracks with him, from “Laisn” to Meanderthals?

IB:We were friends for years, and he always had good music to be heard He was over and in our studio so we asked him to speak in Norske on "Laisn," to lend it that real soul, slow jam, drop your pants moment....Meanderthals happened cos we missed a flight and took refuge in his studio for the afternoon and hit the random button and he found a nice man, Joakim ready to sully his labels good name with further adventures in randomness involving a few more kind folk with instruments they were willing to play. We worked with Rune studio neighbours, Lenny and Jo for percussion, bass and guitar a couple of times at theirs and sent things back and forth, and we hung out with Per Martinsen for a day at Bugge Wuselltorf's lovely studio and recorded ourselves as an out of time percussion combo and his mate Anders on the Steinway.

What does he bring to the collaboration? Was it easy playing together? What was the process like?

IB: Rune opened the door to some great musicians in oslo..The process was most definitely random, involved much going back and forth...we went to the players with backing tracks and hung out and tried to remember to press the big red record button when something good was occurring...we then went way edited and demanded more where necessary.. setting out ideas would require some efficiency or organizational powers that were quickly acknowledged to be too challenging for the cast... it has a kinda live feel...we got what came out, we are maybe going to do a dub version of the lp because there is stuff lurking underneath that could be more club playable if undressed suitably and interfered with in the right places.

Rune mentioned Conrad having a bad bike accident right before work started on this. Can you recount that story?

IB: He was knocked off his bike. It hurt alot. He's better now.

So back to “obsessions”: what are some current ones?
Favorite comedian: George Bush III
Favorite Bohannon track: "Maybe You Can Dance"
Food you always like to eat in the studio: coffee and lamachan
YouTube clips that you like at the moment: what's YouTube ?

heep see (special summer reading edition)

David Byrne: Bicycle Diaries

A few years earlier I had been reminded that the former first lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, was a habitué of discos during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. This would have been the era of Studio 54, Regines, Privilege and Le Palace (in Paris) and other velvet rope clubs. This was also, um, the era of martial law and heavy censorship in the Philippines. Was the lightness, effervescence, and headiness inherent in that music --and the drugs that went along with it—similar to the feeling one gets when one is in a powerful position?

Pierre Michon: Small Lives

I did not know that writing was so dark a continent, more enticing and disappointing than Africa, the writer a species more bent on getting lost than an explorer.

Cesare Pavese: The Moon and the Bonfires

Now I knew why every so often a girl was found strangled in a car on the highway, or in a room at the end of an ally. Maybe they, too, these people, would have liked to drop on the grass, to agree with the tree frogs, to be masters of a piece of earth the length of a woman, and really sleep without fear. Well, it was a big country, there was some of it or everyone. There were women, there was land, there was money. But nobody had enough, nobody stopped no matter how much he had, and the fields, even the vineyards, looked like public gardens, fake flower beds like those at railway stations, or else wilderness, burned-over land, mountains of slag…A day would come when just to touch something, to make himself known, a man would strangle a woman, shoot her in her sleep, crack her head open with a monkey wrench.

Lawrence Wechsler: Seeing is Forgetting the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin

You had no visual or audio input at all, other than what you might do yourself. You might begin to have some retinal replay or hear your own body, hear the electrical energy of your brain, the beat of your heart…There were all kinds of interesting things about being in there which we observed, but the most dramatic had to do with how the world appeared once you stepped out. After I’d sat in there for six hours, for instance, and then got up and walked back home down the same street I’d come in on, the trees were still trees, the street was still a street, and the houses were still houses, but the world did not look the same; it was very, very noticeably altered.

heep see (special summer reading edition)

José Donoso: The Obscene Bird of Night

"Boy was to grow up believing that things came into being as his eyes discovered them and died when he stopped looking at them, that they were nothing but the outer shell perceived by his eyes, that other forms of birth and death didn't exist, and, so much was this the case, that the most important among the words Boy would ever know were all those signifying origin and end. No whys, whens, outsides, insides, befores, afters; no arriving or leaving, no systems or generalizations. A bird crossing the sky at a certain hour was not a bird crossing the sky at a certain hour, it wasn't headed for other places because other places didn't exist; Boy must live in an enchanted present, in the limbo of accident, of the particular circumstance, in the isolation of the object and the moment without a key or a meaning that could subject him to a rule and, in subjecting him to it, cast him into the infinite void it was necessary for him to avoid."

Janet Malcolm: In the Freud Archives

"When I was little, I remember how astonished and interested I was in how easy it is to take life-- when you're driving a car, all you have to do is move the wheel a few inches to the left and you kill somebody and also die yourself-- and how difficult it is to keep alive someone who is sick. Building is interesting, because it's ultimately impossible, I suppose, but killing is boring. It's easy to see through something --to show how stupid it is, or how wrong-- but that doesn't take very long, and then you're finished."

Jean Renoir: Renoir, My Father

"What most struck outsiders at first meeting were his eyes and his hands. His eyes were light brown, bordering on amber; and they were sharp and penetrating. He would often point out a bird of prey on the horizon flying over the valley, or a ladybird climbing up a single blade in a tuft of grass. We, with our young eyes, had to look carefully, concentrate and examine everything closely, whereas he took in immediately everything that interested him, whether near or far...As for their expression, they had a look of tenderness mixed with irony, of merriment and sensuousness. They always seemed to be laughing, perceiving the odd side of things. But it was a gentle and loving laughter. Perhaps it also served as a mask. For Renoir was extremely shy about his feelings and never liked to give any sign of the emotion that overpowered him when he looked at flowers, women or clouds -- other men touch a thing or caress it."

John Williams: Stoner

"But he was not beyond love, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought...He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive."

betealth

I haven't had health care in the 21st century. Instead, I have the God-given, American-brand freedom to practice alternative medicine techniques as I see fit, such as: only crossing busy New York City streets with the light, brushing my teeth three times a day, not letting my glasses slip off my face and break, and uh...never ever getting sick. It's my catastrophe/ dental/ eye package.

As I toil through yet another freelance gig that doesn't quite pay enough to sign up for the Freelancers' Union, one of the job's temporary perks is getting a constant cable feed. Meaning CNN for a daily fix of being filled with "O-motion" (that indescribable feeling of peace, well-being and sense of benevolent intelligence from above that stems from President Obama).

Between being inundated with updates about how his "universal health care" will be his Waterloo and/ or if Michael Jackson was killed by prescription pills (forget about any news about Iran, Honduras, North Korea, China, etc.), I've been seeing lots of commercials about how univer-- uh, "socialist" health care will take away MY rights. Thankfully, seeing the same commercial hundreds of times a day, I've finally been able to read the fine print.

Just being curious, I looked up the Patients United Now group behind the TV spots, finding out that they are in fact just a front for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. (Turns out they share office space with the Independent Women's Forum, who have stood up for women by claiming that "the battered women's movement has outlived its useful beginnings." Or perhaps you recall them in a previous incarnation,Women for Judge (Clarence) Thomas, when they defended pubes on a Coke can for the sake of womankind.)

So when not defending women's rights, which somehow also has something to do with supporting free markets and a strong foreign policy, APF also fights for "my health care rights" by opposing clean air laws and cigarette taxes in Texas, Illinois, and D.C. And just last year, they again helped save me from health care and skin cancer with their campaign against Global Warming Alarmism. Why start worrying about my health now when we have more pressing matters for the future, like...the passing of HR 1503?

heep see (special silverdocs edition)

The September Issue
directed by R.J. Cutler

Made by the same folks that did The War Room, a shot of the interior of Vogue's offices as it gears up for their largest issue ever (a/k/a the September issue) feels more war-like than anything in the movie about James Carville. One person esteems Vogue to be more like a church, with main subject Anna Wintour the pope, "the most important woman in the United States." But strangely enough, the film's heart does not reside within this expressionless, sunglass-hidden cultural icon, but rather in her foil, Vogue's creative director Grace Coddington.

"You don't have to look perfect," Coddington assures the cameraman as she puts his beer belly body into a fashion spread at the end of the film, "It's enough that the models are perfect." She at one time was such perfection herself, modeling with the likes of Twiggy and making the swinging '60s London scene, before a car windshield put her on the other side of the camera.

Now fraught, aged, unglamorous, stressed-out, a powerful foil to that Prada-wearing devil, "a romantic left behind" as Grace puts it herself, Coddington might be the first such female figure on the big screen to be all of the above. And as the film makes evident, she's a total artist and genius as well.

No Impact Man
directed by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein

A Gawker comment that appears in this film about Collin Beavan and his year-long experiment to leave absolutely "no impact" on the environment by not generating trash, riding in a car/ train/ elevator, and --six-months in-- not using electricity labels this man "a bourgeois fuck." And I can't say I disagree with that sentiment, as Beavan is one of the least-appealing characters of recent memory. Even though the film does inspire one to shop exclusively at farmers' markets with ones own canvas bags, staring at the smug-mug of this Fifth Avenue Co-op owner also makes one want to drive out to Wal-Mart in an SUV, throwing out Starbucks cups all along the way.

Act of God
dir. Jennifer Baichwal

Missed about half of this film, so I found myself adrift in impressionistic imagery of lightning storms. The film is about people randomly struck by lightning, and how they interpret it: as either the epitome of a random act or else its polar opposite, a determined act. Baichwal really plays with structure here, but to the point where it loses its grip on reality. There's also this immense leap into a digression about how the creative act itself is like a bolt from the blue. perhaps it doesn't quite fit, but the film ends in this uncanny duet between Paul Auster, reading a short story about a boy he saw struck dead by lightning when he was a child, and an incandescent guitar improvisation by Fred Frith.


Still Bill
directed by Damani Baker

From the outside, it seems almost impossible to fuck up a documentary about Bill Withers, especially when it opens with a pulse-raising montage of the man grooving through a series of live performances on Soul Train and other sound stages. And as a subject that probably doesn't quite get why he's getting the feature film treatment himself, he continually downplays his work with a knowing self-deprecation and wit.

Yet the film's pacing and editing runs contrary to the man's own powers. Emotionally-attuned but never maudlin, crafted but never rambling, direct and never aimless, Bill oeuvre has little in common with his documentary. He's burned out on the biz twenty minutes into the film. Chronology is abandoned midway through, amid a montage of live performances from the Bill Withers' songbook at Prospect Park, the concert strangely mute as old footage of him gets super-imposed. By film's end, we're suddenly back here.

It's fine enough to plunk the man into a backyard BBQ chat with Cornel West and Tavis Smiley, but it never quite moves beyond the novelty of its participants. We see Bill get teary-eyed over any number of things, from talking to a class of stutterers to watching his own daughter sing a song in his studio, but that sacrifice of cohesiveness for such moments still isn't quite Bill.

Bloody Mondays and Strawberry Pies
directed by Coco Schrijber

What does a dessert maker strumming Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" have to do with no-necked stock brokers, American Psycho, a Frenchman painting numbers, football hooligans, a guy lounging in the desert, a 101-year-old businessman, the woman who "doesn't like Mondays," a toothless guys selling newspapers on Wall Street, Danish teens, a female spy, and $40K wrist watches have in common? Uhhhh....despite the chicanery of editing that seemingly makes this into a meditation about "boredom," absolutely nothing.

Dancing With the Devil
directed by Jon Blair

You'd be forgiven for thinking you stumbled into yet another remake of Miami Vice at the start of this film about life in the favelas. Bombastic, brutish, with ludicrous "cop show" aesthetic choices that beggar belief. Both the muscle-bound cops and hideous drug dons of this film thank God for (fill in the blank). Well, God has alot to answer for with this one.

This is documentary porn at its most cruel. Let's get a close-up on this guy's ear, mangled by an attack dog. Now let's get a good look at his broken foot. How about this woman shot in the face? Let's hold that shot until everyone in the theater has to turn away. Now let's talk to this drug kingpin, making sure to pan down and sloooowly regard his mangled tree stump of a leg, looking like it's got shelf mushrooms growing all over the diseased skin.

But whatever we do, let's not pause to understand just how fundamentalism, religion, and capitalism helped to create this mess in the favelas. And let's be sure to only put a female in the film when it's time to show young woman dipping low to a hot favela funk track that goes "Just spread your legs/ Just squat." What ultimately wound up running through my mind while watching a pastor hand out food to these poor kids was if they were going to recycle those plastic cups or else continue to negatively impact the environment.

Treehouse 003

As seen in the New York Times!

Just don't be intimidated by the quote that Treehouse is for "serious technoheads" as --simply put-- it's party music for party people. And who better to elucidate that quality than our special guest, Alex From Tokyo. As always, it's upstairs at Frank's Cocktail Lounge. The needle drops and the disco ball starts spinning at 9pm and yours truly will be on by 10 (no doubt some of the records listed below will be in the gig bag). Hope to see you out!

heep see

Been buying up heaps of tunes while out on the road, so thought I'd laundry-list a few recent favorites:

Talking Heads: Speaking in Tongues LP (with the Rauschenberg art)
Voyage: Disco Around the World LP
Everly Brothers: Stories We Could Tell LP
Chilly: For Your Love LP
Keith Hudson: Steaming Jungle LP

Kikrokos: "Jungle DJ" (Spectacular Disco Mix by Jim Burgess)
John Tropea: "Livin' in the Jungle"
Beautiful Swimmers: "Swimmers Groove"
The Winners: "Get on Up and Do It/ Love is Free"
Hot Chocolate: "Every1's a Winner/ Put Your Love in Me"

Permanent Vacation feat. Kathy Diamond: "Tic Toc/ Zucker Hut"
Eletrik Dred: "Butter Up (Gimme Some Bread)"
Ann-Margret: "Love Rush"
The Bombers: "The Mexican/ Dance Dance Dance"
The Bombers: "(Everybody) Get Dancin'"

Sinnamon: "Thanks to You"
Susan Stevens "Boogie Walk"
PiL: "Memories"
Diskjokke: "Asa Nisi Masa"
Prins Thomas: "Mammut"

Barbara Roy: "Gotta See You Tonight"
Barbara Roy & Ecstasy, Passion & Pain: "If You Want Me"
Staple Singers: "Slippery People"
Rockers Revenge: "Walkin' on Sunshine"
Gary's Gang: "Keep On Dancin'"

washington, b.c.

The only time I had ever visited Washington, DC previously, it was for work, in the middle of the abject purgatory that was the previous regime. About the only thing I recall from then was how unsettling the Washington Monument was up close, how we had to walk past a crackhouse to get to our fancy boutique hotel, how a five-minute drive from the capital unveiled women in crusty Daisy Dukes, shriveled and toothless from too much Tina.

Not that Chocolate City has changed too much, but the entire place feels suffused with O-motion (def. that wondrous sensation of well-being that floods one's self when Obama's name gets mentioned in conversation or in a newspaper article) upon my return. This go-around, DC feels like a dream come true, to the point of it almost being ludicrous:

*Randomly run into Fugazi's Brendan Canty on a street corner, buzzed and about to go sing karaoke? Check.

*See Christo and Jeanne-Claude give documentary legend Albert Maysles a lifetime achievement award and hear Maysles talk about how in seeking to understand a person, you grow to love them? Check.

*Gardens in full bloom (and in full utilization) in every single front yard I stroll past? Check.

*Delirious amounts of Ethiopian food? Yep.

*Ridiculously great 12"s sitting in the dollar bin at Som Records? Untold amounts.

*Seeing R.J. Cutler's brilliant new documentary The September Issue that seemingly is about Anna Wintour and Vogue, yet trenchantly reveals instead the genius artistry of creative director Grace Coddington? Yes.

*Attend a block party with Trouble Funk dropping the bomb on my ass? You betcha.