Diplo interview

Originally, the plan was to run parallel interviews (or failing that, one interviewing the other) with both Alan Bishop and Diplo for The Believer's 2008 Music Issue, as both gentlemen are polar opposites in how they incorporate disparate worldwide sounds into their art. Schedules didn't quite permit, so instead, I conducted two separate interviews.

I met Diplo in person at the Indonesian consulate as he was getting his papers together for a travel visa there. In the same breath that he told me his one-off DJ fee (about a fifth of my yearly income), he also borrowed my last five bucks to pay for the visa. We then walked through Central Park and talked about Missy's beats, Santogold, and I passed him a copy of Sublime Frequencies' take on favela funk. We agreed to an email interview, but that's where it began to fall apart...he started traveling, the responses shortened up, and it wasn't ready when the other was. Maybe one day some of this will get saved.

I'm curious as to your thoughts about the C.V, the Sublime Freq. disc. Is it true to the sound of favela parties? Will armchair listeners get it? What is a better conveyance of the experience, something like this or Favela Strikes Back? or something else?

Diplo: i mean yeah the songs on the CD cover like 10 yrs of the scene.. it is more closer to the tru sound, which changes every day

favela on blast mixtape was like damn.. i can dance to this at home sorta was with the easy samples, etc. its a djs mix and its very tame.. but it does sound a lot like a marlboro radio show. as hes the pop funk DJ.. i do think that rio is big its not jsut favelas and everyon in that citie s thinks funk is the soundtrack to thier lives

but when it comes to gangs and the bigest wildest free parties.. yes this music rules ever the artists have to play this type of sound as opposed to thier own track when visiting a trafiicante party

Hollertronix mash-ups helped to establish you. When you were doing stuff like pitting TV on the Radio against Afrika Bambataa or else Mike Jones and Britney, what informed such decisions? Was it simply that it worked, that you could juxtapose two separate entities, or does it go beyond that? Is it just brokering a dialogue between two artists that otherwise wouldn't talk? Is it a dialogue that instead takes place in the listener?

Diplo: well we just worked things in that worked,, the club music landscape was changin while we werereally developing our style. gwen stefani on black radio, outkast on rock radio? we started out as an electro and 80s kinda party but we got the crowd open nough to really play different shit.. our demographics beign so diverse.. - really working class philly, white kids black kids.. anyone that grew up on hip hop and DJs.. but was bombarded by radio playlists.. they were our customers and we gave them everything we had and got really drunk and werent afriad to try different shit

And I guess along the same lines, an anecdote you posted on Mad Decent:
"when vampire weekend finished i got on and played the theme song to coming to america (black ladysmith whats there names cover of the tokens) and a couple of prissy journalist jerks down stairs gave me the fuck you dude face and it was worth it"
Why that song?

Diplo: i do like them . but i just thought it was funny to play coming to america, thier hype seems really silly cause they were boats shoes and play afropop, regardless that one dude was a good songwriter and they sound good, but journslists take them too seriously, they love tohate me too, but i just keep stickin around , that makes em the maddest.. but the ladysmith covering tokens is pretty funny idea anyway

Also from the Mad Decent site, I saw that Paul was discussing how "Jam On It" was popular in India. When you travel to different countries, does it surprise you to across such American cultural debris in other settings? I'm thinking of samples from stuff like Inspector Gadget or the use of Sanford and Son (for Baltimore club beats, which isn't exactly not American, but...). Is it just a matter of them hearing our trash in new ways?

Diplo: cultural debris is a really cool word.. i think that theres a lot of truth in sound when you dont have the cultural baggage.. what we consider trash in brazil or africa they get sent down in some way and it is just the sound and notes.. no pop references in a brittany sample or cheesy techno.. its just what moves them .. i tell you one thing though! SPoNGE BOB rules the world .. if your region or language doenst have a spongebob trak or sample. you dont exist


To clarify something you wrote to me: "if your region or language doenst have a spongebob trak or sample. you dont exist"
can you explain that? a language that doesn't have a sample? or give an example of stumbling across a Spongebob song out in a crazy country somewheres?

Diplo: well i guess these days theres a few cultural icons.. like disney people.
but everywhere form africa to english speaking countries to brazil and southeast asia. theres spongebob on tv dubbed in the local language.. hes the new new for kids
i have angola spongebob, budstep spongebob, bmore club spongebob, afrikaans techno spongebob, 2 live crew spongebob, bail funk favela spongebob.. and thats without even searching

And what about how "exotic" tracks become popular in the US, I'm thinking "Get Ur Freak On," "Rock the Casbah," "Walk Like an Egyptian" the little foreign noises that capture American listeners? Is it a novelty then? When I think of the little noises that inform these tracks, it makes me think back to Inspector Gadget, Sanford & Son as mentioned above.

Diplo: shit well I was listenin to a zulu nation tape yesterday . bambaataa playing at a party.. he was droppin tim maia, banjo tracks - "bad bascomb - black grass, kraftwerk, and babe ruth keep your distance.. some christian song i didnt even recorgnize... this is in 1981.. so its not a new idea . it is the findamentals of hip hop . i think walk like an egyptian was a gimmick.. or more like bow wow wow wow doing that african dumming things.. i mean there are no rules to what tools you can use.. the second irish peopele were doin jigs in nyc or africans were out on congo swuare in luoisiana 300 years ago -- up til imigrants from eastern europe at the turn of the century ... thats when we started this mess.. i mean i cant even tell you what is true american msuic from when I started growin up and listenin, was it madonna, woody guthrie, fats domino
bottom line is that it was exoticized when africa and europe met in americas and developed a blueprint


You reference the 80s a lot in your tracks and remixes, like the Pixies interpolation on your iTunes EP, as well as that 8-bit Nintendo sound on your Spoon remix, or copping that "Careless Whisper" sax on your PRGz remix. Is it a nostalgia that you yourself have for these sounds that makes you go for, or is it that your audience responds to something that's familiar more? Does it help to use something that has 'baggage' for your stateside audience?

Diplo: nah i just like to use samples, its very "hip hop"

Do you feel that by having Jay-Z and the Bangles (two "exotic" sounding radio pop tracks) on M.I.A.'s Piracy mixtape, that it helped to make it such a hit? When you look back on it, what do you think caused such a critical and popular breakout for the two of you? And when you talk about people hatin you at that SXSW set, what do you think they specifically "hate"? Why would they not want you to stick around?

Diplo: nah i didnt think peopel hated on me..
they just took them selves to serious (journalists) they like music journalism to be very dramatic or somethin.. i think we are all just in a big rave called life and some bands r just a lil too tiesto and the journalists are like the girls with thier tits out

Do you feel that in America that they've become more or less aware of global trends? Is America increasingly insular with fears of terrorism and the like? I felt when I was overseas that I didn't see many Americans travelling around. What is it like when you stumble across a phenomenon like the "Dança du Creu" dance? Is it any different than...say "Chicken noodle"? Are people more connected? back to Piracy's art for a sec, with images of b-boys, monks, freedom fighters, etc. all kinda together, was it aimed at that same sorta idealism? that it's all connected in the end?

Diplo: hmmm. yeah american accepts global trends .. but we co opt them as exotica and its kinda falls somewhere between world music and trendish.. something stick aroun when the community exists - fanis records and then reggaeton etc.. is here to stay and has been co opted into other genres. but yeah we dont accept and adapt easily like other micorcultures like jamaica where the indusrty is soo small but strong and has the balls to do whatever it wants and doesnt think twice

You decried New York City's radio when we met up. Why do you think they are so far behind the times? Is it like that around the US? Do you ever see media conglomerates losing their grip on things?

Diplo: yeh ny is over
philly is late on shit too
baltimore was pretty progressive.. not like canada or even ldn radio where djs are playilisting not the major labels

You contributed Missy beats, right? Do you like fucking with major labels? Is it a good platform or not worth the hassle?

Diplo: well im the hassel to them cause i can care less. havin a beat on a missy (or major label) record is not the end all be all (like it is to a lot of hip hop producers..) i can have a an underground track that goes all over the world from a free DL from my site or whatever and get played out more than a missy cut.. - i think debonair samirs "samirs theme" got more play in european clubs last year then any current pop/dance hiphop track...
but there wasnt much money for him to make off it (and he didnt know how to capitalize) but those big artist have to fuck with us in the underground now cause we are what keeps them current.. they are no longer trendsetters, they re just rich

Can such conglomerates ever really keep up with the kids and trends happening at street level? How do you keep up? How much of your time is spent simply processing music? Sam Hunt tells me that he emails you tracks every week.

Diplo: i cant keep up even cause if i played for a room full of diplos.. id play all new tracks that were wierd.. but i still gotta debut sounds in say berlin or some places like that.. where its still quite new to the stuff we are experimenting with

When you moved to Philly, you were working with inner-city youth, were you not? And one of your kids there turned you onto crunk and Baltimore club music. Is it crucial for you to keep the pulse of what "the kids" listen to and follow?

Diplo: well i always say this.. and of underage dances..
kids react to music in a more instictive way.. u can blow new tracks and styles to them.. only when they are a lil older and cooler do they start to thinkk//// hmm thats not cool , thats kinda gay, wierd.. etc..
songs being to gay is a pretty realistic concern to some kids that i find funny

Was it this work with kids that led you to create Heaps Decent? Your label seems to invest a great deal in making sure that kids, especially in third world slums, have access to technology, so as to create their own music. Can you talk about this program, how it works?

Diplo: its a sort of trade off for the hype and exposure i get from being the dude that capitalizes on music.. its every DJs job to do i mean most those uk euro dudes should go to chicago and detroit and set up shelters and build house in thier armanis shade if they got the same slack i get from breaking new music... (thier roots lying in house and techno) but nah what i do is much more obvious and i think we have a responsibilty, but i like to work with kids anyway its a thing that makes me feel good

When we first talked, you admitted that you don't consider yourself a 'great DJ'. What do you think it is that you do best? Spot youth culture trends? Put disparate things together? Bridge gaps between indie and mainstream? What?

Diplo: i think i have a good ear for things and i alwasy try and be progressive.. its important to me to always move forward.. goin backwards make me depressed

And what was it like working with the beats of someone like Tony Allen? I read something once where he said that you achieve trance states not with the bass drum, but with the hi-hat. Anything you discovered when dealing with his beats?

Diplo: well his i didnt have much to work with .. but i do see trends.. liek that in minimal techno.. where a beat can move peopel with no change for 3 minutes and on minute 5 hi hat comes in (only hi hat) and peopel heads explode.. somethign similiar in brazil in the favelas how that sound I was acttracted to has turned much more afr0-brazillian and perscussive without music .. and it sounds even more moders

Alan Bishop interview

The following sections were excised from the published Believer interview with Sublime Frequencies co-founder (and Sun City Girl) Alan Bishop. Some topics touched on here include Diplo, M.I.A. and funk carioca, the serendipity of travel, and the academics and ethnomusicologists not having "the fucking spine" to do what Sublime Frequencies does.

BLVR: What was the paper you saw presented at EMP this year about Sublime Frequencies, the one presented by David Novak?

AB: It was an overview of some of the more extreme concepts that have been affiliated with the label and he covered it from an academic (versus the academic ethnomusicological) approach and how different it was. That was his main point and how it challenged so many different viewpoints that were established over the years from the early days. He pointed out the differences in what we did as opposed to what is expected in the genre of ethnomusicology or international music.

It wasn’t that passionate a delivery. We may have made him a little nervous cuz we came in there and announced ourselves, shook his hand, then sat down. He just went with…it was a pretty shoddy sense of research. He started off by saying that Charles Gocher was an owner of the label and he was married to a Burmese woman. It was just all wrong. I’m the one married to a Burmese woman, Charlie was never involved with the label other than just being around. That’s nowhere to be found on the internet. I don’t know where he came up with that. It really shows you that if you can’t get that right… He brought in the Sun City Girl angle as a prelude to mine and Rick’s part in the label. He never mentioned Hisham (Mayet), he barely mentioned Mark Gergis.

He just got into all these things that are so generalized and not-specific, then glossed over very important points just because of a smart-ass quote I gave to Erik Davis designed to piss people off: “If these things start making money and selling like Outkast, I’ll fly over to Sumatra and just hand out Benjamins to anyone that looks like these people.” It was obviously a fucking crack but he prefaced the whole thing with: “Obviously, the label doesn’t believe in paying royalties or compensating musicians, as Alan Bishop is quoted…” and then he just blankets that and moves onto the next point. It’s by no means the case. If he had done any research in any of my diatribes on the Web, he would’ve been able to see that it’s not as black and white as that and it’s not --in any regard-- that we don’t want to pay anyone; we do. It’s just set up where it’s really difficult to pay. You have to make that decision. Are you going to take the risk to do it or are you just going to not let it be heard? That needs to be dealt with, that needs to be said, instead of what he said. You start to wonder how well minds can process information. How smart are these guys? How serious are they if they’re not going to bring this stuff to the table correctly? But that’s just the nature of the game, the nature of information, whether you’re covering politics or sports or music or whatever. It totally is in line with the way that things go down.

BLVR: Which is why you’re there in person.

AB: Yeah, I was able to defend it a bit. A couple questions came up and he directed them to us, as he would have said the wrong answer (laughs). I think he knew that. It tempered the situation. I got a few jabs in: “Well, there are a few things that were said that were completely inaccurate and I don’t know how you could have found them. They’re not even on the web!” But that’s the nature of it. It’s when that information gets spread around and compounded in articles as though they are gospel, then other people are going to propagate that forever and ever, they’re just always there to refer to. It’s always disinformation being thrown out there. To make a point about how we function sometimes, we put out our own disinformation. We want our own disinformation to be dealt with, not the ones that are completely wrong facts said by other people. We can’t have it both ways.

BLVR: Ethnomusicology just left the field, climbed up inside the ivory tower, and has been firmly ensconced there ever since.

AB: And they have their exclusivity and how they have their papers written and recordings filed away and there’s no access to them unless you’re a member of their club. You have to kiss their ass to get in to it and pay them money to get in. That’s the only way you can get it. Which is worse. I look at what we’re doing as practical work in things like that, weighing our options and trying to do the best we can as we move along, learning as we go and we’re making it up as we go along and side-stepping the whole thing and just getting our work done in the only way we have the means to do so without the funding and power machine that the institutions have. It still can make an impact.

BLVR: Having heard appropriations of the music by DJs here like Diplo, I was surprised to hear Sublime Frequencies dip into baile funk with the C.V. release. Did you know much about funk carioca and baile funk before Carlos Casas sent you those recordings from Rio drug gang Comando Vermelho’s parties?

AB: I really didn’t know too much. I’ve heard a few clips and I wasn’t really interested in that kind of music. But when I encountered the music that Carlos sent me, it struck me as something completely different. I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that it was from Rio and that it was recorded within the favelas and I didn’t associate it with baile funk or the Miami bass at all. I had no idea what it was. It just sounded like raw spontaneous hip-hop beat music from the urban Rio, in the favelas. And because it was so raw and the way that it was mixed, and the way that it was presented, I liked it. That’s the only thing to it. I immediately liked it.

An anonymous Belgian holds up a photo of George W. Bush for the sublime Frequencies DJ team and they immediately salute their president (from Sublime Frequencies DJ night in Belgium).

BLVR: You didn’t know about Diplo or M.I.A. and what they had done with it on Piracy Funds Terrorism, their mix CD?

AB: I hadn’t heard Diplo, but I heard his name. I was familiar with MIA’s music but I didn’t see a connection at all when I heard this stuff. To me, that was a different kind of music. MIA was this beatbox urban sound. I don’t know what she does. It sounded okay, but it’s not anything I’d sit around and listen to. Ever.

BLVR: She seems have this similar ethos of taking these third world cultures and re-appropriating them within “western pop” sensibilities.

AB: I find it hard to really say how mush she’s taken. It’s so wide open, the influences are so homogenized now, that it’s really difficult to say how much she’s taking from them. She is Sri Lankan and maybe there’s some things she has done, but even with what Sri Lankans are doing in that vibe, and what the Indonesians are doing in beat music or Thais in hip-hop, it all sounds alike to what the West has always been doing. It’s too close for me, it ‘s a kind of music I don’t respect. I’m not interested in it.

BLVR: Have you ever been down to Brazil?

AB: Never been down to Brazil.

BLVR: Do you find it difficult when you’re presented with music from a country where you haven’t been to wrap your head around it?

AB: Not necessarily. I’m very interested in Brazilian music, just not in that type of Brazilian music. There’s 500 kinds of Brazilian music to like. Funk carioca really wasn’t one of them on my want list when I do go to Brazil. You just never know. I have to hear to know if I’m going to be able to wrap my head around it. Sometimes, it’s not a matter of me not being able to wrap my head around it. I prefer not to go there because it doesn’t interest me. I look at the music as too simplistic or too easy to do or I don’t respect it because too many people that are associated with that music I would just as soon wish would vanish from the universe. I just can’t stand it. It reminds me of all that is wrong with the people that I despise. It’s a personal thing.

BLVR: Who are what are the earmarks of this music?

AB: People who worship pop culture to the point where they try to emulate it too much and all they’re concerned with is fame and money. The slick production quality, the lack of creative ideas and inspiration, the lowest common denominator factor of worldwide acceptance so as to continually promote a handicapped mentality of thought, where stupidity and an inferior mindset are 'cool'; There are pockets that interest me when I hear them but they are few and far between.

Even if it’s poor people growing up in the ghetto, I understand the situation but when it comes to people from other countries emulating what is big and powerful about the rest of the world and they’re blinded by it all, it doesn’t mean I have to feel sorry for them because they’re hypnotized. You either get it or you don’t and if I start feeling sorry for them, then I’m going to become weak and not be able to do what I can do to destroy the fucking thing that I hate.

I can go out and try to do social work that’ll never get anywhere or I can try and go at it with all the ammunition I have to just completely annihilate the thing that I hate. It’s the kind of music that reminds me of the big machine that creates that music and that entertainment and that hypnotism and that social engineering, cultural engineering that keeps people in their place and doesn’t allow them to innovate or evolve into greater beings.


We’re pushing the idea of the higher-minded bootleg being something that is legitimate. Because the system has failed, the system needs to be changed, and the system needs to relax, and the system needs to be less precious. And we’re pushing that envelope and we have the guts to do it and nobody one else out there has the fucking spine. You can’t find them, they’re not there. We’re the only ones.

BLVR: You told me before that you had never been into Laos or Vietnam. I was wondering what it was about those countries that isn’t interesting to you.

AB: That’s not the case. I just don’t have the time. I’ve almost been to both, it just didn’t work out. When I go to a place, I like to stay in one place for a period of time, so that I can get some things going. I could’ve gone to Vietnam but I wouldn’t have accomplished as much as I did in Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, India, other places I have been. It’s a matter of time. There are a lot of places I’d love to go: Brazil, Haiti, Yemen, Sudan, all over Africa. I’m not going to get spread out just to say I’ve been to a place. I have friends and contacts and continuing projects in the places I’ve been. That’s seven or eight countries I have worked in multiple times, that’s a lot for any one person. I’m not working for the corporate world anymore. It’s not easy to accomplish. I’ve got to make it all happen myself.

BLVR: How difficult is it negotiating in new countries?

AB: I think you build off your experiences and the more that you’re used to going into different places. The first time anywhere is mind-blowing. I was overwhelmed by everything. I now have experience in these religious cultures in Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism and have learned quite abit about all of it. it’s not nearly as big a deal as it used to be. There are challenges and you never know when it’s going to come. I'm pretty fearless about anything, I just naturally blend in to the situation. I’m really good with people and have the power of communication, I can pretty much do whatever I need to do no matter where I go and I have that confidence and people tend to like me no matter where I go. It’s pretty easy for me.
...
BLVR: I feel there’s a serendipity, a synchronicity, once you’re fully in the travel mindset, where magical things just start to happen. You meet certain people…certain things align.

AB: It’s amazing how many instances are like that. The more that you’re experienced, your radar works better. You know what you’re looking for or where you might find something. You know something’s going to be happening and you’re always ready to pull out the camera or record something; you’re going to catch it. There’s too many times when you have documentation equipment with you that you’re just thinking you’re not experiencing this the way that I wish I could. When I watch it back, it’s not going to be the same either.

BLVR: How do you balance it then, being in the moment versus capturing it?

AB: I don’t think about it. I go into mode. That’s what I’m doing…I’m taking it all in and I’m digging it as it’s going, but you have to be aware of what you’re doing if you want to document it in a way that can be used. It’s a give and take. There are so many different situations that are unexpected. Those are the greatest ones. It’s like a gift, it just shows up and you’re at the right place at the right time. In terms of collecting, I’m always looking for old cassettes and old vinyl wherever we go. That’s part of the situation as well.
...
BLVR: Of the different religions you've come across in your travels, is there any one that is more convincing than the others. If you were to subscribe to one set of beliefs, which do you go for?

AB: Hinduism is by far the most interesting and endlessly fascinating. Nothing else even remotely comes close. Although I will always respect and admire the beauty and discipline of Islam. Muslims are perhaps the most hospitable and kind people I have ever encountered overall.

the betiever

My interview with Sublime Frequencies founder (and Sun City Girl) Alan Bishop is in the new issue of The Believer, as part of their annual 2008 Music Issue. An honor for me. While you can read the full interview here, the actual issue also features a swell mix CD (featuring Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance, Mahmoud Ahmed, Dirty Projectors, and others) as well as a centerfold map of my failed search for Thai molam music through Southeast Asia (with Bob Marley jokes aplenty). The best part of the magazine though is that the mix CD mounted in the front synchs with Irma Thomas's teeth and soft palette. Nudge the disc just so and she's either without her dentures or sporting giant horse teeth.

cerebro eletronico

A head's up (get it?) that you should chew some blotter and then buy the recent reissue of Gilberto Gil's self-titled album from 1969, often referred to as Cerebro Eletronico (trans. "Electronic Brain"). I wrote the liner notes and was pretty proud of them. (Fellow associate Mike Powell wrote the notes for Expresso 2222.)

While I usually leave out such claims (don't expect much hyperbole in the notes themselves), I will say that there are moments on this album (like "Vitrines" and "Futurivel") that are the finest examples of psychedelia that I've ever heard (and yes that means Can, Fifty-Foot Hose, Linda Perhacs, Dom, and the first Pink Floyd album): majestic, nuanced, destabilizing, sumptuous, rapturous, visceral, a perfect blending of pop song, acid guitar, avant orchestrations, and studio trickery. Eat it up.

heep see

Bonnie "Prince" Billy: Lie Down in the Light

Not prone to use such vocab, but this is Will Oldham's "best" album, his "masterpiece," my "album of the year." Call it the polar opposite to what's often considered his most fully-realized work, I See A Darkness, full of life and light. In making such a proclamation though, it's difficult to pinpoint just what it is about this album. He's audibly happy and in love, and for some reason, that's led to song structuring that feels perfected yet not strained. Of course, he said-she said dialogues are present, as is his ever-present naturalism.

Rather than the "first thought, best thought" in his approach in the studio, it seems like there's a place for everything here, be it a clarinet or a guitar tone right out of "Rock'n'Roll." The best example I can conjure off the top of my head occurs on "So Everyone," which seems at first like its chords are based upon Fred Neil's "The Dolphins." But whereas that song was world-weary, finding solace not in another human being but in submerging that pain in the animal kingdom, here Oldham finds his peace in his betrothed. That it's a blowjob song appropriate enough to play at a wedding reception is just the cherry on top.

Portishead: 3

A few months back, listening to a promo of the new Boris album, I kept being struck by the "rupture" inherent in its sonics. That is, until I paid enough attention to realize that it was just an edited, truncated promo. Such rupture is instead best put on display here: re-vitalizing a decade-dormant career only to riddle their telltale sound with shards of ancient synthesizers and drum pads. Or else plunking in an homage to The Jerk that endearingly --albeit wholly-- derails the album's momentum. Recurdling sour times only to leave listeners in an ice-bath. Laid flat by the appearance of "Threads" (which could totally be covered by Sunn O))) ), I kept hearing behind Beth Gibbons's mewl this hole where a man's voice could've been harmonizing. That is, until I realized the hole was in fact a man's howl. I think it clenches into that Morricone-esque yip nearer the end, but I'm always so unsure.

Erykah Badu: New Amerykah Part One

It'd be easy to say that Erykah's been getting her daily dose of Parliament/ Funkadelic, but then I thought that maybe she's just watching Spongebob with her kids and getting all those tweaked voices from there instead. But much like Bill's paternal turn in Kill Bill, Erykah also weans her kids on kung-fu matinee, too. A true pothead's album: indulgent, meandering, prone to lean and headnod, super-paranoid, silly, messy, weirdly anal retentive, knee-deep in dusty funk, apocalyptic.

Lindstrøm: Where You Go I Go Too

As I stated on the I Love Music message board, this is the Ys of Neo-Disco, every bit as expansive and endgame for its respective musical subgenre, save HP's effort is Jacuzzi-warm instead of chilly.

Les Autres:

Blues Control: Puff
Toumani Diabaté: The Mandé Variations
Earth: The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull
Low Motion Disco: Keep It Slow
Daniele Baldelli and Marco Dionig: Cosmic Disco?! Nah...Cosmic Rock!!!

heep see

Husbands dir. Cassavetes

A friend sweetly and unexpectedly bought me a bootleg copy off of eBay of my favorite John Cassavetes film, to this day not available on DVD (thanks AAAA). The only noticeable effect of such a transfer is that there's this weird artifacting on the black fabrics, which makes the funeral scene turn slightly psychedelic. This marked my fifth time through the film, and I realize that the promise I made to myself a decade previous upon my first viewing of the film --that I would one day be as sartorially unfuckwithable as Mssrs. Cassavetes, Gazarra, and Falk-- has still not come to pass. I also lament that there's no sort of Smell-O-Vision here, especially as the bender the three husbands indulge in stretches on ever longer. If only you could get a whiff of Peter Falk's vomit and cigarette breath.

Seriously though, click this and sign the petition to have Husbands released on DVD.














Battle of Algiers dir. Pontecorvo

Since the Iraqi War is no longer front-page news, it may be best to learn about our enemy via a forty-year-old documentary-style story on how Algeria threw off French occupation. The Criterion set is heavy, revealing that the film was made less than five years after liberation, on the very streets that were covered in blood and rubble but a few years previous and including a roundtable discussion with Richard A. Clarke (author of Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror) about the movie's effects. Mandatory viewing for both Al Qaeda recruits as well as US special ops.

While the film's depiction of both torture and terrorism tactics (see women hiding their bombs in their baskets or police using live wires on suspects) are chilling and spot-on, there's something else at work. We see how effective both strategies are, in that the bombs kill hundreds of innocent civilians, rally Algerians to their cause, and entice the oppressors into more self-defeating policies, while the gruesome torturing of captives allows the police to capture/ kill the insurgents and their leaders. Yet at movie's end, both terrorism and torture fail. And yet, due to some intangible movement that the camera does not register, liberation still occurs. Even the film itself professes to have no answers as to why independence finally comes, why the populace finally rallies and throws off the French. It is, as Clarke states though, about an invisible war, a war of ideas.


2 or 3 Things I Know About Her dir. Jean-Luc Godard

Perhaps it's as Godard intended, to have the Law of Diminishing Returns enacted on celluloid. While my first viewing of this film imparted a giddy and heady rush, each subsequent viewing has turned into more of an pedantic slog. It's also incredibly noisy, with a near-constant clamor of construction work and a clanging pinball machine. There's still whispered Brecht, mere reportage of the senses, 'Nam polemics from the mouths of babes, endlessly quotable lines like "Language is the house man lives in" and "If you can't afford LSD, try a color TV," but it tells of things to come (like the execrable Le Gai Savoir, which we also suffered through. That said, it has two of his most poetic visual musings, one involving the play of tree-dappled light atop a candy-red car hood, another of that cosmic cup of stirred coffee.

heep see

The Pawnbroker dir. Sidney Lumet

MoMA's theatre must run an elderly special, as we were the youngest people in the crowd by a good three decades. Caught this early Lumet flick as part of the museum's ongoing (and simply exhaustive) overview of jazz-inflected soundtracks for American and world cinema, Jazz Score, I would've written this up for my soundtrack column, save that I can't find any usable clips for this film on YouTube. Lumet weds Quincy Jones debut film score to the gritty B&W cinematography of Boris Kaufman, and shows how a cage can follow a man. Who knew that 1960's Harlem bore such close resemble to concentration camps? Or that in the middle of this depressive/ redemptive film would appear the theme from Austin Powers?


Crazed Fruit dir. Ko Nakahira

Also part of the MoMA Jazz Score series. This directorial debut from Nakahira (who --according to critic Donald Ritchie-- was assigned more middling fare ever after) was the first film of Japan's new wave, kin to Rebel Without a Cause and Breathless. Was delighted to learn that this film features the first score of Toru Takemitsu, whose significant soundtracks I dig immensely. Here, Takemitsu presents a winsome interplay between Hawaiian steel guitar and muted trumpet. Damn YouTube, why is there no clip of the subtle seduction scene, wherein the slight movements of fingers, thighs, and quick glances (all while the sea heaves and seaweed wags and sighs) hint at the urges teeming just beneath the surface? One of my favorite scenes in recent memory. And the ending remains jarring some fifty years on.


Cat People dir. Jacques Tourneur

Reading Martin Scorsese's lecture/ book on American cinema got me excited about trolling deeper into low-budget noirs, which prove that whole "necessity is the mother of invention" adage. Can't afford special effects to transform Simone Simon into a black panther (no afro wigs and hip-huggers in the 40's)? Then convey such animalistic change and its attendant fear and bodily terror via shadows, shrieks, the disorientation of light that comes from a pool, the held shot of an otherwise orderly descent of stairs growing more ominous merely through deepening lines of shadow.

















Gun Crazy dir. Joseph H. Lewis

Again, as recommended by Scorsese, a raw and careening predecessor to Bonnie and Clyde. The gun-loving guy is disgusted not by death, but instead by the resulting convenience: "Two people dead? Just so we can live without working?" Too many incredible shots to be had here: the camera on the floorboards of the getaway car, the tracking shot through hallways of carcasses or else a looooong backseat shot that follows the heist and pistol-whipping of a cop outside of the bank before following them on the getaway, then that discreet smile back at us as they speed away. And is there a sexier cinematic entrance than that of Peggy Cummins (as Annie Laurie Starr) firing her six-shooters at the county fair?

Looking at IMDB now, it makes sense that Dalton Trumbo helped on the screenplay. Check this dialogue:

Him: "It's as if nothing were real anymore."
Her: "I'm yours. And I'm real."
Him: "But you're the only thing that is. The rest is a nightmare."

cry tuff the beta encounter

A friend of mine is about to undergo an emergency root canal. And as she tussles with tooth pain, she also has to hit her deadlines throughout the process. Listening to music in the throes of such physical pain isn't much fun. I recall how I had to review the needling onslaught of Orthrelm's OV a few years ago while dealing with fallout from food poisoning: horrific body aches, nausea, and a blinding feverish headache. Not fun. Needless to say, I have yet to revisit that album, lest I feel such symptoms again. I am curious as to how music gets coupled with acute physical sensations though, embedded into the nerve endings.

When she told me the "good news" about getting a root canal, my entire body shivered. While my own troublesome tooth (and non-dental plan) was from a few years back, that physical misery was conjured so that I re-lived it for a second. Again, I felt that never-ebbing sear of hot pain, white light, the hallucinatory tremble of my skull from those weeks leading up to the drill. And there's an exact song that encapsulates that pain. When I think about root canals, I think about Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love."

It was a few summers ago and I was out at Siren Festival. It was my first time out at Coney Island and I was with then-fellow Pforker Brandon Stosuy. Unable to chew down a Nathan's hot dog, I wandered instead into the decrepit penny arcade out on the boardwalk, the skull pain masked by the din of skee-ball thumps, Street Fighter, and Dance Dance Revolution noises. As "Crazy in Love" burst forth, that horn line (from the Chi-Lites' "Are You My Woman") incessantly drilled deep into my head (where it would remain the rest of that summer). My skull reached the threshold: all brass blasts, Jay guest verse, arcade noise, Coney Island teen yammer, sweat, leathery local skin flash, skull nerve throb. At "got me going so crazy right now," everything roared white.

It was at this precise moment that the arcade attendant deployed some sort of industrial strength room deodorizer to cut through the pall of B.O. that hung in the hot room. Stunned and stuck in place, I was hit square in the face with that noxious mist. I can't hear that song without all those bells, whistles, and florid stinks flooding back and overtaking me.

Recently, another friend of mine recounted the first time he ever heard the God of Thunder, Prince Far I, on his face-melting dub reggae classic Cry Tuff the Dub Encounter Volume 3. Reduced to a puddle (bong-abetted, no doubt), he then had to be scooped up and put into a Brooklyn gypsy cab. It was a late November night, but for some reason, his cabbie had all the windows rolled down. To top it off, the cabbie had "Unchained Melody" cranked up. Already a bundle of nerves, the cold and the soaring Righteous sound (arranged for maximum beatitude by Jack Nitzsche, natch) shook my friend down to his spinal column. In simply retelling his tale and thinking about the Righteous Brothers, his arms had broken out anew in goose flesh, still cold at the sound of music.

the secret life of beta

Without my knowing it, writing chums Peter Relic and Dave Tompkins apparently created this hippe-dippie pseudo-entity in the early 70s known as "Peter Tompkins" and co-authored tomes like The Secrets of the Great Pyramid and The Secret Life of Plants. I hold the two of them wholly responsible for inspiring the worst Stevie Wonder double album ever.

Still, there's lots of kooky science goodness to be had in The Secret Life of Plants. Nothing is quite helpful tipwise, like how to prevent root shock, secrets of how to make bulbs bloom, or what Beethoven sonatas will make plants grow best. Should I be playing Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations from 1955 or 1981 for the aloe? Will geraniums thrive better hearing Pablo Cassals's recordings of the Cello Suites or else Yo-Yo Ma's take? Can they hear Wagner looped in the GAS box set? Will the twee-classical of Nico Muhly shrivel them outright?

Instead, there are all these weird experiments that prove that plants are lie detectors, mind readers, can feel the death of any and all animal cells, and have a telepathy that has no bounds, meaning plants have a sense that extends beyond our understanding and conceptions of space and time. So the more I write snarky criticism, the more my plants will suffer? Oh, and they receive transmissions from deep outer space. Weird reports stream in from the Soviets and from India too (Pravda headline: "What Leaves Tell Us: Plants talk...yes, they scream").

They also talk about Goethe's lesser-known career discussing the morphology of plants: "To Goethe the fact that the action of the root of a plant is directed earthward toward moisture and darkness, whereas the stem of trunk strives skyward in the opposite direction towards the light and the air, was a truly magical phenomenon." Even during yoga class now, I keep imagining myself becoming some sort of plant: spine like a stem, face and hands turning towards the sun, growing ever so slowly. Guh, can I really be turning back into a hippie? Even if the archival discovery of this Father Yod album from 1973 makes my skin creep?

Black Dice

Black Dice feature in Self-Titled Magazine

Late summer of last year, I was asked by the editors at Devil in the Woods Magazine to write the "definitive" article on Brooklyn's Black Dice. Oddly maligned now by the cognoscenti (a colleague at Pitchfork once lamented that after Beaches & Canyons they moved away from sounding like the Boredoms, which is really fucking unfair) and forever in the shadow of a band they helped nourish, Animal Collective, I undertook the task of recasting the group. Read for yourself to see if it was successful.

The article involved a series of one-on-one interviews with Bjorn and Eric Copeland and Aaron Warren, as well as ousted drummer Hisham Bharoocha. I also talked to Catsup Plate Records founder Rob Carmichael, DFA label boss Jonathan Galkin, the Animal Collective's Avey Tare, and world-renowned artists Richard Phillips and Doug Aitken. In retrospect, I wish that I had talked to videographer Danny Perez, Gore co-author Jason Frank Rothenberg, and old bassist Sebastian Blanck, but I was already neck-deep in tape.

Having finished the exhaustive piece, easily the largest article I've ever written for a magazine, I went away on holiday to the other side of the world. Upon my return to NYC, the article still hadn't seen daylight. DiW instead had molted into a new entity, Self-Titled, some weird amalgam of online and print that I have yet to figure out. What I do know though is that said Black Dice article is now seeing some day/ pixel light. The editors keep assuring me that they'll be submitting it for Da Capo's Best Music Writing, but that's neither here nor there, I'm just glad that it exists. (Seriously though, stuff that ballot box come November.)

Usually, I post all relevant interview transcripts here, but for once, the canvas provided by DiW/s/t was large enough to capture nearly every nuance and grace note (which I remain grateful for), so rendering the transcripts here ultimately feels redundant. That said, I am posting below the words from Doug Aitken and Richard Phillips, since both gents were kind enough to take time out of their busy schedules to speak with me, a true honor. At the last moment, all of Doug Aitken's comments were excised and Richard Phillips (who was gracious enough to let me use the above image for this post) had many more illuminating points to make about the art world at large. Enjoy.

Richard Phillips

"I saw them live early on. A friend of mine brought me to some club in Brooklyn. It was a night they played with Wolf Eyes, an all out noise-fest. When I saw Black Dice it was a complete paradigm shift. It was just a really all-out assault, a terrific show. Wolf Eyes were also quite powerful in a more tribal way. When I saw them again at another point, I took Doug to see them at a loft party in Brooklyn. I was struck by the commitment to this form that was completely…it was really had broken free and was original in its aggression and assault. It was a new form. I was preparing the exhibition concurrently and was inspired by them while painting.

"I ended up speaking with Bjorn, Hisham, Aaron and Eric and organized a studio visit. I thought it would be perfect to have them perform at my opening. A 140 decibel all-out assault that they do be happening during the opening for my exhibit entitled “America.” Which dealt with different ways, issues surrounding individuals sovereignty, individuals relationship to power. A huge painting of Bush, with pink panels.

"I just felt the show was as much about negation of that power as much an affirmation. The way in which their music I felt was did have this … application of negation as a way of making music, something I identified with. They did a two-part piece, two half-hour long pieces, solely for that show. They performed at absolute top volume. We provided a huge bowl of ear plugs and they were gone in 15 minutes. This was a night of openings at Chelsea Piers and a lot of it for me was to end the glad-handing, social aspect of openings, where it just becomes a way to advance ones career and I wanted to take the whole idea of discussion and interaction completely out of it. The sound would completely annihilate that potential and that it would be really about being in the space with them and these paintings at a certain point in time. and to cause a break in the trajectory of Chelsea and the arts scene, to really detonate a response to this kind of formulaic traipsing around. They had come over and seen the paintings. It was a statement of purpose. The timing of it…to have this kind of event. 9/11 was uncanny, horrific.

"In sense of collaboration, it was one of the more successful ones I ever worked with. It stands to me as a real singular moment in time. I honestly feel it was a summation. It’d be difficult to repeat. It was before their work became more lyrical and melodic in a sense. It was a culmination of things. I knew what they were capable of. The show was no less violent. It was really a breaking point, a real outpouring of energy and intensity and I felt that way in the run up to the show. There was a kind of abject nature, a negation, not in a punk way. What I really felt about Black Dice they absolutely annihilated agreements/ disagreements. The sheer sonic force blew threw the whole thing. The environment, there was a lot of people in the art community as well. You could hear them from blocks away. There was a huge crowd, hundreds and hundreds of people.

"What I wanted to do was have the gallery and those images become a nucleus for a kind of change. We didn’t have any possible…it was as important as the paintings. It was absolutely integral. That sense of the sound at such an extreme level and it being a culmination of those earlier performance. I was surprised how things changed. I watched their most recent video, it has a dance feeling to it. I really liked it a lot. I really responded to it. I felt the work they were doing at that time was really on it and leading in an important direction, regardless of their discipline. I really identified. It was really of the moment. What could’ve been a better expression of that time? It was more prophetic than we could’ve ever imagined."

Doug Aitken

"Richard Phillips was telling me I should check Black Dice out when they were playing in Williamsburg. You have to listen to your friends to get a lead on some things. It was a physical experience, it’s not so much a sonic experience. That was the thing about BD that impressed me. You could stand there and there was this really heavy bio-rhythm moving through your body that came through the sound.

"The thing that struck me was the idea that there’s something very much a raw white noise wall that you’re confronted with, a sonic assault. The deeper you’re in it, you start pulling up these delicate rhythms and frequencies and repetitions. That’s what makes Black Dice complex musicians. They’re able to harness and create something repetitious, hypnotic, that makes me think of Riley, Reich, Young. Merging that with a VU white noise quality. They’re just a couple of guys. It’s unpretentious, a pretty raw, dirty feeling, very honest and direct.

"I did this happening two years ago with them. Sometimes you feel like you’re inside a speaker cabinet when you see them play. It’s so small and tight, crushing and compacting inside your mind. On a personal level…(like the artist masturbating under the floor) Black Dice plays, very similarly, getting at you and getting in you and shifting your perceptions. That’s really interesting, these ties to avant-garde art sensibilities. It’s still more of a sonic experience for me personally, but I love that book of collages, Gore. It’s just fresh, people doing what they want to do."

Tom Lee Interview

Continuing to post interviews relevant to the Arthur Russell article that ran last week at the Voice, coinciding with a series of tribute concerts. At the Friday night concert, I finally had the pleasure of meeting Tom Lee, Arthur's longtime live-in boyfriend and the man who bears the herculean task of keeping Arthur's legacy extant in the physical world. I sent him a set of questions and received this as his reply:

I was very excited when Matt wrote to me about making a film about Arthur. I remember that I was away for the summer and was very enthusiastic about meeting with him when I returned that September. His letter was direct and a little formal…very respectful, as is Matt’s demeanor. When we met he had a variety of ideas that really interested me because he wanted to create something that was not a ‘typical’ looking documentary. I right away thought that it will be interesting for a person of a different generation, who was not a witness of Arthur’s times, to make this film. I also was aware that there was not very much footage of Arthur performing and I remember being a little concerned that Matt might be discouraged when he discovered that. To his great credit he not only used what I knew to be available but on his own and working along with Steve Knutson from Audika Records he was able to unearth some archival footage of Arthur performing.

When Point Music came forward right after Arthur died and catalogued and put together “Another Thought” I was very pleased that this would be a tribute to Arthur’s work. It showcased a good variety of his music and yet I was still at that time holding out hope that a bigger release would still follow. Arthur was always in touch with Geoff Travis at Rough Trade and I think he and I thought that his strongest songs would be released by Rough Trade. He liked Geoff a great deal and Geoff was always supportive…emotionally and financially. Even though it didn’t happen during his life I was still sure that it would after he died. I was a little disappointed that “Another Thought” did not create any sparks of interest.

Of course it is a little bittersweet that it took until many years until after Arthur died for his music to appeal to so many people. People have somewhat mythologized Arthur’s methods and practices…never being quite satisfied with a song, creating many versions of the same song, adding and subtracting a variety of drums, keyboards, horns, etc., but at the same time there were a few very profound factors involved. On one hand the musicians and studios that he worked with would often change…people got steadier gigs, moved on and out of the city, began to work with other people; he would present his music to many different people in the music business, hoping to hear an encouraging word back from them but of course one can’t control that; and of equal or greater importance is that as he kept to practicing at Westbeth, listening to endless takes on his Walkman, scheduling recording sessions on the days and nights of the full moon, arranging gigs at Experimental Intermedia Foundation, The Alternative Museum, La Mama, etc.; he was concurrently attending to an amazing amount of health issues.

AIDS was so complex at that time that even as he followed various regimens of treatments he would often be fighting malaise and fatigue and at the same time be afflicted with any number of opportunistic illnesses that hiv and the medicines might produce. He was heroically moving forward in spite of all of this. All of this work does not automatically lead to acceptance and success and that certainly did not seem to be what Arthur was counting on. I almost think he was courting that idea so that he might get some more money to pore into more studio time to keep going on with his next idea!

After Arthur died it was very hard for me not to continually play various songs to my friends and family. It got so that I could just imagine hearing “Wild Combination/That’s Us” on the radio, where I still feel that it should be heard. I was so wrapped up in every nuance of his music. I was revisiting and re-discovering his music in an almost fanatical way. I have dozens of favorite songs and I tease out my own meanings for slight phrases in certain songs….as I remember him calling me at work to ask when I would be home, or hopping on my bike after a breakfast together in the East Village. I can so clearly remember how much fun he had with the song, “Hop On Down To Petland”. As with many of his songs he wanted it to appeal to young kids and that is often what he strove for with certain songs. I also fell in love with the tender songs of “World Of Echo” after he died. I would just get carried away listening to all the various versions on tape of that record…and the songs that were left off the record, a few of which Steve Knutson included on the re-issue of that album on Audika. It is always a part of my life and there isn’t any way to put it aside.

The idea of “moving on” has taken on a certain meaning because I have been a caretaker of Arthur’s legacy and as people became interested they would be referred to me by others. This also would lead them to the musicians that Arthur played with over the years. (I would be happy to make a list but to save some time here I will wait until you say you need some names of those folks.) In the years that followed the release of “Another Thought” people would periodically contact me about releasing some of Arthur’s music. I would make them compilation tapes of my favorites but they mostly wanted to re-release the dance tracks to test the waters before they would commit to previously unreleased music.

Happily, Steve Knutson contacted me and he was the first person willing to take a chance on releasing some of Arthur’s music that was not known. I was long waiting for someone to take a chance and let people hear the music I was so in love with. The record, Calling Out Of Context, presents some of Arthur’s great songs. (A personal favorite of mine is “Platform On The Ocean”, which I did not think anyone would release. It is so hypnotic to me and as Arthur was creating it he would give me ninety minute tapes of that song to listen to on my Walkman and then as I returned to our apartment we would discuss it and together make edits of it. It was the one song of his that I actually spliced and taped versions of!) Steve has been a fantastic steward and caretaker of Arthur’s music. Arthur’s family and I are so grateful for all that he has done.

The reason that I am so close to Arthur’s family, his parents, Chuck and Emily Russell, and his sisters, Julie and Kate, is that they are such amazing people. Under different circumstances we might have lost contact over the years, but I just love them like my own family. I grew to know Kate and Julie quite well when Arthur was sick and they would visit a few times over his last few years. With his parents calls from Iowa we gradually got to know each other and their support and concerns were so heartfelt. It was such a worrisome time that often it was about comforting, reassuring, informing and consoling one another. Along the way we discovered common interests and we continue to have strong friendships with each other. We have helped each other try to understand who Arthur was during his time on this earth and how our time with him has impacted our lives. We also move on and share a lot of time together during the summer in Maine.

In terms of your last question, Arthur looking for a hit, perhaps we could talk that out a bit. I think that it is complicated. He did not purposely go from project to project because one failed to produce a ‘hit’. He stayed with bands and groups for awhile….The Flying Hearts, The Sailboats, The Necessaries, but would move on as things did not catch on. He would at the same time keep working the ‘dance’ scene and there it was a constant education for him. What are the new ‘beats’, who are the hottest re-mixers, how did a group achieve that ‘sound’ on their record? And as he was considering all that he was trying to think up a new catchphrase to build a song around, such as: “new shoes on my feet…I want to tell you today,” or “wax the van,” or “let’s go swimming!” I’ve called theses songs his ‘call to action’ songs. As people responded to these entreaties Arthur might have just had a sly smile on his face and thought, “hmmm, now what should I do for my next trick?”

Matt Wolf Interview

Director Matt Wolf recently finished his "portrait" of Arthur Russell, screening this weekend. I wrote about the film and a weekend of tribute concerts here. If you don't know about Mr. Russell, do catch up.

How many people interviewed Arthur during his lifetime?

It was really limited. David Toop interviewed him for the Face. I’m not one to be exhaustive with research. There was never any video recording of Arthur speaking. He wasn’t interviewed much. There’s this audio cassette correspondence to his parents about this scheme to sell flutes from India. He needs the capital to buy the flutes. Arthur came up with these business ventures which were circuitous ways to ask for money for studio time. Arthur had great ideas ahead of the time, but wasn’t able to monetize.

For as often as he evokes the ocean, did Arthur ever go overseas?

I believe he was in London to meet with Geoff Travis. Past that, I don’t think he did. His parents are very worldly. I don’t believe Arthur was very worldly himself, in thought but not in deed.

How did you become aware his music?

I found out about it through the reissues in 2003-4, Calling out of Context and World of Arthur Russell. A friend described Arthur to me mythologically as this gay disco auteur who wore farmer plaid shirts and would ride the Staten Island ferry back and forth listening to various mixes of his own cassettes, that image was immediately intriguing to me and I bought the music right away and became obsessively involved in listening to it.

I came from a more experimental film background and my idea initially was to expressionistically render different scenes or situations that I thought might be related to the iconography of Arthur’s music. the places he traversed through his life. Upon having that idea, I wrote to Tom Lee. Months late Tom contacted me and when I met with him I was really inspired by him. As you see in the film, he is very emotionally available, open and generous and his connection to Arthur is still very much alive and real. It’s something in-between being in the world of that. how weird it would be if some kid makes a movie about your life and one day you are watching the story of your relatively humble life unfolding through someone’s interpretation…A subject of a kind of renaissance. How weird that must be for Tom. He’s filled with a lot of joy, but there’s also something uncanny and strange about it.

It’s got to be bittersweet.

I think Arthur had such a self-defeating streak that may have provided obstacles to a film being made or a book being written or albums even being released. I think Tom and the parents are really pleased with the way his work has been re-contextualized and re-appreciated.

Why has it experienced a renaissance?

I feel like Arthur’s music is very prescient, it speaks to a Zeitgeist. Being in that moment it’s difficult to reflect on that. it seems that at this particular moment, so many people of my generation, the larger culture are interested in this time period. The time period of the 70s and 80s was so fertile, so productive, and so radicalized that it may have been difficult to understand it at that moment. It’s compelling and intriguing to reflect back on it. at the same time, Arthur’s music is mistaken as contemporary all the time for the way that it sounds for its ease in hybridizing different genres and ignoring and rejecting distinctions between different kind of musical codes and rules and expectations. That kind of spirit is more acceptable now.

The positivity, the optimism and effervescence in his music is a refreshing antidote to 90s cynicism, what I call Class of 2000 ennui. He sings about birthday parties and swimming and treehouses, being in love and being lonely, very simple and childlike, buoyant ways. And that’s refreshing.

On one hand, there’s this real physicality, distinct pleasures, then this disembodiment a body-less music, an immaterial entity.

The experience of understanding his music after his death, Calling out of Context, that experience of sound in this free-from oceanic scape. Arthur being this figure that can exist beyond his life. The metaphor of calling out of context, the idea of sound and water and disembodiment.

Why Wild Combination as the title?

I’m very bad at naming things. I was more comfortable picking “A Portrait of Arthur Russell.” I wanted to avert expectations for some sort of definitive biography. The film would’ve remained something (that just) dug deeper into musical lore with more interviews technical explanations. There’s definitely ellipses and things left out of the film that instead makes space for more expressionistic and visual material or more emotional material with the family, the parents and Tom. I’m more into the film to avoid those expectations. “Wild Combination” was the song that Arthur wanted to be his big hit. He imagined people would cover that song, that it would have the biggest legacy. I just think the title is a good metaphor for Arthur’s practice between disco and the avant-garde.

Did you find it hard to bring the different worlds together? To touch on them all?

Not in a behind the scenes way, but yes. A lot of people from the world of disco died but the people who are still alive have at times a jaded perspective because it’s been mythologized, oversaturated. There was alot of drugs, a lot of people died. People’s memories are not as rose-tinted. The avant-garde scene tends to archive itself. There was difficulty and differences in constructing stories. In terms of telling a story it seemed like a logical progression. The film may suggest in a way that’s impossible in the story…it’s inevitable he did the avant-garde and then he did disco and then he did World of Echo , when in fact he was doing all of these things simultaneously. That was a particular challenge in the film to relay the simultaneity.
There wasn’t a linear progression of Arthur’s musical interest. It was all concurrent. That was the biggest representational challenge in the film. Who knows if people really understand it as something that was a progression of interests, I don’t think it matters. By understanding all those things you get a fuller picture.

The avant guys seems to never know about these other parts, or appreciate it. I bought my copy of Tower of Meaning from a NY composer who knew of that disco work, but didn’t rank it.

But Philip Glass said: “That was obvious to us. We were composers who were pursuing an audience for our work, we were performers. We evolved this classical tradition in ways that were akin to modern rock’n’roll." Glass was a trailblazer collaborating with David Bowie and other pop musicians. From his point of view, it was a logical extension of the way composers of this new classical tradition were working.

But they never quite made pop songs.

Arthur pushed that a little more aggressively. Philip Glass has a signature style and sound and he has been able to bring that into different contexts. That’s amazing. Arthur wasn’t like that.

Do you think those failures made Arthur branch into different things? That if he had gotten commissions, might he have stuck to that?

I think a lot of it was career prowess in that he was pursuing things that would hit, or that would work. He was producing disco records that worked (so) he kept producing disco records. He made an avant-garde composition, “Instrumentals,” which has an immediate relationship to pop music but was still in the vein of Kitchen composers. And he got the Robert Wilson opportunity. That opportunity was a failure. But what if he had a long-standing collaboration with Robert Wilson, he could’ve been composing for international operas and vanguard theatre directors. These were all his interests, but he was also following opportunities. Unfortunately none of them worked out.

ABBA was his big thing. Ernie called it “transcendent pop music.” ABBA and Fleetwood Mac. When I heard that I listened to them differently. Thinking about the transcendence in F-Mac and ABBA. It’s so emotionally transporting. It inspires me. I think it’s a value we should have about all art. Something that has that transcendent possibility, that could reach everybody. It’s not academic it’s not just intuitive. Both structure and emotional ends. It really inspired me, that value for everything.

It’s alright to like ABBA.

Arthur was really obsessed with ABBA. Among many other things.

What was something you learned about Arthur from the project?

I didn’t know anything about him. My perspective is different. Tim Lawrence (who is working on a book about Arthur Russell) knows everything that ever happened to Arthur. He really unearthed a lot of information. For me I don’t go into a project, my first significant project. I don’t research and then produce. The production is a sustained form of research. I didn’t know anything when I started except my own personal connection and relationship with his music. the experience of the interviews, all the people I met, that’s what I learned most.

With the dearth of info, did that help?

I wanted to avoid the traps of music documentaries. I’m not a huge fan. I don’t read books about music. I’m not a fiend for fandom stuff. I went into it wanting to make an experimental film, the lack of material was a productive constraint. It enabled me to think outside the box about how to bring the material to life. It made the process more interesting.

I’m curious about Tim’s book, though I’m trying to think of something more boring than reading about disco.

Tim’s an academic. Part of me desires that encyclopedic knowledge. I don’t pursue it. For me, I’m more interested in developing a personal lexicon, an archive of experiences. Arthur was one of those really intense experiences I had just connecting to something culturally and artistically. It was more my desire to trust that connection and develop it. Because I felt there was so much emotional resonance in the actual material. The main reason I really focused on Tom and the parents is that I felt that it resonated most intensely with them.

There’s this intimacy.

Knowing he’s producing all the time it feels like this directness, not stream-of-consciousness but the diaristic, going home and writing songs. Everyday re-recording them. you feel this proximity to his self. That was particularly useful. I wouldn’t look for the dairies of Arthur Russell, the music is them.

rambota

Random notes on Myanmar:

"A blood bath punctuated by occasional bouts of clumsy dialogue...but the movie does have its own kind of blockheaded poetry," said A.O. Scott as Rambo IV bombed at the box office. Myself, I was strangely desperate to see it, but at that point, knowing that there would not be time to venture to Myanmar, I became taken by any and all accounts of that land. That said, I foolishly pass up the pirated copies of Rambo that could be found in street stalls in Bangkok, thinking it would somehow still be in theatres upon my return. In a photocopied newspaper found in the western part of Cambodia, I read about Stallone's press-baiting of the Burmese junta, applauding that the movie was making the bootleg rounds there, stating he'd be more than happy to go find the mass graves of ethnic minorities to prove his point, but that was as close as I got to Myanmar itself.

Instead, I read a bootlegged, photocopied-to-thin-newsprint-paper copy of Emma Larkin's curious book, Finding George Orwell in Burma, which argues that Orwell's 1984 world is drawn not exclusively from the Soviet state, but rather that of Burma, where Orwell served as a police officer during the decline of the British empire, a foot soldier for such oppression.

***

“Truth is true only within a certain period of time. What was truth once may no longer be truth after many months or years.”

A Myanmar spokesperson, talking (yet not talking) about the events of "shiq lay-lone" (four eights), a quashed political uprising in Burma that occurred on August 8th, 1988. No wait, it didn't happen. Larkin notes how post-'88, the military erased the violent protests from the record books and renamed itself State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). When another power shuffling happened nearly a decade on, it led to a new name, State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). If you think it's difficult to keep up with the names, she also writes that upon her arrival in any area of Myanmar, nine departments were bid to be aware of a foreign presence in their midst, meaning nine photocopies of her passport and visa to: Township Land Police, the Township Water Police, the District Land Police, the District Water Police, the Immigration Department, the Local Peace and Development Council, the District Peace and Development Council, the Military, and Military Intelligence.

So which one is shifting sandbags? Sawing at fallen trees? Which entity sells highly-inflated petrol, the attendants gripping automatic rifles as they pour?

***

What's with getting a firm tsk-tsk from Laura Bush?

***

The lecturing monk at the meditation center in northern Thailand talks about the great peril of simply going to the neighboring country, seeing all the starving children, knowing that not even Buddhist monks are safe from the junta, knowing that government agents are planted in their ranks, with shaved heads and burgundy robes. I can still hear how he clearly intones the word "hungry."

***

Apparently, the (insert opposing nation) pundits foolishly thought that the grossly negligent oversight and bungling by the government in the wake of (insert natural disaster that killed scores of indigenous poor) might destabilize the country's impoverished state and lead to that military-industrial state's overthrow. The Saints played Monday Night Football in the Superdome, so we know that New Orleans is back to normal at least.

***

"One thing they never report," a fellow tells me in Laos, after learning that I am a journalist. "is how China, India, and Thailand prop up and support the junta, with China building munitions factories for the military. None of Burma's neighbors want unstability, lest it spill over across their borders. They don't want regime change."

Funny how my slowly accrued impressions come from hearsay, photocopied pages and books, conflicting video clips, wholly removed, all secondhand at best.

***

From an unpublished interview with Alan Bishop:

"I first went to Burma in 1993 (12 years after SCG began). I had never heard Burmese music before that and the experience of first coming in contact with it had a huge amount to do with me being interested in releasing some of the music I had been collecting all through the years simply because I found it difficult to believe why I hadn't heard Burmese music before---it was so brilliant, so adventurous and unique, I thought it was criminal that there were no Burmese records to hear anywhere.

"I began realizing that the international music giants have their heads so far up their asses that their financiers and management should be publicly slaughtered by dull axe blades for never roaming the world and reissuing the great music that exists out there. They waste way more money every year on endless garbage than it would take to do what I was to eventually become a major part of doing later with Sublime Frequencies. I was literally floored by Burmese music... much more so than by any other music I had ever heard before. When I brought back some recordings from that first trip and played them to Nick at Majora Records, he immediately wanted to do a release of Burmese classics on LP and so Princess Nicotine was finished within a year or so and actually came out before the Cambodian Rocks LP showed up."

Me: "I was wondering if you were familiar with this Emma Larkin book, Finding George Orwell in Burma. And if you saw the last Rambo movie?"

Alan Bishop: "No, haven't read it. I saw the movie (I always monitor the propaganda on both sides of the Burmese situation)....somewhat ridiculous but entertaining in a weird way, especially because my wife and daughter were laughing every time Stallone butchered the Burmese while he was attempting to speak!

"But there is only one side to the Burmese Junta story circulating outside the country. It is an extremely complex issue and there's hardly an international journalist alive today who even has a fucking clue as to what's really going on there--they all tout the same line coming from the same source that fucks us all in the ass daily with all the news that's 'fit' to print!!"

beta and servants

In anticipation of my friend and fellow Tex-pat cohort Jackie Gendel's new show of portraits, which opens tomorrow at the Moti Hassan Gallery, I'm re-posting something I wrote on her previous exhibit:

Like some sort of leitmotif in Pierre Michon's Masters and Servants, his narrators often compare paint to honey. Poured gold, pure in sunlight, a viscous substance, an ambrosia, the metaphor sticks. Five stories meditate on the relationship between painter and subject. Starting with Vincent Van Gogh's portraits of Joseph Roulin, Michon muses on a relationship between the two men far from the easel and canvas, be it hunched over glasses with sugarcubes plunked in la Fee Vert, in slurred speech about la republique or an unanswered exchange through the post office. Michon dwells also on Goya, before wading deeper into the despairing nature of painting, to that artistic gesture that fails against the immense face of time, to obscured, non-existent artists who are lost to the centuries, their work warped and destroyed by sun and bonfire, by negligence, by simply being. People can get lost, even when set into that amber...er honey of portraiture.

Going to see my friend Jackie Gendel's exhibit recently, her paint feels more like milk, to where faces seem spilt, diluted, either curdling or evaporating, half and half. Her exhibit is a series of portraits, but the faces would never conjure a specific sitter. The glowing review in New Yorker notes a vegetal palette, stating "the underlying subject, however, isn't the figure or its identity but the process of painting itself, and how...subjects are chameleons who can't make up their minds what gender, setting, or century they inhabit."

Her work devastates me the night I finally get to glimpse them. Nevermind that it's one of the most brutal days I've experienced all year-long. Dealing with a sick family member, with a break-up, with a downpour of rain that soaks me through, by the time I arrive, I feel as if the centrifuge in my mind is about to spin me apart. Walking through the rain, everywhere I look, I see fliers that read: "The female is a chaos." Despite being freshly printed, the paper curls and dissolves in the downpour, to where the appropriated Ezra Pound quote reads like some ancient adage.

Inside, soaked, my white shoes taking on the color of my socks, my shirt clinging to my skin so as to become it, I stare into these hanging portraits. They steal my face and I'm lost in the void of them. Veils of brows, cheeks, lips, eye sockets continually peel away, staged characters and multiple personalities at war. My eyes, anxious, terrified, search in vain for a core, a center to it, a familiar face to reassure me, but none comes forth from her canvasses. I need something to hold onto.

It's a centuries-old struggle to exist, to swim up against the tide of rain and to remain in a place, anyplace. Her portraits (which can all be glimpsed here) embrace both disolution and illumination, the rot and evergreen of this skin, these faces. I can no longer recognize anybody in the gallery, even the face of an old lover turns to that of a stranger. Even milk and honey menaces with such a transformation.

(Her) profile was merging with the foliage, enough in shadow that flesh had become light, a ghost or a thing of the trees...the one whose features we recognize -- the full cheeks and mouth, the long neck and throat -- she sank away at the instant of her cry, disappearing, becoming this superlative creature, exalted and ferocious...more imaginary than angels, but like angels was given glorious body and fabular flesh, and like them let out a sort of exaggerated song.

invasion of the beta snatchers

I bought a bunch of these tea balls when in China, compacted little green buds that would give High Times readers fits. When plunked into hot water, these pods bloom, bristling outwards and shooting an alien flower out past the water's surface. It almost looks too good to drink.

What it winds up reminding me of most is Invasion of the Body Snatchers, at least the eerie and unsettling 1981 remake with Donald Sutherland and Leonard Nimoy, its weird shoot perhaps about to create a gooey pod in my likeness as I sip at the green tea. It's been awhile since a movie frightened me so much, and watching it late one night, when my long-absent roomie happened to come home, I almost set her on fire, convinced she was a pod person. Meanwhile in the next room, my other roommate has subsequently killed every single pot he's been plant-sitting for over the past two months.


"I watched a flowering plum come in and out of blossom and at night, most nights, I walked outside and looked up to where the cyclotron and the bevatron glowed on the dark hillside, unspeakable mysteries which engaged me, in the style of my time, only personally." --Joan Didion, The White Album

Soon after that, I visited a horticulturist friend of mine up in the sticks, his house filled with all sorts of strange plants. While my oak allergies were crippling out there (yet another example of the plant kingdom attacking the animal kingdom, I conjectured between sneezing fits and fiery inhalations), I nevertheless found myself longing to wheelbarrow mulch about the yard, plant tulips, and have dozens of tiny heirloom tomato stalks ready to go in the ground. It also didn't hurt to hear his out-there neighbor, a Vietnam Vet obsessed with both Bill Evans and power-lifting, talk about growing a new strain of Lights and Haze.

Another strange after-effect of watching Body Snatchers is that I went out immediately to IKEA and bought a bunch of plants, my room now green with hanging ivy, geraniums, and aloe vera. I find myself strangely addicted to the act of watering and potting, and am now on the lookout for other plants to hang with.