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.

dirty projectors interview

If you read the internets, you've no doubt already had the Dirty Projectors' new album, Bitte Orca, shoved down your throat. By which I mean, lovingly and deliciously shoved down your throat, as BO is a wondrous thing in 2009, something I never thought I'd admit for a work of theirs. In the past, DP mainman Dave Longstreth and his work struck me as too precious and precocious, over-thought and over-wrought. But within moments of "Cannibal Resource" I was converted. A metaphor excised from my Spin review perhaps put that transition best: "Like a pineapple, Longstreth’s prickly surface now belies the pop within: bright, tart, sweet, and gushing all at once." It helped that I spent plenty of time with the album down in the Caribbean. Anyhow, I had a chance to chat with Longstreth over a bowl of black rice as he mused about mis-translations, Coltrane's Meditations, Paper Rad, and Henry Rollins as mere mouthpiece for Greg Ginn's vision.

I moved to New York in 2005. I did finish my studies at Yale. I thought I was leaving for awhile because I hated it.

What did you hate about it?

I hated the attitude, I’m super into learning and stuff like that. Just the feeling of that at the school, is just kinda gross.

What does it emphasize instead?

Instead of a noble and clear pursuit of knowledge? The same shit that college anywhere is about, or academia. Specifically, I wanted to study painting and music together. You come up to a certain point where you can learn about the history and the technique, but you can’t really teach the thing itself.

It’s a giant metaphor.

Yeah, a giant metaphor. There’s this reverence for the way things were done that was just stiff and unnatural.

Do you study painting still?

I’m focused on music.

I think it’s funny your band name invokes this other medium and discipline.

Porn you mean.

Nonono. My girlfriend is a filmmaker and she goes “a dirty projector is my nemesis." Then there’s “DP” double penetration jokes too.

I didn’t think about that at the time.

What did it stem from?

I like the idea of it being an open phrase. I like the idea of a psychological projection, the idea of sharing or agreeing on a mutually blurred image. Also just the idea of this bloom of imagination that happens when things are translated poorly, mistranslated, um…which is something that I feel like is a generative principle in the music that I write.

Glitches and the like? I was thinking of this correspondence that takes part in Ulysses, where Bloom has this affair with a woman and the woman means to write “I do not like that word” but instead misspells it as “world.” It totally changes everything. It’s this amazing mistake.

Totally! What if she does mean ‘world’?

(mention getting a word from "Stillness is the Move" in the review wrong)

That’s my shit! I don’t know if you’re looking for it, but when it first occurred to me that one could try to re-imagine an album from memory (Rise Above) and I was thinking of Damaged, I was like…at first I was horrified of the idea but I went “That’s what I have to do.’ That was the most explicitly expository of a mode of dirty projection that I’ve done so far. The songs on this album that I wrote for the girls were coming from a similar place. Seeing if I could transpose a melody that I’ve written into this other instrument, if I could speak through them. That idea of taking one thing from one idiom and putting it in another.

Did you ever get feedback from Ginn or Rollins about Rise Above?

Rollins yes, but Ginn no. But to clarify, I'm completely uninterested in Rollins. Rollins is a figurehead; it’s Ginn’s vision. You know your shit, but it’s not about Rollins.

Ginn is the shredder visionary.

He was in some documentary recently, where they managed to interview him. And he was soooo stoney. He was on another plane. And it felt like this kind of…not to draw a Stephen Dedealus thing, but I would’ve loved to be there with him in that kind of moment, responding to it. Dead Oceans made an effort to get in touch with him, to get his approval, also from a pragmatic, copyright approach. He was just OUT. Not available. But when we played in Austin on the tour, I guess Rollins was doing “spoken word.”

AKA a stand-up routine.

AKA motivational speaking for dispossesed teenagers. Which is a mildly noble pursuit. The next day he’s in Waterloo just as my friend had pressed play on Rise Above. He was walking around, glancing up at the speakers amusedly. An interesting footnote is that apparently Rollins bought a whole bunch of Sun Ra and West African guitar music. Which I thought was hilarious.

“I suddenly need some Thomas Mapfumo…” But back to the girls and transposing your intent onto them, was there any correction on their part? Like, saying that a girl wouldn’t express something in such a way? As a man, I wonder if a woman would think like me?

No, I just wrote the songs. Haha. I was thinking about that, especially on “Two Doves.” It was really funny to write that.

That was even more of an originating idea for the album was the old truism that an indie rock band is only as good as its record collection. One thing that annoyed me about Rise Above in hindsight was how I had unwittingly played into that, pitting West African guitar music against Black Flag. It was a totally awesome thing I was thinking about, but I like the idea for the new album to be about taking the most blockbuster references. Basically carving my musical language into a bedrock of the most blockbuster references. Songs that are just unequivocally successful music, in terms of progeny that our culture has: Timbaland, Zeppelin, the Beatles. Music that it’s pointless to like or dislike and see if we could maintain that.

Bitte Orca is the German word for please and then the carnivorous whale. The song with that phrase, I feel like there was a meaning…the way it relates to the music is twofold: in the broad sense, there is something gentle and barbed in that combination of words. Something smooth and jagged. Sweet and sour. I love music like Coltrane in ’65, this kind of apex that is resolving apparent opposites, taking two things that are on opposite ends of a spectrum and showing them to be totally entwined. As Coltrane took the technical and the spiritual expression as totally one.

The end of his classic quartet or more with Rashied Ali and Alice Coltrane?

I was thinking of Meditations.

That's funny, as I always think of that particular record as having a true dichotomy between chaos and peace.

I guess in the past, I tried to do that with the music that I’ve written. Not only have it be on a level, but to have this corresponding idea frame, which I never really considered essential to the enjoyment of the music, but as another layer of it. With these songs, I tried to just ask less of the songs in the hope that they could be bigger.

You went through a lot of band members, did you not? Was it a personal thing or was it a difficulty in getting the vision properly transcribed?

Wanting to have it bend to the music. The way DP started was me writing the music because I write and I’ve always written music. It started as an art project. I didn’t think about it as a rock band or career, I just did it because I do it. It wasn’t until I was touring so much that it was time for me to simplify and codify this a little bit in January of ’07.

Was it hard to find the right personnel to carry it?

Yes and no. Our instincts were good. Looking back it feels very haphazard. It all made sense.

Was it pre-meditated to have a more feminine aspect to it?

I like music and art and literature for that matter that posits its own world. Wagner, William Blake, or Coltrane, or Ulysses, something that is an entire world. A balance of masculine and feminine. Kinda retarded but magazines ask artists to generate content for them so they don’t have to pay anyone. I ended up doing ten songs that fit the broadest and most inclusive aspects of “new jack swing.” The expressiveness of R&B to bear. Two things that appeal to me about that, that uniting of opposites and the masculine-feminine, rhythmic, melodic, bringing it all together. The way the band has formed totally makes sense.

What is startling about Bitte Orca is that the album has the feminine songs as the centerpiece.

This is the first album where I’m writing for this group of people, for Angel, Amber, Brian, me. The treatment of the girls as alternate embodiments of myself. The polyphony and hocketed stuff…That wasn’t a pre-ordained idea. I wanted it to be like a Beatles album, with everybody having their own tune. It’s just what felt natural (in terms of sequence). Which one is it? This one, it appeared in a certain form.

What about how the cover of Slaves’ Graves being re-iterated a second time?

Right! As I was writing the basic cassette versions of the melodies, I wanted that to be the cover, Amber and Angel enacting that emblem. I like the idea of revisiting an old idea in progressively greater detail..

When you read these spiritual tracts about going in a circle or what have you, there’s this sense of returning to the starting point, but one step up. A spiral more than a circle.

A cyclical idea of history. I love it. For sure.

What was the first African thing you got into?

There was that Eno essay about the migration of African musical something. He calls it something awesome, the transmigration of something. It starts with the Congo, gets into the slave trade, to the West Indies, down into Brazil, up into Spain. It’s this amazing historical map that he did. Just seeing how Fela was re-Africanizing James Brown just a few years after James Brown had gotten Africanized.

Or Ali Farka Touré hearing the blues and folding that back in, to where western ears hear him as John Lee Hooker…

I can see where that’s coming from. Oh! Have you heard Group Doueh? That to me is that moment!

(Play him the new Sublime Frequencies release from Group Bombino and then quote his quote from The Believer about "contextualizing the international music/ American 'independent' music relationship (not just sanitation, domestication, and theft, but proper deconstruction, abstraction, and creative misreading)
I like that on SF stuff, you can hear rock’n’roll becoming Thai pop but mishearing it and vice versa.

Yeah, I can’t remember the exact context in writing that but yeah, it’s an awesome time to be making music, just to be involved in the whole thing. The trading of ideas and stuff like that is…I feel like it is a different model than the Graceland love and theft way. I feel like it’s a different sort of paradigm.

Do you get to engage with people outside of indie rock, outside of the states?

We might play some shows with Ali Farka Touré’s son, which would be soo cool.

I’m one of those people that engages with the rhythm. I love to engage with language and trying to, particularly with poetry, examine from all possible angles, which can be a source of playfulness or airlessness. Earlier albums and earlier lyrics that I’ve written, I let that reign, this interest in language as a slippery thing. Less so with this album. I just wanted to be more direct. To me a way of getting at that was being less conscious of the things that we’re all singing. Just letting them. Not not editing exactly, but just doing it.

Can you tell me a bit about the lyrics for "Temecula Sunrise"?

This came out of this discussion I had with James about these Paper Rad kids camping out in these warehouses in Providence, these disused artifacts of this different social organization. We were thinking of these miles and miles of new construction subdivisions that blanket the landscape outside of every city in the US. On tour, you’re driving through them, before and after the city, these new construction zones. After the social impetus that makes these things pass, we were imagining what these buildings would be used for. We had these ecstatic artist kids just painting crazy murals and making funny Utopian art in a new construction home in Temecula, California.

beta's sweet dreams

For all of the Japanese readers of Beta Blog, a head's up: I just received a parcel from the fine people at Sweet Dreams Press. Included in the package is not only a delicate little book on Ida (including many swell pictures of one-time Graham Ave. record pusher Miggy Littleton) but also a copy of their latest issue (#4), which features a Japanese translation of my interview with Alan Bishop about "world music" (originally in The Believer's 2008 music issue).

black beta

I was stoked to play a few tunes with my DJ partner Anna for the Black Dice/ Awesome Color/ Soft Circle show last night at the Bowery Ballroom. Over the years, I've no doubt seen Black Dice more than any other band in NYC, and every encounter only convinces me that they are one of the heaviest bands out there today, at once hardcore punk and electronic and noise and avant-garde yet not belonging anywhere. And once Danny Perez's insane video projections are added to the mix, it's an assault on all eyes and ears that no one is close to topping. But my admiration of the group might already be evident. I even jotted down my setlist (which I never ever do elsewhere), which veered from New Age to R&B to post-punk in a few moves:

Tibetan Bells/ Henry Wolff and Nancy Hennings: "Wrathful Deity"
Children's Hospital: "Left Handed"
Francis Bebey: "Binta Madiallo"
Spiritual Singers: "African People"
Studio: "Life's a Beach" (Todd Terje's Beach House Mix) at about 38 rpm
Tom Tom Club: "Spooks"
Black Cock: "Love Finger" also at about 38 rpm
Aaliyah: "One in a Million"

(Anna's set and Soft Circle's set)

Ut: "Mosquito Boticelli"
Honey Bane: "Guilty" (JD Twitch re-edit)
Grace Jones: "Private Life"
Jackie Mittoo: "Ayatollah" (real world relevance!)
Funkadelic: "Be What You Is"
The Residents: "Diskomo"

(and then Awesome Color, Anna's second set, and Black Dice)

stephen o'malley interview

For the Sunn O))) listening session from a month or so back, I conducted interviews with both Sunn's Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley. I had met Anderson a few times randomly, but this was my first chance to engage in a dialogue with O'Malley. Quiet, focused, yet open, O'Malley and I chatted abit about his work with artist Banks Violette, my recent obsession with Robert Irwin and perception, and about the Richard Serra painting that adorns the cover of their latest album. Below are a few choice quotes from our chat:

The direction we decided to do before we started anything is to finally work with acoustic instrumentation, to bring that to the table. And then we fleshed it out. Specifically, the integration of acoustic instruments, we wanted it to be a real integration, not just an additional element. It had to be musically relevant. Part of the inspiration of that came from French composers who work in a ‘spectralist’ style. Their style of composition is based on computer analysis of timbre. They’ll work backwards. A lot of it sounds electronic, but it’s not so simple as that. Hallucinatory, like Messiaen. Spectral composers are scientific. That’s all about perception. It’s not illusion. Illusion is the expectation of how an instrument should sound.

It’s extremely focused on sensorial aspects. I like such extreme experiences like isolation chambers. It allows you to re-examine your own work, see flaws, see other details. Of all the records I’ve made, this is one that continually is opening up with more listening.
...
It’s like family, this band. The people that get involved, you get to be really close. But it’s not the other experience I had with bands, where it gets to be bad. You’re not in the band to be friends. It’s been one of the main points working with people. It’s that friendship. It’s a pretty tremendous experience playing the music live so you have to be trustful and confident.
...
It’s spanning generations now with this record. Those guys are old-timers, in their 70s. Dempster has more energy than everyone else. He’s been doing yoga 50 years now. Meanwhile Priester is out in the parking lot. I don’t smoke anymore actually. But they’re deep listeners. They’ve been making experimental free music since the 60s. In some ways, it’s cool to feel you are part of this longer tradition by having these guys involved. We’re the generation doing it now.
...
I hope people who get into Sunn get into other stuff, going backward through the catalogs, references, like I do with music. Real music fans are always doing that, the quest to find the ultimate records, it’s the exploration. That’s the joy of music. If we can turn some kid on at the Hot Topic...fuck. I bought Darkthrone at the mall in Seattle. To be able to do that again, that’s the theory. Hot Topic, it’s fucking hilarious. But teenagers are into it.
...
This record really goes into the musicality of it though. I used to think Sunn was more about repetition in the style of raga perhaps, then cycles. But I found recently that it seems more cyclic than ever, a continual tone, a slow build, a continual piece more than repetition. The focus on the actual musicality has become much more tuned in. musical aspects have been…There is something about the repetition of playing concerts. That’s where the music actually exists. That’s the reality, the manifestation of it, that’s the only thing that matters. Everything else is just documenting. I’m really into that, exploring that way. That seems more like penance somehow (laughs).

tortureta

For reasons just slightly beyond my grasp, I keep finding nestled underneath my "entertainments" the leviathan of torture. For example, the last two pieces I read in the New Yorker (on vacation in paradise no less) were about Rwanda fifteen years after genocide and the lingering psychological damage of solitary confinement in America's maximum security prisons.

And when I have a Netflix movie drop into the mailbox, and it turns out to be Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, about an Nazi concentration camp survivor and sex slave encountering her master/ tormentor in a Viennese hotel, thus re-igniting their relationship 15 years on.

Giving myself over to such torture, I also tried watching Dennis Hopper in Mad Dog Morgan, which similarly depicts situations in an Australian jail in 19th century. Only, I couldn't get past Dennis Hopper all strung-out, jittery and gulping down great quantities of opium smoke while also trying to pull off an Irish brogue. Insufferable.

***

And I just finished reading Lawrence Wechsler's A Miracle, A Universe, a harrowing yet rewarding read about how societies in Brazil and Uruguay grappled with the specter of torture and punishment after decades under brutal military dictatorships. Not only can you learn just when to drink your own urine (within an hour after the uric crystals sink to the bottom of the tin can) but also learn about atypical torture techniques in Brazil, such as "cockroaches inserted in the anus, being forced to ingest large quantities of salt and then denied water for several days, being forced to drink one's own urine." Presumably, it's after that first hour has passed.

Attending a dinner party in Montevideo, Wechsler notes that one guest describes how such torture ultimately shuts down the society at large: "Our own lives became increasingly constricted. The process of self-censorship was incredibly insidious: it wasn't just that you stopped talking about certain things with other people -- you stopped thinking them yourself. Your internal dialogue just dried up."

Torture becomes less the punishment of a specific individual and more for the society surrounding that person. In almost every instance, it seeks to shred the social fabric instead. Wechsler quotes Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, noting that "the civilian public unintentionally allies itself with the torturer." It becomes a matter of inxile and introjection, being trapped within your own body and suffering "the destruction of the personhood of a person," transforming from subject into object.

***

A painter friend visited me just last week, about to relocate out west, and offered up a recent painting of his that he has yet to unload. It gobbles up an entire wall and it's a glowing, instantly eerie thing. Its subject is a non-descript tin shed erected at Abu Ghraib. The viewer might fail to grasp what truly happened behind its flimsy walls yet it somehow knows. I politely demur.

heep see (special scopitone version)

Inspired by a DVD sent by David Serlin, who penned this loving tribute to the Scopitone in an early issue of Cabinet. Believe he sold me on such campy celluloid by deeming it "the Dead Sea Scrolls of music videos" or something similarly biblical.











(This one might be my favorite, as the woman has a set of furry panties that match her poodle.)

juan maclean interview pt. 2

Well, onto The Future Will Come. "Happy House" came before it. Where were you when you did “Happy House”? It has this domestic aspect to it...

You mean...why is it so happy?

Basically.

It’s because of you (points to girlfriend). That’s not true.

My girlfriend thinks it’s about her.

It’s such an ultimate girlfriend song. Actually, three people have told me that they have used it as their wedding song, which is really nice, actually.

“You’re so damn excellent” is such a weird way of saying whatever. Usually, it’s couched in something else.

It says something that people would have a really hard time expressing themselves. Especially if you’re a self-centered hipster. Like we are. You can’t be excited and honest about anything. But I really actually think that’s why it resonated with a lot of people, our peers. And that was…there was a conscious decision to do that, to approach the entire album in that way. In a way that Nancy and I both were like: “We’re going to do a vocal-oriented album, it became apparent that the one thing we had to write about was this very specific thing of personal romantic relationships and uhm…we made the decision to be as honest and sincere as possible, at the risk of sounding trite and especially operating in the hipster world and electronic dance music world where lyrics and vocals tend to be couched in irony or some kind of surface.

Dance music is always very physical and temporal, not emotional and monogamous in relationships. It’s anonymous. To be domesticated is just…

It was the experience…the hipster turning 30 finally kind of thing. But “Happy House” was done at the same time the whole album was done. It wasn’t done before. It’s funny because we had picked…it had been so long since I released anything. What could we put out that’s deeper, won’t be a single, that just gets me back on the radar. I had no idea. I loved the song but I had no idea it would resonate the way that it did, the dance twelve of the year in that world, basically.

And all the financial success that that brings.

That I could kick back the rest of my life, a million free downloads yet again. I didn’t know. It sidetracked things actually, well, you can’t put out an album right after that now. You have to let it play out. It was definitely the theme of the entire album though.

With anyone in mind?

It’s an amalgamation of previous relationships. And Nancy and I have known each other for so long, so well about these things that it was easy. We went to this wooded studio in Woodstock, New York to do the vocals. We would sit on a couch and write back and forth to each other and laugh. So much of it was about our experiences being musicians and living that kind of impermanent, nomadic lifestyle. And you’re not…just personality-wise you tend to be much harder to deal with, very self-absorbed and that kind of thing.
Nancy had a longtime boyfriend who lived in Belgium, Steph of Soulwax. And so…(forgets train of thought) A lot of it, but more so than even being impermanent, which for us is not necessarily true. Everyone around here at DFA is a little bit older and more into being at home. People are married and have kids. So everyone that tours here won’t go away for too long or bring their wives and girlfriends. For me, Nancy as well but for different reasons, it was just about being this type of person who seemed totally baffled by relationships and never having them work out for any long period of time. I feel like on my end of it, it was…some things are very specific for sure.

So what’s specific on the album then?

The ballad “Human Disaster” that’s a very specific thing about a specific person and a situation for sure.

The way it’s set up, it’s a crash and burn and having “Happy House” completes yet re-creates this cycle.

That was an intentional thing in sequencing. The way that we wrote the songs and what songs we picked, it was supposed to tell a story that we had written out.

It was like that Bergman film, Scenes of a Marriage.

That’s what the idea was. The conflict and coming together and that kind of thing. That’s why “Happy House” is at the end, to leave it “happy,” a Hollywood ending. That’s why “Tonight” is the last song on side one, a much more positive coming-together kind of thing. “Happy House” is the last song on side two.

Did you hear back from Dubtribe Soundsystem about it? Did their sample come first?

That was…I actually had all the rhythms written for that song and we wanted to have a piano on it and just lifted the piano from that song. “That goes perfectly on there.” I never tried to find or make any claim that it was anything other than that. It was funny, guys on blogs and messageboards love to point it out. Somehow, this whole culture…I can’t read that stuff it makes me so crazy, that whole culture, there’s this whole thing where people priding themselves on pointing out where you’ve stolen from and that it somehow discredits what you’ve done. Where in fact, since the beginning of pop music, that’s all anyone has done.

Half of Shakespeare is where he took things from and how he put them back together.

Sunshine, the male of Dubtribe, they were hippies. He got in touch with me and told me how much he loved the song. So I’m going to have him do a remix which is a big fuck you to all the guys on the blogs upset. Someone actually wrote me to say “I’m going to tell on you. I’m going to write to Dubtribe and tell them what you did.” And the funny thing about “Do it Now,” it’s literally the piano part (which they sampled) and then the rest of the track is “I Am Every Woman” by Chaka Khan. It’s just those two things put together. (Laughs)

It’s like that Saul Bellow quote: “You’re aloud to steal anything that you’re strong enough to carry out.”

Exactly. That whole culture of…it’s a very American thing, a male thing. It’s an upper-class, over-educated, too much time on their hands, of getting into that world of being an uber-critic. It’s just been a long time problem of hipsterdom. People are so terrified of actually standing for something, being a fan of something. It’s much easier to pan something. It’s the go-to thing for critics of our generation. It’s an easy default. When in doubt, go to the pan. Somehow being negative and critical of something, people think you know what you’re talking about.

Or you could only be enthusiastic about something if you’re a-historical.

This is dangerous territory for me to get into but Hercules and Love Affair, it was my favorite album of the year. But when Pitchfork picked “Blind” as their number one song of the year and much of their dealings with Hercules, it felt like this affirmative action sort of thing. Finally, we can show you we’re not homophobic. Seeee, we like gay stuff, too. That’s a huge element to their approval.

Or like when Pitchfork got into Clipse.

Trying too hard to show that you’re not racist or homophobic. When in that world, it’s always been…racism and homophobia are pillars of rock, of hipsterdom. Of people coming from this collegiate, upper middle-class world. Which is fine. That’s where people have come from. But it’s not fine when it plays out…they’re the first people to say “I’m no racist, I’m not homophobic, I’m not sexist.” But in all of the things that they do, all of those things seem to creep out.

With disco and people discovering disco, James Murphy and I always talked about how disco edits, the whole point is to take out “the gay part.” The gay flourishes are always taken out and you’re left with this very rock thing that’s easy for people to like. DJing, the more indie-rock the audience, they’re so turned off by anything gay. Like, really turned off.

It's like when I wrote about disco edits and talked about how straight and white it has become. No black people, no Puerto Ricans, no gay people, it took thirty years to get white-washed. Back to topic though, was Nancy as big a part on Less Than Human? She seems to be such a big part of LCD.

In thinking about that, she has sung on very little LCD stuff. Little yells here and there and then she plays keyboard in the live band. Nancy is on many songs of mine in the past. (tape cuts off)

Does the relationship play a big part in terms of…?

For sure. That’s where all of this stuff came from. It’s always the most intense emotional things that you’re writing about. You’re not writing about “It was sooo nice when we cuddled on the couch and watched TV.” It’s great but it doesn’t make for compelling songs. The times when I’m most compelled to write is when I’m nearly suicidal probably.

I’m in a relationship now and you have to re-examine your sexism. I’m more in touch with my sexist side as well as my feminist side as now I can see the other side.

I’ve always been into having girlfriends than being like “I’m this music guy on the road sleeping with different girls every night.” Which has made for much more interesting material and references. You figure all that stuff out and it becomes…yeah. That’s what so much…for both Nancy and I.

Is she in a relationship?

I feel like I shouldn’t say. She’s with me on this campaign.

What I like about this album is how, in the past you’ve had this polar thing between human-robot and this time around, the polarity is between men-women. It’s transferred to this other thing.

There’s still robots. I’m taking the position of a super-sexist robot, criticizing a girl for being a girl, falling for typical male tricks. Desire will be your undoing. He’ll treat you like the rest. The relationships remain dysfunctional. For me, it was a clearing out of everything, the last number of years. This is everything that has happened.

Do you work through the crappy bad relationships to purge it?

Well, you linger on the bad parts. Otherwise you keep doing the same things over and over again. It is cool to have this public domain for this art project where you can purge all these things. Now I’m pretty much perfect, I would say.

(To Juan's girlfriend) Do you agree?

(Laughs.)

I’m like the ultimate boyfriend now...But it’s hard living in the shadow of something like “Happy House.” Like James always living in the shadow of “Losing My Edge.” He goes: "I’ll never make a 12” as big as that."

juan maclean interview pt. 1

Here is the first part of the full transcript of my interview with John MacLean a/k/a/ The Juan MacLean. In this first part, we chat a bit about robots, Six Finger Satellite, and of course, the nadir of 80s television, Small Wonder.

Were you much of a sci-fi fan or a comic book fan growing up?

I was a big fan of sci-fi, but with a limited scope. I was not into the fantasy world-related stuff at all, but Philip K. Dick was always one of my favorite authors of all time. Obviously, his writing technically is sorta awful, but the ideas and themes of alienation were big. The cosmology was stuff that I really got into and the offshoots like Blade Runner. It ended up being enormously influential for me. Thematically, that movie has played out in so many of my songs. Setting these scenarios for some being that doesn’t know whether its human or android or not, the polarity between the two. I’ve always used that theme or allegory of robots and androids to represent my own feeling not exactly “human.”

That goes back a ways for you.

To the earliest days of my music career.

Was Six Finger Satellite your first band?

My first and only band. I feel like I’ve had such a charmed music career, two of them, that 6FS…I graduated from high school and with money I got for graduation, I was going to buy a motorcycle and take off. Instead I went and bought a guitar. I just want to be in a band, so I taught myself to play the guitar. Made the band and made 6FS.

Was it a RISD band?

Nonono. We were so far removed from those people on a social level. There wasn’t a single band. We made our first demo after being together for a year, a year of learning how to play basically. Sent a cassette to Sub Pop and they signed us. We were signed.

Did the robotoic aspect of it ever play out live?

Devo was a big influence. We had the uniforms and were very strict about not smiling or showing emotion on stage.

Was that aesthetic was your contribution?

That was my thing. Devo, PKD stuff, Kraftwerk was a huuuuuge one, pretending they were robots and singing about being robots.

Songs about factories...

The uniforms they had we copied. We had shirts with very strict regulations in the band. When you were on tour you had to be in uniform all the time. We had our uniforms with the 6 emblem, your name underneath and we would sell them as merchandise on the tour as well.

Now with YouTube, I keep finding weird Italo disco like The Droids and it seemed like there was this giant movement of robot-pop. Why is it always European though? Never American? Why doesn’t America like robots?

There’s a definite social and cultural aspect to it, because Americans are…there’s such a focus on individuality and personality and originality and those kinds of concepts in these bourgeouis notions where kids grow up being told that they’re better, everyone is above-average, everyone is in the 99% percentile. But this idea of being an automoton or robotic or you’re part of the factory or the machinations of everything else.

Is it anti-Communist? You can’t have that crop up...

Very much so. Whereas that’s a very European –especially German—thing. Efficiency and the factory and that kind of thing. It’s a sentiment that Americans can’t…it doesn’t resonate at all in our culture or in the arts. Literature tends to be about the opposite, about individuality.

America’s lone obsession is Small Wonder.

Never seen it. I never watch TV.

You should check it out, a girl robot that lives with a family. Just terrible.

For me to it’s always a way to hide behind the idea of robots, without having to see that you’re expressing these really human emotions.

Was it funny to be on Sub Pop?

Of course. We were signed to Sub Pop, the first non-NW region band to be on Sub Pop. It was Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Tad, all those guys. The Xmas parties were quite humorous. All those guys in grunge attire and we would show up in uniform. Then we made a ten inch EP Machine Cuisine that was entirely electronic in ’93.

I remember putting it on and thinking it sounded like NIN.

(Laughs) That at the time, there was no context for that whatsoever. And we made it with Steve Albini. And there’s no guitar, drums, or live instrumentation.

With Juan, why did you want to re-enact it?

My first twelve-inch, there are some tangential references to Italodisco with “By the Time I Get to Venus” was very informed by the Boney M song “Nite Flight to Venus.” It’s where I took Venus from. That song was the template for the very first thing that I did. I was really into Italodisco at that time.

Boney M is a funny phenomenon to me: huge in European, but in America, they don’t even register.

It becomes this esoteric reference.

The robotic thing is a studio construct now though?

Live, not at all. Live has been an attempt…because 6FS was primarily a rock band and part of it was being antagonistic and willfully contrarian. Totally contrary. So when you’re in a rock band immersed in this post-rock indie rock, to bring out keyboards and dress up in these Fascistic uniforms and march around on-stage and pretend that you’re robots, it definitely got a rise out of people and was controversial. In dance music though, the opposite is true, especially if you want to re-create it live. It’s so horribly boring to see somebody start up a laptop or something and try to play live electronic music. So it seems like bringing this punk rock live chaotic element to it is much more interesting.

In the lag of time between 6FS and Daft Punk, what was it like to see their success, to see it come across?

It’s seems to be the theme of my entire music career. To be too far ahead. It is finally gratifying to actually be for once making the music that is of the day, right now. It actually feels a little alien in some ways. After awhile, you do get tired of having to wait 5-10 years for people to say “Wow, you guys were doing that.” And then they went and did it at it was HUGE! But Homework was a huuuge influence for me when it came out. It was fine because I had made Less Than Human and that’s when DFA was signing its deal with EMI right at the same time. The album sat there for a year waiting to be released while they negotiated the deal. In that time is when Human After All came out. It wound up getting released a month after Human After All. It was so hard to take. The name of it and everything.

Rather than being five years too early, you were five minutes too late.

Basically. A hair too late.

wax boetics

I saw Kieran Hebden at that Björk/ Dirty Projectors mash-up the other night, who reminded me of something I recently wrote for Wax Poetics #34: The Jazz Issue about funky Moog drummer (and Jaco backer) Bruce Ditmas. Since it's not available online (and good luck finding mp3s), the text is below:

The name "Bruce" tends to hang around my family tree: it’s my youngest uncle’s name, my mother’s second husband’s name, not to mention her favorite Super Bowl halftime performer. While mining a vein of odd records that wound up in an antiques mall in South Texas (including hand-painted synth records, Italo no-wave 12-inches, and French electroacoustic LPs with 3-D glasses attached, all with the original Wax Trax price tags still affixed), I naturally gravitated towards one in a glowing red sleeve with “Bruce Ditmas” and “Yellow” written in a kinked wire font. If the long-haired beardo in Cazals cast in yellow wasn’t enticing enough, then his array of gear was: drums, Moog drum, Mini-Moog synthesizer, ARP 2600 synthesizer, electric congas, cuica, percussion.

The Atlantic City-born Ditmas backed everyone from Judy Garland and Babs to Chet Baker and Lee Konitz, even appearing on Jaco Pastorius’s Jaco album from 1974. Around 1976-77, he began dabbling in electronics and drum machines in earnest, collaborating intently with abstract vocalist Joan La Barbara (the future Mrs. Morton Subotnick). On his own, Ditmas was no doubt digging the fault line between jazz chop-shop noodling and proto-techno klingklang, all in the shadow of Mt. Patrick Gleeson.

Released in 1977 by Wizard Records (responsible for another Ditmas record, a mesmeric flute album by Carl Stone, and two early La Barbara efforts), Bruce extends thanks to “Trevor and Kim’s foot” though true gratitude goes to guests La Barbara and ECM trumpeter Enrico Rava. Opening cut “Surprise Hotel” was written by Rava and is his lone appearance. It’s also the busiest most jazzbo cut, with La Barbara on “voice with instant flanger” (though “batshit chitter” is more sonically-correct). “L’Unita” --with its wiggle, gurgle, twitter, and spurt-- could be spliced into a half-dozen decent disco edits. As is, though as is it uncannily mixes well with Paul McCartney’s similarly navel-gazing synth doodle, “Temporary Secretary.”

On the second side is where Ditmas relaxes his jazz muscle and does deeper exploratory work. He references Fritz Lang on the minimal “Dr. Mabuse” while the sprawling “Aural Suspension” combines his analog wow with drum break butter. “Soweto” remains a singular concoction though: crawling through La Barbara’s Afro-alien mewl, Bruce slows what sounds like Ann Peebles’ rain blops until it feels like cough syrup.

Treehouse 002

Treehouse is back in effect! Once again, it's going down on a Wednesday --tomorrow to be exact-- at Frank's Lounge (upstairs) in Ft. Greene, near BAM at 660 Fulton St. It'll be myself, Eric and Piotr, along with special guest Thomas Bullock of Rub-N-Tug, A.R.E. Weapons, Laughing Light of Plenty, Map of Africa fame (Beta Blogheads will no doubt recall an epic conversation with the man from a year or so back). Hopefully, I'll be able to unpack my boxes in time to find some killer jams for the dancefloor. Regardless, Thom promises "to get a bit esoteric on the night, growing up from protoplasm to full-grown dancing ape."

beta moving

"Hey dude, I'm getting ready to box up a shit-ton of records and I saw on your splendid mp3 site that you have a picture of your movers carrying records downstairs. Any recommendations on what sort of boxes I should get for carting vinyl?"

"Uhhh...that pic is from Google, and those are beer crates."

"Oh."

Which is to say, mind the gap.

ol' dirty beta

Torn between which of these re-imagined Wu-Tang-as-Blue-Note-cats album covers are the dopest (check 'em all out here). But here are two of my favorites.

betody nelson

Before I forget to mention it, I wrote an essay in the recent domestic reissue of Serge Gainsbourg's classic of 'la decadanse,' Histoire de Melody Nelson. For having spent well over a decade swooning to such orch-pop perfection, it was something else to finally learn about the creative process for the album, as well as its inspiration, not to mention finally unpacking all of the man's trenchant lyrics. Order it from Light in the Attic direct.