betablical

Since I found myself within spitting distance of the Museum of Creation and Earth History in San Diego the weekend that the Chargers lost to the Jets and the entire city of San Diego collectively wept as rain began to fall, it became a running joke to say that "Baby Jesus is crying because LT and the Chargers lost." Local newscasts didn't take entirely different routes from such conclusions (making me realize that Will Ferrell's turn in Anchorman wasn't quite fiction either).

For almost the entire duration of my California stay, that "Baby Jesus" joke came back to haunt me tenfold, as another iteration of "El Niño" dumped rain, hail, mudslides, thunder, and tornado warnings on my head for over a week. And even when I ducked into museums or burger joints, I got confronted by the Bible. A delicious bite of an In-n-Out burger reveals a Revelations citation, a slurp of a chocolate shake gets me some Proverbs.

Head to the Hammer Museum and there's an exhibit of all of R. Crumb's original drawing for his recent Genesis Illustrated book lining the gallery walls. As a failed Catholic, I can't say that I know the Old Testament all that well. And as one tour guide put it to a group of septuagenarians tongue-clucking to these panels: "Most churchgoers might be able to hum a few bars, but few know the whole song."

In the exhibit's introduction, Crumb's perceives that when the church began to consolidate the myriad stories that make up the "Good Book," an agenda of patriarchy erased any notions of matriarchal society. It's not hard for me to believe that at one point in such creationist myths, it would've made a lot more sense for the woman figure to be molded first, to have the man emerge from her. Since that's how the story goes thousands of times each and every day.

If the Crumb book revealed anything, it's how contorted and disturbing the first books actually are. Count at least two instances of husbands passing off their wives as sisters so that they can marry richer pharaohs (and unleash God's plagues upon them). But there's also a sequence wherein two daughters of Abraham get him drunk on consecutive nights so as to impregnate themselves. So where is the museum for that?

RIP

Rough couple of days all around:

Robert Charles Guidry a/k/a Bobby Charles

(February 21, 1938 – January 14, 2010)

Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr. a/k/a Jay Reatard

(May 1, 1980 – January 13, 2010)

Vivian Jackson a/k/a Yabby You a/k/a Jesus Dread

(August, 14 1946 – January 12, 2010)

Theodore DeReese "Teddy" Pendergrass

(March 26, 1950—January 13, 2010)

post no beta

I got smashed in the head by one of these construction barricade walls while walking home on Friday afternoon. Ambulance ride, emergency room visit, calls to attorneys, brain hurting...

2010

Things I'm already enjoying in the new decade:

Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté: Ali and Toumani
Beach House: Teen Dream
Lindstrøm & Christabelle: Real Life Is No Cool
Hot Chip: "One Life Stand" (single, not the album)
Prins Thomas: s/t
Four Tet: There is Love in You
Nneka: Concrete Jungle
The Crystal Ark: "The City Never Sleeps"
Yeasayer: Odd Blood
Bison (supergroup featuring Holger Czukay and Paul 'Mudd' Murphy): "Way to LA"
Peter Gordon and Love of Live Orchestra: "Beginning of the Heartbreak"

P(B)&J Ballot for 2009

Didn't there used to be automated emails sending your Pazz & Jop ballot back your way? Which was helpful, as I almost instantly forget what my list is, infusing it with "Oh shit! I forgot to mention that track!" outbursts right after I click 'Submit.' Anyway, here's what made it, and what I loved/ played to death but didn't place...

2009 ALBUMS:

1. Animal Collective/ Merriweather Post Pavilion/ Domino
2. Meanderthals/ Desire Lines/ Smalltown Supersound
3. Mulatu Astatke & the Heliocentrics/ Inspiration Information/ Strut
4. Dr. Dunks a/k/a Eric Duncan/ How We Do in NYC/ aNYthing
5. Dirty Projectors/ Bitte Orca/ Domino
6. James Blackshaw/ The Glass Bead Game/ Young God
7. Fever Ray/ Fever Ray/ Mute
8. Ernst Reijseger/ Tell Me Anything/ Winter & Winter
9. Phoenix/ Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix/ Glass Note
10. Death/...For the Whole World to See/ Drag City

2009 SINGLES:

1. Animal Collective, "My Girls"
2. House of House, "Rushing to Paradise (Walkin' These Streets)"
3. Culoe de Song, "The Bright Forest"
4. DJ Kaos, "Love the Night Away (Tiedye Mix)"
5. Dirty Projectors, "Stillness Is the Move"
6. Walter Jones, "I'll Keep on Loving You"
7. Horse Meat Disco, "Eyeko Syko"
8. Jenny Wilson, "The Wooden Chair (Peter Visti Mix)"
9. Song of Sound, "Life Under Bridges"
10. Mendes &Alcada, "Coaster (Idjust Boys Version 2)"

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Group Bombino "Boghassa"; Linkwood Family: "Piece of Mind"; Junkie XL "Cosmic Rave"; Still Going "Untitled Love"; Permanent Vacation "Zucker Hut"; Prins Thomas "Mammut"; Jackpot "Brief Encounter"; Ray Mang "Tattoo Me"; C.O.M.B.I. "P.G.B."; Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas "Tirsdagsjam"; Moxie "Moxie Heart MJ"; The Sexican "Liza"; Capracara "King of the Witches (Rub-n-Tug mix)"; Gerrie van Noord "White Room (BB edit)"; A Mountain of One "Bones (Thomas' Way of the Ancients mix)"; Sandra Nnaké "La Mauvaise Réputation (Blackjoy Instrumental Mix)"; Noir Desir "Le Vent Nous Portera (Rubber Room Rerub)"; Beautiful Swimmers "O Yea"; Soft Rocks "Back to My Roots"; Abel "Round in Circles"

Coati Mundi interview

This fall, I went out west to have some doughnuts and a Styrofoam cup of Orange Bang and hang with Andy Hernandez, a/k/a Coati Mundi, the man who had a hand in such bands as Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band and Kid Creole and the Coconuts. After bowing out of the biz for twenty plus years, he's back, dropping a fun single earlier this year and prepping an album for release on Rong Music early next year. I wrote a feature on the man entitled "It Came From Spanish Harlem." Here are a few more bon mots:

On his performance at PS1:
It was for an older crowd that knows my history. It’s performance art. In another age, the 40s-60s, it was all part of the performance: singing, dancing, music. Louis Jordan and James Brown and all that, you had the music, but it was a package. The music is together, then you can do the other stuff. It doesn’t become a substitute, it adds to it. That’s how it was with Kid Creole, but before us, it was LJ, JB, all these people.

Back to that show at PS1, it was clubgoer kinds of kids. What I told my posse is we’re gonna ignore the audience, we’re just gonna be another piece in the museum. Like people watch art. Sculptures don’t change because people looking at it. Either they like it or they don’t. At least, they’ll appreciate it. At least you put something forth.


Theatricality:
One thing about me, I was always theatrical. If you look at those guys from the 40s, all those great musicians had a lot of theater to them. We were part of that, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, we kept that in. I was always a ham, which came from me just trying to entertain my aunts and uncles. I could never just do something simple. I could never just play the instrument. I could never keep still. If I played a note, I had to dance to that note, I had to make a face. I couldn’t just play the music. I wanted to show off.

Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band:
I was in my early 20s. I was coming out of being a social worker, up in Spanish Harlem, 122nd St. and that whole area. I don’t remember us thinking of vision. We just came together and everybody was into something. Stony and August, the brothers, they were just into a certain style. I don’t remember any of us saying “This is the vision.” It just came together.

We came together as a friend said these guys were looking for a piano player. My main instrument was vibes. Back in the day, few bands were using vibes. My guy was Cal Tjader, latin-jazz, one of my main influences. Cal Tjader was just a classic player. Lionel Hampton is the number one guy. Milt Jackson, and then Cal Tjader. With the piano, I couldn’t get work playing vibes. In order to keep getting gigs, I taught myself piano.

These guys were starting Savannah Band. And I auditioned with a lot of piano players, all better than me, but I had a sense of humor with it. I was willing to do anything on piano, not just stick with the basics. And they were dressed in these antique 1940s clothes they picked up in thrift shops and I dug it. I was with the program and I played enough piano to interpret their music and get it out there. I didn’t have to be McCoy Tyner. We were just kids in our 20s, from the Bronx in Spanish Harlem.

We became a very successful band. We were living high off the hog or whatever the phrase was. Like a lot of successful rock bands, we went bankrupt. August and then decided to do projects together. So I came along as his musical director and arranger and formed Kid Creole and the Coconuts. It was sad at the end, we were still in our twenties and had a taste of success. It was tough psychologically. How can you go back to square one and start all over again? In my case, my sister supported me and took me in and got me back on track, got me out of my depression.

Kid Creole & the Coconuts never having US success:
We never felt that successful. If you can’t make it in your hometown…we would go on tour: France and Japan and play in front of thousands and thousands of people and then come back to my little apartment in Spanish Harlem and it was like a dream. You’d come back and there’s nothing. What is so difficult about it that we can’t get over in the US. We had a good product and we were entertaining. The music wasn’t ‘pop’ Top 40, but it wasn’t that inaccessible. We weren’t from Mars! It was tough and it was tiring. Eventually it got to me after ten years. It was too much.

Did you and August part amicably?

Not at the beginning. No we didn’t. We’re okay now. When you’re younger, you’re more energetic on not liking somebody. The spiritual part of life doesn’t kick in that soon. We’re cool now, but not back then. That’s the way it happens.

On acting:
I had been doing acting on and off in New York and LA. It came during the band. What happened was…I never planned any of it, the band, the acting. So with the acting thing…The producer for Miami Vice saw me playing in Savannah Band and saw how animated I was. He wanted me in Easy Money with Rodney Dangerfield, but I was going off on tour. So he got this Miami Vice thing and he told the casting person to get a hold of me. My first professional thing was Miami Vice, an episode with Bruce Willis. I played a part of a gun-running mob and Bruce Willis was my boss. It was a lot of fun. I had a great time. I wound up doing a few episodes as different characters. They always called me “The Ghost” because they would kill me off and bring me back as another character. That’s how I got into it. I came out to LA because I had family out here and NYC was getting expensive to live in. It was colder. I just got to change it up. I go to NYC cuz it’s still my town.

Any other acting parts?

Who’s That Girl? was the most popular acting thing. Since then, I’ve done little bits and pieces for a lot of different things. Independent films, We Own the Night with Joaquin Phoenix. Choreography for an episode of Heroes.

The new record, Coati Mundi is Dancing for the Cabama Code in the Land of Boo-Hoo:
This new record was really an accident. One of my best friend’s was a singer and his niece married my co-producer, E-Love. He was a big fan of Savannah Band and Kid Creole. He wanted to write with me. I wasn’t really interested in doing a record, but we got together on our spare time. It took a few years, but we were just getting together and doing songs. A guy named Doug Lee was a friend of Johnny’s and he passed it along to Rong.

It’s cool these cats were into my style. That was intriguing for me, cuz I didn’t think they’d be into it. I was into dance stuff, but not into computer-laden, without any personality, stuff. I would go to the clubs but after awhile it became linear to me, it lacked personality and I wouldn’t know one artist from the next. It didn’t mean anything. It was great productions, great sounds, great beats, but…so I sez to E, I want to put my personality into it. I want to attach my personality, my signature to this album. I’m gonna sing what I want to sing, even if it’s stupid things about a dog. No one is telling me what I’m gonna do. And he was with the program. We’ll see how it works out.

I’m just going with the flow. I try to keep it in balance. If this record never came out, I could care less. I’m an old cat. I’ve had a lot of records out. I’m not a twenty-year-old with my tongue hanging out. If it ain’t right, I couldn’t care less. I’m a bit ornery, old age does that to you. In my 20s, I’d give up my ass a lot. As I get older, the less of a whore I become. In a way, it feels great. I hate to put it this way, but I don’t give a fuck.

Beats in Space article

This week, in celebration of the 500th broadcast of New York underground dance music radio program Beats in Space, I wrote a feature about the show for the Voice. Read it here. The best part was getting to hang in the studio the night that Juan Atkins DJ'd, a true honor to meet the techno legend and watch his alchemy in the moment. Truly an honor. Congratulations, Tim! (Full interview with Sweeney to come in the new year.)

Beta's Favorite Albums of the Decade he's not really seeing elsewhere

Thankfully, I've skipped out on having to quantify and qualify the last ten years of my listening life in the last month or so. Yet in talking to one of my editors about such drudge work, he mentioned a few zealous colleagues who have been pondering such a list since last year! Perhaps I am just blessed to know people who have moved beyond the calendar year of 2002 or who think that Funeral is kinda grating?

Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy heaps of the albums that are getting numerical rankings and silver medallions and plaques this month. Instead, I'm just posting up here are a few of my favorite things from the last decade, some by artists barely known to me, others more-recognizable but represented here by a less-hailed though no less-affecting effort. Regard this as just a list of alphabetaized albums I really did spend a great deal of time listening to and unpacking beyond my role as a music fan/ consumer/ critic/ processor/ ponderer/ devourer. They have all outlived their media cycles and deadlines for me (though there is a ringer tucked in here) and almost all come off of the shelf for the sheer sake of listening to them again:

Tetuzi Akiyama- Don't Forget to Boogie (Idea) 2003
Oren Ambarchi- Grapes From the Estate (Touch) 2004
Animal Collective- Here Comes the Indian (Paw Tracks) 2003
Mulatu Astatke & Heliocentrics- Inspiration Information (Strut) 2009
William Basinski- The River (Raster-Noton) 2002

Anton Batagov- The Wheel of Law (Long Arms) 2002
Black Dice- Creature Comforts (DFA) 2004
James Blackshaw- The Glass Bead Game (Young God) 2009 
Blues Control- "Puff" (Woodsist) 2008
Bonnie "Prince" Billy- Lie Down in the Light (Drag City) 2008

Boredoms- Rebore Vol. 0 (WEA Japan) 2001
Brightblack Morning Light- s/t (Matador) 2006
Cam'Ron- Purple Haze (Roc-A-Fella) 2004
Jonathan Coleclough- Cake (Robot/ Siren) 2002
Toumani Diabaté- The Mande Variations (World Circuit) 2008

John Duncan- Phantom Broadcast (All Questions) 2002
Farben-Textstar (Klang Elektronik) 2002
The Fiery Furnaces- Gallowsbird's Bark (Rough Trade) 2003
Mannie Fresh- The Mind of Mannie Fresh (Cash Money) 2004
Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom- The Days of Mars (DFA) 2005

Double Leopards- Halve Maen (Eclipse) 2003
ES- Sateenkaarisuudelma (K-RAA-K/ Fonal) 2005
Peter Garland- Love Songs (Tzadik) 2005
Goldmund- Corduroy Road (Type) 2005
Group Bombino-Guitars From Agadez (Sublime Frequencies) 2009

DJ Harvey- Sarcastic Study Masters (Sarcastic) 2001
Florian Hecker- Sun Pandamonium (Mego) 2003
Tim Hecker- Harmony in Ultraviolet (Kranky) 2006
Bert Jansch- The Black Swan (Drag City) 2006
Johan Johannsson- Englaborn (Touch) 2002

Kaito- Special Love (Kompakt) 2003
Eyvind Kang- Live Low to the Earth, in the Iron Age (Abduction) 2002
Salif Keita & Kante Manfila- The Lost Album (White Sun) 2006
Lil Wayne- Tha Carter II (Cash Money) 2005
Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas- Reinterpretations (Eskimo) 2007

Loose Fur- Born Again in the USA (Drag City) 2006
Stephan Mathieu- The Sad Mac (Headz) 2004
Meanderthals- Desire Lines (Smalltown Supersound) 2009
Mirror- Visiting Star (Robot) 2000
Juana Molina- Un Dia (Domino) 2008

Mountains- s/t (apestaartje) 2005
Mu- Afro Finger and Gel (Tigersushi) 2003
Takeshi Nishimoto- Monologue (Büro) 2007
Aki Onda- Ancient & Modern (Phonomena) 2003
Optimo- Walkabout (Endless Flight) 2007

Jim O'Rourke- I'm Happy and I'm Singing and a 1,2, 3, 4 (Mego) 2001
Paul Panhuysen- A Magic Square of 5 (Plinkity Plonk) 2004
Phantom Slasher- Gruble (Noid) 2006
Princess Nicotine- Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar (Sublime Frequencies) 2004
Ernst Reijseger- Tell Me Everything (Winter & Winter) 2009

To Rococo Rot & I-Sound- Music is a Hungry Ghost (City Slang) 2001
Tonalamotl: Mo(ve)mentsum (Sedimental) 2003
Ricardo Villalobos- Achso (Cadenza) 2005
Robag Wruhme- Wuzzlebud KK (Musik Krause) 2004
Rub-N-Tug- Campfire (Eskimo) 2005

The Stolen Stars- An Anaphorian Dance Drama (AoA) 2003
Akio Suzuki- Odds and Ends (Hören) 2002
Vetiver- To Find Me Gone (de Cristina) 2006
Brendan Walls & Andrew Chalk- This Growing Clearing (Three Poplars) 2004
World Standard and Wechsel Garland- The Isle (Staubgold) 2004

texflix

Our Netflix the other night delivered both Kelly Reichardt's ruminative 2006 film Old Joy and Lynn Shelton's more recent and mumbled Humpday. The films blurred for me a bit and the blurbs on the back weren't really helpful:

When old friends Mark/ Ben and Andrew/ Kurt embark on a weekend camping trip at a sex-positive commune in the Oregon Cascades, they soon find themselves exploring much more than nature in strange new ways when a dare leads them to contemplate filming a live sex scene in this meditation on friendship, memory, and generational malaise. As the shoot date looms, our heroes journey deeper into the wilderness –losing and finding their way— as they struggle to find common ground in the divergent paths with two major logistical difficulties: Mark/Ben’s wife and their heterosexuality.

txv

Some shows we were subjected to in-between televised football games:

Battle Hair Loss
Training the Perfect Dog
Free Money "They" Don't Want You to Know About
Stop Memory Loss
Millionaire Next Door
Stud Finder
Not Eating Enough Fruits and Vegetables?
Knife Show
Carve Abs in Bed
Turkey Fried Easy!
The World of Stupid Criminals
Insane Workout
Healing Power of Juicing
Sandwich Paradise
Shark Feeding Frenzy
Clean With Shark Steam

cassettexas

Despite an iPod and a CD wallet stuffed with CDs, fifteen-plus hours of driving down those Texas highways have been soundtracked solely by three cassette tapes:

Willie Nelson- Redheaded Stranger
Brian Eno: Before and After Science
The Stanley Brothers: Old-Time Favorites

Between a few computer meltdowns, looming projects, and some family stuff, turning my attentions away for a moment. Thanks.

Cassaveteta

A few weeks back, I posted here how I attended a Q&A with Pedro Almodovar as part of the New York Film Festival. During the interview, it came out that Almodovar worshipped at the altar of John Cassavetes. Which was uncanny, as the man who fathered American independent film isn't necessarily the first person to spring to mind when I think of films like Live Flesh and Bad Education (though I did parse that a scene from Opening Night was appropriated for Almodovar's All About My Mother).
Anyhow, in the interim, I have had Cassavetes' name invoked time and time again. First is in a recent NY Times fluff piece feature about Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. In my review of the film for Paste, I bemoaned the film's "infantile dialogue" and "plot devoid of conflict," spurring a reader to comment that I needed to "read Eggers' adaptation prior to seeing the movie...(so as) to pick up on a lot more of the subplot." Which I uh...geez, really? I need to read an adaptation of a children's book (but not the original book itself) in order to understand a movie that children (and or immature adults) will go see? Per the Times piece, it says that Spike Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers modeled such inanity on the films of Cassavetes.
Not even a few weeks on, I came across Richard Brody's fluff piece feature on Wes Anderson's new film, an adaptation of a Roald Dahl book Fantastic Mr. Fox, in the New Yorker. While we are fellow UT alums, Anderson is not my favorite director of the past generation. In my review of The Darjeeling Unlimited, I unpacked my distaste for his previous efforts:

Anderson’s men still behave like petulant children in the throes of arrested development, while the women—be they Margot Tenenbaum or Eleanor Zissou—are chilly and hastily sketched, serving mainly as objects of desire for the male leads to place on pedestals. All of Anderson’s characters blindly stumble about, emotionally estranged from family, relationships, themselves, and ultimately reality. And yet for all of their personal tumult, they exist in a cute, stylized world as tidy as any play or book.

Needless to say, Darjeeling did little to alleviate such concerns, existing in a bubble outside of modern-day concerns. (And Slate's grousing about Anderson's films and "the clumsy, discomfiting way he stages ineractions between white protagonists --typically upper-class élites-- and nonwhite foils" is dead-on but a whole other can of worms.) The piece asks if Anderson's films are apolitical, to which he responds: "The politics in them is the politics among the characters."

The Brody piece then reveals that a big influence on The Darjeeling Limited is Cassavetes' 1970 film, Husbands, about three grieving friends who go on the bender to end all benders: "'They're all on the cusp or in the middle of some kind of meltdown," Anderson said. "(We) watched 'Husbands' together and we really felt connected to it.'" For a director hellbent on lazily falling back on clichés: this stylized Louis Vuitton baggage made by Marc Jacobs explicitly for me represents "emotional baggage"; my female leads should be seen and not heard; these bandages mean he's emotionally injured, too; "rather than have my characters engage in agonizing yet crucial dialouge, I'm going to deploy a Elliott Smith Kinks song instead," this is unfathomable. I'm hard-pressed to think of a director less interested in what actually goes on between his characters and aesthetically unwilling (or wholly incapable) of deploying language and dialogue to chart or capture inchoate emotions to unearth said politics. Save for maybe Spike Jonze.
For two directors that trade in cleverness, stylishness, and neat'n'tidy characterizations, not to mention eternal childishness, can they be more any more opposed to the femme-centered, mentally-messy, confounding, irrational, uneasy, emotionally-draining, raw, yet totally mature and adult films of Cassavetes?

Pasteta

While I didn't vote for Paste Magazine's 50 Best Movies of the Decade (Almost Famous? Really? I know I should be pulling for more films about hookers with a heart of gold who secretly love music critics, but still...), I did pen entries for a few of the films: Pan's Labyrinth, Up, No Country For Old Men, and City of God.

Finland 5

I know I know, every picture from Finland so far has been of Moomins, but isn't a peroxide blond bad boy also a beloved character from your childhood?

On to the bands...

Astrid Swan and the Drunken Lovers- First band I saw of the festival. Tart and catchy new wave-laced pop, but Ms. Swan's sparkly dress got diminished considerably by the dudes in her band wearing bowler hats. It set an unfortunate trend for mis-matched band outfits.

Downstairs- Blame it on the lead singer's beard, but this band reminded me of Les Savy Fav. Their band blurb though references: "The Fall or early Bad Seeds with a sound that has been compared to NWA and Shellac." Uh...no.

Miss Saana and the Missionaries- Retro throwback from a 15-person ensemble. Miss Saana had the pipes (think Bassey and Staton) to not get lost in the string quartets, backing singers, horn section and a dreadlocked organist, but how can she pay all these folks though?

Cosmobile- An oi band before they got broadband, allowing them to download their new influences: Green Day, Talking Heads, Vampire Weekend. Another friend made a game out of guessing what their influences were for each and every song. He heard lots of Paul Simon.

Plain Ride- Was told that this band was the Smog of Finland and they do have roots in Circle, which should've been a good thing. But Finnish dudes singing about "the bayou" is not a good thing. Lead singer is draped in Jeff Tweedy's flannel, there's a total long-hair hesher guitarist, and a keyboardist in a black turtleneck, but in the end, they sound like George Thorogood: "B-b-b-b-bad."

Joensuu 1685- Every single person I encountered at the Lost in Music Festival, locals and international guests alike, insisted that I catch this trio, who were billed as being along the lines of Jesus & Mary Chain and Spacemen 3, meaning pouty, trance-inducing psych noise cloaked in heavy reverb. Such word of mouth also guaranteed that the entire city was seemingly packed into the club for their performance. The androgynous look of their lead singer had me hoping that a woman might be unleashing such a roar, but alas. A decent enough band, but when they blew a fuse onstage, it broke the spell for me and I missed their cover of "I'm On Fire." Which leads to the Catch-22 of the music scene here, or anywhere up and coming. If you sing in your native tongue, you run the risk of remaining only in your niche market. But if you switch to English, you are then a third-tier simulacra of bigger bands, like, JAMC and S3.

Regina- Seeing this trio gave me great hope that there might be something good brewing here. Solid grooves and well-crafted breaks inform their sleek dance-pop. Even singing in their native tongue (save for one song which had Indian war whoops, which I did understand) couldn't stop them from being the most intriguing and catchy band I caught all weekend.

Reckless Love- For as much as Finland's indie rock scene would like to forget, the biggest rock band to come out of Finland remains Hanoi Rocks. While most of the delegates attention is turned elsewhere, one night we decide to dabble in the heavy metal showcases, meaning we are the only men in a room full of hot Finnish women squeezed into black leather, spandex and sparkles, hip-swaying to Reckless Love.
Clad in similar outfits themselves, the band sang "I Love Rock'n'Roll" in Finnish and then proceeded to made eye contact with every woman in the room during "Beautiful Woman." It's as if Use Your Illusion never came out and Brett Michaels never had to resort to doing Rock of Love, as Poison still ruled the airwaves. It's as if Nirvana, hip-hop, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Radiohead never happened, or at least, never reached Finland. Wait, is that a bad thing?

Finland 4

One night while I was in Finland, I found myself seated at an event I would never in my right mind have attended back in the United States: a music industry awards ceremony. And yet there I was, subjected to all the free Jägermeister I could tuck away for three hours and an MC that looked like NBA star Tony Parker dressed up as Andre 3000 for Halloween.

The table I'm seated at won two awards and the statuettes looked like this:

Which in a way sums up the Finnish music industry: blocky, unpolished, not quite gold. For convenience's sake, let's just group Finland in with its Scandinavian brethren (leaving Estonia and Russia out of it) and ask why the Finns lag behind Sweden and Norway in musical exports. Seated at the table with me are a few members of said industry. Sweden is simple: starting with the massive success of ABBA in 1975, they've grown into the third largest music industry. To rattle off the artists who hail from here is a fool's task, but so ubiquitous are its talents that even our own chart-toppers are often propped up by their productions and studios.

And at least on an indie-rock level, Norway's crested in the past decade: Röyksopp, Annie, Turbonegro, Kings of Convenience,  Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas, etc. while whole subcultures like space disco and black metal are cultivated and nurtured there (and then there is 80's one-hit wonder, a-ha). But for most of my trip, I was hard-pressed to name famous Finnish acts beyond Luomo/ Vladislav Delay, Pan Sonic, and Jimi Tenor. Do any of them count as "famous" though? For a country of roughly-similar size, why does Norway outpace Finland?

One of my tablemates works for the Finnish Music Information Centre, and she informed me that Finland's breakout year actually occurred back in 2000, when three acts took Europe by storm: HIM, Bomfunk MCs, and Darude:

Conveniently enough, I was traveling through Europe at that time and remember all three acts very well. So my reply went something like this: "They were all Finnish?!"

For whatever reason, each act lent itself to anonymity or a misconstruing of their roots. HIM surely must have arisen in Sweden, while Bomfunk MCs were such a heinous strain of hip-hop that surely it must have been the Germans who got it all so horribly wrong. I mean blond dreads, jeeeesus. Darude was the number one song the duration of my trip, it seemed. Hearing it everywhere made me wonder why the US pop charts hasn't had an instrumental number one in decades (can anyone out there tell me what the last one was? My mind said "Axel F," yet it only reached #34 in the US). It took years before I heard "Sandstorm" stateside, but it was at Yankee Stadium, so it's at least crept into the subconscious.

Since then, the industry has admittedly been hard-pressed to follow up on that success, with only HIM being something you could really hang future expectations on. But what sort of act would it take for Finland to be back on the map? While we pondered that at the table, we were treated to the sounds of this band (I shit you not):

Finland 3

Since the Sibelius symphonies I checked out from the New York Public Library were too scratchy to play, my main impression of what the music of Finland sounds like remains the wondrously inscrutable Fonal imprint. In years previous, I had written about artists such as Lau Nau and even gave an overview of their folk scene for the Nashville paper, but hadn't quite kept up with their releases since then.
Before I left, I again pulled out the works of Kemialliset Ystävät, Paavoharju, Islaja, and ES and uploaded them to my iPod, providing an alternating soundtrack of blissed-out and jarring sounds. What I played again and again though was this double album by ES, Sateenkaarisuudelma, which was just sublimely idyllic for watching the pines and birches flicker past on the landscape. Steeped in the sounds of Harmonia and Popol Vuh (at least to these ears), it's one of the most beautiful minimal albums of the decade.

Arriving in the city of Tampere for the Lost in Music Festival, I wondered if I might somehow see acts such as these. Instead, I braced myself for what I knew to be a weekend of metal and attempted indie-rock, rather than the weirdo, introverted, idiosyncratic music that Fonal trades in (and that I am magnetically drawn towards).
As luck would have it though, the man behind ES, Sami Sänpäkkilä, is also the man behind the label itself. And while my impression was that the Fonal folks lived under giant mushroom caps or in log cabins out on the Laplands, Sami lived but a few blocks away from the festival and I spent a few afternoons listening to music with the man (our favorite being the French pop album cut by Princess Stéphanie of Monacco). He told me that the two principal artists that inspire his label and its telltale sound are Terry Riley and Alice Coltrane. Fitting then that those two artists and their body of work continue to inspire me as well. Sami then gave me a slew of new Fonal releases, by himself, as well as Shogun Kunitoki. To top it all off, Fonal won an award that weekend from the Finnish music industry (for Best Album Art), which is sort of kin to Catsup Plate Records walking off with a Grammy.

Finland 2

I can unequivocally state that I've never been in a culture as intent on eating black food stuffs as the Finns. (Even in Cambodia, they stopped short at giant scorpions and tarantulas. Okay, that's a whole other level of fucked up, but I digress.) Perhaps it has to do with the dearth of sunlight, the sky an impenetrable cataract of clouds the duration of my stay, the time of day gauged only by gradations of grayness. Anyhow, I found myself ingesting quantities of black licorice that I never thought possible, especially salmiakki, this salty variant on the stuff: strong in taste as well as in fortitude: you could feel your gums developing muscles.

Another day, my hostess offered me a chocolate that when I bit into it, oozed out what she translated as "tar." Tar? In chocolate? It left an ashy streak on my skin and stank like Pine Sol, leading me to think that the confection was actually filled with pine tar. Meaning, what major leaguers rub all over their Louisville Sluggers is what counts as a delicacy here.

Nothing can possibly top the sight of mustamakkara (a/k/a black sausage) though:

Finland!

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

notebook beta

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

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