en garde!

My humble hopinion is that one's musical experience is reciprocal. You will always only get out of music only as much as you are willing to invest in it (or anything else for that matter). One's musical willingness is tempered by, among other things, the richness (or poorness) of your previous experiences plus your natural aptitudes and inclinations (or lack thereof). A combination of 'nature' and 'nurture' makes one more 'willing' and 'able' to listen well.

If your heredity and experience endows you with a butterknife, your ability to participate in certain experiences is attenuated. Although it can be sharpened, (Biosphere and some of the finest musicians of every sort can certainly improve the dullest ears and brains - if willing), a butterknife will always remain limited and more suited to dining. Which is not to say that being the sensual equivalent of a dull, short article of tableware wielded by children and oldsters in addition to artists, cannot be useful and rewarding. T'ant pis. If your heredity and experience endows you with a sword, it too can be sharpened (Biosphere and some of the finest musicians of every sort speak to and can certainly improve the keenest ears and brains - if willing) but is not suited for dining, and you are again, limited to where it can be used.

It all comes down to what one can do and what one chooses to do with one's tools, and not so much the size or quality of the tools, but to take advantage of the cracks and crevices laid out into which they can be plied and poked, and the willingness to make the most of what one is given.

No matter what kind of music is in question, the key here I think is to be 'willing' to listen. If you are, many musical experiences are rewarding (except of course those that are not - IMHO most of the Western world's Top 40 pop for the last 30 years – this is more evidence that some music can actually become more repulsive the more sensitive one is!} Ambient music is just one of the many aesthetic choices an adventurous and sensitive listener can probe with their enlarged musical tools.

En garde!

big idea for the day

loscil and vladislav delay

Hi all

Loscil and Vladislav Delay played Seattle on Thursday, May 24. There were two other acts on the bill - Phonographers Union and Son of Rose - but I missed them, too bad so sad, because they came on so blinkin early - Phonographers at 8 - I had just begun wetting my beak.

Loscil (pronounced law - sill, I think) aka Scott Morgan, played from his two latest records First Narrows and Plume (both on Kranky Records) at the Broadway Performance Hall. He was accompanied by a live human Vibraphonist whose name is unknown to me. They made the rich, rounded, sky-and-ocean inflected, melodic, transportative music that listeners have come to expect from Loscil. For those who are unacquainted, and totally simplifying things just for the sake of convenience, I'd say that Loscil's music is colored by tinges and subtle gestures toward the pulsing, Teutonic-style space music of early Tangerine Dream, the more "universally-understood-as-ambient" mood and place evocation of Brian Eno circa side 2 of Another Green World, and On Land, with skillfully-manipulated, understated and elegant touches of microscopic glitchy fractures and textures along the lines of the best of Alva Noto and Oval. Loscil makes nearly perfect ambient that is a very tasty and finely-realized synthesis of some of the most interesting things that have gone before and some of the more interesting things going on now. By turns cozily snuggled into a midrange vibraphone-enhanced burbling groove, with little excess or jarring frequencies, dynamics, or timbre, or drifting steadily along in a clickity/poppity fuzz-filled channel under a microfiber gauze - it all adds up to music that sounds like no one but Loscil. (Not easy to do, these days!)

On the surface the music sounds simple; but that's deceptive - like a beautifully executed card trick, it appears easier than it really is because it flows so effortlessly. With a closer listen I notice that Loscil's music is very complexly layered - there's a lot going on to create what pops out most, and more underneath besides. Aside from this live performance, which sounded great, I can say that Loscil makes excellent headphone music. What's more, his music has the disturbing ability to amplify or reflect in you what feelings you bring to it in the manner of a slightly distorted mirror. For example; if you're sad, it'll make you more sad, but in an unexpected way, altered and directed by the music. You will be surprised to discover unsuspected elements and nuances within your response to the music. Those of us with mental illnesses must use this music very carefully - taking the same care as when one responsibly medicates with any psychoactive substance. This is not party music and that's a Good Thing. This is quiet and personal music that can cause deep introspection and contemplation - with it you can easily access your built-in Soul-Searching function. It has a communicable palette that seems to range from slight and unfocussed apprehension, to a muted kind of absurd joy, to a blissfully carefree contentment in the mysterious (in the minor sense) and ineffable (in the major sense). I can say this too about Loscil's music: I have seen it act an as effective calming agent for people with A.D.D., and Asperger's disorders in a manner similar to results noted using Eno's Discreet Music. I don't know why that is, it just is! Because of those effects Loscil's music can be used as less toxic substitute for religion or magic!

Contemplating the juxtaposition between the beautiful ink-in-oil projections and the open, honest-looking Western European/Western Canadian features of the Lo' one and his contrasting, contrapuntal but complementary and mellow henchman (whose name I still can't discover), while being gradually immersed in deep warm sounds, I found myself closing my eyes and almost asleep (but not quite!) I was as thoroughly satisfied with the setting and the sonics as though I'd been opiated after one of those multi-course French meals. I was entranced actually, drugged and totally carried away with the music to another place, a dream far from the stifling hall, far from my pedestrian cares and concerns, to a better place - Vancouver B.C. perhaps? I imagined being a passenger aboard a ship - maybe a tugboat - in the a harbor passing under a great sweeping bridge, leaving, heading out into the rhythmic swells of the Ocean, approaching a shimmering wall of fog...

Vladislav Delay (Sasu Ripatti, from Finland, aka Luomo) played last. Vladislav's live set is tough to describe. It's quite different than his recordings. I would not call it "ambient", and I can't call it "IDM" either. Although it could be the soundtrack to accompany criminal activity in Rio de Janiero or traffic in Rome. His music is difficult, challenging - daring even. Indirect, full of half-made and cryptic references, and all of it through-and-through slathered and spiked in heavy dub. Most times the sound was extremely dense, but sometimes strikingly simple - brought up in a sudden startling halt to a single note or noise. Bad Vlad's dynamics were incredible, ranging as it were almost literally "from a whisper to a scream" within the space of seconds. Some music sounds to be composed of all round vowels, and some sounds mostly consonant, and most music incorporates both. On the other hand, Vlad the Delayer's music sounds to me as though it is all punctuation. It is as different from much other music as the !tchkung language in the Kalahari of Africa which is composed of clicks and whistles is different from French.

I have no idea what record he was playing from, or if his set was improvised. His 45 minute (approx) piece(s?) at this show made me think of a scenario in which the dub pioneers King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry carry huge silver platters laden with crystal glasses and covered dishes through small carpeted hallways and across huge open plazas - echo laden clinking and clanking, the occasional bong, splintered rhythms - choked off sounds and ridiculously huge sounds that scream off into inaudible. Here they come, first one, then the other. L Scratch P is too tall and stretched to fit easily anywhere and King T is of course, too heavy and wide. Then they would get to the stairs - which elbows and glares from Wolf Eyes and Pan Sonic compelled them to go down - of course they would fall - but exactly when and how far? And how disastrously? Gigantic beats, seemingly barely rhythmic, or detached parts of bigger but fractured rhythms, blasted through extreme fragmented and kaleidoscopic soundscapes of wild variety. The length of the fall and the degree of severity varied each time - Vlad the D would pull it back together somehow, cleverly obvious at times, other times subtle, invisible. At the bottom King Tubby and L Scratch P would pick it all up again and continue on until they got to another staircase...

Its always fun to watch and to hear interpretations of the juxtaposition of order and chaos - the finely-crafted but anarchic cartoons of Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, etc. and the impeccably-timed wild abandon of the comedy of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers are good examples that come to mind. Hearing Vlad the D, I was reminded of those contrasts and the entertaining tension therein. That tension is also what I like best in the music of Hal Willner, Carl Stalling, and Spike Jones - IMHO three of the best composers in the world of all time. Highly-trained and skilled musicians making complex music that reflects the idiotical in Bedlam. What's called a "method to the madness"

Vlad the Delayer overtly makes music perfectly suited to frenetic cartoons and madcap comedy. But its not quite as simple as that. Vlad's music really reflects and reinforces the confusing and discordant events in the manifest world around us. In that sense, he makes true ambient music for an eclectic, post-modern tabula rasa dominated by continuous, rapid and uncontrollable change and the post-traumatic stress and attention deficit disorders that result. His set left me with the feeling that I had heard every possible type of musical characteristic - the entire dynamic range and timbre and tone played out in almost every style of music known - a sprawling sound collage of sorts with elements of most of music's vocabulary embedded somewhere in it, if only fleetingly. What structure there was in his set was too fleeting to latch onto for relief, or too big to understand. My head was spinning.

On the other hand, Loscil makes music that uses the elements of chaos in small, subtle amounts only insofar as to reinforce a piece's order and balance, and suggest only the milder and perhaps more noble emotions by inferrence. His music only hints at the feral outside circling the gates, and it does so with restraint and control - this serves to further highlight the pervasive geniality, humanity, even-tempered reasonableness, well-engineered and elegant structure of his pieces.

It was a highly enlightening musical evening brought by two of the world's best electronic composers, and an excellent case-in-point of two ways to look at the world through music. One is the way of "Girls Gone Wild" - more fun, and arguably, more realistic; the other is the romantic, artful, beguiling way of "a well-turned ankle".

bitters

Ach! and Oy! I raise my bitter cup with thee, fellow vinyl fragrance devotee.
I too detect a cold breeze blowing from the nether regions of those who own culture.
Is it downloading? Is it TV? Is it the plethora? I don't know. Really I don't care.
I know that as long as you and I and others alike are out and about, what we want and what we need will be somewhere within the going…

Trips of this ilk, like Don Quixote's, are the most illogical and unrewarding, but the most eloquent and beautiful.
We know why we go and where with little hope of comfort.
The world may ask and we may tell them, but understanding and loving are ours alone.
We may keep it to make us strong (and wise?)

A flood of memory and emotion has been undammed from a life spent placing too much emphasis on this art form - music and its sundry and vulgar pursuit - compulsive. Regret? Stop now?
Is it the end of an era? No! The end of an ear!

eyeconic iconic

some things never change...

king of the world

Its not that I have anything personal against Paul Simon. I don't actively hate him. I just don't like his music, or the tastes of his audience, or the people who sell his music to his audience. It and them are nearly the antithesis of what I think has "quality" and is "artistic". His artistic intentions have no value to me. But that's just my opinion, yours may be different. Eno's art has (in the past) had great value to me. Now apparently Eno and Simon are going to work together on a new Paul Simon record - this unlikely coupling creates a dilemma. Is it sweet or sour? Or neither? Do they nullify each other like mayonnaise and butter? Or do they augment each other and make something new like peanut butter with chocolate? Or is it just repugnant and inedible like getting sand in your sandwich?

No matter what Eno's role in this, its almost as ugly as the Iggy Pop song "Lust For Life" being used on a cruise line commercial. Was Iggy so hard up? Or had he no choice? Was a gun held to his head? Makes me wonder whether some tremendous pressure was also brought to bear on Mr. E.... Or maybe Eno's hit his big shiny head once too often a little too hard? Any other possibilities, like him working with someone like Paul Simon of his own free will are are just too terrible and discouraging to contemplate - perhaps he has been fooling everyone all these years? Makes one wonder if everything and everyone for sale to serve the insatiable American pop craw?

Maybe Eno has too much time on his hands. Maybe he has some big bills - gambling debts, protection money, alimonies, child support, drug habit, or expensive hobby? Maybe he's been hanging with the wrong crowd, going to the wrong parties and come under the influence of corrupt American music industry demons? Is intervention necessary? An exorcism? Or is a
simple excommunication from the temple necessary? Throw him down the stairs out into the street, wipe our hands, turn our backs, shut the door and forget him?

No matter what goes on here, this is one of a few records that have Eno's prints on it that I won't buy. (the others being the James')

"Pop" goes the weasel

--Bill wrote:
“On May 4, 2006, at 10:03 PM, wobbly scribbled with a crayon:”

> Its not that I have anything personal against Paul Simon. I don't
> actively hate him.

--Bill also wrote:
"This one goes to 11."

> I just don't like his music, or his audience, or the people who
> sell his music to his audience.

--Bill then wrote:
“Thank the Gods "somebody" isn't king of the world.”
--and went on a little in similar vein...

So I replied:

I don't know what you might be imaging about a 'king of the world'. Maybe you were thinking about what you might do if you were - something nasty perhaps to all those people who detest Paul Simon's music? Something punitive to all those who speak of their detest of that detestable music, and to those good people whose opposition to those who have the inhuman nerve to sell that detestable Paul Simon's detestable music to the innocent (but detestable) sheep of the music consuming audience? This detestation makes them a direct enemy of those who imagine being a dictator of aesthetics and behaviour - would you suppress them harshly - Stalinate them and their disagreeable detestation?

I expressed nothing but my opinion and raised a few questions. I saw something I think is ugly and I said so. I didn't say anything about what other people ought to think or do. I just ask questions to stir one up and stimulate debate. Its interesting that your thinking went to regulation - that's exactly what you've done - the dictatorial scolding about what people should say and think and do. Shame on you - to know better and do worse! But thank you too - that kind of attitude would never have occured to me otherwise, so I learned something from your unusual perspective on my opinion. Perhaps its because you didn't read all the way through my post, or maybe misread it, or misunderstood what I was attempting to express? Sorry about that. I guess from now on I'll try to be more clear and simplify my statements in case you have trouble understanding metaphor, sarcasm, and black humor. I could try to be relentlessly positive and champion what everyone else is to be part of the team...?

In any case, what DO you think about this Eno/Simon thing? Do you like it? If so, why? If not, why not? Let's hear it. All of you snipers - what IS your opinion? I don't really care what your view is if you have one and can stand up and say what it is. Are you brave enough to venture it? Are you sure enough of it? Do you have enough belief in your own personality and aesthetics to say what YOU really think? If you don't have opinions on aesthetics and why and how art is made, and you don't know what you like and why, you have no business talking about it, much less taking piddly little potshots at anyone who does have an opinion.

Many people pretend like they don't see the embarrassing or ugly. We learn to wear blinders and not see, not experience. Usually it takes a child to point out when something really stinks. Why? Because they are unafraid to speak their mind. They haven't been told often enough yet that to tell the truth is bad and impolitic. We should all be unafraid to voice our opinions. Especially when our sensibilities are offended and we sense buschwa in what's offered to us. Like children and dogs, the best detectives have an instinct for the truth, the best artists do too, and so do the best critics. But its nothing unusual that they have that the rest of us don't. Its just that they are willing to allow critical examination of what they experience - they are willing to discriminate, to compare, to measure value. We should all be so nitpicky. Then we might all know when the
Emperor has no clothes - when bad art is made or is threatened to be made. In this particular case we could all see that the king does indeed have a lead hat dragging him down. And that is my own opinion. I was not sponsored or coerced in any way to express the above. I did it all on my own, for free.

To paraphrase the Absurd Christians (different than the Serio-comic Christians, and the Slapstick Christians): "...thank the Gods (us), indeed that someone actually has an opinion that differs from the 'yes-men' that are too common even here among the castoffs and disgruntled, because we are bored to eternity by the predictability of bandwagoneering and a pack mentality! If I hear one more lying quotidian defense of bad art I'm going to shove the Don Van Vliet + Jon Bon Jovi combo down their mass market gullet. Let's see how they take that in. Otherwise we'll just keeping cranking out the Enya, that'll show 'em"!

Scuppernong and sedition y'all

frank zappa said...

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture"."

Helpful as that is, I think Zappa was right in one sense, but not quite in the way its usually taken. Art is about synthesizing and reinterpreting experience, not about being formally literal. It should not be taken that he meant that you cannot dance about architecture and that writing about music is equally as futile. I don't think that's what he was trying to get across. That's flat wrong. Frank Zappa could not have been that simple-minded. Could he? In as much as one may make music about the experience of being in the Artic, one may dance an interpretation of architecture, with equal validity. Writing is not intended as a substitute for the actual music it is about. It is intended as a further way in to deeper understanding and more richly experiencing the music. Zappa was telling us not to mistake interpretation of art done in one form for the art that exists in another form.

Although I use reviews too, I keep in mind what Marcel Duchamp said: "I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste. "

'Ambient' does not necessarily have to mean pleasant music-like noises - it can and should be comprehensive enough to include the widest range of human experience possible - as jazz and other musics allow. 'Ambient-ness' lies mostly in the intentions of the music and not fully in the components of the sounds. If the sound is organized at all and not
specifically intended to demand your full attention, its intentions follow a ( (possible) loose ) rule of ambient music. Harsh, machine-like, rhythm-less pounding noise can be 'ambient' as much as soothing, drifting drones combined with artificial bird sounds. Probably will never sell as well though... (relatively speaking)

Fight the real oppressor and throw off your painful shackles of exclusion before ambient music is caused to ossify into a narrow formula like Bluegrass and embrace the concept of what our golden boys Broads of Canasta have insisted is that "Music Has the Right To Children"! (Be they even Red Headed Stepchildren with no manners and obvious gastric disorders)

Remember The Fountain's doppleganger!

liking music in a schedule

It never ends once the connecting starts.

This is how it was explained to me by my uncle who is an architect - a man with a plan and
a snappy dresser too -

"If you keep enjoying music that distorts genres you might end
up liking all kinds of music! Beware! There are only so many hours in a day, after all. A
listener must have discipline and stick to a regimen: so many hours a day of listening to
one kind of music at a time.

For instance: light classical first thing in the morning, shading gradually into light pop hits from the '40s, '50s and '60s in the late morning, progressing steadily (mind those BPMs!) into more stimulating music - rock and roll afternoons so you can stay awake after lunch and into the early evening.

Evenings are the time for a decision - turn things up a notch or two? or turn them down? Martin Denny or Comets On Fire? Harold Budd or Butthole Surfers? Later, The New Sons of Hypnos hold sway and Morpheus descends.

It's all true, so don't be a deviant and waste your precious and finite time on confusing music! Program your music and stick to it!"

deRock-un

broads of canasta

I can't fathom the intense interest there seems to be with Boards of Canada. I've listened to everything they've done, mainly out of curiosity - to see where such a loud buzz was from. I've been more underwhelmed with each release. With this new record from them, I think they've actually unimpressed me so much that they have taken music away from me somehow. Created a kind of anti-music or negativemusic which cancels out some other interesting music. From what people say I always expect some great new thing - from those heights of hype, the plummet to reality and my splat of disappointment is greater. What a shame. What is everyone thinking? I think. What do they hear that I don't - after all these years of polishing my ears with every musical solvent and soap? Am I only hearing half of the music somehow? Is there a secret music, or an esoteric way of playing the discs backwards that gives them their revered meaning to the enlightened? I. just. plain. don't. get. it. What I hear is very pedestrian for this day and age, very predictable, very "safe". Dare I say that they might to be called the Boreds from Yawnada?

If you had heard Einsturzende Neubauten, Nurse With Wound, Foetus, or even the Residents, Tuxedomoon, Throbbing Gristle, early Eno, Fripp, Arvo Part, Conlon Noncarrow, Boyd Rice, Eugene Chadbourne, Glenn Branca, Cabaret Voltaire, Cluster, Neu!, Terry Riley, John Cage, Ken Nordine, Gong, Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, Varese and all those other unsung experimental music pioneers, or even Martin Denny, not to mention Phillip flippin Glass, or Kraftwerk, and newer things like Twine, Oval, Climax Golden Twins, Boris, Sunn0))), BlackDice, Wolf Eyes, Stars of the Lid, Tim Hecker, Negativland, the Books, Vladislav Delay, etc, etc, well, you wouldn't be impressed with Beards of Granada either. Compared to any of these other artists, the artist in question is not what you'd call adventurous, original, or anything more than mildly competent; maybe “professionally workmanlike” is more apt. It is well done with clean, square edges; all well-sanded and painted and put together in the accustomed style, completely unobtrusive, carefully inoffensive, and universally palatable. My 5 and 6 year old children don't mind Boards of Canada - in fact they ignore it when its on. Whereas they react strongly to things like Wolf Eyes or Sunn0))) - which they immediately don't like - a lot. Other things like Negativland, the Books, Oval and Kraftwerk they just as immediately love.
Is it relevant to the case of Boars of Colasco why kids hate some music, love some so much, and totally ignore other music? Don’t know. The kids can't tell me, so I can't tell you. But it's an interesting question. After all, taste is such a personal thing, isn't it? We all have our niggling doubts about what we like and why... Its part of one’s “personality” innit? Gee, if I like music of Smelton Yawn and the music of Yanni, is thee Bones of Calisto the halfway point? And what kind of person am I because of this?

I think my mother wouldn't mind Gourds of Cramada - it would fit her idea of "electronic" music. New music to bring home to Mum! Its shaven, showered, wears clean clothes, brings flowers and always says "Please" and "Thank You". It doesn't ride a motorcycle, smoke, or look a shade too... "dark".

While its not really fair to place the sum value of certain music upon one man's scales of worth as I have done, and render it all worthless as Weimar Deutschmarks, and probably its very worrying for you all browknitters and nit-threshers to hear such heresy, I feel that someone has to say something before this Boards of Canada thing goes too far and becomes a dangerous cult with some evil antisocial manifesto, wearing their trademark hairstyle while preaching “the End To Music that is not like Boards of Canada!" This inevitably ends with the drinking of the deadly Koolaid or shooting it out with the ATF and taking down a lot of good musicians and music lovers with them. Lets try to avoid all that early, starting here. To be honest, I would rather listen to Boards of Canada than a lot of other things. Millions of other things. But as long as I have a choice, I won't listen to those millions of other things when I can help it. Most of the other things are unpleasant like Abba or painful like Bob Dylan, and a lot of it can be avoided. Neither will I choose to listen to Boards of Canada again because its boring.

Is there is anyone out there who has listened with interest to most or all of the above over the years, that can tell me with all of their hard-won musical experience that they can still go "Woo-Hoo! Boards of Canada!”?

Bottoms

idm vs. ambient

--Alban deCongee wrote:
"Whar in tarnation do this music come from, any dang how?"

You find a dusty jar on a shelf and think "What's in here?" So you open it (just because you can) and then...

While both are based in electronic sound manipulation and generation, and both are the direct descendants of the early musical experimentalists like LaMonte Young, Edgard Varese, John Cage, and so on, "IDM" and "Ambient" are antagonistic in many ways if you think about it. Very generally speaking for the sake of brevity; although tucked off together in the shady back of the garden, and having some common ancestry, they are completely different plants. IDM grows primarily directly out of the fragrant manure of the earliest and still continuing European folk traditions. It is easy to see that strong danceable rhythms then and now is the key ingredient. Ambient is grown primarily in the hothouse nourished by that blue crystalline product mixed with purified water which is the music of the fairly recent European Art Song and the Romantic style of Western Classical Music. Ambient music and its doppleganger "experimental" music are often informed by scholarly reference and literary aspirations, and usually rely on a high level of musical training, technique and theory - big-headed conceptual with no dancing allowed. IDM conversely, is often created with more universal intentions, is usually lacking the literary ambitions and conceptual artiness, and generally places less emphasis on theory. Ambient does not necessarily refer at all to continuing Western folk traditions or regular rhythms. IDM on the other hand, relies heavily on "danceable" rhythms and nearly always refers to aspects of "Pop", or widely-understood and shared mass-media culture to create meaning. Although of course there are blurred boundaries everywhere, and the rule is one of exception; these are the gross differences between two related but distinct musics. They shared some relatives (music has always had many potential fathers contributing seeds to its makeup) but they were raised by their mothers in different places in different circumstances. One went to work and was outgoing in nature, and the other went to school and is more introspective.

As an aside, and only slightly OT; perhaps no one in history has done more to bridge all these styles and schools of thought than George Martin, the classically trained producer of the Beatles from Sgt. Pepper on. He combined classical arrangement and instrumentation from the art song tradition with Pop music from the folk tradition and used electronic manipulation on the resulting melange to come up very fresh, popular and influential. Wasn't a pioneer in theory or technique, he wasn't the most beautiful of the angels, he was never more than workmanlike and unassuming, and he didn't sing in that lovely McCartney voice, but over time in his unobtrusive work, he has had the most impact. He, like Eno and a few others was in the right spot at the right time - at the converging point of different strains of aesthetic approaches. To paraphrase Dali: He provided the right kind of honey, for the right kind of fly, at exactly the right time.

And then there are the other earlier actual pioneers/theoreticians who are directly responsible for the music we enjoy today. Debussy, Satie, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Boulez, Erwin Schulhoff, and many others. Without them we might all be rictus-grinning and line dancing to very loud bluegrass, seven-movement, two-hour polkas; and evolved Dixieland and Big Band would be the music of the criminal and labor class. (Hmmm, wait a minute! That sounds very close to what we actually have now, in spite of everything). I wonder though, when I "listen/think" to Webern or Schoenberg, if the world would have been better off with less intellect and more dancing... Or is the more conceptual music the necessary refuge inevitably created for those of us that lack the rhythm to dance and/or refuse to march?

European folk traditions - the vast boiling cauldron of "whatchagot stew" - a violent melange - is most of our cultural heritage - it is "who we are" yesterday and today. It is what we call popular culture or "Pop" - music, dance and costumes. Popular is a "what came first, the chicken or the egg?" sort of concept: Is it good-selling because its Popular? Or called Popular because it good-sellling? Is it widely distributed entertainment because its Popular? Or vice versa? Is it popular because the product is by, and for the common folk? Or vice versa?

Often popular music is what you might call "natural" music like blues or bluegrass. Oftentimes too, it is utilitarian like marching music, or it rises out of the religous/superstitious impulses that we all fall prey to en masse and results in chorale or gospel musics. It is the musics of the real lives of people.

Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) is mostly informed by elements common in pop music and secondarily by components common in art music. Simple as that. Pop a boil, end the infection, live to see another day! Or not? IDM at its best, reverses the ratio of pop and art. However when it goes too far, its no longer IDM! So it walks a fine line.

Ambient and experimental electronic, in contrast to pop and IDM, grows out of the music of the educated, elite, leisure class of Europe. These people were able to devote a good deal of time to education in music, pondering the warps and the wefts of sound, and to the gaudification of their musical fripperies. Idle hands... So we can call it "art music", as in "artificial" as opposed to natural or utilitarian or simple entertainment. It is unnatural and not useful and inhuman. It is the music of the spheres, and music of the abstract, and the ineffable, and the platitudes, obliqueness, and esoteric and obscure reference. And attractive as strychnine-cut heroin. You know the price, but you know you must have what it does...

nopix opon thope opbopay

Or, as I've heard it said from the old Hibernian sod:
"Gargling Money"
by S. Woon

But soon and sadly, like all the rest I fear,
He'll sag and start selling stuff...
or maybe not! We'll see.
One day too may choke he
at the bank with crowds
while hosing a dose.
and the ambient music becomes more so,
in the dust, never heard.
How sad!


And awfully too,
the stores all suddenly closed.
So everyone went home and
cried, "What'll we do?"
Then Gramma said,
"Why there's some perfectly good ambient music being wasted right now!
It's playin outside the winder all the livelong day,
but nobody's fer listenin', catscratchit!"
So they did.
And although they were a little bit scared,
and then a little bored,
they all slept well.
Even wee little ____, the busiest one.
So ye now, cuddle doon, little bairnies..

unheeded advice

Here's a coupla ideas:
Bong!) Take your overhead projector, open it up and put a little DVD player inside playing a loop of goof - maybe tilt the player so that its plane is not perpendicular to the projector’s glass so that the focus is slightly different from side to side of the image > make sure it shows in the top glass > unfocus the projector head so that the image playing is not recognizable. Never tried this - just an idea…
Bong!) Rent an orthographic projector which lets you blow up images laid on its table. Put your DVD player down there > project onto stage. This method has limited size and brightness, but if you put it on the stage it might work. Plus most of these beasts look hulking > cool. Never tried this either...
Bong!) Borrow a 16mm projector and the oldest films you can find – maybe steal them from an elementary school or your public library > smear vaseline on the lens - or unscrew the lens to defocus the lens for mysteriousness > wind the films backwards onto the spools (tip: throwing the film up over power lines will give you plenty of clearance to keep the film off the ground and clean while you rewind it inside out) > project films onto stage and whatever they happen to hit. You might have a friend help with this one. This I have done using 1000 foot reels and several projectors (and several friends). Old science films and cartoons etc can go abstract really cool! Not having paid for them makes them look even better! The clacking of the projectors is also a very cool rhythmic sound that you can work with – and with several, you get polyrhythms!
Bong!) Save the best for last. Mix giant batch of Sangria (red wine with fruit slices) – like 5 gallons > mix in about 200 hits of acid > Serve to every guest - miss no one! (Seconds are OK if everyone has had at least one cup.) Turn off all the lights except for tiny worklights and play show. Guaranteed memorable evening.

Speaking of geeks:
one of my favorite palindromes is this: "Satan oscillate my metallic sonatas". This was coined by Brad Stevens, roommate of Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil in Seattle circa 1987. We used the palindrome in a film we made for Lollapalooza in 1994 featuring Thayil burning an American flag, it also included original music by Steve Fisk and Negativland. Timothy Leary loved it and watched it repeatedly in the "Media Tent" which was the geek sideshow in which he was impanelled that year. A small sachet of cultural history to perfume our daily lives and lessen the stench of pillage and advertising all around...

…don't know how old you are - the early nineties may seem like ancient history to you. And after all we as individuals, and us as a society, and us as a subculture have come so far since then! I'm so proud to note our evolution and the improved circumstances of the world since the dark ages of the early 90s!
When discussing etymology however, the qualifier "recent" can mean anytime within the previous 10, 20,30 generations or so - or it can mean any time after an event shifted common useage from an archaic to a contemporary strain like our Western calendar has done repeatedly.
The Jargon File did not invent the term “geek” but it does help us understand "recent" useage and maybe each other a little…
Doesn't matter how you pronounce it, as long as when you do use the word you are pointing to the right place or thing.
A “geek” is a person who swallows live animals, bugs, etc., as a form of entertainment at fairs etc. This often included biting off the heads of chickens (iggy pop - chicken, ozzy osbourne - rock dove – both classical geeks). The Geek would usually perform in a "geek pit" (rock show). This probably comes from the Scottish geck, meaning 'fool', in turn from Low German. ( 19th century.)
Geek has always had negative connotations within society at large, where being described as a geek tends to be an insult. The term has recently become less condescending, or even a badge of honor, within particular fields and subcultures; this is particularly evident in the technical disciplines, where the term is now more of a compliment denoting extraordinary skill (like de capo).
 sans tete

-- "Z Moser" wrote:
“Hi. I just moved up to Portland from Texas.

Where should I go for good music?

What groups should I affiliate myself with?

Zach”

Well, since you hadda ask:

Portland is the doorstep to Seattle, which is the doorstep to Vancouver, BC, which is the doorstep to San Francisco, which is the doorstep to... etc. In other words, yawn. Its a nice town fer yer Gramma, but...

About the music… uh, good luck! Some notable indy/emo rock like uh... er..., um... Mountain Goats? Plus Steve Miller lives not too far from there (if he's still alive) (cool, huh? He's got a big farm! With cows!)

Extra good news: It rains a lot. And, the days are short in the winter, so its dark and wet for about four months. Just like Seattle only there are less wet people in Portland.

The best good thing is that there are free "magic mushrooms" (Psilocybin) growing all over the place! Probably even in your yard, or your local park if you look. (Psilocybin (also known as psilocybine), is a psychedelic alkaloid of the tryptamine family. It is present in many species of fungi, including those of the genus Psilocybe, such as Psilocybe cubensis and Psilocybe semilanceata, but also reportedly isolated from a dozen or so other genera. Psilocybin-containing mushrooms are commonly called magic mushrooms or simply "shrooms". Effects of psilocybin are comparable to LSD, but last for a shorter time, although intensity and duration vary depending on dosage, individual physiology, and set and setting.)

My advice to you if you must be there, is to get some good raingear, freeze-dry the shrooms (to kill the bugs), drink lots of coffee to stay alert, buy a full-spectrum lamp for the vitamin D deficiency you’ll soon have, and be a good lad and just forget the music. Don't go to Apotheke/City Centre Offices – they are way too cool to comprehend a southern accent as a genuine human spoken language – they will take what you say for insane gibberish and call the police. You would do well to get to know the police first hand anyway and this might be a good way to get introduced. If you want to assimilate, affiliate yourself with the best group in Portland - the police... Besides, the police are your best connection - they know where all the drugs are!

Good luck, Tex!


--simon wrote:
> “Hello i'm making a report about new innovations in Bars, Clubs and Hotels...
>
> anyone seen anything with WOW factor?
>
> Like these:
>
> http://www.enviu.org/cm/cm_index_site.html
> (the world's first sustainabole dance club)
>
> http://www.i-bar.ch/info/
> (interactive 'intelligent' bar surface)”

--fwitcher wrote:
This calls to mind what I said when I encountered the Hooters and Best Western partnership: they call it "Breast Western". I said "WOW!"

-- "Ed Hoc" wrote:
“tight sweaters and big boobs are undeniably soaked in WOW factor,
imho. you should look into boobs.”

--Fwitcher wrote:
Let me know if you “uncover” anything promising in some of these cutting edge bars. I’d like photos names and phone numbers…



"...Please submit your top 10 ambient releases from 2000 to present...."

That is simply all that is necessary: Your ten personal favorite ambient records released from 2000 to present. Not “the ten greatest all time ambient records from then”, or what one thinks is the "Best Of.." - just the ones you like the best. Simple.

What do you find yourself returning to repeatedly? Maybe its not necessarily the most highly regarded music, perhaps its even a 'guilty pleasure'. Maybe its from a bigger label and not the most fashionable boutique label - it doesn't matter! Surely everyone has ten records released since 2000 that they listen to the most often? What matters is sharing what you like most in this limited, formal, and manageable manner.

Your favorite music will no doubt differ from mine and probably from everyone else's, and you will have contributed just an oonce to the broadening of the world of aesthetics. If you don't let everyone know what your favorites are, well, I guess it can remain your little secret and that's OK. We'll play on, regardless. But it would be fun to have as comprehensive and diverse a tally as possible.

I propose that in the future we call these lists or polls "Favorite Ambient Records Tally" or F. A. R. T. s for short. We can refer to them as "old FARTs and new FARTs, etc. It is what it is: the smelly by-product of caloric conversion to create and release energy.

Please contribute. Its simple, clean, fun and painless (unless you want it to hurt) and everyone can be happy. Its all about sharing! These are all good things as we all (should have) learned in Kindergarten.

Unrockun



--Joe King wrote:
My CD player doesn't play CDRs in Louisiana. What should I do?

Have you eliminated humidity in the player as a possible cause of probs? Lasers do fog in damp.

Here's a couple of possible remedies:

1) Move out of the bayou and go to Iceland - its so cold there that hardly anything works right anyway - have you heard Bjork sing? Now you've got bigger problems and your CD player will cease to be a big deal.

2) Open up the case, put in about five of those little silica bags that come with new shoes inside the player/recorder - does it still skip? Do you find high-end freqs a little more crisp? Do you get thirsty now when you play music? Good signs.

3) Buy a banjo and then buy a house with a porch (screened from bugs if need be). Sit on the porch nightly and learn to play the thing over the years. F____ the CDs! (jah, in a rocking chair. [or maybe an un-rocking chair]. Remember with enough mint juleps you soon won't care about stupid ole CDRs or the heat…)

Yerz
Henry of Hanging Swamp

eno the blessed

He walked in. Both of his feet touched the ground. I heard them. A hush fell over
the bald heads in the room. Thud, thud. No air showed under his feet when he put them down - I looked. Gravity did apply upon such lofty heights. Also noted that He wore dark pants and a dark sweater. It made perfect sense. It was night and it was chilly. Not even Eno can ignore the elements and neglect creature comfort. Towards that end too, he was supplied a bottle of cognac set on a little table beside his chair on the low stage. (during the course of the talk (about an hour and a half) he drank approx. 1/3 of it).

That was fine! There were only about 50 people in the audience that night. We had been supplied with nothing to drink. We all sat on the floor close (or maybe in chairs, but we felt small and they felt like the floor, anyway). We were tiny, and the tiniest of the lucky and the hip; but still just acolytes at the feet of the master, hanging on his every word, noting his every small gesture or movement. If he looked to the side when he laughed, everyone noticed. When he drank water, we all watched his adams apple. Several women talked about that after, smoking post-coital/lecture cigarettes in the rain. Later we all practiced doing things, like him, just... so!

Years later, many of us still retain those "Enoisms", as we call them, that we
picked up that night from such avid study. We don't remember what exactly he did (if he did anything (or everything)), since no one brought a camera, but we do know now and we see it in each other when we make gestures that seem unnatural or pretentious - one can tell - and those we call Enoistic. We know that perhaps their origins are Enoical and thus contrived. We are torn between shame and pride - how can we be so slavishly apish and still have had the intelligence to be there to get such inoculation? Its enough to drive the weak to the drugs of the week or religious zeal.

We 50-odd "Enophytes" all hate each other. Is it because of our unwillingness to share and thus dilute the experience? Or is it because we are all competitors in a highly esoteric field that is invisible to most people; where we are affecting the most subtle perfect scars, the perfect attitudes of hot-coolness, passionate distance and restrained allusion to anarchy and chaos? We look f---ed up, but we all went to university and we're all white and American, so deep down we know we'll be OK. The ineffable confidence of karma.

Somehow we seem to keep meeting like jackals drawn together by an invisible scent trail of the blood of a fresh kill, or like priests scratching at other over a fallen altar boy. Certain aesthetic confluences concentrate us in odd parts of cities – or weirder still, way off in some odd rural leyline crossover. Its always surprising, but frequent enough to be predictable enough to be avoided. But I never pass up these events. I know who I'll see and how I'll feel, but I go anyway because I want to feel nauseous and I want to feel indignation. But I also want to feel that my subtleties and my Enoistic "scars" are understood. If only there and for that short time. Its enough. When we do meet face to face we vacillate (oscillate?) between scathing each other by mocking obvious or apparent "Enoisms", and lavishing excessive (insincere and envious) praise for someone's clever Enoissitudes. Over time I've noticed that these tics and habits and airs have become stylized and exaggerated and codified. We all understand them and what they signify. There is a tendency toward formalism and regularity in our deployment of our repertoire of Enoisms. We recognize each other by them. We acknowledge status amongst ourselves by them.

We appreciate the subtlety and artistic modification of them. It is our own secret
language. With this language, so far removed from the source of its inspiration and so
artificial to its actual users, we can find a common ground from which to conduct our pale imitations of musical alchemy and soul enriching philosophical platitudinousness, with our own hollow rewards and gilded cups. Not to mention sacred rights and mating rituals. Because we've named them Enoistic, they are, and we are sure he would do it the same as we.



The paramount question for many through years of debate remains: Did Eno in his infinite wisdom choose that particular time and place to appear to us - only those that he knew could be there and would be there? Or did we do so unconsciously - we wisely choose to be there as though GUIDED BY VOICES or an UNSEEN HAND?

Sometimes I bum out and think it wasn't that big a deal - I was only there because of some chick, and that there is no "secret language" and all that. Sometimes I'm not sure if Eno should be so influential, that maybe having someone like him around is not so good for artists. Maybe his Santo oughta be pulled outta the niche! Can it be that I've wasted thousands of dollars on adams apple enhancements and throat excersises in my attempt to emulate his attractiveness to three women who smoke in the rain? Fooey!

Other times I'm pretty sure that he's not quite human - maybe a demigod of some kind, like Madonna.

Usually I just settle for the good old tried and true explanation that is a variation on the 100 monkeys/100 typewriters/100 years idea. One that seems to apply to a good many explorers, scientists, innovators. He stumbled into it. He was walking along and stepped in it. He was exactly the right person there at exactly the right time. To paraphrase Salvatore Dali explaining his art in his 'moustache' book: (Eno was) the right kind of honey for the right kind of fly at exactly the right time.

Not many artists have had such a profound impact, after all. Not even Boards of Canada. The night I saw him he didn't say anything too remarkable like "Burn the flag!" or, "wear a tie!" Rather he seemed the urbane spokesman of a chin-stroking
placid revolution, where one just wills the bad and ugly of the world away and poof! All
is good and mysterious in a golden way. Or not...

I do remember though that he was very much at ease, well spoken, friendly and charming in a Cary Grant/Bela Lugosi/E.T. sort of way. He was also very compact and self contained, seeming as though about twice his mass was contained inside him. You don't get that impression from people very often. Of course, my impressions were skewed because he was one of my heroes, so I could be way off. Plus, I had dropped a lot of acid. After the first couple of tabs didn't kick in after an hour, we took a couple more. About an hour after that, they all kicked in at once. I think acid makes me a better observer though. Everything is so much more... distinct. And because its so clear, it must be more real than one is accustomed to, and its heightened reality means that it must be more true. Simple logic.

But in all things as in even plain old music, everyone has their own
perception of reality. Some people say that the only time they ever have seen him, he was coming down out of the sun wearing only a beach towel, which, when he landed and stood over them, fell off. They swore he was a saint because he carried a "wooden staff". I've never seen that! Can't even imagine.
I do have a friend that worked with Mr. E. for a while though, M.B., and he does have some rather interesting anecdotes! But those are other stories I save to get "the mood" going.

Obliviety and chiarusco

en garde

Eno falls off the fence he’s teetered dangerously on for years – messing about with James and U2, scaring us all half to death. Well now he’s done it! He’s fallen hard, and landed on his unprotected-by-the-padding-of-hair head. Working with Paul Simon, the composer of “Feelin’ Groovy”, and the unforgettable album “There Goes Rhymin’ Simon”. What a peculiar pairing. But I get it – Eno gets money, Paul Simon gets to wear Eno’s artistic credibility and maybe cops a few modern sounding songs from Eno. It’s such an unnatural but transparent arranged marriage that its vulgar and almost sickening, but funny. Its so obvious and pathetic its funny.

What makes this even funnier is that perhaps there's a real kernel of possibility here. Other 'Serious' ambient and electronic musicians can follow Eno's vapor trail and cross over to where the money is and go a-slumming for cash. Its kind of a win/win relationship for the 'artists'. Trading cash in exchange for the borrow of their air of high cool. Popsters can buy access to cutting edge musicians and their cred to get back into the bigtime.

Although, as we've seen, its a lose/lose proposition for the audience - we lose our art star's credibility and can never take them seriously again, AND we get more pop personality drivel which is never in short supply anyway, like most effluvium of industries of all kinds.

However, to be kind, we should remember that pop music personalities need all the help they can get. Like racehorses that lose a step and are out to pasture early in life, they're rather sad and inspire pity when trotting their feeble 3-legged songs around the ring and yelling too loudly about their quality. The more they insist, the more we notice the missing leg. Who can't shed a tear for the heroic has-been troubador who still pretends to have "fight" left in them? After they've used up the 5 or 6 melodies they found in their twenties, and the trends they were part of are all commodified, standardized, and quaintified, and way, way over with, they still need the crutches of some decent songs and knacky musicians around them to prop them up on the downward ramp of their careers. This need is probably driven by extreme fear - you can smell it! Fear of being nobody again in some cases but I think in most cases, its gotta be those pesky bills. Especially the taxes on those houses. A good example is Paul Simon. Even though everyone at the IRS (Infernal Revenue Service) loves the song "Feelin' Groovy", they are still charged to collect Paul Simon's taxes. And they will. With a vengeance only an agency with no public oversight can wield.

Our musical starling Paul Simon has shown over the years to be extremely willing to wear other music's platform shoes to get the attention he thinks he deserves (and maybe acquire some cash?). If his renewed glory reflects upon anyone else (but not too much - like those African musicians he used – uh, what were their names, again?), so much the better. But Paul Simon's dilemma is not unique. There are many other needy pop personalities out there. Perhaps Coldplay needs to try this hairshirted concept on too, so early in their "career" and that's why they want to show Eno their privates.

The possibilities are exciting: Madonna can buy the monolithic Monolake to hide her lack of talent behind while making the most of her other behind, Geir Jenssen can go to work for Justin Timberlake icing him down, John Mayer can chain Funckstorung up in his four car garage, Four Tet cozies Janet Jackson and acquires his own trick wardrobe, Billy Joel can pull himself out of the tarpit and pull Stars of the Lid his lap for a joyride, etc.

Call it what you will - pure sh!t, or inspired genius, or efficient product generation, it may be an idea whose time has come and perhaps we all should submit to it. Eno is not the first to do this kind of thing, nor the last. Eno's defenestration, like Iggy Pop's is just particularly obvious and ugly like a big red boil in the middle of your forehead on a Saturday night.

square pizza

Even if, in the final analysis (which will not be made by us), what I think makes no sense whatsoever, and furthers no progress in understanding, nor creates greater aesthetic appreciation, I can only ask questions about why interesting things are exciting and why dull things are ignorable. If I know more about those problems, then I can hold a stick up to experience and more reliably gauge its worth; perhaps saving time and increasing quality. Efficiency and economy as elements of quality. Primarily, we need less opposable "rules of thumb" from which to make intelligible thumbnail sketches for reference to all choices that are subject to the range from "poison" to "nourishing".

Let me also say that my intentions here are to stimulate debate. It helps keep aesthetics from becoming reflexive. (I think) Socrates said: 'An unexamined life is not worth living' and following that, I say: 'unexamined tastes are not worth having'. Why do you like one thing and not another? I cannot stress the importance of this self-awareness enough.

Seriously though, from this specific to general aesthetic knowledge we can create a useful template (which I will then license to manufacture a product).

Consumers worlwide can place this product - an attractively-styled aesthetic appliance/lifestyle accessory in front of their stereos. If the music played passes through it and can be heard on the other side, it is 'ambient' (if that is the model of the appliance). If the music does not pass through, you cannot hear it. But in that case, it is not ambient, so you don't care. We will also sell replacement filter sets so the consumer can change them out as need be - especially should the filters have to work too hard and get excessively dirty screening out things like Aphex Twin or Boards of Canada.

We will also create an IDM screen, and one which works on ersatz jazz, and several others as our market research identifies areas of urgent need and strong demand.

Think of it as a HEPA filter set for music, protecting the aesthetic health and well being of music lovers everywhere through the miracles of regulation and measure. Perhaps the product's motto can be: "Protection of listener sensibility is Job One!"

All desriptions of the world have to be adjustable, but regular and fairly precise too. A difficult set of conditions to impose on a tool and its users. A crescent wrench being adjustable, is among the most useful of tools, useful even for most non-mechanics.

Pizza is a food like that - everyone knows what it is - it has recognizable and universally accepted parameters and characteristics, there is a "pizza-ness" or an "ur-pizza" that can be referred to and understood, yet at the same time it can have all manner and numbers of toppings, making it almost infinitely mutable, and a different experience for all who perceive it. Yet after all and no matter what, it is still a pizza, as everyone knows, even for its eaters and perceivers in Germany, Jonestown or Japan.

Or is it? Is a pizza really a pizza everywhere to everyone? There is the problem of square pizzas... Are they pizzas? Do they retain enough ur-pizza traits to remain pizzas? I see square pizzas as problematic as penguins for avian-ness, as problematic as using vocals with intelligible lyrics in otherwise ambient music and still calling it "ambient", and almost as problematic as describing smell and taste. Difficult to grip. Not impossible, just blurry and wobbly, hard to catch and describe.

Slippery tools are hard to use. Do you have hold of it or not? If it slips, you'll smack your knuckles! A good job is to try to clean up the tools and keep them so; they'll be more reliable and thus more useful. However, in the end, a slippery tool is better than no tool at all...

Socrates also advised that 'the only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance'

spent is the new fresh

Perhaps "ambient" music is one of those somewhat acrid, mildly dangerous and self-destructive "adult" tastes that appeals to very few; cigars and cigarettes, single malt scotch, coffee, lars von trier's films, dark chocolate, garlic, sudoku, etc. Complicated, not sweet, with a faint whiff of poison - the sophisticated delights of bad-for-you intoxication and the contemplation of memento mori; the relentlessness of time and inescapable biological and chemical processes - the passage of ripeness to rot. The approach of the End. What the Japanese call Wabi Sabi - beautiful decay - the acknowledgement, if not bittersweet relish of the melancholic slow slide from youth and beauty to age and wear.

Some call this decadence. But I think it is a more forward-looking aesthetic. It is not merely lapsing into glorification of the present corrupted state of an idealized, semi-fictional past and its beauties. Wabi Sabi and ambient music share an awareness and delectation of intimations of the aesthetic future - they are not simple celebrations of decay or the randomness of chance, but they are informed by those factors, and by keen awareness of the directions and flavors of the past and the meandering, mysterious ways they took to get here, now. I believe Ambient music looks hopefully far into the future - an optimistic and fantastical reality expanding impulse, while simultaneously making richer and broader use of what has gone before than any other genre of music.

Much ambient music incorporates ideas of imperfection, chance and decay by using lo-fidelity "found" sounds from old magnetic media and fractured or random portions of "field recordings" of natural sounds, along with random computer generated sounds and generated waves of sound designed to decay and mesh in upredictable, asymmetrical, never-repeating patterns. The riotousness of chaos made obedient as an element of a more elastic sense of order.

Not many people can appreciate ambient music. Its too demanding. Too much has to brought to it by the listerer. It does not lay down in front of you obviously begging to be petted. You have to struggle some toward it and puzzle it out. You have to be brave and confront chaos and degeneration and extremity. Embrace ideas that are not conducive to life or civilization or safety. Concepts that represent confusion, impersonality, poison and death. Not many people have the nerve to enjoy the intimations of their own demise. I think its easier for us who are ugly men to confront the truth, savor the reality and avoid the (too American (or Western?)) denial of entropy and chaos - its just too starking obvious for middle-aged men to ignore. Conversely, its very difficult for most women to appreciate the aesthetics of imperfection and entropy. No one really wants to hear about old and ugly and worn out - women have been instructed their whole lives in the importance of personal beauty. Our whole culture (in the West) stridently and continuously shouts to us about beauty and strength, youth and perfection, and mocks the virtues of experience and patience, scratches and rust, the evidence of use and time - which are the very foundations of ambient music. Most ambient music is antithetical to our cultural surroundings - bete noire to our bourgeios parents and organization in general! The fact that Ambient music is difficult to dance to and will never lead to a larger audience further proves the point.

Don't blame me that any of this stuff is true! If you detach your political personality and your amazon.com preferences for a second and think about it objectively, you'll see it like a target at the mall. Besides, shooting the messenger is not only ill grace, but very bad luck.

Frankly, I don't always have the patience for ambient music either – sometimes I just don't want to have to enter imaginary, suggestive and fantastical realms where I have to supply a good deal of the content and effort - I think that's true for most people - sometimes I just want to "rock out" like a knucklehead and not worry about anything. But when I need the emotional and intellectual stimulation that ambient music provides, I've got to have it, nothing else will do - its just me and my taste - one of my drugs-of-choice.

lift with your mind...

Speaking of Sunn0))), I met the two of them and one of the members of Boris recently while they were mixing a new record at Avast! Studios in Seattle. (I'm still unclear if it's a Sunn0))) record or a "split" Boris/Sunn0)))... - or given that the guitar player of the late, lamented Soundgarden contributed roccoco feedbacking, it will be something else entirely...)

(The record is known as "Altar")


It was an interesting experience. I don't listen to much heavy metal music. I'm only familiar with the most well-known of the metal groups. I mostly listen to experimental and electronic music and some lo-fi style indie rock. So I can't really address how Sunn0))) fits in to the metal world. I have to hear them and see them from the outside and try to place my observations into a broader, less specific musical perspective. I came to Sunn0)))'s music via this path: David Bowie>Brian Eno>No Wave/Ambient/Bauhaus>Throbbing Gristle/The Residents/John Cage/Glenn Branca>Oval>Merzbow>Boris>Sunn0)))...


To hear them talk I notice that they are interested in the physicality and the transportation of energy from performer to audience of their music and of the psychoacoustic effects upon the listener. Their intentions seem to be with how the listener responds physically and psychically to large, long, slow, gradual sonic change at extreme volume in an almost scientific way - what is perceived and inferred via this excruciating (and once sensitized, exquisite) music and what its physical and mental effects are. They drew pictures to help them come to grips with the scale of the sounds (and perhaps also to help overcome the language barrier with the man from Boris who is Japanese). The pictures work for me too - there is simply no normal way of contextualizing what they're doing - its too big, too loud, too slow, to long-form for caffienated, squirrel ears raised on 3 minute pop songs, like mine. Words to describe it right don't exist and I don't think standard musical notation works well either. Their musical intent seems to be something of a combination of the centuries-long aims of the Clock of the Long Now and the psychoacoustic effects of the multi-guitar symphonies of Glenn Branca with explicit and garish overtones of the irrational and superstition in the form of the occult and its obverse - religion, and pervasive undercurrents of mortal dread, that all surrenders ultimately in a celebration of the triumph of chaos.

Amazing to me is that they can actually think like this at all! Both men in Sunn0))), Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley, were raised in the very ordinary suburbs of Seattle. How they've managed to rise above those uninspiring rain and ennui drenched impediments is testament to the resilience of the human spirit. I have seen the place they're from and know what it consists of. Think of overactive, sugar-saturated imaginations pent up in the toxic-cloud of our manufactured indoors while the accessible world consists only of a mostly damp and cool place where everything you touch is wet, where mold and mildew are the most obvious life forms. It is a place where nearly perpetual looming grey skies wallow down upon a hostile, faceless environment of rectangles - grey roads, vast grey parking lots, boxy chain stores and bland identical tract houses, and absent any history and culture aside from the ersatz ones on television - a really not too uncommon situation for many of us - and you have to wonder that they were able to wring any inspiration and creativity out of such a dismal origin.





In any case, its been a horizon-expanding experience to be confronted by music that doesn't hold the door open for you, so to speak. I don't even really know what to properly call this music - there is little cultural or musical vocabulary available to describe their works. There is simply nothing in Western musical history that has dealt with music this extreme - everything that has gone before is pale and small and inadequate - its like trying to describe Godzilla by holding up a stuttering little Woody Allen as an example. This sound would instantly kill Mozart historians. It would collapse the craniums of anyone who has ever contributed to the LaRousse. The London Philharmonic would spontaneously combust with the opening salvo of tones of any of Sunn0)))'s pieces. Pavoratti would soil himself just prior to messily exploding when bodily exposed to a short blast of this sound. Naturally, this kind of language has been used in the past to describe heavy metal music. There is a certain truth in describing power with destructive hyperbole - our language and experience has no way to describe things like this except as destructive - storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, monsters, etc. But raw power does not necessarily mean "bad". Its a mistake to automatically equate force with destruction and negativity.


Sunn0)))'s music is not simply about power and volume, and not necessarily about destruction and doom. I've come to see their music as a very natural evocation of our universal unconscious responses to the way our world really is - it's mostly dull and chaotic, often hostile, punctuated by moments of startling beauty and poignance and insight, and overall, deeply frightening because of our limited vision and understanding. But its not all about our fear of the unknown - its really all about our fear of uncontrollable changes that bring us to the unknown. Any sensible person can feel all of that, and any sensible person ought to admit it and accept it. Their music is an entry to the idea that uncontrollable change is the only real constant in the universe. It is cathartic to accept chaos as normal, and a relief to abandon the illusions of permanent order and give up on the idea that we are able to keep our fingers in all the holes in all the dikes forever, so to speak. In those respects, their music is actually a positive force - liberating and life-affirming. Amen.


Live, their "songs" are long, mostly improvised pieces played at extreme volume mostly with guitars, that explore shifting sets of musical ideas to their conclusion with little use of traditional song-structure. They present themselves anonymously; black-robed, backlit, fog shrouded, mysterious. Their shows are not about them - their faces, their personalities, as much as the performances are about the music and the atmosphere it evokes, which, its been said, is surprisingly ritualistic, without a trace of the formalism of religious ceremony, Wiccan, Catholic, or otherwise. On their records they explore the furthest limits of what metal music can be - seldom using drums and then only to very unconventional effect, only occasionally using a guest vocalist, and frequently collaborating with other noise, metal, or experimental music musicians. These apparently equal partnerships have a very obvious benefit: They add tremendous variety in structure, texture and tone, and flavor to Sunn0)))'s recordings. The collaborations make it plain that Sunn0))) is capable of nearly anything because they are clearly always ready and able to experiment and go in any number of directions with each and every record. That openness is all too rare - often artists find a couple of things that "work" and ride them for all they're worth. Sunn0))) takes the high road into the unknown with each release. For me, this makes their music unpredictable and challenging, and for all that, ultimately more rewarding than a lot of other music.


To my ears what Sunn0))) is up to seems far more ambitious than mere metal music. Many of Sunn0)))'s methods of working and apparent aesthetic goals remind me of things that were and are said and done by jazz players (those who actually said anything about what they did/do, that is): Free structure, limitless improvisation, unconventional playing, etc. Sun Ra and Albert Ayler would probably have understood. Sunn0)))'s music is way too loud and assertive to be "ambient music" - although it does share the implicit and explicit aims of summoning visions of other places and perhaps through the music achieve a trance-like and egoless transportative state to create in the listener an altered state of reality. Sunn0))) amplifies on that goal (literally) and achieves those results using repetition, complex layering of sound, slowness, and high volume (the zen and peace of extremely loud machine noise - the relaxing music for the robots in the mine to set explosive charges by?)


The guitars and the volume and the gothic visuals are trophies or talismans that Sunn0))) has put up around themselves - stuck there in much the same way that we Europeans used to put our enemies heads on poles at our city gates not so long ago. These superficial ornaments collide with the actual music being made, and the juxtaposition forces us to re-look at the stale and stereotyped cultural reference point of heavy metal. The heavy symbologies of metal they brandish really are powerful reminders and lessons that should be seen as tools, not as fortifications or weapons. Sunn0))) is forging tools that you ought to use to re-listen to music and re-examine your calcified ideas about music. Perhaps that harsh, aesthetic grinding-away of inflexibility will allow you to flex your mind about a lot of other things too - so you can see and hear things of high quality that you overlooked or forgot. With Sunn0))) and a few others like Earth and Boris, metal has become a fresh and unexpected launching point for further musical exploration.

These are some of the interesting kernels of aesthetic challenge and reward laid out on the path by these noisemongers, unwittingly or not, that are too attractive for musical starlings like me to dismiss lightly and pass up. Sunn0)))'s game is bigger than metal, or jazz, or electronic - I get the feeling that their sights are set way beyond those known and safe harbors. In fact, what they lay down is so vast and so heavy, I can barely comprehend how to lift it!

an eulogy

I'm sorry not to let this go quietly, but sometimes some things should not pass
without much comment. Without a stink, so to speak. Not be allowed a quiet death. Some things deserve a good Wake and a proper eulogy from someone who is not a family member. I'm referring of course to e/i magazine - champion of "quiet is the new loud" and "black-on-black as the replacement for orange (which was last years black)".

e/i magazine was good, real good. Very quiet and in the shadows, almost invisible. But gooder still was its potential for even greater goodness. It had that. I could smell it. An almost "good" kind of smell.

Things like the record label Merck and e/i magazine should not be allowed disintegrate from our ephemeral-and-tenuous-enough-as-it-is community without due remark. No ghost shall dissipate without leaving behind a whiff or a bottle containing their signature aroma. Let us all hold our noses together and know that their passing leaves us all poorer, with less things to buy and collect, and more in danger of apathy. Let us open the door and go into the grims. Ignore the grims and do not allow concern and rage and depair over the current state of the world with its widespread fashioneering and dystroaesthesia and Presto! you're apathetic - aesthetically dead - while still alive. A distressing state for the afflicted and unpleasant to be around for those of us who try to combat this disease by embracing the grims among other psychanaestheticogogic tricks. The treatment for that is to emphatically maintain sour, skeptical demeanor and a fond irreverence toward the deceased. This can take the form of jokes, the cleverest insults, or the form of heavy but non-serious drinking. After all, they're dead! What do they care what you say about them at their expense? What do they care about your state of sobriety when you say these things? What are they going to do? Come back and haunt you?

The bottom line is though, that the dead are not funny. They're just gone. That's hard to accept for awhile. I'm really sorry that e/i is gone. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It looked good and it felt good in the hand. It didn't smell that good, but ink never does. I persevered through that ink like a good skunk handler - wearing gloves and a mask. I read every single word in every single one - even the stuff no one usually reads like the articles, uh, I mean the ads. It always seemed like a lot had gone into it - which I appreciate - but I always assumed that there were some deep pockets behind it (like Paul Allen with his EMP or suchlike), so e/i would last forever. It was reassuring to have a lot of my thinking and research done for me and compiled into one nice-looking, but evil-smelling, package. It was opiate-like in its use - bitter but psychoactive!

Maybe in time, after the smell has worn off my hands, I can move on…

OK! Now that the grieving stage is finally over, lets move on to some life-affirming actions we can take!

Maybe someone can call EMP and ask them when they're going to publish Number 7 as though everyone thinks they've done all the others!

Institutions fall for that kind of trick all the time.

That can take some time though, because even lean and mean institutions like the EMP move slower than reading hour with George Bush.

Meanwhile, you can set it all up beautifully with the right marketing. Somebody said that 99% of success is just showing up. Being seen. If you believe in the merits of what you do, you will have no qualms about doing whatever it takes to make sure that a lot of people know who you are and what you're doing. Getting e/i seen is of the greatest importance! Thrust a copy into the hands of celebrities you've stalked and take a snapshot of them holding it. Send it to People magazine. Soon everybody will wonder about that magazine Brad Pitt is holding with his newest adopted baby. That'll light a fire under the EMP! They won't want Microsoft or Google to rush in and steal all the thunder right from under them!

Even if you aren't actually doing anything at the moment, do the things that make it seem as if you are. But what are those things?

A good T-shirt design is a plus. A design that can be printed on stickers with that permanent adhesive so they can only be partly removed. A design that can cover an entire Volkswagon. A design an architect might be proud to wear to his first Burning Man. A design that kids will have put on their snowboards and tattooed on their upperbutts. A design that screams: "e/i dares to advocate in a loud way quiet music that is not about irritation, chemical imbalance, or the instinct to procreate"

Maybe check into those "Free The Homeless" T-Shirts from Republican Designers that are so hot right now! And free! Everybody's talking about them:

--Ed Hoc wrote:
"yup, as your post mentioned, designers republic is in fact giving free
tshirts to homless IDM producers. please email
meatsock@thedesignersrepublic.com for more info.

-- Jeff wrote:
"yeah $60. it cost me lot to get it plus you can't get this one any
more, so it's rare :) don't like the price? make an offer!"
Jeff

--fwitcher wrote:
Someone say that DesignersRepublic! is making free shirts for the
homeless? I'd pay $60 for one of those, if I weren't homeless...
Free T-shirts are very rare!

--Jeff wrote:
"probably the bad designs they have left that haven't sold!"

--Fwitcher wrote:
"We homeless are BAD people. We LIKE BAD designs and leftovers. We are badly
designed. We don't really know what "LIKE" means but we do know what "FREE"
means. Its good! Especially if its bad.
Bring it!"

-- Ed Hoc" wrote:
"no jeff, that's a hoax, DR are giving away *any* of their shirts to
the public, duh. just check the internet, why dont you?"

Say outrageous things about sacred cows in posts like this and to local newspapers and stir up the anthill a little, prod the lawyers out of their cull-dee-sacks!

You already got the good subject matter and the good writing. But that isn't enough apparently. If a lot of people wanted to read smart people talking about things that matter, we wouldn't have People magazine or (amerikan-style) TV. You've got to tell them that you won't give them something they can't have in the simplest terms, or they won't know that they want it.

If you want more people to do something that they aren't doing enough of already, you've got to make them think that they can do more of what they are already trying to do more of. The thing has to feel cultish and reek of drugs and wiggle like sex. Its gotta be like Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin teenage call-girl week long casting call, but smart and about music.

About that stinky ink... You ever hear about any research that links our strongest emotional responses to our sense of smell? Well its true! Things that smell bad make us want to put them down and go wash our hands. Things that smell good, make us want to linger with them, maybe eat them or put them down our pants. Imagine if word got around that a cult of artists was putting e/i magazine down their pants all the time! Imagine if a bunch of people realized that not only was Alan Lockett's writing insightful but also edible (if not nourishing)! Whole new venues might open up - imagine e/i mag in supermarkets in the snacks aisle and right next to checkout, e/i mag in new age stores in the aromatherapy section, e/i mag in sharper image stores right next to the stock and bond accumulator and the compact travel money launderer... !

A signature smell would be good. "Aah, there's that e/i smell!" people would say as they opened up their mailbox or stepped into the mall (e/i operatives would spray or operate scent dispensers at mall entrances - other sexually attractive operatives would hand out abbreviated free copies of e/i magazine) and soon people would associate e/i magazine with that good smell and that attractive man/woman and all the other pleasant things about the mall. Now you got them. Now they're receptive to all that smart talk about aesthetics and why some music is worthwhile and some is not and for what reasons. Now they'll read, now they'll care. And then, suddenly, WHAM! Unsuspecting, they'll KNOW what they ought to even if it goes against their baser instincts, miseducation and ignorance. Our side will carry the hour, the day and the age. Statues and parks and organisms will be named after e/i mag so that history remembers the moment!

And if they still don't seem to really care and they don't respond with the amount of dollars you want... well, the "gloves will have to come off" and e/i magazine can begin its FEAR campaign - using time-honored methods for acquiescense – techniques that have worked so well and tested true by the Nazis and the Halliburton administration! The FEAR approach is your ace in the hole. I will give you details about my ideas for it should it become necessary.

Yer humble servant
Henry of Hanging Swamp

-- Alan wrote:

"Thanks, Henry. I feel, however, that, rendered edible, my text would likely be a tad indigestible for the average para-grazer used to syntax-snacks; all that subordination and compound nominalisation would end in bloating. Powders would need taking. Darren B. and I are still collaborating albeit through non-inky unpapered odour-free channels. Won't be the same but it'll be something. Hypertext aether talk is better than being mute, I ultimately figured. Talking the other part of the shop, have you clapped ears on new CDs by Tim
Hecker, Chris Herbert, and Growing (not on Kranky but sounding like it should've been) yet?

Bestness,
Alan"

-- Alan wrote later (in response to something related):

"OK, I'll bite. I guess it's stating the obvious to point out that it bears more than a passing resemblance (esp. 'My Eye'). Any relation? Who was that Lone man? 'November dream tape' almost sounds like a parody of one of their titles. So now we get artists knowingly recontextualising artists of the 90s/00s, who are knowingly recontextualising the sounds of the 60s/70s etc etc How post-post-modern do we want to get before we implode? Is 'Autophagy' a word? I just coined it, if it isn't..."

I think Alan's onto something (or perhaps he's 'on' something, anyway) (And some have observed the cannibalistic overtones of some of his other statements: "OK, I'll bite," etc.) Yikes! Watch that man!

(Seeing cannibalism in your dream, symbolizes a destructive and forbidden desire or obsession. In a literal sense, cannibals consume people's lives, along with their energy. This dream may then denote an aspect of your life (career, relationship, children...) which is consistently draining your enthusiasm and vitality. Dreaming that you are a victim of cannibalism means that you feel that you are being "eating alive" by work, a relationship. or a situation in your waking life. {Dreaming that you are a cannibal on the other hand, is obviously the opposite or inverse of that.})

He suggested:

AUTOPHAGY
Pronunciation: ..Au*to ph"a*gy..,
Definition: [n] [Gr. ? self + ? to eat.] (Med.)
The feeding of the body upon itself, as in fasting; nutrition by consumption of one's own tissues.

To which we can append as an hypothetical explanation of symptoms (in a figurative sense):

ECHOLALIA
Pronunciation:`ekow'leylee-uh
Definition: [n] (psychiatry) mechanical and meaningless repetition of the words of another person (as in schizophrenia)

EPANODOS
Pronunciation: i'panu`dâs
Definition: [n] repetition or recapitulation in reverse order
O more exceeding love, or law more just? Just law,indeed, but more exceeding love!
--Milton.

EPISTROPHE
Pronunciation: i'pistrufee
Definition: [n] repetition of the ends of two or more successive sentences, verses, etc.
A figure in which successive clauses end with the same word or affirmation; e. g., ``Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I.'' --2 Cor. xi. 22.