Today I digest music at a pace I would deem unhealthy. Within seconds my mind is made and its on to the next bit of musical info. Whether its itunes samples, lala, pandora etc…if somthing doesn’t grab my futuristic attention span in this small window I almost write it off entirely. The sheer amount of music available to my ears at anytime almost makes it impossible not to process music in this way. Once every month or so I find something that sticks out against tha backdrop of so much other mediocrity. I then begin a gay and nerdy process of reading reviews and news related to the act while I digest the record. It’s my modern way of reading the liner notes. I want to know who played what, where they recorded it, how they did that, how they did this…what kind of instruments they play. Ill look at the studio’s website, go on ebay looking at rare gear they use and see what its going for.
My latest crush is on dream pop duo Beach House. The sheer prettiness of “Teen Dream” is enough to check it out. The songs are lofty and dreamy. They are both bouyant and heavy. Some tracks drag you along while others propell you up. I have no real favorite track at the moment. Here are some of the bangers….
p.s. I am fond of Victoria Legrand’s unisex vocal sound
Back in the 60′s there was a smaller jazz subsidiary of the Chicago blues powerhouse we know as Chess Records called Cadet Records. This label released more of the experimental stuff that might reach a smaller audience than its parent company Chess did. One artist in particular on this label that is dear to me is the soul, blues, jazz artist Terry Callier. After a couple of hits in the late 60′s his career mostly faded out and was eventually forced to take a job with University of Chicago. Recently he has enjoyed a fruitful resurgence in his career and continues to tour. This soul jazz blues man speaks right to my heart: he makes me feel human. His music is both sad and uplifting. Check out his definitive 1973 work “What Color is Love”
short post today
here is a video, try not to get into it I dare you
In my previous post I went into cleaning music and its important role in motivating me to get things done around the house. The scene is always the same. I am home alone, probably about to head out of town for a few days and I want to tie up some loose ends around the place before I go. Sounds pretty simple right? I think to myself, “Man, if I am going to be home dawdling around I might as well have a reasonable brew in hand to make things a bit more fun.” So, I go to Binnys and snobishly buy some expensive fancy beer saying “Ill treat myself tonight”, as if I hadn’t spent $11.40 on craft beer in a really long time.
So I get home with ingredient one in hand (Belles Two Hearted Ale!) and an intense cleaning agenda on the mind. I settle in crack a brew and walk over to the record collection. I already know what record I am going to pick in the back of my mind,
I’ve picked it 2 or 3 times before.
I know where that road leads.
I pick up ”Blue Train” like I might actually put it on. ”Who am I kidding?”
Red House Painters feels so right in this situation. I pick up “Old Ramon” and crack beer number 2.
At this point I’ve been home for like 45 minutes and am ready to finally start cleaning up. I go to my room, and what do I do? Look around at bunch of piles of dirty clothes that line the floor while “Void” is playing in the back round. The back of my mind is going “Man this song is fucking awesome”…the front of my mind is saying…”Man I need another beer….”
This process repeats until there is no more beer. By the end of the night I will have listened to the record a good 2 or 3 times through. Some sides more than others…I have maybe done 3o solid minutes of productive activity and I am drunk as shit stumbling around my house mumbling “Feel the void in me now…” I get all relfective and sit in my living room staring off into the distance. The record has lured me into some time trancendent trance. Even when I am sober I lose track of time listening to these 6 minute mind baths. ”Simple and slow, just like life should be” I say to myself in some drunken epiphony. “I done an alright job for tonight” I think in a moment of self congratulation as I then end the night on a cleaners high stoked on all my “progress”…
All in all Belles Two Hearted Ale and Red House Painters’ “Old Ramon” are partners in crime for the ole’ Bman…
The Avalanches for me are one of those groups you got really into and then quickly out of well before you knew how cool they actually were. Later in high school I stumbled accross their record, “Since I Left You” by complete accident. It was sitting under the seat of my friends Dodge. It had been sitting there for some time. Left by some random that was in and out of the car at some time. We popped it in and heard “Fronier Psyciatrist”. Absolutely needless to say, my mind was fucking blown out of my head. We listened to the whole record that night whilst driving back and forth around town. In fact I listened to it everyday in my own car for like 2 months. Listening to it was like some sort of weird trip. You have no idea how the music takes you from one place to another. It was quite unlinke anything I had ever heard. It wasnt just dance music, it was more cerebral. In my early college days when I was really into Aphen Twin and everything Richard D. James ever touched I realized people creating dance music as sublte and as thoughtful as this is very rare thing indeed.
Recently I was in a mood to kick ass around my apartment. There was a pile of things to do that had been building for some time. I knew I needed more than just a playlist or a shuffle to get me through it seeing as it was going to be a couple hours worth of cleaning. The last two times I “cleaned” my apartment I put on the Red House Painters and ended up drunk by myself reflecting on life. “Not this time” I said to myself as I searched for somthing that would get me into the spirit. And there it was…Sitting there waiting for me just like it had been wiating under the seat of my friends car. It felt right so I dropped it in.
I did dishes to “Electricity”
I scrubbed the sink to “Fight Tonight”
I stopped everything and just listened to “Frontier Psyciatrist”
I have not really done any music nerd research into this group like i usually do. I prefer the mystique. I like to keep myself in the dark on this one. It feels wrong to know everything there is to know about a record like this. I dont want to know how they did what they did or who they is. All I know at this point is what I feel. And right now, I FEEL like I want to clean… and god damnit I want to dance while doing it.
There are few better ways to show off and prove your good taste to all your friends and family than wearing a pair of bad ass sunglasses. And in the badass sunglass game, it seems there has always been a classic. Ray Ban’s Wayfarer. These sunglasses have been kicking ass from Dylan to Depp since 1952. Personally, wearing a pair of these sunglasses is one of the first actually cool things I ever did. While I dont own an actual pair of wayfarers I do have a couple pairs of decent imitations.
I recently discovered another classic just as timeless and sophisticated as the wayfarer. I am talking about the Ray Ban Clubmaster. Its plain to see that from first glance these glasses are obviously another beacon of light in the sea classic style and good taste. Soon, I will own a pair of these and wear the shit out of them, preferably while flying my vintage Cessna over the coasts of Maine.
This past weekend whilst partaking in a post thanksgiving zombie party with some old friends I succeeded in looking totally rad for a change. Not to say that I dont usually rule, but for a short period of time I was as a legend once said “THE GLOW STICK KING”. These jams have been in my life for sometime now, and most of them thanks to my roomate Sean. He is the one with the unquenchable thirst for all things RnB. I usually get into things that fisrt pass his seal of approval. Thanks to him mostly I blew some peoples mind this weekend. I showed people that Hall and Oates are not novelty, they are legitamtely the shit. We boogied to Stevie, and Bobby and Guy. It was raw, heres the playlist, read it and weap.
“Family Man” Hall and Oates
“Peg” Steely Dan
“Ride Like the Wind” Christopher Cross
“Higher Ground” Stevie Wonder
“Aint Nothing Like the Real Thing” Michael McDonald’s Motown version
“Groove Me” Guy
“Family Man” Hall and Chromeo (with vocoder infuzed choruses)
“I Wanna Sex you Up” Color Me Bad
“Motown Philly” Boyz to Men
“What you Won’t Do For Love” Bobby Caldwell
Being the big time hipcat that I am, I often feel the need to probe the vast interweb in search of new music. I also have a to stay up to date on current music related news trends. Probably just in case I am down at Reckless and I hear someone talk about WAVVES I can say…”Did you guys hear about dudes meltdown in Barcelona? Dudes crazy!… Do you have that record on laser disc? Those are all I listen to these days, CDs are so played out.”
(The real reason is actually closer to satisfying my need to scoff at people who I feel like crappier music than me, which in my humble opinion is everyone.)
Anyways, recently I caught wind of a new movement that seemed like it had already happened. Came and went totally under my radar. I would usually be cool with somthing like this seeing as in about 10 years I could “get back into” whatever music I missed and be totally raddder for “bringing it back”. The movement I speak of is “Glo-Fi”, Maybe you have heard of it.or… “Probably not, its pretty underground”
This is what I have started calling a “Frakengenre”. Somthing that melds so many subgenres together it is no longer worth labeling within a genre. Things like Rock, Jazz, Classical, Folk, Blues, Electronica in my mind are all very broad encompasing umbrellas for many things to hide under. Most of the time classifying anything past these is too much for me. After a certain point it just seems like pondification. In some cases the label almost means more than the music.
If you were to label the death out of Glo Fi what would it be?…part Electronica, part Shoegazey Pop, half Super Nintendo Core, and 2 parts Lo-Fi. It is quite a specific sound. I first found out about this new subgenre in a very mysterious way. It was a type of discovery I am not used to. It started whilst surfing through songs on my roomates ipod a month or two ago. I came accross two songs by an artist called Neon Indian. I threw it on out of boredom and curiosity. My reaction wasn’t immediatley positive, but it sure was’nt passive, which is unique for people in my generation when hearing new music. I listened to those two tracks 3 or 4 times each while cleaning the house trying to figure out if I hated them or liked them. Knowing nothing about Neon Indian or Glo-Fi at the time it was hard for me to disect and digest this music. I needed more info. How was this music made? Were there alot of people making music like this? Was it new or old? I needed to know. I eventually decided that I couldn’t react in a negative way to this music so itwas alright in my book.
My second expierience with this genre was similarly mysterious. A week or two later while surfing a music news site I cold clicked on a link labeled “best new music” and listened to a few tracks. The first one I clicked on being “Feel it all Around” by Washed Out. Instantly I was captured. The thumpy cassette deck quality of the synths threw me into a nostalgic tizzy. All these farmilliar sounds melted into somthing so pretty and so heavy. The sound of a snare drum on a recording is one of the most important things to me. The backbeat is the heart of any song for me. The snare drum on this song is like a really slow punch in the head, as if you were underwater. The vocals were 20 layers deep singing melodies slower than dial up internet. I was stuck in the song. Stuck in slow motion. As I read the blurb beneath the title I saw “Glo-Fi”. I immediatly laughed at such a silly term. I didnt know what it meant, but I knew that if it sounded like this I liked it.
Since then, I have checked out a few other acts in the genre and have been surprisingly undwewhelmed. There are listenable tracks here and there but nothing similar to these two artists. Would I say I am a fan of “Glo-Fi?” If it means liking Neon Indian and Washed Out;then I am guilty as charged, trendy as the next acid wash jean wearing Pilsen dweller.
I am wondering though: Is there room in a genre so specific to progress? I am willing to bet no, but I guess time will tell. I will hopefully be surprised with Neon Indian or Washed Out’s next release. Maybe someone new will come along and do somthing equally as compelling and fun. Fun being very important here. I am hard pressed to think of many other styles that pull on so many things I like. If “Glo-Fi” were a musical color it would be the brownish grey one; A little bit of every other color to varying amount.
Anyways here are a couple of tracks worth checking out…
Over the last few years on my never ending path to find good/meaningful music I have come back to a certain era over and over again. A romantic era involving people struggling to be heard, be equal, and be great. An era when making hits was fucking making hits. The era I speak of is Detroit in the early to mid 1960′s.
I realize this period has gotten its fair share of attention, but for good reason. In my opinion this one of the shining moments in American recording history. Why? For one main reason; it involves real people making good music. It is one of the rare occasions in history where everything involved is working at a level so high it breaks a barrier and becomes so much more than the sum of its parts.
I forgot it. In the 90′s I was all caught up in teen angst. I hated everything pop. I thought it was, as they say, dead. Killed by punk….Bad punk. Punk music that the radio plays. My parents liked Motown. Dick Biondi played Motown; It must suck. He liked The Monkees. No one else understood what “good music” was about except for me and Matt Skiba.
It was a slow road back to an appreciation of this music and regrettfully so I would have to half blame it on the feel good blockbuster to end all feel good blockbusters. I speak of….Remember the Titans. Am I ashamed of it?…HELL NO. This captured the whole spirit of the movement. Disney said…”What better way to express the racial tension in the early 60′s than through football?” …Then they said…”Get Denzel on the phone.”
What music was in the backround of the entire film? What song was playing in the locker room the first time the black players bonded with the white players? The answer, ”Aint No Mountain High Enough”. Other tracks include “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” or The Temptations “Superstar”. The point I and Disney are trying to make is that the music was just that good. It wasnt white it wasnt black, but it was purely American. These songs are about life as lived in America in the 1960′s by all classes. The relate-abilty factor is somthing Berry Gordy understood and relied on to make his empire.
As an aspiring Recording Engineer Motown holds a special place in my heart. Whats not to like?
Heres a new mix, I call it “Detroit Deep Cuts Vol. 1″
(I know some of these tracks are hits and not “Deep Cuts” persay, but they rock in an under the radar kind of way…)
1. Bernadette- The Four Tops
2. Stop! In the Name of Love- The Supremes
3. Nowhere to Run- Martha Reeves and The Vandellas
4. Love Child- Diana Ross and The Supremes
5. Ain’t No Mountain High Enough- Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell
Imagine you could own a company that sells an inferior and much more expensive product than all of your competition and still be a billionare. “Thats impossible!”, you say. “That just isnt how this crazy world works.” You’re right. It’s not, unless your Digidesign.
The model for the protools/digidesign world is simple…
1. Make a software platform that can only operate in the presesnce your hardware
2. Make this hardware much crappier than just about anyone else and sell it for a much higher price.
3. Make this software completely void of anything your comptitors have in thier software..(ex. MP3 encoding, OMF exporting, free software instruments, user friendly MIDI interface…I could go on)
Also write “Professional Standard” in all your advertisements.
Oh and also draft up a contrat with Guitar Center making you shit the only shit available.
The bottom line is that Digidesign are either MIT graduate geniuses or kings among us lower caste serfs that have no idea how to play the game that is capitalism. Maybe they deserve what they’ve gotten. They have figured out how to cheat the laws of economics. The are the top seller in a very compitative field and the only thing that pulls them out of thier overwhelming mediocrity is the fact that they are…”THE PROFESSIONAL STANDARD”
“that last bit is to be said either in a wrestler announcer voice or a Don LaFontaine voice you pick
Theories on what digidesign spends thier money on besides R+D
1. wrecking the brand name focusrite
2. building thier Compact Disk collection…(“scoffs and high fives bros on a sick burn”)
3. fucking chicks
4. getting fucked up dude
I hope you got all that, I had to blow off a little steam after I spent 6 hours today trying to install software I purchased (guess what software that is).
I recently decided to start a blog about things that I like. This is probably because the things I like are good and worth reading about. It is also probably because blogging my thoughts and interests to the interweb is a way for me to organize and make sense of them myself.
To celebrate this joyous first post I am going post a little playlist of music I have been into lately. You can download it by clicking the link below. The download site looks spammy but I assure yall its not. I hope you dig it.
