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Tuesday, November 27th, 2001
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3:17p - The Arrival and the Reunion
Sorry about the low profile. As you may have seen from my last post, I had quite a lot of things I wanted to get done over the weekend and the four-and-a-half-day break from work.
I have made considerable progress.
I am about to post the three posts I wrote over the weekend but didn’t post at the time. There is another to come, perhaps later tonight.
Oh, and for anyone who uses the search engine or has contemplated doing so, I found out that Livejournal has apparently put a temporary ban on Google from indexing any of its pages, and that this ban is almost certainly affecting other indexers. I found out about this not with enough advance notice to allow me to pop ‘round to the FreeFind site and have the spider hold off on indexing until this shady ban is lifted (if that ever is to happen) – which would have at least have allowed the search engine to maintain a cache of pages indexed up to that point (ie. nearly all the pages of this journal) – but when the spider tried to index the journal and was told to go away, which effectively means that it completed an index of no pages at all. It still works, I believe, but it may not be quite as up-to-date or altogether on the ball. Be patient with it. Be patient with Livejournal.
And here’s a good link from a good source about a good song: #11 on the list.
current music: Low: Live from the Middle East: “Over the Ocean” (2 louches | share your thoughts)
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3:20p - Stereolab and Quasi, 13 Nov. '01 at the 9:30 Club
The most succinct way to sum up the Stereolab concert is to say that there was a lot of good music toward the middle which was bookended on both sides by a din of god-awful noise.
The duo Quasi was the opening act, and they did eventually play a lot of catchy, bouncy songs after opening their set with about three minutes of a steady and uninterrupted painfully loud drone on the keyboards. To be sure, there are a number of bands who regularly take what’s commonly described as ‘noise’ and do something interesting or even beautiful with it. Same with drones. I’m an active fan of drones, provided they have a pleasant timbre and add something to the music. But I have never understood the turn-it-all-the-way-up-‘til-it-distorts-and-feeds-back schtick. In my opinion it was boring to begin with and is now thoroughly tired out on top of that. And the let’s-play-the-same-thing-over-and-over-and-over-and-over-again-with-no-variance-in-tone-or-rhythm-or-pitch bit is equally boring to me, and just as tired; it’s like a crappy jam band without the crappy solos. And like my grandfather said: just because it isn’t any worse doesn’t mean it isn’t Bad. In this case, there was a brief confluence of those two schools, and the result was deafening and painful. When you’re right there in the moment, three minutes seems like a long time to endure uncomfortably loud noise, especially when you aren’t sure when it will end. But like I said, when the actual music began, it was a pretty decent show. The instrumentation was generally just keyboard and drums, though sometimes Sam Coomes played guitar instead of keys, and on several songs Janet Weiss played drums and keyboards at the same time. Both of the musicians are a lot of fun to watch – Janet is a phenomenal drummer, a real powerhouse who beats the utter hell out of her drums while all the while maintaining a rock-solid rhythm and never dropping the beat. And Sam Coomes quite literally attacked his keyboard; he kicked it and played it with his heels, he headbutted it and rolled his face across the keys, he leapt atop it and played several octaves at a time with his arse, he backed away from it and dove onto the full length of it, pantomiming coitus and creating 88-key clusters which would’ve made Henry Cowell proud. All of this was made further ironic by the fact that the keyboard was enclosed in a wooden box which had emblazoned on the back “FRAGILE: MUSICAL INSTRUMENT”. And amid all the chaos and craziness, there were some cute little catchy indie pop songs.
(I’ve distracted myself: two interesting things about Henry Cowell which I did not know until recently: until he began studies with Charles Seeger at UC Berkeley, he had never been to school at all, ever; and, at his concerts, at least his early ones, his music frequently caused riots. Wow.)
Stereolab waited a long time to come out, and in the interim between the two bands I listened to the conversation of a group of people beside me and grinned at little bits like “Well, I see we’re on the Laetitia side of the stage tonight - that’s Laetitia’s Moog! Huh! I’ve always been on the Mary side of the stage before!” and “So, is this your first Stereolab show?” and “This is the only band I get all fanny over!”
They’re a fun bunch to see live. Laetitia Sadier looks very demure; Tim Gane shakes his head back and forth like he’s saying No, no, no for minutes at a time; Andy Ramsay sticks his tongue out while he plays. The keyboardist (and I forget his name) came out with a stuffed octopus on his head, which he kept there for quite a long time, and replaced each time it fell off. There were some neat surprises, too: I didn’t know that Mary Hansen played guitar - I don’t think she does on the studio recordings - but she played guitar on a lot of the songs that night. And Laetitia is apparently learning the trombone; she played it on several songs, and though she was sharp a lot of times, she was in key more often than not, and the live brass (especially in a lower register) definitely added to the music.
Now, I’m mostly a fan of the more recent Stereolab sound; everything after Music for the Amorphous Body Study Centre, really. I like the production on the later albums, and I like the arrangements (even Sean O’Hagan’s), and I like the quirky elegance of the music, and the layering, and the warmth of it. To be sure, the more pointedly poppy songs and the faster rock songs are great fun (cf. “Motoroller Scalatron,” “Lo Boob Oscillator,” “Outer Bongolia,” et cetera). But my favourites are the darker ones, the slower ones, the subtly bossa nova vibes, especially a lot of tracks from the Dots and Loops album, which is my favourite of theirs. And they didn’t play any of that material live; no “Contronatura,” no “A Flower Called Nowhere.” Most of their live fare, I’ve found, is made up of the pop songs, or of songs which have been substantially altered to sound like pop songs even if afterwards they bear little resemblance to the originals or the versions on record. In some ways, it was like seeing a Stereolab cover band hell-bent on raising the bpm by 20+ on nearly every song. It reminded me of seeing Will Oldham / Palace; I’ve seen Will Oldham and some incarnation of his band play under one name or another three times, and on each occasion, they only played the rock songs or new versions of songs which had been changed to suddenly be rock songs. I would’ve loved to see acoustic renditions of “I Send My Love to You” or “I Was Drunk at the Pulpit” or “The Gator,” but it seems that that material isn't ever performed. I wish more bands would understand that if you write soft and pretty songs, whether they’re simple acoustic songs like Will Oldham's, or elegant analog synth-driven tunes like those of Stereolab, that it’s alright to play them that way live. The audience isn’t dependent on high amplitude and fast tempos.
So, consequently, most of the stand-out tunes at this show were the up-tempo rock songs which had always been kind of up-tempo, rather than the ones which were revamped to sound that way for the occasion. The ones I particularly liked were “Ping Pong,” “Household Names,” “Miss Modular,” “Les Yper-Sound,” and “Cybele’s Reverie,” although that wasn’t quite the same without the strings.
True to form, Stereolab came back for an encore and invited their opening act to play with them. They launched into “Metronomic Underground,” which was up until the end one of the strongest songs of the night. Clocking in at nearly eight minutes, it’s a pretty long song to begin with, but it’s got a catchy melody, great guitar textures, a funky hip-hop-inflected beat, and the harmony between Mary and Laetitia is one of their best in my opinion. It can fill eight minutes proudly. Eight, I’ve seen, but not twenty, and definitely not twenty when the last twelve minutes of the song are horrible blaring noise – the same horrible blaring noise which began the concert. It was nothing but two drummers pounding a beat over an unceasing shriek of feedback from several guitars and keyboards. The bassline was totally buried, and the line Laetitia started to play on the Moog quickly got lost, too, so she just moved to a tambourine (at least it wasn’t the trombone). I covered my ears and thought What are they doing? That’s nothing but noise! I looked around, and was surprised to see that most of the other people seemed to really be into it. But I truly hated it; it was physically painful, and it was beyond incongruous to me to think that a band which makes such good music would willfully sustain distorted feedback at the maximum volume their amps could produce for minutes on end. The only other indication that anyone shared my point of view was a rather awkward look on Mary Hansen’s face; after a few moments she smiled and waved to the audience and to the rest of The Groop and walked offstage. It seemed that the real concert was over (for me, anyway), and I turned to leave. I was at the foot of the stage, and by the time I worked by way through the dense crowd and made it to the door at the rear of the club, the song ended.
All in all a good time, but ye gods, enough of the bloody noise! It doesn’t mean anything, it’s painful, and it’s boring. Three fine reasons to get over it.
current music: Low: Live from the Middle East: “Lust” (share your thoughts)
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3:25p - First Impressions from the World of Song-Poems
Alright, now for a bit about Song-Poems. Get ready. Turn your speakers on, because you’ll all certainly want to download some of these songs.
Phil talked about this singular style of music – I think it really is its own style altogether – a few times earlier this month, and I must say, I should’ve paid more attention at the time. He’s written a bit about some of the specific songs I’m going to mention here, on the 4th; also, I’ll go ahead and repost this link, to a collection not solely of these song poems but to “the world of outsider music;” and there are sample clips up now, by the way, one for nearly every song on the album.
“Song-Poems,” if I understand the term correctly as used in this context, refers to the resultant product of a person having written a poem or a set of lyrics, and having then submitted them to a business comprised of professional musicians, who subsequently set their words to music. There was of course a fee for this service; the one I saw listed was about $150. Some of the music is surprisingly credible, if not enjoyable. It’s pretty campy easy-listening pop for the most part, and though not in and of itself my thing, it’s generally at the least well played, which is somewhat amazing – those musicians often cranked out twelve songs in an hour. Of course, sometimes that was easier than others – one set of lyrics might have an arguably similar cadence as another, and thus it would be recorded with exactly the same music as another previously-recorded song-poem. To quote The American Song Poem Music Archives: “Belying their inherently prostituted origins, these finished song-poem recordings are sometimes quite remarkable, either by being so inept in all directions as to defy belief, or by being weirder than the weirdest thing you've ever heard. Sometimes they are both at the same time.” And if that doesn’t make you curious enough to want to go to that site and check out the .mp3 page (which has well over a hundred of these song poems available for download), and you weren’t moved by the lyrics which Phil reprinted on his page, I’ll say this, too: I don’t think that “Psychic Cigarette” is a dud at all. On the contrary, when Phil played it for me a few weeks ago, I quite literally sank onto the floor and held my belly and wept with laughter. It’s that good. It’s an intensely peculiar song on first listen (it's intensely peculiar on every listen), with a funny disruption in the bassline that makes it sound like a tongue-in-cheek Jaco Pastorius is sitting in with the band, and a pensive, easy-going guitar line. The singer’s voice has just enough of a drawl to make it sound almost country – but it is the very lyrics themselves which make the song so terribly bizarre – I won’t reprint them in their entirety, though I’ve transcribed them and am tempted to do so – but how could you not be curious to hear a man with an affected drawl have to sing his way through such dubious gems as “All the channels of the trade make the psychic cigarette / magnificent / as we compare it to / the quasi-sparks of the spectre” or “and I will never roam, / I won’t try his face / to the center of the series” ? And of course, “Psychic Cigarette” is by no means the only worthwhile song on the list – Phil earlier reprinted the first verse for “What I Am You Know,” another exceptional example of truly awful lyrics. “Can you imagine those musicians getting something like that in the mail?” he asked. “And having to sing the inane ramblings of a seventeen-year-old kid?!”
Some of my other favourites include the equally bizarre “Blue Atoms” (in the same vein as “Psychic Cigarette”) and the thoroughly nonsensical “Munchikins” (not Munchkins like in The Wizard of Oz, mind you – Munchikins. What the hell are Munchikins?) The thematic deviance of “On Blackness” is probably worth hearing, and hopelessly droll love songs like “My Husband Lover Friend” and “Blue Jean String Bean” will make you blanche but may well compel you to listen all the way through at least once. “Five Feet Nine and a Half Inches Tall”…what is there to say about that song? Horrible lyrics that tell a ridiculous story about a man of average height with a little man complex who beats his father and two brothers, presumably to death, because of his insecurities – without realising that they are his family. Mental lapse? Drug binge? Good old fashioned insanity? Whatever it is, it makes for a wonderfully awful song. There are the ideas for new dances, like “The Crazy House Twist,” or the more confusing “Doing the Wagon-Na-Gal.” There are odes to helicopters, Elvis Presley, popular actors, and more inspired ravings of queer and often egregiously skewed interpretations of Christian philosophy than you’ll probably care to hear – probably close to a third of the songs on the site fall into that latter category.
Oh, and of course, “Proud to Be Gay,” which is included on the site because although not a song-poem it was released(?) on a song-poem label, is a strong contender for The Most Awkward Melody Ever. I’d mention that a song of that length can’t really support so many key changes, but I’m hesitant to call what’s going on in there “key changes” when I have a hard time hearing enough consistency in the song to ever ascribe it to any one key at all, or when those comical deviations may simply be repeated mistakes.
Go. Listen.
current music: Low: Live from the Middle East: “Stay” (share your thoughts)
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3:30p - Soulfood and Dreams
For the past several nights I’ve been falling asleep to Deeper, the second disc of the Breathe album by Soulfood. Soulfood lists this site as the one to visit, and has this to say on the liner notes to the album:
Soulfood follows a familiar path to rediscover…ancient wisdom and lost knowledge. Throughtout this musical journey, you will have the opportunity to experience an innate connection to the first people who walked the earth. Through creation stories, many of the sounds and melodies heard in this journey can be traced back over 100,000 years. Maori, Aboriginal, and Native American are many of the musical influences touched upon within the compositions. Indigenous voices, drums, flutes, rattles, shakers, bells and a variety of other instruments are presented in a way that amplifies many of the exotic harmonies and rhythms of the indigenous peoples throughout the world. Exploring these harmonious rhythms may take you back to a time where celebration, dance and ceremony were honored daily in life.
We wish to transport each listener on a musical journey through the human experience. Two linear ways of experienceing Soulfood are by moving through the Seven Directions of the Ancient Indigenous Medicine Wheel and the Seven Chakras found in Hindu tradition. While there are individual tracks, the program is a continuous theme which takes the listener on an organic / electronic adventure within which the secular meets the sacred.
Musically, it’s not bad. It’s a little reminiscent of MCMXC A.D., Enigma’s first album, only with a native culture / aboriginal inflection as opposed to Gregorian chant. They cite the work of Stanislav Grof, Linda Wolf and Jaquelin Small (among others) in the liner notes, and mention the practises of Halotropic, Shamanic, and Integrative Breathwork. It strikes me that a lot this music would be appropriate for breathwork sessions – then again, a lot of music is appropriate for breathwork sessions that one might not consider. In Portugal, in some of the first breathwork sessions I experienced firsthand, my teachers played Juno Reactor – and it worked really well. Actually, I loaned this CD to them for some time, and only retrieved it the last time I was in VT.
And I’ve certainly had some interesting dreams the past few nights. For the most part, they’ve been the brief and fragmentary single-image sort of dreams where “one thing happens,” but interesting nevertheless.
( Three Dreams )
current music: Low: Live from the Middle East: “Shame” (share your thoughts)
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