Peering into the Bright Underblack

Totems Flare

Let’s have a shot at the impossible, shall we?  Let’s take a quick glance at Clark’s new record.  If you haven’t already, you should absolutely listen to the new Clark record, out on Warp, Totem’s Flare.  He has recovered from his much too dance-oriented 2008 outing, Turning Dragon, and is again wending at high and highly engaging speeds through the musical microspaces between the very fascia and connective tissue of audible reality.  He is back on form, raging with too-hot off kilter beats over distant and eerie sample spaces and, a first for him, a good show of none-too-shabby redefinition of overprocessed vocals.  The music snaps and oozes viscously like a musically demolished body, a skeleton articulated and rearticulated through automated filters by an undead Paganini.  I included “Rainbow Voodoo” off this record in a recent playlist on this very blog.

Clark is one of the most original musicians working in the electronic genre today, and, though I don’t think he’s widely been given this due in all the deserved praises he’s been lauded with, I would put him on an equal footing, from the standpoint of pioneering new sound, with Aphex Twin.  He’s a genius with texture and timing, which is where his last album failed.  It’s precisely the point he picks back up and attacks with a a vengeance on this record.

All meaningless imagist poetics and music crit hyperbole aside (these songs are a unicorn bouncing on a cloud of light, sipping untroubled on a leisurely idle day from a warm bowl of delicious broth, etc.), this is one of the albums of 2009.

Let’s turn our attention back to that single track from Totems Flare, “Rainbow Voodoo.”
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The rubber ducky saw and square waves give way in the process of modulation to a psychopathic hybrid sound between bagpipe and a saxophone.  Do you hear that?

All artists, all pioneers, must find their antecedent in something, be it raw necessity or the barely cleared path through the brush of cultural morass some intrepid or crazy souls perhaps accidentally blazed before them once, long ago, before abandoning it or being lost.  The only other artist that I have heard using this type of sound effectively is T. Raumschmiere, most notably on his very, very good 2003 Mute release Radio Blackout.

Radio Blackout

Listen to “I’m not Deaf, I’m Ignoring You”, from that record.
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While this saxophone/bagpipe squeal/scream is not a sound on exactly the same aural spectrum, there is overlap of intent here.  Other critics can pigeonhole Clark for the atmospheric influences of Warp labelmates Boards of Canada, but I want to put him both here, in the aggro with T. Raumschmiere and there, in the with the hypnotized by distant church bells set.  And, then again, he sits in that rarefied category of genius and attention to detail only artists like Aphex Twin attain.

Jumping up and down for Wheat

The dulcet tones of grown men crying.

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Get your whole grains.  Get them and shove them in your sensitive, your emotional, your very ears.  Wheat is the crop to circle.

Wheat is a band who made a pop album in ’99 to snap, crackle, and pop all pop albums, a quiet record with slick, loud production and a weird nonlinearity to its emotional songs that juxtaposed their ultra-finished sheen, a record called “Hope and Adams,” their second album released on Chicago’s Sugar Free records.

There is probably a story in the few records they have made since then, a story about a band whose Big Star easy mass appeal got them noticed by a major, and whose talent was subsequently squandered by committee.  I don’t care.  I have been waiting for them to follow up “Hope & Adams” with something more hopeful for 10 years.  “Per Second, Per Second, Per Second,” their ’03 Sony debut, was more akin to holiday snapshots of tired revelers taken on the hike down from a beautiful plateau than dispatches from the intrepid tour’s acme.  I didn’t hear the one they made after that, 2007’s “Every Day I Said a Prayer for Kathy and Made a One Inch Square.”

Today they release “White Ink, Black Ink,” and I am jumping up and down.  Take a listen to Don’t I hold you from “Hope & Adams”, and then alter your surround with Music is Drugs, an anthem to abandoning yourself to what’s going on in the here and now from “White Ink, Black Ink”.  Good things is drugs, bad things is drugs- all these things being equal, man, I am glad to have this band back.

Don’t I hold you, from “Hope and Adams”
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Music is Drugs, from “White Ink, Black Ink”
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Buy the self-released record here.

They played in June in the Federal City at DC9, at Philadelphia’s Kung Fu Necktie (what venue was to have hosted the final Clockcleaner show some time back), and at NYC’s Mercury Lounge, all of which dates passed right by me unnoticed.  They have a CD release gig in Allston, MA at Great Scott on August 1, followed by shows at the 7th St. Entry at First Avenue in MPLS August 27, and one at Schuba’s the following night on August 28.  A blog post on their Myspace encourages all joiners and would-be lovers to join them onstage for some sprawling choruses of My Warning Song, the aural answer to Drunken Sword Kung Fu.  What I mean is that, just when you think its disparate parts and vocalist Scott Levesque’s powerful pipes have finally staggered completely off the rhythm- SLICE!  Right in the heart.

Their website.

Built to Spill at Coney Island to Headline the Village Voice Siren Fest

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With a price that was right and in a locale that has never disappointed to defy good taste or tip its swim cap to the surreal, Built to Spill played next to the Cyclone at the Coney Island Village Voice Siren Festival last night as the annual free music festival’s main stage headliner.

They were scheduled to go on at 7:30 PM, but I didn’t arrive till near to 8.  After pushing through the crowd for a city block or more, I settled at a spot near the sound booth and watched the veterans push out noise that wended through wavy gravy jams stuck to the powerful, puncturing, penetrating indie guitar fury and whining vocal keen that has been the trademark of Doug Martsch and company’s Boise, ID outfit since 1992.  In no exact order and without pretension to completeness, I include above a few of the songs I enjoyed during the show.

The only comment Martsch made during the show seemed to be in reference to a tantrum or posture thrown or posed by one of the day’s other performers, the Raveonettes.  “We’re not the Raveonettes, we’re not angry about anything.  We’re just trying to concentrate on playing songs and having a good time.”

I wasn’t witness to said showboating, much to my ineluctable happiness.  I got what I came for- unassuming honesty and the joyous display of hard-won, well earned chops from a band whose critical ethos is present lyrically, sonically, and performatively.  Never an image-based band, they will never have to demand any kind of fealty to their celebrity or perform antics befitting the false glamor of the stage to remain great.

A line from “Big Dipper” has always made me laugh:

I thought I bored me, but I learned to think like you/Now nothing bores me that that’s nothing is thought through

By remaining a band that has defied conventional wisdom (“in a world that’s just so unconventional”), Built to Spill is still carrying the torch, carrying through, still accountable to themselves, remaining human among so much Twitter-ready shit and garbage.

During the solo on “Carry the Zero,” a fireworks display lit up the sky to the right of the stage.  It likely originated from the Brooklyn Cyclones’ stadium where Wilco and Yo La Tengo played a show last week and was unrelated to the moment two to three solid blocks of living human meat and I were having with one of the greatest bands of the past twenty years, but, sandwiched there between the clack and screams of the Cyclone on one side and the pyrotechnics arcing into the sky on the other with the music the binding miasma between, I felt a religious certainty that all events up to that moment had only been arranged just so to wake us all into last night’s swaying dream of sound and idea.

In this year begin.

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1. Damaged Goods – Gang of Four

It’s more than lust.  I’d drink your sweat from a shoe.

2. My Life in Art – Mojave 3

Tell me all about your prettyboy friends.  Europe seems further all the time.

3. Vomiting Mirrors – Clockcleaner

I know what she does and why.

4. In the Morning – Built to Spill

Feeling half-right, feeling normal– just an all-too isolated incident.

5. Hypercommunication – Poni Hoax

6. Happy Already – Sportsguitar

Happy?

7. Gojam Province, 1968

The city’s gonna burn and we’ll still have to wait our turn- the last among contenders of the superfeatherweights.

8. Mile Me Deaf

You got nothing to say, so just say it.

9. More like the Moon

Why don’t you come to me now more like you are.

10. Flash Ram

Flip the switch burn me again, spark me out.

I travel to and fro, and I lean toward the day less than a month from now when I land in the Pacific Northwest, drink the beer, bathe in the water, breathe the air.

Do you believe in reincarnation?  She put the question to me recently.  Perhaps she phrased it, “What do you think about reincarnation?” instead.  This was last weekend, after we had just seen Unmistaken Child.

What do I think of it?  I have the vanity to think the same way that Adam Duritz did when he penned those words that buoyed me through those ignorant summers as high school was slinking up sideways to an end.  “I’ve been here before, and I deserve a little more.”

I, now 32 years old, in perfect health begin…

I read and reread as though I am reading myself the words of the gone patriots of the renamed streets of time-deserted cantons and arrondissements in worlds that could be here today if we didn’t today think like fish and possess powers of recall even less exemplary.  If we loved half as honestly as we are diligent in tossing the only minutes of our lives out the closing asshole of our sum total of days.

A little music in moments, and maybe I’d like to think seriously about reincarnation, about anything.  About the long view of anything.  I certainly need something more extended than the burn of flash ram spackling the leads of of my brainpan with coke and robbing me of my taste and capacity for the longer-viewed things.  Something better than the false gestalt of all this insincere misuse of communication.

So to the Pacific Northwest I am pointing, with it in mind to pause a moment and gather the important thoughts.

Diversion on a Monday

A weekend of halcyon days in the sun gone, a few tunes should be put on.
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A few songs to put a person through an hour or so, to foment some small rebellion among the androids, to encourage a rising up against the civilized worm.  Give the human race a try, get back to the original heart.  Use the satellites in ways never intended- to truly connect to someone else.  Do your part to see that you’re not the last human being left standing; it does no good to be a Robinson Crusoe among the fully devolved.

Somebody do something today.  Everyone, do something today.

Miniskirts, Fishnets, Sexy Mutants, and the Cleaving Swords of the Ronin Capitalist State

Shoko Nakahara stars in Yoshihiro Nishimura’s 2008 tour-de-abattoir Tokyo Gore Police (Tokyo Zankoku Keisatsu) as the hard-nosed avenger of decency without mercy Ruka.  Preternaturally calm, dangerously certain of her purpose and her use of the katana in the black and white battle between criminal indecency and the directives of the privatized Tokyo Police Corporation, Ruka is a little death fashionably decked out in a miniskirt and fishnet stockings, the call-girl of justice tossing the most hardened criminals into the icy salad of divine retribution.

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Japan’s police and self-defense forces were privatized during Ruka’s youth under the auspices of a single draconian for-profit agency whose shock troops resemble something between armored, war-ready samurai and Darth Vader, a change in course in society the initial contestation of which has been deliberately buried in the past by those powers who stood to profit most from it.

This proves to be a crucial detail in the development of Ruka’s life, for the Terry Gilliam-esque former tracheotomy patient wearing the horned helmet with the external car stereo speaker affixed to his badged armor is the man who, as chief of police, stood to gain the most power from disposing of the more socially-minded cop leading the privatization opposition- Ruka’s father.  That this was done before the impressionable eyes of this girl he then raised among the police as his daughter, that the assassin he hired to clear the field of his opposition and publicly executed was the father of a brilliant genetic engineer studying the heredity of criminality is key- it is the self-serving action that at once created a ronin state of arbitrarily unchecked police aggression in the service of order and the same moment forged that state’s arch-enemy, the Key Man.  It also birthed the one warrior who would be the undoing of the whole system.

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Key man is the creator of a parasitic virus culled from the DNA of the world’s most notorious serial killers, a key-shaped tumor that causes any wound inflicted on the infected to mutate into a deadly weapon.  During the movie’s course of corpse production from conflict to resolution, Penes, pudenda, breasts, bellybuttons, really all the best stuff is transformed into a high-pressure blood-hosing instrument of gore.  These augmented augerers hosting the mutation-inducing tumors of anti-humanity are dubbed “engineers.”

When the police declare an all-out war on the population in an attempt to eliminate the engineers, the truth, that the chief hired the man who killed her father, is revealed to a virus-infected Ruka.  She single-handedly wipes out the police force and takes her revenge on the man who raised her, even as he flies about the room enhanced by drugs that cause gravity-defying jets of blood to fire from the stumps of his legs.

I should mention that, marring the progress of the movie is a scene of anti-Chinese nationalism that really doesn’t add anything to the story, leaving me with a bad taste on the iron-coated walls of my mouth.

The film is intercut with bizarre and hilarious PSAs for the new privatized police force, the reduction of workplace hara-kiri, cute accessory box-knifes for high-school aged cutter gyaru, and swords advertised for the same purpose on a “Call Now!” basis, all while this vixen of an S/M Marilyn perfectly amputated from her Norma Jean, a cross between a DJ and a police dispatcher, broadcasts whilst dancing to an amazing Japanese rock soundtrack her frenzied bloodthirsty dispatches.

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For blood or for pizza, the axes swing when she sings.

You Can Have a Dog.

I held him for the first time after he was born and walked him about.  Beneath the mass of black curls atop his head, his big black eyes reminded me of my own, of photographs of my own, taken in the days and hours after my own birth.

He was moving his lips, and I was watching him work wordlessly when very clearly I understood him to say, “Can I have a puppy?”

My first fatherly decree would be that my son would have a dog.

“Yes, you can have a puppy.”

Someone else in that dream room laughed good-naturedly.  They hadn’t heard my son’s first words to me, they were touched by what they thought was my pantomime of fatherhood.

I walked with him a bit more in silence and he asked me, “What is worrying you?”

In dreams the whole world is your own mind, and your worries cut true figures with little effort, so I asked him, because the world is the place that it is,

“Was I right to bring you into this world?”

It was almost with a laugh that he said, “Old friend, you have never been able to remember or understand the passing of 2,000 years.  I’m happy to see you again.”

It’s true.  In my dream-mind I had that waking-world irked struggle with familiarity that always surrenders to affability and further investigation.  I knew my son, and I knew I should know my son.  But, then again, I didn’t.  I was simply happy.

“Then welcome back.”

Stay Weird

deerhunter

Nature, it is said, abhors a vaccuum.  As we wake daily older into our ever more vanilla lives, hypermediated and corralled by deadlines and an over-influx of topical information that we can make neither heads nor tails of, an influx whose surfeit is too total to help us to tackle and reshape the world of late humanism we are plunged in, a soon-to-be vestigial organ of that nearly obsolete humanity of ours is sounding the aether for fellow monsters.

It’s a bit of us now so tenuously real that our children will probably be born without it.  For us, it still calls out a tiny, unanswered S.O.S. to the parent notion to Wonder; the Terrible- the old, silent spirit guide to memory.  It drops stones into wells and listens to see if that well has really emptied, to suss whether we can still wake the Terrible while still endlessly hitting the send button, calling meetings, talking using words that carry no meaning.

We are each morning watching the light crawl frightened as roaches across the ceilings, running photon by photon out the windows and out of the skies as though called back at the end of a job.  They are clearing the aisles at the end of poetry and politics, food and camaraderie.  We are married and eking out our days in companionship with our carpal tunnel syndrome, relinquishing reflection and recall to search engines and catch-phrase exhibitionism.

Thank the old gods that Deerhunter, amidst everything that is deadening and normal, in the face of everything that is forgetting and frivolous, is weird and still playing.  They are monsters still in the gulf of an uncrossably wide vaccuum of spent humanity.

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Having Danced

Having danced last night to Love is All, tickets to which I received free of charge by responding to a Time Out New York ticket giveaway blog post, I am thankful that I sweat as much as I did.  I think it did something to ameliorate the hangorative effects of all last night’s imbibing.

I don’t know anything about Love is All, nor do I know anything about its members’  previous band, Girlfriendo.  The tickets were free and I was by myself and the pace of the show was enough to keep me on my toes.  Sometimes, very rarely, that’s all I ask.

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