Re-Telling Someone Else's Story

The ability to summon Asperger-ish focus upon a task is mixed blessing: on the one hand, I always manage to complete a project to satisfaction by deadline; on the other hand, everything else gets sidelined. The closer I come to completing a mammoth project, the more I become a kind of music-studio Gollum: a wretched, washed-out creature that exists to the outside world only in rumour.

Then comes the happy day that I achieve my goal and can rush outside, arms outstretched to welcome the world back within me. Of course, this time, it was more a case of rushing outside only to jump back into a cargo van and heave away on a month-long national tour - hopscotching from one great undertaking to the next. Not that this is a problem. I love touring Japan, if only because truckstop service area food actually resembles food. But then the coffee's never strong enough. Trade-offs!

Anyway, enjoying a brief breather between jaunts, I figured it was high time I unveil what's had me waylaid for the past month: my new solo album, a collection of genre pieces & "re-scores" inspired by indelible scenes from various films I love.



Over the winter holidays, as per usual, I spent a couple-dozen hours on planes with nothing better to do than drink cheap whiskey and watch eight movies back-to-back. I actually quite enjoyed most of the movies I watched (with the notable exception Drive) yet found myself thinking, more often than not, that I could've composed a better film score. Perhaps it was the booze talking, but it seemed a wager worth taking.

Of course, unless I was content to sit around & wait for my first commission, I'd have to work with pre-existing material. The initial plan was to re-score a entire film from start to finish, but I couldn't imagine who'd want to sit through a whole movie, stripped of dialogue & sound-effects, simply to hear several variations on a single theme. Instead, I selected a handful of films that whose visual content offered a reasonable amount of stylistic leeway - films that didn't scream out for another blustering Holst knock-off or the moronic thrum of bad techno. From each of these films, I chose a scene or two whose mood & pace would benefit from musical support and set about giving it to 'em.

I continued watching movies for fun in my free time. Recently, though, I'd been revisiting the ol' poliziotteschi, those gloriously amoral Italian cop movies from the 1970s that apparently all star either Franco Nero or Maurizio Merli. So naturally, a couple of weeks into the writing process, I began churning out generic themes to the best & bloodiest of Italian B-movies, attempting my best impressions of maestros Morricone, Piccioni, Ferrio, Micalizzi and - as seen below - Cipriani.



In the end, three of these genre pieces landed on the album; the other twelve tracks, however, were are written specifically to picture. It'd be silly, of course, to compose soundtracks whose visual component would go unseen, so I've made a YouTube playlist of the songs synced with their respective scenes for all to enjoy. So... enjoy!

Counter-Creative

The following has been rephrased, re-presented, and reiterated in a variety of ways, some more scholarly than others, but Frank still said it best: if you're involved with music in any way other than making it, you are the problem.

Objects Collecting Subjects

Over ye Impostume way, Carl poses a small, concrete question which very quickly balloons into a mammoth, existential one. At the outset, I thought we were basically talking about storage media and instead we may as well be asking ourselves, why listen to music? Or even more broadly, why art?

Those questions are impossible to answer, so Carl does us the service of scaling it down:

...what is the impulse to keep hold of all that non-essential stuff, stuff you are not invested enough in to listen to more than once, yet alone pay for?

Which is still a damned difficult question, if only because I've no idea by what standard we're measuring - how much stuff? Is it non-essential by my own standards, or society's? What about the stuff we have paid for? To understand my trouble in establishing a workable baseline, let's take a look at some of my closest friends and their respective music-consumption habits.

• One is an amateur noise-maker with a steadfast belief in the shamanic power of music - yet, as a digital Maoist, he listens to music primarily via YouTube. He occasionally buys vinyl records, but he doesn't own a turntable. (The son of an investment banker, he treats records much as speculators treat real estate.)
• Another is a collector par excellence, who's plowed unfathomable amounts of time & money into every passing storage medium - yes, even MiniDisc - on the off-chance that this format will become the historical default. Consequent to his unyielding compulsion for accumulation, he possesses both an embarrassing assortment of obsolete petroleum-derived media and an unimpeachable record collection.
• My band's drummer spends his waking life behind either the kit or the wheel. In Japan, every car still comes stocked with yer standard CD player, thus he listens almost exclusively to CDs.
• Our singer approximates what I imagine is today's average music consumer: functionally computer-literate, he knows a couple of file-sharing sites that he infrequently downloads illicit MP3s from, but he relies by-and-large upon the iTunes store. He came of age during the CD boom, purchased hundreds of the damned things, and is thus uncomfortable with either going digital - divesting himself of physical musical objects - or fully embracing the frail, impermanent, totemic atavism of vinyl.

Of the above, I most closely resemble the collector, but with two heavy caveats: that I could never match his mania, and that I discard or neglect a far greater swath of music. If I may call myself, like him, a collector, I certainly can't call myself an archivist. I don't accumulate for posterity: sure, I love Ghostface, but I'm not going to buy The Pretty Toney Album just to complete the discography.

I'm actually quite vicious in my musical discrimination, to the point that I'm one of those so-called "music nerds" who is somehow ignorant of even the most popular music on the planet. (Lady Gaga? Still haven't heard a full song start-to-finish.) By now, I know my own tastes well enough to know when something isn't even worth investigating; or if an artist, though unimpressive at first, could become a slow-blooming favourite. Of course, over the past forty years, artists have become ever more self-aware and adept at deploying their particular potpourri of signifiers to establish themselves as more brand than band. The sole benefit of music's infection by the marketing brain parasite is that, simply by paying attention, one becomes well-versed in the signs, symbols, satorial choices, tonsorial maneuvers, promotional stratagems, and subcultural propaganda necessary to decide if something may be worth a listen.

The upshot is that the more I know about music, the less I listen to (a paradox I've addressed before). By the time I download a given album, I've pretty well decided that I'll enjoy it - all that remains is the question of how much. This could point to a key difference between me and Carl: whereas he's fairly certain he "could happily live without 80 percent of what I have downloaded over the years," I'm not so sure I could, because everything on my hard drive arrived there as the result of research & deliberation. There's only so much copper in the ground, there's only so much storage on my computer, and I've only so much time to waste upon whimsy & poor consideration.

But even then, is all my digital music essential? Because I own almost all of it on vinyl too. Granted, the acrimony of the collector's market has kept certain albums off my shelf (I'll be damned if I can afford a copy of Rid of Me) but such exceptions are relatively few. Just about every album that's ever "meant" anything to me, I have in physical format - which helps assure that these albums will continue to mean something to me.

Though this carries the stink of the Sunk Cost Fallacy, of course I don't mean my copy of Man Overboard is merely worth the hours spent crate-digging before plucking it out of a bargain bin, plus the ¥500 I paid for it. Records imbue the music they contain with import precisely because of the format's Achilles' heel: its physical fragility. Taking proper care of vinyl can be boring and expensive; handling & playing them so as not to do damage is precarious and prudish. So if I go to the trouble of putting a record on, I damn well want to listen to it, and the act of listening itself becomes center of my attention. The palaver of playing a record also insures that it's unlikely I'll overplay any given album and prostitute whatever mystique it once held.

Music is literally nothing if we don't afford it our time and attention; the ritual around playing a record is a gesture of respect to the music - the sacrifice of our time and attention.

The difficulty is that collecting always takes place in the shadow of the Big Other. At worst, this leads to the establishment-of-self-via-consumption that Carl finds troubling:

...the weight of all that accumulated culture reassures us that we are ourselves substantial, a kind of prosthesis, we must be smart, we must be committed, we must be artistic, or intellectual because the sheer range and diversity of our hard drive, as a kind of concretization of our restless seeking and searching memorializes us to ourselves.

Now, as I explained above, I've no idea how far out of step I am with the general music listening populace, but as a collector I too consider how my collection presents itself - its depth, its diversity, its material condition. But I'm not counting on my collection to buttress my reputation or enhance my cachet: I'm counting on the fact that these records are the only possible means of sharing my own aesthetic epiphanies with another person. I'm well aware of how counterproductive a distraction analog fetishism can be, but at least the lingering spectre of a record's totemic power is far more commanding of attention than an MP3 e-mail attachment or YouTube link.

More importantly, we human are subjects only to ourselves and mere objects to everyone else - noisy, unpredictable, combatative, delightful objects, but objects nonetheless. Some of us are gifted enough to translate our feelings somewhat effectively to other people by some form of vibration: physical, aural, oral, or corporeal. But most of us aren't. Most of us are bloody useless at making ourselves understood. The best hope we have is to find meaning inscribed upon some other, nonhuman object that we can pass to another human, who luckily will read the inscription with the same surprise and passion that we did.

Déja-Vu Times Two, Part Deux

Could this little ditty, famously used as a daytime soap theme song...



...have been copied from this Italian thriller score?



It's possible: the first tune, "Cotton's Dream", was included in the score for Bless the Beasts and Children, released in August 1971... four months after the release of Una Farfalla Con Le Ali Insanguinate (a.k.a. The Bloodstained Butterfly). Of course, both of these songs inherited their harmonic spine from "(They Long to Be) Close to You". Originally released as a stiffly-performed single in 1963, Bacharach & David's famous ballad is most commonly remembered by the Carpenters' 1970 iteration, with the piano skipping daintily between the suspended-second & major-seventh chords - a motif extremely similar to that employed by the two tunes above.

But really, the sus2-maj7/min7 vamp is just an easy-listening trope in the same way every that "underground" hip-hop album starts with a B-movie or cartoon sample, you can't write a druggy rock song without the I-IV chord progression ("IV", get it?! So clever, those junkies!), and if it's got a Jew's harp it's a Morricone score.

Misplaced Indignation Again?

Am I obliged to comment on M.I.A.'s "finger malfunction" because my most popular post ever - by a factor of over four times its closest competitor - is my 2010 takedown of her pop-provocateur persona? Because, like, I've got shit to do besides rehash two-year-old quarrels of stage-managed mischief.

But fine, let's get into it, if only because it'll be easy. Turning first to the finger itself: really? Really! Have we backslid into such petty puritanism that flipping the bird is cause for a proper conniption fit, as opposed to the single most overused & hackneyed gesture of juvenile waggery that packs all the symbolic punch of overcooked rice noodles? She doesn't even do it well! Look at her hunched shoulders, look at how tightly drawn in her arms are: a meek & defensive posture, like a toddler who's committed to misbehave deliberately just to piss off the parents. Pathetic. This is how you give someone the finger:

Boom! Ain't no equivocatin' when you're telling someone to fuck off.

Now, with regard to M.I.A. as riotous pop shit-kicker, a lame, recycled flip of the middle finger is merely the latest in her continued reliance upon lame, recycled gestures. The chorus of her latest single is a monotone bleat of "Live fast, die young" and it doesn't get more threadbare & depleted than that hoary countercultural trope. Hopefully, M.I.A. has accepted (as most of us have) that she's utterly inept at articulating a political position so we needn't reexamine precisely why her identity-derived political aesthetic is bullshit. Of course, she still covets the currency of being branded a "political artist," but she can shoot every one of her music videos within safe distance of a "conflict region" from now on, and everyone will understand it's empty & opportunistic provocation, like Madonna fornicating with Black Jesus and burning crosses.

Which returns us to the stock defense of M.I.A.: the provocation itself was the point. As I explained before, I'd have no problem with such an excuse - heck, I might even become a fan - if M.I.A. was able to transgress the form or process of "being a pop star," but she isn't. (In fact, no one has been - not even Lady Gaga, I'd argue - since Kurt Cobain.) Because M.I.A.'s transgressions are limited to the realm of content, she is - at the risk of repeating myself - doomed to one of several failures:

1. The provocation fails to provoke. Congrats, you're boring.
2. The provocation succeeds, at the expense of banalising the provocative.
3. The provocation succeeds to the point of returning the threat to the provocateur, who stands by the ever-present escape hatch of "not meaning it."

And if anything is symptomatic of art's sickly & moribund state in the post-modern era, it's an absence of meaning.

Through the Looking Glass

It's amazing how sexy & dynamic the clinical tedium of recording looks when rendered in gorgeous, smoky cyanotype.



It's also amazing how totally unaware I was that my band look like a bunch of fidgety, unshaven chain-smokers. Or that I look uncannily like Dez Cadena circa 1983.

Anyway, for those of you who happen to be in Japan this coming March & April, we'll be touring behind the split single featured above. Come check out one of the shows. You shan't be disappointed.

A Half-Hearted Attempt at Genuine Enjoyment

As the recently-late, formerly great Christopher Hitchens once said, travel - contrary to popular belief - narrows the mind, in that it diminishes difference & spotlights repetition. So it is with the touring musician: the more gigs you play, the more other bands you see, the more other bands you talk about and listen to... the more everything starts to sound the same. This is why so many stalwart musicians are crusty chauvinists guarding the carved-in-stone conventions of their respective genre: they've had to retreat to only the most elemental, primordial iteration of what they love(d) about music to feed whatever flagging enthusiasm they have left for the art form.

The point is that I'm a very tough motherfucker to impress. In the past, this was largely thanks to arrogance (and still is to no small degree), though by now I've logged enough hours as a listener, enough miles as a working musician, and enough hearing damage as an audio engineer that I'm rarely - if ever - surprised. Of course, I still want to be surprised, and seek it like a fiend. On the odd occasion I am surprised, it's not the shock of the new, but the unexpected re-appearance of some estranged sonic friend. No wonder all the contemporary bands that push all my buttons are older dudes who've been stubbornly strumming away since my formative, sponge-brained adolescence in the mid-'90s. Vaz produced one of the gnarliest rock records of the year, Chartreuse Bull, but they're veterans of the hallowed, harrowing Amphetamine Reptile roster. The Psychic Paramount are the most instrumentally enthralling band on the planet, but that is certainly because guitarist Drew St. Ivany and bassist Ben Armstrong have spent almost twenty years in the art-rock trenches. Meanwhile, the inimitable Metatron from Maryland, Daniel Higgs, might as well be one of my parents' old art-school buddies.

The good news, though, is that excellent music continues to be made, and in greater volume that I have time to attend. Some of this year's more experimental releases (e.g. Roly Porter's Aftertime and The Haxan Cloak's gorgeously glacial eponymous debut) were gripping textural explorations that demonstrated an intense, detail-oriented approach to composition - though I still prefer artists whose focus is wide enough to encompass the whole forest, not just the peeling bark of a single birch.

Another Year, Another Holler

1. The Skull Defekts feat. Daniel Higgs - "Peer Amid"
2. Young Widows - "In and Out of Lightness"
3. Action Bronson & Statik Selektah - "Silk White"
4. Tom Waits - "Talking At the Same Time"
5. Obake - "The Omega Point"
6. The Haxan Cloak - "Burning Torches of Despair"
7. The Psychic Paramount - "DDB"
8. Roly Porter - "Corrin"
9. Vaz - "The 2nd"
10. YAMANTAKA//SONIC TITAN - "Reverse Crystal//Murder of a Spider"

Then, of course, there is the record collection. Now that my wife is as avid a crate-digger as I am, we've fast run out of shelf space and now our floor is disappearing almost as quickly. A great many (if not most) of our acquisitions this year have been '60s and '70s Italian soundtracks and funk bibelots, since it's a musical area we enjoy equally. Sure, most of it is breezy & cosmopolitan, much to my wife's pleasure, but there's plenty of strange sound-mass strings & free-jazz bass spazzery to keep an avant-gardiste prick like myself happy. Anyway, here's a few of the tunes that earned the heaviest rotation on our turntable this year...

Fine Vinyl

1. Piero Umiliani - "Le Raggaze Dell'Arcipelago"
2. Ennio Morricone - "Trafelato"
3. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "She Fell Away"
4. Scott Walker - "Rosemary"
5. Buck 65 - "Up the Middle"
6. Roots Manuva - "Witness (One Hope)"
7. I Marc 4 - "Hyde Park"
8. Googoosh - "Shekayat"
9. Piero Piccioni - "Traffic Boom"
10. Main - "Flametracer"

Déja-Vu Times Two

Both of the following albums were released in 1969, one in March, the other in November.


Care to guess which one came first? Here's a hint: one was a meticulously constructed masterpiece of elegiac beauty, and the other an anonymously cookie-cutter rehash of sub-Sly Stone funk with a snare sound thin enough to give your eardrum papercuts.

Also, listening to good ol' Bullhead earlier today, I'd forgotten how bald a ripoff of "It's Shoved" was Nirvana's "Milk It". Still, Grohl was about the only drummer whose "bigness" could match - even occasionally exceed - Dale Crover's.

Looking For a Spectrum Within a Singularity

Since Ariel Pink loudly shat himself onstage earlier this year, the hipoisie have turned their attention to his former collaborator (and philosophy prof - bonus points!) John Maus. It came as no surprise that Pitchfork yawped and I yawned at Maus' latest release for more or less the same reasons: coyly blurring the borders between "Top 40 cheese [and] ironic cool"; using his academic stature to silhouette otherwise vague & swampy songwriting; and an album title that sounds like a try-hard undergrad thesis that would prompt derisive laughter before being suffocated in red ink.

Like so many of his '80s-pop-pilfering peers, Maus' reviews are peppered with allusions - which is unavoidable, given how openly derivative Maus' music is. For example, both the song & video for his "Believer" single are basically Spectrum's "How You Satisfy Me" if Pete Kember had handed vocal duties off to Ian McCulloch. But as Adam Harper has pointed out, Maus is not only apologetic but proud of resurrecting bygone sounds:

I don't see this as a returning, I see this as a palette that we have to work with. These sounds are part of the vernacular. I resist this idea that we somehow move on to 'better' sounds. It's not about nostalgia or some kind of remembering, at least not consciously for me; it's what the work necessitates.

...I think it's supremely contemporary to use these so called 'nostalgic' effects, in the sense of the contemporary being out of joint with the moment in some way.

Which begs the question of when the contemporary has been anything other than "out of joint." This is one of problems I have with the hauntology "movement" (I suppose "stasis" would be a more appropriate term): it's indistinguishable from stock post-modernism in its cherry-picked anachronism, and suggests that the march of history was, until recently, a linear narrative untroubled by cataclysm, disruption, sudden exits, and unexpected entrances. Time is more wrinkled than Rupert Murdoch's brow; history is a slapdash patchwork of unmatched epochs; the contemporary has always been out of joint. The difference is that now we've the time, access, and materials to retreat from the future's shock-&-awe into the warm embrace of nostalgia.

But I agree wholeheartedly that we don't necessarily "move on to 'better' sounds" and that the past bequeaths artifacts & ideas that "warrant exploration right now, here, today." But Maus is being too generous in describing '80s synth-pop as a "palette." Imagining an Alesis drum machine & Yamaha DX-7 constitute a "palette" is as coarse and reductive as remembering the 1950s as America's Golden Age while conveniently forgetting segregation, patriarchy, the Korean War, and McCarthyism. It's not a palette, it's a colour.

If Maus and others wished to be heard as anything other than nostalgic tribute acts, they'll have to far less conservative in their pillage of the past. There have been musicians (e.g. Public Enemy or Amon Tobin) whose music has been constructed solely of samples, of existent material, of second-hand semiotics, yet has sounded ferociously and utterly contemporary. This is because they imposed no limits upon their source material: if it sounded good, it was fair game. Panning for gold across every decade and genre, then melting it down into a single white-hot mass - that is what made their music so unmistakably immediate: a total implosion of temporality. However, once too much attention or emphasis is put upon any particular source of antiquated inspiration, the trap of retro-referentiality has sunken its teeth into you.

Man, I'd better post something about music I enjoy soon, otherwise everyone's going to think my sole preoccupation is shitting on other people's enthusiasm.

Not All Thoughts Turn To Words

Curious seekers that they are, musicians' creative intentions often bleed into other idioms, and then the trouble starts. Even backed by the full might of the publicity machine, few musicians are admired for their literary prowess, thespian skill, or political acumen. For every Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson, or Peter Garrett, there's a thousand Nikki Sixxes, Mariah Careys, or Bonos. The sense of entitlement that follows massive success in a specific field is the most obvious motivation for these multimedia misadventures, but it's also partially a problem of genre: rock & pop are deliberately simplistic & populist forms that often discourage experimentation or analysis. The purposeful, studious effort required to excel in any art form is likely onerous to anyone who just wants to rock.

Sometimes it works the other way: skills cultivated within a certain musical style translate well into other milieus. It's no surprise that as skilled a lyricist as Jay-Z is a decent author & thoughtful commentator; similarly, since hip-hop is all about embodying a persona, MCs often make far more convincing actors (e.g. Ice Cube, Mos Def) than musicians of other genres (e.g. Jack White, Jon Bon Jovi, Sting, etc) - though I imagine anyone who saw Get Rich Or Die Trying or How High would beg to differ.

It may be expecting too much for successful musicians to be skilled in other artistic forms. It's a reasonable assumption that someone chooses a specific mode of communication because it comes the most naturally to them. As the art most directly related to pure sensation, music is an expression of the inarticulable. Perhaps that's why the majority of musicians flex all the verbal dexterity & rapier wit of Koko the gorilla after chugging a handle of cheap Vodka.

I'd prefer artists were at least as lucid as their audience in discussing their art. Unfortunately, there's little in a musician's quotidian routine that would necessarily encourage aesthetic, philosophical, or political inquiry. The internet is an infinitely resonant echo chamber, packed with pop-cultural detritus, from which any musician can hand-pick a grab-bag of references & aesthetic allusions without having to confront said references' original context. Consequently, Lady Gaga can name-drop Andy Warhol & Nietzsche all she likes, but her "smartest" song is barely equivalent to forebear David Bowie's dumbest.

More importantly, the current means of recording have placed an undue emphasis upon the production - as opposed to the composition - of music. As digital technology has made world-class recording tools accessible to the masses, professional recording studios with veteran engineers have become frivolous luxury. So musicians must now craft their own sound-worlds from scratch, unaided, even if they've never so much as plugged in a microphone before. The fashion in which their music is captured & represented is arguably of greater concern than even songwriting.

This, unfortunately, leads to amateurish & underachieving performances of amateurish & underachieving tunes, because it's the only music that withstands amateurish & underachieving recordings. The post-JAMC lo-fi rock 'n' roll revival has been fueled by the fact that it's the only full-band sub-genre that doesn't sound like shit recorded one track at a time using only an SM57. I'd also argue the availability & ease of sequencing & sampling software like Fruity Loops has inculcated the moronic anti-lyricism so prevalent in contemporary hip-hop. Lo-fi, once an obstacle to be surmounted, has become a nostalgic aesthetic retreat for the musically unambitious.

This isn't to say that seasoned engineers make excellent musical directors. Gear-heads are notoriously coarse in their appreciation of aesthetics, since they can find something equally praise-worthy in either Pet Sounds (nice doubling of the piano & accordian!) or Linkin Park (excellent gating on the guitars!). But the musician-engineer relationship provided a valuable & effective division of labour: the musicians were left to focus on their artistic vision, unperturbed by technical considerations, and engineers employed their scientific savvy to faithfully capture & frame the musicians' sound-world.

Obviously, much of the best music is a synthesis songwriting and production, but it's almost never the result of vague intuition or ham-fisted fuckin' around. Those leading lights equally famed for their musical and technical prowess - Quincy Jones, Brian Eno, Steve Albini - began as musicians and gradually developed their own production styles by being inquisitive, assimilating experience, and spending a lot of time in studios. It's precisely because of their intellectual curiosity that polymaths not only craft some of the most interesting music, but are more engaging in discussion. Intellectual laziness breeds artistic laziness, which in turn spawns boring albums and bad interviews.

Nothing From Nothing

Deep in the dunes of time, when the first caveman bashed two sticks together in a rhythmic fashion, music was born. When a second caveman bashed two sticks together in a rhythmic fashion, I imagine his tribesmen scoffed derisively, "Eh, that's fine, Grom, but it's just a rehash of Grog's stick-noise, innit?"

Complaining that music has become derivative is as old as music itself - and why not? To one extent or another, all music concedes the influence of its antecedents. But new frontiers of frustration over secondhand sounds have unfolded, thanks to the omnivorous archive of the internet and what Tony Herrington calls "pop culture’s own acquiescence to the illusion of neo-liberal ‘end of history’ propaganda." The latest entry in the derivation debate comes thanks to Simon Reynolds' less-than-flattering profile of L.A.-based content-generators Not Not Fun. There's a lot to unpack in NNF's cherry-picked pastiche, and so several different conversations have developed. Marc Hogan, Mike Barthel, and Eric Harvey have all toyed with the idea of "underground music" as consumer niche (with Harvey in particular refusing the very notion that music can exist external to capitalism). Herrington's blog posts for The Wire have dissected NNF's libidinal affectations. Elsewhere, The Impostume's Carl has pulled back to the broader question of aesthetic mutability, which to me is where the rubber meets the road:

The problem with hybridization of this kind (ie affirmative hybridization: this cool thing plus this cool thing equals new cool thing) is that it misunderstands much of the original hybridizing impulse which was to “correct” the racist or sexist or regressive elements of traditional rock and its representations...

In characterizing progressive hybridization as "corrective," Carl rightly recognizes that musical evolution - like biological evolution - is fundamentally subtractive. Even when music was embellished structurally or timbrally, the motivation was to liberate the art from some hindrance or reactionary element.

Following centuries of parochial tunings plagued by wolves, the establishment of "well temperament" excised tonal anarchy & miscommunication from European music, providing a universal language for composition & performance. Only later, when this system became ossified dogma, did composers begin ridding themselves of its restrictions. And yet in the 1970s, some experimental composers, such as Krzystof Penderecki and Cornelius Cardew, abandoned the avant-garde, suggesting that it "gave one an illusion of universalism" which, as such, could arguably serve imperialism.

Over the twentieth century, music has repeated this adoption-then-abandonment of pedantry in ever-accelerating cycles, yet each oscillation has been an effort to shed the perceived misapplications of the previous generation of music. Bebop, an elitist reaction against the populist sloth of big band, was in turn countered by more meditative & minimalist styles like cool & modal. Meanwhile, rock spent the first thirty years of its life vacillating wildly between extremes of simplicity (e.g. rhythm 'n' blues, punk à la Ramones) and ostentation (e.g. acid rock, progressive rock).

Since the early '80s, the central conversation within anti-authoritarian styles of music (in contradistinction to Pop) has been about "authenticity": is punk better defined stylistically or by D.I.Y. business practices? Has an artist "sold out," regardless of how unconventional their music is, once they sign to a major label? Are music videos an extension or a perversion of an artist's expression? What's real hip-hop? Underlying all of these questions is the subtractive impulse: artistic purity has less to do with aesthetic specifics than with erasing the corruptions inflicted by the culture industry. This is why a debut album is so often considered a given artist's pinnacle, or why so many musicians speak of getting back to a genre's "roots": their sense is that the time elapsed between inception and present has served only to distort or deteriorate.

The subtractive impulse is immaterial because it is just that - an impulse, a motive, an intent. However, the physical means of composing, performing, and reproducing music have multiplied over the years because technology is almost (but not quite) exclusively additive. The toolbox only gets bigger; implements are never discarded, only updated & improved. One generation plows a dirt road across hostile & uncharted terrain; the next speeds effortlessly along an asphalt-paved highway.

Technology has been the engine of every major aesthetic shift, every stylistic warp, every timbral weft. The temporal limits of physical formats first dictated, then liberated conventional song structure. Amplification allowed small ensembles of amateur musicians to become icons. Voltage-controlled oscillators and tape-based effects modules produced physically-impossible sounds. Turntables and samplers turned compositions into instruments, folding music Moebius-style back upon itself. Without barely an exception, any time a new noise has been born, it's been midwifed by machine.

But stop to consider the most recent technological developments: have any of them been appropriate to producing sound, or merely reproducing it? The last great leap forward in music production was non-destructive and non-linear editing, and the shine was already off by the 2001 release of N*Sync's "Pop" single. Most new tools for composers & producers are meant only to emulate older analog equipment minus any of their mechanical failings (or character, for that matter) and with greater ease of use. It seems sadly appropriate to me that the best-selling effects units are looping pedals: contemporary musicians seem more than happy to shackle themselves to endless, high-resolution reiterations of the same.

Meanwhile, the technology with the single greatest impact upon music as an art-form, the internet, offers no new means of crafting sound, no new compositional methods. Its sole capabilities are storage and transmission - not unlike handing a megaphone to everyone inside the world's biggest library.

This presents a real problem to those whose primary exposure to music happens online. In ye olden days, even if you were distant from an artist's immediate context, you could infer something about the artist's politics, class, and sociogeography from the medium via which you were exposed to the band. You'd make radically different assumptions about a band profiled in Touch And Go if they'd instead received a write-up in Rolling Stone. An artist getting airplay on Hot 97 occupies a very different frame than anyone being broadcast by WFMU. But the internet fails to offer even this referential silhouette. Between the infinite interchangeability of blogs and the pandemic speed with which hype feeding-frenzies spread, you often only find a artist after they've become ubiquitous and, thus, utterly divorced of context. All that is visible is the aesthetic surface, delicately draped over a void. Artists like NNF's Amanda Brown, who hybridize other artists' eggshell personae, are building their artistic identities like Russian dolls, each layer a pretty mask atop nullity.

As I said at the open, derivation is a necessary factor in making music. But borrowing another artist's ideas, their politics, their motives, their frustrations & passions at least provides the possibility articulating the same inspiration in a different way. Borrowing another artist's style, their pose, their inflections, their gestures isn't making music - it's acting. And only the most gullible & stupid among the audience ever confuse the actor for the character they're playing.

Ties, Slurs, and Ligatures

Along with appearances by Bono or Thurston Moore, one of the checklist clichés of music documentaries is the breathless pronouncement that "I'd never heard anything like it before." The statement usually comes towards the end of the first act, once all the major players & their backstories have been introduced, and is typically made by someone peripheral or successive to the spotlit artist or scene. It's threadbare hyperbole by now, but bless 'em for having lived in a place or time when it was possible to be genuinely surprised by music.

These days, almost anyone with a music-listening appliance is also sure to have a decent internet connection. There's consequently no excuse to be ignorant: easy access to the full global & historical sweep of music means everyone is now a music nerd. It's merely a question of how much of what kind of nerd you are.

So should there a come a day when filmmakers decide this solipsistically self-documenting culture requires even further exposition, no one will vaguely exalt a song or artist as "unlike anything I'd heard before." Everyone will have their own hand-picked stockpile of ready references & easy similes. Nevermind the ol' Band A = Band B + Band C equation; folks will be busting out algebraic analogies, multiplying influences before subdividing by microgenre.

Of course, the opposite effect could easily result: because the internet allows users to hand-tailor their input, everyone's frame of reference could shrink to a miniscule, self-satisfied speck. Sure, it requires the same minimal effort to drag up a YouTube clip of either some new buzzband or a tried-and-true favourite, but why risk the disappointment that Yuck might kinda be bullshit when I can just listen to "Wings" for the god-knows-nth time? Why struggle to decide if it's morally acceptable to enjoy Odd Future when you can just throw on the Wu-Tang's debut again? The danger of such smug myopia is that there are hordes of nerdier-than-thou jerks (Hi!) ready to school your cul-de-sac ass. Sure, Lostage may be the latest in a long lineage of arena-sized riff merchants, but beware if you're going to "saddle the band with too many overt Page/Plant comparisons." Some snide punk out there will want to know, for real, Led fuckin' Zeppelin is the only goddamned guitar band you can draw a comparison to? What, were you too stoned to take Houses of the Holy off your turntable and investigate Drive Like Jehu, or Universal Order of Armageddon, or, I dunno, any band on Dischord records?

Mercifully, some bands make it easy for lazy critics by wearing their influences so baldly, they don't require multiple citations - it's straight Band A = Band B. (See: Black Lips, Serena Maneesh, The Horrors, etc.) Many Japanese bands actually invite such easy equivalencies. Desperate to broadcast their influences, many musicians borrow a song title for their band name (e.g. Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her, Boris) or vice versa (e.g. Number Girl's "Pixie Dü"); the clever ones quote directly but with deliberate misspellings (e.g. Discharming Man).

Often, the most interesting bands work like Rorschach tests for their listeners' musical knowledge: everyone draws different correlations, based on their personal tastes, without anyone necessarily being inaccurate. For example, a band I used to tour-manage earned sprawling comparisons to DJ Shadow, Radiohead, the Flaming Lips, and Can - all fair assessments to my ears. There were, of course, a few folks suggested jaw-droppingly inaccurate agnates (Helmet? Really?) but that's what happens when drunk Alabamans try their hand at cultural criticism.

My current band's been suited with an even baggier patchwork of musical parallels. No one seems quite sure where to situate us. So far, we've done things strictly D.I.Y. without so much as an official website, yet two weeks ago the drummer from Melt Banana said we "totally sound like a major [label] band." Well, yeah, contrasted with Melt Banana, we do totally sound like a major label band, but that's a seriously relative appraisal - like saying the Melvins sound way more commercial than Napalm Death.

Given Japan's malignant self-perception as rock's farm league, it's high praise for a band to be compared to a foreign act. Not only have we only been identified with overseas acts, we frequently receive the highest praise possible: we don't even sound like a Japanese band* at all! I suspect most people are tempted to make this comment because there's a gaijin on guitar and the lyrics are all in English. That we look & sound comparatively "less Japanese" is less a plaudit than a plain statement of fact.

Anyway, below is a mix of the bands we're most frequently stood alongside - which I find hilariously flattering, with the exceptions of Killing Joke (meh) and perennial underachievers Primal Scream. But I admit, we bear the most consistent likeness to Primal Scream, in that all of our songs sound kinda sorta like Primal Scream. Our vocalist loves Bobby and the bassist digs Mani, so we operate around 20% Primal Scream at all times. The similarity to our other soundalikes varies wildly: one song may split the difference between Shellac and the Birthday Party, the next number might sound like Sonic Youth all over.

Perhaps I should make a "soundalike outlier" mix of all the bands we've been compared to only once, just to see how ludicrous a Venn diagram that draws around our sound. Could we in fact be the middle point between Sleep, Seefeel, and Company Flow? I fucking wish.

Ties, Slurs, and Ligatures

1. Shellac - "My Black Ass"
2. Lungfish - "Jonah"
3. My Bloody Valentine - "Slow"
4. Killing Joke - "Seeing Red"
5. The Jesus Lizard - "Monkey Trick"
6. Primal Scream - "Rise"
7. The Birthday Party - "The Dim Locator"
8. Public Image Ltd. - "Death Disco (Swan Lake)"
9. Sonic Youth - "Death Valley '69"

* - Believe me, I don't consider this praise of any sort, let alone a high honour. The endemic insecurity of many Japanese rock musicians is a sorry state. And what does it mean to "not sound Japanese" anyway?

Inner Ear Balance

Earth Hour - a token gesture at best - doesn't mean much in a country rolled over by blackouts. Having lost 20% of its capacity, TEPCO is running dangerously near its maximum output and has asked for the public to curtail its electricity consumption. For their part, the Japanese have dutifully & promptly complied: tights belts are the new black. This new trend of collective restraint is the upside of that hive-mind passivity that recently emptied supermarket shelves and often drives type-A expats off their hinge.

I personally suspect the electricity deficit could be addressed merely by shutting down all the damned pachinko parlours. But otherwise, the obvious first sacrifice is Tokyo's famous forest of neon signs. A week ago, my band drove the width of the city coming back from a gig, and from the Edo river through to Shinjuku, Tokyo was a literal shadow of its former self. Friday nights are usually a parade of packed taxis jamming streets lined with sloppy drunks under a technicolour canopy; instead, we sped through a chaioscuro landscape haunted by the odd straggler searching for cabs that were all idling outside dimmed train stations. The hostile loneliness reminded me of the grim, grimy New York immortalized in After Hours or Night On Earth.

(Lest I be accused of bathos, let me refine the above description: Tokyo now looks less like Blade Runner on MDMA and more like... well, just any other city on the planet.)

Having shaken off the initial shock, we're starting to understand the medium- and long-term consequences of the disaster: the global consumer economy has been gut-punched by the disruption of Japanese manufacturing, and imports & exports will be unsteady until the Daiichi plant is solidly entombed in cement. Both of the above have direct consequences for those of us in Japan physically unscathed by the catastrophe: no beer and no new iPhone! The horror... the horror...

But this is where my general pessimism pays off. Should the patina of modern convenience completely peel and flake away, I'm ready. I've been anticipating the day when the lights go out and supermarket shelves are stripped bare since I first saw Mad Max. No tears or rending of garments from me, 'cuz son, it's go-time!

I want to be clear about the cut between pessimism & cynicism. I haven't spent my adult life glumly awaiting Armageddon because it's all fucked anyway - that is the joyless slouch of the cynic. My pessimism sits somewhere between Shöpenhauer's and Nouriel Roubini's: those of us lucky enough to inhabit the best possible part of this worst-possible world ought to enjoy it because it's too good to last forever. Every time I set out across this city, I'm filled with a marvelous hilarity. Should I ever have grandkids, how will possibly describe the lunatic animation of this place to them?

During the drive home with my bandmates last week, we had an amusing epiphany. Our singer had titled two songs - both written last year - "Plutonium" and "Atomic Age", the latter of which contains the couplet "I don't wanna meltdown/But this is really happening." Barely two years into his career as a language-mangling frontman and he's already giving Mark E. Smith a run for his money as rock's preeminent psychic. The drummer immediately demanded the singer start writing some happier goddamned songs before he kills us all.

It's been good to get back to gigging. Aside from restoring a sense of regular purpose, it kills the solitary paranoia of disaster to see friends and swap where-were-you-when stories. Next week, we're off to Hokkaido for a run of shows across Japan's northernmost isle. Nothing like a short vacation from the capitol to clean off the cold sweat & fear-spun cobwebs of the past three weeks.

But now another potential casualty of the disaster could be Japan's live music circuit. Not only have dozens of foreign acts (who bring in the big money) canceled their Japanese tours, but rolling blackouts pose a clear danger to the functional existence of many venues. In the interest of keeping the ecosystem healthy, we're overloading our live schedule. By playing the same city three times in two weeks, sure, we may split our audience for any given show three ways, but better to draw one-third of our audience each to three different venues than pack one club while leaving two others to languish.



This past Monday, I played an improv gig with Uozu, guitarist for hardcore abstractionists (and my favourite band in Japan) Z. This was only our second excursion into quadramplified chaos under the clunky moniker UOZEB, and though it was a hell of a lot of fun, I couldn't hear myself play a damned note all evening. This may have been because we were augmented by a guest drummer & violinist (who ran through more effects pedals than I did). Bedlam at 120 decibels, but all for a good cause: I recorded the show, and as soon as it's mastered, it'll be available as a paid download with all proceeds going towards the Tohoku relief effort. I'll have it all linked up here as soon as possible.

See you on the other side of next week, and meanwhile - stay outta Hong Kong.

Shuffle-Play in Dark Days

We're at a bit of a loss for what to do. On the one hand, there's elevated amounts of Godzilla snot floating over Tokyo; on the other hand, the UK's chief science adviser and a moron who once declared war on crows say that it's perfectly safe to be out & about. What's a media-gorged foreign resident to do?

But, happily, our ward is currently exempt from the rolling blackouts, so we've the internet & a handsome record collection to keep ourselves occupied as we fortify ourselves against radioactive intoxicants with spinach (high in iron!) and hard liquor (a.k.a. "The Chernobyl Method").

...Hey, another aftershock! Ain't no party like a tectonic party because, evidently, the party don't fucking stop.

Anyway, in our idle hours under self-imposed house arrest, we've come up with a kind of apocalypse playlist, reproduced below. Each link leads to a YouTube clip, so you can enjoy each song discretely.

And the Earth Died Screaming

1. AC/DC - "You Shook Me All Night Long"
2. Tom Waits - "Misery Is the River of the World"
3. The Fall - "Lay of the Land"
4. David Bowie - "Panic in Detroit"
5. Tricky - "Aftermath"
6. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "City of Refuge"
7. Talking Heads - "Life During Wartime"
8. Kraftwerk - "Radioactivity"
9. Loop - "Burning World"
10. Black Sabbath - "Into the Void"

Postscriptual Requests
11. James Q. "Spider" Rich - "Yakety Sax"
12. Spacemen 3 - "Things'll Never Be the Same"
13. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "Cabin Fever"
14. John Lennon - "Nobody Told Me"
15. The Mothers of Invention - "Any Way the Wind Blows"

Squibbity-flabbity-doo!

Labour's last stand in Wisconsin, turmoil in Libya, unsubstantiated xenophobia in the financial sector - how much horror can one ingest during the first cup of coffee? How angry can you get at breakfast? For want of any meaningful contribution to the conversation (and to preserve what fewed frayed nerves I've left), I gladly pick up the gauntlet cast by Simon Reynolds for a li'l musical frivolity.

Great guitar solos! Man, what are the odds of anyone under the age of twenty-five joining this debate? If the Great Riff War of 2010 was troubled by the recent restriction of the guitar to a supporting role, then the solo is an expressive mode dead & buried for two straight decades. Perhaps the last memorable moment a guitar stepped front-and-center was Kurt Cobain's minimal reiteration of the verse melody in "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Certainly, guitar solos have forever been stained with the nut-bustin' excesses of '80s metal. Whether you're an eyebrow-arching ironist or an melodramatic raconteur, the human voice is an unmediated, more easily-understood means of expression. You're not going to talk through your guitar. (With due respect to the possible exception of Stephen Malkmus.)

Yet many of my favourite guitar solos came after the finger-sports Olympics of the 1980s. This is partially due to my age: 1990 was the first year I paid attention to contemporary music in a conscious way. Granted, the window hadn't quite closed on masturbatory machismo at that time. Slash & Kirk Hammett were unarguably the most popular guitarists on the planet, and the friend who first encouraged me to pick up the instrument was still spending his days deciphering the flurried fretwork of Steve Vai and Nuno Bettencourt. But such pyrotechnical playing was a bridge way too far for an eight-year-old still struggling to form a bar chord. It also struck me as a kind of silly - but silly in that awkward way that is totally unaware of how silly it actually is. If I was going to go silly, I wanted to enjoy it overtly.

Enter Primus. My parents, bless 'em, bought me The Beavis & Butthead Experience on cassette for Christmas '93. A bunch of my favourite bands were on the dodgy cash-in compilation (Nirvana, Anthrax, et al.), but what seized me by the cerebellum were the first two tracks on the second side: "I Am Hell" by White Zombie and "Poetry & Prose" by Primus. White Zombie were gloriously coarse, like Metallica deprived of any artistic pretense, and Rob Zombie had the most resolutely unpleasant voice I'd heard - mesmeric in its repulsiveness. (You can imagine how excited I was when I finally heard Ministry six months later.) But Primus were just baffling: a nasal redneck spitting syllables at auctioneer speed over the Ren & Stimpy house band. And what was up with the guitar solo (which hits around the 1:30 mark)...



This fleet-fingered loon was desperately snatching notes all over the neck and grabbing the wrong one every time. I had no idea what to make of it. I'd never heard playing so willfully unhinged.

...That is, until I discovered Marc Ribot and Frank Zappa. Evidently, Larry Lalonde's two greatest influences were even further out in orbit that he was. Ribot's playing, particularly his more restrained performances behind Tom Waits, was what I thought the blues should sound like: gnarled, lacerating, and not quite on key. His solo on Waits' "Way Down In the Hole" has long been a favourite.

And Zappa - well, the first spin of Zappa's Apostrophe(') was my Damascene moment as a young musician. As I've written before, "it defied every rule that Top 40 radio had imposed on my impressionable mind: it was virtuosic but hilarious, it was orchestral but whimsical, it was psychedelic but cynical." His guitar playing was stupefying, especially for its near-total aversion to rhythmic regularity. Many people find his three-volume instrumental tome Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar overly indulgent, but I still think the opening salvo of "Five Five Five" is a terrifying piece of modernist improv.



After my prog-head period, I began gravitating towards more textural, deconstructive guitarists like Kevin Shields and Ian Williams. Still, players whose concepts exceeded their chops can surprise with the occasional searing solo, like Lee Renaldo's fuzzy freakout in "Kissability" or Chris Woodhouse's confounding blitzkrieg during the late, great Mayyors' "Metro". And I have to admit, two-meter sentient phallus though he may be, Billy Corgan killed it during the solo on "Zero".

But, as so often comes to pass with rock history, you gotta go old school for honest-to-god, as-yet-unmatched genius. The solo that scorched, then salted the earth so that nothing could grow in its wake was Robert Fripp's six-stringed exorcism on Eno's "Baby's On Fire". There's hardly a more exciting three-minute instrumental span in rock music, and its serrated howl echoes in every other solo I've cited above. Every time I listen to it, I simultaneously want to throw off my instrument in futile disgust and to kick on the Big Muff and run through Lydian scales until my fingers bleed.



Your move, Mr. Neville.

To the Delight of Caucasian Dullards Everywhere

Well, look who took home top prize at the music industry's annual closed-circle-jerk. Doubtlessly, such an achievement by a 1.3 million-selling band that has licensed its songs to major corporations, has performed at private functions for political insiders, and whose record label doesn't happen to have a corporate parent, will be hailed as another culture-industry equivalent to David taking down Goliath. Backslaps all around, you smug pricks!

Honestly, who is excited by this band any more? Scratch that - who ever thought an anemic, sphincter-clenching hybrid of "Once In a Lifetime" and "Born To Run" was a good idea? I swear, anyone thrilled by the Arcade Fire's coronation at the Cocksucker's Ball is such a boring, beige-souled, conservative bastard that they'd have similarly picked Tom Jones' "Green, Green Grass of Home" over anything off Revolver for Record of the Year 1966.

Actually, you only live once...

John Barry's passed on. Now, the fear is that Morricone can't be far behind him, after whom we'll have lost every forward-thinking modernist film composer. Seriously, we'll be stuck with the likes of Rota plagiarist Danny Elfman and Hans bloody Zimmer, whose most impressive contribution to the art of film scoring boils down to BWAAAAAAAAAAAAHM!

At least Barry left us with an endlessly entertaining body of work.

Slight Return

I realize it's slightly worrisome to write a post about suicide and then all but vanish from the online landscape for two weeks. The fact is that, one week ago, my video logic board shat itself most spectacularly and I'm in the midst of catching up on the various tasks I was unable to perform without my machine. On the bright side, brief banishment to meatspace reminds me of the multifarious & wonderful things I should be doing every day instead of wasting hours on end skulking around FARK or Wikipedia or VBS or, uh, Gawker.

Anyway, I've got some immediate obligations to attend before offering any trenchant cultural dissection around here, though I offer the following morsel in the meantime...

Undoubtedly the funniest bit of online flotsam I've found this month was this scholarly history of Van Halen's "Hot For Teacher". However, one friend was more than a little aghast at the realization that a great many academics do discuss the most frivolous & frothy of junk culture with such chin-stroking seriousness. Determined to see just how far this po-faced cultural deconstruction could extend, he issued me a challenge.

"Go on," he wrote. "Explain this in 500 words or less!"

I don't like to disappoint, and so I offered him (and now you): the seductive power of Kajagoogoo's "Too Shy" in precisely 300 words!

Despite their laughable moniker & ludicrous coiffures, Kajagoogoo’s single chart success, 1983’s “Too Shy”, was neither accident nor aberration. Two years after Depeche Mode’s smash “I Just Can’t Get Enough”, synthpop was a commercially-ascendant genre that had yet to lose its novelty, attracting scores of late-coming opportunists – including Kajagoogoo – exploiting synthpop’s instrumental arrangements & sartorial sense. This strategy let Kajagoogoo & their peers ride the genre’s commercial crest yet anchored them irrevocably to what was obviously a transitional pop-cultural moment, dooming their prospects for long-term success. This echoes the limp career arc of many one-hit wonders, before & after the New Wave.
 
Of course, a hit doesn’t simply happen. Guided by veteran producer Colin Thurston, Kajagoogoo began by expertly mimicking au current musical tropes: mid-tempo disco beats underneath minor-mode counterpoint played upon chirpy synthesizers and slapped bass. But the key to the success of “Too Shy” is in the very nonsensical nature of its earworm chorus:

Too shy shy

Hush hush, eye to eye
Too shy shy

Hush hush, eye to eye
(x2)

The entire chorus consists of two lines, repeated four times. Chanting and repetition is known to have a detrimental effect on critical subjectivity, immersing the listener/participant into a non-critical hive-mind. Indeed, this attack on the listener’s consciousness is amplified by the further repetition of the word “shy” in the first line, inculcating greater passivity. Then “hush hush” forbids reactive expression outright, refusing the autonomy or agency of the listener. Meanwhile, the word’s sonorous sibilance suggests romantic intimacy; the song is literally seducing the listener, emphasized by the sexually-predatory description of the Singer-Other & Listener-Subject as being “eye to eye.”
 
Though these words appear vague as directives, their impact is heightened as the listener becomes disoriented by the aggressively non-grammatical construction of the chorus.

War of Attrition on the Listener's Attention

As irresistible as list-making may be, it presents a problem that I've purchased precisely zero albums released within the last calendar year. I've been given quite a few records by friends, but I can't convince myself (let alone anyone else) that the best albums of 2010 happen to be by all my buddies' bands, whom you've never heard.

But I've not been incurious as a listener; I think I've explored a wider array of new sounds than I have in at least several years. It just so happens that almost none of this exploration has been contemporary - not that contemporary music has encouraged me to explore it much. (Seriously, with Best-Of lists like these, who needs Worst-Of lists?) Thanks to the Internet's obliteration of the over-/underground divide, even the most subterranean acts are tempted by the possibility of a pop crossover, implicitly depressing experimental daring.

The other problem posed by the Internet is what Patton Oswalt dubs "etewaf": Everything That Ever Was - Available Forever. New musicians must compete not only with each other, but with the sum-total of musical history which is now but a right-click away. Rather than liberating listeners from the dull hegemony of current trends, this suffocates them with option paralysis. From this, the modern audience appears to bifurcate into obedient contemporaneity on one hand, conservative retrovision on the other.

This presents career-minded musicians with three wholly unpleasant options:

• Craft face-punchingly moronic Aspartame pop that seizes listeners within the first 30 seconds and fails to disappoint by going precisely nowhere.
• Pattern your tunes after a tried-and-true template (be it Springsteen, Toni Basil, or Klaus Schulze) with plagiaristic fidelity.
• Give up and enjoy your obscurity.

And the first two options all but guarantee music that is dogmatically diatonic, rhythmically regular, and grindingly dull.

Many would argue that the very curse of the internet is its blessing: everything that ever was - available forever! But, as Oswalt explains, "that creates weak otakus. Etewaf doesn’t produce a new generation of artists — just an army of sated consumers. Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie?" Indeed, this is the fundamental problem of the digital environment in general, as Jodi Dean elaborates in her brilliant book, Blog Theory:

...no authority tells the subject what to do, what to desire, how to structure its choices. Žižek argues, however, that in fact the result of the Master's decline is unbearable, suffocating closure. The online environment Second Life clearly demonstrates this closure: able to do or create anything (there aren't even laws of gravity), the majority of users end up with avatars that are sexier versions of themselves walking around shopping, gambling, fixing up their houses, and trying to meet people ("meet" can be read euphemistically here). It's not only boring - it's stifling as it confronts users with their lack of skills and imagination.

To be sure, there are those (myself included) to whom "etewaf" has been a boon. Anyone with a dram more discipline than the average subcultural tourist has access to whole goldmines that before were largely inaccessible by time, distance, and/or cost. Then again, we're the very people who, in Ye Olde Offline Times, had the curiosity & dedication to pursue our niche manias despite the prohibitions of time, distance, and/or cost.

As such, my chief means of musical exploration is the same now as fifteen years ago: talking with friends nerdier than myself. Ergo, to give credit where it's truly due, here are the top 5 influences upon my listening habits across 2010.

1. Watching Too Many Old Movies

As I mentioned a month ago, I was recently inducted into the gruesome world of giallo cinema. What's odd is the genre's initial appeal lies not in its cinematic strengths (which, depending on the film, are frequently few) but in its soundtracks. The friend who introduced me to gialli made no attempt to sell the genre on its Swiss-cheese screenwriting or Mexican soap-opera acting; instead, he pointed me towards the tonal warp of Bruno Nicolai's strings and the violent arrhythmia of Ennio Morricone's scores for Dario Argento.

If a score was particularly striking, I'd actually get around to watching the movie. Occasionally, the movie would exceed my (admittedly minimal) capacity for guts 'n' gore, which sent me in search of less graphic films of the same vintage. Spy thrillers fit this bill perfectly, from the cartoonish Danger: Diabolik to the more cultivated Harry Palmer trilogy. What these films held in common with the gialli is that the soundtracks often outstripped the films themselves in quality - especially John Barry's ominously exotic score for The IPCRESS File.

2. Co-Producing a Hip-Hop Album

The friend who introduced me to the giallo films had an ulterior interest in their obscure & outlandish scores: as a largely-untapped source of samples. For a couple of years, he's been quietly piecing together a hip-hop album that, even in its unfinished state, is more musically compelling than damn near any album since Fantastic Damage. I was flattered & a little intimidated when he asked me to help sculpt the record's sound, given that I'd yet to produce any hip-hop. This prompted me to research as much left-of-center hip-hop as I could handle, starting with prolific oddballs Madlib and his brother Michael "Oh No" Jackson. Though their total lack of self-editing makes for an uneven discography, I far prefer their analog grime to the slick digital minimalism that currently dominates mainstream hip-hop.

3. Talking To Other Bands On Tour

Obviously, what I've enjoyed the most about being back on the road is playing gigs. But it's also the perfect idiom to geek out as a listener - after all, what greater music nerds than musicians themselves? Our March tour with Lostage was especially enjoyable, whether it was comparing the spoils of some dedicated crate-digging (Karp for ¥300!) or turning each other on to unfamiliar acts. I'm especially grateful for the introduction to Z, whom I became immediately convinced are the best band in Japan.

4. Attending Salford University's Noise Conference

When in spring I blagged my way into an academic conference on "noise," it became suddenly incumbent that I know what I was talking about. I've never actually been a great fan of noise music: I usually find it either a pompous incursion into the "unintentional" soundworld, or just plain boring. But if I was going to participate in a 3-day conference on the subject, I'd better be on more intimate terms with it than merely having attended a My Bloody Valentine concert. Mercifully, I'd chose to focus primarily on the No Wave scene, whose "noise" was less noise outright and more about the expansive blurring of rock's outermost boundaries. This way, I got to listen to my Swans & Sonic Youth records on loop and legitimately call it "research."

The conference itself was every bit the brain-massage I'd hoped. Not only did everyone have something interesting to say, they were quite affable & easy-going. I was thrilled to have found a social milieu where the slurry pub talk would be about, say, the apparent dearth of right-wing prog rock. This niche of ne plus ultra nerdom also exposed me to musical cul-de-sacs of which I had no previous knowledge. Who knew that the Madchester sound owed its very existence to the early-'80s Sheffield scene, and why hadn't they told me before about long-forgotten visionary acts like Hula?

5. Not Being Sated By All the Above

Finally, the maniac's calling card is that there is never enough. Despite musical riches heaped upon my ears by the above experiences, I still craved more strange sounds, more uncharted territory, more unfamiliar artists - which is why I have to acknowledge a certain debt to the "etewaf" phenomenon. Between online retailers like the unequaled Aquarius Records and such appetent blogs as Son of Zamboni, Dayvan Zombear, and OngakuBaka, I became acquainted with countless enthralling artists I'd not yet had the pleasure of hearing: library funkmeister Janko Nilovic, space-rock svengali Walter Wegmüller, Ulaan Khol's rustic soundscapes, and (possibly my most oft-spun album of 2010) Getatchew Mekurya's barnburning collaboration with Dutch post-punks The Ex. I eagerly anticipate what exotic & intriguing sounds I'll be exposed to in the coming year.

And to you, I give a small cross-section of the fruits of the explorations detailed above. Click on the mix title to download, and all the best for 2011.

The War of Attrition On the Listener's Attention

1. John Barry - "Main Title" from The IPCRESS File OST
2. Tyler, the Creator - "French!"
3. Karp - "Forget the Minions"
4. Sonic Youth - "Major Label Chicken Feed"
5. Hula - "Red Mirror"
6. Ennio Morricone - "Trafelato" from Giornata Nera Per l'Ariete OST
7. Walter Wegmüller - "Der Wagen"
8. Getatchew Mekurya & the Ex - "Ethiopia Hagere"
9. Oh No - "Smoky Winds"
10. Z - "新今日"