it turns out that lingouf’s phenomenal 2011 release, doeme, was just a temporary blip and he’s gone back to doing happy hardcore. that’s really too bad.
http://lingouf.bandcamp.com/album/luc-lma
Sunday, December 29, 2013
suuns continue their quest to convert clinic from redneck pickup truck hick music into interesting art rock....
the disc is a little sterile, and it was flat out boring to watch it performed live, but it works fairly well, overall. you're going to need headphones, volume, time and patience for this.
the record before this is much more interesting.
https://suuns.bandcamp.com/album/images-du-futur-2
the disc is a little sterile, and it was flat out boring to watch it performed live, but it works fairly well, overall. you're going to need headphones, volume, time and patience for this.
the record before this is much more interesting.
https://suuns.bandcamp.com/album/images-du-futur-2
the hype around this is really silly. it fits properly into a trend called 'chillwave' that was popular a few years ago. mild influences from ymo and oldfield don't change what it is.
i found their earlier work interesting from a guitar perspective; now that that has been dropped, i see no reason at all why anybody would listen to this except to fit it into their 'cool kid' playlist between washed out and neon indian.
...which makes it not just one of the most disappointing records of the year, but one of the most disappointing records of the decade (so far).
i found their earlier work interesting from a guitar perspective; now that that has been dropped, i see no reason at all why anybody would listen to this except to fit it into their 'cool kid' playlist between washed out and neon indian.
...which makes it not just one of the most disappointing records of the year, but one of the most disappointing records of the decade (so far).
Saturday, December 28, 2013
music video for ‘inertia’
i'm sure this won't be the last traditional music video i put together, although i don't have much respect for the medium and have no interest in doing it as something mandatory.
this footage just struck me as very powerful, and fitting to the track.
original video taken from here without requesting permission:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS_oLmWlG8s
this footage just struck me as very powerful, and fitting to the track.
original video taken from here without requesting permission:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS_oLmWlG8s
ugh. if you must rot your brain with the garbage they call "film" nowadays, can you please have the common fucking courtesy to not monopolize the entire block's bandwidth for hours at a time?
BAN NETFLIX.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/15/bittorrent-says-netflix-is-hogging-bandwidth-not-beating-it
when you contemplate what this technology could be doing, it's flat out revolting to think it's being wasted on middle aged bureaucrats watching jennifer aniston romcoms - to the point that it's starting to strangle service. that's the kind of imagery that makes me yearn for the consequences of nuclear warfare.
i'm pretty sure my upstairs neighbours got netflix for christmas, and i'm going to have to move to dsl as a result. i'll give it a few more days...
BAN NETFLIX.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/15/bittorrent-says-netflix-is-hogging-bandwidth-not-beating-it
when you contemplate what this technology could be doing, it's flat out revolting to think it's being wasted on middle aged bureaucrats watching jennifer aniston romcoms - to the point that it's starting to strangle service. that's the kind of imagery that makes me yearn for the consequences of nuclear warfare.
i'm pretty sure my upstairs neighbours got netflix for christmas, and i'm going to have to move to dsl as a result. i'll give it a few more days...
Friday, December 27, 2013
publishing inrijected (inri022)
this is a collection of rejected tracks from the inri/inriched period. it's just chronologically sequenced.
recorded over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synth, drum programming, lyrics, samples, loops, cool edit synthesis, digital wave editing
released feb 27, 1999
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrijected
recorded over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synth, drum programming, lyrics, samples, loops, cool edit synthesis, digital wave editing
released feb 27, 1999
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrijected
publishing inrimixed (inri023)
this is a collection of weird, glitchy remixes from the inri/inriched period that i meant to do something with and just never did.
the cover art is actually the waveform for track 2; similarities to the mirror reflection of the cover of any seminal eponymous records from the late 60s are purely coincidental.
constructed over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, synths, bass, drum programming, vocals, digital wave editing, cool edit synthesis, sampling, sequencing, loops
released feb 28, 1999
the cover art is actually the waveform for track 2; similarities to the mirror reflection of the cover of any seminal eponymous records from the late 60s are purely coincidental.
constructed over 1998. compiled and remastered in late 2013. please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, synths, bass, drum programming, vocals, digital wave editing, cool edit synthesis, sampling, sequencing, loops
released feb 28, 1999
yup. headphones cleaned and as good as new. in the end, i'm going to prove these things are indestructible.
mixes passed through multiple listening tests and the result is acceptable if not always perfect. minor existing problems are source related, and in tracks i'm not as attached to. moving on. finally....
i hope to have the reject cd done by the day, and maybe move into inrimake.
mixes passed through multiple listening tests and the result is acceptable if not always perfect. minor existing problems are source related, and in tracks i'm not as attached to. moving on. finally....
i hope to have the reject cd done by the day, and maybe move into inrimake.
Thursday, December 26, 2013
ugh. i just spent the last several days trying to figure out what the
factors were around certain tracks buzzing only on the laptop, to
realize they buzzed out of the pc, now, too - because the buzz is coming
from the headphones. autechre and htda and even asmz are also buzzing,
albeit at different levels. it's definitely the phones.
these are my beloved phones that i've had since i was a kid and that i just replaced the cord on. and was very excited about having in working order again...
on the one hand, i seem to recall them buzzing like this in the past. yet, they weren't doing this recently up until this week. it sounds like i blew a speaker and i'm sort of blaming myself for it. i was really blaring them.
there's an off chance it could be dirty, but i'm not really sure what to do if the speaker is actually blown. that's twice, now, that i've run up against these headphones being out of order. but i don't have $800 to blow on a pair of phones that are comparable. i don't even have $300 to blow on a downgrade.
the only other pair i have to mix on are a pair of "noise-cancelling" phones that designed for ipods, and they're just too synthetic to get a useful signal from. they're just not useful for this purpose. unfortunately, my previous backups (aiwas) seem to have gotten damaged in the move.
i'm going to try and clean them and let them sit for the night and go from there. it seems bad, though...
even blaring them is...i blared them for years...
i'm wondering if the cord had too strong a signal for the speakers, a different impedance. these phones are 20+ years old, the cord is for newer models. i used the cord support told me to use, but that doesn't really say much..
these are my beloved phones that i've had since i was a kid and that i just replaced the cord on. and was very excited about having in working order again...
on the one hand, i seem to recall them buzzing like this in the past. yet, they weren't doing this recently up until this week. it sounds like i blew a speaker and i'm sort of blaming myself for it. i was really blaring them.
there's an off chance it could be dirty, but i'm not really sure what to do if the speaker is actually blown. that's twice, now, that i've run up against these headphones being out of order. but i don't have $800 to blow on a pair of phones that are comparable. i don't even have $300 to blow on a downgrade.
the only other pair i have to mix on are a pair of "noise-cancelling" phones that designed for ipods, and they're just too synthetic to get a useful signal from. they're just not useful for this purpose. unfortunately, my previous backups (aiwas) seem to have gotten damaged in the move.
i'm going to try and clean them and let them sit for the night and go from there. it seems bad, though...
even blaring them is...i blared them for years...
i'm wondering if the cord had too strong a signal for the speakers, a different impedance. these phones are 20+ years old, the cord is for newer models. i used the cord support told me to use, but that doesn't really say much..
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
excerpt from ‘soul of man under socialism’
we need less anarchist writing by economists and philosophers and more anarchist writing by artists. i know. i'll get to it.
i've posted this a few times. i don't absolutely identify with any single strain of anarchist thought, but this is really the closest thing i've seen to articulating my own viewpoints.
" Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other. An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it in an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in any sphere at all – well, nowadays the man of science and the philosopher would be considerably amused. Yet it is really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected to brutal popular control, to authority – in fact the authority of either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of course, we have to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it does more than linger; it is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.
In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true, but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work may be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is when one comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to one’s own views, this acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not dwell upon the point. But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of the drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions – one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France, is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make the establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England. Of course, the public are very reckless in their use of the word. That they should have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be expected. Wordsworth was a poet. But that they should have called Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist is extraordinary. Kingsley’s prose was not of a very fine quality. Still, there is the word, and they use it as best they can. An artist is, of course, not disturbed by it. The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/
i've posted this a few times. i don't absolutely identify with any single strain of anarchist thought, but this is really the closest thing i've seen to articulating my own viewpoints.
" Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other. An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it in an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in any sphere at all – well, nowadays the man of science and the philosopher would be considerably amused. Yet it is really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected to brutal popular control, to authority – in fact the authority of either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of course, we have to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it does more than linger; it is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.
In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true, but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work may be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is when one comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to one’s own views, this acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not dwell upon the point. But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of the drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions – one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France, is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make the establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England. Of course, the public are very reckless in their use of the word. That they should have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be expected. Wordsworth was a poet. But that they should have called Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist is extraordinary. Kingsley’s prose was not of a very fine quality. Still, there is the word, and they use it as best they can. An artist is, of course, not disturbed by it. The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
publishing first remaster & re-release of inriched (inri021)
and here it is, finally - done.
the editing here was much deeper than the first cd demo. while i was initially less excited about this one, the end result is comparable - there's one specific track, the 6th, that i just wish didn't exist.
in every way, it's a bit more extreme. the bad decisions were worse; in the sense that i've removed them, it doesn't matter, but in the sense that they remain they're painful. it's mostly related to vocal tracks. but where the first failed on content, this one fails more often on singing. thankfully, there's only two or three tracks that are painful.
the rest of it is actually pretty good. the noisy/experimental/glitch sections are more extreme. the techy parts are more elaborate. the ambient sections are thicker. the silliness is sillier...
as before, the record/demo bounces back and forth between "songs" and "experiments". on this demo, though, the songs are no less interesting than the noise.
the problem with the sixth track is explained on the page. i was being ironic, but not obviously, and it's kind of left me in the awkward position of identifying as queer and yet having a queer-bashing song. *shrug*. it's not queer-bashing, but it would be easier if it just didn't exist...
for the rest of it, i need to reiterate that it is valid, even when it's trite, because it's real. that is to say that it sounds like i'm 18 and less than well-adjusted. if it could be better than it is, it would lack the authenticity of being a demo produced by a troubled teenager. i might not articulate my feelings of being ignored at a very high level of thought or with much compelling poetry, but i'm certainly feeling them and that feeling certainly gets across in my unique and goofy sort of way. likewise, when i go into juvenile shock rock i am actually convincingly juvenile and convincingly shocking (unless i'm trying to be ridiculous, in which case i pull that off just as well).
that means you have to listen to it from a certain distance because a big part of what you're listening to is the spectacle of a demented child being demented, but when you do that it comes off as some of the most idiosyncratic leftfield synth pop i'm aware of. you've never heard anything quite like this.
so, if i could remove the 6th track without killing the flow of the disc, i would. beyond that, the edits that i've made have left me comfortable with throwing this out there as it is - under the existing caveats.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched-lp
==
this is very much a follow-up to the previous demo (there's a pun, here) and in fact is largely constructed of "leftover tracks" from that period. this demo may be a bit glitchier/noisier than the last one, jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp.
some of these songs are reworked versions of tracks i had recorded previously. in almost all cases, i consider the versions here (and on the previous demo, inri) to be the authoritative versions of these tracks.
the demo is consciously constructed to alternate between "conventional songs" and "experimental pieces", although both definitions are stretched. it generally takes the form of connecting passages. it's meant to give the record the feel of a cohesive work rather than a collection of songs.
lyrically, i'm still a teenager, but i'm starting to grow into myself a little more. there are some points of significant embarrassment on this recording, but it's really only the sixth track that makes me cringe to the point of regret. i was also experimenting with an "ironic distance" type of spoken word style that, in hindsight, doesn't come off so well.
the guitar work is one of the things that separates the sound from a typical industrial aesthetic. i've never been a fan of heavy metal and largely shied away from creating that kind of thing. yet, i found myself connecting more with psychedelic guitar at this point than punk rock. industrial psych generally implies something like trance, but it need not to. industrial hendrix? well, maybe it ends up sounding more like synth pop, which has historical roots in psychedelic music and progressive rock. the point is that the music does manage to carve out a unique space between industrial music and synth pop that i don't know of any clear comparisons to. people have suggested mid-period swans, the legendary pink dots and nine inch nails - only the last of which was a significant influence, and none of which are really that close. a better comparison, although still not a significant influence at this time, would be joy division - who would become a significant influence after this phase. my actual influences at the time would have been more like brian eno (through his 70s and 90s work with david bowie, as well as his work with u2), early prog (genesis/floyd/crimson), peter gabriel, the beatles, radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, REM, sonic youth, the tea party and a bit of contemporary electronic music (prodigy, nin, coil, foetus, autechre, nitzer ebb, ministry, econoline crush, gravity kills, stabbing westward, skinny puppy and side projects). the sense of humour is coming from frank zappa and matt groening, if they are not actually the same person. i wasn't listening to much tears for fears, i don't think, but you can hear them lurking underneath everything.
this material was recorded throughout 1998 and the very beginning of 1999, but some of it was written as far back as 1994. unfortunately, i decided that the songs sounded better in mp3 and consequently compressed everything before burning. i understand now that i was hobbling together a crude mastering process, but it means (unfortunately) that the closest thing i have to the finished tracks are low quality mp3s and a cd-r. these tracks were taken off of a cd-r and run through digital post-production in dec, 2013 in a process that also included minimal editing (mostly the removal of badly placed samples, but also the removal of some vocal sections where it was possible). as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, drum programming, sequencing, sampling, digital wave editing, vocals, cool edit synthesis, production, found sounds, strategies
released feb 10, 1999
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched-lp
the editing here was much deeper than the first cd demo. while i was initially less excited about this one, the end result is comparable - there's one specific track, the 6th, that i just wish didn't exist.
in every way, it's a bit more extreme. the bad decisions were worse; in the sense that i've removed them, it doesn't matter, but in the sense that they remain they're painful. it's mostly related to vocal tracks. but where the first failed on content, this one fails more often on singing. thankfully, there's only two or three tracks that are painful.
the rest of it is actually pretty good. the noisy/experimental/glitch sections are more extreme. the techy parts are more elaborate. the ambient sections are thicker. the silliness is sillier...
as before, the record/demo bounces back and forth between "songs" and "experiments". on this demo, though, the songs are no less interesting than the noise.
the problem with the sixth track is explained on the page. i was being ironic, but not obviously, and it's kind of left me in the awkward position of identifying as queer and yet having a queer-bashing song. *shrug*. it's not queer-bashing, but it would be easier if it just didn't exist...
for the rest of it, i need to reiterate that it is valid, even when it's trite, because it's real. that is to say that it sounds like i'm 18 and less than well-adjusted. if it could be better than it is, it would lack the authenticity of being a demo produced by a troubled teenager. i might not articulate my feelings of being ignored at a very high level of thought or with much compelling poetry, but i'm certainly feeling them and that feeling certainly gets across in my unique and goofy sort of way. likewise, when i go into juvenile shock rock i am actually convincingly juvenile and convincingly shocking (unless i'm trying to be ridiculous, in which case i pull that off just as well).
that means you have to listen to it from a certain distance because a big part of what you're listening to is the spectacle of a demented child being demented, but when you do that it comes off as some of the most idiosyncratic leftfield synth pop i'm aware of. you've never heard anything quite like this.
so, if i could remove the 6th track without killing the flow of the disc, i would. beyond that, the edits that i've made have left me comfortable with throwing this out there as it is - under the existing caveats.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched-lp
==
this is very much a follow-up to the previous demo (there's a pun, here) and in fact is largely constructed of "leftover tracks" from that period. this demo may be a bit glitchier/noisier than the last one, jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp.
some of these songs are reworked versions of tracks i had recorded previously. in almost all cases, i consider the versions here (and on the previous demo, inri) to be the authoritative versions of these tracks.
the demo is consciously constructed to alternate between "conventional songs" and "experimental pieces", although both definitions are stretched. it generally takes the form of connecting passages. it's meant to give the record the feel of a cohesive work rather than a collection of songs.
lyrically, i'm still a teenager, but i'm starting to grow into myself a little more. there are some points of significant embarrassment on this recording, but it's really only the sixth track that makes me cringe to the point of regret. i was also experimenting with an "ironic distance" type of spoken word style that, in hindsight, doesn't come off so well.
the guitar work is one of the things that separates the sound from a typical industrial aesthetic. i've never been a fan of heavy metal and largely shied away from creating that kind of thing. yet, i found myself connecting more with psychedelic guitar at this point than punk rock. industrial psych generally implies something like trance, but it need not to. industrial hendrix? well, maybe it ends up sounding more like synth pop, which has historical roots in psychedelic music and progressive rock. the point is that the music does manage to carve out a unique space between industrial music and synth pop that i don't know of any clear comparisons to. people have suggested mid-period swans, the legendary pink dots and nine inch nails - only the last of which was a significant influence, and none of which are really that close. a better comparison, although still not a significant influence at this time, would be joy division - who would become a significant influence after this phase. my actual influences at the time would have been more like brian eno (through his 70s and 90s work with david bowie, as well as his work with u2), early prog (genesis/floyd/crimson), peter gabriel, the beatles, radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, REM, sonic youth, the tea party and a bit of contemporary electronic music (prodigy, nin, coil, foetus, autechre, nitzer ebb, ministry, econoline crush, gravity kills, stabbing westward, skinny puppy and side projects). the sense of humour is coming from frank zappa and matt groening, if they are not actually the same person. i wasn't listening to much tears for fears, i don't think, but you can hear them lurking underneath everything.
this material was recorded throughout 1998 and the very beginning of 1999, but some of it was written as far back as 1994. unfortunately, i decided that the songs sounded better in mp3 and consequently compressed everything before burning. i understand now that i was hobbling together a crude mastering process, but it means (unfortunately) that the closest thing i have to the finished tracks are low quality mp3s and a cd-r. these tracks were taken off of a cd-r and run through digital post-production in dec, 2013 in a process that also included minimal editing (mostly the removal of badly placed samples, but also the removal of some vocal sections where it was possible). as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, drum programming, sequencing, sampling, digital wave editing, vocals, cool edit synthesis, production, found sounds, strategies
released feb 10, 1999
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inriched-lp
detroit was actually one of the origin points of punk rock in the late 60s, though.
deathtokoalas
generic glam rock.
you don't need to pull an obscure demo out of somebody's attic to know that punk was developed in the 60s in detroit and seattle, largely as an american reaction to the british invasion.
Matthew Perry
In what why is this likened to glam rock? It definitely displays the characteristics of early punk. In my opinion its one of the finest examples of it.
IvoryPagoda
The idea is that these guys were doing something that just wasn't being done at the time. And I fail to see the connection to glam that you suggest.
deathtokoalas
but, it was being done at the time. there's a few songs that are right off aladdin sane, which was itself an attempt to capture the sound of detroit bar bands, and a definite t-rex influence. todd rundgren? another blatantly obvious influence is early queen. they claim they were influenced by the who, and it's obvious. what i fail to hear is anything novel, here. i mean, it's not bad as far as early glam goes, but it's not groundbreaking.
IvoryPagoda
Aladdin Sane? Totally not hearing the connection there. Yeah, I get it, we're gonna capitalize (again) on the Sound of Detroit, but Death sounds like 1973 Bowie? That is a huge stretch, and I'm gonna have to disagree...
deathtokoalas
i was admittedly trying to avoid the obvious cooper/mc5/stooges comparisons, which are weaker than a new york dolls comparison.
and i'll admit it's sort of curious how similar the sound is to at the drive-in.
...but if you listen a little more carefully, the bowie comparison is there in the more straight-up rock material. it occupies a position between glam and punk that a lot of other acts in the period were straddling. that being said, it does open the question: was death one of the nameless detroit bar bands bowie was emulating?
it's probably better if people connect to it as it is, rather than compare it to other things. it's not fair to attack the band for it's marketing technique. shit sucks; we all need marketing techniques. it's just that the idea that punk was novel in 1974 isn't correct. at all. 1964, more like it.
(i should probably clarify that i'd argue that the 70s punk thing was actually a retro movement, maybe the first modern retro movement, at least i don't see an earlier one. specifically, a retro movement to 60s mod music. if you listen to what punk musicians actually said at the time, they were all on about resurrecting the 60s mod scene or even going back to 50s rock. so, how does the idea of saying "this band was ahead of their time because they were punk" make any sense if it's understood that punk was about going backwards in time? i know that's not the modern interpretation, which considers punk the beginning of modern music, but that's what it was to the musicians at the time. punk became novel when it became hardcore through scenes in dc (bad brains), the uk (crass) and california (dead kennedys), as well as when it went art-prog in new york. the ramones were just the kinks played at the wrong speed. and this is just period glam...)
Miloš Milosavljević
right. everyting is the same. just different speed, different lyrics, different vocalisation. of course you cannot come up with something entirely new, but you can come up with something distinct enough from everything else it follows up on to be able to call it a genre. Or else it's all music, and we can relativise anything by pulling out bits and pieces that sound like something you've heard before.
Death was the closest thing to what stabilised as early punk a couple of years after they created their sound. Closer than the Stooges, or MC5, that's for sure. And you can't liken the Mods or Glam to this. There are shared elements, as with everything else that evolves in music and art.
And you assumption about Bowie is probably correct. As much as I love the guy, he was one of the slickest thieves of sound in popular music.
deathtokoalas
well, it's not a right/wrong issue, to begin with. somebody pulled a demo out of an attic by a band that nobody's ever heard of and proclaimed "invented punk!", but the reality is that they're roughly ten years too late to make the claim in the first place (everybody knows punk came out of the 60s), and on top of that it just sounds like all the other glammy rock bands that existed in detroit at the time.
you've just all fallen for a goofy marketing campaign. but, as i mentioned, that's not why it's irritating to me. what's irritating to me is that falling for the marketing campaign requires a level of historical ignorance, and that if that's not corrected then it's going to result in an inaccurate historical revisionism.
this isn't a new tactic by record companies, either. a few years ago, the industry found itself in need of a way to market a handful of records that were done by some of the members of the foofighters before they were in the foofighters, when they were in a band called sunny day real estate. now, those of us that lived through the 90s remember sdre as a minor grunge act that was known mostly for a leftfield hit they released on one of the batman soundtracks, called 8. people into sdre were also into radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, spiritualized, the manics...maybe sigur ros. but that wasn't good enough to market to foofighters fans, so they packaged it together with a weezer record that everybody hated (pinkerton) and marketed it under the label of a type of 80s punk that was seeing a resurgence. the whole thing is absolute corporate bullshit that never happened, but it's enshrined in wikipedia and therefore must be true, right?
and i didn't even mention malcolm mclaren.
again, this isn't the worst period glam i've heard, but there's nothing new relative to 1974 here.
Hanuman Ares
I support your stand 100% The band is fine and has some nice things going, but is obviously not some form of timeless wonder sprung out of nowhere to invent punk - a genre and term who's history has been traced to much earlier origins somewhere in the mid 60's.
(deleted)
deathtokoalas
well, i did listen to the whole disc. and i've offered concrete comparisons. i'm sort of starting to wonder why this simple observation is getting so much traffic, though. how many of these people work for the record industry and are trying to enforce the marketing scam?
Xterminating Angel
the eye opener is these are so called niggers in 1975 LOl!
deathtokoalas
but, there were several other black glam and proto-punk acts, too. pure hell is one.
Xterminating Angel
true but Death set the slandered before punk existed no gettn around that LOL!
Please Tell me the bands im an audiophile!
Death is not glam these guys lived in the hood,In those days that fairy shit didnt fly. If you dressed like a woman you better stay at home LOL! They're black neighbors hated "The white boy music and called the cops" Death is the full circle lets not forget who invented rock n roll......Brothers LOL!
deathtokoalas
glam was a proto-punk phenomenon that had one of it's epicentres in detroit. you may have heard of iggy pop, who fronted a band called the stooges. they even cite alice cooper as an influence. glam, in turn, was a merging of white mod culture with black funk & soul, a precursor to disco. punk was actually a sexual term that referred to male prostitution. it was initially a fundamentally queer rock movement, in opposition to the heteronormality pushed down by early metal bands.
at the time, "punk" basically meant "fag". it's not a coincidence that it got applied to musical styles that derived from early 70s glam. and, again, that had a lot of overlap with the specifically black queer culture that was all over the mixed industrial centres of the american northeast - and detroit (then a wealthy cosmopolitan center) was at the center of that. at least as much as mod culture did...
again, my point is simply that this is not particularly novel. it fits right into the mid 70s proto-punk/glam scene that was spilling out of detroit, and that was actually fairly biracial in it's merging of soul and mod (and heavy blues) influences.
just to throw this out there.....and it makes me a little bit sad....but with all the reversals in civil rights that have happened since reagan (which, i'll remind you, punk took a very vocal stance against), it's easy to forget that there was a period in the late 60s and early 70s where a real kind of integrationism and post-racialism was in the culture. punks tended to find hippies naive (no, holding hands isn't going to accomplish anything, you need to go out and break shit), but there were a lot of shared values there. in a real sense, punk rock was born out of the civil rights legislation of the 60s. it wasn't the only kind of music that can make that claim, either. there was a substantial fusion movement that was trying to be syncretic and inclusive.
so, yeah. it's not that odd. there were black musicians all over punk rock, from the drumkit in the dk's to the bassist in magazine to the creation of hardcore by bad brains in dc. those are just the famous bands. if you dig into the scenes of city after city you find solid racial politics and full racial integration. perhaps we can say something about racism in the media regarding what got picked up and what didn't, ok, but punk itself does not make sense when stripped from it's biracial character. it just creates an attitude that ought to be told to fuck off...
....meaning that maybe there is something to say, here, about how the substantial contribution of black people (on both sides of the ocean) to punk rock has been marginalized and forgotten. i'll state my initial reaction again: that people are shocked by the existence of this record is just surreal.
Miloš Milosavljević
all sounds great. I really can see you know your stuff, but then instead of beating around the bush and speaking in general terms, just dish out a list of bands, link to their tracks or performances with dates. I can't say for myself that I am an uber pundit, but equating glam with punk just won't do. Death is not glam.
sazopro
Well, I got lost at the Todd Rundgren comparison. Definetely 'Politicians In My Eyes' is like 'I Saw The Light' lol. But I kinda see your point: "nobody is a true original" I guess.
IvoryPagoda
I understand the point you are driving at, and your arguments are well-put. I am willing to admit that there has been a lot of interplay in that fuzzy zone between the so-called punk icons and the world of glam - and yes, as you point out - even in the years where these words were not universally being applied to the music it now represents. But let's remember where this traffic began. It isn't so much that Death was really all that special, and it's not that they were the Black Grandfathers of Punk. Whatever they were, I still can't go so far as to agree that they were Glam - not by 70s definitions, and not in any decade since. bad brains, DK, crass - similar, but later. Iggy? Closer in sound and chronology, but iffy. Bowie? Nah. Not really a whole to compare them to from 1974. Is their music fabulous? Not really. But whatever: it isn't Glam.
Xterminating Angel
death could have sighned with SST records in 1975 oh wait they didnt exist...This is what make death special.I never considered the sex pistols or the GBGb stuff real punk.ity was pure rockn roll to me. then again i was in the pit during the dead kennedys/black flag west coast punk
Sharangir
They did not invent punk. But they are a 70s protopunk rock band like there are a handful of others. The actual peculiar part about this band is that they were not allowed to exist because nobody would sign them cause they were a black rock band (ignoring the obvious hypocrisy due to rock's origins). And that the records were just sitting in an attic from 1977 until 2008 when the three sons of one of the bandmembers found them and decided to cover the albums, resulting in the band trying to release the record again in 2009.
Geron Fletcher
i cant really call this a REACTION to british rock when british rock was a reaction to black rock and rollers like chuck and jimi. this is more of just in line with chuck and jimi with a garage city midwest twist.
deathtokoalas
your jimi part is anachronistic (jimi went to britain to connect with some of his influences, like clapton, and then came back to america after making a name for himself on the british heavy blues circuit, which is actually where early metal bands like sabbath and zeppelin came from rather than from where punk was developing in what is now the american rust belt extending into nyc) but the berry part is right to an extent. jimi hendrix has a complex place in punk history, in the sense that he was revered as an icon that could not be emulated without losing his brilliant idiosyncrasies, but it's usually not as a musical influence. it would have been common to run into punks in the mid-to-late 70s that wrote off people like van halen by saying "he can't hold a candle to hendrix".
something that happened in the british invasion is that the structures of "rhythm and blues" became warped into the kind of rock music that is now called punk, partially by going through a synthesis with folk rock. you can compare the who or a specific period of the beatles (around revolver) much more readily to the ramones than you can to 50s rockers like chuck berry. it's a flow of influences, but the shift happened in the 60s rather than the 70s.
i'm just going to reiterate my earlier point: this wasn't novel relative to the mid 70s, and i've presented a number of examples and a great deal of reasoning to demonstrate my argument. if you choose to reject those comparisons, that's your choice, but i feel i've demonstrated them well. this doesn't sound remotely like anything that was ever released on sst in it's hey day, it sounds like doomy black eyeliner-wearing early 70s glam rock. my lack of response was actually due to my laptop's hard drive faulting on me, but i'd like to move away from this discussion.
(deleted)
deathtokoalas
the reason it matters is that creating a contrived history of punk to sell records has the potential of erasing the actual history if people don't bother to take the time to correct it.
to answer a specific one of your inanely hypothetical questions, though, you could give acknowledging a diversity of opinions a try. not just here, but generally. it might stop you from having further terrible toddler internet temper tantrums.
that actually applies to a few of you.
as mentioned, i stated my case, some disagree, it's time to move on, now. further viewers can decide for themselves: is this glammy proto-punk truly novel, or do they sound like a thousand other failed bar bands from the period?
Rich Latta
except this Death album sounds more aggressive than your typical glam.
deathtokoalas
i'm sorry, but, as i stated previously, this thread is now closed. all further comments will be deleted. all complaints will be deleted.
(if you don't like it, start a new thread)
generic glam rock.
you don't need to pull an obscure demo out of somebody's attic to know that punk was developed in the 60s in detroit and seattle, largely as an american reaction to the british invasion.
Matthew Perry
In what why is this likened to glam rock? It definitely displays the characteristics of early punk. In my opinion its one of the finest examples of it.
IvoryPagoda
The idea is that these guys were doing something that just wasn't being done at the time. And I fail to see the connection to glam that you suggest.
deathtokoalas
but, it was being done at the time. there's a few songs that are right off aladdin sane, which was itself an attempt to capture the sound of detroit bar bands, and a definite t-rex influence. todd rundgren? another blatantly obvious influence is early queen. they claim they were influenced by the who, and it's obvious. what i fail to hear is anything novel, here. i mean, it's not bad as far as early glam goes, but it's not groundbreaking.
IvoryPagoda
Aladdin Sane? Totally not hearing the connection there. Yeah, I get it, we're gonna capitalize (again) on the Sound of Detroit, but Death sounds like 1973 Bowie? That is a huge stretch, and I'm gonna have to disagree...
deathtokoalas
i was admittedly trying to avoid the obvious cooper/mc5/stooges comparisons, which are weaker than a new york dolls comparison.
and i'll admit it's sort of curious how similar the sound is to at the drive-in.
...but if you listen a little more carefully, the bowie comparison is there in the more straight-up rock material. it occupies a position between glam and punk that a lot of other acts in the period were straddling. that being said, it does open the question: was death one of the nameless detroit bar bands bowie was emulating?
it's probably better if people connect to it as it is, rather than compare it to other things. it's not fair to attack the band for it's marketing technique. shit sucks; we all need marketing techniques. it's just that the idea that punk was novel in 1974 isn't correct. at all. 1964, more like it.
(i should probably clarify that i'd argue that the 70s punk thing was actually a retro movement, maybe the first modern retro movement, at least i don't see an earlier one. specifically, a retro movement to 60s mod music. if you listen to what punk musicians actually said at the time, they were all on about resurrecting the 60s mod scene or even going back to 50s rock. so, how does the idea of saying "this band was ahead of their time because they were punk" make any sense if it's understood that punk was about going backwards in time? i know that's not the modern interpretation, which considers punk the beginning of modern music, but that's what it was to the musicians at the time. punk became novel when it became hardcore through scenes in dc (bad brains), the uk (crass) and california (dead kennedys), as well as when it went art-prog in new york. the ramones were just the kinks played at the wrong speed. and this is just period glam...)
Miloš Milosavljević
right. everyting is the same. just different speed, different lyrics, different vocalisation. of course you cannot come up with something entirely new, but you can come up with something distinct enough from everything else it follows up on to be able to call it a genre. Or else it's all music, and we can relativise anything by pulling out bits and pieces that sound like something you've heard before.
Death was the closest thing to what stabilised as early punk a couple of years after they created their sound. Closer than the Stooges, or MC5, that's for sure. And you can't liken the Mods or Glam to this. There are shared elements, as with everything else that evolves in music and art.
And you assumption about Bowie is probably correct. As much as I love the guy, he was one of the slickest thieves of sound in popular music.
deathtokoalas
well, it's not a right/wrong issue, to begin with. somebody pulled a demo out of an attic by a band that nobody's ever heard of and proclaimed "invented punk!", but the reality is that they're roughly ten years too late to make the claim in the first place (everybody knows punk came out of the 60s), and on top of that it just sounds like all the other glammy rock bands that existed in detroit at the time.
you've just all fallen for a goofy marketing campaign. but, as i mentioned, that's not why it's irritating to me. what's irritating to me is that falling for the marketing campaign requires a level of historical ignorance, and that if that's not corrected then it's going to result in an inaccurate historical revisionism.
this isn't a new tactic by record companies, either. a few years ago, the industry found itself in need of a way to market a handful of records that were done by some of the members of the foofighters before they were in the foofighters, when they were in a band called sunny day real estate. now, those of us that lived through the 90s remember sdre as a minor grunge act that was known mostly for a leftfield hit they released on one of the batman soundtracks, called 8. people into sdre were also into radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, spiritualized, the manics...maybe sigur ros. but that wasn't good enough to market to foofighters fans, so they packaged it together with a weezer record that everybody hated (pinkerton) and marketed it under the label of a type of 80s punk that was seeing a resurgence. the whole thing is absolute corporate bullshit that never happened, but it's enshrined in wikipedia and therefore must be true, right?
and i didn't even mention malcolm mclaren.
again, this isn't the worst period glam i've heard, but there's nothing new relative to 1974 here.
Hanuman Ares
I support your stand 100% The band is fine and has some nice things going, but is obviously not some form of timeless wonder sprung out of nowhere to invent punk - a genre and term who's history has been traced to much earlier origins somewhere in the mid 60's.
(deleted)
deathtokoalas
well, i did listen to the whole disc. and i've offered concrete comparisons. i'm sort of starting to wonder why this simple observation is getting so much traffic, though. how many of these people work for the record industry and are trying to enforce the marketing scam?
Xterminating Angel
the eye opener is these are so called niggers in 1975 LOl!
deathtokoalas
but, there were several other black glam and proto-punk acts, too. pure hell is one.
Xterminating Angel
true but Death set the slandered before punk existed no gettn around that LOL!
Please Tell me the bands im an audiophile!
Death is not glam these guys lived in the hood,In those days that fairy shit didnt fly. If you dressed like a woman you better stay at home LOL! They're black neighbors hated "The white boy music and called the cops" Death is the full circle lets not forget who invented rock n roll......Brothers LOL!
deathtokoalas
glam was a proto-punk phenomenon that had one of it's epicentres in detroit. you may have heard of iggy pop, who fronted a band called the stooges. they even cite alice cooper as an influence. glam, in turn, was a merging of white mod culture with black funk & soul, a precursor to disco. punk was actually a sexual term that referred to male prostitution. it was initially a fundamentally queer rock movement, in opposition to the heteronormality pushed down by early metal bands.
at the time, "punk" basically meant "fag". it's not a coincidence that it got applied to musical styles that derived from early 70s glam. and, again, that had a lot of overlap with the specifically black queer culture that was all over the mixed industrial centres of the american northeast - and detroit (then a wealthy cosmopolitan center) was at the center of that. at least as much as mod culture did...
again, my point is simply that this is not particularly novel. it fits right into the mid 70s proto-punk/glam scene that was spilling out of detroit, and that was actually fairly biracial in it's merging of soul and mod (and heavy blues) influences.
just to throw this out there.....and it makes me a little bit sad....but with all the reversals in civil rights that have happened since reagan (which, i'll remind you, punk took a very vocal stance against), it's easy to forget that there was a period in the late 60s and early 70s where a real kind of integrationism and post-racialism was in the culture. punks tended to find hippies naive (no, holding hands isn't going to accomplish anything, you need to go out and break shit), but there were a lot of shared values there. in a real sense, punk rock was born out of the civil rights legislation of the 60s. it wasn't the only kind of music that can make that claim, either. there was a substantial fusion movement that was trying to be syncretic and inclusive.
so, yeah. it's not that odd. there were black musicians all over punk rock, from the drumkit in the dk's to the bassist in magazine to the creation of hardcore by bad brains in dc. those are just the famous bands. if you dig into the scenes of city after city you find solid racial politics and full racial integration. perhaps we can say something about racism in the media regarding what got picked up and what didn't, ok, but punk itself does not make sense when stripped from it's biracial character. it just creates an attitude that ought to be told to fuck off...
....meaning that maybe there is something to say, here, about how the substantial contribution of black people (on both sides of the ocean) to punk rock has been marginalized and forgotten. i'll state my initial reaction again: that people are shocked by the existence of this record is just surreal.
Miloš Milosavljević
all sounds great. I really can see you know your stuff, but then instead of beating around the bush and speaking in general terms, just dish out a list of bands, link to their tracks or performances with dates. I can't say for myself that I am an uber pundit, but equating glam with punk just won't do. Death is not glam.
sazopro
Well, I got lost at the Todd Rundgren comparison. Definetely 'Politicians In My Eyes' is like 'I Saw The Light' lol. But I kinda see your point: "nobody is a true original" I guess.
IvoryPagoda
I understand the point you are driving at, and your arguments are well-put. I am willing to admit that there has been a lot of interplay in that fuzzy zone between the so-called punk icons and the world of glam - and yes, as you point out - even in the years where these words were not universally being applied to the music it now represents. But let's remember where this traffic began. It isn't so much that Death was really all that special, and it's not that they were the Black Grandfathers of Punk. Whatever they were, I still can't go so far as to agree that they were Glam - not by 70s definitions, and not in any decade since. bad brains, DK, crass - similar, but later. Iggy? Closer in sound and chronology, but iffy. Bowie? Nah. Not really a whole to compare them to from 1974. Is their music fabulous? Not really. But whatever: it isn't Glam.
Xterminating Angel
death could have sighned with SST records in 1975 oh wait they didnt exist...This is what make death special.I never considered the sex pistols or the GBGb stuff real punk.ity was pure rockn roll to me. then again i was in the pit during the dead kennedys/black flag west coast punk
Sharangir
They did not invent punk. But they are a 70s protopunk rock band like there are a handful of others. The actual peculiar part about this band is that they were not allowed to exist because nobody would sign them cause they were a black rock band (ignoring the obvious hypocrisy due to rock's origins). And that the records were just sitting in an attic from 1977 until 2008 when the three sons of one of the bandmembers found them and decided to cover the albums, resulting in the band trying to release the record again in 2009.
Geron Fletcher
i cant really call this a REACTION to british rock when british rock was a reaction to black rock and rollers like chuck and jimi. this is more of just in line with chuck and jimi with a garage city midwest twist.
deathtokoalas
your jimi part is anachronistic (jimi went to britain to connect with some of his influences, like clapton, and then came back to america after making a name for himself on the british heavy blues circuit, which is actually where early metal bands like sabbath and zeppelin came from rather than from where punk was developing in what is now the american rust belt extending into nyc) but the berry part is right to an extent. jimi hendrix has a complex place in punk history, in the sense that he was revered as an icon that could not be emulated without losing his brilliant idiosyncrasies, but it's usually not as a musical influence. it would have been common to run into punks in the mid-to-late 70s that wrote off people like van halen by saying "he can't hold a candle to hendrix".
something that happened in the british invasion is that the structures of "rhythm and blues" became warped into the kind of rock music that is now called punk, partially by going through a synthesis with folk rock. you can compare the who or a specific period of the beatles (around revolver) much more readily to the ramones than you can to 50s rockers like chuck berry. it's a flow of influences, but the shift happened in the 60s rather than the 70s.
i'm just going to reiterate my earlier point: this wasn't novel relative to the mid 70s, and i've presented a number of examples and a great deal of reasoning to demonstrate my argument. if you choose to reject those comparisons, that's your choice, but i feel i've demonstrated them well. this doesn't sound remotely like anything that was ever released on sst in it's hey day, it sounds like doomy black eyeliner-wearing early 70s glam rock. my lack of response was actually due to my laptop's hard drive faulting on me, but i'd like to move away from this discussion.
(deleted)
deathtokoalas
the reason it matters is that creating a contrived history of punk to sell records has the potential of erasing the actual history if people don't bother to take the time to correct it.
to answer a specific one of your inanely hypothetical questions, though, you could give acknowledging a diversity of opinions a try. not just here, but generally. it might stop you from having further terrible toddler internet temper tantrums.
that actually applies to a few of you.
as mentioned, i stated my case, some disagree, it's time to move on, now. further viewers can decide for themselves: is this glammy proto-punk truly novel, or do they sound like a thousand other failed bar bands from the period?
Rich Latta
except this Death album sounds more aggressive than your typical glam.
deathtokoalas
i'm sorry, but, as i stated previously, this thread is now closed. all further comments will be deleted. all complaints will be deleted.
(if you don't like it, start a new thread)
Monday, December 23, 2013
were death even a punk band at all?
deathtokoalas
but....it was also right around the time where proto-punk was all over detroit...
grargh.
it's just really surreal to see a barrage of hipsters that are somehow surprised that glam and punk existed in detroit in the early 70s. whatever. back to your "music began in 1976" regularly scheduled programs.
(deleted)
deathtokoalas
rock itself is mostly a splice of folk & blues. how you choose to augment the sound beyond that (with classical orchestrations or horn arrangements or electronic textures or ...) defines the subgenre. but, when you strip aside the embellishment, what you get is the combination of blues and folk.
but....it was also right around the time where proto-punk was all over detroit...
grargh.
it's just really surreal to see a barrage of hipsters that are somehow surprised that glam and punk existed in detroit in the early 70s. whatever. back to your "music began in 1976" regularly scheduled programs.
(deleted)
deathtokoalas
rock itself is mostly a splice of folk & blues. how you choose to augment the sound beyond that (with classical orchestrations or horn arrangements or electronic textures or ...) defines the subgenre. but, when you strip aside the embellishment, what you get is the combination of blues and folk.
yeah. i admit i'm a fan of autolux in a "what radiohead should have done" sort of way - and i'd suspect that most of the negative comments are from people that are not.
it's still lacking, compared to the brilliant remixes that came out of the 90s, but it's a little closer to what a nine inch nails remix used to sound like back in the day and that's a tad refreshing.
it's still lacking, compared to the brilliant remixes that came out of the 90s, but it's a little closer to what a nine inch nails remix used to sound like back in the day and that's a tad refreshing.
on the question of john mclaughlin's underacknowledged importance in the development of guitar rock
deathtokoalas
only the levee breaks would stand up in court. except it wasn't plagiarism 'cause it was a cover.
page is definitely guilty of ripping off mclaughlin and clapton and beck. and plant was definitely trying very hard to do the aretha thing. there's no need to make things up.
gonzocurt
Yeah, and Clapton, The Stones and Beck "ripped off" B.B.King, Freddie King, Chuck Berry, Elmore James, Robert Johnson, etc. Or was it they just loved that stuff so much they had to play it? And it influenced their musical language just like you pick up accents etc. In most cases, they worked their own creative process on it and honed it into something the young whites of the time loved.
deathtokoalas
well, it's sort of exaggerated, really. my point was that page wasn't really a guy that copied black artists, he was a guy that copied white artists that were heavily influenced by black artists. the synthesis had already been established by the time page came along...he built his sound on top of a fusion that had already happened....
but, to the extent that those other players were copying? there's a far stronger "cultural appropriation" accusation leveled at the rnb sound of the stones, the early beatles, etc than there is at the heavy blues of cream, yardbirds, zeppelin or sabbath. they operated in the same (lack of) theoretical space, sure. but cream didn't steal any more from robert johnson than jimi hendrix did. they were both working with extrapolations of a pre-existing sound, but they were also both entirely unique. delta blues simply doesn't have a psychedelic quality or a baroque quality, or any influence from eastern music.
MICHAEL HAMILTON BERRY
mclaughlin ? Page was on recordings long Before he was even heard of....what do you have to offer about music history ?
taking some one Else's song and presenting it as your own is dishonest and is actually theft of intellectual copy write. It is Illegal and morally wrong .
I like Led Zep but I think this is a rotten thing they have done over and over again.
The other poor bastards are probably broke and dead with nothing to show for a life in music. nothing to pass on to us and their descendants.
THATS why if is a ROTTEN thing to do !
deathtokoalas
i hate led zeppelin, but it's not because of the plagiarism (that doesn't truly exist), it's because robert plant is just not enjoyable to listen to. it's really a shame that page decided to work with such an annoying vocalist.
mclaughlin was even page's biggest influence, at least in the sense of who we understand jimmy page as today. mclaughlin actually gave jimmy page guitar lessons in the mid-60s. he's the architect of the sound.
page started off doing session work for country musicians, while mclaughlin was playing for graham bond. graham bond's rhythm section was made up of ginger baker and jack bruce, who would later form cream with eric clapton. this is where the fusion sound developed; mclaughlin did some early jazz recordings with bruce & baker....
when baker & bruce formed cream, clapton was very much their replacement for mclaughlin.
davis wanted hendrix to work with him, initially. hendrix couldn't commit. so, he picked mclaughlin. not page. not clapton...
page first intersected with mclaughlin when they were doing (uncredited) session work for the rolling stones. mclaughlin was the primary session guy, page was the second. there are apparently mid 60s stones tracks where mclaughlin is playing lead and page is playing rhythm.
i'm not adding anything to music history, i'm merely teaching it to somebody who doesn't know it.
only the levee breaks would stand up in court. except it wasn't plagiarism 'cause it was a cover.
page is definitely guilty of ripping off mclaughlin and clapton and beck. and plant was definitely trying very hard to do the aretha thing. there's no need to make things up.
gonzocurt
Yeah, and Clapton, The Stones and Beck "ripped off" B.B.King, Freddie King, Chuck Berry, Elmore James, Robert Johnson, etc. Or was it they just loved that stuff so much they had to play it? And it influenced their musical language just like you pick up accents etc. In most cases, they worked their own creative process on it and honed it into something the young whites of the time loved.
deathtokoalas
well, it's sort of exaggerated, really. my point was that page wasn't really a guy that copied black artists, he was a guy that copied white artists that were heavily influenced by black artists. the synthesis had already been established by the time page came along...he built his sound on top of a fusion that had already happened....
but, to the extent that those other players were copying? there's a far stronger "cultural appropriation" accusation leveled at the rnb sound of the stones, the early beatles, etc than there is at the heavy blues of cream, yardbirds, zeppelin or sabbath. they operated in the same (lack of) theoretical space, sure. but cream didn't steal any more from robert johnson than jimi hendrix did. they were both working with extrapolations of a pre-existing sound, but they were also both entirely unique. delta blues simply doesn't have a psychedelic quality or a baroque quality, or any influence from eastern music.
MICHAEL HAMILTON BERRY
mclaughlin ? Page was on recordings long Before he was even heard of....what do you have to offer about music history ?
taking some one Else's song and presenting it as your own is dishonest and is actually theft of intellectual copy write. It is Illegal and morally wrong .
I like Led Zep but I think this is a rotten thing they have done over and over again.
The other poor bastards are probably broke and dead with nothing to show for a life in music. nothing to pass on to us and their descendants.
THATS why if is a ROTTEN thing to do !
deathtokoalas
i hate led zeppelin, but it's not because of the plagiarism (that doesn't truly exist), it's because robert plant is just not enjoyable to listen to. it's really a shame that page decided to work with such an annoying vocalist.
mclaughlin was even page's biggest influence, at least in the sense of who we understand jimmy page as today. mclaughlin actually gave jimmy page guitar lessons in the mid-60s. he's the architect of the sound.
page started off doing session work for country musicians, while mclaughlin was playing for graham bond. graham bond's rhythm section was made up of ginger baker and jack bruce, who would later form cream with eric clapton. this is where the fusion sound developed; mclaughlin did some early jazz recordings with bruce & baker....
when baker & bruce formed cream, clapton was very much their replacement for mclaughlin.
davis wanted hendrix to work with him, initially. hendrix couldn't commit. so, he picked mclaughlin. not page. not clapton...
page first intersected with mclaughlin when they were doing (uncredited) session work for the rolling stones. mclaughlin was the primary session guy, page was the second. there are apparently mid 60s stones tracks where mclaughlin is playing lead and page is playing rhythm.
i'm not adding anything to music history, i'm merely teaching it to somebody who doesn't know it.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Saturday, December 21, 2013
publishing first remaster & re-release of inri (inri015)
so, this is completely, totally done now, no going back to it. i boosted the bass in a few places and actually reverted back to the cd rip for a few of the sound collages. i think it sounds pretty good, actually, for the most part.
there's one specific track, the 8th, on the second demo that is causing me headaches. the mix is just so saturated and muddy that i'm constantly getting information overload listening to it. i'm having a hard time building reference points. i want this done with by the end of the day, so i can move on, so soon.
====
it took a little longer than i wanted it to, but i've finally got this cleaned up to a final state.
....and now that it is mastered decently and has had a handful of bad decisions removed, i have to say it holds up fairly well. when comparing it to other late 90s electro-rock hybrids, it carves out a really unique space in it's exploration of more abstract electronics. i'm not content to recycle depeche mode or new order yet again; i want to mix in elements of glitch, throw in sound collages and even get a little proggy sometimes. really, i wish there were more people working in this removed a space, both then and now. it's really rather refreshingly creative.
the record/demo bounces back and forth between "songs" and "experiments". while some of the songs are more compelling than others, the more consistently interesting material is actually the experiments.
where it drags is in the vocals, but only to an extent. the eighth track is indefensibly bad; incoherent to the point that i don't even remember what it was about, if it was about anything at all. the rest of it is valid, even when it's trite, because it's real. that is to say that it sounds like i'm 17 and less than well-adjusted. if it could be better than it is, it would lack the authenticity of being a demo produced by a troubled teenager. i might not articulate my feelings of being useless at a very high level of thought or with much compelling poetry, but i'm certainly feeling them and that feeling certainly gets across in my unique and goofy sort of way. likewise, when i go into juvenile shock rock i am actually convincingly juvenile and convincingly shocking (unless i'm trying to be ridiculous, in which case i pull that off just as well).
that means you have to listen to it from a certain distance because a big part of what you're listening to is the spectacle of a demented child being demented, but when you do that it comes off as some of the most idiosyncratic leftfield synth pop i'm aware of. you've never heard anything quite like this.
so, if i could remove the 8th track without killing the flow of the disc, i would. beyond that, the edits that i've made have left me comfortable with throwing this out there as it is - under the existing caveats.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
====
my first cd demo represents a dramatic shift in sound that, at the time, was meant to be permanent but that ended up being merely a step in a long journey. on one hand, the shift in sound reflected my changing tastes away from alternative rock and towards industrial music. on another level, it was a return to my childhood roots in 80s synthpop. i was also expanding my tastes into glitch, noise and what could be called "musique concrete".
the shift to using drum machines was dominant in the new sound, as was the reality that i had a synthesizer available to me starting in the beginning of 1998. another major factor was the use of a pc. however, my main songwriting tool remained the guitar and these are still mostly guitar-driven pieces.
the guitar work is one of the things that separates the sound from a typical industrial aesthetic. i've never been a fan of heavy metal and largely shied away from creating that kind of thing. yet, i found myself connecting more with psychedelic guitar at this point than punk rock. industrial psych generally implies something like trance, but it need not to. industrial hendrix? well, maybe it ends up sounding more like synth pop, which has historical roots in psychedelic music and progressive rock. the point is that the music does manage to carve out a unique space between industrial music and synth pop that i don't know of any clear comparisons to. people have suggested mid-period swans, the legendary pink dots and nine inch nails - only the last of which was a significant influence, and none of which are really that close. a better comparison, although still not a significant influence at this time, would be joy division - who would become a significant influence after this phase. my actual influences at the time would have been more like brian eno (through his 70s and 90s work with david bowie, as well as his work with u2), early prog (genesis/floyd/crimson), peter gabriel, the beatles, radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, REM, sonic youth, the tea party and a bit of contemporary electronic music (prodigy, nin, coil, foetus, autechre, nitzer ebb, ministry, econoline crush, gravity kills, stabbing westward, skinny puppy and side projects). the sense of humour is coming from frank zappa and matt groening, if they are not actually the same person. i wasn't listening to much tears for fears, i don't think, but you can hear them lurking underneath everything.
some of these songs are reworked versions of tracks i had recorded previously. in almost all cases, i consider the versions here (and on the follow-up demo, inriched) to be the authoritative versions of these tracks.
the demo is consciously constructed to alternate between "conventional songs" and "experimental pieces", although both definitions are stretched. it generally takes the form of connecting passages. it's meant to give the record the feel of a cohesive work rather than a collection of songs.
lyrically, i'm still a teenager, but i'm starting to grow into myself a little more. there are still some points of embarrassment, but it's really only the 8th track that is causing me any serious grief. my singing style has changed quite a bit though - most of the lyrics here are in a spoken word style, rather than sung. it's partially the result of insecurities with my voice, but it's mostly due to the shift to something electronic. i found the dead pan vocal delivery more appropriate. it's something that stuck with me though until relatively recently.
some of this material was written as far back as 1994, but was only sequenced in the second half of 1997 and recorded in the first half of 1998. unfortunately, i decided that the songs sounded better in mp3 and consequently compressed everything before burning. i understand now that i was hobbling together a crude mastering process, but it means (unfortunately) that the closest thing i have to the finished tracks are low quality mp3s and a cd-r. these tracks were taken off of a cd-r and run through digital post-production in dec, 2013 in a process that also included minimal editing (mostly the removal of badly placed simpsons samples). this is my first official record; as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, drum programming, sequencing, sampling, vocals, cool edit synthesis, windows 95 sound recorder, found sounds, strategies, soundraider, hammerhead, sound design, metronome, digital wave editing, production
released june 20, 1998
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
there's one specific track, the 8th, on the second demo that is causing me headaches. the mix is just so saturated and muddy that i'm constantly getting information overload listening to it. i'm having a hard time building reference points. i want this done with by the end of the day, so i can move on, so soon.
====
it took a little longer than i wanted it to, but i've finally got this cleaned up to a final state.
....and now that it is mastered decently and has had a handful of bad decisions removed, i have to say it holds up fairly well. when comparing it to other late 90s electro-rock hybrids, it carves out a really unique space in it's exploration of more abstract electronics. i'm not content to recycle depeche mode or new order yet again; i want to mix in elements of glitch, throw in sound collages and even get a little proggy sometimes. really, i wish there were more people working in this removed a space, both then and now. it's really rather refreshingly creative.
the record/demo bounces back and forth between "songs" and "experiments". while some of the songs are more compelling than others, the more consistently interesting material is actually the experiments.
where it drags is in the vocals, but only to an extent. the eighth track is indefensibly bad; incoherent to the point that i don't even remember what it was about, if it was about anything at all. the rest of it is valid, even when it's trite, because it's real. that is to say that it sounds like i'm 17 and less than well-adjusted. if it could be better than it is, it would lack the authenticity of being a demo produced by a troubled teenager. i might not articulate my feelings of being useless at a very high level of thought or with much compelling poetry, but i'm certainly feeling them and that feeling certainly gets across in my unique and goofy sort of way. likewise, when i go into juvenile shock rock i am actually convincingly juvenile and convincingly shocking (unless i'm trying to be ridiculous, in which case i pull that off just as well).
that means you have to listen to it from a certain distance because a big part of what you're listening to is the spectacle of a demented child being demented, but when you do that it comes off as some of the most idiosyncratic leftfield synth pop i'm aware of. you've never heard anything quite like this.
so, if i could remove the 8th track without killing the flow of the disc, i would. beyond that, the edits that i've made have left me comfortable with throwing this out there as it is - under the existing caveats.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
====
my first cd demo represents a dramatic shift in sound that, at the time, was meant to be permanent but that ended up being merely a step in a long journey. on one hand, the shift in sound reflected my changing tastes away from alternative rock and towards industrial music. on another level, it was a return to my childhood roots in 80s synthpop. i was also expanding my tastes into glitch, noise and what could be called "musique concrete".
the shift to using drum machines was dominant in the new sound, as was the reality that i had a synthesizer available to me starting in the beginning of 1998. another major factor was the use of a pc. however, my main songwriting tool remained the guitar and these are still mostly guitar-driven pieces.
the guitar work is one of the things that separates the sound from a typical industrial aesthetic. i've never been a fan of heavy metal and largely shied away from creating that kind of thing. yet, i found myself connecting more with psychedelic guitar at this point than punk rock. industrial psych generally implies something like trance, but it need not to. industrial hendrix? well, maybe it ends up sounding more like synth pop, which has historical roots in psychedelic music and progressive rock. the point is that the music does manage to carve out a unique space between industrial music and synth pop that i don't know of any clear comparisons to. people have suggested mid-period swans, the legendary pink dots and nine inch nails - only the last of which was a significant influence, and none of which are really that close. a better comparison, although still not a significant influence at this time, would be joy division - who would become a significant influence after this phase. my actual influences at the time would have been more like brian eno (through his 70s and 90s work with david bowie, as well as his work with u2), early prog (genesis/floyd/crimson), peter gabriel, the beatles, radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, REM, sonic youth, the tea party and a bit of contemporary electronic music (prodigy, nin, coil, foetus, autechre, nitzer ebb, ministry, econoline crush, gravity kills, stabbing westward, skinny puppy and side projects). the sense of humour is coming from frank zappa and matt groening, if they are not actually the same person. i wasn't listening to much tears for fears, i don't think, but you can hear them lurking underneath everything.
some of these songs are reworked versions of tracks i had recorded previously. in almost all cases, i consider the versions here (and on the follow-up demo, inriched) to be the authoritative versions of these tracks.
the demo is consciously constructed to alternate between "conventional songs" and "experimental pieces", although both definitions are stretched. it generally takes the form of connecting passages. it's meant to give the record the feel of a cohesive work rather than a collection of songs.
lyrically, i'm still a teenager, but i'm starting to grow into myself a little more. there are still some points of embarrassment, but it's really only the 8th track that is causing me any serious grief. my singing style has changed quite a bit though - most of the lyrics here are in a spoken word style, rather than sung. it's partially the result of insecurities with my voice, but it's mostly due to the shift to something electronic. i found the dead pan vocal delivery more appropriate. it's something that stuck with me though until relatively recently.
some of this material was written as far back as 1994, but was only sequenced in the second half of 1997 and recorded in the first half of 1998. unfortunately, i decided that the songs sounded better in mp3 and consequently compressed everything before burning. i understand now that i was hobbling together a crude mastering process, but it means (unfortunately) that the closest thing i have to the finished tracks are low quality mp3s and a cd-r. these tracks were taken off of a cd-r and run through digital post-production in dec, 2013 in a process that also included minimal editing (mostly the removal of badly placed simpsons samples). this is my first official record; as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, drum programming, sequencing, sampling, vocals, cool edit synthesis, windows 95 sound recorder, found sounds, strategies, soundraider, hammerhead, sound design, metronome, digital wave editing, production
released june 20, 1998
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
Friday, December 20, 2013
on the middle class nature of socal punk
happyhooliedaze
Punk is punk and has nothing to do w/electonic or hiphop.
deathtokoalas
i'd say punk has a lot to do with hip-hop, politically. further, this is a type of punk that was popular in california; rave/industrial was a type of punk that was popular in england.
happyhooliedaze
real punk is rebellious and libertarian,NOT political .Rave has NOTHING to to w/punk.Ravers are a bunch of drugged up rich kids that listen to talentless.pre-programmed garbage. Don`t talk about u don`t know as its obvious,ur "standin` on the outside,lookin` in".
deathtokoalas
the reality is that most punk, especially socal punk, was also put together by upper middle class kids. bad religion were centered around rich mommy's basement. they wrote most of their lyrics as a criticism of wealthy white culture from a first person perspective. great band, don't get me wrong, but bringing class politics into punk rock has always been perilous. joe strummer was actually an aristocrat.
rave is derived directly from industrial, which was an offshoot of punk. this is a question of historical fact. it's not a matter for debate.
ron paul is not a libertarian.
the major thing libertarians don't understand is that markets are inherently coercive. they base their ideas around concepts of freedom from the responsibility to contribute, rather than freedom to choose how to contribute responsibly. the end result is a freedom to exploit, rather than a freedom from exploitation.
Paul Boisvert
First off, all of your facts are correct and I'm sure others can agree on that. Also I completely agree with your opinion of Libertarian ethics. With that said, the subliminal opinion within your comment displays a vast amount of Class Envy. I think that your opinion of this band's writing material and your own personal beliefs make no sense because the lyrics to these songs can give you the proper information to fuel your conflagrations against the Upper-Middle/Upper Class. Also, your general thesis on discontent for Class Politics involved in Punk Rock music into a rant on Class Politics was completely hypocritical. I'm truly not trying to throw any hate in your direction because I can admit to suffering from Class Envy as well, of course those of us who have been truly affected by this recession have many of the same beliefs in that specific area. Good luck to you!
deathtokoalas
i was responding to a previous comment, which was a response to a previous comment of mine. the privacy settings that have come with these new youtube/google+ rules have created the problem of not being to reply to replies on your own comments. i think the context would clear things up.
but "class envy" is sort of a weird concept from a leftist perspective, where the aim is to abolish class. i think all leftists have something that is sort of like class envy, but that that isn't a very astute way to articulate it.
i mean, "class envy" is sort of the same concept as "distributive justice". i don't want to completely discard it as nonsense. it's just that, envy is an almost comical way to describe the process of recognizing the injustice of inequality.
Marios Laskaris
Who told you their parents were rich? They were shopping clothes from Walmart from what I know. I am not saying they were starving, but they were not rich either. Writing generic stuff without having done your research is unacceptable and far more off putting than middle class 17 year olds writing songs about what they think is wrong with the world!
deathtokoalas
i don't know or care where brett & friends shopped before they became very wealthy from epitaph records, but if you had done that basic "research" yourself, you'd realize that this entire genre is the reaction of upper middle class suburban white kids - and that, yes, bad religion is a band that mostly operated out of upper-middle class garages.
to be clear: these were guys that lived with their parents well beyond any socially normal cut-off point. they fit any conventional definition of the word "loser". self-releasing records isn't cheap, and they partially offset the cost of that by not taking responsibility for paying for living expenses like rent. if you share the mindset, you realize why climbing up social hierarchies isn't important to some people. but, socal punk as a reaction to suburbanite living (and this is a distinct thing from other kinds of punk) couldn't have happened otherwise. that's exactly what this is.
which is fine. i'm not really criticizing them for this, i'm just correcting somebody's flawed perception of punk having this kind of ghetto hip-hop romanticism. that's not true. the prominent, influential bands were mostly rich kids, which reflects our social reality. it would be a remarkable triumph of capitalism if kids could actually climb out of the projects with socially relevant art projects!
the reality is that it's how most of the audience connects with it. i grew up in a project, but by the time i was in my mid-teens i was living in a white, upper middle class reality. there were a lot of things i didn't like about that. socal punk bands like the offspring, the dead kennedys, bad religion and others helped me make sense of this upside-down reality i was living in and work my way through it's contradictions. upper middle class white kids are humans too; they need ways to cope with reality like everybody else. they may see some problems with the composition of the current system (even as it privileges them). more importantly, they may very well reject it on it's axiomatic basis. it's those upper middle class white kids that this was written by and for.
in a sense, understanding bad religion (and socal punk in general) is very simple: teach a generation of kids a moral code when they're growing up, then tell them to go out and break it in order to be "successful" and finally watch them react in confusion and horror when faced with such daunting contradictions worked into the basic process of survival. this whole cycle of events - from the moral teaching, to the opportunities revolving around being "successful" to the freedom to rebel - is a reflection of the privilege that socal punk was birthed within.
so, rather than reject the idea of these bands coming from wealth, you'd be better off to look into it a little further. it's kind of a vitally important aspect of actually understanding what this is/was all about.
Marios Laskaris
Upper middle class can be punk too. As Graffin says and I totally agree, a girl from an affluent religious family who consistently shows up to church on Sunday with her green mohawk and "Fuck Jesus" shirt is punk. But so is a biology professor who claims that Charles Darwin's ideas were wrong and has his own. Going against the grain is punk.
And what you're asking for/your idea of the "proper punk band" is impossible. You're asking for a bunch of 17 year olds that have no money to somehow aquire guitars and drums and convince Atlantic records (since epitaph would not exist in your "punk world") to release their album! Not possible! Most punk bands had to "create record labels", because no one would release a punk album from an unknown band back in 1975-1980. And if epitaph was not created, offspring, pennywise and NOFX and so many other punk bands probably wouldn't exist now and I definately wouldn't have been able to listen to them/discover them over here in Greece. So thank f**k for that! You need to think about reality too and not just theory!
I'll help you get an idea of their world back then. Sure they were not living in the streets like bums, but they were not living an untroubled life either:
''In 1976 I moved with my mom and brother to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Like millions of other victims of divorce in the 1970s I had to deal with the fact that my father was now living far away (in Racine, Wisconsin) and I would not get to see him as much as most other kids see theirs. This pain was compounded by the bewildering alienation I felt as a Wisconsin boy at Junior High School in the Los Angeles unified school district. I had entered a landscape unlike anything I experienced in my 11 years of life. I had dark brown fluffy, wavy hair, unfeatherable, impossible to mold into the cool rock-and-roll hairdos of the 1970s that were so popular. I wore velour kids shirts from K-Mart, and corduroys and because they were less expensive than jeans and we didn't have a lot of money. I had cheap shoes, usually also from K-Mart or Payless, always worn out, with goofy logos that emulated the real popular brands that all the other kids wore. I could see fellow 7th graders come to class with squinty eyes and euphoric smiles reeking of pot smoke. If you went along with the flow, unquestioning and complacent, you were accepted and rewarded with social status. If you questioned the norm, or went against the grain in any way, you were in for a rocky ride down the social ladder.
I came to be friends with a particular class of people who were labeled geeks, nerds, kooks, dorks, wimps, and pussies (or "wussies" if you combine these last two). We hung out together and did creative things after school...''
deathtokoalas
as pointed out in a previous comment, i was responding to a previous comment about prominent punk musicians and class. i've never presented an ideal of a punk band, or criticized anybody for the class they were born into. i was merely rejecting the idea that punk (and especially socal punk) had any kind of inherently "lower" class politics, for the sole reason that it just simply isn't true.
lukmruk
"ron paul is not a libertarian." oh sure he is randroid
deathtokoalas
right-wing libertarians tend to reject rand and objectivism. it isn't very good with ideas like the nap. and paul is racist, homophobic and sexist - ideas that tend to be weak in libertarian circles. libertarians tend to be in favour of gay marriage, to the extent that they acknowledge marriage at all. not paul. libertarians tend to be pro-choice on abortion. not paul. and libertarians tend to be "colour blind", they don't write up racist newsletters to try and control a white supremacist voting demographic.
paul, like rand, is just a peculiar type of american conservative. there's no value in analyzing him more deeply than that.
miaumiaucatmagician
you're making very good comments all the way
mattlaureys
here are some words from greg himself from "no direction" :
"a righteous student came and asked me to reflect
he judged my lifestyle was politically incorrect
I don't believe in self important folks who preach
no Bad Religion song can make your life complete"
Alfredo Rodriguez
The reality is, you have no clue. You weren't there when they wrote this, and fuck your political agenda. Fuck Joe Strummer, he wasn't even in a punk band. Sorry, but I can't even think of his useless bands name right now. Dance music, isn't punk rock, go rock the cashbah on the dance floor.
deathtokoalas
i don't really enjoy the clash, either, but there are a lot of other early punk bands (like the buzzcocks) that double very well as dance music. again, i don't know where people are going by disconnecting punk from dancing. what's the motive for that kind of revisionism? hardcore was something else, but it was as much of a reaction against punk as it was an evolution of it.
i also don't know why there's so much hostility to rave culture. ignoring the historical connections, just the similarities in outlook should be enough to see a set of political allies. they're both dead now, but rave was arguably more successful than punk in building a viable counter-culture. i guess there were punks that hated hippies, too, but they must have been no less close-minded.
randomusername987
I agreed with the first part, but how the hell was all the rest relevant?
deathtokoalas
i think it follows from the conversation. i mean, can you be more specific?
randomusername987
Well i was referring to the original post. What does ron paul etc have to do with Suffer?
mattlaureys
what are you even ranting on about ? that guy was making solid points and you start going on a rant talking about things that are completely insignificant. the reasons people disconnect genres from eachother is because they are diff genres and completely diff music duh. you're just ranting and linking everything to punk. and you say "they're both dead now" punk is very much alive tons of punk bands still making music and rave is also , still plenty of raves going on. you like to bash on punk don't you ?
Alfredo Rodriguez
I guess Bad Brains was also a rich band of white kids from the "burbs" as well. All these bands come from blue collar working families. Greg and Brett's parents are educators. Teachers don't make much money. Fuck Ron Paul fucking racist piece of shit!
deathtokoalas
the last time i checked, bad brains weren't skate punk from southern california. further, it's rather insensitive for you to suggest that teachers don't make a lot of money. relative to who? doctors? it's a certain sort of cluelessness that would argue that teachers are not comfortably in the middle class.
as mentioned repeatedly, that has nothing to do with what i was talking about. i really couldn't imagine dropping a bad religion record off at a mcdonalds and expecting the employees to connect to it. the songs do not discuss issues that are of relevance to the most desperate members of the working class. rather, they discuss topics that are of concern to the middle class children of teachers.
Sam steinhauer
Average yearly salary for a public school teacher in the US is about $50,000. However, Greg's parents were Professors which is most certainly an upper middle class job. Still don't get why this should change my opinion of the band.
deathtokoalas
i at no point suggested it should....
Punk is punk and has nothing to do w/electonic or hiphop.
deathtokoalas
i'd say punk has a lot to do with hip-hop, politically. further, this is a type of punk that was popular in california; rave/industrial was a type of punk that was popular in england.
happyhooliedaze
real punk is rebellious and libertarian,NOT political .Rave has NOTHING to to w/punk.Ravers are a bunch of drugged up rich kids that listen to talentless.pre-programmed garbage. Don`t talk about u don`t know as its obvious,ur "standin` on the outside,lookin` in".
deathtokoalas
the reality is that most punk, especially socal punk, was also put together by upper middle class kids. bad religion were centered around rich mommy's basement. they wrote most of their lyrics as a criticism of wealthy white culture from a first person perspective. great band, don't get me wrong, but bringing class politics into punk rock has always been perilous. joe strummer was actually an aristocrat.
rave is derived directly from industrial, which was an offshoot of punk. this is a question of historical fact. it's not a matter for debate.
ron paul is not a libertarian.
the major thing libertarians don't understand is that markets are inherently coercive. they base their ideas around concepts of freedom from the responsibility to contribute, rather than freedom to choose how to contribute responsibly. the end result is a freedom to exploit, rather than a freedom from exploitation.
Paul Boisvert
First off, all of your facts are correct and I'm sure others can agree on that. Also I completely agree with your opinion of Libertarian ethics. With that said, the subliminal opinion within your comment displays a vast amount of Class Envy. I think that your opinion of this band's writing material and your own personal beliefs make no sense because the lyrics to these songs can give you the proper information to fuel your conflagrations against the Upper-Middle/Upper Class. Also, your general thesis on discontent for Class Politics involved in Punk Rock music into a rant on Class Politics was completely hypocritical. I'm truly not trying to throw any hate in your direction because I can admit to suffering from Class Envy as well, of course those of us who have been truly affected by this recession have many of the same beliefs in that specific area. Good luck to you!
deathtokoalas
i was responding to a previous comment, which was a response to a previous comment of mine. the privacy settings that have come with these new youtube/google+ rules have created the problem of not being to reply to replies on your own comments. i think the context would clear things up.
but "class envy" is sort of a weird concept from a leftist perspective, where the aim is to abolish class. i think all leftists have something that is sort of like class envy, but that that isn't a very astute way to articulate it.
i mean, "class envy" is sort of the same concept as "distributive justice". i don't want to completely discard it as nonsense. it's just that, envy is an almost comical way to describe the process of recognizing the injustice of inequality.
Marios Laskaris
Who told you their parents were rich? They were shopping clothes from Walmart from what I know. I am not saying they were starving, but they were not rich either. Writing generic stuff without having done your research is unacceptable and far more off putting than middle class 17 year olds writing songs about what they think is wrong with the world!
deathtokoalas
i don't know or care where brett & friends shopped before they became very wealthy from epitaph records, but if you had done that basic "research" yourself, you'd realize that this entire genre is the reaction of upper middle class suburban white kids - and that, yes, bad religion is a band that mostly operated out of upper-middle class garages.
to be clear: these were guys that lived with their parents well beyond any socially normal cut-off point. they fit any conventional definition of the word "loser". self-releasing records isn't cheap, and they partially offset the cost of that by not taking responsibility for paying for living expenses like rent. if you share the mindset, you realize why climbing up social hierarchies isn't important to some people. but, socal punk as a reaction to suburbanite living (and this is a distinct thing from other kinds of punk) couldn't have happened otherwise. that's exactly what this is.
which is fine. i'm not really criticizing them for this, i'm just correcting somebody's flawed perception of punk having this kind of ghetto hip-hop romanticism. that's not true. the prominent, influential bands were mostly rich kids, which reflects our social reality. it would be a remarkable triumph of capitalism if kids could actually climb out of the projects with socially relevant art projects!
the reality is that it's how most of the audience connects with it. i grew up in a project, but by the time i was in my mid-teens i was living in a white, upper middle class reality. there were a lot of things i didn't like about that. socal punk bands like the offspring, the dead kennedys, bad religion and others helped me make sense of this upside-down reality i was living in and work my way through it's contradictions. upper middle class white kids are humans too; they need ways to cope with reality like everybody else. they may see some problems with the composition of the current system (even as it privileges them). more importantly, they may very well reject it on it's axiomatic basis. it's those upper middle class white kids that this was written by and for.
in a sense, understanding bad religion (and socal punk in general) is very simple: teach a generation of kids a moral code when they're growing up, then tell them to go out and break it in order to be "successful" and finally watch them react in confusion and horror when faced with such daunting contradictions worked into the basic process of survival. this whole cycle of events - from the moral teaching, to the opportunities revolving around being "successful" to the freedom to rebel - is a reflection of the privilege that socal punk was birthed within.
so, rather than reject the idea of these bands coming from wealth, you'd be better off to look into it a little further. it's kind of a vitally important aspect of actually understanding what this is/was all about.
Marios Laskaris
Upper middle class can be punk too. As Graffin says and I totally agree, a girl from an affluent religious family who consistently shows up to church on Sunday with her green mohawk and "Fuck Jesus" shirt is punk. But so is a biology professor who claims that Charles Darwin's ideas were wrong and has his own. Going against the grain is punk.
And what you're asking for/your idea of the "proper punk band" is impossible. You're asking for a bunch of 17 year olds that have no money to somehow aquire guitars and drums and convince Atlantic records (since epitaph would not exist in your "punk world") to release their album! Not possible! Most punk bands had to "create record labels", because no one would release a punk album from an unknown band back in 1975-1980. And if epitaph was not created, offspring, pennywise and NOFX and so many other punk bands probably wouldn't exist now and I definately wouldn't have been able to listen to them/discover them over here in Greece. So thank f**k for that! You need to think about reality too and not just theory!
I'll help you get an idea of their world back then. Sure they were not living in the streets like bums, but they were not living an untroubled life either:
''In 1976 I moved with my mom and brother to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Like millions of other victims of divorce in the 1970s I had to deal with the fact that my father was now living far away (in Racine, Wisconsin) and I would not get to see him as much as most other kids see theirs. This pain was compounded by the bewildering alienation I felt as a Wisconsin boy at Junior High School in the Los Angeles unified school district. I had entered a landscape unlike anything I experienced in my 11 years of life. I had dark brown fluffy, wavy hair, unfeatherable, impossible to mold into the cool rock-and-roll hairdos of the 1970s that were so popular. I wore velour kids shirts from K-Mart, and corduroys and because they were less expensive than jeans and we didn't have a lot of money. I had cheap shoes, usually also from K-Mart or Payless, always worn out, with goofy logos that emulated the real popular brands that all the other kids wore. I could see fellow 7th graders come to class with squinty eyes and euphoric smiles reeking of pot smoke. If you went along with the flow, unquestioning and complacent, you were accepted and rewarded with social status. If you questioned the norm, or went against the grain in any way, you were in for a rocky ride down the social ladder.
I came to be friends with a particular class of people who were labeled geeks, nerds, kooks, dorks, wimps, and pussies (or "wussies" if you combine these last two). We hung out together and did creative things after school...''
deathtokoalas
as pointed out in a previous comment, i was responding to a previous comment about prominent punk musicians and class. i've never presented an ideal of a punk band, or criticized anybody for the class they were born into. i was merely rejecting the idea that punk (and especially socal punk) had any kind of inherently "lower" class politics, for the sole reason that it just simply isn't true.
lukmruk
"ron paul is not a libertarian." oh sure he is randroid
deathtokoalas
right-wing libertarians tend to reject rand and objectivism. it isn't very good with ideas like the nap. and paul is racist, homophobic and sexist - ideas that tend to be weak in libertarian circles. libertarians tend to be in favour of gay marriage, to the extent that they acknowledge marriage at all. not paul. libertarians tend to be pro-choice on abortion. not paul. and libertarians tend to be "colour blind", they don't write up racist newsletters to try and control a white supremacist voting demographic.
paul, like rand, is just a peculiar type of american conservative. there's no value in analyzing him more deeply than that.
miaumiaucatmagician
you're making very good comments all the way
mattlaureys
here are some words from greg himself from "no direction" :
"a righteous student came and asked me to reflect
he judged my lifestyle was politically incorrect
I don't believe in self important folks who preach
no Bad Religion song can make your life complete"
Alfredo Rodriguez
The reality is, you have no clue. You weren't there when they wrote this, and fuck your political agenda. Fuck Joe Strummer, he wasn't even in a punk band. Sorry, but I can't even think of his useless bands name right now. Dance music, isn't punk rock, go rock the cashbah on the dance floor.
deathtokoalas
i don't really enjoy the clash, either, but there are a lot of other early punk bands (like the buzzcocks) that double very well as dance music. again, i don't know where people are going by disconnecting punk from dancing. what's the motive for that kind of revisionism? hardcore was something else, but it was as much of a reaction against punk as it was an evolution of it.
i also don't know why there's so much hostility to rave culture. ignoring the historical connections, just the similarities in outlook should be enough to see a set of political allies. they're both dead now, but rave was arguably more successful than punk in building a viable counter-culture. i guess there were punks that hated hippies, too, but they must have been no less close-minded.
randomusername987
I agreed with the first part, but how the hell was all the rest relevant?
deathtokoalas
i think it follows from the conversation. i mean, can you be more specific?
randomusername987
Well i was referring to the original post. What does ron paul etc have to do with Suffer?
mattlaureys
what are you even ranting on about ? that guy was making solid points and you start going on a rant talking about things that are completely insignificant. the reasons people disconnect genres from eachother is because they are diff genres and completely diff music duh. you're just ranting and linking everything to punk. and you say "they're both dead now" punk is very much alive tons of punk bands still making music and rave is also , still plenty of raves going on. you like to bash on punk don't you ?
Alfredo Rodriguez
I guess Bad Brains was also a rich band of white kids from the "burbs" as well. All these bands come from blue collar working families. Greg and Brett's parents are educators. Teachers don't make much money. Fuck Ron Paul fucking racist piece of shit!
deathtokoalas
the last time i checked, bad brains weren't skate punk from southern california. further, it's rather insensitive for you to suggest that teachers don't make a lot of money. relative to who? doctors? it's a certain sort of cluelessness that would argue that teachers are not comfortably in the middle class.
as mentioned repeatedly, that has nothing to do with what i was talking about. i really couldn't imagine dropping a bad religion record off at a mcdonalds and expecting the employees to connect to it. the songs do not discuss issues that are of relevance to the most desperate members of the working class. rather, they discuss topics that are of concern to the middle class children of teachers.
Sam steinhauer
Average yearly salary for a public school teacher in the US is about $50,000. However, Greg's parents were Professors which is most certainly an upper middle class job. Still don't get why this should change my opinion of the band.
deathtokoalas
i at no point suggested it should....
Thursday, December 19, 2013
deathtokoalas
yeah, i'm just seeing that comment now in my secret inbox, and it's absolutely hilarious. talk about hipster bullshit - it's the people rejecting this as 'poppy' that are vacuous scene kids. on a musical level, trying to compare this to older melt banana is like comparing a jazz musician to a child bashing on a garbage can. this isn't a bit of an evolution, it's leaps and bounds ahead of anything they've ever done.
something similar can be said for boredoms. their early work sounds like a bunch of drunken orangutans smashing their way through a pre-school. chocolate synthesizer may very well be the most absolutely idiotic thing anybody has ever released. anybody claiming to actually enjoy listening to it is lying through their pretentious as fuck teeth - it's a party trick that dumb teenagers can scare their mom with, not something anybody actually connects to or enjoys. this is the hipster scene shit. there's not a musically inclined person on the planet that would uphold it as anything but absolute nonsense, just a bunch of hipsters that think it's cool through a chain of recs. nor was it in any way novel; noise rock came out of the late 70s and early 80s and was practically retro by the time the boredoms came around. the kind of operatic post-rock they swung to, on the other hand, is both musical and novel. to think there's even any kind of comparison is just hilarious.
don't fret, though. if this is too mainstream for you, just record yourself knocking over some garbage cans. that should amuse you for a while.
uny
See I don't like that attitude. It basically narrows down to "That's something I don't like and I can't see how anyone can, so objectively it can't be good", which is a very dangerous way of thinking. Thinking like that is what stopped albums like this being produced earlier (besides obvious technical limitations).
deathtokoalas
no. that's very much binary thinking, in declaring everything subjective or nothing subjective at all. you're jumping to unjustified conclusions that don't at all follow. there's a lot of space for subjectivity in music, but there's also a lot of space for objective statements. i don't really have patience for dumbfuck hippies that want to say that burping into a vocoder is equivalent to writing a symphony.
also, this is really a logical extension of ministry c. 1988.
AmericaTheEngravy sauce
people are just idiots. they were saying similar things when cellscape came out.
yeah, i'm just seeing that comment now in my secret inbox, and it's absolutely hilarious. talk about hipster bullshit - it's the people rejecting this as 'poppy' that are vacuous scene kids. on a musical level, trying to compare this to older melt banana is like comparing a jazz musician to a child bashing on a garbage can. this isn't a bit of an evolution, it's leaps and bounds ahead of anything they've ever done.
something similar can be said for boredoms. their early work sounds like a bunch of drunken orangutans smashing their way through a pre-school. chocolate synthesizer may very well be the most absolutely idiotic thing anybody has ever released. anybody claiming to actually enjoy listening to it is lying through their pretentious as fuck teeth - it's a party trick that dumb teenagers can scare their mom with, not something anybody actually connects to or enjoys. this is the hipster scene shit. there's not a musically inclined person on the planet that would uphold it as anything but absolute nonsense, just a bunch of hipsters that think it's cool through a chain of recs. nor was it in any way novel; noise rock came out of the late 70s and early 80s and was practically retro by the time the boredoms came around. the kind of operatic post-rock they swung to, on the other hand, is both musical and novel. to think there's even any kind of comparison is just hilarious.
don't fret, though. if this is too mainstream for you, just record yourself knocking over some garbage cans. that should amuse you for a while.
uny
See I don't like that attitude. It basically narrows down to "That's something I don't like and I can't see how anyone can, so objectively it can't be good", which is a very dangerous way of thinking. Thinking like that is what stopped albums like this being produced earlier (besides obvious technical limitations).
deathtokoalas
no. that's very much binary thinking, in declaring everything subjective or nothing subjective at all. you're jumping to unjustified conclusions that don't at all follow. there's a lot of space for subjectivity in music, but there's also a lot of space for objective statements. i don't really have patience for dumbfuck hippies that want to say that burping into a vocoder is equivalent to writing a symphony.
also, this is really a logical extension of ministry c. 1988.
AmericaTheEngravy sauce
people are just idiots. they were saying similar things when cellscape came out.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
sporadic 2012 list
didn't get a chance to go through this closely; this is all tentative, and only the first half of the year, but the italics are stuff i really deeply enjoyed.
cloud nothings - attack on memory
leila - u&i
eyes - a candle in the crown of the dawn (re-release)
venetian snares - affectionate
loma prieta - IV
a place to bury strangers - onwards to the wall
frank riggio - psychexcess I
squarepusher - ufabulum
matthew bourne - montauk variations
tennis bafra - abulia jubilee
disappears - pre-language
school of seven bells - ghostory
monolake - ghosts
child bite - monomania
venetian snares - fool the detector
julia holter - ekstasis
extra life - dream seeds
actress - r.i.p.
katarrhaktes - ascension
kosmonaut - green
eivind opsvik - overseas IV
emptyset - medium
torche - harmonicraft
led er est - the diver
white lung - sorry
slugabed - time team
animal faces - anomie
marriages - kitsune
kosmonaut - the four directions of the universe
adderall canyonly - btonal
dreamers
sonnymoon
jherek bischoff - composed
pinkish black
swans - the seer
cloud nothings - attack on memory
leila - u&i
eyes - a candle in the crown of the dawn (re-release)
venetian snares - affectionate
loma prieta - IV
a place to bury strangers - onwards to the wall
frank riggio - psychexcess I
squarepusher - ufabulum
matthew bourne - montauk variations
tennis bafra - abulia jubilee
disappears - pre-language
school of seven bells - ghostory
monolake - ghosts
child bite - monomania
venetian snares - fool the detector
julia holter - ekstasis
extra life - dream seeds
actress - r.i.p.
katarrhaktes - ascension
kosmonaut - green
eivind opsvik - overseas IV
emptyset - medium
torche - harmonicraft
led er est - the diver
white lung - sorry
slugabed - time team
animal faces - anomie
marriages - kitsune
kosmonaut - the four directions of the universe
adderall canyonly - btonal
dreamers
sonnymoon
jherek bischoff - composed
pinkish black
swans - the seer
best of most of 2011
01/01: david shane smith - controls sm
01/01: this city defects - patterns
01/07: cycle~ 440 - the geography of collapsing structures
01/11: x-ray press - uvb-76
01/18: braids - native speaker
01/18: white laces
01/24: the joy formidable - the big roar
01/25: deerhoof vs. evil
01/25: papercranes - let's make babies in the woods
01/25: vampillia - alchemic heart
01/27: katarrhaktes - pareidolia
01/31: pepepiano
01/31: seefeel
02/01: delicate steve - wondervisions
02/04: ...and you will know us by the trail of the dead - tao of the dead
02/07: conquering animal sound - kammerspiel
02/07: papaye - la chaleur
02/08: wires under tension - light science
02/11: coh - iiron
02/15: hey rosetta! - seeds
02/15: phaedra - the sea
02/15: sonic youth - simon werner a disparu
02/20: namine - neon
02/22: colin stetson - a new history of warfare vol. 2: judges
02/22: the psychic paramount - II
03/01: adderall canyonly - it was a dark and stoney night
03/07: cyclo - id
03/08: ahleuchatistas - location location
03/08: defeater - empty days & sleepless nights
03/15: al di meola - pursuit of radical rhapsody
03/17: adebisi shank - this is the second album of a band called adebisi shank
03/22: stendeck - scintillia
03/23: salyu×salyu - s(o)un(d)beams
03/28: rene hell - the terminal symphony
03/29: gangpol & mit - the 1000 softcore tourist people club
03/29: the alps - easy action
04/01: adderall canyonly - asuuna
04/11: hauschka - salon des amateurs
04/12: thursday - no devolucion
04/15: talfast - machination
04/21: slew52 - catalog
04/26: skeletons - people
05/05: noxious foxes - legs
05/06: man man - life fantastic
05/10: gang gang dance - eye contact
05/16: dreissk - the finding
05/16: joshua stamper - interstitials
05/16: william d. drake - the rising of the lights
05/17: austra - feel it break
05/17: screens - dead house
05/17: son lux - we are rising
05/23: david sylvian - died in the wool
05/23: thurston moore - demolished thoughts
05/24: amon tobin - isam
05/24: emptyset - demiurge
05/24: human eye - they came from the sky
05/24: white denim - d
05/28: fay wrays - strange confessor
05/30: three trapped tigers - route one or die
05/30: united fruit - fault lines
06/02: lefolk - intermitter
06/02: manorexia - dinoflagellate blooms
06/03: snowman - absence
06/06: fucked up - david comes to life
06/06: slugabed - moonbeam rider
06/06: touche amore - parting the sea between brightness and me
06/14: the dear hunter - the colour spectrum (jessica's edit)
06/16: marihiko hara – credo
06/20: blanck mass
06/20: ghosting season - far end of the graveyard
06/21: the nightey nite - dimples
06/24: william bowers - piano works
06/30: night birds - the other side of darkness
07/01: oxykitten - the streets were paved with circuit boards
07/04: whatever brains
07/05: ghibli - pythia
07/08: tangled thoughts of leaving - deaden the fields
07/11: gazelle twin - entire city
07/19: city of ships - minor world
07/19: prurient - bermuda drain
07/21: bodhi surfs
07/23: metazen - the conscious cicatrix
07/26: aficionado
08/01: total control - henge beat
08/02: moonface - organ music not vibraphone like i'd hoped
08/05: the great tyrant - there's a man in the house
08/07: myths
08/08: al gore rhythm
08/18: pepepiano - king
08/23: i break horses - hearts
08/24: tom hall - muted angels
08/29: canon blue - rumspringa
08/30: equals
08/30: julia holter - tragedy
08/30: ume - phantoms
09/02: the blank reference - fried
09/05: plaid - scintilli
09/07: lingouf - doeme
09/09: howling bells - the loudest engine
09/13: levin torn white
09/14: st. vincent - strange mercy
09/19: roly porter - aftertime
09/19: teeth - whatever
09/20: born gold - bodysongs
09/20: tori amos - night of hunters
09/21: giraffes? giraffes! - pink magick
09/24: anatomy of habit
09/26: patten - GLAQJO XAACSSO
09/26: spectres - family
09/27: crock - grok
09/27: tobias lilja - delerium portraits
10/03: emika
10/04: la dispute - wildlife
10/06: doldrums - empire sound
10/10: rustie - glass swords
tentative:
04/22: bohren & der club of gore - beileid
10/10: bjork
10/25: skinny puppy - handover
11/04: animals as leaders - weightless
12/09: trent reznor & atticus ross - the girl with the dragon tattoo
01/01: this city defects - patterns
01/07: cycle~ 440 - the geography of collapsing structures
01/11: x-ray press - uvb-76
01/18: braids - native speaker
01/18: white laces
01/24: the joy formidable - the big roar
01/25: deerhoof vs. evil
01/25: papercranes - let's make babies in the woods
01/25: vampillia - alchemic heart
01/27: katarrhaktes - pareidolia
01/31: pepepiano
01/31: seefeel
02/01: delicate steve - wondervisions
02/04: ...and you will know us by the trail of the dead - tao of the dead
02/07: conquering animal sound - kammerspiel
02/07: papaye - la chaleur
02/08: wires under tension - light science
02/11: coh - iiron
02/15: hey rosetta! - seeds
02/15: phaedra - the sea
02/15: sonic youth - simon werner a disparu
02/20: namine - neon
02/22: colin stetson - a new history of warfare vol. 2: judges
02/22: the psychic paramount - II
03/01: adderall canyonly - it was a dark and stoney night
03/07: cyclo - id
03/08: ahleuchatistas - location location
03/08: defeater - empty days & sleepless nights
03/15: al di meola - pursuit of radical rhapsody
03/17: adebisi shank - this is the second album of a band called adebisi shank
03/22: stendeck - scintillia
03/23: salyu×salyu - s(o)un(d)beams
03/28: rene hell - the terminal symphony
03/29: gangpol & mit - the 1000 softcore tourist people club
03/29: the alps - easy action
04/01: adderall canyonly - asuuna
04/11: hauschka - salon des amateurs
04/12: thursday - no devolucion
04/15: talfast - machination
04/21: slew52 - catalog
04/26: skeletons - people
05/05: noxious foxes - legs
05/06: man man - life fantastic
05/10: gang gang dance - eye contact
05/16: dreissk - the finding
05/16: joshua stamper - interstitials
05/16: william d. drake - the rising of the lights
05/17: austra - feel it break
05/17: screens - dead house
05/17: son lux - we are rising
05/23: david sylvian - died in the wool
05/23: thurston moore - demolished thoughts
05/24: amon tobin - isam
05/24: emptyset - demiurge
05/24: human eye - they came from the sky
05/24: white denim - d
05/28: fay wrays - strange confessor
05/30: three trapped tigers - route one or die
05/30: united fruit - fault lines
06/02: lefolk - intermitter
06/02: manorexia - dinoflagellate blooms
06/03: snowman - absence
06/06: fucked up - david comes to life
06/06: slugabed - moonbeam rider
06/06: touche amore - parting the sea between brightness and me
06/14: the dear hunter - the colour spectrum (jessica's edit)
06/16: marihiko hara – credo
06/20: blanck mass
06/20: ghosting season - far end of the graveyard
06/21: the nightey nite - dimples
06/24: william bowers - piano works
06/30: night birds - the other side of darkness
07/01: oxykitten - the streets were paved with circuit boards
07/04: whatever brains
07/05: ghibli - pythia
07/08: tangled thoughts of leaving - deaden the fields
07/11: gazelle twin - entire city
07/19: city of ships - minor world
07/19: prurient - bermuda drain
07/21: bodhi surfs
07/23: metazen - the conscious cicatrix
07/26: aficionado
08/01: total control - henge beat
08/02: moonface - organ music not vibraphone like i'd hoped
08/05: the great tyrant - there's a man in the house
08/07: myths
08/08: al gore rhythm
08/18: pepepiano - king
08/23: i break horses - hearts
08/24: tom hall - muted angels
08/29: canon blue - rumspringa
08/30: equals
08/30: julia holter - tragedy
08/30: ume - phantoms
09/02: the blank reference - fried
09/05: plaid - scintilli
09/07: lingouf - doeme
09/09: howling bells - the loudest engine
09/13: levin torn white
09/14: st. vincent - strange mercy
09/19: roly porter - aftertime
09/19: teeth - whatever
09/20: born gold - bodysongs
09/20: tori amos - night of hunters
09/21: giraffes? giraffes! - pink magick
09/24: anatomy of habit
09/26: patten - GLAQJO XAACSSO
09/26: spectres - family
09/27: crock - grok
09/27: tobias lilja - delerium portraits
10/03: emika
10/04: la dispute - wildlife
10/06: doldrums - empire sound
10/10: rustie - glass swords
tentative:
04/22: bohren & der club of gore - beileid
10/10: bjork
10/25: skinny puppy - handover
11/04: animals as leaders - weightless
12/09: trent reznor & atticus ross - the girl with the dragon tattoo
some people are asking about software.
in the 80s and early 90s, there were three (well, more than three, but three competitive) types of computers on the market: your typical macs and intel machines, along with something called an atari. due to issues that exist in reality (such as price), the atari machines became standard amongst diy electronic musicians in the late 80s and early 90s. the computers used by bands like autechre, ministry, skinny puppy, kmfdm, etc for sample editing and sequencing were mostly ataris, using software written for atari.
probably the most well known software atari daw was cubase, which enjoyed a run as a popular windows/mac daw in the 90s before being dismantled by, i think, yamaha, in the 00s. the vst interface was not developed until 1996, but it was built on top of previous technology.
all that to say that there were probably "plugins" used on the album, but you'd need an atari emulator to actually use them.
another piece of relevant history: one of autechre's contemporaries, rdj, aka the aphex twin, almost single-handedly popularized software synthesizers. if you'd like to hear some early vst plugs, the aphex twin is a better place to look than autechre.
if you really want to capture the spirit of this type of 90s techno, though, you'd better learn to program in C. a lot of these artists programmed their own software. for a (not so) gentle introduction to this approach to music, i'd try a program called MAX.
young people that are interested in seeing some old (but very modern) computer software running in real-time (it's an early version of pro tools) can also consult the 'gave up' video by nin, 1992: watch?v=yVpw1SwJRBI.
in the 80s and early 90s, there were three (well, more than three, but three competitive) types of computers on the market: your typical macs and intel machines, along with something called an atari. due to issues that exist in reality (such as price), the atari machines became standard amongst diy electronic musicians in the late 80s and early 90s. the computers used by bands like autechre, ministry, skinny puppy, kmfdm, etc for sample editing and sequencing were mostly ataris, using software written for atari.
probably the most well known software atari daw was cubase, which enjoyed a run as a popular windows/mac daw in the 90s before being dismantled by, i think, yamaha, in the 00s. the vst interface was not developed until 1996, but it was built on top of previous technology.
all that to say that there were probably "plugins" used on the album, but you'd need an atari emulator to actually use them.
another piece of relevant history: one of autechre's contemporaries, rdj, aka the aphex twin, almost single-handedly popularized software synthesizers. if you'd like to hear some early vst plugs, the aphex twin is a better place to look than autechre.
if you really want to capture the spirit of this type of 90s techno, though, you'd better learn to program in C. a lot of these artists programmed their own software. for a (not so) gentle introduction to this approach to music, i'd try a program called MAX.
young people that are interested in seeing some old (but very modern) computer software running in real-time (it's an early version of pro tools) can also consult the 'gave up' video by nin, 1992: watch?v=yVpw1SwJRBI.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Monday, December 16, 2013
austra’s olympia
the switch to a major key does not suit my tastes at all. it's mostly sterile talking heads style disco. stelmanis has also, unfortunately, exposed herself as having a very limited vocal range.
i'll acknowledge that it's still dangerously catchy, but it left behind the operatic edge that made it compelling beyond that. the material is also all very similar to itself and one gets the impression that the band wouldn't care if queried on the point.
she seems more interested in getting people to like her sunglasses.
i'll acknowledge that it's still dangerously catchy, but it left behind the operatic edge that made it compelling beyond that. the material is also all very similar to itself and one gets the impression that the band wouldn't care if queried on the point.
she seems more interested in getting people to like her sunglasses.
welcome to oblivion, alright
i wrote a lengthy sort of psycho-analysis of trent reznor when this came out that has largely been rendered inaccurate by the new nin disc.
i think i'm developing a theme out of 2013: creative artists going back over some of the ground they developed around the same time as trends have developed around the sound they created once upon a time, but in a way that is more like connecting with roots than following trends. this is either reznor's attempt to sound like fever ray [although it never falls into a space that is nearly as poppy as fever ray] or it's pretty hate machine v 2.0, !now with ableton!.
i don't care about any of that.
it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between trent reznor and atticus ross mimicking trent reznor. that's also secondary, except to point out that the disc crosses the line to self parody. it's like...you've used that fucking sample in about 20 songs now, trent....maybe you should stop doing that now....
this could have been something, but it's too consciously structured as a marketable product. listening to it with a little space from it, and with better headphones, is still leaving me with the same basic reaction: this record is painfully constrained by a set of artificial boundaries that are far too limiting to capture the potential that the songs hint at, and it's enraging because what they hint at is an extrapolation of trip-hop into a level of abstraction that the genre never actually accomplished.
so, it'd be great to hear this remixed by some off the wall younger electronic musicians (doldrums, born gold, lingouf) but, nowadays, reznor is more likely to go after pitchfork picks than hang around the fringes looking for new shit. i'd expect remixes from mgmt and lopatin, if he were to bother. it's easy to forget that this is the guy that distributed warp records in north america, or that this band is named after a coil record. fwiw, it sounds more like cabaret voltaire remixing a collaboration between peter gabriel and kate bush.
i could go on; i'll stop. it's just frustrating....as has been the expectation for far too long...
i think i'm developing a theme out of 2013: creative artists going back over some of the ground they developed around the same time as trends have developed around the sound they created once upon a time, but in a way that is more like connecting with roots than following trends. this is either reznor's attempt to sound like fever ray [although it never falls into a space that is nearly as poppy as fever ray] or it's pretty hate machine v 2.0, !now with ableton!.
i don't care about any of that.
it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between trent reznor and atticus ross mimicking trent reznor. that's also secondary, except to point out that the disc crosses the line to self parody. it's like...you've used that fucking sample in about 20 songs now, trent....maybe you should stop doing that now....
this could have been something, but it's too consciously structured as a marketable product. listening to it with a little space from it, and with better headphones, is still leaving me with the same basic reaction: this record is painfully constrained by a set of artificial boundaries that are far too limiting to capture the potential that the songs hint at, and it's enraging because what they hint at is an extrapolation of trip-hop into a level of abstraction that the genre never actually accomplished.
so, it'd be great to hear this remixed by some off the wall younger electronic musicians (doldrums, born gold, lingouf) but, nowadays, reznor is more likely to go after pitchfork picks than hang around the fringes looking for new shit. i'd expect remixes from mgmt and lopatin, if he were to bother. it's easy to forget that this is the guy that distributed warp records in north america, or that this band is named after a coil record. fwiw, it sounds more like cabaret voltaire remixing a collaboration between peter gabriel and kate bush.
i could go on; i'll stop. it's just frustrating....as has been the expectation for far too long...
some year end stuff...
1) http://adderallcanyonly.bandcamp.com/album/influenza-10
2) fire! orchestra: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqoBUuA8g1o
3) http://californiax.bandcamp.com/album/californiax
4) joy formidable:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nzWUNmsHhpFAb6lwTKbo0e9qQaXxIZ9ZY
5) http://ghibli.bandcamp.com/album/clubs
6) autechre: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1yYEMwtFZHNP6hwp1lgEEQqkfFXIeqcS
7) oxykitten: http://shop.fieldhymns.com/album/fugue-state-2
8) mbv: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV5Dj2xlNnONJWlHRLnxoEDHp89rKoNpO
9) the first time i saw them play last year, opening for somebody, they played a bass/drums instrumental set that was all over the place, expertly jumping through metal, grunge and punk riffs and into jazzy lines that wouldn't be out of place on a dmst record, all wrapped up in a catchy-as-fuck dance punk package. excellent show.
the record is far more focused, but it's still pretty top notch noise rock for fans of the albini sound.
http://big-dick.bandcamp.com/
10) gazelle twin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkwDAamep2c
11) http://noxiousfoxes.bandcamp.com/album/epochalypso
12) man...or astro man?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWFMPH5C4lc&t=1s
13) http://indricothere.bandcamp.com/album/ii
14) i initially put this in my iffy pile, but i need to accept it as disappointing. musically, it's not terrible; the renaldo clone does a convincing job, even when he misses the subtleties (and i'm not at all being fair to the guy). vocally, it's sort of embarrassing.
there's an obvious kneejerk reaction to this along the lines of "yikes, this old guy's trying to be krallice and instead ends up coming off like billy corgan in his cyber-metal phase", but you have to understand that thurston moore has been obsessed with that point where extreme punk meets noise for going on thirty years now. and, "he was there": outside of being in sonic youth, which was kind of an important noise band that you've probably heard of, he was also in an early incarnation of swans, involved with branca's orchestra, etc.
it's weird.
1) he happens to be doing this in a point where it seems hipster,
2) who would deny thurston moore is a hipster? he's the archetype.
3) & yet, it doesn't seem like he's trying to be trendy.
the truth is closer to the idea that he's liberated by not having to deal with that goddamned hippie, lee renaldo, anymore. i can hear moore: "fine, he can go do his grateful dead shit, i'll go start a rock band.". there's just an age where it doesn't work anymore, and this is the first time moore has crossed that line - perhaps because his former bandmates, and ex-wife, are no longer there to yell NOOOOOO.
worse, the songwriting is a little lazy. i can handle thurston moore being a loser because that's the irony in the persona. when did he stop being a loser, y'know? but i can't handle him being a disingenuous loser that's out to prove a point or something.
the next one will probably be better. but whatever energy it was that sparked this missed it's target.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kdN2Q3g0_7zOS-dYot8Ao0aRGmD1xij80
15) black pus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2MI88lUiQM
16) the flaming lips have released a lot of records. there's a couple that are amongst the best records released in the modern era, a couple that are almost unlistenable and a lot that are sort of mediocre. following up embryonic was going to be difficult, there's no question. given how wide of a spectrum their releases occupy (on a quality scale), it's hard to talk about expectations; however, this is certainly in the range of possible expectations, if maybe on the low end. i'm not particularly impressed, but i can't honestly claim i'm disappointed because i had to expect something a little less impressive after the last one.
the truth is that they're still cleaning up ideas that came out of embryonic.
they seem to have three basic "modes": catchy, spacy and trippy (which combines catchy and spacy). i've found that they're at their best when in "trippy mode". their "catchy" mode is usually sappy to the point of being irritating (i don't hold their early records in as high a regard as some others do) and their "spacy" mode is often boring. but, when they can splice them...
this disc is all spacy, but it doesn't just come off as boring, it commits the sin of being cheesy prog. with the retro feel of the ancient synths, it's even cheesy 70s prog. again, it's hard to accuse somebody that helped invent a sound of trying to cash in on it after the fact but is it a coincidence that it sounds like chillwave spliced with kosmische, produced by mgmt? you may find something enjoyable here if you're into that particular type of retro music, but the truth is that what this record actually is is a masturbatory pastiche of references to 70s music that will go over most listeners' heads.
i'd forgive that, though, if it had more hooks - if it didn't come off as such a tepid blur. there are a few moments, but there just aren't interesting songs underneath the haze of production.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oad6At_a9M
17) as always, jello has interesting perspectives, but he's moved into a muscle rock musical space on this disc that i can't really enjoy that much. i have to balance it out to iffy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi14822rcB0
2) fire! orchestra: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqoBUuA8g1o
3) http://californiax.bandcamp.com/album/californiax
4) joy formidable:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nzWUNmsHhpFAb6lwTKbo0e9qQaXxIZ9ZY
5) http://ghibli.bandcamp.com/album/clubs
6) autechre: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1yYEMwtFZHNP6hwp1lgEEQqkfFXIeqcS
7) oxykitten: http://shop.fieldhymns.com/album/fugue-state-2
8) mbv: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV5Dj2xlNnONJWlHRLnxoEDHp89rKoNpO
9) the first time i saw them play last year, opening for somebody, they played a bass/drums instrumental set that was all over the place, expertly jumping through metal, grunge and punk riffs and into jazzy lines that wouldn't be out of place on a dmst record, all wrapped up in a catchy-as-fuck dance punk package. excellent show.
the record is far more focused, but it's still pretty top notch noise rock for fans of the albini sound.
http://big-dick.bandcamp.com/
10) gazelle twin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkwDAamep2c
11) http://noxiousfoxes.bandcamp.com/album/epochalypso
12) man...or astro man?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWFMPH5C4lc&t=1s
13) http://indricothere.bandcamp.com/album/ii
14) i initially put this in my iffy pile, but i need to accept it as disappointing. musically, it's not terrible; the renaldo clone does a convincing job, even when he misses the subtleties (and i'm not at all being fair to the guy). vocally, it's sort of embarrassing.
there's an obvious kneejerk reaction to this along the lines of "yikes, this old guy's trying to be krallice and instead ends up coming off like billy corgan in his cyber-metal phase", but you have to understand that thurston moore has been obsessed with that point where extreme punk meets noise for going on thirty years now. and, "he was there": outside of being in sonic youth, which was kind of an important noise band that you've probably heard of, he was also in an early incarnation of swans, involved with branca's orchestra, etc.
it's weird.
1) he happens to be doing this in a point where it seems hipster,
2) who would deny thurston moore is a hipster? he's the archetype.
3) & yet, it doesn't seem like he's trying to be trendy.
the truth is closer to the idea that he's liberated by not having to deal with that goddamned hippie, lee renaldo, anymore. i can hear moore: "fine, he can go do his grateful dead shit, i'll go start a rock band.". there's just an age where it doesn't work anymore, and this is the first time moore has crossed that line - perhaps because his former bandmates, and ex-wife, are no longer there to yell NOOOOOO.
worse, the songwriting is a little lazy. i can handle thurston moore being a loser because that's the irony in the persona. when did he stop being a loser, y'know? but i can't handle him being a disingenuous loser that's out to prove a point or something.
the next one will probably be better. but whatever energy it was that sparked this missed it's target.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kdN2Q3g0_7zOS-dYot8Ao0aRGmD1xij80
15) black pus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2MI88lUiQM
16) the flaming lips have released a lot of records. there's a couple that are amongst the best records released in the modern era, a couple that are almost unlistenable and a lot that are sort of mediocre. following up embryonic was going to be difficult, there's no question. given how wide of a spectrum their releases occupy (on a quality scale), it's hard to talk about expectations; however, this is certainly in the range of possible expectations, if maybe on the low end. i'm not particularly impressed, but i can't honestly claim i'm disappointed because i had to expect something a little less impressive after the last one.
the truth is that they're still cleaning up ideas that came out of embryonic.
they seem to have three basic "modes": catchy, spacy and trippy (which combines catchy and spacy). i've found that they're at their best when in "trippy mode". their "catchy" mode is usually sappy to the point of being irritating (i don't hold their early records in as high a regard as some others do) and their "spacy" mode is often boring. but, when they can splice them...
this disc is all spacy, but it doesn't just come off as boring, it commits the sin of being cheesy prog. with the retro feel of the ancient synths, it's even cheesy 70s prog. again, it's hard to accuse somebody that helped invent a sound of trying to cash in on it after the fact but is it a coincidence that it sounds like chillwave spliced with kosmische, produced by mgmt? you may find something enjoyable here if you're into that particular type of retro music, but the truth is that what this record actually is is a masturbatory pastiche of references to 70s music that will go over most listeners' heads.
i'd forgive that, though, if it had more hooks - if it didn't come off as such a tepid blur. there are a few moments, but there just aren't interesting songs underneath the haze of production.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oad6At_a9M
17) as always, jello has interesting perspectives, but he's moved into a muscle rock musical space on this disc that i can't really enjoy that much. i have to balance it out to iffy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi14822rcB0
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