Once, many years ago, I was at an artist’s colony in New Hampshire, The MacDowell Colony. I could never spend much time at MacDowell without suffering with paralyzing loneliness, and this visit was no exception. …more

“Talent” is from the Greek for a certain weight of gold, because, I suppose, people who had a lot of it seemed to be metaphorically wealthy.

Here’s one example I encountered recently: …more

Johnny Cash’s late covers are superior to their original recordings, but are they traditional? …more

Recently, I was given an assignment by Rumpus film critic and friend Ryan Boudinot to write about one of those pieces of music that is so execrable, so thoroughly gangrenous, that it’s nearly impossible to figure out why anyone would like it. This is outside of my brief since a) I am meant to be writing here about independent and unsigned and unreleased music, and b) I very rarely waste my meager scribblings on things I hate. Contempt is too easy. …more

Lovers of contemporary experimental music will likely remember the moment in the early eighties when John Cage, the godfather of minimalism and of most New York City experimental music, referred to Glenn Branca (he of the pieces for ensembles of multiple electric guitars) as having “fascist” qualities. …more

In popular music circles, these days, very good instrumental technique is often considered bad form. …more

The following is a record review in dialogue form conducted between this columnist and Michael Snediker (with whom I corresponded about Antony and the Johnsons a couple months back), the poet and literary critic. We were shooting for ten thousand words about the Size Queens, until Michael fell deeply in love and, simultaneously, started preparing for his fall classes back in Ontario. Apologies, therefore, for brevity. We each deal with a brace of songs from last year’s very effective and inspiring release from San Francisco’s own Size Queens, entitled Magic Dollar Shoppe, an album I urge you to seek out.  More follows immediately. …more

These lines depend on your having a working knowledge of the New York City suburbs. So for those who are not from the Northeast, or who are not up on their regional suburbs, let me remind you that Westchester County is the first county beyond the edge of the Bronx …more

As I mentioned a few posts back (see: “On Repetition”), I am friendly with a writer from Santa Fe called Tim Ramick. I have never met him, but we correspond now and again on various subjects. I admire his uncompromising devotion to his aesthetic. Recently, I’ve been writing a long piece somewhat about the Velvet Underground, and in the course of that piece I stumbled on a recording I thought Ramick would like, and the following exchange ensued. Some points of information: Ramick’s wife is Laura, and his son is Reeve (who is in school in Glasgow, Scotland). My wife is Amy and my daughter is Hazel (who is 3 _ months old). Ramick (who is a compositional voice in which Tim Taylor, somewhat Pessoa-like, composes) has lately spawned a couple of additional voices and manners. Thus the opening of the exchange. And as it will be noted, Ramick agreed to let this correspondence be published on the condition that I change nothing. Basically, I swindled him into writing these lines (though it didn’t occur to me to post these lines until after I saw how good they were), and a doctrine on the acceptance of error was  the pound of flesh exacted.

Dear He who is no longer Ramick,

I’m having a Metal Machine Music moment. Have you heard this cover of the whole thing by Zeitkratzer? I know nothing about it except that it’s on iTunes and I got myself one. Rather sublime, rather sublime. You should get one and we can compare notes.

R.

*

Still Taylor, still Ramick, but now the two other quadrants, too, for
survival or endurance, I don’t know, but that is of small substantive
worth. Fool’s play.

I’ve been thinking of you some today, oddly enough, not sure why,
perhaps residue from the fact of Hazel Jane, wondering how the world
is now different for you, how you move through your days (and your
nights) and your pages. Laura is in Mississippi with her sister and
brother for ten days and they’ll be attending the Delta Blues Festival
while I’m taking off equal time to find another job (I’ve given June
30 notice—I want to do more physical work while my body can still
withstand some abuse). But today I’ve spent the day trying to write.
Brutal. And l.o.n.e.l.y. Cearley’s not any better at this than Ramick.
Sayes has it easy, since his task is (in essence) prescribed. Why this
persistent pursuance (silliness)?

But not silly, from what I’ve heard tell anyway, is this Zeitkratzer
stuff. I can’t listen to it here at home because of our dial up, but I
have a $15 gift card for iTunes in my wallet that I’ve been wondering
what to do with—so I’ll use it on Saturday up at the Institute and
throw it on an iPod and let you know what happens to me. Perhaps
they’ll next transcribe Merzbow’s 50CD box set of noise
(http://www.discogs.com/release/100630). I wanted to buy that set and
find a stereo that could handle 50 CDs on shuffle and start it and
then leave it on shuffle—even when away from the house and while
sleeping (or trying to sleep!)—for an entire year.

“Rather sublime” said twice itself, is itself.

Do you know the Garfield minus Garfield comic?
(http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/)

I was thinking of what that would be like for moving images—perhaps
The Brady Bunch with only Marcia. All other characters and their
actions and their voices would be removed. Marcia would talk to
herself a lot (when she was present) and inhabit her own strange world
a la Markson’s (or Wittgenstein’s) Mistress—but there would mostly
just be lots of shots and reaction shots of the (now) mostly always
empty house. Not sure what to do with the laugh track. These musings
also for some reason made me think of you.

Well, enough. You can tell I’ve been alone for the past couple days
without much sleep or esteem. I’ll get my legs under me around day six
(of sans Laura).

Tim

*

Do you want to amplify the conceptual underpinnings re: Cearley, and the other guy (guy? or indeterminate?) Sayes? Spelling correct? I’m doing it from memory in case memory is somehow relevant?

I like the idea of Bradys with just Marcia. Or maybe just Alice’s boyfriend. Wandering around that house wondering. Or wondering around the house wandering.

Writing, yes, is brutal.

The Hazel situation is hard at the moment because she has hip issues (like the Wife, who has a rather bad case of dysplasia) and they are trying to enharness her in a way that feels very Victorian or Dickensian or something. There has been much tension surrounding Hazel. Who is mostly ignorant of all this, I think, and very happy on occasion. I really do adore her in a way I have adored nothing in my life. As for work, work is now something that has to be fitted around her. And it is strange trying to finish up this novel that feels very B.H. I can already feel the outline of A.H. Which is maybe what Cearley is: A.R.W.S. or After Reeve Went to Scotland. I think my manner is about to change again. I’m going to do music essays after this novel, and then stories, perhaps, and a novel that I feel listing toward me, but it has no jokes and much less plot. Back to an older more European model, or A.H., where the prose must save lives. I tried to be nice for a while, because I felt brutalized by The Black Veil, but now I want my daughter, one day, to be proud of me.

The shorter answer is: when am I going to write? I have no time to write.

R.

P.S. I’ll go check Garfield(less).

(later) Garfield(less) is most excellent.

*

Rick,

First of all, thank you for bringing this to my attention. I’d heard
about it early last year and had absently failed to follow up. That
would have been my loss. So, primarily, despite any spew below, thanks
so much.

I’ve listened to Zeitkratzer’s MMM twice now. I liked it better the
first time, but I still liked it the second time, so I’m not sure what
subsequent listens will bring. I also listened to Ascension and
Crippled Symmetry and OV and Music for 18 Musicians today for sake of
comparison.

The textures are wondrous. It’s almost unimaginable that it’s all
acoustic and that it’s done live (more on this aspect later). And I
think it would have quickly jumped to my top shelf of favorite
compositions if not for the following problems (for me):

I don’t care about its history. I wish I didn’t know. I’ve only heard
Reed’s MMM once, long ago, and wasn’t that impressed (although it was
before I had much of an internal lexicon for these sorts of things).
So its “rock star” origins don’t do anything for me. The fact that
Krieger transcribed it in its entirety is such an astonishing fact
that it somewhat pollutes the experience for me. This knowledge will
become less problematic with future listens, I’m sure. I don’t like
the way it’s presented, live in three sections with applause
interruption (though it must be exhausting for the performers and they
probably couldn’t go 45 minutes without stopping). It’s very jarring
to suddenly hear the audience and realize I’m not alone in all that
glorious sound but am a voyeur to their experience. Why not a
definitive studio recording (sans crowd and sans Reed) so that it
could stand as a piece of music and not as a remarkable performance
event (stunt)? I don’t at all care for Reed’s guitar solo that nearly
finishes the work and it isn’t even up to the original’s standards (if
memory serves).

Do you have the original MMM? Is it worth purchasing for comparison?

Zeitkratzer’s version certainly holds up to Orthrelm’s OV (or anything
I’ve heard from Merzbow or Earth or Sun O))) or Dead C for sustained
noise-throb). But it doesn’t match Ascension’s palpability, Feldman’s
endless tension-weaves, or Reich’s pulses and flows.

The best parts of it all make me think a little of Xenakis’ plateau-like slabs.

In the end, I’d say it lacks the resonances of intention (a private
inner life). Still, I’m quite grateful to have made its acquaintance.
And will seek out more like it, if such exists. Please let me know if
you get wind of anything.

Tim

*

Tim, you are, as always, a remarkable hard ass. This is, I expect, one of your adorable qualities. I agree that any participation of Lou in the piece is problematic. I also agree that Lou cannot play very well anymore. Lou remains a challenging character. (I’m writing about New York underground music right now, and that’s what led me in this direction in the first place. And he certainly doesn’t come off too well in those accounts, the accounts of the Velvets.) Part of the problem IS the sort of “authorized” quality of the Metal Machine Music recording we have at hand. Maybe they couldn’t get the rights unless Lou got his grimy fingers all over it. And I recommend not believing everything he has to say on the subject. In a way, for me, the best analogue for this recording is the Bang on a Can All-Stars recording of Music For Airports, which was one of the very first of these “classical” covers of popular music (there are many others: Alarm Will Sound covering Aphex Twin (great in spots); that jazz pianist Brad Mehldau (sp) covering Radiohead (not terribly interesting to me, as Radiohead is only fleetingly compelling, I think); Ensemble Moderne doing Frank Zappa (quite spectacular on the first disc)). In the Music For Airports performance the balancing act is just as intense, because it too is really loop-oriented. On the original MMM, the piece is recorded in loops, but it’s really hard to tell where the loops begin and end, as the piece has no melodic center. It would be easy to duplicate this piece, in a way, by saying: okay the drone lasts for 48 minutes, or however long the original LP would have lasted. With Music For Airports, the loops are melodic, so you have to score out the whole thing for the exact number of repetitions that you have on the original. What was great about the Bang on a Can recording is that as the album wears on, they take greater liberties with the original, so that by the final piece (“2/2″) they have a clarinet adding these filigrees of new melody expanding on what was, originally, a piece for analogue synthesizer. This is a hallmark of the sub-genre (serious music renderings of pop), and I think, as with Proust’s description of metaphor (in Proust on Ruskin, I think), serious music achieves best when the rendering is at the greatest possible distance from the original. Clarinet and analogue synthesizer, e.g. Anyway, for me, this recording of MMM has a similar feel, and the transcription must have been arduous, yes, and the performance was probably arduous, yes, but remember that the original piece was four sides of an LP, and thus had breaks in it too. So there’s a rationale for pauses. And as far as doing it before a live audience goes, there’s the issue of how “classical” ensembles get paid. Usually, a piece is a commissioned for a specific venue (the Berlin Opera House, e.g.), and it’s possible that Zeitkratzer didn’t record the piece first because they had the arrangement with Berlin Opera House to perform it. One of my very favorite recent albums, A Crimson Grail by Rhys Chatham, is scored for 400 electric guitars, and that piece was performed first (in fact, I don’t think it would be possible to do it in a studio setting, unless you rented out an entire concert hall), in a church (can’t remember which right now) in Paris. I think Zeitkratzer sort of had that piece in mind when doing this one, or that’s my guess.

If you can set aside the contextual issues, which I agree are genuine issues, is it possible to enjoy the piece? I admit that I love drones, and I don’t experience drones as difficult listening at all. They calm me down. In the same way that we have both agreed that “extreme” repetition works on the limbic system. I’m thinking for example of La Monte Young’s tamboura-only piece, which lasts for an hour. Or many of his other pieces, or the very long Feldman pieces (which I don’t think count, really, because they actually have melodic development, if extremely slow and repetitious melodic development). The original recording of MMM was actually, however, slightly irritating. I think there was some kind of tritone or minor-second harmonic thing therein that was designed to impede your ability to “enjoy” the drone. My tolerance for dissonance has increased dramatically since I was a young person, since first hearing the piece, and I confess that there’s a lot that I like about MMM now. The original that is. I still find it challenging for some reason (I think it really screeches), but I like it in some ways. I don’t have a deep abiding desire to listen to it all the way through. And I think listening to drones all the way through is sort of being completist about it, and slightly anal. Coming in and out of the piece is just as reasonable an approach, and listener-centered to boot. There WERE contextual issues for me, with respect to the initial recording of MMM. Lou was in the midst of his solo career, having made recently, I think, the very lackluster Sally Can’t Dance, or the very commercial Transformer, and then he released this helping of fuck off to the fans, and it was never quite clear if it was a deliberate fuck off, or if he thought he was actually making art. There’s some very good Lester Bangs writing on the subject (in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung), and it’s in there that Lou says that there are all kinds of serious music “samples” (though this was the era before samples) buried in the mix of MMM. I resist this boast. I bet Lou recorded the piece quickly, probably not in a state that was free of intoxicants, and he wasn’t thinking at all about the long term ramifications of the piece. The Velvets were just in the process of becoming recognized for their legitimate greatness, though a lot of the reputation of that greatness was being lofted upon the shoulders of John Cale, who DID come from the La Monte Young school of drones, and maybe Lou wanted to serve some of the big fuck you in the direction of that high art stuff. He wanted to indicate that he could think “avant-garde” and that he thought it was all pretentious nonsense at the same time.

The Zeitkratzer recording pries the music loose from its earlier reputation. Or more exactly it represents an interpretation of the meaning of MMM. A very different interpretation. For me, the meaning of Zeitkratzer is in the realm of “serious” music. And partly that’s because of the textures. Lou’s piece is scored for electric guitar (feedback) and nothing but. The Zeitkratzer piece is scored for chamber orchestra, with lots of amplified strings and brass, and so on. That is “virtuosic,” which is a hallmark of serious music, especially serious music played in concert halls, and it is also performed live, which again signifies its seriousness. But if you can set that stuff aside, for me it’s actually the better and more interesting rendering off MMM, because everyone knows the guitar feeds back at certain intervals and with certain frequencies. And because the string textures are richer and more powerful than just guitar timbres. In away, Zeitkratzer interprets MMM as though it’s a Velvet Underground piece, instead of a Lou Reed piece, and in particular, a Velvet Underground piece from the Cale period. It leaves out the fuck off portion of the thing (even when Lou plays with them on the third part).

This may be a good time to opine that Lou Reed’s last two albums now, are a) an ambient electronic album for meditators (or so he says) called Hudson River Wind Meditations, and b) a trio recording called Metal Machine Trio. The latter is a clear attempt to capitalize on what was learned from the ZeitKratzer recording and for Reed to return to his roots as a droning primitivist. I think the Hudson River Wind Meditations piece is only fleetingly interesting, and I don’t find New Age electronic music relaxing. It makes me nervous (in a way that MMM, in either rendering, does not). The Metal Machine Trio album, however, is occasionally interesting. But there’s also an element of exhaustion about it, as if the idea no longer has the provocative aspect it once had (there are much more provocative players of drones, these days, than a Lou Reed in his late sixties). With the result that is sounds almost refined, kind of the way, say, that Robert Fripp sounds now, improvised, sure, virtuosic, sure, but kind of polite, too. As if what Lou Reed learned from Zeitkratzer was how to be a concert musician. Of the serious sort. That said, I like Metal Machine Trio. It’s not hard to listen to.

Maybe part of the issue is that history has passed the minimalist idea by, now, and it’s no longer possible to make a truly minimalist recording, by which I mean a recording in the style of La Monte Young, or In C, without sounding like you are quaintly associating yourself with a historical notion of counterculture and all its ancient trappings. This would depress me, if true. I still love La Monte Young and think of a performance I saw of his Second Dream brass piece as one of the great listening moments of my life. Maybe, therefore, I’m arguing for MMM, because I want to believe that you can still make music like this.

Peace,
r.

*

Rick,

I enjoy reading your thoughts on music (and look forward to the future
essays and more blog posts, both because of your insights around music
and your skills with language, but also because of some wide-field or
even freckle-level affinity). And I accept all of your clarifications
and adjustments of my granite-reared position on Zeitkratzer’s version
of Metal Machine Music, except one: I very much appreciate various
Peel Sessions because they were generally done live with some
spontaneity, but without an audience (a crowd of clappers and hooters
and whistlers),* so I assume Rhys Chatham and his four hundred
guitarists could have recorded a live performance in the Sacré-Coeur
without an audience (or at least not a significant or audible one).
Same with the Zeitkratzer ensemble. But, as usual, I’m leaving out the
economic portion (a paying crowd offsets the costs of the production),
not to mention the energy an audience provides for the performers (as
if the piece of music and one’s fellow performers aren’t sufficient
energy in and of themselves). And my bias is such that I’d always
prefer to listen to an ensemble or band practicing in the next room
(or even just listen to a recording of the session, or just feel the
resonance of the sound through the wall with my hand) than ever have
to deal with the social milieu of a live concert setting.

I still have some iTunes credit so I’ll see if any of the works you
mention (A Crimson Grail, the Ensemble Moderne’s Zappa covers, Bang on
a Can’s Eno-ing) are available next time I’m up at SFI. I agree with
your feelings regarding New Age Music (about it making you nervous),
but I would recommend one work: Steve Roach’s Structures From Silence
(not the whole album, just the title track). It’s sublime when
listened to alone in bed in the middle of the night. It’s not La Monte
Young, but it’s singular nevertheless.

Your email was stunningly generous (humbling to receive). I assume you
can/will modify/amplify it for a blog entry or music essay.

I’m listening to Dirty Three’s entire career output on shuffle today
(in all its shadow-soar and shambolic lumber).

Cheer and time,
Tim

* perhaps someone could transcribe (for orchestra) the sounds of
various massive audience appreciation moments (encore appeals) and
make an hour long drone of that…

PS No one has tried to sneak the word “adorable” on to my property
before, not even Laura, so I found your deployment of it amusing
(although I still had the thing shot before it got ten yards past the
hedge).

*

Can I run the exchange as is on the blog? Or would that violate the Ramick code?

r.

*

Um. Okay. I’m happy to help you out, provided (as long as it wouldn’t
break your code) you mention in some sort of quick (even
parenthetical) intro that I wasn’t aware this exhange would go public
while I was writing my half, but agreed to let it appear AS IS after
the fact. That said, I trust you to do what seems true and fair to
you, as I approve of your notion of running it exactly as is (our
modest little version of an impromptu and unrehearshed Peel Session).
However, if you’re able to tidy matters for readers by italicizing (or
standardizing in some way) all titles, that strikes me as a reasonable
non-violation of the “as is” declaration. – Tim

*

Tim, I was listening to the demos of the pre-Velvets (the Warlocks?), just Reed, Cale, Morrison, rehearsing the early songs. Disc one of the box set. And it seems to be just what you want: like a John Peel session before there was John Peel. Lots of stops and starts. And beautifully skewed renderings of songs that later became classics, like “All Tomorrow’s Parties” with a Johnny Cash feel.

**

images of Lou Reed by Liam O’Neill

I was an outcast in high school. …more

The original idea for this blog was to find my way to things that were unreleased, self-released, and unsigned, and in this installment I’m going to take my mission seriously for a change. Since I’ve been writing these notes, I’ve been polling friends near and far—as well as complete strangers—for interesting music, and a great many people have written in with suggestions. I have to say, I really love the aspect of blog-writing that makes it possible for people to write in almost immediately to respond to what I’m thinking about, and I like the interactivity of the medium. That said, many people wrote in to suggest exactly the kind of thing that this blog resists, which is to say bands of boys with Marshall stacks and double kick drummers. Or pop bands that are just, as yet, unlucky enough to be well-known. There are probably many music writers out there looking for this kind of next big thing, but my feeling is that the next big thing is what makes pop music dull these days. I offer instead a playlist that is somewhat against the grain as far as “indie” music goes these days, the obscure, the experimental, the ancient, each devoted to the project and the vision instead of the results.

Twi the Humble Feather

It’s really interesting how influence works in contemporary popular music. Somehow I assume that influence will always be predictable, verifiable, that people will be influenced by certain indelible voices: Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, The Beatles. Maybe some artists come back into fashion, like Leonard Cohen, and suddenly they make a mark. But otherwise things proceed in an unsurprising way. How can you fail to be influenced by these seminal bodies of work? It’s pretty arresting instead to hear a new band that is completely indebted to Animal Collective, and not just the Animal Collective as we know them now, but a very specific period of Animal Collective, namely their earlier incarnation as sort-of psych folk band, as indicated, e.g., on Sung Tongs. I could go on at some length about Animal Collective, and probably will some day, but that would, in this case, fail to account for Twi (which rhymes with why, and, yes,on the list of band names, this will go down with Toad the Wet Sprocket as one of the more bizarre and inexplicable). Twi are very compelling in a lovely and subtle way. They are largely acoustic, pointillistically so, and are really great players (and I’m never sure about this with Animal Collective—I often think that it’s Animal Collective’s laptops that are the good players), and the sound amounts to a fusion of contemporary folk-influenced independent stuff with serious new music, West African music, Balinese monkey chant, and so on. This is a rich stew of indigenous music, then, with the barest of pop veneers. Influences get digested, you know? Remember when everyone sounded like Nirvana? A couple years later none of those bands sounded much like Nirvana anymore. Individuation is inevitable, in music, and when an inclination is followed to its conclusion, there is the uniqueness inevitably discovered. I assume this is what’s going to happen with Twi. They appeared on my horizon via Alec Bemis from Brassland (who also led me to The Clogs, a new-music side project of the members of The National whom I really like a great deal). I expect Twi will only get better. And they are already very very good.

(More about Twi at Friendly Ghost, the collective that is releasing the album, or, I suppose, helping the band to release it.)

The American Opry

This amazing find came courtesy of my friends Laura and Tim, who ran into this guy at a Will Oldham gig. I understand that Will Oldham is powerful force in contemporary music, and I too like those early Palace albums (especially Palace Brothers), but let us set aside Will Oldham and speak instead of this American Opry guy. The concept seems to be, based on what I can dig up on up MySpace, a newfangled approach to the field recording idea made popular by Alan Lomax. Chris, I think that’s his name, just goes out and records regular people singing and playing. He also seems to work as a fieldhand. (His note on the MySpace page is a pretty incredible combination of manifesto and critique of self.) As with Lomax, Chris seems to be attracted to the regional and the indigenous (I mean, he’s not going out to record electronica at some club), and therefore to preservation, but with a slightly postmodern spin on the whole thing: it’s not the 1930s anymore, and lots of these players have satellite tv and a wifi connection, and maybe they have their acoustic guitars wired up to their Facebook pages. Still, the field recording concept is noble and sublime, now as ever, and I am often as moved by music played by “non-musicians” or hobbyists as I am by music played by virtuosi. I guess it’s the whole range of possible musics that make listening such a way of life. This guy, Chris, the American Opry guy, seems to have that kind of spirit, the listening spirit.

Dan Friel

Electronic music is challenging these days. I suppose it is challenging because most of it just does that one thing, the house music thing, and we have just gotten used to it being used according a rigid template of clichés. All those faceless house music compilations with semi-clad Brazilian beauties on them and names like Techno From Rio, or some shit, the same fucking breakbeats in the same fucking places, and the same boring sine waves being played on the same sampled analogue synths. It’s a dead medium, and it does nothing but delude people with too much disposable income or too much ecstasy, into believing they are having a spiritual experience. When they are not. They are just getting separated from their cash. Don’t get me started. That said, when an electronic artist comes along who doesn’t traffic in these cliches (Mouse on Mars, or Oval, or Matmos), it’s so refreshing. The secret, I figure, is melody. When the electronic beeps and blips come closer to having actual melody, then they become, well, sort of funny. And when they are funny, they are so much more interesting. Joelle Sun, whom I met on Facebook, and about whom I know nothing but that she likes robots, told me to listen to Dan Friel, and I was really delighted by the encounter. He has another band, I am told, and perhaps that band is more conventional. But this is electronic music that sounds like what your Casio would play if it drank a cocktail of battery acid, absinthe, and crystal meth. I don’t think there’s a sample on the whole thing. (I think sampling is not really very defensible at this late date. I know that an accelerated culture prefers collage, blah blah blah.) Friel engages the Indian, raga-like component of early electronica, the part that produced the early Tangerine Dream albums, and Terry Riley, but he also seems to like roller rink music, and guitar feedback, or things that sound like guitar feedback, and free jazz. He lists Sun Ra and John Fahey as influences, and you can hear it.

The Mercantillers

John Domini, a very interesting novelist who teaches at Grinnell College, pointed me toward his daughter’s band, and my feeling is that his daughter’s band is good and is well on their way. Not long after, he included me on an announcement for a gig by his cousin’s bar band in New York City. I don’t think he was under the impression that I was going to be seriously interested in the bar band. But wait! This is not a bar band, except in the way that the Pogues were (are) a bar band, which is to say that the Mercantillers have that reckless, out of control quality that can be calibrated only with a lot of heart. By their own account, they mix country and traditional Americana with sea chanteys and some originals, but such a description doesn’t quite capture the punk rock uptempo quality of their emotional register. The instrumentation consists of a brace of guitar players and rhythm section augmented by banjo, accordion, and some horns. The vocals sound, uh, not overrehearsed—in a very agreeable way. Intonation is not considered an essential quality of the singing. Guys go ARGGGH in the background now and then. In short, this is the kind of band that plays for all ages at neighborhood cultural centers, as well as at bars. The Mercantillers have a couple of albums out, and I hope they make many more–without ever encountering a click track or any other studio invention that slicks up their sound.

Less the Band

Adam Rapp, who I think is mostly the singer here, and the uniting force, is best known as a playwright, and an extremely good one at that. As I understand it, he made this band to do some live performing in the course of a play that he wrote, after which the band kind of took on a life of its own. The doubt one might have about such an endeavor was that is was too performative, you know, rock and roll in that Broadway kinda way. Like Meatloaf or Ellen Foley. Maybe Adam or the others would sing too well, you know? On the contrary, there’s something refreshing about this band, or what I have heard of it. They really have a band sound, and it’s an old kind of band sound. I mean, they are a little bit slick, but slick at sounding like a CBGB’s band circa 1979. There’s a little Velvets in here, and a little X, a little Wire Train, a little Mink DeVille, a little power pop (Plimsouls), and a little Tom Jones. You could do a lot worse. And here’s the best part! They self-released the album! This band plays at Mercury Lounge, opening for this hip band and that hip band–they are extremely well connected, as they would be—but they released the album on CD Baby themselves, and they have stayed true to a pretty stripped down and self-generated career model. I am willing to bet there aren’t any managers or publicists breathing down their necks. They do what they do because it’s pleasing them to do it. In fact, you could say that about just about every band on this list, and that’s something to be honored and appreciated, self-determination.

dd/mm/yyyy

My friend Emily went to see these guys at SxSW, just because she liked the name, and you have to admit that this is a very good band name. They are from Toronto, which seems to be a place that has generated some fine music recently, and this band is no exception. I suppose that they are post-punk, making use of some of that same late seventies, early eighties stuff that has motivated a number of British bands a few years ago (I’m thinking of a set of influences that includes Wire, Pere Ubu, P.I.L., early XTC, etc.). But dd/mm/yyyy are so concerted, so hell-bent, that they sort of transcend that era in their relentless devotion to tricky tempo changes, vintage analogue synthesizer (sounds like one of those homemade oscillator kits), slapback echo on the vocals, and sheer noise. Everyone seems sing, or lots of people in the band sing, so they get away with nice counterpoint, or what passes for counterpoint when you’re shouting a lot. The arrangements, in the kitchiness, are not unlike another great Canadian band, Do Make Say Think, but since Do Make Say Think are an instrumental band, dd/mm/yyyy carve out some space by virtue of being song-oriented. There’s a cartoon-y earnestness to the eccentricity here, as if they just discovered how to play in 5/8 or in 9/8, but as a result the whole feels incredibly enthusiastic, new, and unpretentious. In a way, dd/mm/yyyy are already too well known for this blog, but since they were new to me, I’m including the recommendation here. This is the best new band I’ve heard in a while.

Blind Buddy Moody

He’s really blind, and his name is really Moody, and I don’t think he’s any relation to me, but you never know. Most of the Moodys go back to one British wastrel from the 16th century, who fished King Henry (can’t remember which one) out of a lake. Anyway, Buddy is from Tampa, and he plays old country and western music, which is the only kind that makes any sense, and his originals sound as old and written in stone as his classics. He yodels a little and plays acoustic guitar and harmonica and dobro, and his voice is a rich baritone with a little microtonal warble that recalls Tennesse Ernie Ford. On MySpace there’s a fair amount of audience talking during the live numbers, and that gives the recordings a very historical feeling. You can imagine this guy playing by himself on some busy thoroughfare, and I guess that’s how Randy Polumbo, an old friend of mine from college days, heard Buddy. Outdoors, at some art fair in Florida, as I recall it. As with The American Opry (see above), this is a music of an actual person playing an actual guitar, and summoning up a genuine time and place and locale. (I recommend, especially, his stunning recording “Mule Train,” replete with simulated mule calls). This is how human beings make music when their musical inclinations are not being concealed or cosmetically surgered by machines. You can learn a lot about civilization from listening to this kind of thing.

Bonus find: Grand Duchy

This is a unrestrained shout-out for a record that was until recently only released in the EU (I think that situation has now been remedied by Cooking Vinyl records). It’s the newest project from Black Francis (of the Pixies)–here collaborating with his wife Violet Clark. It’s the most interesting side project Francis has ever done (I have always found Frank Black solo work a little challenging for some reason–as if he wants to resist what makes him great in the first place). These are pop songs–with a lot of Pixies resonances. But there’s something else going on here too, and

it’s not only Violet Clark’s voice, which has a sultry sixties girl group quality. The chemistry between the singers is palpable, e.g., and you start to realize, upon considering this chemistry, that what made the Black Francis/Kim Deal partnership great was not the friction, it was more that Black Francis’s intensity just sounds really great counterposed with a woman’s voice. At one point Kim and Francis must have had really good chemistry too. Meanwhile, a lot of this record borrows from eighties Britpop. There’s a Cure/New Order/Jesus and Mary Chain quality to the way the keyboards work, and to the way the melodies are constructed. But the whole thing is also really ragged, as if a lot of it were made at home, or by the two of them without much interference from producers or other musicians. There’s a lot of drum machine on it, in fact, which is the sine qua non of cheapness these days. And yet the offhandedness is charming and Francis sounds fully engaged, exalting in working with someone he really cares about, and the songwriting is great, and both singers are allusive and complex (it’s not a Black Francis album, that is, on which his wife merely appears), and the hooks really grow on you. I count myself as a passionate Pixies fan somewhat disappointed by how that band has been treated by history (and I think the band is its own worst enemy and this is part of the problem), but this album kind of makes the old magic apparent all over again.

In conclusion, let me say that these are all provisional listening experiences, and I don’t entirely trust provisional listening experiences. It’s better to listen to something for a long time, and, in fact, I often like albums better when I resist them at first. When there is work associated with understanding songs, their treasures are more valuable. Nevertheless, these are artists that were suggested by friends and readers of what I’m writing here, and that informal circulation of enthusiasms is part of what makes avid listening exciting–coming upon the buried treasure without knowing anything about it–so I offer this grab-bag of surprises that have passed the irritation test recently, with the hope that those of you out there will continue to send me suggestions. Lots of them. It’s a big part of what makes this blog fun.
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Julie Vanderburg is a painter, jewelry designer, and mother of three from Seattle, Washington, who is distinguished, among these other things, by the fact that she has been reading the same book over and over again for a very long time. …more

I love the city of Tucson, Arizona, because I like places that have run out of luck, and I think running out of luck makes for good music. Running out of luck makes for a lot of good things, in fact. Good writing. Good sunrises. Complicated futures. Everything easy is dead inside somehow. I assume that Tucson doesn’t think it has run out of luck, but you only have to visit to know what I mean. Maybe Tucson never had any luck in the first place. Many places have none, and yet people relocate to these places nonetheless.

Among Tucson’s areas of especial bad luck: it has virtually no water. It’s drier than almost anywhere in the USA. The aquifer underneath it has been sucked mostly dry and is on the point of collapsing, or so the doomsayers say, and the pools outside of town that are supposed to replenish the underground aquifer are just evaporation pools, or so it is said, and the doomsayers are probably right. Then there is the nearness of the border and the country to the south. This makes for a brisk trade in undocumented people coming and going, bringing about the complicated and ambiguous and electrifying border culture phenomenon. Which around Tucson is noteworthy, in part, for its hard luck and poverty. While it is true that South Tucson is its own city, that can’t disguise the fact that the struggling South Tucson and the struggling south side of Tucson proper are one and the same thing, dangerous, with lots of gang activity, lots of crystal meth, lots of people who are having trouble finding work, lots of people who don’t speak English and who don’t have much to lose, making Tucson, this city I love so fervently, a hive of car theft activity and violent crime, much more so than the city where I nominally live, New York City. (I should also say that the south side is more colorful, literally, and has amazing food.) If all of that weren’t enough, Tucson is startlingly hot much of the year. It’s also paved over in amerciless way. The heat shimmers off the blacktop, you see it when you’re driving, which you are bound to do a lot, and reality goes all hallucinatory, shimmery, as if they put mescaline or peyote in the water supply; you move slowly from curb to vehicle, because there is no other approach to life that makes sense, in summer, and the animals from the desert, as desperate as the residents, crowd into town, the coyotes, and the javelinas, the overly tanned homeless population, and occasionally, the mountain lions crowd in too, especially in that rich neighborhood up by

the canyon, up there the mountain lions get out into the carefully xeroscaped yards of the rich people, and they get habituated to trash-picking, and then they will attempt to take out the occasional jogger or overly tanned homeless person. Anyway, a lot of Sonoran Arizona is like this, is like nowhere else in the USA, and that’s why I like it, because it’s crime ridden and physically dangerous and poisonous, what with all the snakes and cacti. I like Tucson because it seems like it just can’t go on this way. Oh, and it’s a college town, too, so it has its share of kids with purple hair and fishnets and jump boots. These kids look like they are part of the indigenous landscape.

Probably for all these desertified reasons, Sonoran Arizona has produced its share of interesting and rather strange bands. Among my favorites is the Tubes. The Tubes, you may recall, were a kind of boring band from the early MTV era who produced a mediocrity called “Talk To Ya Later.” I think I can say without fear of contradiction that we should be suspicious of any song with “Ya” in the title. But this is not an exemplary Tubes song. “Talk To Ya Later” comes from a period when the best songwriter in the band, Bill Spooner, was already fallen on somewhat delinquent times. On the other hand, the first three albums by the Tubes (The Tubes, Young and Rich, and Now) from when they had first moved from AZ to San Francisco, are remarkable and strange. There was no genre the band could not burlesque and reinvigorate, and they were such great players that they could do all this while flourishing with the occasional brilliant lick and bizarrely ornate arrangement—just enough to show that they knew how, without sounding showoffy. Their live shows were legendary. Their first album is remarkably hilarious and singular, with its science fiction synthesizer blips and nihilistic lyrics and choral arrangements.

Another unusual Arizonan band was the Meat Puppets. Again here, you have to locate the earlier material. Which glistens with a stoned, offhanded quality— Meat Puppets II, e.g., or Up On the Sun, or Huevos Rancheros—somewhere between Captain Beefheart, Black Oak Arkansas, and Rush, but with less professional credibility. Along the same lines, and perhaps from the same moment, were the Sun City Girls, a real favorite of mine for their world music fixations and their bad attitudes. Torch of the Mystics, their best album, manages to sound pyrotechnically dazzling and international without sounding like a Ry Cooder project. It also manages to preserve some of the punk rock creepiness and menace of their earlier albums. In this case, the band got older and stopped touring without losing what they once had, though I believe one of them, the drummer, recently passed away. They also started the Strange Frequencies label of “found” world music, any release of which is completely fascinating for those who want to get beyond the rigid formulae and predictable gestures of Western pop.

In Tucson itself, there is the two-headed monster of local popular music, viz., Giant Sand and Calexico. Calexico is perhaps the better known now, having sundered itself from Howe Gelb of Giant Sand with whom they earlier collaborated. But to my ears Calexico, while having all the requisite skills and a charming Mexicali inflection, is the less interesting of the two. They are very skillful musicians, sensitive renderers, but they are not writers. Whereas Howe Gelb has vision, and the vision is deeply melancholy, and slow-moving, in a really Tucson-like way. You can imagine that it takes Howe a fair amount of time to get started in the morning; Howe could easily abandon the project, no matter what the project is; Howe understands the complexities of life in the Southwest, and thereby he understands some of our national difficulties, entire, because (arguably): as the Southwest goes so goes the nation. The Southwest suffers cruelly under the lash of the Big Collapse of Capital, the Southwest had a speculative real estate market, the Southwest is a bellwether for what comes next, in immigration, in environmental policy, in water rights.

Now, when I began composing these notes for this site, I remarked that I was interested in hearing from people out there about some of their favorite unsigned and unreleased musicians, and in the course of this attempt to reach out I fell into communication with a musician from Tucson called Maggie Golston. I don’t know very much about Maggie Golston, except for one tantalizing fact: she used to operate a very good bookstore. One thing about Tucson that is consistent with its desperate qualities (as catalogued above): it has nowadays a wealth of mediocre bookstores. The best bookstore in town, actually, is the used bookstore, called Bookman’s. (Which also does a fine business in used CDs.) For new books, you are basically shit out of luck in Tucson, unless you want to go to one of those fucking horrible paved over strip malls that have raped much of the town, where you will no doubt find an understaffed and underserved Border’s or Barnes and Noble, and a few lonely souls pawing over the latest murder mystery. Anyway, Maggie Golston had this bookstore, and no longer does, and this I assume has to do with the cruel realities of mercantile life in a town that balances its budget by selling condos to retirees.

I investigated further. Golston has some songs up on her MySpace page, and these are good, but when I wrote to her that I was liking some of the songs there, she told me that the “best song” on her album, her words, was not available on MySpace (though it is now). I got myself a copy. As to the song, let me first say that one thing a lot of desert music is not: Goth. The Goth thing just doesn’t seem to play well in Sonoran Arizona, maybe because layers of black clothes are contraindicated in overpowering dry heat. There’s hardcore in AZ, there’s twang, there’s the skatepunk stuff, but not so much Goth. Maggie Golston, however, writes, and therefore she has a writer’s interest in song forms that leave a lot of room for the words, and mood, and that means that she likes people who have Gothic aspects to what they do, like Nick Cave. Maybe there’s a little Leonard Cohen in her diet of influences, too, and some Tom Waits.

Because of her strange stew of influences, and the way these go with her local landscape, “Black Capsules,” the best song according to Maggie, is, yes, very, very interesting, very compelling. First, Maggie has a really alluring (and nicely uninflected) voice. It’s alto, slightly smoky, and with an urgent prosody to it, sort of like Debora Iyall from Romeo Void. Or maybe she’s a more urgently feminine Carla Bozulich. In “Black Capsule,” she has lots and lots of reverb ornamenting her voice. Sounds almost like it was recorded through an intercom or in the echoing interiors of a semi-demolished mall corridor. “Black Capsules” is structured according to rules derived from the Bob Dylan school of multiple verses, lots and lots of verses (9:02!), without feeling a great need to develop rapidly. The ensemble is small and simple—acoustic guitar, drums, accordion (mixed way back)—and the percussion, which was apparently recorded late at night by a battery of infrequent drummers, slips in and out of the pulse, giving the whole thing that woozy, slightly drug-addled feeling that I associate with Tonight’s the Night, by Neil Young. Upon repeated listens, the song only gets better, more grim, especially as it slips into some scalding white noise toward the end of its momentous journey. And that is before you gaze upon its allusive and unsettling lyrics:

I can still see the dashboard that carries your face past the checkpoint
You’re bending your words with the frequencies I had to teach you
I can follow your trace with machines whose long names will escape me
A machine is a heart is a galaxy trying to reach you

You’re an engine with pistons that kick up the dust of a presence
You’re a laser that cuts me to ribbons from light years of distance
You’re a mirror, a pistol, an airplane propeller that hisses
You’re the space where I put all that matters, you’re only an absence

These lyrics, as I understand them, are full of Neruda’s brokenheartedness, Hispanic and Latin American fatalism, admixed with the strange desertified hallucinatory quality, of which you should now consider yourself informed. The results are sometimes like a Goth version of Garcia Marquez, or maybe a Hispanic version of P. K. Dick. The narrator alludes again and again to the black capsules in her pocket, though we are not always sure of their particular chemistry, their makeup (could be NASA-prescribed cyanide, could be something with a more sedative purpose). There are also ghosts in virtually every verse, and what of the “spaceman” and the “checkpoints,” of which we hear so much?
It all reminds me of a couple of a trip I once made to Portal, AZ, a town on the New Mexican border, a town with almost no one living in it. I love towns with almost no one in them. They can see you coming from a great distance. On the way to Portal, I stopped in the last berg with a Safeway. The big city, comparatively speaking. This berg, whose name I am excising, was a true ghost town. The roads there were still. There were people living there, somewhere, because someone was going to that Safeway and the drive-thru MacDonald’s, but all the trailers had tinfoil in the windows to reflect away the violence of the topography. A great place for a meth lab, and there were billboards dotting the empty roads warning about the horrors thereof. There were the occasional border patrol guys, parked, leaning out of rolled-down windows, looking lost and bored. Actual tumbleweeds. The dirt roads led from there up into the mountains, but in such a winding and irresolute way that no car could ever have made that passage.

What did the desert offer the residents of that town? Did they know anymore of their surroundings than they tuned in on their satellite televisions? Did they know only empty spaces and an absolute paucity of economic opportunities, or, the extermination of their people for the greater glory of European expansionism? Did they long for families back on the other side of the border? Crystal meth? Safeway burros that you just throw in the microwave? Did they, these heliotropes, wander out into their landscape, and glory in the expanses, or were they so used to these expanses that they didn’t even see them?

Golston’s song, with its uncanny lyrics, so full of desert resignation and, as she puts it, “bad excuses,” is a great artifact of this lonesome Southwest. If you offer her money for her songs, on MySpace, maybe she can amass the capital to reopen her bookstore.