Since 2005, Larkin Grimm has made four albums, the first of which are unvarnished howls from the world of psychedelic folk. …more

The early, formative period of rock and roll criticism produced three great and indelible voices, three voices that have gone on to influence every writer who has written about popular music in the years since. Those three voices belong to Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, and Greil Marcus. Bangs died young, and Marcus has drifted off into a phase where his muscles, at least to this reader, are more academic than hortatory. …more

For an entire decade, between 1975 and 1985, Brian Eno could do no wrong. In fact, even for the four or five years before 1975 he could do no wrong. …more

Mike Doughty is a singer-songwriter of a particularly urban sort, whose compositions, though guitar-based and often not terribly far from the ideal of the busker, are, nonetheless, cross-pollinated by just about everything audible in New York City …more

Aarhus, Denmark, is the second largest city in that nation after Copenhagen, and a center of the arts and education. I was recently there for a literary festival, …more

Like other people who once had a childhood, I sometimes give in to fits of longing for the music I cared most about when young. In particular, I give in to reunion fever. …more

Tad Friend’s profile of John Lurie in the 8/16-8/23 issue of The New Yorker from last year starts thus: “From 1984-1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face.” A curious and disheartening opening. Hard to think otherwise. And the profile does not improve in the column inches that follow. …more

Rick Moody interviews Moby about his obsession with Drum Machines: …more

It’s hard not to think a lot about Tucson lately, a place where I have spent a lot of time in the last five years, and which I have written about multiply on this site already. (See, e.g., my columns of January 29 and August 28, 2009.) Not long ago I was visiting there and met up briefly with Vicki Brown, a violinist of whom I have written above. She in turn brought along a singer-songwriter from Oregon called Amy Rude. …more

Nick Delany turned up at a reading I gave at the Brooklyn Museum in November of 2010. He remarked, during the question and answer portion of the event, that he had mostly been reading just one book for the last ten years. …more

On 11/29, a band in Brooklyn called The Universal Thump staged a fortieth anniversary rehabilitation of George Harrison’s monumental All Things Must Pass album. …more

I met Lauren (whose last name we are suppressing here) at a writing workshop in Provincetown almost fifteen years ago. She was shy, funny, brilliant, and very, very talented, and she dressed like one of those kids who had been to every show that Mission of Burma ever played. I was surprised, therefore, to learn that she worked in a very glamorous department store (not supposed to say which one!) selling shoes. …more

The city of brotherly love is always reinventing itself, coming up with varieties of eccentricity meant to distract from its diet of horrors, for example, a good baseball team. …more

In April of this year, two writers, Matthew Quick (author of The Silver Linings Playbook and Sorta Like a Rock Star) and Alicia Bessette (Simply From Scratch), decided to make a blog to help promote their efforts, and, in the process, they began offering space to fellow writers of their acquaintance in which to compose stories of kindness. …more

It’s the Internet, where I am plying my trade here, and it’s meant to be the Wild West—unregulated, unruly, unpredictable. …more

The millennium is not very old, it’s true, and yet today is the day on which I feel obliged to anoint a best song of the millennium, and to risk open debate on the subject, even though I recognize that these kinds of assertions are rash, and, in the main, unwarranted. But here it is, nonetheless. …more

Recently, I’ve been digging again through the wilds of the CD Baby site, where no print run is too small and no approach to music is too individual, and in this regard I have found a lot of great work recently, some of which I will deal with here soon, but none of it more interesting than an Italian exponent of extended vocal technique named Romina Daniele. …more

Rick Moody shares the music he’s listening to now thanks to suggestions shared by others: …more

William Basinski was born in Texas in 1958, and, after a childhood playing wind instruments, he became in the early-eighties a composer of ambient and minimalist compositions. …more

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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