Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Feast and Famine
From the ages of 16 to about 24, I spent every cent of disposable income on an addiction.
Black and tactile, with reassuring heaviness and warmth, everything about vinyl fascinated me. Like many obsessives, I dug through record bins and yard sales; I would scour e-Bay for old Scott Walker records, check bulletin boards for rare Mo’ Wax “Headz” compilations and order countless drum and bass 12’s from shops in London -- exorbitant shipping fees and all.
Many others still share this addiction. Vinyl sales – spurred by DJ culture, audiophiles, and perhaps for the reasons I’m about to outline – are actually up in the UK today.
Thinking about this act of collecting and experiencing vinyl as a physical manifestation of sound, I started considering the current climate of digital media, and how, when records are reduced to easily distributed files -- intangible 1’s and 0’s -- content can be devalued.
It’s almost too easy to overdose, flailing softly amid notifications and options, losing precious moments in the white noise of constant information.
We live in a time of tremendous access. Obscure film and television clips previously relegated to memory and subconscious are now on YouTube. Music comes from peer-to-peer networks, connected friends and, often as a last resort, through legitimate download sites.
In many ways, this is great. Palates are becoming more and more refined and the barrier to hearing new sounds and genres is lower than it's ever been. As a result, people have developed more of an open mind. Self-described fans of indie rock, who might have never listened to anything urban and/or electronic ten years ago, are now checking out Dubstep nights. Shoegazers are discovering freak folk, dub-techno and countless other genres with ease – and in ways they inform one and other. This is all incredibly positive.
But, in the wake of this digital feast, there is a famine. Infinite accessibility and portability means many people aren’t experiencing music as deeply as they once did. I suffer from chronic iTunes attention deficit syndrome, clicking through the best bits of several songs and mixes throughout the course of an hour. It’s a forgotten luxury to let an album play through and listen with undivided attention.
I think back to the time when I ordered Sigur Ros’ Agaetis Byrun from Fatcat’s mailorder site and spent much of a year drinking it in, learning every little nuance and texture of the album. Later I played Radiohead’s Kid A over and over so many times on my headphones that I still recall every seamless segue between songs.
Skip forward to today. I recently declared promo bankruptcy. I’m fortunate enough to receive piles of free music in my mailbox, digital zip files of new singles, and enthusiastic recommendations beamed from friends over instant messenger. Inspired in part by the late John Peel, for several years I tried to give everything a listen -- however cursory -- to make sure I wasn’t missing out on something truly special. But in this effort, combined with personal music buying, mix-making and live shows, I suffered a figurative death from a thousand cuts.
For a fleeting moment, I lost all perspective. I didn’t know what was good or bad anymore. The constant onslaught of new music turned into a pink haze of static—as overwhelming as the first time I heard Loveless, but nowhere near as sublime. The consumption of music had lost its pleasure.
To remedy this, I had to force myself to remember everything that goes into creating a single piece of music: the nuances of writing and recording, the creative tension, frustration, aspiration, and the seemingly simple goal of making tones sit nicely together in a mix. The mastering, re-touching, editing and hiss of the tape reel. The magic when things congeal into something special. All of the things that happen behind the new barrier to entry, that little icon you click on your desktop, the bubble mailer with a promo CD in the mailbox.
Things are better now. The panic has subsided. But I learned a valuable lesson that’s starting to seep into other areas of my life: Take your time. Respect the craft and remember the process. Put a record on the turntable and listen all the way through. Enjoy the permanence of physical things and what goes into their creation.
From the ages of 16 to about 24, I spent every cent of disposable income on an addiction.
Black and tactile, with reassuring heaviness and warmth, everything about vinyl fascinated me. Like many obsessives, I dug through record bins and yard sales; I would scour e-Bay for old Scott Walker records, check bulletin boards for rare Mo’ Wax “Headz” compilations and order countless drum and bass 12’s from shops in London -- exorbitant shipping fees and all.
Many others still share this addiction. Vinyl sales – spurred by DJ culture, audiophiles, and perhaps for the reasons I’m about to outline – are actually up in the UK today.
Thinking about this act of collecting and experiencing vinyl as a physical manifestation of sound, I started considering the current climate of digital media, and how, when records are reduced to easily distributed files -- intangible 1’s and 0’s -- content can be devalued.
It’s almost too easy to overdose, flailing softly amid notifications and options, losing precious moments in the white noise of constant information.
We live in a time of tremendous access. Obscure film and television clips previously relegated to memory and subconscious are now on YouTube. Music comes from peer-to-peer networks, connected friends and, often as a last resort, through legitimate download sites.
In many ways, this is great. Palates are becoming more and more refined and the barrier to hearing new sounds and genres is lower than it's ever been. As a result, people have developed more of an open mind. Self-described fans of indie rock, who might have never listened to anything urban and/or electronic ten years ago, are now checking out Dubstep nights. Shoegazers are discovering freak folk, dub-techno and countless other genres with ease – and in ways they inform one and other. This is all incredibly positive.
But, in the wake of this digital feast, there is a famine. Infinite accessibility and portability means many people aren’t experiencing music as deeply as they once did. I suffer from chronic iTunes attention deficit syndrome, clicking through the best bits of several songs and mixes throughout the course of an hour. It’s a forgotten luxury to let an album play through and listen with undivided attention.
I think back to the time when I ordered Sigur Ros’ Agaetis Byrun from Fatcat’s mailorder site and spent much of a year drinking it in, learning every little nuance and texture of the album. Later I played Radiohead’s Kid A over and over so many times on my headphones that I still recall every seamless segue between songs.
Skip forward to today. I recently declared promo bankruptcy. I’m fortunate enough to receive piles of free music in my mailbox, digital zip files of new singles, and enthusiastic recommendations beamed from friends over instant messenger. Inspired in part by the late John Peel, for several years I tried to give everything a listen -- however cursory -- to make sure I wasn’t missing out on something truly special. But in this effort, combined with personal music buying, mix-making and live shows, I suffered a figurative death from a thousand cuts.
For a fleeting moment, I lost all perspective. I didn’t know what was good or bad anymore. The constant onslaught of new music turned into a pink haze of static—as overwhelming as the first time I heard Loveless, but nowhere near as sublime. The consumption of music had lost its pleasure.
To remedy this, I had to force myself to remember everything that goes into creating a single piece of music: the nuances of writing and recording, the creative tension, frustration, aspiration, and the seemingly simple goal of making tones sit nicely together in a mix. The mastering, re-touching, editing and hiss of the tape reel. The magic when things congeal into something special. All of the things that happen behind the new barrier to entry, that little icon you click on your desktop, the bubble mailer with a promo CD in the mailbox.
Things are better now. The panic has subsided. But I learned a valuable lesson that’s starting to seep into other areas of my life: Take your time. Respect the craft and remember the process. Put a record on the turntable and listen all the way through. Enjoy the permanence of physical things and what goes into their creation.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Greetings from a hazy and sweltering Tokyo.
Few things:
I spent a couple days last week in Chicago with my old friend Karl (of Speck Mountain fame).
Their latest LP will be out next Spring on Carrottop in the US and Peacefrog in the UK. Will have some tempting bits and bobs to tide you over in the meantime. Stay tuned.
Also, here's a beautiful track from Honey Owens' Valet project. This is easily my favorite track of the moment. She's incredibly talented so be sure to pick up her latest LP, Blood is Clean.
Valet- Kehaar
Grab the Speck Mountain Valet cover at their RCRD LBL page.
Few things:
I spent a couple days last week in Chicago with my old friend Karl (of Speck Mountain fame).
Their latest LP will be out next Spring on Carrottop in the US and Peacefrog in the UK. Will have some tempting bits and bobs to tide you over in the meantime. Stay tuned.
Also, here's a beautiful track from Honey Owens' Valet project. This is easily my favorite track of the moment. She's incredibly talented so be sure to pick up her latest LP, Blood is Clean.
Valet- Kehaar
Grab the Speck Mountain Valet cover at their RCRD LBL page.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Thursday, June 19, 2008
From this week's Earplug:
For years, Montreal's MUTEK festival felt like an upstart — an isolated outpost for experimental electronic music and the kind of more populist (but hardly popular) club fare that's perpetually struggled to convince North Americans of its relevance. But, after eight annual installments and numerous satellite projects (in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, India, China, Berlin, and elsewhere), this year's event reached a sort of critical mass, boasting both the smoothest delivery and most diverse offerings in the history of the event.
A case in point, Underground Resistance supergroup Interstellar Fugitives are far from the MUTEK norm: their opening-night performance integrated smoke machines, angry political sloganeering, dystopian sci-fi projections, masks, and five men clothed in all black. For nearly 90 minutes, the group kept a small throng stage-front at the warehouse-like SAT space, covering material from 2006 UR label compilation Interstellar Fugitives 2, a stylistic hodgepodge that runs from brooding downtempo to kicked-up Detroit techno. Special mention goes to MIA, on drum pads, and hypeman Atlantis (we think — they were masked with blindfolds for much of the time). We were definitely feeling the rejection of personality and injection of politics into dance music that UR represents. Put against something as flashy and indulgent as Modeselektor's set two nights later, it gave the five-night MUTEK party some gravity.
More so than in recent years, dub, breaks, and digi-crunk were also on prominent display. Friday's Nocturne offered a reprieve from the 4/4 techno onslaught with performances from hometown turntablist-done-well Kid Koala as well as Megasoid and Knifehandchop. Fresh from the success of Happy Birthday! and seemingly nonstop global touring, Modeselektor grabbed the headline spot. While the act may have lacked the playful, on-the-fly spontaneity and jump-up/ragga stylings of earlier incarnations, the duo made up for it by the sheer size and impact of the performance, packing extra punch courtesy of larger-than-life visuals from Bpitch's in-house design team, Pfadfinderei.
Elsewhere, Flying Lotus made up for a rained-out Piknic Électronik with a stunningly powerful indoor set, focusing largely on improvised selections from his Reset EP and recently released Los Angeles LP. The set blurred the line between live performance and DJ set at times, as Lotus cut up and dropped in familiar breaks and bass lines from other artists' releases (he earned a significant crowd reaction to the razor-sharp hi-hats and familiar wood-block percussion of Burial).
Representing the full-on dubstep side of the equation, Kode9 and Spaceape played after a sleepy-yet-psychedelic run through the new Quiet Village record on !K7. Their performance had power, messianic incantations, and more than enough raw bass intensity to convert a completely new audience to the sound (it was apparent from the steady stream of people entering the room that word-of-mouth raves were working their way around).
Sometimes relegated to the daytime periphery of the festival (read: slept through by exhausted ravers), this year's experimental and ambient installments — which went under the rubric of "audio/visual" fusions — were particularly strong. On Thursday, Freida Abtan warped and melted artfully captured videos of classic and modern dance, while Thrill Jockey's Németh and Hess constructed a cinematic dialogue between analogue synthesizer and live jazz kit. The following evening, two boldfaced names in experimental electronic music catapulted MUTEK's audio/visual daytime sessions into a must-attend event. The sold-out performances emphasized so-called "post-guitar," with Canadian Tim Hecker playing the warm, radiant sounds of his latest LP, Harmony in Ultraviolet, while later, Christian Fennesz dropped processed, crystalline guitar textures in front of a cinema-sized backdrop of beautifully moody visuals.
Of course, there was plenty of "proper" dance music as well, ranging from the techno onslaught of Danton Eeprom and Radio Slave — the latter pulled off a two-hour set on borrowed CDs after the airline lost his record bags — to more intimate post-minimal from Half Hawaii (Bruno Pronsato and Perlon's Sammy Dee) and Dave Aju. For a laptop performer, Aju is a treat to watch, grinning, bopping, and chanting along to oddball minimal tracks heavy on jazz sax samples, off-kilter, organic beats, and big, pillowy synth lines. Aju's forte is rubbery, funky songs that recall Kit Clayton when he's being floaty. The Savoy, a small, carpeted side room adjacent to Metropolis' bi-level space, was immediately thrumming with bodies and, soon enough, sprouted a queue that wouldn't abate all weekend.
Sunday dawned grey, but it wasn't enough to deter several hundred celebrants from flocking to a riverside park, umbrellas and all, to dance beneath an enormous Calder stabile during sets from Nôze, Ernesto Ferreyra, Onur Özer, and Mathias Kaden. No matter that the lineup had been programmed with sun in mind; Ózer and Kaden's three-hour tag-team set closed out the festival like a rain dance in reverse, with congas and African chants raised like invocations for the precipitation to abate. By nightfall, it mostly had.
-Michael Byrne, Colin J. Nagy, and Philip Sherburne
For years, Montreal's MUTEK festival felt like an upstart — an isolated outpost for experimental electronic music and the kind of more populist (but hardly popular) club fare that's perpetually struggled to convince North Americans of its relevance. But, after eight annual installments and numerous satellite projects (in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, India, China, Berlin, and elsewhere), this year's event reached a sort of critical mass, boasting both the smoothest delivery and most diverse offerings in the history of the event.
A case in point, Underground Resistance supergroup Interstellar Fugitives are far from the MUTEK norm: their opening-night performance integrated smoke machines, angry political sloganeering, dystopian sci-fi projections, masks, and five men clothed in all black. For nearly 90 minutes, the group kept a small throng stage-front at the warehouse-like SAT space, covering material from 2006 UR label compilation Interstellar Fugitives 2, a stylistic hodgepodge that runs from brooding downtempo to kicked-up Detroit techno. Special mention goes to MIA, on drum pads, and hypeman Atlantis (we think — they were masked with blindfolds for much of the time). We were definitely feeling the rejection of personality and injection of politics into dance music that UR represents. Put against something as flashy and indulgent as Modeselektor's set two nights later, it gave the five-night MUTEK party some gravity.
More so than in recent years, dub, breaks, and digi-crunk were also on prominent display. Friday's Nocturne offered a reprieve from the 4/4 techno onslaught with performances from hometown turntablist-done-well Kid Koala as well as Megasoid and Knifehandchop. Fresh from the success of Happy Birthday! and seemingly nonstop global touring, Modeselektor grabbed the headline spot. While the act may have lacked the playful, on-the-fly spontaneity and jump-up/ragga stylings of earlier incarnations, the duo made up for it by the sheer size and impact of the performance, packing extra punch courtesy of larger-than-life visuals from Bpitch's in-house design team, Pfadfinderei.
Elsewhere, Flying Lotus made up for a rained-out Piknic Électronik with a stunningly powerful indoor set, focusing largely on improvised selections from his Reset EP and recently released Los Angeles LP. The set blurred the line between live performance and DJ set at times, as Lotus cut up and dropped in familiar breaks and bass lines from other artists' releases (he earned a significant crowd reaction to the razor-sharp hi-hats and familiar wood-block percussion of Burial).
Representing the full-on dubstep side of the equation, Kode9 and Spaceape played after a sleepy-yet-psychedelic run through the new Quiet Village record on !K7. Their performance had power, messianic incantations, and more than enough raw bass intensity to convert a completely new audience to the sound (it was apparent from the steady stream of people entering the room that word-of-mouth raves were working their way around).
Sometimes relegated to the daytime periphery of the festival (read: slept through by exhausted ravers), this year's experimental and ambient installments — which went under the rubric of "audio/visual" fusions — were particularly strong. On Thursday, Freida Abtan warped and melted artfully captured videos of classic and modern dance, while Thrill Jockey's Németh and Hess constructed a cinematic dialogue between analogue synthesizer and live jazz kit. The following evening, two boldfaced names in experimental electronic music catapulted MUTEK's audio/visual daytime sessions into a must-attend event. The sold-out performances emphasized so-called "post-guitar," with Canadian Tim Hecker playing the warm, radiant sounds of his latest LP, Harmony in Ultraviolet, while later, Christian Fennesz dropped processed, crystalline guitar textures in front of a cinema-sized backdrop of beautifully moody visuals.
Of course, there was plenty of "proper" dance music as well, ranging from the techno onslaught of Danton Eeprom and Radio Slave — the latter pulled off a two-hour set on borrowed CDs after the airline lost his record bags — to more intimate post-minimal from Half Hawaii (Bruno Pronsato and Perlon's Sammy Dee) and Dave Aju. For a laptop performer, Aju is a treat to watch, grinning, bopping, and chanting along to oddball minimal tracks heavy on jazz sax samples, off-kilter, organic beats, and big, pillowy synth lines. Aju's forte is rubbery, funky songs that recall Kit Clayton when he's being floaty. The Savoy, a small, carpeted side room adjacent to Metropolis' bi-level space, was immediately thrumming with bodies and, soon enough, sprouted a queue that wouldn't abate all weekend.
Sunday dawned grey, but it wasn't enough to deter several hundred celebrants from flocking to a riverside park, umbrellas and all, to dance beneath an enormous Calder stabile during sets from Nôze, Ernesto Ferreyra, Onur Özer, and Mathias Kaden. No matter that the lineup had been programmed with sun in mind; Ózer and Kaden's three-hour tag-team set closed out the festival like a rain dance in reverse, with congas and African chants raised like invocations for the precipitation to abate. By nightfall, it mostly had.
-Michael Byrne, Colin J. Nagy, and Philip Sherburne
Monday, June 16, 2008
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Instead of cluttering this site with half-formed thoughts and random items of interest, I've been posting a lot of interesting bits and bobs to Facebook on a near-daily basis. I find the most useful thing on there to be the feeds feature-- I love reading what friends post (articles, music, etc). It's a nice little personalized content filter in a world of too much shrapnel and white noise.
If you're so inclined, feel free to say hello here. Or share your Google reader shared items. Or just email me and say hello.
Also, I publish the Facebook feed to: cjn.tumblr.com if that is easier.
As always, thank you for reading this humble blog. I will start posting here more regularly, promise.
If you're so inclined, feel free to say hello here. Or share your Google reader shared items. Or just email me and say hello.
Also, I publish the Facebook feed to: cjn.tumblr.com if that is easier.
As always, thank you for reading this humble blog. I will start posting here more regularly, promise.
It's been a busy month of May: LA, DC for Radiohead (lawn seats in a downpour), Tokyo, Montreal for Mutek, and a quick breather in North Carolina.
Stay tuned for some photos when I get them downloaded from my loaner N95, as well as a Mutek writeup I contributed to in Earplug. There's also an interview with The Mole in the works.
In the meantime, Mr. Sherburne has a good writeup of the festival, which was incredibly good this year.
My personal highlights were Kode9/Spaceape, Chic Miniature, Flying Lotus, Fennesz and Tim Hecker. Unfortunately the Radio Slave set wasn't what I had hoped it would be, but was still great nonetheless.
Here are some things I've enjoyed over the past month:
Klimek- Dedications (wow)
Spiritualized- Songs in A&E
Nicola Ratti- From the Desert Came Saltwater
Nemeth- Film
The Mole- As High as the Sky
Muting the Noise (Innervisions Comp)
John Tejada- Where
I've also been revisiting the Cinematic Orchestra's back catalog as well as Root 70's Heaps Dub.
Stay tuned for some photos when I get them downloaded from my loaner N95, as well as a Mutek writeup I contributed to in Earplug. There's also an interview with The Mole in the works.
In the meantime, Mr. Sherburne has a good writeup of the festival, which was incredibly good this year.
My personal highlights were Kode9/Spaceape, Chic Miniature, Flying Lotus, Fennesz and Tim Hecker. Unfortunately the Radio Slave set wasn't what I had hoped it would be, but was still great nonetheless.
Here are some things I've enjoyed over the past month:
Klimek- Dedications (wow)
Spiritualized- Songs in A&E
Nicola Ratti- From the Desert Came Saltwater
Nemeth- Film
The Mole- As High as the Sky
Muting the Noise (Innervisions Comp)
John Tejada- Where
I've also been revisiting the Cinematic Orchestra's back catalog as well as Root 70's Heaps Dub.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Back by popular demand: the live Minilogue set from Panoramabar in a higher bitrate. Don't miss them drop Massive Attack's "Teardrop" about 37 minutes in. Wow.
Minilogue- Live in Berlin
Friday, May 09, 2008
I've been hibernating from this blog a bit.
Here are some things I've been into recently:
Osborne- Osborne
Dixon's DJing
High Places
Ryan Elliot Presents "The R Factor" (download the zip here)
Olafir Eliasson
The Ruby Suns- There Are Birds
Bruno Pronsato- Why cant they be like us
The new Speck Mountain LP (!)
Lykke Li
DJ Koze- Let's help me (an oldie but goodie)
Daso- Det
Resident Advisor
Elbee Bad- Show Me (another oldie)
Carl Craig- A Wonderful Life (classic)
Anything by Ame lately
Németh - Film
Traum 100 compilation
Laurent Garnier- Back to My Roots (both sides are killer)
Daso & Pawas- Det EP
Also: Gamall's blog and Talkwasadream. Don't miss This Month in Techno, either.
Next up: Tokyo and Montreal in May. Dispatches forthcoming.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Sunday Best!
For those of you in NYC, Justin Carter just sent this lineup through. Looks amazing.
Sunday Best! takes over The Yard, a leafy waterside lot on the Gowanus Canal for a nice, mid-afternoon barbecue. It’s no ordinary weenie roast, though. The bar-b’s organic and resident DJs Justin Carter, Eamon Harkin and Doug Singer play alongside some of the finest DJs to ever take on a back yard…
May 25
Roy Davis Jr – Chicago house legend playing his first New York set in years
June 01
King Britt – This party with the former Digable Planets member is FREE!
June 08
Trusme – A Manchester man walking in the very large shoes of Moodymann
June 15
Stefan Goldmann - Innervisions artist who makes jangling, melodic dance music
June 22
Afrika Bambaataa – The hip-hop progenitor and legend who still keeps it eclectic
June 29
Rick Wilhite and Jerome Derradji – Three Chairs member with Still Music founder
July 6
Riton – UK re-rubber on Berlin’s Get Physical imprint
July 13
Kevin Saunderson – The Detroit legend plays a special house set
July 20
Move D – Former Warp Records ambient artist now making super deep house
July 27
The Wurst BBQ – My Cousin Roy and Doug Lee serving up sausages!
August 3
Danny Wang – The prodigal progenitor of disco house returns to New York!
August 10
John Tejada – Maker of the lushest and bumpiest techno of the past decade
August 17
Pilooski – Paris’ edit-maker of the moment
August 24
Joakim – The Tigersushi and !K7 artist brings weird, organic dance jams
August 31
Metro Area – Hometown disco heroes close out the series nice and easy
For those of you in NYC, Justin Carter just sent this lineup through. Looks amazing.
Sunday Best! takes over The Yard, a leafy waterside lot on the Gowanus Canal for a nice, mid-afternoon barbecue. It’s no ordinary weenie roast, though. The bar-b’s organic and resident DJs Justin Carter, Eamon Harkin and Doug Singer play alongside some of the finest DJs to ever take on a back yard…
May 25
Roy Davis Jr – Chicago house legend playing his first New York set in years
June 01
King Britt – This party with the former Digable Planets member is FREE!
June 08
Trusme – A Manchester man walking in the very large shoes of Moodymann
June 15
Stefan Goldmann - Innervisions artist who makes jangling, melodic dance music
June 22
Afrika Bambaataa – The hip-hop progenitor and legend who still keeps it eclectic
June 29
Rick Wilhite and Jerome Derradji – Three Chairs member with Still Music founder
July 6
Riton – UK re-rubber on Berlin’s Get Physical imprint
July 13
Kevin Saunderson – The Detroit legend plays a special house set
July 20
Move D – Former Warp Records ambient artist now making super deep house
July 27
The Wurst BBQ – My Cousin Roy and Doug Lee serving up sausages!
August 3
Danny Wang – The prodigal progenitor of disco house returns to New York!
August 10
John Tejada – Maker of the lushest and bumpiest techno of the past decade
August 17
Pilooski – Paris’ edit-maker of the moment
August 24
Joakim – The Tigersushi and !K7 artist brings weird, organic dance jams
August 31
Metro Area – Hometown disco heroes close out the series nice and easy
Thursday, April 17, 2008
From SV4:
good Osborne "wreckage" pic
Speaking of which- the new Osborne record is stellar (and drops May 5th). Check Ghostly HQ to read about it and listen to samples.
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