Words About Sounds – Page 3

Don’cha Know I Get Emulsified

We each had about 20 minutes on the decks at Ci’en’s Pah-ti. This was obviously not a whole lot of time with which to reprazent, but therein lay the challenge! Here’s what I did with mine:

Emulsified (Yo La Tengo): Because I was playing something later which sounds quite similar to Griselda, because The Whole Of The Law isn’t really a party track, and because Blue Line Swinger would have taken up almost all of my allotted time. And because Emulsified is lovely.
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (Neutral Milk Hotel): Because I have lived in every moment of this album for the past 8 years, and it still transports me the same way it did the day I brought it home.
Baby Got Back (cover by Jonathan Coulton): Because this is just self-evidently awesome, and anyone who doesn’t appreciate it is an enemy of joy. And big butts.
Home Sweet Home (Kano): Okay, I knew this one and the next would pretty much go down like lead balloons among most of the crowd there, but I have to admit I didn’t care. The Amoy Street concrete just needed to hear this, okay?
Dancingbox (Modeselektor featuring TTC): I was somehow really in the mood to play some TTC, but Leguman just loses so much when you don’t get to see it performed live by a guy with a big legume for a head. This track had been rocking my commute for a couple of months, so I used it instead.
Darling Nikki (Prince): Because every set needs some Prince. Who else is gonna rhyme “sex fiend” with “masturbating with a magazine”?
‘Cross The Breeze (Sonic Youth): Because you knew I’d get this in somewhere. :)

I only wish I’d been able to get there earlier, stay longer, and hear more of what other people played, but I didn’t dare to risk missing any of Gang Starr and left around midnight. Cheers to everyone I met, if you read this – I arrived feeling alone and awkward and weird but that quickly evaporated with your good company. And cheers, obviously, to Ci’en for organizing. Please do so again, I promise to stay and get trashed with all of you the next time!

Mogwai Noise Snippet

From a Mogwai gig review at The Guardian:

Not enough is written about the sensual pleasure of being bathed in noise. There’s probably a good reason for this. Pretension is a constant danger. It’s hard enough to articulate what rock music actually sounds and feels like when there are lyrics to analyse and themes to play with. When – as in the case of Mogwai, a largely instrumental Glaswegian five-piece – there are few words, just sinuous guitar lines erupting into ear-splitting volume, the risk of ending up in Pseud’s Corner, waffling on about cathedrals of sound, is high.

But here goes. Being bathed in a wash of deafening guitar noise is lovely.

It really is that simple. Lovely. :)

Not My 2005 Albums List

So yeah, it’s been pretty quiet here lately while I’m working on that year-end album list. It’s always a bit of a struggle to write about music when your music writing sucks.

But I thought I might as well throw anyone who’s bored a couple of bones in the meantime, while I agonize obsessively over the internal ordering of my top 12. (Yes, 12.)

Here are a few albums which aren’t in there. I’m fully aware that lots of other people love these albums, but for various reasons I’m unable to buy into the hype myself. No attempt has been made in the writing to spare myself any flaming – feel free to enjoy yourself in the comments if you think I’m a grumpy jaded old hatah. :)

Wolf Parade – Apologies To The Queen Mary: It’s not that this is a bad album – Dear Sons And Daughters Of Hungry Ghosts only narrowly missed the cut for my 2004 Songs To Thank MP3 Blogs For list, and You Are A Runner And I Am My Father’s Son is pretty good – but it simply doesn’t inflame me with enough passion to warrant a ranking on my list. Even though it’s objectively quite pleasant, I’d be hard-pressed to summon up much enthusiasm for it in a review without having to fake it. It might be something about music with the “Isaac Brock touch” that everyone else likes but I don’t – I’ve never been a Modest Mouse fan and I never understood the acclaim for The Moon And Antarctica either. Apologies To The Queen Mary is better than that album, but I still don’t feel any desire to listen to it very often, and when I do it fades into the background quite quickly.
Bloc Party – Silent Alarm: I bought this on the strength of She’s Hearing Voices (another close contender in my 2004 MP3 Blogs song list) but I now think that track was deceptively innovative. The first half of the album just sounds like reheated 90s Britpop and the second half a mishmash of various post-punk influences which move neither my heart, my head nor my feet. There are 2 exceptions – Price Of Gas and Luno have a touch of frenetic beautiful chaos to them – but 3 good songs isn’t what I normally buy albums to hear.
Magic Numbers – Magic Numbers: After a couple of listens my only abiding impression is of a lot of tweeness and winsome crooning and easy but utterly forgettable melodies. I think I’d probably have liked this when I was 16 or 17 but I guess my tastes must have moved on since then.
Antony And The Johnsons – I Am A Bird Now: I might well be totally alone here but this one really does absolutely nothing for me. How can something so overblown and overdramatic be so deathly dull?
Serena Maneesh – Serena Maneesh: I can’t disagree with the reviewers who say this is strongly influenced by MBV’s Isn’t Anything. Serena Maneesh’s self-titled does indeed remind me of that album except, that is, for one small but rather substantial difference – I don’t fall asleep after the first song of Isn’t Anything.
Isolee – Wearemonster: I know the omission of this (especially when you soon see which other dance music albums I did include!) is a huge admission of dance music plebness, but I just haven’t listened to it an atmosphere conducive to appreciating it yet. What I gather from the reviews is that this album’s all about the details, and I guess those must be eluding me when I listen to it on my commute. I’m not writing this album off yet – it’s very much loved by people whose taste and genre knowledge I hold in high esteem – but until I take the time to listen to it in a better context than an iPod on a bus, I just don’t think I’ll be able to see the light.

Okay, flame away! :)

Random Rules Rules

Oh! Oh! Stylus’s latest Perfect Moments In Pop instalment features a song I adore – Random Rules, by the Silver Jews – and is absolutely spot-on about what makes the song and the band so quietly stupendous.

In fact, the almost complete congruence between the sentiments of the article and my three-year-old post about the same song, is actually kinda freaky. Checkit.

Neu! Used! S$10!

Music-related activities of last weekend included microhouse at Jacob’s rathermacrohouse on Friday (Jacob and Cherry spinning, me listening, Alec reading comics), and DJ Dexter (of Avalanches fame) at DXO on Saturday, but I have to dorkily admit that despite these very enjoyable social and musical activities, my weekend’s most intense moment of musical joy was walking into Flux Us and finding a used copy of Neu! going for S$10, after having had it on my Django’s wishlist for the past four years.

“Without Neu! there may have been no Pitchfork. Neu anticipates us all,” gushed Pitchfork when the band’s first three albums, previously available only as Japanese imports in exchange for a kidney, were remastered and re-released in 2001. And you know, although my views have diverged from Pitchfork’s often enough to warrant some caution here (*cough*thearcadefire9.7myarse*cough*), this time I’m really feeling the love. Believe the hype.

This album begins with a sound Neu! made and Sonic Youth taught me to love. Hallogallo’s insistent guitars and propulsive beats are exploratory but never directionless; I can’t explain how I know from the start that it’s going to take me somewhere I want to be, I just know. By the time we reach (exquisite) meltdown it fades almost too suddenly for me to bear even after the 10 minutes of build-up, and recedes into a distant shimmering chaos I can only stagger towards.

Sonderangebot is part tense experimental soundscape, part expansive prog noodling, and it bridges the journey between the two with the sort of scary shocking sound they use in Asian horror movies when the protagonist gets a sudden flash glimpse of THE GHOST! Best workout my stereo’s had since Knifehandchop.

Weissensee doesn’t do much for me, I must admit. It’s like Pink Floyd wandering around a bit lost and ending up…still a bit lost.

I realize it sounds loopy to say this, but Im Glück feels like emerging from the Ark the morning after the great flood. Paddling slowly through devastation, accompanied by a funereal bass drone. Notes beginning to melt in, breathe, pulsate, as glimmers of hope appear on the horizon. After notes, then chords. Birdcries in the distance, as the drone fades away. Long before Boards Of Canada, long before The Books, and 3 years before Brian Eno made Another Green World.

Negativland starts off with abrasive dissonant noise and squalling guitars, and then it escalates from there. In other words, this song is Michelle Heaven.

Lieber Honig interrupts Negativland mid-screech, and teleports us somewhere totally different with sparse plucks, wheezed, abstract vocals, and the same found sounds they used in Im Glück – barely audible voices, paddles on water. We are still travelling when the album ends.

In a conversation with someone at my first Yo La Tengo gig, I bemoaned the fact that I just couldn’t seem to get my hands on a used copy of I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One. (I’m generally too poor to buy anything when it’s new.) “Well of course,” he said, “who would sell that album after hearing it?”

This is what I’m wondering now, about Neu!. Who? Why? But nevertheless – thank you!

Manual For The People

At Stylus, J. Edward Keyes does an interesting Playing God With REM’s Up. Unfortunately, I sold this album in my last CD purge and am therefore unable to experiment with his recommendations, but the article still makes for good reading and I love how it describes my favourite song on that album, At My Most Beautiful (which it repositions from track 5 to second last):

Coming near the end of the record, it sounds like salvation, the final beautiful destination we’ve been struggling towards for the last nine songs. It felt chintzy at the center of the record, a piece of rock candy on a plastic ring, but as a conclusion it’s a solid diamond, three-and-a-half straight minutes of melody as a reward for struggling around the record’s hundreds of tight corners. Stipe sang the word ‘smile’ and Mills went ‘doot-doot-doot’ and so everybody within throwing distance hollered ‘Beach Boys!’, and God only knows how many reviewers followed suit. It’s just as much Gary Wilson as Brian, though, a Botticelli done up in Day-Glo Paint. More, though: it captures that beautiful, holy, serene stillness that comes when you watch the person you love sleep. ‘I count your eyelashes, secretly’ – who does that? A better question: Who doesn’t?

Microhouse In The Morning

Over the past months I have discovered that if I begin playing Immer when I get on the bus to work, the track that heralds my eventual arrival at Collyer Quay, powers me up and across the Change Alley bridge with its motley crew of dejected 70s-frontage shops (“For Rent”, Dinky Di House Of Russian Goods, Intimo), and eases me apologetically into my desk at work is the Superpitcher remix of Carsten Jost’s You Don’t Need A Weatherman with its febrile synth walls, pondskater beats, and birdsong. (Yes, birdsong.)

I think it’s a more positive way to start the work day than Satan.

2004 List: Six Songs

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I decided to write about some of the music I’d really enjoyed in 2004. I do realize it is now May 2005, which means that as far as a lot of the indie music press is concerned, The New “The” Band are now where it’s at, and The Old “The” Band are, like, so five minutes ago, and my shitty writing about 2004 music is totally off the radar.

But I care not! Behold as I fly in the face of convention – not, mind you, out of feisty sticking-it-to-The-Man rebellion, but sheer inability to follow it. My various song and album lists have been staring me in the face for months, but I’ve been continually prevented from actually writing about them by serious duties such as smacking the Pingu and other similarly weighty online tasks.

So here it is, my Six Songs I Really Liked In 2004 But Which Weren’t On Albums In My Albums List (Forthcoming, Seriously!) For Said Year And Which I Haven’t Already¹ Written About list!

Me Plus One (Annie):
Everyone keeps going on and on about Chewing Gum, Heartbeat and The Greatest Hit, which are all wonderful, but I seem to be the only one who’s craziest over this one. This is the best song S Club 7 never made, slinky bass, spunky beats, Annie sing/speaking her way through verses like “Mrs D, Mrs I, Mrs F F I, Mrs C, Mrs U L T. If ever there’s a girl who could rock your world, then that girl sure is me! (Right!)” and then we’re into the chorus, O joyous chorus, “feeling good, I’m top of the pops”, and for the video in my head we’re all tiny bubble-shaped dancers in a glass of Lucozade.
Get On Dis Motorcycle (Petey Pablo feat. Bubba Sparxxx):
If you still say you’re jaded of Timbaland productions after listening to this one, I will kill you until you are dead. Never on God’s sweet earth has there been a more glorious union of manipulated kiddie-singing samples, frenetic bhangra pluckings, and classic crunk growl.
Greetings In Braille (The Elected):
This song is a perfect little slice of alt-country lo-fi electronica with wistful nostalgic lyrics that sound great in the context of the song but look bad when quoted as email signatures. In other words, this song is emo as fuck, but don’t let that discourage you. It’s real purty.
Paint The Moon (The Czars):
For the first two minutes or so this sounds like standard-issue Czars material – very pretty, but in a way that blends into the larger prettiness of the album rather than standing out as a song in its own right. Then we hit the bridge, the bass and guitars suddenly assert themselves, the harmonies get really lovely with “Let it go, let it go, let it fall down from the sky and leave this world behind”, and after this you don’t resent the subsequent return to verse-chorus-verse because when a song’s taken you that high you have to come down some time.
Parliament Square (Stina Nordenstam):
I love midnight walks in parts of London that are crowded during the day, but deserted at night. This is a song for those walks, where less is not just more but everything, where even the silences contain multitudes and the timelessness of the great city envelops you. Against wintry piano, restrained guitars, and a saxophone like a lonely busker hoping against hope that his day isn’t over, Stina sings a photograph: “It may be silent, but I hear bombs fall. I hear sirens down in Whitehall. I see fires around you, Paul, but you stand so still and you look so small.”
Atmosphere (Technova):
I don’t know when this was made, but I only heard it for the first time when Andrew Weatherall put it at the end of his Fabric mix, thereby making it the only dance mix that has ever made me want to cry. The beautiful synths in the Joy Division classic become the heart and soul of this remix, which I now wish I could have had as the secret soundtrack for the end of all my great clubbing nights in London. For me, it perfectly captures it all, the lights coming on in the club as you realize you finally have to leave, the tiredness beginning to set in as you wind down from your sensory overload, but also the quiet joy that keeps you walking to the tube station – and if it’s winter, and still dark after 6 a.m., those synths light your way like sparklers in slow-motion.

¹ Stuff I’ve mentioned before: Galang (MIA), Evil (Interpol), You Make Me Like Charity (The Knife), Baby Boom (The Crimea), and These Are Your Friends (Adem).

Words About Noise

I liked the introduction to Bryan Berge’s review of Tom Smith/Sightings’ Gardens Of War:

“Noise defies language. In the everyday sense, noise is the category of sound that cannot be explained (“what is that noise?”) or doesn’t merit explanation (background noise). Thus noise is marked primarily in its relation to language, or more precisely in that lack of relation. In a technical sense, noise lacks the typical harmonic patterns that mark most resonant sounds produced by this wide world o’ vibrating objects. This too is a refusal of language, that most important of organized sounds in our acoustic lives. And finally, noise music attempts to obliterate our critical faculties, to send reason scurrying to a tranquil wrinkle deep in the brain stem while caustic sound ravages the ears. At its best, noise overwhelms, leaving the listener a battered, quivering mass of flesh who gulps for air and squeaks like an animal but who certainly does not smugly put down the headphones and deliver a discourse on the effectiveness of the brutal crunching sound in the fourth minute of the third track.

But here I go anyway.”

Also:

“Whenever I was tempted to form a thought during Gardens of War – “this song sounds like a particularly frightening Sunburned Hand of Man session overrun by homicidal robots” or “is that fuzz guitar playing some sort of insect melodyï¿½” – a grating din arrived to punish me. We’re talking some serious negative reinforcement here. So I never strived for language and conscious analysis again – all that you see here was written after the album had seeped into my skin after so many listens that I could relive it without the threat of another storm cloud breaking in my ears.

Only guttural grunts and surreal words-in-isolation issued from my brain and mouth while the record played.

As such, I did a spot-on impersonation of Tom Smith’s vocals.”

There’s also a bit about being forced into a corner by a big angry man with a genre fetish, but it doesn’t work well when excerpted.

2004 List: 9 Songs To Thank MP3 Blogs For

9 great songs I’d never have heard and wouldn’t currently be trying to purchase, if some of my favourite mp3 blogs hadn’t committed copyright violations for the love of music: (Links are to corresponding entries at the relevant hosting blog where possible. The songs probably can’t be downloaded there any more, but I’m sure you can find them elsewhere if you’re resourceful enough.)

The Bug Speaks (The Song Corporation) (from said the gramophone)
The best pop song about totalitarianism, ever. “The nobility of suffering was foremost in my mind / When I said that I feel that sacrifice has been too much maligned / I have a great respect for those who suffered for their race / And my policy will be that lots of suffering take place.”
lugu lugu kan-ibi (Bunun Tribe / David Darling) (from said the gramophone)
A beautiful Taiwanese tribal song, accompanied by cello.
Freaks (Lil Vicious featuring Doug E.Fresh) (from gabba/POD)
Human beatboxing as dancehall riddim!
What You Waiting For (Jacques Lu Cont remix) (from Laces)
I barely noticed the original despite its media saturation, but Lu Cont’s divinely exuberant synthy version totally brings out the fag hag in me.
Rok One’s Crazy (Rok One) (from Laces)
I bet you thought Vanilla Ice spoiled that Under Pressure sample for all rappers forevermore, but Rok One does a new tongue-in-cheek take on things.
Ghost White Flowers (The Tease) (from Fluxblog)
It’s like Idioteque, except it isn’t like it at all.
The Trumpet (George Atkins and Hank Levine) (from Fluxblog)
If you haven’t already heard this, I guarantee you’ve never heard a song like it. JFK giving a speech about tyranny and poverty becomes the leader of a pop band on helium.
In The Belly (Other Passengers) (from Music For Robots)
I’m a sucker for drama and distortion. Think Mogwai with vocals by Interpol.
Avminnast (Nils Økland) (from Music For Robots)
Austere Norwegian fiddle music, a soundtrack to movies of ice and snow that don’t exist except in my imagination.