Immersion Therapy

It's not that I take back everything I said about this track in my prior (now deleted) post. It's just that I found myself listening to it ten times in row on headphones this evening, and decided that my (and others') opinions about it really didn't matter. As with Burial's priors, the thing's its own fuckin' thing. One of those sort of abstract, ineffable things that the Germans alone possess a word for. One of those really long words.

Interlude

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

:: Boards of Canada - "Everything You Do is a Balloon"

"Mephistopheles came to Faust in the form of a poodle..."

The godfather of the World Wide Web, centuries-old technologies meeting with extinction of our lifetimes, the end of privacy, personal and national security, the connection between the vocoder and the modem, digitized music, and what does psychoacoustics have to do with any of this?

That and a number of other things as David Byrne (yes, that David Byrne) ruminates over the Internet Antichrist.

"We Burnt This Nowhere Town to the Ground Once Before in 1864, Son. And We're All for Doing it Again..."

Still haven't had much time to go scouting, learn what's what, etc. But here's a few randomly-encountered Atlanta artsy things...


You see these stickers pop up here and there. For the non-local: Buckhead is the neighborhood just NE of downtown, what started gentrifying in the late '80s and is now the center for the city's densest concentration of yuppie (as the current parlance has it) douchebags.




From a series of flyers and posters for a gallery show from about 2 years ago. I think it was organized by some of the people responsible for the stickers above.


Miscellanea.

Oddest thing I've seen so far? Some building on the NE side, a row of roadside shops. Wedged between the shops in the middle of the block -- a 5-foot painting on the wall bearing some big Masonic emblem, accompanied by some text that proclaims: "MADE BY MAN, INSPIRED BY GOD. Take Up Thy Sword and do-something-or-other." Naturally, you have to wonder what that was all about.

Despite that first item (y'know -- the bit about "douchebags"), I have to admit something: Yuppies on bikes here are very polite and civic-minded. They stop at intersections, are mindful of other traffic, observe the rules of the road, and everything. Quite refreshing. But the economy and attitude in these parts has never been such that it ever afforded the luxury of humoring or enabling other people's self-indulgences. Which is maybe why a guidebook might include the following:

Visitor's Guide to The South, Tip #2: Your clueless, pathological sense of middle-class entitlement will get you absolutely NOWHERE. It is no match for the native omnivorous species of Passiveaggressivenessnus.

Which makes for an interesting situation, considering that -- as people keep telling me -- "Most everyone here is from somewhere else."

More about this stuff later.

"No Matter How Glum The Song" -- Or: On The Merits of Moping at 33⅓

Mark Fisher (a.k.a. k-punk) recently posted something that I found especially intriguing. It's a theoretical tangent in which he plays the post-punk trio of Ian Curtis, Mark E. Smith, and Morrisey off of each other; the rub being that Curtis represents a melancholic worldview, compared to the psychosis of Mark E. Smith and the (mere) neurosis of Morrisey.

Fisher offered plenty of intriguing points throughout his analysis, of which here are a couple of highlights...

"It seems to me clear that Curtis was a denizen of the Cold World in the way that Morrisey is not, and I think it is worth thinking through why this is the case. The Cold World involves terror, and Joy Division are terrifying - which is not a word one would ever associate with Morrissey, no matter how glum the song. It isn't only Morrissey's campness which disqualifies him, though I don't think the notion of camp dysphoria makes much sense -- there can be a pathos to camp, to be sure, but it never approaches the frozen certainty of depression. Camp centres on play-acting and distanciation (that is why it is the form of postmodern subjectivity par excellence: I don't believe but nevertheless I play along). Dysphoria, meanwhile, involves both a disdain for play-acting and an inability to achieve any distance, particularly in relation to oneself. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the distance between the dejected subject and the rituals of the symbolic order is so total that it is no longer liveable."

Going on the state...

"What is remarkable about Joy Division is the way they are bereft of two of the mainstays of most other rock and pop: longing and supplication. On the occasions that the 'you', usually so ubiquitous in pop music, features in Curtis's songs it is neither as as an Other held responsible for his condition nor deemed capable of ameliorating it. No amelioration is possible, that's the point - and that's why depression is not mere sadness, not a 'mood' that will lift, but an ontological conviction."

Unfortantely, Fisher's discussion of the matter has little (well, almost nothing) to say about the nature of Smith's "psychosis" and how it plays out as a creative strategy, contrasts with the above, etc. And to be fair, when it comes down to the (capital-a) Aesthetic argument, Fisher's post is more philosophical than musical -- couched entirely in terms of "militant dysphoria," meaning that it's inspired by the thesis of Dominic Fox's new book, Cold War (recently published by the same press that will soon be publishing Fisher's own Capitalist Realism).

I suspect that Fisher brings all of this up in relation to his recent assertion that 2009 marks a "new Year Zero...like 1979, but in reverse." It's his expectation that the political landscape will very likely change amidst the cultural reverberations of the current economic crisis, and that shift may bring about a significant socio-political shift (be it for better or for worse). What better time, the unspoken "speculative realist" premise has it, than to begin thinking of means to steer things in another direction? The "politics of dejection" and their lingering presence in popular music and culture suggests a more widespread & underlying politics of disaffection, of dissatisfaction, etc. -- of a general undertow of malaise that lurks beneath contemporary (late-/advanced-/hyper-/whatever) capitalist society. If so, then some of those aforementioned elements -- as a sentiment shared on some subcultural level -- might serve as a basis for a more concerted, unifying cultural critique; if not the basis for some form of socially transformative action & intervention. Or so one primary subtext of Fisher's post has it.

This might be viewed as an effort of wrangling some degree of hope from the maws of aestheticized hopelessness. It also, Fisher asserts, means politicizing what is largely "apolitical" by nature -- of tapping into the creative and critical impulse that ties such stuff together, and steering it into some productive direction.

Naturally, this whole "Militant Dysphoria" notion has met with its share of skepticism among the navel-gazing crit-theory camp.

Of course, the obvious question many will raise is: The "sad bastard" angle aside, what does any of this have to do with music? Very little, I suppose, depending on how much weight a listener puts on the narrative persona/perspective offered by the singer/songwriter. Meaning it's ultimately a matter of the literary component of the music.

In the end, all of this probably only begs the question of why it is that rock music (and a few contingent domains of pop culture) still remain fertile ground for the Eternal Return of certain lingering (capital-r) Romanticist sentiments & attitudes.

Of course, there are those that'd point that Moz wrote the catchiest songs -- y'know, the ones people can sing along to -- so therefore he wins, and the rest is just noise and chin-stroking nonsense.

At any rate, I have my own thought on some of this, and may return (talking to the wind, once again) to them later.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Elsewhere, Rouge's Foam gets into some more directly musical discussion, as he muses over the aesthetics of wonky (as opposed to the merely donk-y) in recent electronic music.

Home Thus & Such is Killing Music, Redux #31

Or: "Daddy, What Did You Do During The Sampling Wars?"

In case you missed it, WNYC's "On The Media" just did a special edition dealing with the current state of the music industry.



Some topics covered:

• How badly did record company/RIAA execs soil their skivvies when they first encountered Napster -- and why are they still stumbling around in the same pants a decade later? 
  
• Why is it only now being acknowledged that the legal war against sampling was a farce? 
  
• Why hasn't Greg Gillis been sued yet? Why do (some) concert tickets cost so damn much 
  
• What exactly ranks as "pop" music when the measure for what's popular is so wildly out-of-focus? 
  
• How radically has the recording artist-to-audience relationship shifted in the past three years? 
• And who was almost (but not quite) the pop-music world equiv of Che Guevara?

That and a bunch of other questions covered in quickly-paced & well-written gloss as guest host Rick Karr offers handles the bulk of the program. Pretty much every topic covered could've merited an hour-long discussion, and I could go at length on a number of them. But the before & after audio examples from the Public Enemy back catalog that they offer up from the Public Enemy back-catalog was much appreciated, here. Lots of "I'm glad someone said that .... and finally got airtime while doing so" moments throughout. Basically, it's a primer/101 crash-course on the "fair use" issue and other things. But still, recommended listening.

And please, if any of you have any inclination to discuss or add to this issue, feel free to pipe up & vent/query in the comments section.

Fader Photog Series

The Fader just floated out a new art-related supplement -- their "Photo Special" edition. Presently featured on their site is the work of Victoria Sambunaris and Peter van Agmael, with a good many profiles on other photographers to follow.

The current piece includes a conversation in which the two photographers talk about their work and their travels. The overlap in this paired profile is intriguing in that both photographers have recently spent time traveling in and documenting the most central, landlocked portions of the U.S.; especially throughout Utah, Nevada, and the like. Anyone who's read Mike Davis's writings (especially those in Dead Cities) about this inland region of the country might find this ironic, especially given the Burtynsky-esque quality of some of Sambunaris's landscape shots.

A Beginner's Guide to Swiss Fem-Punk

Proto- Kleenex/Lilliput, 1974



Kleenex/Lilliput, a few years later



Pipplotti Rist, "Ever is Over All" (1997), installation view

I may have missed a thing or two, but I'm pretty sure that covers it.

Probably The Dopest Thing I've Seen or Heard in Ages

Or: Why The Radio Sucks, Reason #82.

I heard this thing turn up on a Spine Magazine podcast about a year ago, but only now got around to tracing it to the source. Jeezus, totally sick. And hilarious.

"Awesome" DJ Set

Yeah, so Sublime Frequencies is pretty wonderful and all that; but their catalog is a little slight on material from sub-Saharan Africa.

No problem, because the website Awesome Tapes From Africa more than takes up the slack. At this past year's Audio Poverty Konferenz in Berlin, ATFA site curator Brian Shimkovitz played a DJ set that covered the wide range of the Awesome Tapes archive. If you haven't had a chance to check it out yet, here's a downloadable primer...


[audio]: 'Awesome Tapes From Africa' DJ Set

Get the download from over there.

Also, folks interested in such stuff might also want to check out Radiodiffusion Internasinaal. The site's run by Stuart Ellis -- an old college friend of mine, who also recently put together the "Bollywood Steel Guitar" CD for the Sublime Frequencies roster. There's a page for featured recording of the week, as well as a cascading cache of audio on the site's blog.