dystopic

I wanted to do a lot more with this. I have about two pages of mixing notes and tracking ideas. There’s a middle section I wanted to put in. But it ended up sitting there untouched and calcifying for a few weeks, and now going back to it would be like rebreaking a limb that has set wrong. So here it is, as is.

October 18th. The Theater at Madison Square Garden. Beck. Puppeteers on stage during the whole show pulling the strings of Beck and Co. puppets that were then projected on big screen in lieu of the usual posturing rock stars.

October 24th. The Met. Madame Butterfly. Bunraku puppeteers on stage during most of the opera.

Hmmm. I sense a theme developing.

Coming soon: Puppets In Government.

Oh, wait a minute…

Lord knows i’m no fan of NME, but if you sign up and carefully uncheck or check (beware, they’re tricky) the appropriate boxes, so your info won’t get sold and you won’t get bombarded with offers for penis enlargers, you can listen to all sorts of new albums for free. Sure as hell beats spending an hour in the Virgin Megastore (read FNAC if appropriate) trying to listen to new releases through headphones blocked on maximum volume and with only one working earphone, and even then only if you wiggle the volume knob back and forth ever so slowly in a counterclockwise direction. Just go to nme.com and you’ll see indications for their media player.
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Dexter Gordon - Our Man In Paris (1963)
great sax, no prises de tête (literally takings of head, i’m open to any suggestions as to a satisfactory english equivalent)

McCoy Tyner - The Real McCoy (1967)
post-Coltrane but still with Ron Carter (b) and Elvin Jones (dr), the original quartet’s rhythm section. Yay.

The Flaming Lips - At War With The Mystics (2006)
Because they kick ass and you haven’t heard anything that sounds like the Flaming Lips except the Flaming Lips. And give Wayne Coyne’s voice a chance, it grows on you. And the lyrics almost make sense this time (relatively speaking). Though Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was a fabulous album in its blade runner absurdist kitsch way, and contains possibly the coolest titled song ever, Ego Tripping At The Gates of Hell, as well as this, i.e. a 2:57 minute climax in the middle of the album replete with mewling electro cat and crashing drums. Also Yoshimi is the perfect companion album to Beck’s Sea Change, because of the similar laid back drifty feel, and because they toured those albums together, and if you like Sea Change, which you should, because it is incredible, you might also like The Divine Comedy’s Regeneration, because both albums were produced by Nigel Godrich and sound like the stepchildren of Ok Computer, as far as sound and vibe, which goes to show you that Nigel Godrich is Radiohead’s fifth Beatle.

Neil Young - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)
Because. And also, if you listen to the guitar solo on Down By The River you’ll notice that the guitarist from the band Cake cribbed the sound and the notes and everything else he uses in all his songs from this one itsy bitsy quirky thirty year-old solo.

On Christopher Street, 55 Bar is a jazz/blues hangout. Except the people who hang out there are mostly Berklee (not Berkeley) graduates, and can count in 7/8 and 5/4 simultaneously, whilst rattling off the F# mixolydian mode.

I saw Wayne Krantz there tonight (and no, i’d never heard of him before today either…) and he was playing with a drummer named Cliff Almond and a bassist named James Genus. And it was a stark reminder that everything on the radio sucks and should be used for fruit juice and cereal commercials.

I guess you’d call it jazz fusion because the concept was jazz, take a simple theme, run through it once and then off everybody goes, except they were playing in the rock idiom. All i know is that though i could nod my head to the underlying beat, nobody including the totally amazing drummer actually played on the beat anytime during the hour-long performance. You oftentimes catch yourself smiling during such performances, simply because there is some form of inherent humor or irony in such total technical mastery, but also because there is an exhilaration in the tension created by three musicians pulling in often separate directions along the razor’s edge, when it would take only a split second of self-awareness on their parts, the slightest conscious thought, to send the whole elaborate yet spontaneous structure crashing down.

Recommended though not directly related album: Spectrum - Billy Cobham.

So this is how my day ended. After walking the streets aimlessly for most of the day, tearing at my clothes in grief over the radiohead debacle, i wandered back towards school for my 6pm class. As i sat down at the 3 Square Cafe right across from school I noticed a congregation of about 15 people and 4 security guards around the back entrance to Irving Plaza, a small rock venue. I figured they might be waiting for someone i liked, as i knew that Seu Jorge had played there recently as well as the Eagles of Death Metal (Josh Homme’s side project from QOTSA). I pulled out my camera and crossed the street just as a minivan pulled up. I came around the side of it and came face to face with Eddie Vedder, as he and the other four members of PJ leisurly poured out of the van. I shook his hand. I’ve spent the rest of the evening in a kind of daze. Funny how you think you’re above such things till out of nowhere you feel like a fourteen year-old.

Today was like not getting tickets to see the Doors and then running into the Rolling Stones at the supermarket. Possibly. It has been suggested I am totally incapable of formulating valid analogies.

And did i mention that there are about 4 bajillion (that’s four and lots of zeroes) sites out there selling 200 bajillion tickets to the shows for just a little under 500% of the original price? As Ticketmaster is the only official means of purchasing tickets and all tickets sold out in approximately 1 picosecond although Ticketmaster has all sorts of scrambled-text based safety measures to allegedly prevent automated scalpers from purchasing tickets, i ask thee, doth ticketmaster not verily deserve a speedy demise?

the bastards.

The dirty bastards. I’m not one for vulgarity, but any of the people who got tickets to the shows must SUCK THE COCK OF SATAN. There. That’s all I have to say about that.

Are playing Madison Square Garden in June. I know this because i have just received an e-mail from Ticketmaster. Having frantically clicked through to the site to purchase 11 tickets, all for myself, aaaaaallll for meeeee, most of my hair fell out upon discovering that they’d only be on sale at 10am today. I am leaving to class now (8am). I will be locked indoors till 1pm.

M must succeed in buying them for us. She must. She has already been instructed to summarily auction off my guitars and photographic equipment if need be. But what if there’s a power outage? What if Verizon decides to suck just at 10am, bringing our blazing 700k line down to 0.01k a second, rendering all forms of communication impossible? What if she tries the phone instead and it catches on fire, falls off its stand and lands in a plastic smoldering mass on both her cellphones (the Swiss and the US one). What if all our neighbours are out, or the stairs cave in and she can’t reach them in time? What if Homeland Security instructs Ticketmaster to only sell tickets to pre-screened individuals who pose no threat to Republicans or the United States? What then i ask you? What then?!!!!

These are very tense times.

this is via hendrix-cat

1. A track from your early childhood
That would be Sailing - Christopher Cross, or Abracadabra - Steve Miller Band or Man Eater - Hall & Oates, essentially all the mustachioed pink shirted stuff that was playing when i was four and living in Florida.

2. A track that you associate with your first love
Well, that would either be the tracks mentioned above, if you count Vicky S. as my first love. I was four, she was four, I told her i loved her, she ignored me, i was inconsolable for years. Or that would be the soundtrack to the Big Blue, when i was in seventh grade, because i’d just split up with A and my friend N said, oh no! whatever you do don’t listen to/watch the Big Blue now, it’s so romantic and sad, so i did of course. Or Sade’s Love Deluxe album, the soundtrack to my month with V. Or maybe I Will Always Love You - Whitney Houston because i spent a year and a half with L when i was sixteen and that was our song (or would it be Love Me Tender - Elvis? no, wait, Dream a Little Dream of Me - the Mamas and Papas). Or would it be Perfect Blue Buildings - The Counting Crows, because that was the soundtrack to pining for R (before, during, and after (it’s complicated)). Or Chopin’s Nocturnes (the Daniel Barenboim version) that I and i listened to during our embarassingly platonic nine months (even more complicated)? No, no, let’s settle on what was spinning during the first weeks of M and i, Sheryl Crow’s EP for the Tomorrow Never Dies Soundtrack, because eight years and counting can’t be wrong.

3. A track that reminds you of a holiday trip
CeeCee Rider - Ella Fitzgerald

4. A track that you like but wouldn’t want to be associated with in public
Anything off of the Entre Gris Clair et Gris Foncé album by Jean-Jacques Goldman

6. The track you have listened to most often
That’s like asking…um… I can’t find a proper analogy, but that’s just plain silly. Is this supposing i just started listening to music a year ago? Or that i still now repetitively listen to the same track that i would rewind and replay, rewind and replay, rewind and replay in high school?

7. A track that is your favourite instrumental
This would be from the non-jazz non-classical instrumental category, i take it? Either way, i’m realizing this whole meme is not about absolutes but making choices, since it’s absurd to think anyone beyond the age of 15 has only one answer to any of these questions. So let’s say my answer is either Born Under A Bad Sign off the posthumous Hendrix Blues album, or any of the pieces composed by Gabriel Yared for the English Patient soundtrack.

8. A track that represents one of your favourite bands
Lucky - Radiohead

9. A track which best represents yourself
Famous Blue Raincoat - Leonard Cohen

10. A track which reminds you of a special person
Country Feedback - REM

11. A track to which you can relax
the five tracks that make up Kind of Blue - Miles Davis

12. A track that stands for a really good time in your life
the five tracks that make up Kind of Blue - Miles Davis

13. A track that is currently your favourite
In A Sentimental Mood - Duke Ellington & John Coltrane

14. A track that you’d dedicate to your best friend
that’s tricky only because the specificity of bestfriendness and the importance of said qualification in my life has greatly faded over the last years. There are the four or five people who benefit from Permanent Friend Status, and then there are other friends. That being said, how about Barbecue à l’Elysée - Philippe Katerine, for S.

15. A track that you like especially for its lyrics
I guess i’ll have to go for funny, in that the question makes no sense unless you take it to mean a track where the music is not unpleasant but not the main attraction. How about Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart - Johnny Cash.

16. A track that no one likes but you
Am i being unpleasant in criticizing these questions? Helena, i know you just passed them along as is, and so it’s not your fault. And were it your fault that i’d forgive you anyway. But even unsuccessful albums sell a few thousand copies, even terrible movies can make a few million bucks. Hmm… I’ve just gone through my iTunes library, and i guess the only thing i could say that none of my friends share with me is my passion for Sade. I know that’s not a track, but i can’t find anything obscure enough that i don’t know at least one person who likes it, or would like it.

17. A track that you like that’s neither English nor German
It would be harder if you asked me for a track i like in German. Not because i have any particular aversion to German music, but because i can’t think of any specific song off the top of my head by Die Fantastischen Vier or Die Toten Hosen. Wait, i’ve got it: 99 Luftballons - Nena. But that doesn’t answer the question, does it? Let’s say Au Port - Camille.

18. The track that best lets you release tension
I Vant to Tortur Kittenz mit Scrudrivern - Vanderflucht Destroyers

19. A track you want to be played at your funeral
So What - Miles Davis

20. A track that you’d nominate for the “Best Track of All Time” category.
Definitely The Final Countdown - Europe

I’m usually wary of “magic mysterious tapes discovered in someone’s basement”. Especially when the CD cover boasts super-duper digital remastering. What you usually end up with is something that sounds like listening to a bad recording, but through a small and immaculately resonant tin can. Plus there’s always some ego thrown in. Take for example Jimmy Page’s remastering of all the Led Zep stuff. Their sound wasn’t supposed to be good in the first place. But now it’s all cleaned up and that only renders more blatant the shortcomings of the original recordings. And on top of that he felt the need to take all his guitar work and boost it up a notch, so it sits on top of - and separate from - the rest of the music. It was supposed to sound muddy and you were supposed to hear the tape saturation from the bass drum and blablabla oh the silent rage of all the pink floyd and led zep albums that you can’t find in non-remastered form any longer.

And of course it’s the same though worse for jazz albums. For some reason jazz recordings have become the epitome of sterile high-fi cleanliness over the last twenty years. It’s supposed to sound like a mono mic in the middle of a sweaty room. But no, the remastering geniuses must imperatively make it sound neat and flat. Like a bunch of bored mathematician/musicians in a billion-dollar studio, aimimg for that beautiful Kenny G sound. Ha!

But not this album. The sound is incredibly warm and not over-processed. And there’s the music itself. Coltrane is coltrany, which is a very good thing. And though Monk is not my favorite simply because i’ve always had a hard time getting into his super dry percussive approach to the piano, in a live setting like this the use of um… let me just skip the anal reviewing bit and say

whoopee! this album’s amazing and all the hype was totally justified so go and get it.

Okay, get this.

Wednesday i went to see DJ Cam spin at the Hiro ballroom in the Maritime hotel. Nobody here knows who he is and the place was only half full. I got up on the low stage and mentioned, as he was switching vinyls, that Substances is one of my favorite albums. He thanked me and as i was walking away he called me back to tell me he was currently working on Substances 2.

And now i’ve just come from a free concert at the BAM café, where Keziah Jones played to a room of about 100 people, alone, on acoustic guitar. Which in itself is ridiculous. Then i caught up with him at the bar and got to ask him the question that has been keeping me, and many of you i’m sure, up at night: what does kpafuca mean? To which he kindly replied that it’s a Nigerian word and means everything’s all fucked up. Craaazy…

I suppose next week Jimi hendrix will resuscitate and proceed to play every song from the potshumous Blues album in the bar up the street from our place and then we’ll meet up with Thom Yorke and go for drinks and maybe a movie…

Saw Goldfrapp in concert last night. It was glam-rock robot cabaret, which is the closest i can come to categorizing it. It’s what we thought the future would be like thirty years ago. Tight uniforms and platform shoes and analog synthesizers. She’s in love with a strict machine. Yes.

Rock and roll is alive and well and she is Feist.

Just saw her at the Knitting Factory, and though her album is more in the Kings of Convenience mellow pop vein, on stage she kicked the shit out her guitar, to everyone’s great pleasure.

Sometimes some brief moment of grace gives you hope.

Well, it’s thursday again, so here’s a bit of blues (500k):

denial.mp3

Obviously just a start, but i wanted to post something by thursday so there it is.

Vocals are on the way.

I have a confession to make. I just downloaded 10 Paul Anka songs from the iTunes music store. I know, i know…

What can i possibly say except, we were sixteen, the year was 1992, and i was in looooove. or would that be lust? or mad infatuation?

i suddenly got the urge to listen to the songs that remind me of that period. actually, scratch that, they don’t remind me, they are that period. little time capsules that, when opened release sights & sounds on command. anyone see Somewhere in time? sort of like that but without the bowler hats.

believe it or not, there were some elvis and mamas & papas tunes thrown in too.

i certainly didn’t expect to start longing for my adolescence anytime soon… am i an old fart? is old-fartness a state of mind?

oh well, i guess i’ll just finish my early-bird special and shuffle on off to bed (mental note: wash dentures; write a will).

alrighty kiddies.

blues du jour, by moi:

thursdayblues.mp3

(recorded using a mono mic plugged into my ipod)

it’s nothing special, but the possibility to post sketches amuses me.

if you’ve ever debated the intrinsic worth of music, or gotten into a fistfight over personal preferences or beliefs (wes montgomery vs. joe pass, radiohead vs. coldplay, prince vs. michael jackson…) you should read this:

Ideology, Burgers, and Beer (by Brad Mehldau)

PS: obviously radiohead and prince kick the asses of MJ and coldplay any day of the week, even blindfolded and with one arm tied behind their backs. I don’t think there’s actually any way you can compare Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery though. Pure technical abilities set aside, their approach and style are so totally different. Which is also part of the point made by the abovementioned article (not specifically relating to JP and WM but to our habit of aggressively defending our opinions, musical, political, or other)

And this is the song version of the words from this post. As the demo-ish sound attests to, i didn’t take the whole two months between posts to record it…

As usual, it’s all me, for better or worse.

Skin

ps: i can’t be bothered to go look up the html (c) symbol, but rest assured that the lyrics and music, however crappy, are my own, and should you feel inclined to either claim otherwise or make use of them without my express permission, you will some day wake with a horse’s head in your bed…

well, here it is. my first song posted online: questions
vocals and guitar: me; bass: bering; drum programming: andrew (there’s safety in numbers…)

Please feel free to comment. Actually, no. Feel obliged to comment.

The sound is shitty, but this is a necessary consequence of semi-webfriendly size. And the vocals are shitty, not because of size, but because they were recorded late at night, and i had a cold, and my neighbours were sleeping, and even if i’d sung them louder they still would have been shitty but i’d have used some other excuse. yay.

thanks, and goodnight.

ps: i can’t be bothered to go look up the html (c) symbol, but rest assured that the lyrics and music, however crappy, are my own, and should you feel inclined to either claim otherwise or make use of them without my express permission, you will some day wake with a horse’s head in your bed…