Ghost Outﬁt

Last week when I saw Boris I wrote that “the same...

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:30:14 -0400

Last week when I saw Boris I wrote that “the same adventurousness that make Boris so refreshingly unpredictable also means that appreciating their music can require a weird level of awareness and irony.” This song, from their pop experiment New Album, is the sort of thing I’m talking about. It’s instantly catchy and really well-executed, but the polished, mall-ready production aesthetic gives me an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. Am I only letting myself enjoy it because I’m insulated by Boris’s decades of avant credibility?

Stephen O’Malley seems to have felt something similar — but also points toward a way out. In an interview with the Quietus he says

I love watching Boris go through all these chameleon stages. It’s pretty interesting, even if I don’t connect with all those stages. I appreciate it as a long-term conceptual work.

I’m used to thinking of bands aiming to embody a focused aesthetic — O’Malley’s own Sunn O))) are a particularly purposive example — and so I’d thought of Boris’s shifting styles as deviations from their larger goals. But thinking of the shifts as being the essence of the project weirdly improves Boris for me. Since Boris’s style encompasses all styles, you can enjoy their music without reference — so instead of “Flare“‘s high gloss representing a betrayal of some underlying aesthetic, it just becomes another effect, as worthy of formal interest as any other. It’s not about irony but about always-open, enthusiastic listening.

markrichardson: In most computer programming languages, a do...

Sat, 11 May 2013 13:25:36 -0400

markrichardson:

In most computer programming languages, a do while loop, sometimes just called a while loop, is a control flow statement that allows code to be executed once based on a given Boolean condition. Note though that unlike most languages,Fortran’s do loop is actually the same as the for loop.

The do while construct consists of a process symbol and a condition. First, the code within the block is executed, and then the condition is evaluated. If the condition is true the code within the block is executed again. This repeats until the condition becomes false. Because do while loops check the condition after the block is executed, the control structure is often also known as a post-test loop. Contrast with the while loop, which tests the condition before the code within the block is executed.The do-while loop is an exit-condition loop. This means that the code must always be executed first and then the expression or test condition is evaluated. If it is true, the code executes the body of the loop again. This process is repeated as long as the expression evaluates to true. if the expression is false, the lop terminates and control transfers to the statement following the do-while loop.

Oh my god I’ve been listening to Oval’s “Do While” for close to 15 years and I never knew that the title referred to a term used in computer programming.

This is in the running for the most beautiful and life-affirming pieces of music I’ve heard in my life. Play this loud on headphones (ideally at better quality than this youtube) and you can dream about what it would be like to have four ears. When the world seems truly ugly I can listen to “Do While” and be reminded of something better. And now I will also be reminded of a control flow statement that allows code to be executed once based on a given Boolean condition.

This is funny — I work writing software, so as long as I’ve known this song it’s been connected with this syntax. I wonder how I might have experienced this song differently if not for that reference; I’m interested to know if it changes the way you think about it, Mark.

I’ve written a lot of code listening to this album — both because the frequencies and repetition make it work well as ambient music, but also because 94 Diskont is almost like an aestheticization of the mental state I’m in when I’m focused and productive. I’m actually paraphrasing this from a description of Phill Niblock’s music, but there’s a sort of surface-level stasis combined with a hyper-acute awareness of detail — it’s the feeling of operating at multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously. In the same way, this song continuously repeats the central melodic loop but also has all kinds of content in the glitching high end of the spectrum. Great song; definitely one of the most major musical experiences I’ve ever had.

Boris played two pulverizing sets at Le Poisson Rouge on Monday...

Wed, 08 May 2013 22:03:00 -0400

Boris played two pulverizing sets at Le Poisson Rouge on Monday and Tuesday nights. Like Led Zeppelin or Can, each of the bandmates are virtuoso instrumentalists — but they’re unusually egoless, never seeming like they’re battling each other for prominence in the song. The only member with a particularly distinctive style is lead guitarist Wata, who deploys crunching tape-loop interventions, bee-buzz vibrato, and glissandos so outrageous that she had to sand the paint off the back of the guitar neck so it wouldn’t slow her down. This band dynamic is a big part of what makes Boris so incredible. Who else could have the frenetic thrash of “Pink” and delicate, feminine coo of “Rainbow” in the same set? At the same time, though, their complete lack of interest in maintaining a consistent aesthetic can make them seem weirdly frivolous.

The first night was one of the best shows I’d ever seen. At Irving Plaza last year the crowd was totally sedate — except during “Pink”. But on Monday everyone stayed cool, even during “Pink”, until the beginning of “Statement” when LPR turned into a bloodbath. The floor was a convulsive mess of catharsis as Boris unleashed banger after banger. Few other bands could describe their own set as “all-time classics” and totally earn it.

On Tuesday Boris mainly stuck to their doom metal and rock-epic modes — to my mind, their least thrilling incarnations. And the inclusion of “Attention Please”, in which Wata sings huskily over a disco pulse, posed a question that often hangs over Boris’s more unexpected moves: is this song interesting in and of itself, or is it too reliant on the novelty of an underground metal band playing it at all? When Boris’s unexpected diversions are at their best — like the exquisite “Spoon” from the glossy New Album — they’re completely convincing. But the same adventurousness that make Boris so refreshingly unpredictable also means that appreciating their music can require a weird level of awareness and irony.

That said, the finale — a complete performance of their 2000 record Flood — was megalithic and fantastic, ending with infinite repetitions of an ecstatic, pummelling riff. It felt like an all-time classic too.

Really enjoying this new Braids track, which brings icy sonic...

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:30:08 -0400

Really enjoying this new Braids track, which brings icy sonic austerity to the shifting narrative of their songwriting. Raphaelle Standell-Preston, as always, is an excellent vocalist — though she hasn’t got a particularly wide range, she’s consummately in control of all the timbral possibilities of her voice, from a breathy coo to a harsher, strained high register.

That said, Braids’ use of live instrumentation to make decidedly electronic music was a big part of what made Native Speaker so exciting. It seems like few experimentally-inclined young bands have rock-and-rollish lineups, and fewer of these are as musicianly as Braids — particularly apparent in Austin Tufts’ impressive drumming. It’s courageous to completely think your mode of musical production, and I hope Braids can do it while keeping up this level of quality.

acutenoteproductions: Waxahatchee performs at Barnard College...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:00:13 -0400

acutenoteproductions:

Waxahatchee performs at Barnard College as part of the WBAR-B-Q event.

Waxahatchee at Barnard College’s WBAR-B-Q. How cool is...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 18:40:31 -0400

Waxahatchee at Barnard College’s WBAR-B-Q. How cool is Katie Crutchfield? Her singing has a great tonal range, she’s a sensitive guitar player, and her songs are muscular and spare. Really enjoyable set.

This is crazy! I’d never heard Muslimgauze music from this...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:30:29 -0400

This is crazy! I’d never heard Muslimgauze music from this early in Bryn Jones’ musical development, so it was a surprise to hear how much more musically sophisticated it is than the later stuff we all know and love. The dubby drum machine and weird tape manipulation at the end are great but I’d never have expected to hear Jones use a synth tone that reminded me of Boards of Canada.

Despite being a big fan of certain power electronics acts...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:30:09 -0400

Despite being a big fan of certain power electronics acts like Whitehouse or Prurient, I’ve never found Merzbow’s music particularly interesting — which is strange, given than it can be a lot more listener-friendly than either of those two. The music occupies a wide spectrum of frequencies (definitely unlike Dominick Fernow’s needling, high-pitched feedback) and there’s a lot of dynamic variation, which is often lacking in Whitehouse’s music.

If anything, Merzbow is too varying. Whitehouse’s sounds are similarly abrasive, but they use a limited selection of them in any particular song, so it’s easier to situate yourself within the music and figure out what’s going on. In Merzbow, though, the changes are too dense and fast to comprehend, so listening can feel like an unending, amnesiac experience. The title of one piece — “I’m Coming To The Garden… No Sound, No Memory” — seems to reference this approach.

I was thinking about the way I enjoy noise when reading the last issue of n + 1. It features an excellent essay by Moira Weigel, called “Sadomodernism”, focusing on Michael Haneke, and his desire that his films “rape the spectator into autonomy” — as unfortunate a formulation as I’ve heard, but an idea that applies to a lot of transgressive art. To experience this kind of artwork is to experience a trauma against artistic form and your notion of what’s enjoyable.

As I noted in a previous post about the aesthetics of power electronics, this kind of liberation through confrontation is very important to the Whitehouse experience. When William Bennett shrieks “kill this fucking nightmare that’s inside you” over shuddering time-stretched percussion, it’s almost like the nightmare that you’re killing is the sound itself. In a similar way, Dominick Fernow has discussed using Prurient’s extreme treble frequencies to make you aware of your own body using sounds he dislikes. These artists’ music isn’t supposed to be enjoyable — and that displeasure is a tool they want to use in service of larger aesthetic goals.

With Merzbow, on the other hand, noise is more the goal in itself. so you’re obligated to focus in a strictly formal sense. It’s no longer noise as existential provocation, but noise as the object of intrinsic fascination. That’s a perspective that, for me, makes Merzbow’s music a lot more challenging; perversely, because inflicting pain isn’t an explicit part of its agenda, it’s harder for me to enjoy.

Loren Connors, Keiji Haino, and Matana Roberts played at the...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:30:34 -0400

Loren Connors, Keiji Haino, and Matana Roberts played at the Whitney last night as part of its Blues for Smoke exhibition. Connors’ set was quite sonically similar to last time I saw him — his guitar transmuted to sound like alien gongs, all uneasy resonances and endless sustain. As Connors finished and sat down at the back of the stage, Haino entered with some astonishing prepared guitar: laying it flat on the tabletop, he tapped on the strings and conjured a mesmerizing pulsating chime. But then he transitioned to reverb-heavy abstracted blues and lost velocity. Even Connors’ return didn’t make the set cohere; instead, it flatlined in the soupy drone. Haino’s stage presence encapsulated the difference between this set and the one at Issue two nights before: where before he was flailing around the stage, at the Whitney he sat still.

Matana Roberts set, though, was as strange and thought-provoking as I could have hoped. She mixed the roaring strength of her alto saxophone with clangorous electronic loops and sung collisions of blues, smoke, blood, red… Roberts’ stage presence is powerful but enigmatic — like this music itself. But as the performance went on and the video projection behind her started to show train tracks and blurring motion, it started to feel like we were watching the blues, like smoke, dispersing and permeating America.

issueprojectroom: Keiji Haino at ISSUE with Tamio Shiraishi...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 10:43:16 -0400

issueprojectroom:

Keiji Haino at ISSUE with Tamio Shiraishi 4/18/13 by Bradley Buehring

Live at the Whitney tonight with Loren Connors (sold out)

Keiji Haino (on vocals, guitar, and electronics) and Tamio...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 20:31:11 -0400

Keiji Haino (on vocals, guitar, and electronics) and Tamio Shiraishi (on vocals and saxophone) played at Issue Project Room on Thursday night. I hadn’t been to Issue before; grand, decaying, and in near-total darkness, its hallowed ambience went well with the powerful, ritualistic performance.

Moving around the space, Shiraishi played high-pitched, asthmatic horn runs, and intermittently returned to the stage to bark vocals in Japanese — valuable contributions, but clearly secondary to Haino’s intensity. His aesthetic is one of boundless variety — beginning in a chair playing spacious free guitar, it wasn’t long before he was virtuosically finger-tapping, then standing up, cycling through ecstatic swells of noisy soloing, exuberant screams, and the occasional synthesizer intervention. The conclusion was the best part: Haino unleashed dense, stuttering electronic percussion that sounded almost like late Whitehouse, set his guitar to a shoegaze squall, then faded the noise away as he sang in clear, pure falsetto.

It was a great demonstration of how noise provides artists with a space to explore their personal obsessions — like Haino’s overwhelming gestural guitar style — and create music that’s as unpredictable and idiosyncratic as their own personality.

As someone who’s interested in self-consciously experimental...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:30:10 -0400

As someone who’s interested in self-consciously experimental music, I’ve often been completely puzzled records that came to be among my favourites. But even after many listens this early Loren Connors is utterly baffling. There’s definitely something there — the rattling bluesy exclamation at the beginning is kind of thrilling, even though Connors is only worrying a single chord — but after that the song comes apart into too many decontextualized parts for me to understand. There’s definitely a certain logic to this record but the perspective you’d need to take to comprehend it seems unfathomably distant.

I’m really excited to see Matana Roberts play at the...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:30:30 -0400

I’m really excited to see Matana Roberts play at the Whitney’s Blues for Smoke this weekend, so I’ve been revisiting her incredible (and underrated) album Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens De Couleur Libres. It’s some of the most devastating music I’ve ever heard.

In Gens De Couleur Libres Roberts often writes from the perspective of a slave — but in a complicated, ironized way. In this piece, “Pov Piti”, she narrates with a startling sing-songy delivery: “I watched my parents die of yellow feeee-ver!” sounds kind of like a clichéd “sassy” accent but consumed with breathless panic. The first time I heard the song I found it jarring, but with time it’s come to sound like a hugely important choice — the contemporary style of her phrasing makes the horror of the events she’s narrating even more present and striking.

But the vocal style makes a more important addition than just a veneer of relatability. When the slave character sings with an anachronistically modern vocal style, it emphasizes the distance between the character’s experience of slavery and how the song represents that experience. And that distance between representation and reality makes us more acutely aware of how slaves — and black Americans — have been denied agency in their own cultural representation.

This seems like a critically important theme in Gens De Couleur Libres, and its most harrowing exploration is on the long, a capella centrepiece, “Bid ‘Em In…”. Roberts sings as the leader of an auction for slave women — “like Sheba in the Bible, she’s black but comely” — until other singers enter, slow down, add some syncopated finger-snaps, and Roberts takes the voice of a slave. Instead of the panicked narration on “Pov Piti”, Roberts sings almost as the buyer’s fantasy version of what the slave might be like. “You can slap me! You can brand me! You can reprimand me!”, she sings: denied personhood by the institution of slavery, her own voice has been edited out of the cultural narrative.

But sometimes, like the beginning of “Pov Piti”, Roberts drops the irony entirely and screams through circular breaths: it’s almost like she’s playing her throat like a horn, dense overtones sustained impossibly harshly through her scream. The aesthetic distance collapses and, for a few moments of horror, we see things as they really are.

One of Roberts’ graphic scores

This is sort of a gear-fetishist thing to say but the very...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 20:30:25 -0400

This is sort of a gear-fetishist thing to say but the very particular sound of the drum machine on this album is a huge part of what makes the tone of this album work. It sounds like a gas leak with a nervous heartbeat — at once ominously industrial and apprehensively human.

Another very interesting release this weekend is this...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 20:30:00 -0400

Another very interesting release this weekend is this mysterious mixtape from West London’s idiosyncratic Jai Paul. I haven’t listened to the whole thing yet but this track is an excellent start. Clangorous South Asian percussion grounds a disorienting array of falsetto hooks, eight-bit noise, and serpentine horn lines, which weave dizzily through the mix — always present but moving too quickly to catch any particular sound. When Paul lets the drums breath and brings in a gorgeous subcontinental female vocal line it’s totally joyous until the abrupt finish.

Paul makes heavy use of several unusual stylistic techniques, like jarring silent pauses, oddly fluttering wah guitar, or sidechain compression so heavy that the whole mix flutters in and out of focus as the bass drum pounds — but these decisions never come off as rote mannerisms. In that respect, Paul reminds me of artists like Destroyer or Philip Glass, whose music is so characteristic as to seem completely pasticheable but still somehow maintain a particular magic. I guess now I’ll listen to the rest and see if Paul can pull it off over a whole album.

So the new Psy song is out and, on first impression, doesn’t...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 20:30:14 -0400

So the new Psy song is out and, on first impression, doesn’t seem very good: instead of the self-deprecation on view in “Gangnam Style” there’s a lot of jolly humiliation of women and the whole thing leaves me with a bad feeling. We’ll see how this one plays out but I don’t think it’s looking good for another K-pop crossover smash, this time at least.

Even about two months ago, when the New York Times published an article about visiting Gangnam, frugal style, it felt like the Gangnam wave had completely dispersed. I was disappointed: when the song blew up I hoped that people would be provoked to investigate other quality Korean music, but it didn’t happen. The technological interconnectedness that enabled “Gangnam Style” to break in the West also makes foreign music less startling… even if it’s still very, very good.

I can’t like this enough

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:30:00 -0400

I can’t like this enough

markrichardson: jamiesoncox: matthewmcvickar: markrichardson:...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:23:49 -0400

markrichardson:

jamiesoncox:

matthewmcvickar:

markrichardson:

Waveform from a track from a new album that many music writers are raving about.

There were two guesses in the comments that this was Deerhunter’s ‘Monomania’, and that was my first guess too.

But it’s not ‘Monomania’! This is ‘Monomania’:

And here’s every track on the noisy new Deerhunter album of the same name:

The track in Mark’s waveform is just over four minutes. ‘Monomania’ is 5:21. ‘Nitebike’ (4:18), ‘Pensacola’ (4:01), and ‘T.H.M.’ (4:20) are too long, too short, and too long, respectively, and their waveforms don’t match. Every other song on the album is under four minutes.

So what is it? I made a smart playlist in iTunes to help me figure it out. Songs released in 2013 whose running time in the range of 4:00 to 4:20.

A few leads, but ultimately nothing. No matches in the Flaming Lips, The Knife, or Autre Ne Veut albums. I checked out Spotify to check runtimes and listen to some albums I don’t have; nothing there either. Not Tyler, the Creator, not Justin Timberlake.

Hmm… maybe Paramore? The new album isn’t on Spotify, but the track listing with track times is on Amazon, and, there’s a song that’s 4:10. The thirty-second preview revealed it’s a loud song. I checked if the full song was on SoundCloud; it is, and the waveform looked promising! I ripped from SoundCloud with OffLiberty and loaded it up in Audacity (the waveform editor in all of these screenshots):

Yes. I am quite confident that the very compressed waveform in Mark’s post is Paramore’s ‘Now’.

This is so cool. You are so cool, Matthew! (“Now” is my least favourite song on the album, FWIW.)

Matthew is right!

This is pretty interesting! Check out the dynamics on that Deerhunter album. I bet a lot of the reason Monomania scans as “noisy” is, paradoxically, because it’s mastered so quietly. It must be pulverizing when the penultimate track jumps up from those tiny waves to as much saturation as the Paramore song. Deerhunter’s song will sound more forceful than the song that’s actually louder.

I have an ambivalent relationship with this Majical Cloudz song...

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:30:13 -0400

I have an ambivalent relationship with this Majical Cloudz song — Devon Welsh has a rich and powerful voice, and Matthew Otto’s production builds a stately sweep out of impressively few moving parts. The simple, warm synth tone is immediately welcoming, and the minimal throb of the percussion provides the perfect amount of propulsion for Welsh’s affecting, earnest melody.

That said, there’s a sour triteness to “Childhood’s End”. Welsh throws around some heavy symbolism — the death of a father, a best friend being crucified — but doesn’t earn them with specificity or narrative coherence. It feels cheap, like Cloudz decided to write a powerful, emotional song before having a particular experience in mind — then collaging together images that are correlated with powerful, emotional experiences hoping that the song will achieve their weight.

But writing isn’t so simple, and the song feels a little cynical, manipulating you at arm’s length. It’s a strange feeling to simultaneously enjoy it and feel like I’m seeing through its techniques; I’m singing along in disillusionment.

This is pretty much my favouriteYouTube comment ever. It reminds...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 20:30:33 -0400

This is pretty much my favouriteYouTube comment ever. It reminds me of an interesting discussion Nick Richardson wrote in February’s Wire:

One of the oldest arguments in favour of transgressive art — one cited by Throbbing Gristle and Mike Dando, among others, is that it serves as a tool for the existentialist. By offending you, it makes you aware that you’ve been conditioned to be offended, and challenges you to take control of your reactions.