Burning Sled

Bassett Furniture

2009-10-21T16:21:00.000-07:00

Your furniture store failed.

You hired people to stand at busy street corners and hold dramatic signs announcing your going out of business sale.

You drive your gas-guzzling SUV with a giant, gaudy sign on top up and down the street here, all day, week after week.

It's too bad that your business fell on hard times. I feel bad for you, I really do. I can't vouch for the quality of your product but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that your American-made (I think) furniture itself wasn't the problem. You were just another victim of the times. The same goes for all your neighbors: Circuit City, Tweeter, Bennigan's, Office Depot, and plenty of other franchises on this street that have closed their doors over the past year. None of those are companies that I have any special feelings toward or will ever find myself missing. However, I have come to respect the (relative) dignity they showed in their final days. What we have here, in the case of Bassett Furniture in Batavia, Illinois, is something completely different.

Is the recession over? I'll leave it to the economists to decide that but from the looks of driving on Randall Road every day, you'd think we were entering the next Great Depression. Sure, everyone hopes that we're entering a period of recovery and growth (er, almost everyone). I'm sure everyone agrees that this is going to necessitate a growth in consumer confidence/optimism/"willingness to take risks"/etc. and that the saying "perception is reality" is the sort of thing that applies here. Putting a big vinyl banner up on your building's facade announcing your "GOING OUT OF BUSINESS" sale is one thing. Disseminating this message throughout the community, taking it to the streets and assigning people the demeaning tasks of holding your day-glo signs by the side of the road in the rain, well... this isn't exactly good for the mental health of our greater retail corridor.

The worst is over, or so I hope. But the longer Bassett draws this out their campaign of psychic terrorism on their neighbors, the more their own feelings of desperation and failure will start to catch on with everyone else like a virus. Is this a new form of pollution, sewing the seeds of economic angst and panic, or is it a mild form of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater?

I know this is a lot of fussing over nothing but I'm just so sick of these people every day and their carpet bomb-style advertising infecting my daily commute. You would be too.

Belle and Sebastian - Fuck This Shit

2009-10-14T20:25:00.000-07:00

Belle and Sebastian - "Fuck This Shit"

October 21, 2003 – Purchased used Ford Escort ZX2, 47,547 miles
vehicle price, license, documentation and tax: $7650.79

April 4, 2004 - ??,??? miles
new driver's side window
$121.33

August 14, 2006 – 78,911
New transmission (reconditioned)
Torque converter
(12 months, 12,000 mile warranty)
$2592.64

June 2, 2008 – 105,128
Thermostat / thermostat housing
Gasket, coolant
Spark plugs, ignition coil
Plug wires
Timing belt, serpentine belt
Hood release cable
Water pump
(12 months, 12,000 mile warranty)
$1906.89

September 23, 2008 – 108,003
New transmission
$3631.00

October 7, 2008 – 108,583
Brake pads and rotors
Wiring assembly repaired
$547.08

January 13, 2009 – 112,175
Battery cable end
$35.50

April 28, 2009 – 116,146
Turn signal bulbs, license plate bulb
Left headlight
$39.75

September 1, 2009 – 121,295
Right headlight
$21.75

September 23, 2009 – 122,102
Thermostat / thermostat housing
Gasket, coolant
$191.17

October 8, 2009 - 122,688 miles
Tests determine internal engine failure
General labor fees
$70.30

October 21, 2003 - October 8, 2009
75,141 miles driven
(average 12,523 per year)

Not counting tires (6-8?), oil changes, coolant flushings, batteries (3?), total charge: $9,156.41 ($1,526.07 per year or $127.17 per month)

Final overall cost: $16,807.20

casual littering

2009-10-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

A small survey of the shit people throw from their cars into the parking lot here at my apartment building. This only covers the east parking lot, none of the north or western areas or the yard out front.

1. Beer bottles

2. Energy drinks

3. Cigarette boxes

4. Condom wrappers

5. Plastic clips

on the rise: batteries, fast food cups, lighters, assorted 20 oz. drinks

Tortoise - Spiderwebbed

2009-09-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

Tortoise - "Spiderwebbed"

Been thinking a lot about this band and what they've meant to me and to others over the past decade and a half. I didn't discover them until TNT in 1998, but that's probably been the most formative album I own, shaping my tastes and ideas about music more than any other recording. That's not to say that I became a post-rock fanboy or fancied them as one of the Greatest Bands of Our Generation or anything like that. Rather, and I realize it's become a cliché at this point, they really broke down the barriers between the worlds of rock, electronic music, jazz, etc. This was a lot more meaningful then than it sounds today.

Always held TNT in the highest regard, "DJed" housing a sick number of their best moments but not enough to raise Millions Now Living Will Never Die above it. Remixed was a landmark album and anyone who disagrees needs to have their Girl Talk and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah albums ground into powder and taken as a rectal suppository (impossible, I know, as none of these kids buy CDs anyway). Standards isn't as good as listeners thought it was when it came out. It's All Around You isn't anywhere as bad as critics said it was. And the new album is fucking great, and I say this as someone who wasn't expecting much of anything from it.

So there they are, and it's been about 11 years since I started listening to them. Despite my continuing fondness, I've tended to overlook their debut album, thinking of it more as a demo of sorts, necessary experiments they needed to take to find their "real" sound, a dense and sometimes difficult record that doesn't lend itself to the mental landscapes that further albums would paint. Now and then it's graced with a few kind words: the once-reputable Alternative Press ranking it #64 on their Greatest Albums of the 90s list/issue, Woebot placing it at #65 on his 100 Greatest Records Ever list. but since it was released in 1994, it's been eclipsed by its successors, never really lapsing into enough obscurity to ever be properly "rediscovered," maybe like Kraftwerk's Radio Activity, respected and enjoyed but seen as a stepping stone to more accessible and melodic breakthroughs, the more playable and "well-rounded" Millions and TNT.

Taking some time to return to this album now, maybe more willing to slowly absorb it than I used to be, and really feeling it for the first time this autumn. The mallet-driven Reich-isms of later albums are still in an embryonic state, melodies and cinematic flourishes not quite as distinct at this point. Later albums would conjure up sweeping Technicolor soundscapes either through the music itself or by song titles like "The Suspension Bridge at Iguazú Falls" and album covers like this. By contrast, the debut sounds like it was recorded in a series of underground tunnels. Like the songs, some impossibly vast and open, others claustrophobically confining. The band plays with a simple and snappy dubbed-out funk on most tracks, playful (despite their reputation at the time as stoic, robo-Kraftwerk clones) but understated in a way that's unfamiliar to "indie" music or experimental rock today. What constitutes a generational gap? Is 15 years enough time? This music isn't mindblowingly difficult, inaccessible, or from all that long ago but at this point it sounds like it might as well be from another world.

10 hiLARious things to say when you're checking into a hotel

2009-09-20T13:30:00.000-07:00

1. At the front desk, start things off with a good old fashioned "I believe I reserved the presidential suite" joke. Laugh hysterically afterwards or condescendingly lean in to the front desk clerk and tell us "I'm just kidding!" This also works with confirming your reservation for "the penthouse."

2. If you're asked for a credit card to cover incidental charges, guffaw uncontrollably and shout "Accidental charges!?! There ain't gonna be no accidental charges!" Another variation on this popular pun is "Incidental charges? You mean accidental charges!"

3. If you're checking in with a group of people, spend the entire time shouting your room numbers back and forth with your companions. Here's a good pattern to follow:
Clerk: "Okay sir, you'll be staying in room number..."
You: "Yo Jay Dawg, what room you in?"
J-Dog: "I'm in room 223, what 'out you?"
You: "I don't know man, how do you find your way around this place?"
J-Dog: "It's like a maze, ain't it?"
You: "No shit!"
Clerk: "You'll be staying in room number 240. To get there..."
You: "I'm in room 240. Where you at?"
J-Dog: "I'm in 223."
You: "223? That's gotta be just down the hall."
J-Dog: "Cool man, hey you goin' to the bar?"
You: "Shit, I don't know. I'm so exhausted. I just gotta crash for a few hours."
J-Dog: "Damn, I could do the same. I think we're gonna hit the bar anyway, have a few brewskis, you know?
You: "I feel that. Now I just gotta find out how to get to my room. Fuck, this place is huge. Which way do I go?"
Clerk: "Well, you'll be staying in building A, room 223, and that's just down the hall over here."
You: (Pointing in the opposite direction) "Okay, so I just go down the hall over here..."
Clerk: "Actually, you're down the hall in this direction, so just head down the hall, take the elevator to level 2 and..."
J-Dog: "Yo, what's your room number?"
You: "223, just gimmie a ring when you're goin' out tonight. Hey! Which way is the bar?"
Clerk: "That's going to be out the door next to the pond, just a two minute walk..."
You: "Okay, okay. Look, I'll figure it out. Yo Jay-Dawg, wait up!"

4. Ask for a room upgrade. When you're informed of the cost, say "You mean you don't give out free upgrades to extra nice guests like me?" There are a hundred variations on this "maybe you could make an exception this time" speil. Depending on what's most comfortable for you, you can try flattering the clerk with complements or by using a vaguely threatening "look, we can do this the easy way, or maybe I'll take this to the next level if you don't catch my drift" approach. There's no line you have to worry about crossing with this routine as long as you remember to laugh it all off when the effects of your poking and prodding start to visily wear the lowly desk clerk down. This effectively turns the tables in a "what, can't you take a joke?" sort of way. You might not get your upgrade but at least you got the last laugh.

5. When you're approaching an especially well-staffed front desk, look back and forth at everyone behind the counter, do several double-takes while waving your head and hands from side to side in an exaggerated "there are so many people working, I can't decide who I'm supposed to go to!" manner. It's really hilarious.

6. In a similar situation, waltz up and snidely comment "Well, you're all looking busy!" Slap the counter for added effect and shout "chop chop!" You're on vacation, after all. Or you're on a business trip and thus, are making at least twice as much money as any of the smiling faces being paid to stand around and help you with your every need, and are inherently worth twice as much as any of us.

7. When you're checking in and providing the credit card, ask "is this in case I trash my room?" Take a break from your check-in to discuss several possible room-trashing scenarios with your companions and have a good laugh over these hypothetical, alternate universe situations. In the same way, discussing a riotous "room party" with a probable "room trashing" outcome is always a great source of laughs. No matter how many times we hear this, it never fails to bring a smile to our face.

8. "Do you ever get tired of saying the same thing over and over again?" Glad you asked. Not at all! What I love best about this job is how I'm paid to recite the same lengthy spiel at least fifty times a day. Maybe I could be utilizing my college education in a career that's slightly related to my interests and skills, or at least not completely incompatible with my personality, but I get to meet so many interesting people here every day. And give them directions to their evening reception and sign them up for bus trips to go shopping! Your convenience and comfort is my number one priority. I just want to make this stop on your fast track to being a manager (hopefully by the time you're 30!) as easy as possible. I'm here for you, and I'll be thinking about you when I'm drinking myself to sleep later tonight. What can I say? I like to lose consciousness as fast as I can, it makes the time spent waiting to come back here and do it all again tomorrow go by so much faster.

9. "Ohmigod, this place is soooo big. Can we get Segways to ride around on?" Sometimes this request will be for conveyor belts in the hallways, sometimes for golf carts to drive from building to building. It's meant as a joke roughly half the time, though more often as a jab at the sprawling size of our facilities, not as a self-deprecating comment on the part of the person asking it on how they're really a lazy and worthless fat piece of shit who can barely suffer the strain and indignity of having to walk more than 5 minutes to get somewhere.

10. "Where are we, Oklahoma*?" Laugh it up, we are pretty far away from the airport and the city. What's that you spotted out the window on your limo ride here from the airport? Fields? A farm? That's fucking hilarious. I know, we're just a bunch of hillbillies, the people you fly over, silly yokels who could never do your job or understand your jetsetting lifestyle. But enjoy your week slumming it with us and try to manage. We'll keep grinning like the dogs we are, just happy to have simple jobs and to mingle with intellectual and financial elite like yourself.

*The most common state name of choice changed here for obvious reasons. I should do more to protect myself and keep my job safe but when it comes to these things it's really hard for me to censor myself anymore than I already do.

why did I receive this in the mail?

2009-08-19T16:22:00.000-07:00

And what happens if I'm incapacitated in a car accident tomorrow? If I fall down the stairs or slip in the shower and break my legs? Or worse? I really don't want my parents finding something like this in my apartment, or in future mail being forwarded from my address to their home.

video #82: Mercury Rev - Butterfly's Wings

2009-08-09T13:30:00.000-07:00

A wonderful little video from Mercury Rev. Try as I may, there doesn't seem to be any information on the Internet about who put it together, not even on the band's website. Quite a disservice to the creator(s), if you ask me. But also, you may ask: who cares? I don't know. I just don't know.

I started blogging about animated videos more than two years ago, if only just to see how many were out there as well as to deepen my knowledge of this once-rare species of video art. I certainly enjoy these things but, not having any stake in the present or the future of this form (i.e. being an animation student), I find myself at a loss for much to say about any of them anymore. Furthermore, simple exposure hasn't really enhanced my appreciation or understanding of them, so at this point I'm just kind of running through these entries without much thought or interest. I'd be of sound mind to just stop this pursuit altogether but from the beginning I had the idea that I would eventually do so once I reached 100 videos, and so it's with this same goal that I routinely press on and hope to reach it soon. With computer animation growing cheaper and more sophisticated with each passing year, there's no lack of material to cover. I still think it's an interesting topic, but the further music videos drift from prominence on television and further entrench themselves in the world of viral and disposable Internet clips, the less vital it all feels.

Closer Musik - Maria

2009-08-05T20:14:00.000-07:00

Closer Musik - "Maria"

"Maria" might not get mentioned as a "key" Kompakt track in the way that efforts from Superpitcher ("Heroin"), Jurgen Paape ("“So Weit Wie Noch Nie"), Rex the Dog ("Frequency") or even Michael Mayer ("Lovefood") have as the legacy of the label and minimal techno in general is discussed by fans and critics these days -- each apparently eager to put all this silliness behind them and pretend that they were always into "big room" anthemic shit and sex-dripping "summer jams", but that's a different matter altogether -- but few of these "hits" can match the subtle pleasures of this song from the now kinda-legendary Total 4 compilation.

Maybe this was/could've been a club hit, but it was probably best-experienced at home, better-suited for experiences more personal or reflective than a sweaty club full of drunken hipsters. Of course, this is one of those songs that most people have just downloaded on their own and listened to on whatever speakers happen to be hooked up to their computer, thereby becoming music to "do things" to, be it writing papers, surfing the Internet, or whatever. This would probably be a good track to listen to on headphones, but it's not like anyone can be bothered to drop everything and do so anymore today than they might have back in 2002 when this was released. If it didn't set dancefloors on fire, "Maria" at least offered an alternative to the soon-to-implode laptop pop scene, proving that emotional melodies could speak volumes more than anxiety-ridden lyrics about relationships gone bad.

I guess I don't know how this track fits into any kind of greater narrative about minimal techno or the 00's, I've just always liked it and its simple, quietly restrained beauty, and I know I'm not alone.

video #81: Moby - Pale Horses

2009-08-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

Finding myself really tempted to buy this album, even though I only listen to Everything Is Wrong once every season or so and Play has slipped into a bi-annual rotation at best. Always rooting for Moby and when it appears that he's going back to doing what he does best, I want to support him just on principle, lest he go back to making really boring double albums and playing the role of meta-celebrity in a decade that doesn't need any more. I like this song but unfortunately I'm trying to curb my music spending and off the top of my head I could probably think of at least a hundred other CDs I'd rather buy before this. Good video, though.

Nuno Canavarro - Untitled

2009-07-29T13:11:00.000-07:00

Nuno Canavarro - "Untitled (#5)"

I'm not going to pretend that I did any heavy lifting in "discovering" this artist or his one and only album. By 2009, the legend of Nuno Canavarro has been well documented and picked over on the Internet by the electronic music cognoscenti and "beginners" alike, leaving little more to say about the man or his work. A fine review of Canavarro and his work was published by Mark Richardson in 2002 and remains the best starting point as well as what seems like the final word on the subject.

Even so, Plux Quba remains a difficult album to pin down. Its murky songpieces resisting any easy categorization, melodies fading into view and disappearing before you're even cognizant of their presence, lengthy passages of what essentially sounds like synthesizer noodling/dicking around, which is probably what the average Justice or even Aphex Twin fan* would probably think the entire album is.

Track #5 is my favorite piece on the album. It's untitled, along with seven of the other 14 tracks. That's kind of a shame not just for how it messes up my last.fm stats, but how it denies the track a sense of identity that it deserves. Then again, the titled songs on Plux Quba don't sound any more meaningful than an average Autechre tracklist, so what would be the point? As far as describing how it sounds, I'm at a loss for words that don't inadvertently paint it as knob-twiddling wankery. It's not musical in the usual sense, though certain motifs begin to emerge as it unravels over its four minutes or so, songbird-like melodies floating over some filtered, muffled voices echoing from what sounds like a distance away, reduced to sinister but subdued-sounding growls as gentle synth tones ebb and flow with the kind of rhythm of ocean waves rolling into shore. None of these elements were new to electronic music but Canavarro goes beyond the simple pleasures of new age or ambient music and builds some truly alien worlds out of them. Maybe walking through the woods with this on headphones last spring created some indelible impressions on me that won't translate to every listener, but this never fails to invoke a goofy sense of wonder in me whenever I hear it.

*I know that forcing these comparisons in order to prove my point is a lazy and misleading tactic and I'm trying to avoid it in speech, writing and thought, but you can't deny there are lots of dudes out there who still love "braindance" and think Richard D. James is "a total genius" who can do no wrong, but who'd rather listen to Squarepusher bass solos or the new Prodigy album than this.

video #80: Ghostface Killah - Daytona 500

2009-07-26T08:31:00.000-07:00

I've consulted a number of sources on this matter and as far as I can tell, this really was the official music video to this song, released all the way back in 1996. Then again, if Raekwon can drop references to Volton on 36 Chambers that people still love to quote, this video probably shouldn't come as a big surprise. No word on how this came to be or whether Ghostface was a closet otaku or what. I should dust off my copy of the Wu-Tang Manual one of these days and at least give it some time on my coffee table.

TRS-80 - Fantasy Football is Stupid/Me and My Skills

2009-07-22T10:53:00.000-07:00

TRS-80 - "Fantasy Football is Stupid"/"Me and My Skills""

I opened this entry with a 2,000+ word account of the time I was assigned to interview this band and the various misfortunes and setbacks I suffered as I struggled to complete this relatively simple task. But as I looked ahead to the end of this troubling recollection, it was clear that there wasn't going to be any real payoff for the reader or much of a point in sharing this story at all.

So then... TRS-80, IDM/breakbeat trio from Chicago formed in the late 90s, a few albums on local labels with good distribution, some good word of mouth online, reputation for interesting live shows with lots of video and other visuals... all that and $5.00 will get you a foot-long sandwich at Subway this summer! TRS-80's sample-heavy downtempo grooves, dusty found-sound samples and nostalgic and sometimes pastoral passages between tracks was a recipe that could have appealed to a wide group of listeners but never really caught on. Blame it on bad luck, the lack of any "Chicago scene" to grow in, or being signed to indie labels that either failed to generate any precious Internet buzz (File13, One Cell) or labels that catered to listeners of somewhat different interests (the industrial havens Underground Inc. and Invisible). The band was prominently hyped and promoted on the late, great Epitonic.com, though the site never quite capitalized on the indie music goldrush of the early 00s and was eventually rendered obsolete by the rise of link-farming blogs and message boards. Its home page (presumably the rest of its content as well) remains forever trapped in the early months of 2006.

Longtime members Kent Rayhill and Deb Schimmel left the band within a year following their finest album, Shake Hands With Danger. This left drummer Jay Rajeck on his own, maybe hooking up with other musicians, maybe moving to Los Angeles... things get a little unclear after that. I comply with a request from someone at their new label to take down an old promo picture from the band's Last.fm page that I'd uploaded years ago. Unfortunately, further "updating" of their web presence on their part also involved removing the old but brilliant "Community College" music video from their Youtube account. Most of the band's videos are still viewable, including many by associate Eric Fensler, best known for the now-legendary G.I. Joe PSA parodies, predating Youtube by several years but continually rediscovered by new viewers every day.

Here's a pair of tracks from their 2002 album Mr. Kickass, which wasn't necessarily their best work, but it's as good a place to start as any. If you like this then you might love their later albums. Or you could listen to Merriweather Post Pavilion for the 93rd time instead. It's up to you.

I can't help but think that the band could have used their talents to connect with (or exploit) the Adult Swim-viewing populace in the same way that MF Doom and Flying Lotus did. You've got to grab the bull by the horns if you want to get any attention these days. At least open an indie rock hot dog stand, start a blog about your own feces or talk shit about celebrities on your Twitter account, maybe then Pitchforkmedia.com will run a feature on you.

video #79: The Beatles - Here Comes the Sun

2009-07-19T14:16:00.000-07:00

Keeping this dead blog afloat can be a chore. Auto-loading it full of AMVs every week would be an easy way to prop it up while sticking to the animated videos theme that I decided to try out more than 2 years ago, but that's cheating so it won't happen. Now and then, something unofficial might creep on (as it has in the past) and such is the case again today.

This gorgeous clip was lovingly put together by Mr. Daniel Chang, though I don't think it was his decision to have it uploaded to Youtube. "rayofash" never takes credit for making it but that doesn't stop him from getting the credit throughout the 500+ comments for it. I watched this at a public screening 5 years ago with a few hundred other people and it was a big hit. I guess another 167,156 views in the meantime can't be a bad thing, even if most of those viewers are leaving these kind of comments:

"Take Flight" was another good fan-made video in this vein but apparently it's been taken down from Youtube, the creator having never uploaded it to "The Org" and somehow failing to preserve a backup copy of their own. I'm not sure I'm buying the creator's reasoning behind its removal. Very difficult to feel sorry for someone who doesn't even bother to save their own work.

U2 - The Wanderer

2009-07-15T15:16:00.000-07:00

U2 - "The Wanderer"

I have no strong opinions about this band, who've written a few songs I've enjoyed at one point or another. I have no memories of how big they were at the peak of their popularity, or any real attachment to any of their albums. I get the impression that a lot of fans felt confused by the turns they took on Zooropa and utterly betrayed by the electronic sounds of Pop. As these were the first two (and as it would turn out, the only) U2 albums that I would encounter, interact with, and enjoy in any kind of non-nostalgic way, my chances of agreeing with the "real" U2 fans over just about anything are about as likely as Bono joining Dave Grohl on a charity album for AIDS denialists.

I'd like to think that even the most traditional fans -- the ones who remember all the words from The Joshua Tree and fondly remember the first time they saw "New Year's Day" or "Where the Streets Have No Name" on MTV -- didn't take "The Wanderer" for granted. The final song on Zooropa, it features no shimmery guitars, no vocals from Bono, none of the epic trademarks of the band's sound. Of course, it does have Johnny Cash on vocals, years before he'd assume his place as an honorary alt. rock hero. That's how we remember him now, thanks to the albums he recorded with Rick Rubin and released between 1994 and 2002. But before his rejuvenation and subsequent generational rediscovery, there was this song, giving the man a chance to lay it all down over the kind of refreshingly bare arrangement that the Nashville hitmakers wanted nothing to do with.

If you still buy CDs but hate U2, you can also get the song on The Essential Johnny Cash, where I heard it for the first time shortly after his death in 2003. A sad day for everyone, that was, losing a figure that everyone in music -- country, gospel, punk, probably even hip-hop -- respected, looked to for inspiration, and wanted to claim as their own. But at least he didn't live to hear this, right?

video #78: Tim Exile - Family Galaxy

2009-07-12T13:35:00.000-07:00

Warp Records has always championed a progressive visual aesthetic when it comes to their sleeves or videos. This clip for Tim Exile (one of their newest artists, but hardly a newcomer to the world of electronic music) won't give you nightmaes like any of Chris Cunningham's works for Aphex Twin, but it's a trip on par with any videos from Luke Vibert's "I Love Acid" or Autechre's "Gantz Graf."

If you're going to watch this on Youtube, it's probably best to view it directly on the site itself, in High Quality and on fullscreen mode. Directed by Howard Kingston.

Original Rockers - Sexy Selector

2009-07-08T11:09:00.000-07:00

Original Rockers - "Sexy Selector"

From the ambiguously titled Ambient Dub compilation released in 1992 -- a collection sure to be the object of awe or revulsion for many, simply based on the name alone -- comes this track from the original incarnation of the somewhat better-known Rockers Hi-Fi. It's not really ambient, or dub, or even trip-hop, but something from the murky depths in between. The rest of the CD kind of sucks but you'll want to turn down the lights and light up to the sounds of this early 90s slow burner. Really gotta find more stuff like this.

video #77: Scratch Pet Land - Escargot Couleurs!

2009-07-05T13:48:00.000-07:00

A solid entry in the French/German bleeps & bloops alliance, Scratch Pet Land carried on the Nuno Canavarro aesthetic as best they could with some help from "artistic collective" Qubo Gas for the video. Released years after MTV's retreat from music programming (perhaps it could have run on "AMP," as the show was apparently still on air as of 2000) but years before the Internet was in any shape to properly host and show such clips, it's unclear where this video was supposed to be seen at the time it was made. Looking not unlike the animations we made on Paintshop (?) during computer class in 3rd grade probably didn't speed it to the front of any program director's queue, either.

Scratch Pet Land's first album was to be their last but they've since gone on to a longer and possibly more visible career as Fan Club Orchestra. And that's about all I have to say about this. There was a time that I really loved this kind of stuff but that quickly came to an end after I purchased DAT Politics CDs in 2004 and quickly realized that I'd just wasted $15. This occasion prompted a gradual reevaluation of my standards for spending time and money on such immaterial products, something we've all thought twice about by now, I'm sure. What was the straw that broke your camel's back?

Luna - Dear Diary

2009-07-01T14:42:00.000-07:00

Luna - "Dear Diary"

"We made an album called The Days of Our Nights. Our fifth studio album, it is possibly the worst of the seven that Luna made...

Of course, my least favorite song, 'Dear Diary,' was picked as the single. I came to hate singing "Dear Diary." The stupid "baa-baa" section. The bad lyric -- 'then you blew my mind.' I hated that lyric. It was one of those things that comes out of your mouth when you're singing gibberish, before you've written the lyrics proper. But then you find it's a phrase that you are incapable of replacing. You're stuck with it." -- Dean Wareham in Black Postcards

The Days of Our Nights was the first Luna album I heard, and remains my favorite of theirs today. "Dear Diary" is the opening song, sounding at once tossed-off but undeniably seductive and just too cool to care what you might think of it. That opening guitar lick, Dean Wareham's nasally Wellington-via-New York vocals, the instantly-repeatable chorus... it's a laid-back and class(y/ic) tune that already sounds like it's from another world, so unconcerned with placating our cravings for the yelpy, juvenile egoism that passes for indie rock profundity in 2009.

Front-to-back, this is a very good album, and to me it feels like the point where Luna really pulled it all together. Why then is it almost universally dismissed as the worst album of the band's career? A few reviews I was able to find online absolutely trash it as irredeemable and worthless. That's not to say that it didn't receive positive reviews as well, though those seem to range from offering backhanded praise to indifferent approval at best.

I'd say that I normally wouldn't care about this at all but when it comes to artists I'm particularly fond of, my tastes usually fall in step with whatever the masses agree on. OK Computer is my favorite Radiohead album. Trans-Europe Express is the Kraftwerk CD I usually go for. Isn't Anything isn't the the best album from My Bloody Valentine; not for most and not for me. And so forth. So when I happen to like something so much that so many other reasonable people think is crap (including the artists themselves), it gives me pause to wonder if maybe I'm really a horrible judge of what goes into a good song.

The Days of Our Nights remains out of print following the merger of Sire Records into London-Sire in 2000. Despite being an album they could conceivably still earn royalties from (any proceeds made from their releases on Elektra Records will go straight back into label pockets until past advances are paid in full -- read Dean's book and it'll make sense), Luna seems content to let it wither and die in the vaults. Finding a used copy was one of the best discoveries I've made in the past two years, and the album's helped get me through some strange times in ways a little too personal for me to want to air out in a place like this. And perhaps falling out of circulation wasn't so bad for this album after all. After an unpleasant introduction to the world that ultimately left it commercially and artistically disowned, it now lies between the cracks waiting for the right ears to hear it at the right time, hopefully belonging to the kind of people who'll love whatever songs on it they feel like without worrying about the consequences.

video #76: Kid 606 - Mr. Wobble's Nightmare

2009-06-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

The latest single from Kid 606, with a video from Joel Trussell. I was licking my chops when I first heard about another collaboration from them, hoping for another video like "The Illness", and certainly not expecting anything with stop motion. But this is another winner.

Do you need to know the background of this song to appreciate it? Probably not but if you haven't heard "Mr. Cook's Nightmare" then you're missing out on a 90's classic. The original source is bound to blow a few minds too.

a pretty big day for this guy

2009-06-25T19:46:00.000-07:00

I don't think I can possibly imagine the kind of happiness or excitement that he's feeling right now, much less hope to know it for myself one day.

Brad Fuller & Hal Canon - Marble Madness

2009-06-24T18:30:00.000-07:00

Brad Fuller & Hal Canon - "Marble Madness"

I always thought of Marble Madness as a classic NES game, but its origins date back years earlier to arcades as well as various computer platforms (Amiga, ZX Spectrum,etc.). I played it a few times as a young child and never got far, but imagined that once you got the hang of it that it would reveal itself as a lengthy, deep and immensely replayable game. It wasn't until this year that I had a chance to play it again and finally find out for myself. Turns out there are only five levels, all of which can be passed in less than five minutes. Then that's it. No more levels, no hidden stages. That's just the end.

Most people who initially bought Marble Madness unaware of its brevity were probably justified in whatever sense of disappointment they may have felt. Playing it in 2009 on a (probably) illegal disc full of classic Nintendo titles (none of which I paid a cent for), it's hard to justifiably feel cheated by the experience, no matter how unexpectedly short it is. Maybe that's partly because of the instantly addictive and unforgettable music. When you have a game with simple courses to run and few enemies to dodge, your attention will inevitably drift to other parts that would normally be filtered into the background of your experience, like the themes for the different stages. Fortunately the music is so original, fun, and befitting to the strange and wonderful polygonal world within the game.

I recorded all of these clips off of Youtube. They're of varying quality and perhaps from different ports of the game, but at least now you can enjoy them in the car, on the bus, or during your afternoon workout. Can't get enough? Go buy the game!

video #75: Amadou & Mariam – Masiteladi

2009-06-21T16:33:00.001-07:00

Amadou Et Mariam & -M- - Masiteladi [NEW]

Here's an enjoyable song and video from Amadou & Mariam, probably the best-known Afropop band in America right now thanks to lots of good press and touring. Too bad they'll never actually get to watch this video. They're blind, but they can probably see the music and that's what really matters. Right?

Is it wrong that I enjoy this while not really bothering to check out most other African pop music? Do I only like this because it's indie-approved and touches on all the right kinds of western music that I feel the most? Not that I listen to Vampire Weekend or anything. But would I if they were from Mali? Haunting questions.

I've also been getting into Omar Souleyman, but is that okay if I don't have any intention of "getting into" any other Syrian music? If I don't, can I still like his music for the right reasons? Not even a half-decade of M.I.A. are we prepared to deal with these dilemmas.

Free Kitten - Never Gonna Sleep

2009-06-17T18:04:00.000-07:00

Free Kitten - "Never Gonna Sleep"

1997 was a pretty good year for music. So many great albums! Here's one that's always been lost in the shuffle and commonly dismissed as a fun but inconsequential side project, but that's a mistake. This was way ahead of its time. Sentimental Education was all over the place as an album (which people hold against it for some reason) but this is one of its best tracks. Give this jam a chance and you won't be let down!

Kill Rock Stars was never the same after they started courting shit bands like Numbers and The Decemberists. I miss their old sound and their passionately feminist and gay (not fey and prissy and whiney, but homosexual!) and creative attitude. This same "old sound" turned out to be the sound of tomorrow. Too bad no one gives a shit today! Too busy blogging and listening to "quirky" (but serious!) bands dressed in their best steampunk outfits, I guess. RIP KRS (Grand Royal, too). Indie rock suuuuucks.

video #74: Miracle Fortress - Have You Seen Your Dreams

2009-06-14T18:44:00.000-07:00

This was going to be one of the longest entries I'd ever published on this blog but after a month of fussing over it and considering what it is about it that bothers me and what I think it all means within some bigger context or something, I was unable to form any real opinion about it or say anything truly interesting at all. My brain is rotting into a useless mass I'll be flipping burgers when I'm 40.

video #73: The Rice Twins - Can I Say

2009-05-03T22:05:00.000-07:00

I don't know who these two guys are or where they came from and outside of their rare and regrettably short releases since 2006, (if Discogs is to be trusted) they don't seem to be doing anything else on the side. But since their first release on K2 they've been Kompakt's secret weapon and I keep hoping that they'll eventually release an album, one we won't have to wait for as long as Rex the Dog's.

"For Dan" and "For Penny and Alexis" were the highlights of Immer 2 and Total 7, but only now am I realizing that I never actually heard Total 8 and, thus, missed out on this great track. Wistful but pounding, gloriously blissed-out and breezy, this won't make people toss their drinks at each other like Justice or MSTRKRFT or Basement Jaxx so that probably makes it dance floor poison by hipster benchmarks of 2009 but if you like shoegaze-y techno and haven't jumped on the "mnml sux!" bandwagon then this is for you.

Oh, I almost forgot. This is a really wonderful video, too. We're fortunate that The Rice Twins care enough about their music to support proper visual treatments of it (another of which I'll post sooner or later), because how many other artists in the realm of dance music who stick to putting out 12" releases on independent labels are bothering to? I got a big Watership Down-vibe from this. Whether this was the intention of animator Tommy Vilkensen is unclear. Grab some tissues and judge for yourself (be warned, big spoilers on the other side of that link).

Jesper Dahlbäck - What Is The Time, Mr. Templar?

2009-04-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

Jesper Dahlbäck - "What Is The Time, Mr. Templar?"

I first came across this track sometime in 2003. An internet acquaintance had burned a mix CD for me and had tossed in an extra burned CD-R labeled "Ellen Allien" along with it. This was around the same time as the release of Berlinette, and I was eager to hear more from her. This disc turned out to be a DJ mix, however, and with no title or tracklisting, hunting down any of the songs on it was an almost impossible task. It would be a few more years before Discogs.com had a through and accurate listing of all her releases, or at least until I would be patient/desperate enough to comb through all of them to identify exactly what I had. The Flieg Mit Ellen Allien mix was released all the way back in 2001, and of all the great tracks on it (mostly deep house, German techno, etc.) I was most interested in finding out what track #10 was. And here you have it, but things get even stranger when I tried to track down its precise origins.

"What is the Time, Mr. Templar?" is not officially listed on any release from Jesper Dahlbäck, at least not until earlier this year, when it was reissued as a 12" single. While online retail blurbs allude to it as a "classic item from the 90's," even in 2003 it seemed like it was ahead of everything else I was hearing from the Kompakt/Playhouse scene and still does today. Further investigation finds this clue from his 1997 release "The Persuader." At only four tracks long, I'd only been able to find and download the first three from it sometime last year. The final track is listed as 5:13 in length, the same runtime as the full version of "Templar" I was able to download elsewhere.

If you love it so much, why not buy the record? The original? An expensive collector's item. And the reissue seems out of stock everywhere online. For now I'll continue enjoying this for free, the time I spent looking for it already feeling like more work and fuss than I've ever gone through for almost any single song before. And no, I don't think this makes me any kind of hard-working mp3 crate digger or anything.

video #72: Moby - Shot in the Back of the Head

2009-04-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

Of course this sounds like Moby, or at least it's unmistakable when you go into it with the expectations laid out by Play, 18, or Hotel. Maybe even Last Night, but after its listless predecessor I gave up on the man and haven't attempted to give it a listen. But this new song, the first single from a surprisingly-quick follow up album coming out this summer, is blessedly free of any lyrical baggage and is just Moby doing what he does best. Chilled out, slightly mournful, but not sappy or trite. It all sounds a little too easy, perhaps, but it's a step back in the right direction for an artist whose past accomplishments should earn him a chance to redeem himself from recent disappointments. Even the album cover is a welcome return to form.

The video is directed, and apparently hand-drawn, by David Lynch!

Steve Reich - Music For 18 Musicians (Coldcut Remix)

2009-03-22T19:10:00.000-07:00

Steve Reich - "Music For 18 Musicians (Coldcut Remix)"

Steve Reich remixed? A great idea, for sure, and a hearty bunch of attempts on this 1999 compilation. Unfortunately, it's all downhill after the opening track. Howie B? Tranquility Bass? Barf! There are a few more promising contributors, but even Ken Ishii and Nobukazu Takemura sound like they're phoning it in. Was Aphex Twin busy? John McEntire? This was a great idea that would probably turn out much better today. As it is, it's fodder for the used bins, not a bad album but a missed opportunity.

At least Coldcut get the CD off to a good start. Their remix of this solid little minimalist jam doesn't cover it up with dusty samples or cartoon sound effects like you'd expect, but preserves the original mallet percussion melody and adds some pleasant electronic pulses and swells. It sounds like the album cover looks, and if that floats your boat then you're going to be one happy camper when you give this a spin!

video #71: KMFDM - A Drug Against War

2009-03-18T16:11:00.000-07:00

"Do I really like this, or would I rather be listening to KMFDM instead?" That's probably the closest thing to a personal "test" that I have for any music that I can't form an immediate opinion about. Unfortunately, most of the time the answer doesn't fall in the favor of whatever hot new indie band everyone is talking about.

I can't say how authentic KMFDM's anti-corporate posturing was or how subversive their songs truly were or weren't. They weren't Throbbing Gristle or Negativland but obviously they were aware of this and for a popular band they had a rare self-deprecating streak about themselves that that would soon be lost on an entire generation (or at least whatever tiny fraction of it would actually hear them once their sound was left out of the Vans Warped Tour/Korn Family Values scenes). I think that's what troubles me most, the fact that they were essentially a joke but it was one their fans were in on. Today, they'd be crucified for empty "sloganeering" by bloggers but taken completely literally by everyone else. Just another sign why this decade has surely been the dumbest I've lived through so far. Of course, you can't take this stuff too seriously but why can't some mock-agitprop still be fun in these image-obsessed times?

The transition from the optimistic and culture-savvy 90s (when skepticism of the media and globalization seemed to be growing into a burgeoning movement -- though maybe I'm embellishing the past as everyone eventually does) to the comparitively retarded 00's (seemingly doomed to be remembered for awful television, butchered attention spans, and the shallow self-mythologizing and prejudice-reinforcement enjoyed by all on the Internet) didn't have to happen. I don't think I'm imagining it all either. I'm not nostalgic for the 90's (not in any meaningless VH1-defined sense of the term) but I truly believe that the thought process of the average person was radically different back then. Maybe I'll end up feeling the same way about this decade in another 10 years?

This video was (probably) directed by Aiden Hughes, whose iconic art appeared on pretty much all of KMFDM's releases, even 13 (!) years after this clip was first aired. Of course, this was when MTV actually played videos, which is almost impossible to talk about now without sounding embitteredly out-of-touch or furiously betrayed by its direction since. You can't even talk about talking about it anymore without using tired words like "rockist" or "oldster" and sounding like some 40 year-old who just discovered the world of online music criticism and is discovering how to use it to vent about his deepest-held values and prejudices. But don't act like it's all relative and there's no difference between progams like "120 Minutes"/"Yo! MTV Raps"/"Daria"/"Aeon Flux" and "MADE"/"Room Raiders"/"The Hills"/"Paris Hilton's my New BFF."

Fleetwood Mac - Albatross

2009-03-15T18:24:00.000-07:00

Fleetwood Mac - "Albatross"

Look, yet another classic song I've somehow never heard before! What's next, blogging about how totally great the Pixies were? Great bands you've never even heard of like Can or Joy Division? How genius the hook in "Toxic" is and how all you indie snobs are too busy stroking your chins and listening to Isan and Brothomstates to ever get it? Stop standing around with your arms crossed and get out there and dance! OMG, this "Losing My Edge" song is so good. I hate those kind of indie pricks! Lol.

A mellow instrumental hit from an era of the band that I pretty much didn't know about at all. I didn't hear it until renting Man on Wire a month ago and since then I've been hooked on it. Brilliant movie, though most of my chums online have a radical aversion to Mr. Petit's excitable recollection of the events portrayed within it, strong enough to keep them from sharing my opinion on the film.

Great song. A number 1 hit in the UK!

video #70: Wagon Christ - Receiver

2009-02-18T19:50:00.000-08:00

Luke Vibert's music has inspired a lot of great animated videos. Here's another one, directed by Tom Perrett.

Turn On - Electrocation Of Fire Ants

2009-02-08T13:21:00.000-08:00

Turn On - "Electrocation Of Fire Ants"

I had no idea that this band even existed until a week ago. Turn On included Tim Gane, Sean O'Hagan and Andy Ramsay, with Laetitia Sadier contributing vocals to a track. Essentially, this line-up was Stereolab without Mary Hansen or Morgane Lhote, and releasing an EP at the height of the Groop's prime in 1997. I've done my best to follow the Switched On collections and other related projects over the years (Monade, UiLab) but this one slipped past me.

I was really into this track for about a week, but went a little overboard and don't know if I'll want to hear this again for a while. Don't get me wrong, this is mellow and pleasant, though not as inspired as the Lab's best instrumental work from the time. Oh well. Trying to track down as much abstract pop from this time period as I can, still searching in vain for something else like it.

video #69: Fol Chen - No Wedding Cake

2009-02-04T19:26:00.000-08:00

Animated video for the latest Asthmatic Kitty band. Pretty tired of this kind of indie pop to say the least, but the video reminds me of Delphine games from the 90's and their somewhat-related imitators. Don't expect anyone else to conjure up those for a reference, though.

Directed by Nancy Jean Tucker.

Telefon Tel Aviv - I Lied

2009-02-01T22:41:00.000-08:00

TELEFON-TEL-AVIV-BOTH
Originally uploaded by kirstiecat

Telefon Tel Aviv - "I Lied"

News of the passing of Charles Cooper hit the Internet last week, first in a post by bandmate Joshua Eustis on Telefon Tel Aviv's Myspace page. News was quickly picked up by local sites like The Reader, Chicagoist, and Gaper's Block, not to mention Pitchfork and a bunch of other music websites (most of which had been gleefully happy to shit on the band's faces for most of the past 5 years, if only for making pleasant electropop that wasn't 100% groundbreaking or part of some trendy and easy to write about revival). Even at this point, details about Cooper's death have not been released to the public, though that hasn't stopped some from not only speculating on what they might be, but also on the appropriate response of his family and friends.

Checking the band's last.fm page, I'm kind of shocked that they have as many listeners as they do. They were never very hyped or given an overwhelming push by either Hefty Records or Bpitch Control. I'm glad to see that it looks like they had, in fact, found their audience, one that had surely been eagerly anticipating their new album, out mere days before Cooper's disappearance had been reported.

Here's a song from their second album, Map of What is Effortless, which helped get me through many long nights at my last job (and still could at my current position if only music were allowed).

video #68: Kanye West - Good Morning

2009-01-21T13:08:00.000-08:00

Original animation by Takashi Murakami, never released as a true music video but displayed as part of his own travelling exibit.

I do enjoy his work, which I guess makes me a trend-hopping hipster kid, though you'd never catch me dead in a patterned hoodie like the rest of them.

Iron Maiden - The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

2009-01-10T15:10:00.000-08:00

Iron Maiden - "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner"

From the Chicago Tribune:

Gov. Rod Blagojevich began and ended the day of his impeachment on literary notes. Whether they were high or low ones is yet to be decided by English teachers.

Upon completing his morning jog Friday, Illinois' embattled leader mentioned a short story from the late 1950s to the media gaggle outside his Northwest Side home.

"I feel like the old Alan Sillitoe short story 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,' " Blagojevich said.

Freudian literary critics may note the hero of that story is a petty criminal who finds solace in running, eventually competing on the track team of a juvenile-detention facility.

I Wanna Be Your Dog

2009-01-05T19:37:00.000-08:00

Not to single out these particular breeders or anything, I just saw this sign while on the way to work today and couldn't help but feel like it all seemed so familiar.

some great blogs

2009-01-02T14:00:00.000-08:00

Most blogs on the Internet, including the one you're reading right now, are, more or less, fairly terrible. But once in a while I find a few that aren't. It's then that I'm reminded why I wanted to start a blog in the first place, and the enthusiasm that I felt when I first began. Along the way, I was sure, I'd find lots of other people online who'd feel the same way, or that I'd somehow find my place in the greater blogosphere and really hit it off with a bunch of other writers.

This never really happened, probably because finding and keeping up with other blogs takes actual effort and curiosity, which I wasn't feeling very much in the past year. I had a blogroll on this page listing a few blogs from people I vaguely knew from message boards (half of which died in the past year). It was a placeholder that was meant to be temporary until I found my own place in the greater blogosphere and had some real contacts that I could promote or throw up at the top of the page like a worthless list of Myspace friends. I'm probably not going to put it back up or try to assemble a new one. If I did, however, it might look something like this:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/
You already know this man, probably no need to say anything about him as a writer. But since his hip injury left him bedridden this past spring, he's ran a blog that's showcased some of his most personal and entertaining writing. Unsurprisingly, most of his entries focus on film but it's the ones that don't that are the most compelling and/or hilarious. Read his entry on rice cookers and see if you don't find yourself dusting off yours or wandering over to Amazon to buy one. Or his piece on the post-irony consuming our culture. His belated and unofficial "review" of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled is one of the most calculated but brutal takedowns I've ever read on the Internet. Ebert has been a regular presence in my life ever since I started reading papers at 13 or 14. How lucky I feel that he seems urgently compelled to write even more with each passing year.

http://intensities.wordpress.com/
One-third of the Twisted Misters, Andrew has grown into such a prolific writer that one blog can no longer contain him! A walking encyclopedia of pop culture, his blog is a treasure trove of insights on television, films, music, and lists. Lots of lists.

http://bit-player.org/
Honestly, I don't know how often I'll be coming back to this, but every time I do I feel a little bit smarter, even if it's all advanced math and computer topics that I usually don't completely understand. The author wrote this great book, which I just bought as a Christmas present for someone else but wish I could still read for myself.

http://birdboy2000.livejournal.com/
Still reading this from the very beginning like an epic novel. I'm almost halfway through it and I can't imagine what's going to happen next. His idiosyncrasies and musings on his identity grow more pronounced with each passing year. I really can't begin to describe what this is about, you'll just have to find out for yourself.

http://thousandbars.blogspot.com/
The journey ended four years ago, New Year's Eve, 2005, and the blog has been hit and miss since then. Still, Dan Freeman's quest still inspires us all to this day.

http://www.haibane.info/
Good geek blog. Gives me a little bit of hope that anime fandom can stretch into one's thirties with no terrible side effects, even peacefully existing alongside family and a career. Good to find more intelligent people who like Makoto Shinkai and Yoshitoshi ABe. His enthusiasm is contagious.

http://ogiuemaniax.wordpress.com/
Deep insights and wandering thoughts on anime, manga, and other otaku obsessions. You'll never have a hard time finding Western bloggers who think they know everything about the industry or what their fellow fans should like, but here's a rare blogger who knows what he's talking about and also isn't an abrasive weaboo snob about it.

http://animedejavu.wordpress.com/
A simple anime blog that's only updated very sporadically, hope to see more from it this year but who really knows what the author has planned.

http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/
Rolling compendium of unnecessary quotation marks from around the world. "Updated" daily.

http://solidlittlerockjams.com/
Another dead blog that's probably not rising from the grave any time soon, but for most of 2007 this was blog that turned the Internet upside down! Did they burn too brightly, too fast? There will never be another...

http://abegrand.pitas.com/
Straight outta the Canadian wilderness comes the long-running blog from metal expert and personal Internet acquaintance Adrien Begrand. Reader comments don't seem to be enabled anywhere, but that's okay. They're just for insecure attention-addicts and blogs look better without them!

video #67: Portishead - The Rip

2008-11-26T18:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPJJSCFdVd0

Youtube / Island Records have disabled embedding for this video, so you'll have to actually click the link to view it, but it will probably play better on their page than on this cluttered and already media-overloaded blog. That probably works out for the best when you have a video as busy and detailed as this one, which you'll need to watch more than once if you hope to take in even half of its comically grotesque brilliance.

"The Rip" is one of my favorite songs of the year, one of the most stunning tracks on Portishead's departure as long-awaited return album, Third. It's a fantastic song in its own right, but even as it breaks from the sounds of 90's Portishead (especially the trip-hop of Dummy), it's perhaps not too hard to believe that it was recorded by the same band who wrote all the gloomy and spooky songs on their self-titled album in 1997. Perhaps, that is, if you're really ready to consider that Portishead, once the embodiment of some upper-class, idealized vision of 1990's coffeeshop "urban cool," could really mutate into a group capable of writing such a paranoid, socially withdrawn, possibly schizophrenic music. The turntablism and dusty beats they were once known for are almost nowhere to be found now, but if you understood them and particularly Beth Gibbons as coming from an especially introverted place that was never calling out for attention like Tricky Kid or Sneaker Pimps, their latest incarnation, or "The Rip" itself, might not come as a terrible shock.

That said, these lyrics will probably conjure up some fairly unsurprising (unsettling and dreadful at times, but unsurprising) mental images in most listeners' minds. Leave it to Portishead to not just release such an bleak track as a single, but to outdo everyone's expectations in the music video. Animated by Nick Uff, whose hand-drawn approach probably requires more work than any mouse-clicking Flash-jockey has ever done in his life. This is one of the most original and imaginative videos I've ever seen, and makes a good case for me to retire this ongoing survey of animated videos. I probably would, if only I didn't know that he has yet another done for Portishead that I've been saving for myself for several weeks now, and will inevitably have to watch and post here.

This video and this song feel like great accomplishments, and I haven't felt like saying that about much of anything in music or art for quite some time. Third wasn't an easy album to get to know, but as the year went on, it just made every other CD I bought, every other album I downloaded, somehow feel like products that would eventually live out their shelf life for me. So much music out there feels "of the moment," which is exciting and sometimes full of potential, but doesn't it feel like the last 5 or 6 years have been a series of replaceable sounds and fads? Excitement is rarely permanent, trends come and go and go and go, and "buzz" bands and their music almost never fail to disappoint if given a long enough (but not even unreasonable!) amount of time to settle into my mind. Third is something else altogether, immediate and essential to our time but not tubthumpingly-reactionary or "clever" in the way that bands try so hard to be these days. Even albums that sound as great as Microcastle or ExitingARM feel vaguely clouded by the sense that they don't really mean anything and that their creators might not actually give a shit about them at all. I don't even know what I mean by this (including my gripes with hyper-posturing bands, many of which I really love), only that it's hard to find any bands writing songs these days that don't seem like they're out to impress or lecture you. Portishead (or Third itself, which feels like an independent object unattached to and uninvolved with any group of people so caught up in the cycle of promotion, recognition, and celebrity as a band) seems unconcerned with pursuing any of these goals and despite this it's a powerful and personable record that's not at all charming but definitely irresistable. I don't know if I'll be "coming back to it for years" or not. Somehow that just feels like a silly question to try to answer right now.

Underground Resistance - Big Stone Lake

2008-11-16T16:39:00.000-08:00

Underground Resistance - "Big Stone Lake"

I'm not sure when I first heard "Big Stone Lake," probably this spring at the earliest. Last.fm tells me I've played it 50 times in the last six months. I sort of can't wait to go home and listen to it a few more times before bed. I don't understand why this isn't one of those classics that everyone knows, like "Chime," "Pacific State"/"Pacific 202," "Virtual," or "Little Fluffy Clouds." I know it's not really electronica, or part of that rave/acid house timeline that people too young to have remembered still get nostalgic for. It's Underground Resistance, still due for some kind of but it's hardly even techno, at least not in any way that Mills, Banks, or Hood would later help define the sound. Is it too lo-fi? To slow? Too black? Are young, white bloggers still allergic to any saxophone that isn't found in canonized jazz, bloated 80s pop, or "skronky" punk songs by guys who cut themselves?

I'm so sick of new music, this is really all I want to listen to anymore.

My Bloody Valentine, live!

2008-10-27T23:49:00.000-07:00

I saw My Bloody Valentine exactly one month ago tonight.

After about 12 years of being in love with this band, this was a big deal. And it was a pretty great show and a good time out overall. For once, none of my usual social hangups or physical ailments (headaches, backaches, swollen bladder, etc.) threatened to ruin the experience, even through waiting for four hours outside the Aragon Ballroom and two hours at the very front of the crowd.

Good travelling companions, shitty scene kids in skinny jeans all around us, awful opening band, surprisingly quick and unexpected appearance by MBV after them, tears in my eyes a few times, the "Holocaust," after-show milkshakes, that feeling of closure after so many years of waiting for this... but maybe nothing else to say that wasn't already said by scores of fans in the weeks before the show. I'd rather not pour out my deepest feelings or personal opinions about it all here. No one is waiting to read them and every time I've ever shared anything personal online, I feel like I've lost something spiritually.

If I don't have anything interesting to say about this show, I should probably reconsider my future in blogging, or at least step back from this one for a while. It wasn't an amazing, life-changing experience, but I can't criticize it either. Reading comments online about the sound quality of the Aragon, the "boring" strobe lights, or the unadventurous set list just makes me tired of the Internet and blogger culture. What a horrible, distracting waste of time and imagination.

I guess that if it does lead me to blog less, then overall I should have an easier time completely extricating myself from the Internet altogether in the coming months. In that respect, maybe this was a life-changing experience.

video #66: Belle and Sebastian - Another Sunny Day

2008-10-15T13:14:00.000-07:00

By the end of this I was surprised to find out that it wasn't an official video commissioned by the band, but one made by a fan. If it wasn't for a school project, it might be easier to admire as a labor of love, but it perfectly captures the mood, the style, the complete mythos of Belle & Sebastian. Perhaps a little too well.

Part of me always wanted this idealized culture (bookish young Anglos on the dole) to become a participatory fantasy in the same way that steampunk, cosplay, or LARPing have. Or maybe I just really like girls in sweaters.

St. Charles, IL: the end?

2008-09-26T15:54:00.000-07:00

This massive crater used to be the Manor Pancake House & Restaurant, where my family would go out to eat at least once a fortnight when I was a kid. It stood next to the Fox River on Main Street, and unless you count the Baker Hotel across the street or the clock tower that stands kitty corner across the river, the Manor was the heart of downtown St. Charles. Now you see what's become of it, a beautiful historical building torn down like a common crackhouse. I won't rant any further about this for now, I already said everything that I needed to here back when it was still standing but stood little chance of ever reopening.

I had the feeling this was coming for quite some time, and wasn't exactly surprised when the day finally came. What I wasn't expecting and had not prepared for was this horrible eyesore to suddenly appear on the banks of the Fox just a few hundred feet downstream.

Take a good look at this structure. Click on the picture for a higher resolution shot if you can stomach it. The half-million dollar townhomes in the area were bad enough, but they're positively progressive examples of smart urban planning compared to this luxury condo complex just off Main Street. Just look at those phony rooftops and fake facades. Disgusting. Reminds me of the storefront of Meijer on the corner of Randall and Route 38. In the middle of our current housing crisis, do we need more unaffordable housing, and some as tacky as this giant concrete box? Do people still romanticise loft apartments as hip, trendy status symbols? Do young turks and trixies still crave this urban sophisticate experience, even when it's housed in such a cheap and gaudy-looking giant shoebox? Are there that many potential buyers who want a piece of this lifestyle, but only when it's offered in the minority-free streets of the suburbs?

I used to love this city and every time I'd find myself walking down the street here I'd think about how great it would have been to grow up here instead of the one-horse little hick town 20 minutes to the west where there was nothing to do and nowhere to go. Even now I think about how much nicer it is than Aurora and how wonderful it would be to live here instead, even if I wasn't already working here in the first place. Now it seems intent on cashing in its charming but financially worthless "small town" feel to attract the kind of yuppies who consider themselves just too real to live in Naperville. Also, how many more bars does downtown need? Alley 64? Prop me up bro, I'm so wasted!

Meanwhile on the west side of town, Costco sprung up seemingly overnight, building a spectacularly huge big box of their own next to the new Harley-Davidson dealership. As if that vast, energy-sucking blight on our suburban landscape wasn't enough, permanently scarring acres of land with asphalt and attracting scores of men in midlife crisis from all over the suburbs and beyond. I endured (what felt like) a year's worth of road construction to widen the Randall to three lanes in between Oak and Main Street, which I assumed was being done to simply alleviate congestion. Were they just making way for Costco a year in advance? Why do they need this store? Jewel, Meijer, and Dominick's are less than a mile down the road to the south, and the site of the old St. Charles mall remains vacant and strewn with rubble.

I know, I know. Somebody order me a Whaaaburger with a side of cries! But I've always had sentimental feelings about this town and I can't help but feel saddened by the forces at work in it today.

Pulseprogramming - All Joy and Rural Honey

2008-09-24T17:40:00.000-07:00

Pulseprogramming - "All Joy and Rural Honey"

Pulseprogramming: two Chicagoans (Marc Hellner, Joel Kriske), two albums on Aesthetics Records, one CD of remixes, and three years of little to no activity at all. What can you assume when a group goes silent for so long? That they're really so busy in the studio that they can't update their Myspace page more than once a year, or that they just don't give a shit anymore and have moved onto different responsibilities that don't involve maintaining a reputation online? Pretty much every band makes sure to let everyone know when they've called it a day, whether we care or not. So no news is good news, right?

Self-titled 1999 album: microsoundscapes, tiny bells and clicks, a few gentle piano melodies woven into some tracks, no real vocals to speak of except for a few whispers. Definitely a surprise after the positively banging "To the Expert Eye Alone" had made it to my ears first via a magazine compilation CD. Pulseprogramming is a pretty unassuming ambient album, not the kind that gets attention from, say, indie rock fans as a token genre CD that they'll download after reading some good reviews. Not being a landmark release of any sort probably makes it guilty of being aural wallpaper to many listeners, but if you enjoy such gentle sounds then maybe this is worth your time. I've fallen asleep to this more times then I can count.

Tulsa For One Second arrived four years later, displaying a completely different sound, perhaps even more confidence on the part of Hellner and Kriske, if you're inclined to notice or imagine such intangible qualities. The same glitch-induced mellow electronics permeate each track, but this time around they resemble real songs nstead of fractured "pieces" of sound. There's more vocals, even some from Lindsay Anderson, who's lent her voice to plenty of releases on Chicago's Hefty Records in addition to L'Altra and her own solo projects. This was released at the height of the "laptop pop" trend, which the band justifiably could have been a part of without necessarily following in the footsteps of Styrofoam, The Postal Service, et al. The album was too sleepy, too world-weary, too mature to fit in among the freshman-level ernestness of those groups, anyway.

I loved the cover art of the first album and the follow-up took it to the next level with a cardboard sleeve that folded out into a tiny house. Really hoped to get more from this band, and I guess we did with a remix album a year later, but brand new music would have been even better.

So what happened to this band? Not asking for any huge final concert for closure, but at least a bullshit press release or blog statement if they're done for like they seem to be.

But who knows? I saw a brand new Dianogah CD at Borders (!) last night, so anything is possible.

Comcast presents Ecobill

2008-08-21T13:31:00.000-07:00

"Congratulations! Every day we're making Comcast.com better and better for customers like you. Now we're doing even more ... so you can do less. Because we've introduced Comcast's Ecobill™ process, an environmentally friendly way to view and pay your bill online that takes less time and uses less paper.

paperless is more convenient!
One less bill in your mailbox? Less clutter? Who doesn't want that? Now, with just the click of a mouse you can quickly review your entire bill from any computer. And we've made paying your bill even easier.

paperless is more green too!
Imagine, by eliminating paper bills (and the envelopes they come in) we'll drastically cut down on the total amount of paper we use. So together, we'll save more trees.

wow, that was easy!
We've also made paying your Comcast bill more green. Just go to Comcast.com/ecobill and sign in. Then, in just a few steps, you can choose to have your Comcast bill paid each month, directly from your checking account. We also have other convenient options that make paying your bill fast and easy."

Three cheers for Comcast! Finally, a company that truly cares about the environment. So many companies today promising us that they're "going green," but at last, here's one that really practices what they preach! Comcast, I raise my canvas grocery bags to you in respect! Sorry, this is the first time I've blogged about anything not related to music, I usually abhor such lazy sarcasm but I'm feeling too cynical to resist it in this case.

Paperless billing? Good job. Now then, do something about all this shit you send to me and every single other unit in this building every single week, junk mail that is apparently impossible to unsubscribe to.

I've lived here for 2 years and have surely received more than 100 of these 6" x 11" fliers. They just keep coming, and there seems to be no way to stop them. Taking your name off their list? Not an option! Actually signing up for the services they offer? You'll still get the fliers every week. For every 1,000 of these that are sent out to individual addresses, does more than 1 go anywhere from the mailbox but straight into the local landfill? Surely Comcast has done the research and has found this carpet-bombing approach of a program to be profitable in reaching customers, even if its benefits are minimal.

I don't have a scale to find out how much each of these fliers weighs, but altogether I can only imagine the tonnage of paper per year that could go into producing these. Factor in fuel spent and man-hours wasted by the Postal Service to deliver each one and you've got an astoundingly wasteful program that merely serves to annoy potential customers, not to mention reminding existing ones how little their continued patronage matters in trying to bring about a stop to this nuisance.

Wouldn't cutting out this waste also cut costs? Is it really bringing in that much business every week? Wouldn't this be the best way to "go green?" It won't be long before everyone sees these empty gestures for the PR moves they are, and when "green fatigue" starts to set in, will the new consciousness emerging in today's consumers be squashed?

Colin Chastain Kellaway - Tell Me My Name

2008-08-10T15:43:00.000-07:00

Colin Chastain Kellaway - "Tell Me My Name"

I ripped this song straight from the stream of the entire film on Youtube, hence the sound effects in the middle. It's not the greatest quality but since the soundtrack is long out of print -- probably never released on CD at all and only surviving in a few scratched up LPs -- there aren't many other options if you want to hear this song by itself. Such a cool opening theme, I can't think of anything else that sounds like this.

Image courtesy of this blog.

video #65: Stereolab - Three Women

2008-08-06T15:43:00.000-07:00

The new single from Stereolab, sounds kind of phoned-in and isn't getting me too excited for the new album. But the psychedelic animation in this really takes me back, like I'm 3 years old again and watching Sesame Street.

Cex - Retina

2008-08-03T15:42:00.000-07:00

Cex - "Retina"

"Accessibility is like, really important to me," said R(j)yan Kidwell in a spoken interlude on his 2002 album Oops, I Did It Again. Kidwell's work as Cex had always stood with one foot planted in the impenetrably difficult world of IDM, but in both his live shows and the confessional, exuberant blog he kept regularly updated for several years on his website he made his desire to break out of the cult-like scene he was trapped in unquestionably clear. Being a solo laptop artist, albeit one of the first to give the genre a real personality, probably wasn't the best route to become the "#1 Entertainer" that he aspired to be. His metamorphosis into a brash but self-deprecating rapper would help him achieve this goal considerably, though the more accessible his work became, the more I lost interest in him as an artist.

Eventually expanding into an actual band with his wife and some other guy, the evolution of Cex from an ambitious and open-minded teenager into a career-minded and predictable young adult seemed complete. And yet... the most recent of his work that I've heard seems to have broken away from conventional pop structures and descended into a claustrophobic blend of mutant dub rhythms and looped samples that was probably never meant to play on, say, Jade Tree Records. Avoiding the indies altogether since his last album Sketchi, he's instead chosen to release much of his work over the past year on... limited-run cassettes from his own website.

The lo-fi, murky vibe of "Retina" feels familiar in the context of these releases, but surprisingly it first surfaced on a 1996 release, two years before Kidwell self-released Cells and four years before Role Model came out on Tigerbeat6. If this is all true, it means Kidwell was only 14 years old when he recorded it. I can't imagine trying to put together a track like this on a bedroom PC running Windows 95, or even a 4-track DAT recorder.

I love any song that incorporates ocean sounds, especially waves and seagulls like "Retina" does. Or maybe it's just be static and sampled baby Metroid squeaks. I can't tell for sure. The production on this isn't anything like the clean, crisp IDM that showed up on Role Model or Oops, I Did It Again, two of the best albums of their era even though they've fallen out of favor these days. A review in Pitchfork asks "Does anybody actually listen to old Cex records?" Okay then: hardly anyone. But does that say more about Cex or about the cynical attitudes of trendy electronic music listeners today? How long before bloghouse becomes the next electroclash?

video #64: Utada Hikaru - Passion

2008-07-30T16:01:00.000-07:00

Animated by Koji Morimoto, who also directed the video for Ken Ishii's "Extra."

Neulander - Sex, God + Money

2008-07-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

Neulander - "Sex, God + Money"

At this point I'm just trying to catch up with posting twice a week, while dumping a few songs here that I'd probably end up forgetting to post after I reformat my computer this week.

Love this song. Do you like Broadcast? Lali Puna? Um... Laika? Then you'll like this. Very Too Pure-ish sound, can't believe they're really an American band.

video #63: Linkin Park - Breaking the Habit

2008-07-23T21:09:00.000-07:00

Directed by Kazuto Nakazawa at Studio 4°C, who also produced the anime sequence in Kill Bill, making him more responsible than anyone for the endless "anime... the next big thing?"-articles that popped up everywhere in 2003. If by the next big thing they really meant the 2 a.m. ghetto of Adult Swim, crappy webcomics, and Erin Esurance, then okay.

Got a free promo of Meteora when it came out from another writer who despised Linkin Park. Too bad for him, 'cuz I'm pretty sure it's the best album from a mainstream, modern rock band this decade (White Stripes and the Strokes aside, since no one under 16 listens to them at all). "Faint," "Numb," "Somewhere I Belong," and this... has there been a better run of singles from a single album this decade? Certainly I was a fan, but between Fort Minor, the long wait for album #3, and the underwhelming feeling I got when I heard "What I've Done," I kind of lost interest in them, though I should give the new (er, 14 months old) album a fair shake first.

Ironically, Linkin Park were the last holders of the unofficial "biggest band in America" title that didn't actually aspire to be living cartoons.

The Isley Brothers - For the Love of You

2008-07-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

The Isley Brothers - "For the Love of You"

I don't listen to nearly enough R&B or Motown to know what I'm talking about, but this is such a great song. Always makes me feel so relaxed, so good, and I can play this on repeat without getting sick of it for a long time.

I can thank a crazy customer at Borders for introducing me to this. He wanted to find and order an Isley Brothers collection that had this song on it, and while we were searching through our inventory, he started talking to me about classic R&B, house and techno music, Man Parrish, et al. just out of the blue. After countless hundreds of disappointing and depressing encounters with customers up until this, this guy was genuinely interesting, and I had no problem letting my guard down and giving him my full attention. Then, suddenly he changed the topic, going off about all the fights he'd ever been in during high school, giving me blow-by-blow accounts complete with sound effects. These were long, intensely detailed stories that went on for almost ten minutes each, and since there were no other customers on the floor, no other employees nearby to rescue me, and nothing else pressing to do, I had no choice but to sit back and listen to him recount about all the times that he hit some guy so hard in the chest that he went flying back 20 feet or more. He ultimately concluded that in his prime he could have handily defeated anyone in the state of Iowa in a fight. In the end, I just didn't know what to say to this.

Later that night I went home and Googled his name, which I remembered from the order he'd placed. He'd been arrested several years before for possession of a large amount of cocaine. Still the most memorable and strange customer encounter I ever had, next to the guy with Tourette syndrome who kept calling me a nigger and sticking his middle finger up in my face as I tried to order him some Ace of Base CDs.

video #62: U2 - Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me

2008-07-16T16:32:00.000-07:00

We have a long way to go before these kind of products of corporate synergy disappear, but it doesn't seem quite so bad these days, at least as far as movies go. No Taco Bell tie-in meals, action figures, or horrible videos like this one this time around.

I actually had the soundtrack to this movie, which I listened to repeatedly on our family vacation to Minnesota back in 1995. (This was during the worst week of the Chicago heat wave that killed hundreds, which came as a huge surprise upon coming home after not watching or reading any news for a whole week.) It's kind of a disaster of an album that tries to be everything to everyone and impossible to take seriously as anything but a product of corporate groupthink, yet it's also an honest snapshot of music at the time and contains enough WTF-worthy choices to rightfully exist as a Batman-free collection if it were given the choice. Sunny Day Real Estate, Method Man, PJ Harvey, Massive Attack, The Flaming Lips... this CD went double-platinum?

Nobuo Uematsu - Fanfare

2008-07-13T10:59:00.000-07:00

Nobuo Uematsu - "Fanfare"

June 5, 2004: Ronald Reagan dies and I play Final Fantasy VII for the first time. A pretty good day, I must say. Bought it used before arriving back at my apartment after a friend's wedding, came home and mixed myself a Jack & Coke, tore open a bag of Twizzlers, and sat down to begin the game that would eventually take me almost 3 years to complete.

This was the first proper RPG that I'd ever play, and when that first battle began I remember being confused and sure that I was about to die right away, just like I did at age 7 when I played Super Mario Brothers for the first time, running straight into the first goomba in World 1-1. Somehow, I surived this first encounter and managed to board the train heading to the Mako reactor. Little did I know, my troubles were only just beginning!

Anyway, emerging victorious from this fight, I twirled my sword in the air as the camera panned around me before cutting to the menu screen. This is a time-consuming and unavoidable part of the game that many players find quite annoying, though even from the very first time I sat through it, it had an afterglow to it that I found most pleasant. Who doesn't like collecting items and watching their bank account grow? Anyway, the music in this short break... endlessly repetitive, and I knew from that moment that I'd be hearing it at least a thousand times more before the game was finished. But it was so hypnotic, so comforting... had I been waiting more than seven years to hear this? It was like a bridge to the past, knowing that so many of my friends as far back as high school had played and loved these games. I never shared in any of that fondness with them firsthand, but in this timeless musical loop, we joined hands and raised our eyes towards the sun once more, separated by a thousand miles but together again in this one moment...

So many people just adore "Tifa's Theme," "Aerith's Theme," or whatever their favorite character's theme is. I watched a few thousand (?) people go apeshit when "One-Winged Angel" was performed twice by an orchestra and choir at the Chicago premiere of the Play! Symphony. It's probably laughable that this is my favorite piece of music from this game, but it is.

video #61: Scissor Sisters - Mary

2008-07-09T13:24:00.000-07:00

Officially produced (but not directed?) by Don Bluth. Apparently it's a commissioned homage of sorts to his work in Xanadu, which I haven't seen.

I know there won't be any comments on this entry so if you want some, just read these instead.

Joy Electric - Sugar Rush

2008-07-06T11:13:00.000-07:00

Joy Electric 5-18-07
Originally uploaded by jdharvey1

Joy Electric - "Sugar Rush"

Getting into electronic music at the same time that my friends were getting deep into Christian rock gave us little common ground. Once in a while, a Christian dance group would show up on one of the compliations that came with their magazines -- names like Antidote, Cloud2Ground, and The Echoing Green come to mind -- though not even a CCM/7Ball stamp of approval was enough to keep them from skipping to the next ska-punk/southern rock band on the discs. Were they put off by these groups' lack of personality? Lack of guitars? Whatever it was, they certainly weren't alone. My journey to the dance tent at Cornerstone 98 brought me to an almost empty room with a few people sitting against the wall and a handful of kids exchanging glowstick-twiddling tricks in the middle of the room.

Only one artist seemed to stand out from this scene in a way that any of the X-tain rocker kids would ever notice. Ronnie Martin, AKA Joy Electric, was signed to Tooth & Nail (and later BEC) for most of the 90s. This got him into most of the big festivals and ensured that his records were available in most Christian stores. Listeners remained completely indifferent as generic ska-punk groups and tepid folk rock bands outsold his efforts 10-1. The first album I heard from Joy Electric was the presciently-titled album Robot Rock, which in all my teenage wisdom I thought was full of all sorts of interesting sounds and ideas but was clearly a confused affair by an artist in need of some direction. Of course, this was years before the electro revival, and I was really hoping to find more stuff that sounded like The Chemical Brothers. This just wouldn't do at all.

I probably found it all just a little... too gay. Not in a homophobic sense at all, but it sounded too pop, too retro and not badass enough in the kind of strict break/big beat + funk + samples arrangement that I was finding so amazing at the time. "Sugar Rush" was the first track on the album, and what an audaciously cheesy way to begin. Maybe it was just my residual memories of the sanitzed grunge-era world in Empire Records and the final scene where Renée Zellweger steps out of her shell and gets on stage to fulfill her rock and roll dreams by singing the a song called "Sugarhigh." In a movie so high on themes of alienation and youthful idealism, seemed like she'd be singing about heroin or self-cutting instead. I don't know, it's been so long since I've first seen it. But I had the same problem with this song. Everything I was finding so progressive and futuristic and sexy about electronic music was reduced to a whitewashed song for kids where cupcakes and candy bars and simple chorus-verse-chorus pop too the place of MDMA and long instrumental passages. What was he thinking?

Martin's follow-up, CHRISTIANsongs, seemed even worse, like a silly compromise to appease kids who listened to shit like The Insyderz. I read further interviews where he stated his intent to stick to pure analog instruments for the album, which seemed like a silly limitation for someone who seemed like Christian electronica's best hope. I wouldn't come to appreciate this aesthetic until the MTV AMP era had ended and I'd listened to groups like Add N to (X) and Adult. The man was really ahead of his time and it's a wonder he stuck with his work long enough to build up a small but devoted following around the world, probably more with synthpop fanatics than with Christian listeners.

"Monosynth" is probably the better song on Robot Rock but I'm posting "Sugar Rush" simply because it offended me so much at the time, and now I can't get enough of it. One of the happiest songs ever recorded?

video #60: Architecture in Helsinki - Like a Call

2008-07-02T16:13:00.000-07:00

I know it's not a "twist" ending but it's still intended to shock us on some level, and when I can see it coming halfway through the video, well, that's not a good thing at all.

Not anywhere on the level as "Do The Whirlwind," but else what is? Probably best viewed here instead, if you can find it. Site always crashes my computer at home, browse at your own risk.

Nas - I Gave You Power

2008-06-30T18:40:00.000-07:00

Nas - "I Gave You Power"

Just like "One Love," this track sends chills down my spine every time I hear it. One of my favorite Nas tracks. I'm still working my way through his albums in order, so I haven't heard any of his newer releases and at this pace, probably won't hear Untitled until 2015 or so.

video #59: Architecture in Helsinki - Do the Whirlwind

2008-06-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

Of all the annoying trends in online weaboo culture, few have gotten under my skin like the proliferation of bad digital sprite art that's saturated the domains of Livejournal, Deviantart, and Gaia, and splattered itself across the rest of the Internet. From NES character-inspired webcomics to customizable chibi avatars as means of authentic expression of the adolescent inner-self, it's a crude and persistent reminder of how far the Internet has fallen as a once-unique medium for geeks to congregate and share their once-unique interests. Ten years ago, the Internet was still largely text-based, and of course it still is, but the up-and-coming legions of illiterate, overmedicated, Naruto-addicted, 1337-speaking nymphochildren have proven that you can establish a vast social network despite having a vocabulary of 500 words or less, not to mention the peer-enforced title of ARTIST by simply by shifting a few pixels here and there. But why should I care at all? I don't know. I just lament the further (but inevitable) dumbing-down of a culture that means something to me, or would if I felt like I was really a part of it.

This aesthetic, if you want to call it that, is pushed to its absolute limit in the work of Paul Robertson. What I've seen of his short films and the artwork posted on his journal is nothing short of astounding in its excessive pileup of meticulously-detailed chibis coupled with seizure-inducing effects. The level of detail he puts into each frame of this work is amazing, from the backgrounds to the characters themselves. Its simple 8-bit-charm makes it all feel so familiar, maybe even evoking a little nostalgia for anyone who grew up with videogames like Double Dragon, River City Ransom, or Final Fight, but there's nothing retro about Robertson's take on the genre. In works like "Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle" and "Kings of Power 4 Billion%" (best watched almost anywhere outside of Youtube's image-compressing viewer), the epileptic-levels of violence is beyond the precedent of almost any anime or videogame.

"Do the Whirlwind," on the other hand, is just clean fun, and even made me love a song that I'd already shrugged off as MOR twee-indie hype when I first heard it. It's probably the best place to start with Robertson's work. Yeah, I'm taking it seriously enough to call it "work." But didn't I say I hate this stuff? Maybe I'm just getting old and it's the kids that I hate. I checked Robertson's birthday on his Livejournal. Born only three weeks after me but creatively indulging his ecchi, ultraviolent id and even getting paid for it. Sounds good to me.

Guitar - House Full of Time

2008-06-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

Guitar - "House Full of Time"

You've never even heard this song so it can't mean a thing to you, but that summer it was always going through my head. Maybe never more than the times that we'd go to the pool. Floating on my back, my ears dipping below the surface and muffling the roar of all the jets flying in and out of O'Hare overhead, the sun blinding my eyes and warming my skin, your hands behind my head, cradling it so gently, I think I'd never felt so content. I'd never allowed myself a simple kind of peace like this. I'd never known it was possible until you showed me.

It's never quite the same in the pool over here. I don't know what it is, all the windows looking down on us, the threat of a horde of sugar-fed, screaming kids descending on us at any minute, memories of that disgusting hairball incident from last summer that I just can't shake... still, we should go more this summer. We'll regret it if we don't.

video #58: The Notwist - Pick Up the Phone

2008-06-18T13:56:00.000-07:00

Good video, good song. I need more of this band in my life. Hope their new album is as good as Neon Golden, might just pick it up this summer if it is.

Yu Miyake - Lovely Angel

2008-06-15T15:30:00.000-07:00

Yu Miyake - "Lovely Angel"

Like I've said before, I don't play videogames very much these days. So three years ago I never expected that I'd ever find a game as endlessly addictive and joyful as Katamari Damacy. What's even more unlikely is that I'd somehow become a proselytizer for it without even realizing it. In the months after buying it, I showed it to my girlfriend and her family, who proceeded to not just buy it but also pick up the sequel (We Love Katamari) when it was finally released. The same goes for coworkers and a handful of friends on the Internet. I'm pretty sure I moved 5 or 6 copies of this game just by talking about it with other people. Did I really sound that excited about it? I guess so.

Everyone loves the music in Katamari, even people who'd never be caught dead listening to J-pop. And besides, the soundtrack really is one of those rare collections where there truly is something for everyone. There's not a single track I'm not delighted to hear whenever I play it, but one piece in particular always stood out for me. Wikipedia tells me that its name is "Lovely Angel," composed by Yu Miyake.

"Lovely Angel" isn't even featured in the playable sections of Katamari. (I really don't want to go into describing what the game is about or how it's played, in 2008 this feels as ridiculous as talking about "metrosexuals" or explaining what mash-ups are.) Instead, it's a post-level theme, played after you reach your goal and successfully complete any of the areas. Here, you (the prince) are beamed into outer space by your father (The King of All Cosmos). Essentially, you're coming face to face with God, and the celestial chorus that plays in this scene is everything you'd expect from an encounter with the Almighty. I can only imagine what this could sound like with a great surround sound system. Like the best videogame music, I could listen to this on a loop for hours. And now I can.

So much more I want to say about this scene and all the the possible intended and unintended deeper religious meanings in it -- what it means from a Japanese perspective, from a Western Judeo-Christian point of view, to me personally -- but I've spent the last two nights at work trying to figure it out but I don't think I have it in me. No matter how hard I think about it or how sincere I try to be, it all comes out sounding like the worst wannabe-Klosterman article ever, or a pale imitation of any of the entries in D.B. Weiss's "Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments" in Lucky Wander Boy. Barf!

video #57: Diverse - Escape Earth

2008-06-11T15:22:00.000-07:00

Did the independent hip-hop bubble finally burst? I'm sure it still has an underground following bigger than I can possibly imagine, and that it would still be going strong even if the Internet hadn't helped push labels like Def Jux and Anticon to prominence in the early years of this decade. But the new audiences who flocked to those labels (Rhymesayers and Mush too, I guess) seemed to give up on it all around 2006. Was it too much to keep up with? Did anti-violence/Bush themes run their course? In listening to music that promoted the virtue of authenticity, did listeners begin to question their own as they struggled to reconcile owning CDs by El-P and The Shins? Does this even matter? Does "indie rap" need those listeners again? I'm sure some fans might find the very question offensive. I can't say I have an answer for it.

None of this was Diverse's fault. One A.M. came out on the Chocolate Industries label back in 2003, featuring contributions from Mos Def, Jean Grae, Lyrics Born and Vast Aire, and production from Prefuse 73 and RJD2. All of these musicians have been raked over the coals by critics at one point or another since, either by failing to live up to past masterpieces (The Cold Vein, One Word Extinguisher) or by sullying their reputation with confusing career moves (The Third Hand, The Italian Job). One A.M. was widely-praised but seemed to do nothing but earn Diverse the status of "artist to watch" or "rapper on the rise" who would surely do great things, but not just yet. Chicago critics had visions of him riding Kanye and Twista's coattails to stardom. This never really happened.

I'm hoping this video is the first sign of a new album, and that Mr. Jenkins is still able to employ some of the credibility he earned with his previous releases. He's a great MC with a good ear for producers. Impossible to pin any kind of gimmick on him, either. That said, I don't expect that anyone on the Internet is still going to care about him. Enough of them sincerely seem to like 'Lil Wayne, though. Maybe I should give him a chance, too.

In the meantime, kind of an unfortunate choice of title here considering Chicago's Christian industrial pop perennials Escape From Earth, whose following was perplexingly huge last time I checked. Haven't heard from them in a while, maybe 7th Heaven beat them in a battle of the bands and the shame was too much for them to go on.

Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano - Super Metroid (mix)

2008-06-08T10:20:00.000-07:00

Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano - "Super Metroid (mix)"

Four years ago I received a distressed phone call from my father asking me for my Super Nintendo. It was stored away in a box in their basement. He wanted to give it to one of his coworkers. To say I was taken by surprise by this sudden request was an understatement. I remember my dad being a decent Donkey Kong player when we had our first game system in the early 80s, the great Colecovision, but since then he'd shown no interest in videogames at all, likely only privately acknowledging them as the reason I never grew up to be a great baseball player like he almost was and probably always hoped I would become. Still, even after buying the original NES for me one Christmas and watching with dismay as it took up a perverse amount of my childhood freetime in the years to follow, my parents ponied up the money again and again for a Super Nintendo, a Nintendo 64, a Sega Saturn and a Playstation 2. Today, I've grown up into nothing more than the most casual of gamers, to the point where even sitting down for a quick game of Katamari Damacy or Tekken 4 by myself quickly bores me to tears. I still enjoy multiplayer games, though, one of the few social activities that I can say I love with no hesitations whatsoever. Maybe I turned out just fine after all.

But then this call, just minutes after punching out at work around 9:00 on a Saturday night, shook me to my core. He didn't tell me all the details, only that one of the guys he worked with was looking for an SNES, and that he knew how mine was gathering dust in the basement. This was true; I hadn't touched it for years and had no immediate plans to change that. I suppose I'd always imagined setting up all my old systems on one TV and getting back into all the old games that I'd lived with for so many years. I'd done this to one extent or another before, but three systems on one television set is a mess no matter how many power strips and cable ties you use. It seemed like a project for another day, maybe sometime in the near future when I'd have that great new job and that great new apartment with that extra room that I could use for such endeavours, perhaps helping to bring my life full circle in the process, or something.

He never told me why he needed it, but the strange urgency in his voice sent my imagination spiralling out of control. Was he getting a generous offer for it? Did this stand to help him advance professionally? Would it simply put him in the better graces of his blue-collar colleagues? I hastily agreed, forgetting that I probably could have slept on it and given him a more carefully considered answer two days later on Sunday evening. Later that night, I realized with horror what I'd done, but knew it was too late to go back on my word. Could I really bring myself to willfully take back that which I'd only kept cloistered away in storage for so many years?

The loss of my SNES and all the games I had with it was salved by my hope that getting another used system in the future wouldn't prove to be too hard. They're cheap and plentiful in Japan. Surely finding one here can't be much harder. Right? But more importantly, I still had three cartridges from it in my dresser drawer, the three that captured my imagination from the first time I sat down to play them and still flicker through my dreams from time to time today.

Shadowrun was an isometric, top-down futuristic RPG. Set in Seattle in 205X (?), you play an amnesiac struggling to recover his memories who finds himself the target of corporate-hired assassins. The dark, grimey settings were so beautifully detailed -- trash-strewn streets, flickering streetlights, dive bars and goth clubs -- capturing the sense of scuzzy urban decay and futurism gone bad that I'd always found myself drawn toward even when I was young. Battles were fought with guns and magic. You could hire orcs, trolls, shamen, shapeshifters, or just plain old mercenaries to fight alongside you in shady alleys, underground dungeons, and highrise office buildings. Now and then you'd have to take a break to hack into some computers to steal money (nuyen) and data. What a fantastic world this was. Even during the times I was lost and confused, just wandering around in the streets and in lonely corridors of buildings was still an involving experience that filled me with a sense of freedom that I was so desperately beginning to crave. Games like these were awful subsitutes for the real thing, but at times they were all I had.

A puzzle/action game with a vaguely similar premise to Shadowrun, Flashback was a collection of cyberpunk tropes that veterans of the genre knew all too well and were likely sick of by 1993. But it was all knew and pretty mindblowing to my impressionable young mind. If Shadowrun played like a William Gibson story, Flashback was straight out of Phillip K. Dick, with interplanetary travel and bizarre alien worlds. The animation is some of the smoothest found on the SNES, with physics so realistic that every leap across a gap takes perfect timing and risk assessment. Your character runs, leaps, and rolls in ways that are pretty pathetic compared to most backflipping, 20 foot-high leaping videogame characters, but kind of impressive by realistic standards. Flashback also has some of the longest and best-looking cutscenes I've seen in a pre-Playstation world, which feel like a great payoff rather than an annoyance each time you reach one. It's a thinking-person's adventure, extremely slow-paced and quiet, translated into English but still very, very French in its very essence.

Shadowrun and Flashback were ripe with borrowed ideas. Super Metroid, on the other hand, was just a bigger, more ambitious attempt on the same ideas found in its two predecessors. But those two games --Metroid for the SNES, Metroid II for the Game Boy -- presented a backstory that felt even more rich and epic than any pileup of iterary references ever could. The lengthy introduction sets the mood perfectly, and even though the false start at the beginning is really quite easy to pass, it introduces a sense of dread and apprehension that stays with you for the rest of the game. Silence, all except for the gentle but ominous hum of the space colony hallways (I'd love to fall asleep to this if I could find a long enough recording of it) and the sound of your own footsteps, is all that you hear from the start until the sudden first battle begins. Once the game really begins, as you touch down on the planet's surface and exit your ship, it's immediately the first thing you notice. Sure, it's all very cinematic and has a rich "atmosphere" and whatnot, but beyond such observations it's really the beginning of a very immersive and personal journey.

I've uploaded a mix of several of the game's tracks. It's maybe only about a third of the music in the game, but it's in chronological order and gives a good sense of how it feels wandering the chambers and corridors of planet Zebes, descending further and further into the unknown as the map slowly constructs itself, revealing the enormity of the world below you. If you grew up in the '90s and found yourself confined to an off-limits suburban existence of fenced-off lots or overprotective parental rules, maybe this was your world to explore. It's all so timeless and still sounds wonderful today. How much more for anyone who's plumbed the depths of this game. Music, sound, and well-timed lapses in each have never been used quite as well as this. If you've played Super Metroid, then you've surely come to notice and appreciate both in ways you never expected.

video #56: Shugo Tokumaru - Parachute

2008-06-04T19:56:00.000-07:00

I always wanted to try to make something like this. Not because I went through some "I want to make music videos" phase but just because. Video editing is fun. But the version of Windows XP I'm running doesn't come with Movie Maker, and my attempts to install it have completely failed. This computer can barely run Audacity without crashing, let alone a video editing program.

I can't afford any of these, but that isn't stopping me from constantly thinking about it anyway over the past week.

Barbara Manning - Mark E. Smith & Brix

2008-06-01T16:03:00.000-07:00

Barbara Manning - "Mark E. Smith & Brix"

The first message board I ever belonged to was the Stereolab Correspondence discussion forum, which finally went offline sometime in 2002 or 2003. To get a quick idea of what it looked like, its closest cousin is the still-kicking Pavement Message Board, running on the same turn-of-the century template that SC used. It was a casual board -- the Internet wasn't Serious Business yet -- that didn't require registration, hadn't enabled image posting, and predated the rise of filesharing by a few years, so everyone had to come up with other ways to make it a fun experience. Thus, between 1999 and 2000, the Stereolab Correspondence tape-trading circle was born.

My mixes? Total garbage. And the shipping was a major pain given how my place in the circle placed me just behind someone in Australia. But once a month or so I'd get the coolest, weirdest tapes in the mail, full of songs that I'd never have heard otherwise, even today with the entire history of music seemingly at my fingertips. Sadly, though not surprisingly, the circle broke down within less than a year's time, though before the rise of Napster and other p2p programs. But no, it wasn't new technology that brought down our time-tested tradition. Just laziness.

I came into possession of 2 or 3 of the tapes by the end, which I continued to listen to for a few years' time before either losing them during a move or throwing them out during some furious cleaning session. Oh, how I wish I could find them again! I'm forever lost, trying to find some of the songs that I heard on those, and without anything more than a few fragments of melody in my mind to go on. It's a really terrible situation to be in, trying so hard to recall what was written on the back of one cassette in particular, remembering about half of the tracks, which included:

A Tribe Called Quest - Electric Relaxation
The Fall - Kurious Oranj
Barbara Manning - Mark E. Smith & Brix
Flowchart - New Radiolab Rip-off
McCarthy - Should The Bible Be Banned
Stereolab - Heavy Denim
Flin Flon - Upper Ferry

Towards the end of side two, there was a real dreamy, mellow track that was primarily instrumental, aside from some voices fading in and out of the mix, cooing and humming like some kind of male Cocteau Twins or something. There were keyboards and a nice beat; altogether, it sounded like Tarwater or Seefeel or some other Rough Trade-ish group, but despite all my research into this and other possibilities (To Roccoco Rot? Moonshake?) I still haven't been able to track it down. I remember enjoying it immensely during all the times I would play the tape in my room, in the car, and on the stereo in the bathroom while I'd shower, but either the tape was labeled incorrectly or it just never occurred to me to clearly look it over to see who the artist or artists behind this fantastic track were. Even if I had figured it out, the Internet was still years away from making this information very useful. Downloading music was still a huge pain and if there were lots of helpful mailorder sites out there, I wasn't able to find them.

At one point, I know there was a page (under construction?) designed to catalog and list all the songs on everyone's mixes. That was surely lost to time at least 5 or 6 years ago, if it was ever finshed at all. It's not linked to or mentioned in the archived pages of the forum, though my earliest attempts at boarding are faithfully preserved in all their incomprehensible and painful glory. The art at the top of this post shows off the misspelling that ran on all the board's banners for the first year or so before it was corrected. Whether or not this was an intentional pun is something I've always wondered but will now never know.

Anyway, I've tried my best to retrace my steps, to get in contact with members of that board who may remember the tape, should it have passed through their hands on the way to mine. I forget that most people out there, even the ones on music message boards, eventually find themselves with real lives and probably won't remember the tracklisting of a mixtape they may have heard in passing more than 8 years before. At least I remembered, or at least I strongly suspected, the screenname of the person who made the tape. She was the moderator of the discussion board, and after some creative cyber-sleuthing on my part, I was able to track her down.

She died more than two years ago. Looks like she was also part of a Belle and Sebastian mailing list/forum that's also long since passed. Hard to believe there was a time when fans actually made websites for the bands they like. Almost all of these have gone offline or been abandoned in recent years, replaced by cookie-cutter Myspace pages populated by manically-friending camerawhore kids. Yes, I understand that the spirit of an age is something to which one cannot return, but I can't help but mourn the past when I look at the state that we're in now. And I can't help but wonder if feelings like this are a good sign that I'm reaching the end of my Internet existence as I know it. As I try to keep up with the changing face of things, I feel a kind of cultural fatigue setting in and start to wonder if my ideals in the shadow world of the Internet are really worth pursuing any longer.

The Barbara Manning song that was on her tape is really good, and worth sharing here even though I have nothing to say about it. Now if only I could find the rest of the songs in the mix! Oh, if only I could whistle or hum the melody that's in my head, maybe then some helpful soul out there could point me in the right direction. The problem is, there are two or three melodies in this song going on at once, and faithfully reproducing just one of them is almost too much of a challenge in itself. Should I grow more desperate, I may attempt this, despite the promise that I'd look like an utter fool in doing so. This seems to be a quest that's going to take a lifetime for me to complete. I'm far from giving up my search, but how long can I keep on?

video #55: M. Ward - Chinese Whispers

2008-05-28T16:19:00.000-07:00

Another great video directed by Joel Trussell. I love his graffiti art style.

I've stayed away from so far M. Ward despite the chorus of hyperbolic praise heaped upon him by the adult indie masses. But this is rather pleasant and impossible to hate.

Add N to (X) - Live Recording with a Dead Thurston

2008-04-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

Add N to (X) - "Live Recording with a Dead Thurston"

Taken from Thurston Moore's Root project, where he mailed out short guitar recordings sealed in vacuum-cleaner bags to a number of artists and musicians. What he wanted in return was never explicitly stated, so artists were free to compose remixes, responses, or even visual pieces. Collected together onto one CD, Root is a jarring album that's all over the map, and probably only for the most patient fans of experimental music. There's still lots of groovy B-side worthy material from the likes of Blur, Stereolab, Springheel Jack, and Luke Vibert, but much of the rest is punishing mechanical noise pieces. At nearly 80 minutes in length, this is not an easy listen. Some people might even say it... sucks.

There's no shortage of ear-grating noise pieces on the album, but most seem intent on getting under the listener's skin through unpleasant frequencies and irregular repetition instead of trying to knock them over with giant slabs of sound. Add N to (X) take the latter route and turn in one of the heaviest tracks I've ever heard, a huge, overdriven assembly of analog noise that sounds like some kind of terrible machine gone out of control. The group was always into merging the physical and the mechanical (as made obvious by their album covers and videos), and likewise there's an unsettling, living pulse beneath this inhuman racket. The end of this track always blows my head off. Brutal shit, this right here.

video #54: Kid 606 - The Illness

2008-04-09T15:54:00.000-07:00

In which Miguel Depedro's fursona transitions from a long running label logo to an Indiana Jones-adventurer on a gabba-soundtracked quest for a magic laptop. Directed and animated by Joel Trussell, who's made a few more videos that I should get around to seeing soon.

Hard to believe this album is already five years old! I know that means nothing to most people but every time something passes a milestone that's divisible by five, it seems like a big deal to me. Anyway, having gone since 2006 without a single release, this has been the longest stretch of silence for Kid606 since he started making records ten years ago. This July finally brings a new album from him on Tigerbeat6. The title is Hooray Bass!, which is probably a clue that it's not going to be a mellow ambient album like Resilience or P.S. I Love You. We'll see!

Alice Coltrane - Translinear Light

2008-04-06T15:54:00.000-07:00

Alice Coltrane - "Translinear Light"

Translinear Light was my introduction to Alice Coltrane and is one of the richest and prettiest albums I've heard in years. There's some really far-out stuff on this but the title track has a beautiful, meditative feel to it that just makes all other jazz I've heard over the past ten years sound like shit! I'm not just talking about Spyro Gyra or Kenny G, I'm looking at you, Wynton Marsalis.

I first heard "Translinear Light" on some NPR jazz show. Not the one that's hosted by the guy who sounds like he's 90 years old and likes big band music a lot. I think it was this one, which used to play lots of good great, classic, 60's stuff nearly every night but was forced off the air last year to make way for some radio experiment that's probably never going to get off the ground. Anyway, that was a year or so before she passed away, but how awesome to go out on top like this? I've since heard Journey in Satchidananda and Universal Consciousness and they have their own dark, moody vibe to them that I really enjoy more than anything I've heard so far by her husband.

Translinear Light takes the ideas of those albums and blows them up into a hi-fi mix, where every note is more immediate and the dark atmospheres are illuminated in the warm glow of a brighter and more organic palette of sounds. It's jazz, but anything but the pleasant and background music that jazz had become in 2006. It's spiritual as fuck, but honest and full of conviction in ways that the peddlers of so much new age pablum these days are incapable of understanding. It's a gorgeous, personal trip that should be a timeless classic if anyone cares anymore.

video #53: Britney Spears - Break The Ice

2008-04-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

Already three singles deep into Blackout we come to "Break the Ice," which actually isn't a bad dance track, for being as dumb and obvious as it is. Much better than "Gimmie More," which was just a boring pole-dancing song, even though lots of people into Robyn, The Knife, Annie, et al., seemed to think it was amazing. At least this song has a little bit of finesse to it. I know they're cranking out ones like this every day now but you could do a lot worse, I guess.

I won't speculate why there's an animated Britney Spears video in 2008 except to state the obvious in that it was probably a necessity. Watch for the shot-for-shot Ghost In The Shell ripoffs. Ponder the subtle metaphors in the narrative as Britney infiltrates the industry and destroys her other, fabricated self. LOL at another "anime" video being made by Americans.

Youtube has disabled embedding of all copies of this so you've gotta click the picture if you want to watch it.

various artists - Laptop Pop Collection, volume 5

2008-03-30T17:15:00.000-07:00

Various Artists - Laptop Pop Mix, volume 5

Having a handful of mix-worthy tracks left over from the last installment, I wanted to make one last disc in this series. Don't worry, it's not a collection of leftovers, but really a nice ending to this series.

Each of the other mixes was 15 tracks long. Volume 5 is 16 songs long, an incongruent abnormality that could have been remedied by lopping off the PlayRadioPlay! song. But from the first time I heard this kid on my local college radio station, it just seemed like a fitting end for this entire genre and a good way to end the whole project.

1. Mystery Palace - Rebelize
2. Mobius Band - Detach
3. Home Video - We
4. Mr. Projectile - You Need
5. E*vax - The Process of Leaving
6. Lullatone - Pajama Party Pop
7. The Bird and the Bee - Fucking Boyfriend
8. The Northern Two - Maybe Not For Someone Else
9. Psapp - About Fun
10. Faux Pas - For The Trees
11. Toothfairy - Kicked Outta The Band
12. Tone - My Mind Exploded
13. My Enemy - Khreis
14. Copy - A Slight But Delicious Warble
15. Childs - Marysal
16. PlayRadioPlay! - Decipher Reflections From Reality

video #52: Prozzäk - Sucks to Be You

2008-03-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

Since I don't live in Canada -- where no less than 35% of music played on Canadian radio must be from Canadian artists -- I never caught onto this song when it apparently was a real hit. Now I'm hearing it for the first time, and it's probably the worst of the batch of Prozzäk songs I've been able to listen to online.

Their compilation Ready Ready Set Go was released on Hollywood Records when it came out in 2002, probably giving the duo the biggest push in America of their career. The album was released under the name Simon and Milo rather than Prozzäk, for reasons I can only speculate about. Was Eli Lily so afraid that they'd tarnish the sparkling image of fluoxetine hydrochloride, their signature product? Surely their lawyers must have learned a lesson from Panasonic.

Not the best Prozzäk video, has the same kind of aggressively ironic/"simple" animation style that all their videos have but it's not really in service of anything interesting this time. Yeah, I know I'm imploring a fake and possibly defunct band to try harder, and I understand what this probably says about me as a person.

various artists - Laptop Pop Collection, volume 4

2008-03-23T17:14:00.000-07:00

Various Artists - Laptop Pop Mix, volume 4

I'd already made this mix before seeing Hot Chip live about a year and a half ago. No laptops in sight anywhere on stage, so I doubt they'd make the cut if I was putting it together now. The mechanical precision and robotic soul of "The Warning" and other songs on their second album make me feel like they're still not out of place here. The goofy antics and bloated trickery on Made In The Dark make me feel like they just don't care anymore. I'm not sure I do either.

Track 13 is the alleged new song from The Postal Service that was leaked in August of 2006. It was never clear who recorded the song or penned the hilarious Ben Gibbard quotes that bloggers spread like herpes around the Internet -- "We plan on telling a story with this album. We don't know exactly how many tracks will be on this release; but we anticipate splitting up the ownership of the album three ways. Jimmy has been working with us [(sic) Ben Gibbard, Jenny Lewis "The Postal Service"] for some time now, and will be responsible for opening the story." -- but it seems to have originated at this blog, citing a quote in this alt weekly paper that either never existed or has been lost to time. I know, it's not a great controversy but I'm kind of impressed that whoever is responsible has been able to keep it to themselves for so long.

I'm fond of this mix, I hope you are too.

1. Ms. John Soda - Scan The Ways
2. Thom Yorke - Atoms For Peace
3. Feist - Mushaboom (Postal Service Remix)
4. Barbara Morgenstern - The Operator
5. Hot Chip - The Warning
6. März - Blaue Fäden
7. My Enemy - My Time Coming
8. Boy In Static - Bellyfull
9. The Aluminum Group - If You've Got A Lover (Slicker remix)
10. Tender Forever - The Feelings Of Love
11. Electric President - Snow on Dead Neighborhoods
12. Miniature Airlines - Pushpin Revolution
13. Unknown Artist - The Importance Of Being
14. Sia - Breathe Me (Ulrich Schnauss remix)
15. Lambchop & Hands Off Cuba - 4 º Gus

video #51: Prozzäk - Be As

2008-03-19T08:47:00.000-07:00

I don't know how to properly enjoy this as a 28 year-old man while still holding onto a few shreds of dignity, but it was stuck in my head for most of today and I really didn't mind at all.

Apparently this video came out back when I was in college -- what a sickening sentence to bring myself to type -- and surely would have been denounced as evil, immoral, and positively sinful by most of my classmates at the time if it had ever penetrated their tiny spheres of awareness. Homosexual propaganda, they would have called it. Aimed at recruiting children. And they would have said this with a straight face, too. Always on the lookout for anything secular or postmodern, this would have sent them scrambling for Biblical warfare metaphors, strapping on their helmets of salvation and their shields of faith to battle for the soul of their culture. But hey, at least it's not about abortion!

Dropping in bits of interviews/testimonials from teenagers into the middle of the song is kind of cheesy but the innocent naivety of it feels refreshing, especially after 8 years of increasingly angry and hateful alternative rock (which had already been building up since the beginning of the decade anyway) since its release. Jimmy Eat World tried the same trick in "Work" but their song reeks of bitterness and entitlement. It's too easy to imagine JEW's troubled teens as a troupe of MTV reality show hopefuls, which the totally poignant music video suggests they just might be. But who knows, maybe some of them were the same kids from "Be As," now 4 years older, confident, cocky, and finally comfortable in the cliques they once resisted.

The video for Eminem's "Mosh" also features more animated marching in the streets, but looks pretty awful next to "Be As" despite what was surely an unlimited budget by comparison. Prozzäk videos have never featured the most impressive animation but almost anything is better than the Eminem's depressing politico dirge.

various artists - Laptop Pop Collection, volume 3

2008-03-16T17:13:00.000-07:00

Various Artists - Laptop Pop Mix, volume 3

Disc three: the inclusion of Laptop here is both a no-brainer and also pretty suspect. Also: do Husky Rescue or the Album Leaf really use laptops? Or any computers at all? I don't know. Seemed like a good idea at the time. More from Jimmy Tamborello, Morr Music, MacBooks, trackers, probable beards, and lots, lots more!

1. B. Fleischmann - Le Désir
2. Laptop - Ratso Rizzo
3. Jeans Team - Arthur
4. Bobby Birdman - I Will Come Again
5. Album Leaf - Eastern Glow
6. The Blow - Knowing The Things That I Know
7. Bitmap - Someone To Call My Own
8. Applied Communications - Let's Make My Bed
9. Triangle - Ordinaries
10. Beth Orton - Carmella (Four Tet remix)
11. Figurine - IMpossible
12. The Dissociatives - Somewhere Down The Barrel
13. Styrofoam - Couches In Alleys (Feat. Ben Gibbard)
14. Husky Rescue - Sunset Drive
15. Nautilis - It's Lonely in the Streets

video #50: Prozzäk - Strange Disease

2008-03-12T08:32:00.000-07:00

Despite being the first fully-"animated band" (or at least beating Gorillaz to the punch by a few years) I've never bothered to check out Prozzäk before now. I can see how they would have fit in well with the turn of the century pop like Len or New Radicals, but I'm pretty sure they've never charted in the U.S. or even got any airplay here. Even today, they seem almost unknown here, and even on the Internet I haven't seen them get very much attention. So I don't know what to make of a scene like this. Is this what Canada is really like? I never would have imagined.

various artists - Laptop Pop Collection, volume 2

2008-03-09T17:11:00.000-07:00

Various Artists - Laptop Pop Mix, volume 2

Disc 2 of the laptop pop set, kicking off with a mellow instrumental version of "Temptation" (which works really nice coming off of the Fennesz cover/edit of the The Beach Boys on the last disc) before moving into a string of great/less-obvious songs that probably make this disc the best of the bunch. I know no one will take Linkin Park seriously here, even though there's no categorical difference between "Breaking The Habit" and, say, "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight."

1. Kid 606 - Temptation
2. The Notwist - Pick Up the Phone
3. Dntel - (This Is) The Dream Of Evan And Chan
4. Blue Ribbon - Eagles Fly
5. Lali Puna - Micronomic
6. Herrmann & Kleine - Kickboard Girl
7. Telefon Tel Aviv - I Lied
8. Schneider TM - The Light 3000
9. Benjamin Diamond - Let's Get High
10. Linkin Park - Breaking The Habit
11. TBA - I
12. Headphones - Hot Girls
13. Manitoba - Jacknuggeted
14. Pulseprogramming - Blooms Eventually
15. Mice Parade - The Days Before Fiction

video #49: Gorillaz - 19-2000

2008-03-05T23:37:00.000-08:00

Video #2 from Gorillaz, again directed by Jamie Hewlett and Pete Candeland. And what a fun video it is, even though hardly anything happens in it at all.

I've had a CD-R of this album for years and didn't even know what this song was called before today. It probably could have been a bigger hit if only it had been called "Get the Cool Shoeshine" or pretty much anything other than "19-2000."

Summer seems so far away right now.

various artists - Laptop Pop Collection, volume 1

2008-03-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

Various Artists - Laptop Pop Mix, volume 1

As part of a series of genre-specific mixes that were being commissioned for a certain message board about two or three years ago, I assembled a two disc compilation of what many at the time were calling "laptop pop." Over time, I kept up with it and assembled what I think is a pretty good overview of the genre, if it even lasted long enough to reach such status. Does it deserve such treatment? Plenty of people who somewhat-deservedly mock Ben Gibbard from the safety of 2008 would roll their eyes and say no. But when you start exploring beyond the 3 or 4 artists that everyone came to namedrop and know, you can find some surprising and unexpected stuff.

There's a lot of problems with this mix, the biggest being one that hangs over each and every disc of it. Lots of these artists, on lots of these songs... don't use laptops at all. I tried my best to find out for myself before including them, but a few tracks slipped through the cracks anyway. Cornelius doesn't employ laptops, as I found out when I saw him and his band earlier this year. And having seen this performance when it originally aired, I should have already known that Radiohead really don't either (though "Idioteque" still remains their signature track from Kid A -- despite not being a single -- and has probably influenced more artists from this spectrum of music than anyone has ever cared to discuss). The Holden & Thompson track came from a generic "chill out" compilation full of trance artists, which they themselves most likely are for all I know. I haven't heard anything else from them but get the feeling they probably aren't running Powerbooks, but the song fits in great here so I don't care.

But I did my best with what I could find at the time. Download and enjoy. More to come soon!

1. Maurmari - Birch Beer Forest
2. Radiohead - Idioteque
3. Octet - Hey Bonus
4. Capitol K - Pillow
5. Broken Spindles - Matte
6. Bright Eyes - Time Code
7. The Postal Service - Such Great Heights
8. Cornelius - Point Of View Point
9. Decomposure - Whose Side Are You On?
10. Marbles - Out Of Zone
11. Her Space Holiday - Meet The Pressure
12. Junior Boys - Birthday (Manitoba remix)
13. Holden & Thompson - Come To Me
14. Múm - Green Grass of Tunnel
15. Fennesz - Don't Talk Put Your Head On My Shoulder

video #48: Gorillaz - Clint Eastwood

2008-02-27T13:36:00.000-08:00

Here's where it all started. Hard to believe this is really seven years old now. I really wasn't into this "band" at all when they first came out, even coming dangerously close to falling in with the idiots who labeled them as nothing more than a big gimmick. But by the time Demon Days came out, which I've probably heard 200 times or more by now, I was a full convert. I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with them -- I don't own a single Gorillaz book, DVD, or figurine -- but if it weren't for Gorillaz, I probably wouldn't have had the idea to start exploring animated videos like this in the first place. This blog would be something very different now.

Between "Clint Eastwood" and the rise of Clinic around the same time, it seemed like we were on the verge of a great melodica revival. What happened?

Jim O'Rourke - Bad Timing

2008-02-24T23:20:00.000-08:00

Jim O'Rourke - "Bad Timing"

I don't have much to say about Jim O'Rourke. I've tried to come up with something but it all sounds like "back in 2000, this guy was everywhere!" or "is there any style he hasn't played?" or even "so this is from one of his 6,438 albums, but who's counting!?"

This is the title track from his 1997 album, which I just got into a few months ago after finding at the library. I don't know how to describe it; I remember the label "acoustica" that was getting thrown around to describe artists like Air or Beth Orton but it feels more appropriate for something like this. More good music to study to.

video #47: Chage and Aska - On Your Mark

2008-02-20T13:15:00.000-08:00

Easily the most ambitious animated video ever made. Really, it's no contest. I know that Daft Punk had a feature-length movie, and that Gorillaz have... well, "their" whole career, but c'mon.

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, a Studio Ghibli production.

Steve Reich - Electric Guitar Phase

2008-02-17T15:13:00.000-08:00

Steve Reich - "Electric Guitar Phase"

I've always loved Reich's compositions with percussion, especially mallet instruments, but his works translate just as well to other families of instruments.

"Electric Guitar Phase" clocks in at around 15 minutes, but makes me lose all sense of time whenever I listen to it. Joe Satriani meets Manuel Göttsching, or something. Great study/chill out music. I'm always irked when good music is "praised" like that but you know what I mean.

video #46: Pearl Jam - Do the Evolution

2008-02-13T16:42:00.000-08:00

Can I say anything about this that hasn't already been said? There's a lengthy Wikipedia entry on it already, which I just read and would be plagarising anyway. I've never been a big Pearl Jam fan, and on top of that I only sort of know who Todd McFarlane is. I don't have any business blogging about this at all, but it's pretty well-known as an Important Video and anything that makes people reconsider the place of "Money For Nothing" or "Sledgehammer" in the Greatest Animated Videos canon is a good thing.

Luger - Pass Agent

2008-02-10T13:56:00.000-08:00

Luger - "Pass Agent"

The first two releases on the Leaf Label were from Boymerang. This was the label's third release. More classic breaks, I get the feeling there are dozens of other records out there like this that I've never even heard of. I wonder if the other groups he was in are worth checking out? Who knows!

video #45: Cornelius - Wataridori

2008-02-06T23:00:00.000-08:00

Probably the only time I've ever cried at a concert. Beautiful, wonderful song, perfect video. Directed by this group.

The Youtube stream was pixellated and awful-looking, so we have the larger, cleaner embedded video straight from the label instead! I was sad to see him leave Matador -- Sensuous could have used more publicity than it got -- but at least the move to Everloving hasn't forced him to sacrifice any of the visual aspects of his work. Still one of the most creative artists of our time. I only wish I'd gotten into him sooner than last year. Even though I'd heard and enjoyed many of his remixes years before, I had a hard time taking anyone seriously who was always being called "The Japanese Beck." But that was my loss.

Oval - Polygon Medpack 2.0

2008-02-03T19:43:00.000-08:00

Oval - "Polygon Medpack 2.0"

Ever since I was in grade school, I've suffered from near-weekly headaches, almost exclusively on Mondays. Maybe the stress of preparing myself to head back after the weekend was too much for me when I was young, or maybe it was the awful air quality in our overcrowded elementary school. I don't know. It was bad enough to permanently set my body rhythms up in anticipation for my Monday migraine, which I haven't figured out how to avert since then. There's only so much I can do -- avoiding jarring car rides, bright lights, loud noises, and consuming dangerous amounts of caffeine and acetaminophen -- to hold them off, but unfortunately I don't have any control of these things when I'm away from home. Coming down from these requires a dark, quiet room, a soft bed, and no disturbances for a few hours. I realize that my case is almost nothing compared to many sufferers of real migraines, but it's an unpleasant nuisance that's interrupted my life more times than I can remember.

I usually prefer to spend these times in silence, but I've found that the right kind of music, played at a low enough volume, can be soothing and comforting in these times. Gentle ambient music of nonabrasive pulses, subtle rhythms, consistent volume and tone... this doesn't characterize much of Oval's work, but on Dok the usual destructive sound of crashing hard drives and damaged CDs is worked into something very pleasant. The skips and flips are still there, but it's never overwhelming. Check the old Thrill Jockey mail order catalogs that used to come inside all of their CDs and read the promising teaser: "[Christophe] Charles traveled the world recording bells and Markus added his special touch..." And $9 for every CD? Why did I have to be so poor back then?

The first time I listened to Dok, I'd just come home frome the record store after school. At the risk of breaking into Garfield territory, I had a throbbing headache so it was probably a Monday. I turned off the lights, put in the disc, and laid down on my bed. This was probably my first foray into the territorries of glitch or even "intelligent techno" or whatever you'd like to call it, and it was pretty mindblowing, even though I was too out of it to really appreciate it. I still remember the fractal patterns that flickered in and out below my eyelids as the second track on the disc, "Polygon Medpack 2.0," played from the other side of my bedroom. Having a dangerously hot heating pad draped across my face might have had something to do with that, too.

This is the kind of track that fans of "real music" love to hate. Completely synthetic, soulless in the randomly-generated heart of its composition, and completely unsuitable for dancing or any kind of social function. The narrative behind Oval is too nauseatingly "academic" for most people today who follow electronic music, especially on the Internet. That's right, the party never stops here. I'll always have a special place in my heart for this, even if I can't come up with any anecdotes for it that aren't completely inane. Anxiously awaiting something, anything more from Oval in 2008. Not software, music.

I didn't know the title of this track until now. Seems appropriate, but to point that out and explain why would be unforgivably hokey.

video #44: The Orb - Vuja De

2008-01-30T18:37:00.000-08:00

Been in kind of a funk lately, too distracted to blog and now a month behind where I'm "supposed" to be with updates. This is one of the signs of a dying blog. Too early to say what's going to happen but hopefully before long I'll be able to get back on my feet again. But isn't that what they all say.

Here's the new single from The Orb. Decent song, decent album, I'd buy it if it was in shops here but I can't bring myself to make yet another online purchase without feeling shopper's remorse from making yet another needless charge. As for the video... no one seems to really appreciate the timeless charm of their early videos, but they could really do so much better if they returned to the simple, multilayered beauty of their classic rave aesthetic. I've never liked this kind of computer animation.

There's really nothing about this video that I like at all. I'd still love to see The Orb someday but now I'm hoping for a set with no visuals.

Brian Eno - Force Marker

2008-01-27T16:49:00.000-08:00

Brian Eno - "Force Marker"

Why don't I like Brian Eno? Just looking at everything else I listen to, it doesn't make any sense. Not to brag or anything but somehow I own four of his albums and have heard three others (I realize this is just a fragment of his work, but still...), and there's just not much that I can get into at all. I mean, I respect him as a guru/innovator/activist, but I keep wondering just when I'm going to "get" him like everyone else seems to. Even his rock albums don't do anything for me; I'm sort of ashamed to say it to anyone but "Baby's On Fire" is one of the most supremely annoying pop songs I've ever heard.

Don't get me wrong. "The Big Ship" is a great song, and I like putting on Discreet Music on low volume whenever I get a headache, but that's about it. And I like "Force Marker," too, even thought it's a pretty late-period piece for him and not even close to being one of his signature tracks. I'm looking it up on Discogs right now, and it's only showing up on one release: the soundtrack to Heat.

I haven't seen the film in almost ten years, but I still remember the best scenes, which are all on the Internet now, anyway. Even the bank robbery scene, so perfectly scored by Eno. It almost sounds like a precursor to Clicks 'n Cuts, turn of the century glitch. Just watch the scene here and see what I mean. Or watch it with hilarious Journey music proudly dubbed over the shootout.

video #43: Fujiya & Miyagi - Collarbone

2008-01-23T19:02:00.000-08:00

Because the video for "Ankle Injuries" was just a ripoff of "Fell In Love With a Girl," I'm posting "Collarbone" instead.

Most of the drawings I made as a kid ended up like these do in the end. They haven't improved much but I'm up to using real markers now.

World Class Wreckin' Cru - Surgery

2008-01-20T16:06:00.000-08:00

World Class Wreckin' Cru - "Surgery"

The essential electrorap/freestyle single, should be background music in every VH1 special about 1984, but remains all but unknown outside of the Internet and in the memories of post-disco clubbers. The first casualty of homophobic gangster rap? As far as I know, Dr. Dre has disowned this amazing track and all his work with World Class Wreckin' Cru. No, they weren't gay! But tossing off effete lyrics ("my name is Dr. Dre / gorgeous hunk of a man") and posing for promo photos in sequined jumpsuits provides more than enough diss material for other rappers (case in point) that Dre's preferred to sweep under the rug. Unfortunately, there's no statute of limitations on these things, even when they're based on ridiculous and ignorant accusations.

I first heard this track as a remix by Hrvatski on the Tigerbeat6-released Attitude EP. I didn't hear the original until years later, as recommended by Erickkk.

Certainly needs to be used in a mix alongside some of these tracks. I'd try it myself if I had any idea where to start.

video #42: Efterklang - Mirador

2008-01-16T16:48:00.000-08:00

An epic journey through the cover of Efterklang's Parades. An unforgettable adventure. Fun for the whole family! Directed by Nan Na Hvass & Sofie Hannibal. I'd rather play a videogame of this than "Boy Soprano."

Boymerang - Soul Beat Runna

2008-01-13T18:07:00.000-08:00

Boymerang - "Soul Beat Runna"

Why isn't Boymerang a drum 'n bass household name? You never see him mentioned alongside Goldie, Roni Size, Photek, 4 Hero, or any other big producers of the scene, or at least I never have, not on the internet or in any magazines. Graham Sutton was never going to earn much name recognition as part of Bark Psychosis -- neither in their prime or in the less productive but more respected years that followed -- but certainly should have once striking out on his own in 1994 with the original Boymerang EP. Just three tracks, but it's as perfect of a jungle release as I've ever heard.

More singles would follow, culminating in the full-length Balance of the Force in 1997. It was released on Astralwerks in America but never came close to crossing over to any kind of success that year like the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, or the Wipeout XL soundtrack. But that's never really made sense to me. Balance of the Force was progressive and complex but also extremely accessible to anyone new to electronic music, as most people still were at the time (a sweeping generalization if there ever was one, but that's how I remember it). If it wasn't successful as a gateway release, then it still could have become an underground classic, but such status still seems to elude it today.

"Soul Beat Runna" is the opening track. One of the best breaks I've ever heard: so mellow but so kinetic. Too classy for the Wipeout XL soundtrack, perhaps. But maybe perfect for World Cup 98.

video #41: The Willowz - Take a Look Around

2008-01-09T23:17:00.000-08:00

When I was 16, I was playing lots of Street Fighter 2 and just trying my best not to crash my parents' car. Paul Gondry is 16 and is an accomplished comic book author. Now he's made a music video! A feature-length movie to come? Maybe soon.

It probably helps when your father is Michael Gondry, but still... fuuuuuck.

Kid606 - I Want to Join a Gang

2008-01-06T23:58:00.000-08:00

Kid606 - "I Want to Join a Gang"/"She's = Defective"

Like Field Manual, this album has a robot on the cover and nothing of any real musical worth on the CD inside. But like the inner sleeve says -- "Real music is the sound of the past which today's youth has very little understanding of," -- it doesn't really aspire to. Kid606 heaps on the same kind of manic gabber/post-rave assualt of giddy breaks and huge slabs of laptop-treated noise as Bomb20 or any of his DHR comrades did, but this time it's all in good fun. There's a screencap of some anonymous anime mecha pilot inside the CD tray. His old website has catgirls on it.

Don't Sweat the Technics was my first Kid606 album, and even though it came out on Vinyl Communications, it lead to my obsession with the Tigerbeat6 label for the next few years. IDM and the sounds of Warp and Planet Mu were getting boring and the nerdy wunderkinds of Tigerbeat6 -- Cex, Blectum From Blechdom, Knifehandchop -- spoke to me, at least as well as laptop musicians making loud and obnoxious but undeniably personal music could. I was jealous of their creativity and success at such a "young" age and how they were able to do this while being themselves and nerver apologizing for being the complete nerds that they were.

Especially going by this song alone, there's not a lot to really "identify" with when it comes to Kid606. Somehow, that's pretty much what I ended up doing with his music (especially on later albums like Down With the Scene and PS I Love You) and other Tigerbeat6 releases (maybe none more than Role Model by Cex. I realize they didn't invent laptop techno but they had a DIY spirit to them that took electronic music out of the highbrow realm and made it something that anyone thought they could do, no matter how weird their ideas were.

video #40: Bogdan Raczynski - Ahou Bouken

2008-01-02T17:17:00.000-08:00

The best stop-motion video ever? Probably not, but it's my favorite one that I can think of right now.

Bomb 20 - You Killed Me First! / Anyday

2007-12-30T11:52:00.000-08:00

Bomb 20 - "You Killed Me First!" / "Anyday"

In the July 1998 issue of The Wire, Rob Young offered up a review of EC8OR's World Beaters, describing the album as "perfect goading music to play inside a suit of intelligent body armour for 21st century exoskeletal soldier boys and girls." The same could be said about Bomb 20's Field Manual if it wasn't already spelled out so literally on the cover. The music? A violent pileup of television and film samples laid over splatterhouse breaks and distorted hip-hop beats. David Skiba was seventeen when he recorded this, or at least when he was signed to DHR. In another world better than this one, it inspired kids everywhere to embrace their ADD and lead to a new movement in sampling that didn't stop with Cassetteboy.

The liner notes in my copy of Field Manual seem to be missing a few pages. It's a long tract describing how political movements are crushed by governments, and how any up and coming movements can learn from the mistakes of others. Or at least that's what I think it's about. I have duplicate pages on the sections titled "Depoliticization," "History," "Individuality + Collectivism," "Social Revolution," and "The Untouchable State," and I think I'm missing the entire middle half of it. I doubt there's any way I can read the whole thing without buying another copy of the CD, unless I could find some helpful soul out there who (A.) is reading this now, (B.) has the CD with a complete booklet, and (C.) has a working scanner. I don't think that's going to happen. I am interested in reading more about Gladio and the Black Panthers, but I've had a hard time separating the good sources about these topics from the bad.

By 2001, if not already in 2000, DHR had fallen upon hard times. The death of Carl Crack on September 6, 2001, officially spelled the end of Atari Teenage Riot, and that in itself probably would have spelled the end of the label if it was even still functioning. But even if that had never happened, the events of five days later effectively ended the DHR's relevance. No amount of dystopian future-shock ramblings or calls for revolution and anarchy, no matter how loud or (at times) reasonable, could compare to what the world saw that day. Suddenly, their collective aesthetic seemed juvenile and pointless. Bomb 20 put out just one more album a year later on another label; fittingly, it was titled Reality Surpasses Fiction.

video #39: Paul McCartney - We All Stand Together

2007-12-26T19:30:00.000-08:00

I was five when this came out but somehow never saw it.

Kids today have nothing like this. Just Shrek, Naruto, and porn.

Komputergurl - I Love My Speak and Spell

2007-12-23T13:31:00.000-08:00

Komputergurl - "I Love My Speak and Spell"

The press release for the VGM Mixtape #8 couldn't have said it any better: "Prepare to flush all those NANOLOOP 1.0 CDs down the toilet!" I had high hopes for the Nanoloop compilation: some of the most exciting glitch, IDM, and noise artists around making Gameboy music? Only once in a while does anything come out that dares to put so many things I love together in one place. But then... it sucked. Maybe forcing all these artists -- many of whom probably didn't care about video game music or even video games at all -- to use Nanoloop wasn't the best idea? Funny how there was already a burgeoning scene of Nanoloop, LSDJ, and other VGM artists who could have done wonders with the software if only given the chance. It wouldn't be until a year later that anything approaching a definitive document of original VGM would emerge. Unless I'm really missing out on something -- and I desperately want to know if I am -- the No Sides Records VGM Mix Tape #8 is still the best collection of Game Boy and other classic game systems-inspired music. Sadly, the mythical seven volumes that precede this appear to be purely fictional. The depth and repeated listenability of this would-be novelty item is astounding. I can't imagine what I'd do with seven other installments of it.

VGM Mix Tape #8 has a few of the heavyweights of the VGM scene (The Minibosses, Nullsleep), lots of artists out of the "Chicago scene" (Mark 4, Handheld, Panicsville), and a widely dispersed group of international artists. I haven't kept up with this scene as well as I'd like to -- I plan on digging deeper once I post this -- so I don't know how many of these contributors are still consistently recording or how many were even meant to be long-term projects in the first place. Nothing from Bit Shifter, The Advantage, 8-Bit, or many other acts that gained prominence in recent years, but that only lends to the mystery behind this collection. These artists are as faceless as they come and though I haven't tried, I'm not sure that any amount of Google searching could locate or identify them all.

It's hard to choose a favorite track on the CD. There's nearly 30, and despite the potential for some annoying digital wankery (fully realized in Nanoloop 1.0, which I think I've only been holding onto for the cover art) there's hardly anything here I'd want to skip. "I Love My Speak and Spell" by Komputergurl has always stood out to me, always made me turn up the volume whenever it comes on, and even brings me to skip backwards to listen again after it's finished. I don't know if there's a drum machine or anything else in the mix, but it sounds so much bigger than any chiptune-powered track should. I always wondered who Komputergurl was, and though I never knew for sure, it was easy for me to assume that the artist behind the name was, in fact, a girl. Was this just wishful thinking on my part? In the sausage fest that is electronic music, maybe.

Now I find out that Komputergurl was, in fact, just a pseudonym for VGM veterans Cosmos Computer Music. And that the track was actually made in 1999. At least according to this page, which hosts not just a free mp3 of the song (rendering my Zshare-hosted file redundant) but a tantalizing photo of "Komputergurl" herself. Brilliant.