video #19: El-P - Flyentology

After my last entry, this is as good a time as any to post this, I guess. Without turning this into a long journal entry full of pitiful agnostic angst, I'll just say that this video is relevant to my interests.

I don't watch any of the programs on Adult Swim nearly as much as I used to (the free cable connection I inherited in this apartment only works when it wants to, anyway) and I was never as devoted to it as a lot of people apparently were/still are. So I still don't really understand what "Williams Street" is or what they do, aside from producing those mildly amusing/annoying bumper cards that are always getting people on the internet so fired up and angry. Apparently they also had a hand in this video, too. Looking over some of the other work that their animators/producers have done, it's not hard to see why Definitive Jux would want to team up with them, and vice versa. After all, surely a few years of instrumental hip-hop music in their promo spots has (hopefully) primed viewers for something new and different. That is, assuming these viewers are who Adult Swim and Def Jux still think they are (college students) and not who I suspect they've largely become (preteens with inattentive parents).

So on the heels of last year's partnership/collaboration with the Stones Throw label, Adult Swim is offering a free compilation of Definitive Jux music on their website. I don't know how long "Definitive Swim" will be available for download, but it's worth checking out. Unless you're one of those "indie rap sucks/T-Pain rules" dudes. I know you're out there. Hopefully people will actually download this. I know this is some questionable, broken window parable-logic that I'm about to use, but I'd like to think that at least some good could come out of the return of Family Guy or the popularity of Robot Chicken. As awful and unforgivable as they are, they're indirectly paying for projects like this.

I'll Sleep When You're Dead is still one of the best albums of the year, and definitely worth the wait, even though it should have come out last year. Lord knows we needed it, though this year hasn't been much better for hip-hop, either.

Jars of Clay - Liquid

Jars of Clay - "Liquid"

I spent most of my childhood living (or "stuck," as I often complained) in an isolated subdivision surrounded by cornfields on all sides. It might as well have been an actual island, for my brother and I were strictly prohibited from venturing beyond the boundaries of it and out onto the dangerous highways that lead to promising but forbidden evidence of real human civilization and commerce. The gas station 3 miles west of our home was off-limits to us. My friends, on the other hand, routinely made this journey without fear of punishment. This filled me with a sense of envy and humiliation that I can still feel today; looking at the journey now, it's almost insulting to think that my parents felt I was incapable of undertaking it without, well... dying. In hindsight, though, I can clearly see that it was more likely that they proposed this rule to protect my brother rather than myself. I can understand their dilemma but I wish they would have chosen to address it differently than they did. Perhaps, maybe, by allowing me to go out with my friends by myself? But no, nearly every bicycle ride, every trip to a neighbor's house, every trek into the then-undeveloped, wooded, and empty lots of our subdivision was tainted by the unnecessary and often tragic complications of having a rude, obnoxious, and confrontational younger sibling tagging along on every outing. When he was not instigating fights between himself and my friends (causing me to choose sides, where I would inevitably lose face in front of my peers or come home to face the inevitable discipline of my parents, eternally unsympathetic to my plight), he was outright challenging me in front of them. Again, there was no way for me to "win" in these situations, no possible positive outcome, no way out other than simple retreat. I'd go home and hide in my closet with a book while my parents wondered what on Earth could possibly be troubling me.

Even more alluring was the city to the east, a busy suburb full of stores, malls, streets with real sidewalks... I only made this trip once, somehow unaccompanied by my brother, and only in total secrecy. It was an exhausting three-hour ride best taken down the local bike trail. My parents had warned me of its dangers, the attackers/molesters lurking in the bushes, ready to spring out at any moment to do (literally) unspeakable things to you. I certainly wasn't the world's most precocious child, but even I knew better than to believe those stories. I hopped on my new mountain bike (several sizes too big for me, but I couldn't have asked for a bike smaller than any of my friends', naturally) and followed my friends into town. After going to the bike shop and Dairy Queen, we started back. My pedal fell off halfway home and I was abandoned at a country store with some of their pocket change. I don't remember any specific punishment that followed after my parents drove out to pick me up; perhaps they thought that I would learn from the experience, that God would know what I was up to even if they didn't, and that little accidents like that were His way of keeping me in line.

Clarification: my parents were not (and are not!) the insensitive Christian stereotypes that I just described them as. But like any new believers, they experienced a long period of adjusting their faith from strict dogma to practical, flexible, and compassionate understanding. From an Eriksonian point of view, though, their strict adherence to James Dobson-style parenting and excessively freedom-curbing limitations at the dawn of my adolescence was developmentally disastrous to me. Isn't this supposed to be a magical time in every young man's life? Taking risks, exploring, learning how to work with and relate to others? Every time I see a group of 12 year old skaters in my neighborhood today, I cringe, wondering what that kind of freedom must feel like. I won't even go into what was going through my mind this week when I saw one of them pull out a videocamera out of his pocket to film his friends doing ollies off the sidewalk. Holy shit. Kids today, etc.

I have good memories too, though. Sometimes I was able to escape, and found refuge down the street at my friend Ken's house. He was one year younger than me. His sister Cara was in my grade. We'd hang out in their basement playing pool and darts and making chalk drawings on the wall. We'd spent hours jumping on Cara's backyard trampoline, listening to her CDs: Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, Nine Inch Nails, Bjork, a few others that I won't mention but surely many other good ones that I've forgotten about. She had a good collection of cassingles, too. Gin Blossoms, Radiohead, Silverchair... there were times back then that I felt completely powerless and at the mercy of my circumstances, but whenever we were together, just listening to music in their house or in the backyard, everything felt just fine and right. We were, at least for a while, quite a team. They were youth group kids too, and like me, they'd probably Accepted Christ at some point before high school as well. But that didn't stop us from having fun, being kids, and rebelling against our parents to a normal and healthy degree. I can only imagine the kind of trouble we could have gotten into if nothing had changed. It would have been good for us, really.

In the middle of the summer before high school, my family moved away from that subdivision. It was a short move, just into town about ten minutes away, so I didn't have to change schools or anything. But this was ten minutes away from them, by car, so it might as well have been a hundred miles to me. Getting my parents to drive me there was difficult and mildly awkward to have to ask for, so for much of the next year, I saw them less and less frequently, and became less and less involved in their lives. I don't remember exactly when it happened and I still don't understand what could have prompted such at change, but at some point in 1995, Cara found Jesus again and never looked back.

What followed was a fundamental change in her entire personality. She grew more involved in our youth group, and over time took on the role of spiritual leader among the small group of us who'd congregated together both there and at the lunch table at school. She made clear her intentions to dispose of her old CDs, and I can remember fruitlessly trying to convince her to at least sell them away for cash (or at least letting me take the burden of them off her hands). It was painful to think of those perfectly good/expensive Nirvana and Green Day CDs going to waste, but there they went. Her brother soon followed her lead, and soon my teenage utopia was infected with WWJD bracelets, Third Day concerts, and youth group sing-along/hop-along songs that I had no choice but to participate in. There are long stories surrounding each of these incidents but I won't dwell on them any longer for now.

By this time, music had become a very important part of my identity, one that I was now destined to explore alone. My friends were suddenly obsessed with bands like Audio Adrenaline, Newsboys, and Johnny Q. Public (this was at least a year or two before they moved on to Five Iron Frenzy and All Star United, which I could enjoy in moderation). Most of this was embarrassingly bad, full of lyrical cliches and devoid of any imagination or experimentation. I was growing more and more obsessed with Sonic Youth, REM, and electronic music, so most of what my friends were listening to just felt... childish? Choosing to listen to and spend money on this stuff seemed like a masochistic act of pointless self-discipline or even intellectual self-censorship. I don't even know how they chose to define or understand "Christian rock." (I suspect that to them, it was anything that was played on the weekend Christian rock show on WCFL -- 104.7 FM, Morris, Illinois -- or anything that was sold at the Christian store at the mall.) This would at least explain why my later attempts to share my enthusiasm for Danielson Famile or Pedro the Lion were met with confusion and indifference. Being trapped in a car with them and a 20-CD case full of this stuff was horribly annoying. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it's probably comparable to how most people would feel if they were stuck in a backseat listening to Merzbow or Twin Infinitives or something.

The first time that our youth group ventured out to the Cornerstone Festival, it was probably the summer of 1996, so I would have been a few weeks from turning 17. We loaded up in the van and I prepared myself for the road trip from hell, knowing my companions' choice of soundtrack and their fondness for singing campfire hymns with their hands in the air. Instead, we probably listened to a lot of MXPX, who we later saw that night at the main stage. Inspired by the sight of some crowd surfers near the stage, Cara asked us to lift us up and onto the crowd, which was actually did despite the fact that doing this from the back of the crowd and trying pass a person forward is a foolish and dangerous thing to attempt. Somehow we lifted her up -- doing this without grabbing her ass was incredibly difficult and impractical, but somehow I was able to muster up the strength -- and away she went. Suddenly, everyone was asking us to provide the same service, so we spent much of the rest of the show lifting people into the air, sometimes nearly dropping them on their heads in the process. Like so much Christian rock, we were doing our best to imitate the real thing, but failing in embarrassing fashion.

But MXPX wasn't the only thing we listened to in the van. The first Jars of Clay album, which apparently had been out for nearly a year (Wikipedia says it was released on October 24, 1995), was played in its entirety. By then I'd surely already heard "Flood," which was fast-becoming a crossover hit on... secular radio! It peaked at #37 on the Billboard 200. It also got heavy play on alt. rock radio (#88 on Q101's year-end list, fwiw), which seems inconceivable today given the takeover by nu-metal anger merchants in the following years, but completely natural given the ambiguously spiritual overtones that half of those bands (Creed, Evanescence, P.O.D.) commonly dealt with. Jars of Clay could never quite match the success of "Flood" or their first album, seeing diminishing returns with each follow-up, even to this day. But their first effort was enough to place them among the greats of Christian rock: Larry Norman, Petra, or DC Talk.

But Jars of Clay sounded nothing like any of those bands, or like any band at the time, though their influence on a generation of Christian bands to follow is impossible to overstate. They weren't merely "better" than other Christian bands. Maybe they were, but that in itself would be a misleading statement. They didn't invent anything "new," but certainly weren't content to be another carbon copy band on the "if you like... then you'll like" posters on every Christian bookstore's wall. Christian rock has never been known for its subtlety or restraint, but Jars of Clay were, at least for their first two albums, content not to mimic the styles or sounds of other bands. The lyrics are never preachy, trite, or sophomorically metaphoric. What they are is hard to categorize. They're certainly "Biblical," but more than just scripture set to music like the dreadful trend of Praise & Worship music that's dominated the last ten years of Christian music.

"Liquid" was the lead track on Jars of Clay, and along with "Flood," was produced by Adrian Belew. I don't know much about Belew and haven't listened to much King Crimson, but those two songs just happen to be the best ones on the entire album, and I get the feeling that's not a coincidence. The song opens with strings, some great vocal harmonies, and (sampled?) Gregorian chant could be hilariously bad in the hands of lesser bands, but fits into the mix beautifully here. Christian rock production is characterized by terrible emphasis on bass and drums. Fat, "funky" bass sounds and loud, overmixed drums are usually all you need to hear to identify a Christian rock song in the first few bars, even before lyrics come into play. "Liquid" hopefully inspired a more efficient, economic use of these sounds, doing more with less, never pushing the needles into the red, but still packing a punch when it counts. When all the elements come together exactly thirty seconds into the song, it's a beautiful moment.

I've bought more Christian rock CDs than I care to remember, even into college. They've all been sold/given away by now, all but the first two Jars of Clay albums, which sit between Skip James and J-Live on my CD shelf. None of their later albums interested me very much, as they began to sound more and more like the "Christian Toad the Wet Sprocket" that they've so commonly been described as. By the time "Unforgetful You" hit the airwaves, their muted sound had been polished into bright, shiny, modern rock for "work radio" playlists.

The first album, as much as I always find myself returning to it, isn't without its flaws. The eighteen and a half minutes of string rehearsals and barely-audible studio banter at the end of the album makes for a strong contender for worst "hidden track" ever included at the end of a CD. The sampled children's voices on on "Like a Child" sound inspired by Precious Moments figurines. And the strings, the Celtic arrangements... they pile on thickly over the course of the album. Is this really rock? I know that doesn't matter, but... did they have to play recorders?

So it's good music to fall asleep to, but more than that, listening to it brings me back to a time when I was struggling with simple problems: identity, friendship, belonging, connecting. At least then I was sure that there was something beyond all of this, something bigger than myself that I could appeal and connect to. When you lose God, nothing can ever quite take His place. Believers can never understand this, but neither can atheists. No matter what I know now, or just think that I know, I don't think I'll ever be able to completely let go of those beliefs. They're always there in the back of my mind, always making me believe two things at once. Maybe people just need to believe in God?

Cara married a boy at Bible college and moved to Florida. Ken is about to earn a master's degree in theology from a prestigious Midwestern private college. The pedals on my bicycle were fixed but the brakes soon froze up, and it now hangs from the ceiling in my parents' garage. And Jars of Clay are now busy recording classic hymns, soundtracks, and... a Christmas album. I hope it at least outsells the one from Barenaked Ladies this year.

video #18: Radiohead - Paranoid Android

I passed on buying The Bends when it first came out, probably choosing to spend my allowance on some crappy sports collectibles or something like that instead. So I didn't get into Radiohead until well after OK Computer had come out. Yeah, not until college. There were actually a few cool kids there who were into them, but they were all Visual Arts/Architecture majors who drank and smoked, and wore better-matching thrift store clothes than I did. I was never able to get into their clique, but the fact that I viewed them as a clique in the first place was my own undoing.

"Paranoid Android" was #4 on the "Top 10 Animated Videos" special that first aired on MTV in 1998. Certainly should be higher than the overrated "Sledgehammer" or the terribly dated "Money For Nothing."

Messiah - You Are Going Insane

Messiah - "You Are Going Insane"

B-side to the Running Man-sampling classic "Temple of Dreams," "You Are Going Insane" is a classic of the latter days of the rave era. Or at least it sure sounds like one to me. I don't know. I wasn't there. All I can do is download these old songs, close my eyes, and imagine what it must have been like to experience this music when it was new.

I don't know what fascinates me so much about this music or this time period. Maybe it's the endless promise and possibility of it all, the way that it broke from the past and pointed towards The Future. It's going to be a fine night tonight, it's going to be a fine day tomorrow, and so forth. Of course, most of the acid house, techno, and early jungle of the time was clearly steeped in the sounds of soul, funk, and disco (and certainly hip-hop as well), so there was no denying the influence of the past. But it was still undeniably new and urgent. And unlike psychedelic music of the past, it hasn't been canonized or repackaged, at least not to the degree that Baby Boomers have done with their music. Not yet, anyway.

But this has all been said before, and by smarter and more experienced people than myself. I know I don't have any new ideas about any of this stuff. Not even any refreshing "outsider" observations. All I can say is that I love this music, I love reading about the history of it, and... maybe that's it. Because what else can I do? There are no more raves, at least none within a thousand miles of here that have played anything but Happy Hardcore and trance for the last 10 years or so. But still, I know that this was a time I actually lived through, so a part of me feels like it's still within reach, still out there somewhere. And maybe it is. But I wouldn't know. I don't even go out to clubs as it is. Honestly, I'm no more connected to the electronic music of today than I am to what was coming out 15 or 20 years ago. I "discover" and consume it in the same way. I know it deserves better.

I'm writing this entry at work, hunched over a laptop that's sitting on a 3 foot-high hotel counter with no room to pull a chair up to. Smooth jazz fills the empty lobby. My co-worker is watching America's Next Top Model on her computer next to me. I want to say more about this but I'm tired and mildly nauseous.

video #17: The White Stripes - Fell In Love With a Girl

This song sent chills down my spine when I first heard it. It still does today. And the video, directed by Michel Gondry, is still one of my favorites after five years. It's funny to think that there are people out there who hate on this because he apparently "cheated" by using computer programs to put together certain parts of this video. So it's not "pure" stop-motion animation? Yes, that certainly diminishes the effect. I'll never look at it the same way again!

What else can be said about the song? One of the first classics of the 21st century? Hardly a bold statement. I still need to hear Icky Thump, but that will be addressed before the end of the summer. Then again, how many times have I listened to Elephant or Get Behind Me Satan since they first came out? Hmmm...

Slag Boom Van Loon - Poppy Seed (Boards Of Canada Remix)

Slag Boom Van Loon - "Poppy Seed (Boards Of Canada Remix)"

Slab Boom Van Loon were Mike Paradinas, best known as µ-Ziq and founder of Planet Mu, and Jochem Paap AKA Speedy J, who I only know from the Artificial Intelligence compilation. Their self-titled album was released on Planet Mu in 1998, and though I've listened to it three times through, I really can't remember much of anything from it at all. If you like late 90s intelligent techno, you'll probably enjoy the album. That's about as hearty of a recommendation as I can muster up for it.

Maybe they felt the same way. There was no proper follow-up album, but in 2001 they released So Soon, a collection of other artists' remixes of the songs from the album. The list of remixers -- including Pole, Coil, Four Tet, Matmos, and more -- make So Soon the "Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue" of IDM.

Most of this has been forgotten in time, however, except for the contributions from Boards of Canada to the project. Few groups have generated such anticipation around their releases as the Scottish duo have over the past ten years -- or more, if you claim to have actually listened to them before Music Has The Right To Children -- making their remixes just as coveted and obsessed over as any of their other work. If you've heard their work on Mira Calix's "Sandsings," Clouddead's "Dead Dogs Two," or Beck's "Broken Drum," it's not hard to understand why.

Their remix of "Poppy Seed," however, unintentionally overshadows not just the entire album, but the entire oeuvre of Slag Boom Van Loon. Not that SBVL was ever meant to be anything but a side project from two musicians already busy with plenty of other projects, but it would have been easy to expect that they'd still be remembered well today, at least due to their individual name recognition from other recordings. Instead, the remix of "Poppy Seed" remains their legacy.

I've been one of those (sometimes annoying) obsessives of Boards of Canada since about 2001 or so, and have tracked down as much of their music as I've been able to find, aside from the pre-Twoism releases. The authenticity and quality of what I've been able to find of those on Soulseek have proven troublingly suspect at best. I thought that I'd heard almost every legitimate release from them, until I found this remix earlier this spring. Since then, it's become my most-played song so far this year. I know it's not actually their song, but still... it's every bit their song as "Roygbiv," "Turquoise Hexagon Sun," or "Dayvan Cowboy" are, and just as essential.

When I started this blog, I knew that eventually I'd be writing something about Boards of Canada. The problem is, there's so much hyperbole spilled over this group, so many people rehashing the same deep, personal experiences they've had with the music, that it seems meaningless to try to add any further thoughts to the volumes of digital exposition left behind by others. It's very important for me to be clear about this, above anything else I'd ever have to say to anyone about music. If I'm only piecing together my thoughts about them in between repetitive phone calls at work or just before nodding off to sleep at night, it might be best that I just abstain from getting in too deep with it at all. I like to think that I love and understand this music (whatever that means) as much as anyone, or at least as much as whoever will eventually write the 33 1/3 book on Music Has The Right To Children. The only difference between us is that they wouldn't need five years to write it like I probably would.

video #16: Trans Am - Tesco v. Sainsbury's

When I started this blog, I thought that finding enough animated videos to keep it regularly updated might prove to be difficult, at least after a few month's time. Keeping an eye on Pitchfork Media's Forkcast, however, has more than relived this fear while at the same time potentially rendering my "coverage" of such new clips rather redundant. New videos show up there -- and are probably featured and covered even more exclusively elsewhere -- almost every week, almost none of them destined for airplay on television, ever. (Although I'll admit that I don't have any idea just how many specialty channels exist outside of the MTV/VH1/Fuse family. Maybe there is a place for this kind of thing somewhere on TV? After all, I have seen Xiu Xiu videos offered on demand by Comcast.) I also don't know very much about the animation process, or how much time and money it takes to put together a four-minute video. Obviously, a video like this is going to cost a lot more than a monochromatic Flash video like this, but either way, I assume that it's easier and cheaper than ever for people to get in on this sort of thing. No wonder more bands want to commission animated videos, or even try making them themselves! It's better than doing another boring "warehouse" video, anyway.

I can't help but imagine that this Trans Am video was thrown together by some sort of a team, maybe a high school summer film class or something. It's somewhere between 30 and 40 quite random clips of computer animation, mutant claymation, crashed 8-bit videogames, puppets on fire, and other strange hallucinations that neither make sense nor translate into a potential viral clip with any hopes of catching on. Who knows where any of this came from or how many people had their hands in it? Like countless other videos these days, it was probably obvious from the beginning that this one would only find an audience online. But how can you really surprise people who regularly subject themselves to the most bizarre and irreverent shit imaginable on a daily basis?

"Tesco v. Sainsbury's" is the best song on the otherwise forgettable Sex Change. I won't say it's their worst album, since I still haven't heard the much-despised TA, but it feels so confused and directionless, the musical juxtapositions feeling quite pointless, the entire mess sounding much more boring than it has any right to. This is after a half-dozen listens. Do I need to give it a half dozen more?

Gas - Untitled (Pop #3)

Gas - "Untitled" (track 3)

Instead of trying to explain who Gas is or what Pop sounds like, I'll just post Ian Penman's original review of the album, which appeared in the June, 2000 issue of The Wire. I'd prefer to just post a link to it, but no such link exists, so instead I'm just going to quote it in its entirety.

Gas
Pop
Mille Plateaux MP83 CD

The pop of Gas: is that sound just a niggling leak or an explosion which will rip through your foundations and level your comfortable heimlich home?

Popgas: 65 minutes, no titles, no information; apparently bland cover snaps of pine, branch, leaf, light. Gaspop: one long track, in essence, with seven twists of inflection or backdrop or uplift. Is it just New Age full-body-massage Muzak, or a cunning autocritique of rainforest 'lush'? The very fact that Pop leaves us queasily posing such questions is a sign that Wolfgang Voigt's latest Gas experiment has worked. This is music in which you dreamily immerse yourself... only to find yourself cut up sharp, short, shocked.

Gas is Mike Ink is Wolfgang Voigt. Like Stefan Betke's Pole, 'Gas' has become a trademark for an ongoing investigation. Like Pole, some might say, it's a perilously repetitive project – and initially it does sound verging bland (or virgin pure); but where Pole is all microstitial flicker and scurry, here there's a massed anonymity of sound which matches the pseudonymity of name. If Pole is the sound of as yet unnamed bacterial life in underground caverns, Pop sees Voigt steer Gas into a resounding mountain Valkyrie ride. By the time the seventh and final track thunders out of your speakers, the initial noodly premise has become monumental, epic, driven, a great cathedral of sound, a great odyssey of icy soundtrack.

Pop opens slow and sinous on the soft accordion undulations of a lakeside afternoon. Having established his basic premise Voigt plays dextrous multiplication games with pattern and pulse – dense layers of sound are folded and knotted and folded again, making a maze of your initial feelings of safety. The method is duplicated by the cover where the postcard-like snaps of a golden glade are rendered uncanny through repetition and close-up. (Voigt treats the calm of Nature like Warhol treats the affectless smile of celebrity.) The feeling is like an endless series of successive colour Xeroxes laid atop one another, increasingly transparent, leaving us a final 'representation' that is blurred, unbound, off, what began as a fairly reliable 'map' becomes a progressively less clear signifier of the world, heading into epic and smoky abstraction.

What seems like a familiar sylvan plot – the comforting sound of hills-are-alive music – slowly begins to decentre itself inside repeated frames. The new picture which emerges – an unnaturally bright and resplendently 'fake' forest – carries with it an implied critique of the nostalgic itch for the Heimat. Pop begins to sound less like a conventional musical pitch than some canny installation displaying entropy in 'progress'. Voigt has taken the stele of pastoral Romanticism – of which too much electronica (with its aspirations to a glutinously 'natural' ambience) is a blithe reprint – and put his machine head to work on deconstructing its claims to be an embodiment of spiritual truth. Pop is both sublime (a flickerbook of beauty overlaid arrangements, a dark heartbeat of sussuration, chirrup and babble) and a critique of over-easy Sublime. A 'political' splinter in the embrace of warm, bosomy electronica.

In Martin Heidegger's later work, he wrote about the 'question of technology' from an isolated personal retreat, keeping the call of the Now at a distance, diving into the language like a foxhole, far from any technological clamour, living out the last vestiges of a 19th century dream of castles and rectors and metaphysics. There is a melancholia inside this imago, and that melancholy reappears here. Except the formula has been reversed, and Voigt presents us with odd, askew Polaroids of Nature from inside a tower of spotless modems. Snap goes the Ambient fallacy. Crackle goes the synthetic forest floor. Pop goes the Heideggerean dream. Pop is a luscious enjoyment in and of itself, but its lingering after-effects may make your doubt your own enjoyment.
Ian Penman

The Wire
Issue 196
June 2000
p. 48

This is copied directly from the magazine itself, which I received in the mail seven years ago and packed up for a trip to northern Wisconsin with friends that summer. Unknown to myself at the time, this turned out to be the last real vacation I'd ever take, but I did my best to made the most of it and still have many great memories from that trip. But I still found the near-constant company of my friends a little exhausting at times, and I can remember retreating back into the cabin on a few occasions when they'd take the 4-wheeler out for another tear around the gravel roads. In the meantime, I listened to Minnesota Public Radio, read some books, and browsed through The Wire, reading and rereading this review and trying to make sense of it. The comparisons between Pole (who I'd just gotten into) and Gas sounded promising. But the rest of the review seemed barely comprehensible to me, yet somehow deeply intriguing. If nothing else, it made me want to hear Pop, whatever the hell it really was. It would be some time until I'd actually do so, unfortunately.

Looking back, I should have made a better effort to obtain the album while it was still available. As Mille Plateaux has now apparently ceased operations, the album (along with all Gas material) has slipped out of print, and now trades hands for no less than three or four times its original price. As I write this, I'm only able to find two copies for sale online: one for €38.00, another for the modest sum of £99.95. As Mark Richardson reminds us in the most recent entry of his Resonant Frequency column, Gas (Wolfgang Voigt) went on to cofound Kompakt Records, which begs the question of why this album has not been reissued on the label. All that's keeping it from absorbing and eclipsing the status of albums like 94 Diskont and Endless Summer is proper availability.

That hasn't stopped countless people from downloading the album anyway, which I eventually got around to as soon as I moved into my second apartment and finally ordered the Internet service I'd always wanted. I don't remember my first impressions of it, though they likely weren't comparable to the usual reactions I have towards music, be it purchased, downloaded, heard from passing by cars or in grocery aisle checkout counters. There's a subconscious accept/reject reaction that I'm sure I regularly go through, possibly because I always longed to be some kind of critic and enjoyed passing judgment on everything I heard. More likely, just because I'm a consumer like everyone else, and find it necessary to rate and categorize all the information/texts I come in contact with in order to find my place in the world and to try to make sense of it all. I don't know. Pop somehow felt exempt from this process, as if it had more in common with environmental sounds -- the hum of office equipment, the gentle rustle of a deserted field -- than anything resembling so-called "ambient" music. But there's been never been any dearth of ambient recordings employing such sounds and specific reference points. Somehow, this was different.

I began to listen to this album more and more, night after night, coming home from work, tired and growing increasingly confused about my current life and whether the choices I'd made were perhaps not as wise as I'd first thought. I was a college graduate working at a bookstore coffee bar, struggling to pay my half of the rent every month, growing increasingly distant from my old friends while struggling to make any of my new relationships work, and... well, just general post-college anomie, I guess. Lately, I've been in a very negative mood about these things and should probably do myself and everyone else a favor and just give it all a rest. But still, I feel the need to mention it because it mirrors my fascination with this album. Is Pop really the perfect blissed-out dream I always thought it was, or is does it float and pulse and entrance us a little too much? Is that possible? Pop is not "pop" by any means, but does it not bring some of us the same kind of gleeful satisfaction? Are we not reduced to the same kind of salivating popstar fanboy/fangirl that we always despised? Does it not actually cause us to regress even further than that? Should we ever resist the lure of the drone, the creeping feeling of womb-sickness that overtakes us when we listen to Selected Ambient Works II or Ágætis Byrjun? Is Pop a continuation of that pursuit for musicians and listeners? Or is it the end?

There's some point that I'm trying to make about music and consumerism here, and maybe about the (un)importance of an artist's intent after the fact. It's all still quite unfocused in my mind and I don't know if I'm really going to be able to work it out or not. Listening to Pop lately, I'm amazed that it still sounds so good and so unparalleled more than seven years after its release. I'm amazed that it still manages to pull me in, even despite my growing apprehensions around it. I just get the feeling that there's something else running through the music that I'm still missing.

As the seasons pass, the significance of this album grows harder and harder to ignore. I just wish I could tell why.

video #15: The Knife - Like a Pen

Was Silent Shout my favorite album from last year? Probably.

Here's a "funky" song from it. And the video is really trippy!

Photek - The Fifth Column

Photek - "The Fifth Column"

The Hidden Camera was the first CD I ever special ordered from a store, and along with the Ni Ten Ichi Ryu single, was the usual soundtrack for my brother and I whenever we played pool in our basement or Wing Arms on my Sega Saturn. Maybe neither of us had been exposed to very much drum and bass before this, but I doubt that I would have been drawn in by anything that didn't seem as complex or "intelligent" as this, which, for better or worse, was just what I was looking for after overdosing on The Prodigy. As for my brother, he later got into Propellerheads and Dieselboy before being sucked into the void of progressive trance, the choice soundtrack of streetracers and custom import-driving obsessives worldwide. It's troubling that I still think there was something wrong with this, and that he'd have somehow been better off sitting in his room listening to The Orb like I did instead of going out and getting his kicks while he was still young enough to get away with it.

The Hidden Camera and Ni Ten Ichi Ryu were later compiled onto the Risc vs. Reward EP. The thought of having all that on just one CD, even though I had all the tracks on seperate discs, seemed too good to be true. This was years before I had a CD burner, and even longer before stores started selling blank CDs as dirt cheap loss leaders. I made due with taping both discs onto one cassette to play in the car, and lived with that until the release of Modus Operandi, which contained seven new tracks plus "The Hidden Camera," "K.J.Z," and "The Fifth Column."

"The Fifth Column" is far from my favorite Photek track, never approaching his most ominous or paranoid moments, nor giving off the lush, warm glow that so many of his pieces radiate. His use of Asian instruments -- whether based on a genuine appreciation for such traditional sounds or a simple fascination with martial arts and samauri films -- is on full display here, though the dazzling and complex breakbeats he's capable of are nowhere to be found. The central beat is too broken, too slow to dance to, but when I first heard it, seemed more original and wierd than almost anything I'd ever heard. More than almost any other track, "The Fifth Column" fed my growing addiction to drumming on tabletops with my hands, a habit that probably confused many of my friends at the time. If any real drummers had ever witnessed me trying to do this, they probably would have turned away in disgust.

I was as shocked and disappointed as anyone when Solaris came out a few years later, but time has revealed my ignorance. It's a fine album and should have received all the praise that was mistakenly heaped onto Luomo and his boring, boring music.

video #14: Los Campesinos - You! Me! Dancing!

Great video. Ch-check it out!

The Black Dog - Utopian Dream

The Black Dog - "Utopian Dream"

I first heard this almost ten years ago on the radio. Everyone was trying to get in on "electronica" back then, even rock radio, so when Q101 began airing the "Electronic Trip" on Sunday nights, I listened religiously, desperate for some new music at the time. I even taped the shows as I listened and would replay them in the car during the week as I drove to school and work.

And this song... the DJ simply identified it as "The Black Dog..." but never gave its exact title. And so, for almost ten years, I struggled to find it, trying to get into The Black Dog but starting in the worst places imaginable, like Temple of Transparent Balls, Music For Adverts (And Short Films), and Unsavoury Products. I downloaded half of Spanners once but didn't hear it there. It wasn't until I heard the entire album this spring that I finally found the track again, buried inconspicuously near the end. Ten years is a long time for a song to bounce around in one's head. If I had waited any longer, what was left of it in my memory probably would have mutated into something else altogether.

I still have a few other songs like this, tracks heard on the radio, on mixtapes or in stores that I need to track down, but have absolutely no idea where to begin. No lyrics, no melodies that I can hum or play on a keyboard, just a few disjointed memories left over from years of obsession and a handful of promising clues that lead to nowhere. And time is running out on me.