Category Archives: Existentialism

Why the vinyl revival can sod off as far as I’m concerned

Posted on February 6, 2013 | 5 Comments

Straight off the bat, for the record, I love Danny Baker as a radio broadcaster; his Saturday morning show on Radio 5 live beautifully demonstrates his story-telling skills, his appreciation of the mythology of the mundanity of everyday life, his understanding of how the format of radio works, and his extensive charm and humanity. It’s funny, and fun, and moving, and I love it.

But last night I watched the first part of his Great Album Showdown on BBC4 and it pretty much infuriated me from start to finish.

I could blame Jeremy Clarkson, one of the anointed foursome discussing what makes a great ‘rock’ LP, but by this point his persona as a caricature of a grumpy old man stuck in the 70s is beyond the worth of criticising. He is who he is, and if you take him seriously, in either direction, you’re an idiot too. I could blame Kate Mossman, for her bizarre assertion that glam and punk were opposites, which is a strange bit of garbled received wisdom that was rightly shot down by the other three (received wisdom being the enemy of criticism and thought in general). I could blame Baker himself, for his unwittingly throwaway sexist remark about not expecting “a woman” to like a particular record (presumably let alone a young, pretty one). Stephen Street, a self-confessed pop fan rather than a rock fan, and the final member of the four, looked uncomfortable, squirmed in his seat when Clarkson anointed Supertramp as the greatest thing ever, and seemed annoyed with the rockism ambushing him from all sides. He was the only one I could really identify with.

So instead, I’ll blame vinyl.

But of course, I’m not really blaming vinyl as a material, or even as an inferior vehicle for the delivery of recorded music (CD has a wider dynamic range when used properly, etcetera); I’m blaming it as a signifier, as a loaded totem of rockist bullshit.

Every time someone eulogies vinyl, they seem to necessarily slag CDs at the same time, and in the process of doing that they’re voiding the cultural experiences and values of a large swathe of music fans.

Because there are lots of people around my age for whom CD was the format through which they experienced music; certainly in our house there are a couple of thousand CDs and barely a hundred pieces of vinyl. Even my brothers, 9 and 11 years older than me, who’ve both been in bands and worked in record shops and so on, have shelves stuffed with CDs rather than crates full of vinyl. We don’t love music any less than the likes of Clarkson and Baker and Mossman, but you wouldn’t think so from last night’s program, or the seemingly endless vinyl-fetishists waxing lyrical about their favoured delivery method online or in print for what seems like the last decade.

Physically, to me, vinyl is an awkward, ungainly thing, difficult to hold in 12” form, easily scratched and made dirty, literally degrading every time you play it (by scraping a needle over a delicate material!), easily warped if not stored with great care. I dislike having to break a mood to change sides, the awkwardness of trying to access a specific song.

In terms of the sound, the warmth that so many people describe vinyl as enjoying just sounds like surface noise to me most of the time, a veil through which detail often has to struggle to emerge. I know a well-maintained vinyl collection and record player can sound superlative, but I prefer the sound of a good CD player; and it’s easier to look after, too. (I use a Rega Apollo for preference; noted for its warmth and detail, if you’re concerned about that type of thing.)

Vinyl’s also expensive and hard to find these days compared to CDs, and in my music-buying history, the last 20 years, has always been thus. Aside from the choice 12” decorations displayed in Urban Outfitters, I literally can’t buy any new vinyl in the city where I live. There is a secondhand shop, catering to old music obsessives and ignoring those after the thrill of the new and the now, but the secondhand market for original pressings and other collectors’ items baffles and disgusts me; scarcity and exclusivity are the two favourite assets of free-market economics and capitalist frenzy. If it’s rare; it’s worth more. Last night Danny Baker mentioned that one LP he had was worth well over £1,000. If you place more onus on the fiscal worth of your music’s format than the emotional and aesthetic worth of your music’s affect, then we’re talking at cross purposes from the very start. I used to deliberately buy debut vinyl singles by indie bands in the 90s and sell them on, circa debut album success and higher profile, for big profits, because it enabled me to buy, and enjoy, more music. The most I’ve ever paid for an album is £36, for the 4CD box set of Zaireeka.

In terms of the wider mythology and affection which surrounds vinyl, the stories people tell about it beyond, y’know, actually listening to it, well; all the things people enthuse about having done with LPs – read the lyrics while listening, studied the artwork, pored over the production credits, even skinned up a joint or chopped out a line on them – people have also done with CDs. These experiences are every bit as valid and meaningful and powerful as their wax analogues, and dismissing them – whether deliberately or as a side-effect of the display of your own preferences – is unpleasant and unnecessary.

Because the discourse which so often surrounds vinyl can often and easily be alienating and elitist and gatekeeperish. Vinyl fans will dismiss CDs as soulless, but the 12” LP evolved directly as a capitalist tool of record companies to increase profits by coercing music fans into paying money for songs they may not necessarily want.

Chris Molanphy gave a presentation at the 2011 EMP conference about the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart and how it, well, charted the (US) music industry’s tempestuous relationship with the single and the tactics it’s used to make us buy albums (and the way it’s marginalized black and female performers by ghettoizing the genres they often work in as ‘singles’ genres, thus keeping big album profits by and large for white men). I wasn’t at the conference but yesterday Chris kindly sent me a PDF of his slides and notes; it’s fascinating reading. I’ve asked him to put it online permanently for posterity, and if he does, I’ll link it.

My conclusion from Chris’ work is that much of rock mythology is a lie, concocted, like most lies since the industrial revolution (and probably since the dawn of human history), in order to make people part with something in order to benefit the liar. The music industry wants us to worship the LP rather than the single in order to draw more money out of us, and the esteem within which vinyl is held is a part of this mythology. The side effect of this, of course, is a whole heap of wonderful albums that we love, but the application of even the slightest bit of Marxist cultural theory should make us question the ontology of the music that we love; the means of production influences the means of consumption, and vice versa. It’s partly this questioning that makes me favour the CD as my musical carrier of choice. The CD just fits best, for me, right now. And has done for 20 years.

(I got my first CD player 20 years ago this May, for the record; for my 14th birthday.)

The CD has its issues as well, of course – it’s encouraged hideous mastering practices, and made incalculable profits for a greedy industry in the 90s, the fallout of which is being felt now. (Interestingly CD sales, and thus profits, start falling at about the time CD mastering starts going off-the-scale into idiocy, which is also when downloading begins to get a foothold; there’s a PhD’s worth of research and pontification here.)

I asked people on twitter, unrelatedly, just before the program started last night, to tell me one thing that made them love a particular song; I got a dozen and more responses, and none of them mentioned the format it was on. Lyrics, melodies, sounds, specific bits of arrangements, emotions; all mentioned. But no one mentioned vinyl, or CD, or MP3, or Ogg Vorbis or wax cylinder or 8-track or cassingle or anything else. It was the music they were bothered about, not the delivery system.

So I think what irritated me most about last night’s show, and the vinyl revival in general, is the idea and myth of rock music, this hoary, old, patriarchal dog that refuses to die. Vinyl, in its totemic form, is a symbol of that. The people programming the media now – the executives and controllers and senior presenters – are in their 50s and 60s; vinyl is their format, rock is their era, and they wont let us forget about it. But their experiences are not everyone else’s. They’re certainly not mine. If rock was ever about change and energy and youth and the future, it needs to get over its past.

So, essentially, I’m irritated by the vinyl revival, if we’re calling it that, because I often feel like my experience as a music fan is being written off as invalid because it wasn’t mediated with vinyl. I resent being made to feel as if I don’t like music as much as someone else because I was born at a time when the ‘wrong’ format was in vogue. The format itself is fine, and beautiful, and can sound wonderful, and if you prefer it as your carrier for music, all power to your elbow. But don’t diminish my experiences to do so.

Postscript
Purely by chance, Sony have announced that they’ll cease production of their final minidisc player in March, news of which lead me to this old ILM thread from 2003 pitching minidisc against MP3 (minidisc seems to come out best!), wherein Jonesey drops some science about why CDs actually are better than vinyl on a technical level, busting myths about sampling-rates and so on.

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Posted in Pop music, Existentialism, Television, Audiogeekery, music writing

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12 albums not from 2012

Posted on December 15, 2012 | 1 Comment

Sometimes, in fact often, the most important records for me in any given year aren’t the salivated-over new releases, but the “why didn’t I hear this before?” discoveries, the things you’d ignored or dismissed or not got round to or simply not heard of previously. The back catalogue albums.

These might be re-releases or remasterings (although I’m pointedly not including My Bloody Valentine’s remasters here, as I knew all the music very well beforehand, and this list is about stuff I discovered for the first time), or explorations of the oeuvre of an artist whose brand new album you’ve fallen for, or they might be inspirations referenced in interviews by current beau musicians. Often, over the last couple of years, they’ve been records introduced to me by my fellow Devon Record Club members at our fortnightly meetings.

Every year I feel like I promise myself (and my wife) that I’ll buy less back catalogue albums over the coming 52 weeks. This year I promised I’d only buy one a month at the absolute most; with a fortnight and more of the year to go, I’ve bought 36. I don’t know how. I still fancy a trip to Rise Records in Bristol or The Drift in Totness before the month is out. Currently, these are my favourites.

Dungen – Ta Det Lungt
Various algorithms have been recommending Ta Det Lungt to me for years, but for some reason this year my desire to listen to it finally reached critical mass – I’m not sure why. Finally buying and enjoying this unashamedly retro psyche rock / jazz cornucopia is probably what’s stopped me from investigating Goat – I feel like I’ve got my fill of northern European psychedelia for the year.

Field Music – Tones of Town / Measure
Cheating, I know to put two records, but so it goes. Inspired by falling for Plumb so hard, I quickly went back and picked up the Field Music records I’d missed first time around, and found them both beautifully agreeable. A very special band.

The Modern Lovers – The Modern Lovers
Tom played this at Devon Record Club, and I fell for the Velvet-Underground-with-a-smile aesthetic straight away. A name and reputation I’d known for years, but never pursued.

Simon and Garfunkel – Bookends
I bought the latest remaster of Bridge Over Troubled Water to play at DRC myself, and, falling in love with it all over again, I also picked up Bookends for a pittance. As well as the fact that it has songs like “America” and “Mrs Robinson” on it, it also has the astonishingly modernistic and confusing “Save The Life Of My Child”. A very different record to Bridge…, but still awesome.

Roxy Music – Avalon
An obvious pick-up (for about £3) given my Kaputt love from last year.

Destroyer – Streethawk: A Seduction
As was this; Em spent a fortnight in America for work in February this year, and I asked if, while she was in NYC, she’d see if she could pick up this early acclaimed peak of Bejar’s from Bleeker Street records; she duly obliged (it’s seemingly impossible to find over here). Far more rewarding than a squashed dime.

Beastie Boys – The Mix-Up
A sentimental purchase in the days after Adam Yauch’s untimely, sad death. I’ve always enjoyed Beastie instrumentals, and this recent-ish collection shows off just how integral his musicianship was to the band; every piece here lives by its bassline, pretty much. We lost one of the best this year.

The Antlers – Hospice
Another DRC-inspired purchase, after Rob played Burst Apart at our ‘albums of 2011’ session. Falling heavily for their latest, I ordered this highly-acclaimed concept album too. It’s a very different record to Burst Apart, and I think I prefer where the band are going now, but this is a heck of a piece of work nonetheless, deeply emotional and affecting.

Hauschka – Salon Des Amateurs
A little cheeky, as a CD of Salon Des Amateurs literally arrived only this morning. We saw Hauschka last weekend at ATP and his set of prepared piano and drums was one of the most beautiful, intriguing, and enjoyable of the whole festival, especially when he went full-on jazz-house for the penultimate number. I ordered this from our chalet the next day, direct from the record label’s website. The album itself sees Hauschka layer his prepared piano (via computer-based recordings) (and with occasional touches of drums, brass, strings, harmonica and mandolin) into house/techno-ish arrangements. The prepared piano (preparing it by tying wire and laying other objects on the strings and hammers inside it) allows him access to a huge array of textures and sounds, man of which you’d assume were digital in origin. There’s a complexity and sophistication and organicness which marks out what Hauschka’s creating here from ‘real’ (as it were) dance music, but nevertheless it’s definitely of a kin. It’s also an absolute joy and pleasure to listen to – tuneful, fascinating, rhythmically addictive and compelling. Off one listen, I know I’ll be turning to this record for years to come.

CAN – Anthology
Although I’ve had various copies of the first five or so CAN albums since I was a teenager, I’ve never picked-up the legendary Anthology until now, meaning I’ve missed whole swathes of fascinating stuff post-Damo Suzuki, and that I’ve never heard the (arguably superior) edits of mammoth tracks like “Mother Sky” and “Halleluwah”. I was probably put off by the fact that they look like aging college professors still desperate to be cool on the cover. With CDs packed into boxes at the end of July, I picked this up recklessly in HMV in August when I had a desperate urge to listen to CAN and this was all that was available. Although I’m gutted it misses crazy b-side “Turtles Have Short Lets” (seemingly unavailable on CD), I’m still very glad I finally succumbed.

Lindstrom & Prins Tomas – II
This was like a cosmic-disco sticking plaster for the weird semi-aberration that was Six Cups of Rebel. It more than made up for that misstep.

The National – Boxer
Like I wrote the other day on returning from ATP, I simply don’t understand how I didn’t fall for this five years ago, except to say that bloody-mindedness has its uses and its failings, too.

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National Motorways

Posted on December 12, 2012 | 4 Comments

All Tomorrow’s Parties, curated by The National

I’ve often wondered whether one day we’ll get to the point where we don’t need roadworks anymore – all the nation’s motorways beautifully surfaced, all the bridges and overpasses structurally sound, every bend and junction and lane everywhere finally finished – and we’ll no longer require maintenance crews, lane closures, flashing orange traffic cones, average speed checks or temporary central reservation barriers.

Of course, this is a crazy pondering: the very act of driving on roads causes them stress and strain and wear and tear – they’ll never be finished. They’re not a thing that can be finished. Few things are; almost everything is a process; moving, changing, not static. That goes for people as much as tarmac.

We went to All Tomorrow’s Parties, curated by The National, over the weekend. I saw (at least some of) 19 different acts perform live over the three days. On Monday we drove back home from Camber Sands in the morning, dozed for an hour, and then drove to Bristol to see Patrick Wolf play the penultimate date of his acoustic tour at St George’s hall. Then last night I had a work Christmas do. I can’t remember the last time I did five nights out on the trot. I feel like I’m coming down with a cold now.

I’m not a massive fan of The National – we bought tickets almost as soon as they were announced primarily because we’d enjoyed last year’s ATP so much, and we love Wild Beasts, Antlers, and Owen Pallett, who were announced early on. Em likes them much more than I do; she’s listened to High Violet a lot and loves it, but I think my ambivalence towards them probably prevented her getting really into them. I feel guilty about this; just because I don’t like something all that much doesn’t mean anybody else shouldn’t, especially my wife. My opinions are loud and not always right.

I bought Alligator when it came out in 2005, and quite liked it. I was sent a promo of Boxer a couple of years later, and thought it was alright too. But they never clicked with me, for whatever reason – in 2007 I was busy with Caribou and Patrick Wolf and Battles and Spoon and so on, and didn’t have room, aesthetically or emotionally, perhaps to invest in someone else. Looking back now, I’m baffled that I didn’t go ga-ga for Fake Empire’s strange build and horns. At the time I wrote something on ILM about how The National were “a no-concept band” with “decent lyrics, decent tunes, decent arrangements”; I think I was struggling to find a USP as a way-in to a straight-up ‘rock’ band. Sometimes I struggle with straight-up ‘rock’ music. I think their occasional fondness for Adam-Clayton-esque basslines probably causes me hesitancy too. I tend not to trust people who use overtly Adam-Clayton-aping basslines. In 2007 I was on my anti-dynamic-range-compression campaign, too, and Boxer could have been more lightly touched, I suppose. I probably dismissed many otherwise perfectly fine records out of principal back then – I probably still do. I had (still have) a point to prove.

But I’ve come away from ATP a massive convert to The National. Partly thanks to their brass section; partly thanks to a beautiful, acoustic sing-along version of “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” as a set-and-festival-closer; partly due to a beautiful, drifting song they played live with Nico Muhly (which may have been brand-new); partly thanks to their evidently massive heart and enthusiasm; but largely due to the nature of the weekend itself.

I’m not talking about the fact that I loved the weekend so now I love the headliners (not quite; though that’s almost certainly part of it): I mean the way the weekend worked, the enthusiasm and care that the band obviously put into curating. The National seemed to have produced or played with almost everyone else on the bill; and those they hadn’t worked with directly were revealed as inspirations. There was a member of The National, usually a Dessner twin, at just about every set by every act.

Seeing these carefully chosen acts, be they influences or musical familial links, exploded the context of The National’s music for me; seeing Michael Rother play the music of Neu! and Harmonia made Bryan Devendorf’s hectic, repetitive drumming make perfect sense; seeing the flamenco guitar and cello of Pedro Soler and Gaspar Claus caused me to hear ripples through Bryce Dessner’s guitar; seeing Hauschka’s minimalist prepared piano (with delirious, highlight-of-the-weekend diversions into full-on jazz-house electronic territory) snapped Mat Berninger’s melodies and song structures into focus. Every act we saw seemed to lead the way towards The National’s climactic, rapturous set, and the band evolved in my mind from an interesting and commendable halfway house between Tindersticks and early Interpol into something incredibly worthwhile and characterful in their own right. That USP that I was looking for five years ago? It’s that they’re really good. Really, really good. That’s enough.

They’re also consummate curators, judging both by this festival and the Dark Was The Night compilation (masterminded by the Dessners) a few years ago. Collaborators, too; as well as the huge list of people they’ve produced records by recently, there’s also a huge swathe of people they’ve worked with – Sufjan Stevens and St. Vincent and Nico Muhly and Richard Reed Parry and Owen Pallett and the Kronos Quartet and David Byrne and Sharon Van Etten and on and on and on.

This type of constant, flexible collaboration and hunger to make music in many directions at once, with many people, for solo albums and side projects and one-offs, is almost alien to someone who came of musical age during Britpop, when it was a spirit of competition and antagonism that drove success; “Oasis v Blur” not “Oasis with Blur”. There’s definitely, over the last decade or so, something going on with American and Canadian “alternative” music. Em always used to say that she liked hip-hop culture because of the way artists guested on and produced each others’ records, the sense of community that there was (although, obviously, that sense of community has had its problems, and major problems at that, with antagonism); that seems to be very much the case with this school of musicians. Whether it’s in part encouraged, or just documented, by the likes of Pitchfork and other web music communication tools, I don’t know. But it’s certainly fascinating, and rewarding, if a little difficult to keep up with the sprawling, interconnected spider-diagram which links The National to Sufjan Stevens to St. Vincent to Grizzly Bear to Owen Pallett to Caribou to Four Tet to Radiohead (so there is UK representation and participation, although it’s telling that Wild Beasts were the only British act on the bill, as far as I could tell) to whoever and etcetera and so on and so forth.

Anyway, this is everyone I saw over the weekend (Em saw them all too, except Michael Rother and Deerhoof)…

Friday
Hayden
Hauschka
Bear in Heaven
(5 minutes of) Tim Hecker

Saturday
So Percussion
Kronos Quartet
Lower Dens
Michael Rother
Sharon Van Etten
Antlers
Wild Beasts

Sunday
Pedro Soler and Gaspar Claus
My Brightest Diamond
The Philistines Jr
(5 minutes of) Perfume Genius
Owen Pallett
(30 seconds of) Deerhoof
Local Natives
The National

Monday (not at ATP, obviously)
Abi Wade
Patrick Wolf

Other than The National, and the tangible spirit that ran through the whole weekend itself, highlights included Wild Beasts playing all of Smother in order, and then a big chunk of Two Dancers to boot: Owen Pallett charming, beguiling, and mystifying the audience with his generous nature and wonderful, creative music (I’ve seen a lot of ways to play violin and cello lately, many of them baffling): Antlers, threatening to spiral down the Jeff-Buckley-fronts-very-early-Verve rabbit hole of beatific psychedelic meandering despite technical difficulties: Michael Rother bringing to life some of my favourite music ever: Hauschka producing the closest thing to dance music of the weekend (the lack of electronic influence would be about my only complaint: that, and no bowling alley): standing next to a little guy with a moustache at seemingly every set, only for him to appear onstage as the singer of Local Natives (who I knew pretty much nothing about but now own an album by) on Sunday night: the Buddha Bowl van serving delicious vegan “scraps” outside the pub: meeting people I’ve previously only spoken to online and discovering them to be real live human beings, which is always nice: So Percussion’s syncopating finale: Gaspar and Pedro’s genial, gentle introduction to Sunday: Sharon Van Etten being as good as people said. There were others too, but these will be the things I remember.

So what have motorways got to do with all of this? Like wondering if the motorways will ever be finished, I sometimes used to think I was looking for some kind of perfect band who fitted some platonic ideal, who would make a perfect album, and I’d never need to listen to anything else again. This is, of course, a ridiculous idea, like assuming that humankind is evolving and improving towards some end-point nirvana. Seven years ago, when I first encountered them, I think I wanted The National to be that band, realised quickly that they weren’t, and dismissed them. Unfairly. They don’t need to be that band. No one does. It’s a crazy idea.

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Posted in Culture, Existentialism, music writing, Pop music

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Rainbow

Posted on December 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

My older brother, JR, wrote me a new version of the theme tune to kids’ TV programme Rainbow when I was a kid. In his version, the lyrics explained how a rainbow is formed. It’s possible he nicked it from somewhere, but I’ve never come across it anywhere else. Anyway, it’s very cool, so I thought I’d share it.

Up above the streets and houses
Rainbow flying high
Everyone can see it shining
But they don’t know why

It’s because the rain and sun
Together make it so
The rain acts as a prism
And refracts the sun’s bright glow

He wrote it on a piece of paper (he has amazing handwriting) and left it in the kitchen for me with no explanation. I would have been about 10.

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My most played album?

Posted on December 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

@LPGroup, which I like as a concept but not so much as an actuality (the communal nature of voting and decision making over what records to listen to and tweet about together seems to often result in safe choices – but that’s always the result of democracy, isn’t it? [There’s also a lot of canon-favouring middle-aged white men involved – I know I’m only a handful of techno and pop records and ten years away from that myself, but still.]), was pimping the theme “My Most Played Album” for their session the other week. I looked at the list and thought about voting, but there wasn’t much on there that might qualify as my own most played, I suspect. It was my own fault for not catching nominations in time enough to put something forward. But it got me thinking about what records I have listened to most in my life, about the types of records they’ve been, and how those types of records have changed over the years, and in turn how the way I listen to records has changed over the years, as life has got busier, time shorter, and collections bigger.

17 years ago the answer would have been simple – The Stone Roses’ debut album, which I played incessantly and repeatedly, and convinced myself was perfect and imbued with magical powers. 16 year olds are odd. A year before that, Revolver. A year after, In Sides by Orbital. 4 years ago, after a year living in together in our flat, it was probably The Milk Of Human Kindness by Caribou, which became our default go-to record while just going about our lives – washing up, reading, cooking, pottering, doing those mundane day-to-day admin tasks that adult-life requires. Inoffensive, undemanding (unless you want it to be), but always interesting. In 2004 it was Drive By by The Necks, the seamless groove and ambient nature of which made it the kind of thing that I could literally play anywhere, anytime, whilst doing anything.

This year I’ve probably played Plumb by Field Music the most, although a considerable factor to consider there is that it was released early in the year. Also, it’s quite short; it fits almost four times into the length of The Seer by Swans, and can easily get played twice back-to-back on a short-ish car journey. In fact the title track of The Seer is almost exactly the same length as the whole of Plumb. At other times this year I’ve binged on Silent Shout by The Knife, Red Medicine by Fugazi, Grizzly Bear, Heartland by Owen Pallett, and WIXIW by Liars. But other than Plumb, the two things I’ve played the most are similar records by similar artists – Pink by Four Tet and Orchard by Minotaur Shock, which both, like the Caribou and Necks records mentioned above, lend themselves to being put on whilst doing other things. Pink, which I started off thinking of as a weird dancefloor compendium, has unfurled over the months to reveal itself as a superlative “livingroom” record. Which is where it gets played most often.

There’s a danger that one can make these records sound prosaic and inoffensive, that “most played” = “most utilitarian”, that their value comes in their palatability rather than their art or power. 17 years ago I thought music should be entirely magical and transformative, passionate and wild or exultant and irresistible. I worry suspect that these days I value the beatific over the outright brilliant sometimes, the tasteful over the transcendent (whatever that means). But actually, as always, it’s more complicated than that. There’s a certain degree of compromise in sharing living and listening space with another human being: I can’t blast Tilt by Scott Walker at a whim, but then again I’m not sure I often want to. And actually, Em would be more irritated if I played Embrace than if I cracked out one of Scott’s latterday opuses.

Sometimes I choose to listen to a record because I love it, and it transports and challenges me, and stretches my brain and soul. And sometimes I choose to listen to a record just because it fills space, beautifully. I probably do the latter more often, and, on average, probably have done so for the last dozen years since leaving the weird cocoon of university. I guess the choice is what you choose to fill that space with, and why: is it a comfort blanket of familiarity, or is it something else?

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On moving house

Posted on November 13, 2012 | 1 Comment

So 12 days ago, after 6 months of offers and contracts and searches and management companies and freehold arrangements and stress and houses falling through, we finally, almost a year after we decided to do it, moved house.

After the endurance test that was the purchasing process, I thought the moving day itself would be a doddle. And in many ways it was – we completed just after 11am – but getting all our stuff (2,000 CDs, giant Italian sofa, 3 pairs of speakers, I dread to think how many books, dozens of framed prints and photos, 2 enormous cats, etcetera etcetera) out of a flat that was up three flights of narrowing Georgian stairs proved to be a mammoth task. The removal men arrived at quarter to 8 in the morning. We left our old street about 2pm, and the removal men left our new house, with an empty van, at quarter to 5. Today, 12 days later, they finally came and collected the cardboard boxes that have been cluttering our new space.

We also finally got a new sofa today, too – the giant Italian thing, that we saved for and wanted for ages, and loved dearly, was awkward to get in, and even more awkward to get out. Luckily our buyer was concerned about getting a new sofa in the flat, and we’d been pondering doing something different with the space in our new house. So we came to an agreement, and as well as our flat he bought our sofa. I threw in our awesome light shades for free. I suspect he’d have liked to buy the place furnished, almost.

Some 24 hours after getting the keys I had a bit of a panic that we’d done the wrong thing: after 5 years in our flat, which we’d bought freshly refurbished and very firmly put our stamp upon, I felt like we’d just dumped our belongings in someone else’s house. Em expected me to be the stoic, pragmatic one, and her to have the emotional wobble, but that wasn’t how it worked.

When I moved into new digs at university I always liked to get posters up, CDs and books out, as soon as possible, to make a space mine. I’ve essentially only ever lived at “home” (my parents house was bought when I was 6 months old, so I remember nowhere else), at university, and in our first flat, so I guess it’s not surprising that I’d fine transplanting our lives wholesale into another set of walls slightly unnerving. I put up as many of our pictures as I could, using the previous owners’ hooks and nails. Some of them seem to fit wonderfully well. Some of the others we’ll move in time. We have more walls now, too, so we’ll have to acquire more pictures.

The television is in the corner now, rather than in the middle. I like that. I think it will encourage us to read and talk and invite people around more, and watch downloaded American TV shows a little less.

We also have a proper, big dining table, bought second hand for about a seventh of what it should have cost new, and four new dining chairs; cheap, unofficial Eames DSWs (I don’t believe in paying £200 each for licensed proper versions, when these chairs were designed for mass-production, were meant to be utilitarian solutions for everyday people; so we picked up 4 for £160). And we have a big, proper kitchen, which takes a small table – we found an old yellow Formica-topped thing for £25.

We still have walls to paint, some more furniture to buy over the next couple of years, but we’re getting there. It’s amazing how quickly somewhere can feel like home.

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Weird dream topographies

Posted on October 19, 2012 | 3 Comments

I want to write about and share the weird topographies that I experience in dreams, which I think are recurring for me, and see if other people experience something similar.

On the ILX Inception thread a couple of years ago (and more) I wrote the following about how the topographies in the film reflected those in my own dreams:

[Nolan] didn’t try to make the representation of dreams here too weird and far-out; I know that my dreams inhabit weird emotional territory, have weird physics, etcetera, but the settings are pretty mundane, very much secondary in importance to the emotional territory that the dream is creating or inhabiting, and I think Nolan goes for that here to an extent too by not making the dream environments too Burton or Del Toro weird (much as I adore Del Toro).

…

The shared dream logic and dream design resonated very much with me, especially the limbo level of Di Caprio and Cotillard’s subconscious romance; the receding rows of buildings, the familiar houses behind fences and moved into strange new positions, all seemed like experiences from my own dreams. I tend to fly, or be being chased, or be in familiar but not quite right situations in my own dreams, rather than have outrageous fantastical stuff happen. This captured the dream state for me as well as anything else, and is up with Waking Life as far as that goes (much as I love Waking Life, a lot of it does not remind me of my own dreams, but feels much more like a cinematic representation of what we think of dreams of being, at least visually; narrative or lack thereof is perhaps closer to real dreaming, but the it’s a film just about dreaming as opposed to a plot within a shared dream).

Last night I dreamt that Em and I had a baby (I think we adopted it in the dream: I think it probably represented my irl new nephew, as it was about the same age and was a boy) and we’d left the baby with my parents in the town where I used to live for a couple of days. When we came back and fetched him he could walk and stuff, which was freaky. Anyway, we were driving what was recognisably our car around what was recognisably but not quite the small town I grew up in – there was a flat area of carpark where there isn’t irl, and roads up the hills and forest behind my parents’ house that follow the actual irl roads relatively closely but not quite the same: one of the dream roads is actually where a dirt track I used to ride my bike down as a kid is irl, near as damnit. I feel like these almost-the-same-roads often appear in my dreams, but I’m not sure if this is because they felt familiar last night because they were so close to irl, or because I actually have dreamt them before.

I used to have a couple of recurring topographical dreams as a kid and young teenager: in one I was in what I can only describe as a big junkyard, with a flat passage / causeway / alley through the middle and loads of junk on either side (the junk was always indeterminate / unidentifiable, like it was toys and cars and furniture covered in junkyard-landscape-patterned blankets). I used to walk through the middle and the landscape would move around me. Sometimes it would be disconcerting and sometimes it would be quite comforting: I think it got more comforting the more I had the dream and started to realise that it was OK, I was in a dream, and almost gained some kind of lucid control over the topography.

The other recurring dream topography was the estate I grew up on, which was modelled after Clovelly in North Devon – lots of white house and cobbled bits and pedestrian areas and hidden garage / parking areas tucked away behind houses and flower beds and little patches of grass with trees on. It won awards when it was designed I think. It’s basically a massive retirement home without any staff now though. But I used to dream bits of the estate that didn’t exist, and there were specific houses and walkways that would feature in dreams over and over again. I knew they weren’t real, and this recognition of unrealness would allow me to also recognise I was in a dream, after I’d had dreams in this topography a few times.

These weird dream topographies are almost weirder for not being that weird: my dreams (the ones I remember, anyway) are almost like the anti-Gilliam or anti-Gondry, they don’t telegraph the fact that they’re dreams by being wacky or outlandish. Maybe this is evidence that I’m not very imaginitive!

Interestingly I don’t think I’ve ever dreamt fake topographies of the city I live in now, only ever the town I grew up in. I guess the landscapes of childhood get writ large in the subconscious.

Tell me about your weird dream topographies.

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On buying physical music

Posted on October 2, 2012 | 8 Comments

I love Grizzly Bear; they’re one of those bands where I don’t really understand how they do what they do, where their songs will go, how they compose, conduct, and orchestrate their twists and turns, and this fascinates and beguiles me, because what they do is often beautiful and exciting. I also love Nitsuh Abebe; he’s one of those music writers who just seems so damn clever and correct and reasonable and tasteful that I can’t ever disagree with him, and that he makes me jealous because I’m not as good as him.

Nitsuh has written an awesome piece about Grizzly Bear, their new album, their current tour, and, most pointedly, the fact that, despite being feted, acclaimed critical darlings who have sold hundreds of thousands of records and had two Billboard Top 10 albums, they don’t earn a great deal of money. Not all of the band have health insurance (I’ll avoid ranting about the fact that it’s disgusting that healthcare isn’t free to all in a civilised society for another time); they can’t afford to buy houses, let alone the kind of mansions fetishised on shows like MTV’s Cribs. I imagine that individually they earn less than me; I earn a decent but not exceptional wage for the UK, and my wife earns the same. I feel reasonably privileged that we do. It means we can afford a mortgage and a good standard of living. That Grizzly Bear are famous – OK, not Prince Harry famous, but NY Magazine cover famous – and probably have a lower standard of living than I do is something I find… upsetting? Perhaps. Certainly unusual, and concerning.

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted at Grizzly Bear that I would always buy a CD I liked, and that I believe artists should be paid a good living wage for making art that we, as listeners, or fans, or customers, appreciate and use. And love. A CD in the UK costs about £10. You might listen to it 5 times, or 500 times, or 5,000 times. You have it forever. It probably took the musicians involved a year, or two years, to create, one way and another. If my employer, my customers, expected me to do my job for free, I’d be upset.

Grizzly Bear retweeted me, and many, many more people retweeted their retweet. I’ve been on Twitter for years now and have over a thousand followers, and that tweet was the farthest-reaching I’ve ever made. It seemed to resonate.

Nitsuh’s piece inspired this fascinating and important debate between two musicians / writers at Stereogum. It also inspired me to start a thread on ILM asking how much physical music people have bought so far this year. I asked the same thing on Twitter, and asked Laura Snapes (who writes for Pitchfork amongst other places, and has loads of followers) if she’d kindly retweet so I could gather more responses. So far, responses seem to be pretty split between two poles – people have either bought no physical music this year, or they’ve bought an awful lot – several dozen, or even over a hundred CDs or LPs or singles or whatever (in one case, a single which came on a floppy disk). There seems to be little middle ground, few of the mythical “12 albums a year” man (or woman).

I love CDs, and I love supporting artists whose work I love. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again but it seems particularly important to say it quite loudly and frequently right now. I’ve little interest in collecting for the sake of collecting; I love listening to music, and my preferred way of listening to music is on my hi-fi, via a CD. This seems to be the way that most fairly pays the artists whose music I’m listening to.

I’ve bought 27 new releases on CD this year, and 25 ‘back catalogue’ CDs. They’re at the top of this post, in that photo (all except the MBV reissues, for some reason). That’s 52 CDs this year. I even bought the Four Tet album on digital download and on physical CD (having to get it imported from Japan), because I love his music and I wanted it. I’ll occasionally buy individual songs – usually singles and b-sides – on digital download, or a whole EP if I simply can’t get it on CD (Owen Pallett, Antlers). I never think to buy vinyl. It’s not what I grew up making pilgrimages to record shops to buy. I know that part of my affection for CDs is some kind of sentimental, romantic notion, but this is music we’re talking about; if you can’t get sentimental and romantic about it, something is wrong.

Ultimately my concern isn’t that Grizzly Bear can’t afford to buy houses or pay for health insurance. It’s that they, and the likes of Four Tet, and Field Music, and Minotaur Shock, and the Divine Fits guys, and Michael Gira, and Liars, and Flying Lotus, and Junior Boys, and Antlers, and Wild Beasts, and Owen Pallett, and everyone else whose music I love, won’t be able to afford to make ends meet so much that they’ll give up, and stop making music, and go and get day jobs. That would be a tragedy.

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Four Tet, and some thoughts on music as content

Posted on August 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

I feel like my musical life divides semi-neatly (but almost completely arbitrarily) into three chunks thus far: pre-university (adolescence, I guess); university; and post-university. The post-university phase starts in summer 2001 (when I finished university, oddly enough), and is the longest, richest phase so far, maybe. It’s also the phase I think of as belonging to the internet, when online resources completely eclipsed print media as a means of finding and investigating new music, gorging on ILM discourse, writing for Stylus, scouring the archives of AllMusic, discovering music by the likes of Talk Talk and LCD Soundsystem that would become some of my absolute favourite music ever.

If there’s one artist that encapsulates… no, not encapsulates… if there’s a single artist who’s soundtracked this third phase more than any other, it’s probably Four Tet. Everything Is Alright was one of the first songs I downloaded using Audiogalaxy at my parents’ house back in 2001 (when it took ten minutes to download a two and a half minute song), and Pause was one of the first albums I bought after graduating, as well as being one of the first albums I bought after meeting Emma – in fact I think she sold it to me whilst she worked in Virgin Megastore. Since then I’ve bought each album as it’s come out, seen him live a couple of times, and investigated a load of other music that he’s been associated with, including Caribou, whose debut album as Manitoba I bought on Amazon’s recommendation after telling them I owned and loved Pause.

So I’m currently enthusiastically devouring Pink, Four Tet’s latest offering; not an album so much as a compendium of DJing-derived singles from the last couple of years, completing his move towards the dancefloor since 2008’s Ringer EP nicely. It perhaps doesn’t have the gestalt of There Is Love In You, although my perception of this may be compromised by knowing the music’s origins, but it’s pretty wonderful nonetheless, his music still looping and spiraling and layering in on itself like it always has done, but now more controlled, more purposeful, less given to happy accidents and tangential detours. Some other artists move from one location to another with their music, but he almost seems to spin in place, whilst maintaining a sense of momentum, of travelling. I like to listen to him whilst on trains, or cycling (only on cyclepaths, kids; no headphones on the roads).

Three of my most-listened records from this year (which feels pretty fallow to me thus far compared to the last three) are very utility-driven in their construction. Which is to say that the three in question – Pink, Wonky by Orbital, and ƒin by John Talabot – were all very definitely conceived for the dancefloor, or feel that way. Not that this should be at all surprising; all three are by dance artists who regularly DJ / have vast experience of getting fields of ravers going. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this as a motivation for music making – we’ve been doing it since the dawn of humankind, and it’s resulted in oodles of stuff that I absolutely adore and hold very dear to me.

But I’m just not quite feeling the love here with these three, even though I’m enjoying them all a lot. With the Four Tet this may just be a matter of time and familiarity; I heard several of the tracks live last December and loved them all, and Pinnacles was a favourite of last year too. The Talabot feels slightly lacking in personality and texture to me; it feels (and this is purely gut feeling, not any technical knowledge) as if every sound used on ƒin came straight out of Ableton or whatever software it was recorded on. There’s little in the way of grit or dust or blood in there, which leaves me feeling at a slight remove from it. This may be different had I ever danced on a Balearic beach, and compositionally its tight as hell in the build and release, but it just feels too focused on dancing to me to really make me love it as a listening experience.

I described Wonky the other day as feeling “like content rather than music”, which, understandably, prompted someone to say it was a meaningless comment. Ironically, the person who said it was a meaningless comment also said, a few months earlier, that New France was “so obviously there for the radio”, which may not have been meant pejoratively, but which I took as being such, from the context of the discussion

Back in April I reviewed Wonky for The Quietus, and included this comment: “Opener ‘One Big Moment’ starts with layers of quiet, sampled voices, a little like ‘Forever’ from Snivilisation, before dropping a beat and a reverberating synth riff and a slowly developing melodic topline that will have a Pavlovian effect on tens of thousands of people of a certain age. You could interpret that cynically, or you could put your hands in the air.” It’s that feeling, coupled with the idea that Wonky exists more as a way of providing new material to play live than as a record in its own right, that makes me think of it as a content rather than music.

I feel like I recognise content because I “produce content” for a day job; I’m a copywriter, a communications officer, and I know that, whilst what I write might be good, and fulfill its purpose, and have a desired effect, it’s done for a reason outside of itself. A brochure or website exists not because I was desperate to produce a brochure or website, but because we wanted it for a reason, and even if I had great fun interviewing researchers or taking photographs and feel proud of said brochure or website, it’s status is forever tied into its purpose. And I think great art, which is what pop music can be, transcends its purpose (and its status as a commodity, too).

Wonky, ƒin, and Pink (at the moment) all feel just a little too closely tied in to their purposes, which is a barrier to me, as listener, from falling hopelessly, desperately in love with them, and thinking of them as a great. What strange characteristic they’d need to possess in order to transcend their purpose, I don’t know – that’s part of the magic of art, of music, arguably – and there are, of course, huge and unanswerable questions about why we do things, about purpose and intention and the death of the author and the birth of the listener / reader / viewer / audience (once I buy a record the artist has no right to tell me how to use it; but how much should I respect their intentions?), about what music is for, both for the listener and the music maker.

It’s wrong to dismiss the idea of making music to make money, for instance, because the notion of the “sell-out” is a dangerous, disempowering one for many people, I suspect, but it’s also wrong to go too far the other way, into utility, and to dismiss the idea of art for art’s sake, music for music’s sake, the ancient human instinct to create beautiful things simply because they are beautiful. The former philosophy makes you a crippled idealist; the latter makes you David Cameron.

So Wonky feels to me like content for a setlist rather than, necessarily, as an album in its own right; likewise Pink, especially when thrown into relief against There Is Love In You, feels like content for a DJ set. But does that mean that This Unfolds, from Four Tet’s last album, is just content for an album? Maybe it is. Does this mean I don’t like Wonky, or Pink? Not at all; I just don’t find myself overcome by them the way I do by In Sides or There Is Love In You. Which could just mean that they’re not as good; or it could mean that they’re for different purposes, as much as any music is for any purpose.

But now I’m going in circles. Fin.

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Am I a racist sexist scumbag (when it comes to being a music fan)?

Posted on August 19, 2012 | 3 Comments

Following debate on the ILM thread, I’ve been thinking about the gender and race make-up of my Pitchfork People’s List.

I’ve been conscious that I don’t listen to much music ‘involving women’ (for want of a better phrase) since I was about 15, and it’s something which bugs me. When I was 15 there were literally no female vocalists in my collection at all. There’s probably only 10% now, and that’s even after Emma and I amalgamated our record collections. Emma didn’t like music with female vocals until her late teens / early twenties either, which is something we’ve talked about many times.

Depending how you count, there are between 12 and 20ish albums with female musicians / voices (ranging from Electrelane at one end of the scale to Massive Attack / Patrick Wolf with guest female vocalists at the other, and possibly including things like Four Tet which have samples of female vocalists somewhere on the continuum) on my ballot.

There are also somewhere between 12 and 20ish albums that are either completely instrumental or which feature barely any vocals at all (which includes the last Four Tet album, which, obviously, could also be counted as having female vocals as described above, and also includes things like Venice by Fennesz, which has one song with vocals and none anywhere else).

There are probably only six albums which could really be described as being hip hop / rap / r’n'b, and perhaps only a dozen which feature black musicians.

Without checking sleeve credits, I think there’s only one record produced by a female producer – Kate Bush.

So it’d be pretty easy to read my list as being racist and sexist (which I hope it isn’t, on any conscious level), as being the product of straight white male privilege (which it undoubtedly is, because I’m a straight white male).

There are some 25+ albums which I’d count as ‘duplicates’, i.e. which are by artists who have multiple albums selected: so 3 Caribou records, 4 Four Tet, 4 SFA, 2 PJ Harvey, 2 Electrelane, 2 St Vincent, 3 Spoon. This skews ratios slightly – just those artists skew from 4:3 to 7:3 from multiples. Not that, if I’d gone for one-per-artist, that the rest of my choices would all have been female-counting records, but it definitely changes the ratio from male-artist:female-artist to male-album:female-album.

Had I had more time, and been able to consult my actual record collection (currently in boxes waiting for us to move house next week) and check dates and so on, then I’d almost certainly have included Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch, Is This Desire by PJ Harvey, Begin to Hope by Regina Spektor, but probably also a load of other albums by men, too. So who knows what more time would have done.

This huge gender / racial / genre bias/weighting does concern me to some extent and if I think about it and ask ‘why’ on an ontological, socio-cultural level, I don’t really know the answer, beyond “I’m a white male 30-something and I mostly listen to music made by people like me”; when couched in that terminology, it doesn’t seem outrageous at all. But if I were to say “I only think one album by a black women is worth including in the top 100 of the last 16 years”, however, it sounds pretty awful. In my ‘defence’, my list isn’t about ‘best’ or objectivity in any way; it’s about the stuff I like the most, and I had to be honest about that.

This is something we’ve discussed at Devon Record Club, too, where choices are massively, massively weighted in favour of white male musicians, to the extent that we’ve had themed evenings where one had to bring a record by a woman (again, there’s the problematic issue of defining ‘by a woman’) and where we’ve asked our wives to choose the records instead of us (which resulted in a 3:1 ratio of women-to-men choices that evening) in a pathetic attempt to try and redress this imbalance, if only for one or two evenings. I asked Emma to replace Tom at our last meeting because he was on holiday, and she politely declined, despite the fact that she knows as much about music, and loves music, at least as much as any of us, and I can’t help but think that the boys-club atmosphere (and fear of being judged upon your choice) probably made her say no. We are boys, and we do compete, even when we’re not competing.

I don’t know how one can ‘solve’ this, or if it’s solvable at all, or even if it needs solving. ‘Solution’ is probably the wrong word. Does it need addressing? Do our music tastes reflect who we are and the attitudes we hold (consciously or subconsciously), or do they just reflect what we like? Does what we like reflect who we are and the attitudes we hold (consciously or subconsciously)? I recall a philosophy seminar from a dozen or more years ago, where we were asked to consider how one ties one’s shoelaces, and if tying shoelaces was a form of self-expression; I was the only person to say ‘yes’ (using Run DMC as an example, if I recall), and from there to conclude that everything you do is an act of self-expression, because it is you doing it. So yeah, I probably am a racist, sexist scumbag. I’m trying not to be. Are you?

Postscript
Saying “So yeah, I probably am a racist, sexist scumbag” at the end wasn’t really helpful to this discourse. Not liking “enough” music by female or black musicians doesn’t make you sexist or racist. But it does raise interesting questions about subconscious taste biases and social privileges, which point towards all sorts of contributory factors, which we might not fully understand the interactions and origins of. Only a crazy person would say that someone’s music taste indicated they were racist (unless they liked Skrewdriver etc). Refusing to listen to or engage with Chris Brown’s music because he hit Rihanna, whilst happily listening to John Lennon (or any of a number of other women-hitting white rock stars through time) might suggest conflicting and hypocritical attitudes, though, and the question of where they come from seems to have some of the same underlying biases as answers.

I caught an interesting moment on BBC 5live this morning where Nick Hancock was talking with guests about the different perceptions of Olympic athletes and professional football players, and who you’d rather have over for dinner, or something (I only caught some of it), and the subject of class bias was raised as a motivator for how people responded (the insinuation being that you’d rather have an Olympian over, presumably because they’d be more polite, better company, more engaging conversationalists, whereas a professional football player would be a classless, self-centred, drunken idiot). This got me thinking about whether the make-up of my Pitchfork People’s List is subconsciously influenced by class issues as much as race / gender ones, and even whether this broad sphere we call ‘pop music’ can be coded on a class basis at all – it’s harder to determine if someone’s music is “middle class” or “upper class” or “working class” than it is to determine if a musician is white or male. Which is to say that it’s complicated, and incredibly difficult to unravel, and, possibly, not all that important.

When I put this list together, like any list, I picked first-to-mind favourites initially, and then perused old lists to jog my memory of other things that may not have been at the front of my mind (and to remind myself of what fell within the chronological barriers); there was no conscious rule to not pick music by any given demographic, or to privilege any other demographic. My motivation was “these are records that I like”. The nuance comes in wondering why most of the music I like seems be the product of similar demographics, even if it’s superficially aesthetically quite different. Of course there’s also the idea that if we like one thing, we may well like other, similar things, and that these other, similar things will quite possibly be the product of similar types of people. It wasn’t until after I’d finished the list and seen other people talking about the gender composition of some lists that I thought to look at how mine counted out.

Of course there’s the genre music which is most explicitly the product of white male privilege of them all, and which I have almost absolutely no time for: metal.

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