Thursday, July 31, 2003

A non-routine update in the middle of the night in a laser lab while basking in the marvelousness of Bardo Pond's new album "On the Ellipse". People aged sixteen and under should not be allowed to record and release music. It should be a law, like the driving age or the age of majority. I decided this while watching (the otherwise enjoyable) MTV Europe, during the video for "Everybody Cha Cha" by Cecil, Johnny and Caro (sp? Does it matter? Who cares? I don't). There's not a single piece of music made by a sub-sixteener that isn't watered down from the norm. So why create it in the first place? To provide crushes for eight year old girls whose older brothers have ugly friends? In this case, the three brats and their music label sugar daddies were peddling a watered down hip-hop latin boy-band hybrid. Music can't get any more watered down than that. That's like going to your nearest student trashy pub hangout bar slum hall (where the beer is already watered down, obviously), drinking seven beers, holding out on breaking the seal, and finally pissing into your eighth beer to water it down even more.

Now that's watered down.

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

I spent part of last Saturday looking for the Tresor shop in Berlin. I was armed with an address I'd found on Mapquest, and went to that address and found ... nothing. An office/apartment building, but no shop. Having been to the Hard Wax shop already, I figured I could outsmart this problem, so I started walking down all the alleys on the block, searching for the hidden entrance. Still nothing. Eventually I had to admit defeat. Does this shop still exist? Is it a real shop or just an office? A secret door underneath a manhole? Anyone?

On the way back home, I settled for wandering around the grounds of the hallowed club itself. Not inside, just the grounds, which were strewn with empty cups and the remainders of a beer tent, no doubt the remnants of a fine Friday night. The club is but a few hundred metres east of the former wall, and thus the exterior of the building has all the charm you'd expect -- a Soviet-era decaying concrete crumbler. When the club opened in 1991, it fit in quite well with the surroundings, no doubt. But Leipziger Strasse in 2003 has been drastically overhauled. With shiny office buildings lining the block, it now boasts a shiny financial district feel. The decades old building that houses Tresor is now very much out of place, as it rubs shoulders with modernity. It's a beautiful fly in the ointment.

Thursday, July 24, 2003

More from Berlin ... so last Saturday, we took a day off from work, and went off to see the sights. And the first stop was -- the Brandenburg Gate? The Reichstag? No silly, it was the HARD WAX SHOP. As a tourist trap, it sure was difficult to find. It literally took ten minutes to find the entrance, which was way at the end of an alley behind a row of buildings. And I'm not talking about a narrow European street, this was an ALLEY, complete with shopping carts piled next to a rusty garage, drunkards, and the shop's name painted on the wall for identification purposes. Then one needs to walk up four flights of stairs in a building that could easily double as the setting for a drug bust scene in any cop movie of the last thirty years.

The shop itself isn't too large, but a third of its area is taken up by a wall, I mean literally a wall of massive speakers that were playing dub music at 1/100th of their volume capacity yet still comfortably loud. The records I bought were as much souvenirs as they are musical investments.

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Continuing where I left off yesterday ... I packed my bags in about twenty minutes, right after I'd spent thirty packing my CD's. Of course, the music accompanying me on this trip would be predominantly German. The heavy hitters, i.e. Kraftwerk, Neu!, Vainqueur, Gas, Lou Reed's "Berlin", all came along for the ride. Without a proper system and speakers (only a discman), hearing music for the one waking hour I spent in my apartment each day (getting out of bed and preparing to return to it) was a bit of a chore. And with no sound card at work and a bike as my main mode of transportation, my interactions with music were limited to MTV Europe and a shockingly awesome German weather and events channel which shows live shots of various cities and resort locations while German oom-pah-pah muzak folk plays gently in the background. Very uppity in the morning, no joke. MTV Europe is shockingly awesome as well, with a maximum of music (a tasty mixture of pop and dance) and a minimum of talk.

Monday, July 21, 2003

I'm staying in Berlin for a three week working trip, and of course there's plenty to see and hear.

A little less than 24 hours before the plane took off, the trip began on a sour note. I'd remembered that the Love Parade takes place in Berlin during July, so I looked for the date, and sure enough, it was due to happen on the night before my arrival. I was disgusted -- this was a serious brainfart because I could have easily flown in a day earlier had I been more on top of things. It would have all been in place. My trip to Berlin : paid for through work. Work : nothing to do until Monday. One million crazy folk dancing to techno in the streets of Berlin : priceless. Then I had to go ahead and fly in twelve hours too late. Idiot. I suppose I could take solace in knowing that the music isn't so much techno as it is trance-rave-E-soaked-crud, but that would be missing the point and trashing the good name of the intangible communal experience that partying in a street with one million Germans and pissing in the bushes and getting with the moment and pretending to love a bunch of strangers, provides. Or was I just remembering being eighteen again? Without the bushes, of course. And the Germans. And the street. Otherwise ...

Friday, July 11, 2003

Buried within my Mutek musings was the true story (not to say that the rest of that Montreal trip was untruthful) of my search and find of Primal Scream's "Swastika Eyes" single. However, that crucially awesome item was in fact a distant second on my "to find" list. And after resolving my search for Number Two, the only rational follow-up was to conclude my search for Number One, without delay.

My Bloody Valentine. Loveless.

The problem: MBV were dropped by Creation almost immediately after the album's release. They are still (to the best of my knowledge) signed to Virgin, and their Creation recordings are now owned by Sony. Re-printing the album on vinyl is not a priority. Therefore, all existing vinyl copies were printed by the now-defunct Creation in 1991. After searching both North American coasts, I've concluded that hardly any of these copies are on this continent, either.

The solution: Ebay. A careful search and one damned fine deal later, Loveless was on its way from the UK and into my waiting hands. Typical auction prices for the record are between $40 and $50 USD. I paid a lot less. I'm Jewish, so I had to make sure everyone understands that.

The record: The outer sleeve is in good condition, the record itself is near pristine.

The sound: I'm used to hearing the occasional new things when listening to the album. Such is the complexity and density of the recording. But I'm not used to hearing several new things in one sitting.

Anyone who's a vinyl-phile or has read my musings on the vinyl vs CD sound quality debate (which of course, is a no-contest one-sided debate) knows what I'm about to write. CD: high frequencies = stifled, bass = sludgy. Vinyl: the coast is clear. But I was surprised by how much more of a ROCK record Loveless becomes on vinyl. The blended murkiness of the CD accentuates the swirling, other-worldly headspaces. On record, some of this fog is blown clear away, revealing actual strumming underneath the din. And the vocals, naturally, are sharper and more nuanced.

I didn't listen too carefully to "Only Shallow". It would be difficult to difficult to discern warped vinyl from actual sound with this track, so I just let it play. "Loomer" carries a strong kick, and "Touched" is "Touched". "To Here Knows When" peels away the layers and allows the soft percussion to peek through.

Then it's the heavy stuff, and the heavy revelations. The bass on "When You Sleep" is quaking, resonating and shaking the speakers. This is the magic of vinyl -- you can hear separation between guitars and bass, rather than the across-the-whole-track blanketing of the bass sounds on a CD. The concluding minutes of "I Only Said" are propelled forward by guitars that rev up every other bar like a Formula One car shifting gears at 150 mph. These accents and attacks are severely curtailed on the CD, and I took delight in playing the two formats simultaneously for the sake of the lopsided comparison. Then I played the end of "I Only Said" four times in a row and listened through headphones to marvel at its marvelousness.

"Come In Alone"'s bass is more quaking goodness, and "Sometimes" carries the same jump-out-of-the-speakers mid-fi kick that "Loomer" did. "Blown A Wish" features unexpected sublime twinkling cascades on top of it's existing expected sublime twinkling cascades. "What You What" is a snarling rocker, and "Soon"'s strumming (heretofore unnoticed and unappreciated by me) stands out.

MBV are certainly part of the Velvet Underground inner circle -- everyone who hears/heard them forms/formed a band. But with the first wave of Velvets adorers, at least they were hearing the record on vinyl rather than the awful mid-80's remastered version that stinks up shiny 5" discs worldwide. But with MBV "Loveless", so much of the inspiration and hero worship comes from people who haven't heard the vinyl. They're hearing a very different album. They're admiring something which only exists on CD, something that doesn't exist on vinyl, never existed in the studio, and never happened in live performance. Obviously, all this applies equally well to me as it does to countless others. And don't read this like I'm thumbing my nose at the ignorant masses, "I have the vinyl but you don't ha ha ha". I took a long look at my CD closet and tried to imagine how much I'm missing. How much better it could all sound.

Besides, a CD is what it is, and there's something to be said for it's heightened sensations of swirl and eddy. Some people might prefer this, and find the greater clarity of the vinyl less inspirational. Which is OK. But there's no denying that you can hear more things on a vinyl recording. Almost always, I'll prefer hearing to not hearing.