Techno Is Dead in Toronto

Of course, this is nothing new. But I doubt it's ever been more obvious than it was last night.

I could tell what kind of night it was going to be from the moment I arrived. About half the people there were standing around in heavy winter coats. This proportion didn't appreciably change as the place filled up. All in all, there was no indication that this crowd had come to dance.

First up was the unadvertised (????) local heroes who played to a stoic throng of forty or so people. After the venue filled up to some extent (although it was nowhere near sold out), the German techno star took to the stage while 90% of those in attendance paid him no attention, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this was the guy they'd paid money to see. Gradually, people warmed up to the fact that dancing was not only allowed but was encouraged. This golden age lasted maybe thiry minutes, after which the venue began to gradually empty out. Therefore, local act #2 (seemingly given the headlining spot since it was his hometown and all), played to an audience maybe half the size of Mayer's. So much for the home field advantage. Fortunately, most of those who remained had plenty of energy left, and a good time was had by those who had bothered to hang around until the end.

The weather? The Oscars? A Sunday night? No. There were no excuses for this.

OK, the music ... Matt and Mark Thibedeau have been producing consistently excellent, soulful tech-house on the local scene for years, and last night's performance as Repair was no exception. It's beautiful stuff that provides a handy missing link between Montreal-micro and Terry Lee Brown Jr's dark&sweet house. Michael Mayer spun a solid set, building from minimal Kompakt techno to harder, trancier stuff. And finally, Jake Fairley delivered a slamming live performance. He began with crisp, track-y robo-funk and gradually eased into the euphoric "Touch Not the Cat" material.

I danced. It's fun if you give it a try.

"Sam the Record Man" is my friend once again

Ah, I am reminded of the olden days, yes, the Great Cassette Sale of 2001 which might have marked the last time I purchased something at Sam's (it makes for a better story if we assume this to be true). This time, the clearance racks were stacked with loonie discs, and I made away with a twelve-strong booty of $1 CD's (plus a few for $5.99 -- hey, six bucks for Beltram on Tresor, a Playhouse comp, and the Scala album I've been trying to track down for ages ? I'll take it. Ooooh, and 20% off the Mojo "Depeche Mode and the Story of Electro-pop" issue!).

You can't go wrong with a $1 CD. There is no CD on this earth that isn't worth one measley dollar. Either you get some music you enjoy (and it only takes one or two great tracks to make up that dollar's worth*. The runaway success of iTunes has certainly taught us that) or you get to laugh your ass off at crap and write a scathing review of it. In fact, I've used that writer's justification on several occasions. Good music or bad, what I was really purchasing was an object I could write about. I was purchasing my own writing (wait, when I put it that way, it's sort of pathetic).

* all of this reasoning only holds true in the small sample limit. Buying five hundred randomly chosen CD's for five hundred dollars is not worth it. You can't laugh off five hundred crappy CD's. Remember that case in San Francisco in the 70's, where a guy ate about 450 Twinkies and then shot some people? The preservative inside the Twinkie wrapper is harmless if you only have a few, but the accumulation of it after eating hundreds of Twinkies at one sitting has psychotic side effects. That's what one dollar CD's are like.

More thoughts on Daft Punk

The rumours surrounding "Human After All" have been swirling for weeks. The version currently floating around the internet isn't the final mix of the album. They intentionally leaked it in order to build anticipation for the proper version. Their record company is concerned about the early reactions from the internet and is considering not releasing the album at all because of the negativity.

If the "anticipation" rumour is true, then they certainly attained their goals vis a vis me, because they've put some anticipation in my brain where surely none would have existed otherwise.

Some tracks do sound empty -- endless looping, with little variation or build to them (e.g. "Television Rules the Nation" and "Make Love". In particular, the latter could be a fantastic little heart-tugger if it had a bit more flair, maybe a "Digital Love"-ish guitar solo?). Some other tracks already sound pristine to me. "The Brainwasher" is structured just like a million other techno records, which is obvious to anyone who has ever used a Stairmaster (= it's the "cross-training" preset, with a succession of hills of increasing height separated by comparatively flatter sections. Er, yeah). "Emotion" is absolutely perfect -- tantalizing build, killer bass line, and Vainqueur-esque synth whooshes. And it's a rather sad tune, for those who like a bit of emo in their slowed-down disco-funk. The only thing missing is another five minutes.

If this is indeed just a rough mix, the next six months of "Proper Mix" vs "Rough Mix" debates will be fun. I'll be armed with my "hey what's wrong with minimalism, just because the proper mix sounds more like pop music doesn't mean it's automatically better music" arguments.

Help! They Just Keep Rolling Out the Great Music ...

If you thought "Up In Flames" was a great album ... well, then I feel sorry for you, because it wasn't. It was a great EP with an average LP wrapped around it (that great EP was "Dirt Road", "Hendrix With Ko", "Jacknuggeted", "Birthday").

The new Manitoba Caribou Caritoba (? why not) album manages to be both experimental (pop songs, weird songs, one-minute sprints, seven-minute wigged-out epics) and concise (all this happens in only 40 minutes). It starts like a less Byrds-y "Up In Flames" (at this point I was thinking that I was in for a photocopy of the last album), moves into some weird Animal Collective moments (with a few nods to the pastoral electronica of his somewhat underwhelming Boards of Canada ripoff debut album), and concludes with a Can-esque motorik piece of complete brilliance. At nearly every turn, this album surprised me, and all the surprises were welcome ones.

Not twenty minutes after finishing yesterday afternoon's post, I heard that the new AUTECHRE album was floating around on the internet. Ooooooh, yet another great album of 2005. It's certainly better than "Draft 7:30" and might be better than "Confield". In fact, the new album (apparently titled "Untilted", and yes, I assure you that I have spelled it correctly) is "Confield", albeit a less dense version of it. It's easier on the ears but is still dominated less by melody and more by manic chaos and unpredictability. And it's got chunky "Chiastic Slide"-esque beats. I need more time with this one ...

Grammys 2005

A few unsorted thoughts:

1. Generally, it was a good show, and the performances were solid. Kanye's performance was nearly identical to the one he did on the Much Music Video Awards a few months back. It lost much of its lustre on this, its second viewing. Green Day were excellent. Marc Anthony sounded great, but looked like he'd been sleeping on a manhole cover all night and had been carted into the hall half an hour before his performance. "Across the Universe" was ... strange. A good try, I suppose.

2. Things that would be more uncool than Ellen Degeneres wearing an Iggy Pop shirt at the Grammys

-- Bono wearing an Iggy Pop shirt at the Grammys
-- Hilary Duff wearing an Iggy Pop shirt at the Grammys

....
....

(I think that's it)

3. As if they hadn't sunk low enough with their "Downloaders = children of Satan" comments in past years, this year they tried playing sympathy for tsunami victims into sympathy for the "victims" of "illegal" downloading. Neil Portnow needs to FUCK OFF AND DIE. RIGHT NOW.

4. I wasn't at all surprised that Ray Charles took the top two awards, in fact, I predicted it. The dead and sick always do well at the Grammys.

Too much music ... and it's only February ...

When last summer rolled around, I had only heard a scant number of 2004 releases, and I considered only one of them ("Fabulous Muscles") to be truly great (I had not yet fully appreciated the brilliance of the Felix da Housecat album, but still, that's only two albums instead of one). But the year's best releases always seem to be backended in Oct/Nov, so I was only mildly concerned.

However, I can't ever remember a year in which I heard so many outstanding albums before Valentine's Day -- or even before the onset of spring! Granted, some of these albums haven't seen their official release yet, but all of them will be out by April or so, which still makes for an outstanding crop of early-year releases.

I've already gushed about my love for the Low and M83 albums, and you can add the fantastic New Order album to the list. Roots Manuva's newest is outstanding, it includes a new single ("Colossal Insight") which is more or less his take on disco, and "Babylon Medicine", which arguably outdoes Timbaland at his own game. Rhythm and Sound dropped "See Mi Yah", which is to dub reggae as the M-series was to minimal techno. On vinyl, it's a series of seven 7" singles, while the CD version (which is what I have heard) offers ten tracks with ten different vocalists. One rhythm, ten vocalists, all versions slide seamlessly from one to the next, like a rotating cast of singers taking their shots at the mike over a hypnotic locked groove that doesn't come close to wearing out its welcome, even after forty minutes.

Last week, I sat slack-jawed listening to the bizarre new Books album. I'm currently dreaming my way through the new Styrofoam. Eventually, I'll get to the new Readymade (Stylus' album of the week), as well as A Guy Called Gerald's latest.

Changing the subject, the Grammys are tonight and I will likely watch but I'm not up to writing a blow-by-blow account like I have done with other awards shows. I will probably write some short comments about whatever makes the deepest impression on me, and I'm not ruling out some live ranting on ILM or something.

New Order -- Waiting For the Sirens Call

I'm on Day Four of a cold/allergy/something that won't go away, but there's nothing that could brighten my bleary eyes any more than hearing the brand new New Order album. Initial thoughts:

-- It's a more upbeat version of "Republic". The sound and swagger of "Regret" is all over most of the WFTSC tracks (particularly in the bass lines).

-- Everyone who loved "Get Ready" will love WFTSC. About half of the tracks on the latter could have appeared on the former.

-- Everyone who hated "Get Ready" will probably like WFTSC very much, because it's a dancier album and less guitar-oriented. The holdouts will compare "Working Overtime" to "Rock the Shack" and claim that this one track sabotages everything. You might think that it's very difficult for one track to tank an entire album, but these are the same kinds of people who also claimed that Billy Corgan ruined "Get Ready" even though he sang two solo lines on it. As usual, these people should be ignored.

-- "I Told You So" is reggae, New Order-style. It's good.

-- "Jetstream" (with Ana from Scissor Sisters on vocals), is to "WFTSC"as "World" is to "Republic", that is, it's more pop-dance than typical NO, and will probably be a single.

-- "Krafty" is their best single since "Regret", and might be one of the best five or six singles of their career.

"Closer" x 2

That is, Joy Division vs Plastikman: more in common than just the title. Both are piercing, and often unsettling glances into the minds of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis and Plastikman, um, "singer" Ritchie Hawtin.

[Let's get this out of the way ... a lot of negative criticism about the Plastikman album was focused specifically on the vocals, while saying very little about the other 70+ minutes of the album on which there are no vocals. To these people, the album's "message" was expressely contained in the lyrics, and hence, interpreting those lyrics was the primary step toward understanding what the album was about. Of course, this meant they had to ignore all of Hawtin's "this album comes closest to finally reproducing the sounds I hear inside my head"-ish comments. To me, the vocals are more of a sound effect than poetry set to music (although that is generally the case with music, not just this album). Hawtin's no great lyricist, but the lyrics here are more than adequate, they're generally quite brief, and it's not like they swamp the album in any shape or form. There aren't enough vocals on the album to drag it down as much as some people have claimed -- if you disagree, then frankly you're not listening to the other 95% of the album too carefully.]

In both cases, the first track is the angriest and most defiant on the entire album. Curtis relates a freakish, grotesque tale (which is told in the third person but he was almost certainly referring to himself -- the line "for entertainment they watch his body twist" gives away the plot) and the disgust in his voice during this song is unmatched in the Joy Division catalogue. On the Plastikman side, Hawtin attacks a former lover with a bitter, caustic mini-rant about their failed relationship. When hearing these albums for the first time, both of these songs might appear to be making a statement of purpose that will become a theme for the remainder of the album.

Except both albums become darker and more introspective, anger gives way to shame, and both close with two devastating epics that give concern for the singer's sanity* and well-being**.

* moreso in the case of Plastikman
** moreso in the case of Joy Division

(if I had to choose between them, I would choose Plastikman and I know I'd be part of a considerable minority with that pick)