Much Music VJ Search (Episode 9)

Why wasn't the VJ Search on TV tonight? All I saw was an infomercial for Christopher Ward's latest protégé / Avril rip-off. The chorus of the song gets played 50 times during each VJ Search episode, so forgive me for being sick of it and not having the least interest in watching the video. Erik was reduced to gophering throughout this entire circus, while Sean did nothing as usual (except act "fabulous" -- even the judges can't be bothered to invent praise for him at this point) and Nikki continued to look smoking hot while peering over the video director's shoulder and pretending to have a say in what was going on. Nikki *has* improved though -- remember the first couple of weeks, when she was repeatedly chastised for being the most boring finalist?

Fast forward to the ending, which would have been tense and/or shocking if it hadn't already been announced during last week's show. Erik, Sean, and Nikki's reactions were certainly understated and underwhelming as well. Let the competition begin anew.

Villalobos = ?

There is lots of good discussion about Ricardo Villalobos here, in which he's compared to Autechre, free jazz, and a host of other people and things. I'm not feeling the Autechre comparisons at all, admittedly because at first thought, I tend to think of Ae as sparse and lush ("Amber") more than a succession of random tics ("Confield"). I can ease into the comparison if one considers the rarer occasions when they lay down a more conventional beat (by Ae standard), and slowly pile more and more shit onto it (the "Basscadet" single, and more appropriately, "Chiastic Slide". So I guess it's strange that I can't get on board with the Autechre -> Villalobos line of thinking, since "Chiastic Slide" is their most minimal, danceable record, oh, and it's my favourite too).

I hear a great deal of jazz in Villalobos' work -- the vast sprawl, the laid back groove (yes, I'm massively generalizing here). More specifically, "Achso" brilliantly combines stripped, simple rhythms with improvised, almost random cracks of percussion. The sum of these parts reminds of John Coltrane's "India" with it's droning oud and locked-groove first bass (the "simple") with the second, spidery, improvised bass (the "complex"). I hear a lot more of breakbeat rave (e.g. Messiah, "Temple of Dreams" among billions of circa 1992 examples) than Autechre in Villalobos' schizo rhythms. If I think about this stuff too hard I start convincing myself that bits of everything sound like bits of everything else ... drowning under the weight of the topic, I guess. Anyway, Autechre -> Villalobos doesn't click for me.

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Unrelated: everything I've heard by Lindstrom and Prins Thomas has rocked my world. If LCD Soundsystem were as good as their reviews claim they are, they would sound somewhat like Lindstrom and Prins Thomas. Never mind a bunch of slack motherfucker disco rock with the occasional squonk tossed in when shit is meant to get "wild". I'm talking about blissed out psychedelic funk epics.

Much Music VJ Search (Episode 8)

This week's show completely threw me for a loop -- and I figured that Jordan had already revealed the biggest surprise.

Erik. The judges are right -- he performs well in every task and is the most eloquent contestant by far, but he's a bit ... genERIK. More precisely, he's great in a more mature, astute, relate to twentysomethings way rather than a young, unhinged, relate to teenagers way. Much Music needs the latter. Bill Welychka has made a career out of excelling at the former. That's not a knock against Bill, who I think is excellent and is one of the best interviewers that Much/MMM has ever had.

Regardless of whether Erik is using the VJ Search as a stepping stone to make it in LA (I have no idea if this is true and I honestly don't care), it seems stupid to rake him over the coals considering that Amanda Walsh, who used her stint as a MMVJ as a stepping stone to move to LA and pursue an acting career, appeared earlier on the show. I'm fairly sure that the irony wasn't lost on the show's producers on account of Amanda's blatant plugs for her new TV gig and the fact that Erik wasn't kicked off the air. Now that I've addressed this issue, I have to clarify that I wasn't concertedly ripping into Amanda Walsh because I still have a huge boner for her -- SWEETIE, YOU'RE ALWAYS WELCOME IN MY HOUSE.

Sean. Still useless, and Robin was correct to note that his interview seemed amateurish. The fact that he's still in the running shows that Much is looking for someone different as opposed to someone with competence. Style over substance -- yes, I'm sure you're all very shocked to hear it. This applies tenfold to Nikki. She gets hotter every week. Her interview was the most casual of the bunch and if she was aiming for the mood of "two girls going shopping", she hit the target dead on. The problem is that "two girls going shopping" makes for dreadfully boring TV. Real conversations don't necessarily have a start and end point. TV conversations, "reality" or otherwise, need to have a narrative and Nikki's interview didn't have it. It was aimless and totally uninformative. Nikki is Erica Ehm: The Next Generation, only 100 times hotter.

The Gradual Breakdown of Casey Jo has been ongoing since the start, and it finally came to a head this week. Her petty unprofessionalism was bound to get her kicked off eventually. It's a Real Job, not high school. Her constant gossip and snickering (notably behind Erik's back in the van in LA) didn't do her any favours, and her interview skills certainly aren't good enough to make up for those deficiencies.

Tim. I thought he'd win, and I still think he will. When Devon Soltendieck won the VJ Search a few years ago, he wasn't more outgoing than Tim is right now. He was young, extremely likeable, and looked the part. Over time, he emerged from his shell and became a damn good VJ. That's what will happen with Tim if he gets the job, and I'm fairly sure that the judges recognized this. Every week, they ask fans to vote by phone and choose which VJ they think will be voted off. Every week, Erik finishes near the top of the voting and Tim finishes near the bottom. I think it's a formality that the fan vote will rescue him from the loser loft and bring him back into the competition. If there are any more fan support components after this, Erik and Sean will likely be eliminated and it'll be down to Nikki and Tim. And even if fan voting *doesn't* come into play once the final four are named, don't think that Much doesn't carefully monitor all those fan polls and won't use the information to help with their final decision.

Much Music VJ Search (Episode 7)

Fairly boring show this week, as the cast flew to Edmonton yet again, this time to pretend that Theory of a Deadman don't suck. It's bad enough that they have the worst band name ever -- what I didn't know until tonight was that they approached Chad Kroeger at a party, handed him their demo tape, and got signed to his label on account of it. Erik was right when he said that it takes a lot of balls to do that. And thus, Kroeger's plan to populate the music world with Nickelback clones reached a new level.

The villain role is now solely on Erik's shoulders. He dominated the show, personality-wise and work-wise, yet again. Sean did jack shit, yet again. Frank was Frank, yet again, and with that, his run is over. The girls were pretty faces and not much else. Yet again. Tim did a solid job all while keeping his mouth shut, yet again, and is looking like the obvious winner from where I sit. He's competent, gets along with everybody, looks the part, and nobody working for Much right now brings the same qualities to the table. Erik's villain role might make for good reality TV, but in real life, nobody would want to work with someone so difficult and Much viewers aren't going to tune in every day to watch somebody they hate.

But the week truly belonged to Kardi, who was on fire throughout the judging portion. From ripping on Frank for his duplicity to calling out Sean for his utter uselessness (they finally noticed!), Kardi was the man tonight.

Audion (live), with Mario J, Terence Kissner, Nitin @ Footwork

This one couldn't miss. Even a boneheaded Toronto crowd could understand this one. Funky, slimy, sexy, greasty electro-techno with titles like "Your Place Or Mine" and "Titty Fuck"? Dance, motherfucker.

Yet I still received a scare when I walked into Footwork this past Saturday around midnight and found a nearly pack club with nobody dancing in it. Maybe it was still too early for that, or maybe they didn't feel like dancing to the sound of Montreal 2003, I don't know (on this basis, I will assume that the DJ was Terence Kissner). But the next DJ (not sure which, but he would make a great Richard Ashcroft impersonator) easily won over the crowd with a wickedly fun electro-techno set -- the perfect warmup for the headliner. Starting with the tighter, more minimal sound of his "Leave Luck To Heaven" album and gradually building toward the tougher grooves of "Suckfish", Matthew Dear kept a diverse group of fans sweaty and entertained for nearly two hours. With that, I got exactly what I came for -- a solid night of techno from one of the continent's top talents in the company of an appreciative and dance-crazed group of strangers. In Toronto! Sick!

Gavin Bryars, "Sinking of the Titanic" / Beethoven, "Symphony no. 9 in D Minor" (cond. Wilhelm Furtwaengler, Bayreuth 1951)

The original release of "Sinking of the Titanic" appeared on Brian Eno's "ambient" label Obscure in 1975. Together with "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet", both pieces run about twenty-five minutes, their running lengths upper bounded by the limitations of vinyl. So along came the CD era -- the 1990's rerecorded versions more than doubled the lengths of both pieces, which proved to be a bit too much of a good thing (in particular, a lot of people bitch about Tom Waits' vocals on "Jesus' Blood", but I don't mind them -- his harmonic variations on the tramp's mantra are quite good).

"Ambient". No. This is far from background music. While listening to it, deep concentration on anything other than the music is nearly impossible. It's so devastatingly sad, and at times it's hard to imagine a piece of music churning along any slower. When your mind is racing, say before your departmental Ph.D. defense, and you're cycling through material at the last minute, trying to pound a few final facts into your head (a futile activity, one of the more blatant instances of "too little too late" that humans can present themselves with), the scene starts feeling like one of those "Ray of Light"-type videos. Everything in the background is blurred, with lights and cars speeding by while the person in the foreground sings. Here, the "studying" is the background -- there's no way to discern any details. It's unwatchable. The music is the foreground. Finally there's no choice but to give up, put everything away, and listen as "Sinking of the Titanic" slips further and further into nothingness. Combined with the last stages of panic, it really does feel like one is sinking -- into a chair, into the floor, into one's own lap. That's when the fear takes over, which is precisely the emotion the piece wants to give. Fortunately, it's .0001% as fearful as if one was actually sinking in the Titanic and was about to die.

When it comes to Beethoven's music, Furtwaengler was my kind of conductor. On the symphonies, he favoured slower tempos than many other conductors (I prefer things on the slower side for a lot of symphonic music) and huge crescendoes that were milked for their maximum dramatic power. For the proper Ph.D. defense, for which the preparations were a calmer, more relaxed affair, I went for his version of Beethoven's 9th from the postwar reopening of the Bayreuth Festival in 1951 (had I been in a different frame of mind, I might have chosen the more apocalyptic version recording in Berlin in 1942). The final 20 seconds of the symphony might be the most incredible moments of Beethoven ever recorded. Furtwaengler races through the final twelve bars -- I mean really really races, frantically and spastically -- and incredibly enough, he speeds up throughout, with the orchestra somehow managing to keep up with him right through the last note. There's nothing like the final movement of Beethoven's 9th to make you feel like something important is about to happen. And after all these years, I still stand by the proclamation I made in high school:

"There are two kinds of music in the world. Beethoven's 9th, and everything else."

Ricardo Villalobos, "Achso"

Is there a word for a record that signifies that a wildly popular artist has finally lived up to their hype?

Sure, this is entirely a subjective distinction. As it concerns Oasis, for me, that record was "Some Might Say". This particular example has stuck in my mind for over ten years now. I was following Britpop very closely at the time and after all the debut album hype, the going to Japan hype, the taking on Blur hype (which was about to shift into a higher gear during the coming months), and the "will they get the Xmas #1?" hype, they finally came through. A merely great single wasn't going to cut it by that point, it had to be an instant classic, a "scuse me while I kiss the sky" moment that made you believe that anything was possible for this band. "Some Might Say" is a record that makes you feel ten feet tall. All the coke-fueled power of "Be Here Now", with none of the red-eyed indulgence. Even the b-sides are massive -- "Acquiesce" is equally gargantuan to say the least.

At Mutek, the most noteworthy thing about Villalobos was often he played. In 2002, he was everywhere, playing for eight or nine hours spread over three nights with various (superior?) collaborators. His best moments always seemed to happen with Dandy Jack by his side. The wet sock thumping that pervaded most of his work finally received a breath of life from tracks like "Dexter" (from "Alcohofa"), which eerily approximated Joy Division's "Heart and Soul" set to a hypnotic beat. The following year's "The Au Harem D'Archimede" stretched on and on and on, with each track completely outlasting its welcome, an endless wade through liquidy murk, as if Villalobos had been searching for the ultimate minimal funk groove and had somehow nodded off to his own beats.

"Achso" is everything you could have expected out of Villalobos. Describing it seems to involve a series of contradictions -- it's minimal, but there's so much going on. It's dark and brooding, yet playful. It's relaxing, but contains plenty of moments of wild, kitchen-sink complexity. Huh?

"Ichso" might be the track of the year. Yes, it's only March, but the competition might be closed already. It churns along for two full minutes, punctuated by coughs, sputtering, and the sound of a block of wood being thwacked (?), all of it combining into a stew of bizarre accented background noises seemingly lifted from Yello's "Oh Yeah". None of them seem to be keeping in time with the actual song. This is all part of the buildup to that immensely satisfying moment when the beat kicks in -- finally, after years of droopy micro/ketamine/drumming on a shoebox house beats, Villalobos slams into a beat I'd expect to hear on a hard house record rather than the typical fare of his contemporaries. Sighing, weeping clarinets (? singing saws? what the hell?) float in and out, all of them following their own dreamlike rhythm. Granular, chaotic, epic.

"Duso" ressembles the more stripped down style of "The Au Harem D'archimede", but "Erso" recovers with a more sprightly tone. "Sieso", the longest track here, playfully skips along for over thirteen minutes, its bleep-filled sing-song melodies acting as a throwback to Orbital's baroque masterpiece "In Sides". Although "officially" a double EP, "Achso"'s 52-minute running time puts it firmly into album length territory. The gauntlet has been laid down -- techno producers, can your best four tracks OR your best 50 minutes of music top this?

Much Music VJ Search (Episode 6)

This was the first night that they looked like real VJ's -- between the interviews, backstage segments, and silly demeanor, I felt as though I was watching an actual MM show.

Rebecca is gone shockah! Her elimination means two things:

1) Frank = ratings. They couldn't allow Larissa to hang around for a few extra weeks to play the villain role because she was embarassingly untalented and unmotivated. Frank showed his inconsistency and occasional lack of focus yet again, but he's still a cool guy who is very watchable as a TV character and as a potential VJ (in his better moments).

2) It's a guy's competition to lose. All the judges had touted Rebecca as a favourite up until now. Originally she was looking like the girl with the most edge, but once she was forced to develop a bit more poise she was overtaken by the more coquettish Nikki and Casey Jo. Frank has had three strikes against him (three straight weeks in the bottom three) and he's still in. However, one strike and Nikki's out. Tim, Sean, and Erik are becoming untouchable -- none of them have received much serious criticism and haven't been remotely close to elimination. Unless Nikki or Casey Jo can show that they're more than two pieces of hot ass then say hello to your next male VJ.

Sean is flying under the radar ... he's clearly weaker than Tim and Erik, who have handled every task handed to them with a minimum of heartache, whereas Sean has done very little other than complain and gossip (playing the token gay role that has seemingly been handed to him). How long until the judges wake up and realise that he's coasting along with 95% style and 5% substance?

Loser loft: what's the point?

Academy Awards 2006

Muzak/music piped into supermarkets is supposed to make people shop faster (and keep them happier while pushing those carts). This must be the rationale behind playing music during all Oscar acceptance speeches ... except that you don't have to concentrate on anything while in the supermarket. Even though 80% of these acceptance speeches aren't worth listening to anyhow, the gently lulling music in the background ensures that you're busy tearing your hair out instead of listening to whatever is being said.

Naturally, the best moments of the night were turned in by Three 6 Mafia. Win or lose, theirs was the first hip-hop performance in the history of the Academy Awards (Eminem won for "Lose Youself" but didn't perform at the ceremony). The. First. Ever. Yes, it's 2006, why do you ask? Do any non-hip-hop acts bring their A-games on soundtrack material anymore? George Clooney praised the progressiveness of the Academy by noting that Hattie McDaniel won for Best Supporting Actress in 1939 at a time when blacks still had to sit in designated seats in theatres in many parts of the county. It only took sixty-seven more years for a black hip-hop artist to perform at the Oscars and win. I've got no punchline here.

Three 6 Mafia's win was the first bit of genuine excitement of the night, a rare moment of unscripted emotion. Everyone else on stage was principally concerned with keeping their poise lest their heartbeat rise by three BPM and cause them to sweat off part of their spray-on tan (what's WITH those tonight?). Three 6 Mafia, fresh off their performance only minutes earlier, seemed nothing short of thrilled to have won.

Much Music VJ Search (Episode 5)

Notes, thoughts:

• the useless Larissa is gone
• Frank vs Erik part two: The N-bomb that wasn't. I like Frank, but his personality has become far too unstable and his performance far too inconsistent to consider him a serious candidate. His inconsistency isn't even on an episode-to-episode basis, it's more like a minute-to-minute basis. There's no way you can hire someone like that. Next week: Frank drinks on the job (maybe). Again. Oy vey.
  
• Traci Melchor needs to work on her post-elimination face. Jeff Probst has perfected the paradoxical smug/sympathetic face at Tribal Council on Survivor. I think Melchor is going for the smug/petty like Carolyn Kepcher from Apprentice. Except that Carolyn adds a healthy dash of "I am better than you" in her face, which fits perfectly with the "attempt to attain the unattainable" theme of the Apprentice. Unfortunately, Traci Melchor can't pull off that type of superiority -- her job looks utterly attainable.
  
• The tape-to-air turnaround time for this show is very short -- Frank talked about J Dilla's passing during his throw, which means the show was taped not more than two weeks ago. Since they always air a preview from the following week's show, we can pinpoint a 7-14 day window, although they probably tape the eliminations later on (otherwise, e.g. a live MOD audience would know who was eliminated before each week's show airs). I'm sure the judging portion can be edited quickly. Regardless, the turnaround i's impressive. Most reality shows are taped in full before the first episode airs.
  
• Dina's "you are .... ____ ..... () () () () .... OFF the air" & "you are .... __~~ ...{} () {}| () .... OFF \\':||| % __ .... to the penthouse" catchphrases are awful. This series receives an F in the catchphrase department. Fortunately (see previous bullet point) they can read this blog and still make improvements before next week's show airs (or the week after).