Glenn Branca RIP

Branca was a composer who was singularly of his time, and also of no time.  The rage, grit, and restrained chaos of his early no-wave recording could have only been born out of late 70's New York City.  But the template he mapped out with "The Acension" and his early symphonies were the basis for the next thirty plus years of his career.  These extraordinary recordings have never been duplicated by anyone, probably because his admirers knew better than to foolishly fail in the attempt.  His style truly stood alone.  One can classically train their ear and brain to compose melodies, to imagine how they will sound fully formed before they are written down.  How does one train themselves to hear the sounds that Branca envisioned?  How did he envision in advanc e the dissonance that will be produced by a symphony of 100 guitars?  Branca warned his listeners to play his recordings at full volume to bring out the full range of tones and harmonics.  But this in turn depends on the speakers and the room used for listening.  Could he anticipate how his music would be perceived depending on the habits of the listener, and the quality of their equipment?  I like to imagine that he could.  Branca truly composed sound in a way that nobody ever had, or probably ever will. 

Netta wins Eurovision 2018!

Six months ago, Netta Barzilai wasn't even a professional singer.   Now, she's the winner of Eurovision.  How did all that happen?

Netta was the winner of Israel's "Cokhav HaBa" (The Next Star), a reality show with real stakes -- the winner represents Israel each year in Eurovision.  This largely solves two of the most glaring problems with music reality shows.  First, it provides a basic template for the type of contestant the show wants to promote.  "Vote for the Worst" and Taylor Hicks-style TV characters who won't translate to real music consumers are out.  The "it's a singing competition" vs "it's never just about the voice" debate is definitively settled -- stars win at Eurovision, not voices.  Second, not everybody can get signed and be a winner in the long run.  Only one person can win and go to Eurovision.

Netta wasn't lucky to win her spot, her wild interpretations of pop songs were mind blowing for reality TV (check out her Massive Attack meets Bjork version of Haddaway's "What Is Love") and she soundly trounced her competition on Cokhav HaBa.  Was she lucky to win at Eurovision?  I don't think there's any clear formula for winning there.  Sometimes there's a specific thing that the public latches on to, like voting for a trans girl with a beard.  Catchy dance songs usually do well, but so do overwrought ballads, and both did well in last night's final.  Netta thanked the fans for voting different, and she's undoubtedly different from the usual parade of models and dancers performing at Eurovision.  Different sometimes pays off, like with Lordi in 2006, but sometimes it doesn't, like with Hungary last night.  I thought it was easily a top five performance and it was the only metal song in the final, but voters and judges thought otherwise. 

I know that the new voting format is designed for maximum suspense, but it's deus ex machina suspense.  The judges and public are attracted to totally different things, so the drawn out reveal of each country's douze points amounts to basically nothing. 

"Toy" is a massive, inescapable hit in Israel, and not in the patriotic "we have to convince ourselves we like it for a couple of months for Eurovision" sense.  It's played on every radio station, at every wedding and big event, people genuinely do love it and love Netta.  I really had no idea if that would translate out of a single country's bubble, so I was on pins and needles up until the very end of the final.  

Prurient, "Rainbow Mirror"; Autechre, "NTS Sessions 1-4"

Is it safe to say that there are more niche markets in music than ever before?  These two releases are great examples of that.  I read the Pitchfork review of "Rainbow Mirror" and was immediately sold on the album, even though it didn't get a very good review.  The author of the review, Louis Pattison, completely understands his role as the informed party who is preaching to the converted.  His review won't attract new fans to Prurient's music.  He's the conduit who transmits information to existing Prurient fans about the album's background and  a general idea of what is sounds like.  The rating attached to the review is irrelevant.   Their fans need to know that they're getting three hours of live, improvisational Prurient in an old(er) school abrasive noise style.  

I agree completely with Pattison's review.  You can go about your business with this music in the background and it won't demand your concentration.   I largely stopped buying this kind of music years ago because I'd go to the live shows where the sound envelops you from all directions as you sit frozen in silence in some darkened room.  Then I'd buy the CD and it would sound so ordinary outside of that environment.  Still, "Rainbow Mirror" is about the concept of the three hour live behemoth, close listening is probably unnecessary.  "Buddha Strangled in Vines" is the clear highlight though, an 80's proto-everything analog industrial epic, like to Depeche Mode's "Pipeline" meets "The Hills Have Eyes".

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The Autechre:unfiltered era is turning into quite the highlight reel.  Continuing where "Elseq 1-5" left off, "NTS Sessions 1-4" features eight hours of wild jams and technological oddities.   Fifteen minute tracks fly by in what seems like five, and the mind-bending repetition that made "Elseq" so hypnotic and addictive is found here in spades.  I found Session 2 to be a bit punchless, but Sessions 1 and 3 were fantastic, and Session 4 features the ridiculously great "all end", a 58-minute sprawl of shimmery ambience that many people are comparing to Gas.  It'll take eons to truly absorb all of this content, but Autechre haven't been this interesting in at least a decade and a half.

Moby, "18", "Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt"

We know that Moby recorded "Play" at his professional and personal nadir, as a self-professed has-been who was planning to get out of the music industry.  "Play" was a pop sensation, moving ten million units and landing in inescapably heavy rotation around the world for three years.  The fact that the album was a bit of a downer (singles included) and contained a few decidedly non-pop instrumental mood pieces didn't affect its monstrous sales numbers or cultural cache. 

Following up a melancholy hit album with an even more melancholy did album can happen.  REM did it with "Automatic for the People", but 1992 and the far more poptimistic 2002 were very different eras.  "18" is a very good album that sticks to the same formula as "Play" -- old blues samples laid over dance beats, piano-field dance-lite pop, and moody downtempo pieces -- but the carbon copy never sells as well as the original, and nobody could have expected that Moby would be a long term A-list pop star.  "Play" was a short lived phenomenon that couldn't be repeated, and on "18", Moby sounds none too thrilled at facing up to the task of trying to recreate the magic.  There are some fantastic tracks here ("We Are All Made of Stars" is an all-time classic) but the sense of nothing-to-lose *fun* that imbibed "Play" tracks like "Honey" and "Bodyrock" is gone.  It's loneliness piled on top of loneliness.  As a pop album with sky-high expectations, it's a miss.  Standing on its own, it's a solid listen and an honest portrait of the artist as an insecure pop star, with a handful of career highlights.

Sixteen years later, Moby clearly has nothing to prove to anyone.  His last few albums were written essentially for his own personal satisfaction because very few people are paying attention anyway.  "Everything Was Beautiful ..." borrows heavily from 90's Portishead and there's not a cheery moment to be found, especially not among song titles like "The Sorrow Tree", "A Dark Cloud is Coming", and "Welcome to Hard Times".  Moby's albums have always been pessimistic about the times we live in ever since the rave days.  Nonetheless, it's an easy listen with many serenely beautiful moments and a few dramatic choruses.   If that's where Moby's head is at, then more power to him.