I bought another stack of cheap CD's. Time for some fifty word reviews.

Twenty years ago,  used to drop $25-$30 on nearly every imported CD I bought.  Earlier this month, I paid about $30 for fifteen CD's.  Yes, times have changed.  Let's have a brief look at them all and bring back the fifty word review for the first time in I don't know how long!   This was sort of like Twitter in the days before Twitter!

1. Harold Budd and Hector Zazou, Glyph

This mixture of jazz, ambient and trip-hop could only have been released in the mid-90's. There's almost nothing to implore you to hear this album in a context other than as background music at your next mixer, but some of the kick-drum heavy grooves have some serious thump to them.

2. Super Discount Presents Minos Pour Main Basse (Sur La Ville), Le Patron Est Devenu Fou! (The Boss Has Gone Mad!) Remixes

With the exception of the "Peace From Chicago Mix" (a storming track that deserves to last well beyond its already epic nine minute run time) none of these remixes deviate much from the nearly unassailable original. I had high hopes for Philippe Zdar’s mix but it’s the biggest disappointment here.

3. Various Artists, DJ Kicks - The Glimmers

This mix is a funky, chaotic mess (that's meant to be a compliment) that should make fans of mid-2000's dancepunk reminisce and smile. Of course that means I feel like I've heard it fifty times already, and I would have said the same if I'd heard it back in 2005.

4. Various Artists, The Morning After - the ultimate post club companion compiled and mixed by Mixmaster Morris

On every 90's electronica compilation, I discover at least one standout track that I haven’t heard before, and that's why I stock up on these cheapies whenever I can. Unfortunately, this disc is an exception, and even the artists and tracks I already knew sound boring in this mix’s setting.

5. John Massoni with Sonic Boom,The Sundowner Sessions

This hypnotizing EP features four rather different styles of experimental music -- "Voices" and "Flange" are throwbacks to Morton Subotnick's futuristic bleeps, but "Untitled" treads closer to Sonic's more blissed out, organic E.A.R. project, and "Organ" could almost pass for a hummable instrumental interlude on an indie rock album.

6.  Flowered Up, St. Etienne, The Rockingbirds, The Fred EP

More proof of St. Etienne's genius: their contribution to this charming covers EP could have been recorded at any time in their career and stays vaguely faithful to the original without sounding like a hungover pisstake. Flowered Up, I'm looking at you although you always make me nostalgic for 1992.

7. The House of Love, The House of Love

They were one of those legendary indie bands who were always spoken about in hushed whispers by people who were convinced they should have been huge and playing stadiums. Over the years I occasionally heard a song by them on the radio, but never really checked them out.  Mistakes happen.

8. Cybotron, Clear

One of those iconic albums I had inexplicably never heard until now.  I hadn't realized there were so many guitars here, making the Parliament half of "Parliament and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator" stand out that much more.  These guys saw the future long before the rest of us did.

9. Biosphere, Patashnik

Oddly enough, I was turned off from Biosphere for a long time because of his non-standout contributions to one of my favourite 90's techno contributions.  More recently, mostly thanks to "Substrata", I understood that his ambient (not beat-filled) tracks are where it's at, which makes "Patashnik" mostly decent, partly sublime.

10. Run Productions, 2004/2005 compilation

(no further information available on the 'net)

Not even sure where to start with this eclectic and often wondrous collection of music from around the globe.  Approximately twenty countries are represented, with folk, reggae, and Michael Jackson covers (to name just three examples) coming from unexpected sources.  Well OK, the Michael Jackson cover is by Senor Coconut.

11. Stephin Merritt, Showtunes

There's always been more than a hint of Broadway in Merritt's work.  Despite the nominal change in genre and format, longtime fans will immediately recognize his fingerprints here.  It's interesting to hear (mostly) new voices interpreting Merritt's work, as opposed to the usual cast of characters on Magnetic Fields' albums.

12. Kristin Hersh, Hips and Makers

This album was already my ultimate bargain bin discovery.  Isn't it a great feeling when you excitedly gush about something becoming of your favourite albums after only a couple of listens, and it actually happens? "Hips and Makers" did in fact turn me into a Kristin Hersh fan for life.

13. Various - Arctic Circles : A Selection Of Sub Zero Soundscapes

[aside: strangely, WMP recalls a tracklist (and year!) which is different from the one in the liner notes, and which is different from the one listed on Discogs.  The latter appears to be the correct one]

The title threatens to subject you to predictably corny "chill out" fare, but have no fear: this is exceptional 90's underwater ambient techno in the style of the best material released on R&S in that decade.  Featuring a full slate of underappreciated Norwegian producers, this disc is a lost gem.

14. Ishai Adar, Beaufort Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

This haunting soundtrack ranges from "Mi Media Naranja"-era Labradford to creepy, abrasive ambient, like Marsen Jules locked in a basement undergoing sleep deprivation testing.  When we imagined what a Trent Reznor-penned movie soundtrack would sound like in the 90's, it was a lot closer to this than "The Social Network".

15. The Orb, Peel Sessions

The first track is nothing less than the ground zero recording that introduced me to electronic music.  I bought this (imported!) cassette in '91 for the bargain price of about fifteen bucks (for years it would regularly retail for 25-30 dollars), and somehow never owned it on any other format.

"Mistaken For Strangers" (The National documentary, dir. Tom Berninger)

In the past couple of weeks, as the rockism vs poptimism debates heated up in print and on the internet, the National somehow became the poster boys for stodgy rock music that takes itself too seriously.  The defense's timing is impeccable, as evidenced by the release of this documentary that is ostensibly about the band's 2010 world tour, but ends up as a case study about two brothers who were once inseparable, were forced apart by the unexpected success of the band, and their struggle to rebuild their relationship.

Or is it?  Every review I have read (except for one) takes the film completely at face value.  The story of the doofus younger brother getting his act together and making his family proud is fun to play along with, but I found myself constantly questioning whether what I was seeing was real.  Could anyone really ask so many dumb questions?  If he's a lone wolf filming his stupid documentary without permission, then who is holding the camera most of the time?  Why would the band's management, who come off as being fun hating squares who are constantly preoccupied with protecting the National's image in documentary footage they've never seen, possibly want to green light the finished product?

In "This is Spinal Tap", the filmmaker played the naive straight man and the band were the fools.  It's remarkable to think that it took thirty years for somebody to try the opposite combination.

No matter what your take, a band that chooses to "profile themselves" by foregoing all the usual rules of documentary filmmaking by agreeing to get strung along as bit players in a story of brotherly redemptions can't be taking itself all that seriously.  

"Breadcrumb Trail" (Slint documentary, dir. Lance Bangs)

This might be the definitive "for fans only" documentary -- essential for fans of Slint and "Spiderland", confusing and utterly irrelevant for everyone else.

It struck me while watching this film that even though their music was freakish and unconventional, as a band and a collection of personalities, Slint were as cliche as any other rock outfit.  The guitarist was a quiet loner who looked unassuming until he started to shred; the singer was a moody, nervous, angst-filled guy; the bassist tried to stay out of people's way and was the most invisible, underappreciated band member; and the drummer was an out of control weirdo.  I guess you could say that about 99% of bands though.  The story tends to repeat itself -- on record they were dour and serious, but in real life, they were young kids having fun.  The former members and entourage of Joy Division let their myth build up over the years before eventually clueing fans into the fact that they were getting drunk and laughing their asses off most of the time. Now it's Slint's turn.

"Breadcrumb Trail" is almost entirely composed of interviews.  It's an oral history told in front of a camera, but the principals get plenty of face time so by the end of it you feel like you've had a fairly intimate look at the personalities of everyone involved.  The snippets of archival footage is outstanding and really attunes you to how young and how talented Slint were (and how pretentious ... tuning up for 1.5 hours at a high school "Battle of the Bands" show?  Totally dickish but also hilarious).

The major flaw of the documentary is that the breakup of the band in 1991 is mostly glossed over.  Maybe they wanted the subject to be off-limits, maybe they wanted to keep mum about it (even after twenty years) to add to their mystique, maybe they don't want to open old wounds in the interest of keeping their occasional reunion gigs going.  Still, it's odd considering the level of detail in the rest of the film.

Outkast reunites at Coachella 2014

Andre 3000 summed it up perfectly when their 90-minute set was abruptly cut off due to curfew -- this was "kind of weird".  Yes, he was referring to the halting of their set when they thought they were getting to the big finish with Killer Mike, but he could just as easily have been talking about the entire night.

The audio glitches were the least of their problems.  I didn't like Dre and Big Boi spending so much time inside the screen-lined cube.  It felt like they were trapped there and I couldn't figure out why it added to the performance when they were prevented from using the entire stage.  The timing and pacing of the set felt completely off, with some songs getting inexplicably shortened ("Ms. Jackson"?  Huh?), and the set never built properly to the hits that people expect to hear at these kinds of shows.  After all, the Outkast reunion is taking place at festivals, and you have to tailor your set to a broad festival goer audience, not the most hardcore thousand or so fans in every town.  They brought out Janelle Monae and Future to almost no reaction, because this wasn't the sort of crowd that would know who they were.  Somehow they seemed surprised by this.

Of course there were high spots -- the horn section, "Roses", "Rosa Parks" and Janelle Monae's guest spot (even if the crowd didn't care) to name a few, but overall this concert was a shockingly unpolished work in progress.  

The decline of downloads

Great article in Billboard about the competition between Apple and iTunes on one side, and the double threat of streaming services and Google's stranglehold on mobile devices.

Here is a graphical history of sales (as a percentage of total units shifted) for the various music formats.  CD's passed cassettes as the top format from 1990 onward, but interestingly enough, IIRC, 1989 (or perhaps even 1990) was the top year for total cassette sales.  IOW, when cassettes hit their peak in terms of total sales they were oddly enough already on the decline -- a decline that came swiftly and definitively.  I believe the peak for CD sales occurred in 2000, although the graphs show that the CD reached its peak in terms of percentage of total sales in 2002-3.  So one could equally claim that when CD's hit their peak around 2002, they too were on the decline -- a decline that came just as swiftly and decisively as it had for cassettes not much more than a decade previous.

CD's ruled the industry for not more than twelve years.  Total download sales didn't pass physical sales until 2012, but by that time the CD had been dead as the leading format for years.  Downloads and streams (both legal and otherwise) were taking over and there was nothing anyone could do about it, but the industry found a way to squeeze more juice out of the very profitable CD model before finally admitting defeat, kicking and screaming.

Downloads will not rule the industry for nearly as long.  The pie charts show that the rise of streaming/subscription services and legal downloads happened roughly simultaneously, so it's arguable whether they ever really dominated music consumption at all.  But iTunes has been crushing the competition in the download market, that part is indisputable.  But as the Billboard article explains, they're rapidly losing market share to streaming services, which should come as a shock to no one because once you've weaned people off the idea of buying music as a physical object, you can't expect any brand loyalty from consumers who are accustomed to thinking about songs as faceless, invisible objects. No matter which site you get your music from, it's all the same mouse click, there's no aesthetic or sentimental reason to prefer one website to another.

If you thought the CDs' decline was swift, that was nothing compared to what's going to happen with downloads.  Download sales may have peaked around 2012, but like CD's and cassettes before them, that doesn't mean that the format wasn't already in decline.  Things were never the same after the iPod was introduced.  It showed that music as a physical object to be purchased in a store was on the way out -- the future would be based around playback devices. Apple, of all companies, should understand this.   So in 2014, that means mobiles and tablets, and Apple will have to shift its way of thinking, and fast.

I still remember the day in 1990 when I was listening to CFNY in Toronto and the DJ (forgot who, but I believe it was early afternoon on a weekday in the summer) talked about some pie-in-the-sky news/tech-y story about how in the future we wouldn't buy our music, we'd have a service (perhaps envisioned as a satellite-based service at the time) that would play our music on demand for us.  And I couldn't even imagine how it could possibly happen one day.  

Berlin nightlife in pictures

I never get tired of reading first hand accounts of life in Berlin during the Cold War.

But the only thing shocking or revelatory about these photos is how ordinary they all look.  Plus or minus a hairdo or two, just about any of them could have been taken in any year from the 1970's until today.  I did a double take on the B/W photo from the 1992 Love Parade, which I would have pegged for something from 1975 without a second thought.  You can't blame the author/collator Stefanie Seidl for false advertising though -- she says in the accompanying interview that the photos weren't about capturing the biggest celebs but about "conveying an authentic atmosphere".  There's a powerful take home message in there.  Maybe you need to know the right people or the super secret way to dress to get into the most prestigious clubs, but no matter where you end up partying in the end, the essential, authentic Berlin is everywhere, you can find it without hardly trying.  You can't say that about New York, Paris, or just about anywhere else.

Somehow this article about repetition in music feels appropriate to be paired with a story about the nightlife in Berlin.  Read the whole thing, but in particular, I've experienced "semantic satiation" a number of times and never knew (but should have assumed) that it was a real, scientifically studied effect.  

Lady Gaga at SXSW

NPR's Ann Powers posted a commentary about Lady Gaga's interview at SXSW.  It's a bit cynical and pessimistic, but she makes a number of interesting points.  What's lost in her commentary (aside from a single offhand admission that Gaga is "far more interesting than what 95 per cent of mainstream pop produces") is that even her appearance at an event like SXSW was something unthinkable even five years ago.  The fact that major pop artists make a point reaching out to an audience at what used to be more of a niche underground festival is a victory of sorts.  The playing field is more level than it's ever been, and spending millions of dollars to promote your album is less of a sure thing than it once was, and "ARTPOP"'s relatively poor sales are a perfect example of that.  Of course, "Lady Gaga appears at SXSW" is a marketing ploy too, where major artists go in the hope that some hipster cred will rub off on them.  That's true no matter how many times Gaga says that she's not manufactured and would happily go back to slumming it in New York rather than play processed music she's not passionate about.

Anyhow, Lady Gaga and Depeche Mode at SXSW in consecutive years is exciting in a way that a festival stacked with unknown bands hoping that their names go viral on Twitter isn't.

Her insistence about "not fitting into a mold" is worded to seem profound, but actually it's a totally conventional path to superstardom.  Great artists break the mold and set themselves apart from the background noise of whatever else is in the charts.  Famously, Avril Lavigne and Pink refused to conform to music industry standards and didn't fit a mold when they eventually broke big.  

The biggest Gaga-related news out of SXSW -- besides getting thrown up on by Millie Brown -- is the "don't sell out, sell-in" statement which probably would have been reported using sensationalist headlines about how "Gaga hearts mega-corporations!!" if she hadn't belittled that kind of sleazy reporting during the interview.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with accepting the support of a patron, and the arts have depended on rich patrons for hundreds of years.  The value is in the association with the artist, not with forcing the artist into striking a pose that's tailored exactly to the need to market a product.  Gaga's comments have been twisted to seem like they're daring or controversial when they really aren't, and that's not at all her fault -- she seems to truly "get" how the industry works, and the press falls for the same traps every time.

Kassem Mosse, "Workshop 19"; Lucy, "Churches, Schools, and Guns"

Leftfield, experimental house looks to be peaking right now.  It's a catch-all term that means different things to different people and I'm not clear on the definition either. But fortunately, these days it seems to be applied less and less to pop-orientted blog house and more toward the "anything can happen at any time in this track" club music that has made Terre Thaemlitz AKA DJ Sprinkles an unlikely star.  BTW, where does Thaemlitz going from purveyor of wibbly ambient to a big name in house music -- over the course of TWENTY years -- rank among the most remarkable and unpredictable comebacks in electronic music?  

"Workshop 19" reminds me of those marvelous cassette tape recordings of 80's Hacienda or Warehouse sets that have been known to pop up on the internet, where everything sounded underproduced, the bass or treble would tend to vanish without warning, and eclecticism was a constant theme.  Unfortunately, most of the tracks here are too short to get their message across.  His earlier singles are wondrous for the way they let the groove breathe often for well over ten minutes, and you just can't capture that hypnotic effect in only five or six minutes.

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I can't believe I'm about to write this, but "Churches, Schools, and Guns" is mostly an album of looping, abstract, club unfriendly minimalism and it might be too abstract and too minimal even for me.  As an exercise in crafting dense and chunky techno it makes for an intriguing listen, but you'll need to be in a patient mood before you sit down with it.  The vaguely Hallucinator-like "Laws and Habits" is a change of gears that threatens to launch the album properly, but the spooked-out horror techno of "Follow the Leader" and "Catch Twenty Too" ratchet the mood right back down again to something unfriendly and fierce.  "The Illusion of Choice" is possibly the most conventional banger here, and it's followed up by "We Live As We Dream"'s static-y beats and echo-heavy, barely there looping melodies that could have been lifted from Autechre's fluffiest album "Amber".  I was expecting a more club-oriented album and I got something that'll take quite a bit of deciphering.

Magnetic Fields, "Strange Powers" (documentary)

I finally saw this Magnetic Fields documentary that was released a little over three years ago.  The reviews were generally quite positive, but I feel that was mainly out of respect for Stephin Merritt's body of work. I didn't get a "this is a must see doc" vibe from anyone. My own views are a bit more negative, out of the reviews I read, I identify most strongly with Mike Hale's take in the NYT.

My main issue is that I don't particularly understand for whom this documentary was made.  It's not for the casual music fan who's never heard of the Magnetic Fields, because the documentary makes almost no effort to explain what makes their songs so great or what makes their fanbase tick (save for the odd comment by a Peter Gabriel or Sarah Silverman).  It's not for the hardcore fan who's looking to peek behind the curtain, because all the principals (especially Merritt) are a bit too aloof and cynical to let their guard down.

There are a number of memorable moments in the film.  Seeing the band record songs in Stephin's chaotic mess of an apartment is a treat.  In some sense it de-glamourizes the songs but that's more than compensated by the way the recording humanizes the people involved. I couldn't help but smile at the way Stephin completely recreated the atmosphere of his New York studio apartment when he moved to Los Angeles at the end of the film.

Kudos to Sasha Frere-Jones for appearing on camera to say "mea culpa" for the racism allegations from 2006.

However, deep insights into the minds of band members are rare.  Sam Davol's admission that he isn't friends with Merritt -- even after twenty years playing in bands together -- was a refreshing and fairly shocking admission for any band documentary, especially one like this that is 99% feel good content.  He simply feels that it's best for band chemistry if the members know how keep an appropriate distance from each other.  This was also the take-home message behind the film's most poignant moment.  After Stephin's move to LA, we see Claudia Gonson looking lonely in NY, clearly missing her best friend like crazy but trying to be supportive of the change because she knows that it's best for Merritt.

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 18

"Each stage of a Lyot mix is one half the size of the preceding stage" (63 minutes)

I've been meaning to record something similar to Episode 8 for a while -- something danceable (i.e. beatmatched) but also eclectic and SHORT (under one hour).  Sometimes you don't have any tolerance to take an epic journey and would rather listen to a bite-sized mix instead.

There aren't a lot of things I would change about this one.  The end result was almost exactly what I was aiming for.  

Each stage of a Lyot mix is one half the size of the preceding stage by Bruiserfs on Mixcloud