Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 9

"The production of coherent mixes was restricted by the large physical size of the components" - 85 minutes

This came about because I wanted to make a mix with a some of the music I bought last month in Berlin and a few more tracks from recent 2012 releases.  To make the mix flow properly (or at least, a little better), I dug through some CDs and mp3's for something to fill in the gaps, and slotted in tracks that for the most part I hadn't listened to in years.  

This mix is in many ways the inverse of DoMT Episode 3 (which I temporarily took down to make room for one).  This mix starts with the quieter stuff and builds toward beat-heavy techno, Episode 3 did the opposite.  And where "The Sun in Eclipse ..." was mostly bright and summer-y (even the quieter stuff was gentle and relaxing), "The Production of Coherent Mixes ..." is angry and dark (and even the beatless stuff ranges from unsettling drone ambience to balls-out noise).

Soundcloud link

Redshape, DVS1 at Breakfast Club

Nothing against them, but it's about time we had a break from the usual Chicago and Detroit legends making the rounds.  This was billed as "Pure Dark Techno Night" and the music didn't disappoint, unfortunately, I may have been too exhausted to fully appreciate it.

On the way to the club we passed a man drinking a beer on a street corner who was wearing jeans, a plain white shirt, and a Redshape mask pulled up over his head.  I had just blabbed to friends about how nobody knows exactly who Redshape is and how he even wears a mask for his DJ appearances, the comedic timing of the whole thing was completely accidental. Of course the man on the corner wasn't Redshape, the real person had already begun his set.  Breakfast Club is a tiny place and they always put the DJ booth near the entrance, making it nearly physically impossible to squeeze your way in or out.  On the plus side, as soon as you descend the stairs and enter the club, you're immediately in the epicentre of the party.  And sure enough, there he was behind the decks, wearing the creepy, vacant, shiny red mask, with a posse of five dancing around him behind the decks and a couple hundred people on the floor of the club already going mad.  A couple dozen of them, both guys and girls, were wearing the same red masks too.  I assume Redshape brings these masks to all his DJ gigs, although I certainly wasn't aware of it.  It's as if everyone is invited to be him for the night, as if anyone can be Redshape.  It's like techno Spartacus.

His set was a hybrid of trance and minimal techno, basically a two hour long Redshape remix.  That pretty much sums up why I don't think much of Redshape on record, but there's no doubt this stuff really works in front of a live crowd.

DVS1 is much more my style -- bruising, dark, heavy techno from Detroit.  I was already wrecked about an hour into his set because fatigue and aerobic techno workouts don't mix.  Plus you could feel the exhaustion in the room after Redshape's set.  But all in all it was a great night, and I wouldn't mind a re-do.

Matt Elliott, "The Broken Man"; Spiritualized, "Sweet Heart Sweet Light"

Matt Elliott has an incredible talent for making time stand still with the brooding Eastern European folk epics on his solo albums, but never more so than on his newest, "The Broken Man".  He's never been so direct with this style of music either -- it's mostly just guitar and voice, with strings and piano making their occasional appearances.  There are no near silent bits or ambient interludes to fill out these tracks, although it wouldn't be a Matt Elliott album without the requisite ghostly wailing going on in the background.  But the background layering, when it appears, never overwhelms these tracks.  His voice has never been so upfront, or so filled with hopelessness and sadness, and his guitar playing has never been this intricate and alluring.  The fifth track offers the best window into the droning melancholy that made the Third Eye Foundation albums so essential, but even here the ghostly wailing takes a back seat to a solemn piano melody that wouldn't sound out of place soundtracking a biopic about a disturbed classical music genius.    

BTW, that fifth track is titled "If Anyone Tells Me 'It's Better To Have Loved and Lost Than Never to Have Loved at All', I Will Stab Them In the Face".  As if you needed another reason why this album is so great.

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I heard most of the songs on the new Spiritualized album when I was overdosing on their music this past January.  They had premiered most of them during live shows and it quickly became clear to me that the new album was going to be something spectacular.  

"Sweet Heart Sweet Light" is released next week, and it doesn't disappoint.  For the time being it can be streamed via NPR (try here).  Like with Matt Elliott, Jason has usually been shy about putting his voice upfront as the star of his music.  He'd feature himself more prominently at the start of a song and then quickly hide himself behind a wall of feedback or a choir or something.  That's been gradually changing over the past few years, with a thread that runs through the amazing Acoustic Mainline shows and "Songs in A&E".  However, "Songs in A&E" stripped away nearly all of SPZ's jammy, improvisational tendencies.  Suddenly, SPZ were just another solo project by an increasingly ordinary-sounding confessional singer-songwriter.  Jason had forgotten how to jam it out, he'd forgotten what it was like to play with a band.  Of course this was no fault of his own -- he'd spent months in a hospital ward recovering from a disease that nearly killed him.  The music was still good but it finally feels like SPZ are back doing the things they're best at doing.  

I listen to the album and it makes perfect sense to hear that it was inspired by rehearsing and playing the "Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space" shows in '10.  This is what the follow up to "Let It Come Down" could have been -- the spaced-out gospel and weepy balladry of "LICD" combined with the VU-inspired drone rock and semi-improvisational feedback squalls of "LAGWAFIS".  

I'd been worried about the long term future of this band over the past couple of years, but "Sweet Heart Sweet Light" is a major return to form for Spiritualized.  

Techno link roundup

The Guardian published an article about club closures in Berlin.  Is Berlin's run as the club capital of Europe coming to an end?  The clubbing boom in the city was in large part due to the sudden influx of cheap and abandoned properties after the fall of the Wall.  That had to come to an end eventually as the city becomes more and more gentrified.

Also from the Guardian, here is a list (with accompanying photos) of ten of the most "in demand" DJs in America. And to think, I laughed when Sean Combs said in an interview around 2004 that he was inspired by dancing in techno clubs, thought the music was the next big thing, and wanted to make a dance album of his own.  In retrospect, the surprise isn't that this music is breaking through, but that it took as long as it did.  The Neptunes/Timbaland wave of adventurous producers, who were clearly inspired by electronic music genres far removed from the nominal styles of the artists they were producing, broke through and dominated the pop charts over a decade ago.  Perhaps the record companies had to exhaust every other possible option (diva-dominated R&B, corporate indie and emo, etc.) and a generation of music fans had to come along who couldn't remember any of the negative connotations around raves and drug parties.

Dmitri Nasrallah wrote a cool overview/mini-history of Canadian Techno/House/Bass culture, focusing on the sea changes that have occurred over the past few years.  I'm still not sure how the rise of music distribution and publicity over the internet is connected to a supposedly healthier club scene, but maybe that's what happens when you move away from the city and lose touch with the club scene.  I made my exit around the peak of the   Berlin exodus, so the mentality of apathetic club goers and always finishing a distant runner up to other genres (hip hop, house, reggae + variants, etc.) is what's frozen in my mind.  Maybe electronic music doesn't come off as cold and calculating anymore, and you don't have to be embarrassed about buying the music, but how it this convincing people to tear themselves away from iTunes and hit the clubs?  Again, it's mostly due to the coming of age of a generation of people who don't remember anything about "illegal" raves, for whom dancing to techno or bass in a club is just a cool thing to do.

Music in Berlin and Hamburg, March 2012

-- I considered going clubbing on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg last Friday (Ewan Pearson was the headlining DJ at Baalsaal) but I needed to check out of my hotel the next morning and didn't want to be dead on my feet for the entire day.  My "threshold" for hitting the clubs is a lot higher than it used to be.  This just in: you can get into a lot of trouble on the Reeperbahn.

-- Almost every time I wanted to hear a song and searched for it on Youtube, I got a "GEMA has blocked this content in your country" message, or something to that effect.  Unless a song is hosted through VEVO, it was blocked, so I had to search out a live version if I wanted to hear something (which isn't so hard, of course).  Streaming restrictions must be tough in Germany, I don't think I'd noticed this before. 

--We joked about going to Berghain on Saturday night.  This was a joke because nobody seriously wanted to head down to Berghain in the middle of the night only to be rejected at the door for the n'th time.  The lineup featured, among others, Fiedel, Luke Slater and DJ Pete. We were slightly more serious about going there on Sunday morning or afternoon instead, but didn't.  The Sunday lineup featured Boris and Joy Orbison.  Yes, we've basically reached the point where Berghain's Sunday lineup for the stragglers and supernarcs is better than any other club's Friday or Saturday night lineup.  Berghain completely dominates the Berlin club scene these days.

--  There are so many clubs and parties in Berlin that I didn't even find out about this one until I'd already missed it -- the Emptyset record release party at Horst Kreuzberg featuring Emptyset and possibly my favourite DJ's at the moment (based on their podcasts), Ancient Methods.  Even though I was dead on my feet on Saturday night and was in no shape for clubbing, I still felt that I blew it by not going.

-- I went a bit crazy with CD shopping, dropping money on stuff without bothering to listen to it, buying stuff unheard from artists I like, etc.  Most of the damage was done at Spacehall.  I checked out Real Deal (a really cool punk/metal/hardcore shop) although I didn't buy anything there, and went back to Hard Wax for the first time in almost nine years.  By the time I got to Neurotitian I was too exhausted to sample the anonymous local experimental/noise CD's that I usually buy when I'm there.

Charlatans, Ride, and the 20th anniversary editions that never happened

Sometimes you read an article that seems as though it was written especially for you.  John Bergstrom's recent review/reminiscence of long neglected Ride and Charlatans UK albums from 1992 is one of them.

There's a really, REALLY narrow generation of music fans who a) got swept up in the 2nd wave of shoegaze and Madchester bands, and b) kept listening to those bands when they weren't the hot new thing anymore.  I was one of those people.  I listened to the Charlatans' "Between 10th and 11th" constantly in 1992, either that or the Orb's "U.F Orb" were my most listened to albums of that year.  I knew it was an imperfect, somewhat streaky (perhaps even Verve-y) album, and probably* not as good as their debut.  I loved it anyway, it was my "go to" album of the year, appropriate for any mood, any occasion.   Most people thought it was just another band going through their sophomore slump on the way down to one hit wonder oblivion.  The fact that The Charlatans recovered their reputation and became the last band standing from their era, with the #1 UK albums to boot, was pretty remarkable.   

I didn't have a job and basically had to beg my parents to let me spend the money on going to their concert in April of that year, the only time I ever had to do that.

Of course I overplayed "Between 10th and 11th" and when I discovered about a million new bands the next year (and had more disposable income for buying music) I very rarely even glanced at it for the next couple of years, and until just now, I hadn't heard most of these songs for well over a decade.  Every song, every word, every note, sounded so instantly familiar.  "Between 10th and 11th" might be a bit of a troublesome album, arguably the only Charlatans album where they didn't seem to know what kind of band they wanted to be.  But it still sounds inspired, and I still can hear exactly why I loved it in 1992.

Ride's "Going Blank Again" is a bit of a different story.  For me, this album never went away, and I still can't understand why anyone would prefer it to their debut.  "Nowhere" was a copycat album through and through, "Going Blank Again" was an original.  Witness "Leave Them All Behind" -- shoegaze meets the Who and the Beach Boys, rocking out for eight unstoppable minutes.  Which other bands were doing that?  But even though it had so many individually great tracks, "Going Black Again" always seemed like less than the sum of its parts.  I'd followed the Charlatans from their first single onward, but I hadn't heard much of Ride until this album (CFNY played the Charlatans all the time in those days, Ride only rarely) and didn't have an existing emotional attachment to them.

That's not the whole story though, because even though the album (and "Leave Them All Behind" to a greater extent) got a lot of praise at the time, nobody really talks about it anymore.  Bergstrom doesn't offer any ideas as to why that happened either, other than the obvious (i.e. the band broke up a couple of years later, shoegaze fell off most critics' radar, etc.), but none of those reasons have prevented songs and albums from attaining classic status before.

Modeselektor live at Block Club 15/03/2012

The first time I saw Modeselektor, it was at an event in Berlin and I did a lot more wandering than dancing -- wandering from room to room, to the outdoor patio next to the river, stopping occasionally to see who was performing.  Most of the people at the party were nomadic as me, and only a fraction were dancing at any one time.  And those that were dancing on the sparsely populated dance floor were pretty freaky by typical techno party standards, even for Berlin (although most of them made their appearances after Modeselektor's set).  I only had a passing familiarity with Modeselektor at the time, and wasn't paying very close attention to their set, although they definitely made an impression ...

[...which I remember as a good, but inconsistent impression.  Or at least that's how it plays out in my mind.  I was surprised to check what I wrote about them at the time, and it certainly wasn't positive.  And I had no recollection of anyone else who played that night.  Memory is a funny thing ...]

The second time I saw Modeselektor, they played in a proper concert venue, i.e. a venue not suited for dancing and/or club acts, although the show itself was quite good.

The third time I saw Modeselektor, I finally saw them as they are meant to be seen -- in a packed dance club.  Yarin Lidor played one of the best warm-up sets I've ever heard, something very close to Modeselektor's own DJ sets, where reggae, funky and bruising techno rub shoulders for hours on end.  By the time he wrapped up and Modeselektor were ready to hit the stage, it was 3:30 AM and the crowd was rabid.

It had been a while since I was at a show this packed, where you had a fight and claw to hold your place on the dancefloor.  Modeselektor, with their dazzling video screens and their champagne baths, certainly know how to throw a party.

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 8

"Gullible souls have noticed a correspondence in shape between certain mixes" - 52 minutes

Here's a useful link I discovered around the time I made the mix ... there's a bit of something for everyone in there, no matter what your level of professionalism and technical know-how.

For some reason I was listening to "Lemon Incest" and decided it would be a good song to start a mix with. From there, it developed into a semi-old school thing.  Every track, with the exception of Orphyx, is over fifteen years old.  The spirit of '90's electronica lives on ...

At the risk of revealing how the sausage was made (and therefore ruining the mix for you somewhat), I had to play a lot with tempos to make the mix work.  I had a preconceived idea in my head and wanted these particular tracks to fit together in this order, but in my head the tempos are always a lot more equal than in reality.  Still, I think things worked out fairly well in the end.

Gullible Souls have noticed a correspondence in shape between certain mixes by Bruiserfs on Mixcloud

Dance music at the Grammys

This performance at the Grammys is somewhat old news, as is Philip Sherburne's fairly well-circulated take down (which has seemingly vanished from Spin's website and the entire internet, but here is a sample of what Sherburne wrote).  In case it disappears from those tumblr and other linking sites, I'll excerpt it again here:

There was David Guetta, flopping about like a Muppet behind the mixer, jabbing away at the controls in a pantomime of performance. What was all that flicking of the faders and tweaking of the knobs about? Why was he wearing his headphones over one ear, as though he were cueing up the next record? During the French superstar’s time onstage, only one song (‘I Can Only Imagine,’ from his Nothing But The Beat, which features Chris Brown and Lil Wayne in its album version) was played. Simply put, there were absolutely no services required of him that a DJ would traditionally provide. He might have tweaked a filter here or there or cut out the bass a time or two, but that was the extent of his interventions. (No matter what he’s doing with his hands, you never hear an appreciable change in the music or note any kind of cause/effect relationship.)

My rebuttal to that paragraph was written three months before the Grammys, in my review of the 2011 MTV EMA's:

David Guetta hits the stage to save the second hour of this show with Jessie J, Taio Cruz and Ludacris. I'm not sure exactly what Guetta is doing back there. He's sporting a pair of headphones (which probably aren't plugged in because he never uses them), pretends to tweak dials, and holds his hands in the air. But the laser light show is amazing, the songs are too, and the guest singers nailed their one minute each. Guys like Moby will be the first to tell you that DAT shows can rock too.  

I'm not exactly sure what Sherburne was expecting, especially since award show performances always favour spectacle and creative guest spots over musicianship.

I didn't mind that Grammys spot, sure, Deadmau5 and David Guetta weren't doing much of anything, but there were plenty of things going on (it certainly wasn't boring), and everybody was dancing (yes, they were on TV, but people do go out to dance to this type of music in real life).  There's a place for this kind of performance, and Sherburne certainly knows and respects that -- he wrote a feature on the most recent rise of dance music and DJ Culture in North America for Spin a few months ago.  

I hardly ever disagree with Sherburne, but I disagreed with him here.  Unfortunately, I have to try to recall his full argument from memory.  He wasn't objecting to the idea that people like listening to Skillrex rather than dancing at Berghain until 7AM on Monday morning.  It was not a "people prefer megastar X to semi-underground phenomenon Y" type of plea for authenticity.  No, IIRC, he was upset that far too many people will see the Grammys and think that "dance music" means this and only this, and it will never occur to them that it can also mean dancing to booming techno all night at Berghain.

To this, I still say "so what"?  Plenty of people believe that rock music means KISS -- makeup, fireworks, and sex parties.   Scenes blow up and it just creates more room for every kind of taste, and eventually those subgroups will themselves become so big that they'll never interact or even acknowledge the existence of the other.

Besides that -- and this is something that is woefully under-reported -- the scene inhabited by Skillrex, Guetta et al is far more inclusive and accessible.  One of the reasons they're so huge is because they're happy to slot themselves into the music industry's regular marketing model, where anyone can invest the time and money into buying their music, going to their shows, and watching their videos on the internet.  It's what every exec dreamed would happen when Prodigy and Chemical Brothers were hitting it big in 1997.  On the other hand, it is nearly impossible to gain admission to Berghain.  The number of people who try to get in every weekend is far higher than the number of people they can admit, but when all is said and done, most people don't get in and they can't go home and download the experience later on.  David Guetta's world is a world of hearing your favourite three minute song on the radio, the Berghain world is one where you need to invest six hours to get a taste of what it's about and you'll never find out the name of most of the songs you heard.

The Langley Schools Music Project, "Innocence and Despair"

On most weekday mornings I wake up with the radio.  The music plays, and the DJ tends to ramble on about the songs, but I'm usually not listening very carefully to either.  But music can really surprise you when you're not really paying attention and aren't expecting to hear anything special.

I was completely taken aback by the sound of a children's choir singing the Beach Boys "God Only Knows".  The voices were haunting and yet somehow uplifting.  Voice intonation would come and go, which would ordinarily ruin a song for me but in this case it didn't seem to matter. There's something so very affecting about hearing children struggling with fragile, untrained voices, singing words that you know they can't possibly fully understand.  It's exactly the same unusual quality that characterizes Daniel Johnston's best work.  Plus, the absurdly simple arrangement flies in the face of the Spectorian approach that Brian Wilson took with his mid-60's productions.  The DJ identified this otherworldly recording as something belonging to the Langley Schools Music Project.  The brainchild of Canadian schoolteacher Hans Fenger, these long lost 1976-77 recordings were rounded up and re-released on CD in 2001 with the title "Innocence and Despair".  The title is perfect -- no two words could summarize Brian Wilson's lyrics any better.   Somehow I'd never heard of this album before, even though it finished 29th in Pazz and Jop in 2003, and inspired.at least two prominent Hollywood movies (Richard Linklater's "School of Rock" and Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are".

Of course, song selection is the most essential aspect of any covers albums.  In 2001 (and today), nearly every song here was an obvious, timeless classic.  But in 1976?  The Beach Boys had been rediscovered and rehabilitated only two years earlier, after the release of their greatest hits compilation "Endless Summer".  Fleetwood Mac were only one album into the Buckingham/Nicks era, their days as an inescapable FM radio juggernaut hadn't arrived yet.  Barry Manilow is much better regarded today than he was in the late 70's and early 80's.  Pulling off songs as weird as "Space Oddity" and "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" with such fluidity --and with children -- took a considerable amount of vision.  Fenger somehow knew what would work just as well as he knew what he needed to avoid. One Bay City Rollers song is fine, but most people in his position would have overloaded on goofy, happy songs like that.