February 2012
23 posts
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WatchSo beautiful. Sink in, slip away. Ambient to lift my mood.
New tape out now on Hooker Vision, go get it before they’re all gone.
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“Everywhere we look, we see companies (not to mention reactionary politicians)...”
– Joe Kennedy - Against The New Naive: ‘Innocence’, branding and Michel Houellebecq.
Brilliant in every single word.
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Making Overtures: The Emergence Of Indie Classical →
I don’t really get the point of this article. Opening with a clash of styles like Terry Riley and Andrew W.K. kind of makes things seems a good bit weirder than they need to be here. Terry Riley has been a huge influence on so many established members of the indie cannon so as to render the inclusion of a figure like Andrew W.K. in the equation obsolete. By focusing only on the most popular...
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Julia Holter - Ekstasis →
Been waiting a long time for this. It’s been a pretty incredible 6-8 months for Mrs. Holter and it’s wonderful to see some degree of success and acclaim bestowed upon someone so deserving.
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Nialler9 - Some Words About The Blondes Album →
Some very nice words from Nialler about a really good album. It’s interesting where he mentions that the album “lends itself to daydreaming and to intense paying attention”. This is one of the qualities I associate most with good ambient music, but also with any kind of truly “modern” music. Along with that, he raises the issue of hardware - instruments and physical...
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"...there is no more underground..."
”..there is no more underground…”
Think about that sentence fragment for a second and try to comprehend the amount of misguided cultural blindness that was involved in writing it in a national newspaper. It’s quite staggering when you get into it. Imagine believing that what you know, what you see day-to-day, is all there is in the world. Didn’t the 20th century make...
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“Rockism’s grand problems had become official. At its best, it made you a...”
– Why We Fight: Embarrassment Rock - Nitsuh Abebe
Interesting look at the way we talk about Rock Music (TM). It’s become so difficult to describe a good rock (or punk, metal, what have you) band without sounding like you’re trying to out drink Lester Bangs at the Cream office Christmas...
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“In this week’s Kerrang!, Marmozets meet an acutal marmoset. Find out what...”
– Music journalism, it lives. (via tomewing)
And somewhere in London, a features editor just got promoted.
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Café Oto on Foxy Digitalis →
Great interview with John Chantler, the man responsible for programming what I would consider to be probably the most interesting venue in Europe. I’ve never been to Café Oto but it is top of my list for my next trip to London. It’s been two years since I’ve been there and I’m dying to get back.
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“Slipping through cracks in the city’s surface it’s possible to find...”
– Rory Gibb - “Kindred Spirits: Burial The Urban Explorer”
Rory Gibb knocks another one out of the park. For me, Burial is the ultimate in ambient music, the perfect successor to the Aphex Twin album I mentioned yesterday. Burial’s work to date has that same feel. It is music that...
“…this music is part of a new way of looking at the world, a new language;...”
– From Jon Savage’s 1992 review of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (via Dummy)
This is a really great review of a great record. Here the form of the review works with the form of the record, the criticism doing it’s best to keep up with the art before realising it must in...
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The issue of micro-genres in metal →
This is something I see a lot of in dance music as well, as techno and house splinter into a million pieces the more you zoom in on them. It does make things more difficult for the casual listener or the new kid, but I feel that is often the point. Genre is such an exclusionary tool, used to mark the unknowing as ignorant. And, as it says in the article, it’s never the artists leading this...
The last week has seen the apparent closure of two venues quite close to my heart; the Lower Deck and Tripod/Crawdaddy. I’ve spent an awful lot of time in both places over the past few years, in both casual and professional capacities, and gotten to know some of the really good people involved in both places.
The Lower Deck was pretty much home to the most interesting bits of heavy music...
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WatchNeil Young talks about “the tragedy of the mp3”. It’s kind of hammy in parts and he gets his figures mixed up and he makes some horrible comments towards the end, but it’s still kind of worth watching if you’ve half an hour to spare.
There’s a lot of things to talk about in the video, but the most important to me is the divide Young makes between people...
Dublin City Council matches landlords of empty... →
“Dublin City Council is calling on owners of vacant properties in the city to see if they are interested in registering their empty buildings on a register of suitable vacant spaces for individuals and organisations who require space for creative, cultural, and craft uses to rent for one to six months.”
This is really fantastic news. Can’t begin to say how excited I am about the...
RA: Technoise →
Basically a profile of some really interesting artists operating at the confluence of noise and techno. A lot of good stuff to be unearthed here for those who are willing to put in the time. Justin Farrar is keeping tabs on this sound better than anyone else at the minute, certainly in the club community.
For more inspiration, have a look at this great mnml ssgs post from a couple of months back...
Azealia Banks live review - State.ie →
This is an interesting review in a couple of ways. Live reviews are always kind of strange things to do and that must only be intensified when the act you’re reviewing has six songs and played for less than half an hour. This is something that I keep coming back to in my mind. How can we actually “review” something so nascent?
I think the people who talk about music in public...
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Top five regrets of the dying →
