Interstate 808

Instra:mental & dBridge - White Snares This is bloody...

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:55:17 +0100

Instra:mental & dBridge - White Snares

This is bloody gorgeous.

Savages - Silence Yourself

Thu, 09 May 2013 13:57:00 +0100

Reviewed that Savages album. Didn’t really like it very much.

Something that has kind of occurred to me since writing this is the positioning of Savages within the “indie” world (indie as genre not set of ideals) and using this as a defence for their music, i.e. People saying “Oh, Indie music has been so soft and languid for ages, it’s good to see somebody roughing it up”.

What confuses me is why do these people not seek out harder, heavier, weirder music? If indie is, by common cultural definition, a bit soft, why not go and listen to some hardcore or something? There’s a long line of acts out there that run the gamut from cleaner, leaner sides of post-hardcore through to fucking extreme metal like Devin Townsend or some shit. There are loads of really great heavy, rough bands out there who don’t get talked about in terms of “indie” because that would just be stupid. So why put Savages in the indie category instead of, say, the punk category? Is it the press? The label? The presentation?

fallowrecords: MM/KM - Bust A Move A few copies of this...

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:23:56 +0100

fallowrecords:

MM/KM - Bust A Move

A few copies of this arrived this morning and are now in the shop. Only a few.

Buy.

Metasplice - Prismatic SwayI really want to hear this album.

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:03:07 +0100

Metasplice - Prismatic Sway

I really want to hear this album.

"In fact, the very success of the owners of capital in securing the elephant’s share productivity..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 01:32:12 +0100

“In fact, the very success of the owners of capital in securing the elephant’s share productivity gains and ensuring low effective taxes, lies at the very heart of the credit crisis.”

- Marc Chandler - Foul-Weather Friends

I don’t really have the economic know-how to fully digest all of this but certain parts stood out.

Hardcore for Nerds: andrewtsks: “Savages do recall a number of post-punk, no wave, and...

Mon, 06 May 2013 23:50:47 +0100

Hardcore for Nerds: andrewtsks: “Savages do recall a number of post-punk, no wave, and...:

andrewtsks:

“Savages do recall a number of post-punk, no wave, and metal bands. “I call it the ‘Old Man’s Disease,’ which I had when I was 21,” says BBC 6Music DJ Marc Riley, debating whether the band’s originality, or potential lack thereof, matters. Riley was a significant enough early…

HC4N makes a great point about the lack of originality being a bad thing until you find an album you like that is unoriginal and then you have to explain your way out. In recent(ish) times, the second Girls album really fits that bill for me. Also Angel Olsen. But if we focus on personal connections/interpretations/resonances as opposed to something arbitrarily “objective”, it should all work out fine in the end.

Anyway, getting on to Savages, the album is not so good. For me, it’s a conceptually interesting (perhaps even necessary?) record which seems to dwell on areas that I am all for hearing artists trying to deal with; silence, self-control, focus, violence. Unfortunately the music is not interesting enough. The revolutionary aspect of the band is all talk. The music seems to root an idea of authenticity in a canon of sounds which (I’m guessing) Savages might be attempting to appropriate - sounds that are “real”, “raw”, “honest”, “powerful” - but they do it in such a straight-forward manner, with such straight faces and a lack of imagination or musical personality, that I can’t take it seriously as an artistic statement. It works fine as a rhetoric statement thought, most of the time at least.

Maybe they will get to a place down the line where they have their own sound and can reflect their radically-minded spoken language with a radical musical language. For now they definitely do not have that. They are not extreme in any sense of the word. As a band, they are not amazingly heavy or intense, nor incredibly refined. Classic punk’n’roll tropes abound without the threat of real subversion, simply “updated” for “today’s world”. That, for me, is not enough.

Full review forthcoming, if I can find the time and can make myself listen to the album a few more times.

A Pleasant Post-Apocalypse

Mon, 06 May 2013 02:28:31 +0100

A Pleasant Post-Apocalypse

Read The Unbearable Lightness Of Being and Junky this weekend so far. Feel like I haven’t read...

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:54:56 +0100

Read The Unbearable Lightness Of Being and Junky this weekend so far. Feel like I haven’t read a book in ages. In the mood to consume everything.

Ghil - Okkyung Lee - Ideologic Organ

Sat, 04 May 2013 14:02:16 +0100

Ghil - Okkyung Lee - Ideologic Organ:

Can’t wait to hear this.

"I begin to wonder about the relationship between geo-history, the saturation of space with affect,..."

Fri, 03 May 2013 21:20:55 +0100

“

I begin to wonder about the relationship between geo-history, the saturation of space with affect, and psychic health.

I want to
describe how
I come to
be here-now:
another
threshold

I start writing a linear story, winding, but linear, about psychic health and academic production, a story that tries to make sense of why I am resigning from a tenure track job from a major research university at the same time as I am completing a book manuscript for publication. Not only resigning but also changing continents, returning to a place I have not called home for a very long time. This, I realize, is a story about words and places. So let me start with the word that started it, or named its fractures.

”

- “On Quitting” - by Keguro Macharia

This is an incredible piece of writing.

Angel Olsen & Lisa O’Neill were both incredible last...

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:26:50 +0100

Angel Olsen & Lisa O’Neill were both incredible last night. Two stunning voices who both have the ability to turn a phrase in a way that is completely unique to them.

I can count on one hand the amount of acts I’ve seen this year play with just a guitar and manage to be interesting. Both women last night managed that and more.

I walked home in a daze.

"The punk mentality used to be a default ethos among rock kids, but over the past decade that fell..."

Thu, 02 May 2013 18:18:30 +0100

“The punk mentality used to be a default ethos among rock kids, but over the past decade that fell apart; punk-think, which used to feel joyful and liberating, has started to look crabbed and guarded as well. Who, at this point, needs to lob spitballs at a monoculture that anyone with an Internet connection can easily escape? It seems bolder now to embrace things with reckless innocence and delight in artifice — which is exactly what some of the earliest New York punks, and some of the best to follow them, were aiming for.”

- Nitsuh Abebe, “This Is Punk?” Best sentences of cultural criticism I’ve read this year. (via judyxberman)

——

Love Nitsuh and Judy both, but this isn’t Nitsuh’s strongest work.

The “punk mentality” used to be a “default ethos” among “rock kids”?* I guess this depends on where you grew up, but that’s gonna be news for punk kids who got sneered at for liking The Slits over Zeppelin, treated like space aliens for liking Slant 6 more than the Beatles, for liking Half Japanese or Unrest more than Aerosmith or AC/DC, you know? Nirvana did something to unite punk and rock fans, but the depth of that union may have been pretty surface level for many.

Not sure what “punk-think” is either. But “joyful and liberating” and “guarded” aren’t opposites. Frankly, it makes sense to be protective of the stuff that is the most awesome and precious to you, especially for communities of marginalized folks. You know? You want to keep Taco Bell out of your all-ages DIY festival not because you hate fun, but because you want to create a context where reckless innocence can thrive unimpeded. That’s always been part of the dynamic.

And then this idea that the internet enables “escape” from monoculture; okay but what if the point isn’t to “escape” but to engage and ultimately transform stuff? Is Nitsuh saying that critical readings of and attitudes toward shitty mass culture are obsolete because you can find alternatives easier? Seriously? True, it is the prevalent trend right now, to imagine that mass culture doesn’t actually have any power over people because one can make jokes about it on twitter, or find a alternative consumer identity that fits one’s taste preferences without much friction.

Yes, “delight in artifice” is great, but artifice is one critical tool in a artist’s toolbox. So the question is: to what end? Delight in artifice for the sake of artifice is still frequently a capitalist bummer.

And okay, we’re being a tad strident here (BECAUSE PUNX ARE ALWAYS ANGRY LOL!), but I dunno why it seems suddenly trendy to conceptualize “punk” in 2013 as if it resembled the Maximum Rock N Roll letters page in ‘94; today’s punks are heterogenous and frequently musically omnivorous and doing rad joyful stuff all over. When you see writing like this you wonder how deeply engaged these writers are with the diverse universe of punk kids today. And maybe that’s not Nitsuh’s job as a pop music writer for a major publication, or maybe it’s just descriptive of phenomena endemic to NYC (which we don’t know much about, having never lived there) but it’s kind of disappointing.

Because if the prescription is to nudge punk in the direction of poptimism, that doesn’t seem “bolder”, it just seems trendier and more congruent with late capitalism.

*We apologize for the overuse of scarequotes in this post, but those sentences are full of questionable constructs and abstractions we can’t really get behind.

(via gaysagainstgaga)

Respect to you, too, and I understand why you’d have a problem with the piece. But I think you’re seeing punk as a philosophy or lifestyle — and especially the punks of today — through rose-colored glasses. As someone who has loved punk music for basically my whole life (despite never identifying as “a punk,” which I think is key to having some distance on it), I understand that it’s upsetting to see the movement painted as reactionary.

You reference poptimism, and that is important to this argument. To identify as “a punk” in 2013 is, in large part, to be a rockist. And that comes with some ideological baggage that historically privileges the musical forms approved by straight white men over genres dominated by women, queer people, and people of color. This is what your Slits fans and your Led Zeppelin fans have in common — they both think that a guitar-wielding person singing songs that he or she wrote is the highest form of musical expression. That doesn’t mean that everyone who identifies as “a punk” is so retrograde that they can’t appreciate a great pop song, but it does mean I can’t speak to Nitsuh’s familiarity with punks in 2013, but I’ve definitely seen enough of that world to notice a problem with people who profess to be so radical closing their minds to so much of what our culture has to offer.

There are aspects of this that don’t even have to with rockism. Some of it has to do with how self-evident punk’s anti-artifice argument has become over the past 35 years. No one’s shocked anymore when you point out that most pop stars’ songs are written by committee or that their images are constructed in a boardroom or that they shill for major corporations. (Never mind that plenty of mainstream bands who “write their own songs” and are marketed as “punk” were constructed in a very similar way.) This stuff is just so obvious it’s become naive to say it out loud. This is, in part, a credit to how effective its early critiques of pop culture were. (Never mind that, as Nitsuh notes, the very first punks had much more open and complex relationships to pop culture than subsequent waves.) But since that critique has stayed static as our collective understanding of pop culture has evolved — especially since the turn of the millennium — it’s punk that’s become outmoded.

This is what’s hurting punk, as an identity, a critical stance, and a genre of music. I don’t deny that we need the punk voice, that corrective negation, that insistence that we question the artifice that threatens to make us complacent. But as we become more sophisticated in our understanding of all that, we need punk to become more sophisticated, too — we need it to tell us something about our culture that we don’t already know. And I can’t think of the last time it’s done that.

(via judyxberman)

——

Judy, we appreciate the response here, but we remain deeply puzzled by this:

“To identify as “a punk” in 2013 is, in large part, to be a rockist.”[…]
the ideology they’ve adopted — not by liking punk music as one genre among many but by identifying as “a punk” — values an increasingly shallow definition of authenticity that upholds some troubling received wisdom that reinforces classic-rock norms.

We don’t understand this. Why should this be so? Who gets to decide what someone else’s identity means? This is a bummer for us as queer people who are constantly being told what identifying as queer should mean, instead of allowed to define it for ourselves, or as feminists who are told that feminism means hating men. Assuming we’re using Douglas Wolk’s definition of rockism, which means positing rock values as “normative,” it’s easy to forget that first wave punk can be understood as a criticism of rockism using a rock vocabulary. In 2013, the punk labels we love the most are putting out hip-hop, weird electro noise music, house, dubby-folk, alongside guitar rock. (Yes, dull annoying rockist wankers are still present in punk, just like the rest of the world. But, um, anyone with an internet connection can easily escape them!)

“And that comes with some ideological baggage that historically privileges the musical forms approved by straight white men over genres dominated by women, queer people, and people of color. This is what your Slits fans and your Led Zeppelin fans have in common — they both think that a guitar-wielding person singing songs that he or she wrote is the highest form of musical expression. “

We’ll set aside questions about which genres have offered which kinds of opportunities for diverse kinds of humans, because, OMG huge topic. But we know a lot of punks who love the Slits, and we don’t think we know any that think a “guitar-wielding person singing songs that he or she wrote is the highest form of musical expression”. Frankly, we don’t think most Slits fans even give a shit about what the “highest form of musical expression” is. That isn’t the point. The point is community, possibility, inspiration, not technical skill, not even “great art for the ages”, not virtuosity. And we don’t know any Slits fans in 2013 who aren’t also into like, Dolly Parton, and Salt N’ Pepa and Kate Bush.

To the extent that punk still fixates on guitar rock, it’s not because most punks think guitar rock is the “highest form” of anything, so much as a reflection of the obvious fact that when music is made in a context that is focused on community and traditions, people create stuff they choose the tools and tropes that are available to them based on their immediate cultural context, not because they think those tools are inherently superior to all others.

And this business about punk’s critique remaining static? This is hard to address without getting into the messy business of defining what punk’s fundamental critique actually is (there are multitudes—a topic for another post). And there’s also something to be interrogated about why novelty is so paramount these days, or the false equation of novelty with sophistication—why we’re all more inclined to ask for culture to “tell us something new” instead of “tell us something true” (even as we could point to a lot of bands/artists that are doing both.)

But if you accept that part of the point of the endeavor is some kind of social transformation on individual or collective levels, just because something is obvious and “everyone” knows doesn’t mean there’s a reason to stop saying it! There is endless value in articulating and rearticulating big corny irreducible truths like:

Women and queers should be able to control their bodies and destinies.

An increasingly small handful of corporations control the vast majority of media outlets, and we should fix that.

Authority should be accountable.

We should work to create better and more egalitarian systems that value people over money and privilege.

You have agency and you don’t need permission.

It’s okay to feel how you’re feeling.

Etc.

Punk praxis does this stuff for us; gives us access to a community of shared values and mutual support and critical inquiry and accountability. Obvs not the only place you can access those insights and resources, but it works for us, and that’s why we’re punks, even as most of the music we listen to sounds more like Sade than Minor Threat these days.

(via gaysagainstgaga)

Re-blogging this because FUCK YES!!!

Honestly, I usually like Judy and Nitsuh’s writing but there is some startlingly reductive thought going on here. I’m glad someone said everything I would have said about a million times clearer than I would have said it.

(h/t to HC4N for the link)

What an insane line-up. Didn’t know Mick Barr was playing,...

Thu, 02 May 2013 02:35:27 +0100

What an insane line-up. Didn’t know Mick Barr was playing, though he clashes with Pharmakon and that’d kill me if I was there. Just insane all round though. I need to see KTL soon.

latenightjimmy: Hello, Tumblr readers. This is Jonathan Cohen,...

Wed, 01 May 2013 18:57:54 +0100

latenightjimmy:

Hello, Tumblr readers. This is Jonathan Cohen, the show’s music booker.

We feel so lucky to bring you great music every night on the show, and today, we’re going to try something a little different. We’re thrilled to be premiering the song “Shiner ‘92” from the forthcoming Rodan compilation, “Fifteen Quiet Years,” which will be released by Touch & Go Records on June 11.

Rodan was a short-lived but hugely influential quartet from Louisville, Ky., who broke up soon after the release of their only album, 1994’s “Rusty.” They also happen to be one of my all-time favorite bands (for proof, here’s an essay I wrote last summer when Rodan’s Jason Noble passed away). We hope you’ll check out the song, and if you like it, more of their music on your platform of choice.

Digital Download pre-order at iTunes

CD and vinyl pre-order at Amazon

Rodan. Jimmy Fallon. What is this even?

"But although there was a mutual admiration pact between Eno and the no wavers (who revered their..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 17:20:41 +0100

“But although there was a mutual admiration pact between Eno and the no wavers (who revered their patron for his work in Roxy Music and his solo output), there were big differences too. No wave was based around an aesthetic of assault and confrontation. Lyrically, it stretched from deadpan nihilism (James Chance) and tortured expressionism (Lydia Lunch of Teenage Jesus) to explorations of psychotic states (Mars). There was a huge gulf between no wave and Eno’s alternately quirky and placid music, especially the proto-ambient directions he pursued on Another Green World and Discreet Music. Lunch speaks warmly of Eno today but at the time she made a number of public jibes, describing Eno’s music as “something that flows and weaves… It’s kind of nauseating,” she said. “It’s like drinking a glass of water. It means nothing, but it’s very smooth going down.””

- From Simon Reynolds’ piece on Brian Eno’s time in New York for the RBMA magazine.

I’ve always loved that Lunch put-down and it’s indicative of the distrust a lot of the people in the No Wave “scene” seem to have had for him. Can’t really blame them either. This piece generally just reminds me of how I dislike just as much about Eno’s personality and ideas as I like. Some great music in there and interesting concepts but some of it doesn’t go down all that smooth.

decayedintelligence: Coil’s second live performance, August...

Wed, 01 May 2013 12:48:24 +0100

decayedintelligence:

Coil’s second live performance, August 24th, 1983.

Reblogging so Niamh sees.

The Quietus | Imperfectionism: An Interview With Lumigraph

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:34:29 +0100

The Quietus | Imperfectionism: An Interview With Lumigraph:

I talked to Gareth about his music, which is really good in case you didn’t already know that. Tape is sold out but do grip the digital, it’s totally worth it.

lizpelly: this is a new projectFaye Orlove & I have been...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:24:40 +0100

lizpelly:

this is a new project

Faye Orlove & I have been working on it for the past month or so

it launches tonight around midnight

we are very excited

if you want to know why it’s called “The Media” i will talk your ear off about it sometime

how bout @ our launch party? it’s this Friday @ Lorem Ipsum

Beneath for Electronic Exlporations.Loving this.

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:58:13 +0100

Beneath for Electronic Exlporations.

Loving this.

Big Black - Bad Houses Morning listening.

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:37:15 +0100

Big Black - Bad Houses

Morning listening.