Shuffle Off #1: Synthetic sounds redux

I have no shortage of ideas for recurring features for this blog; my only problem is making the time to make them happen. So I'm gonna strike while the iron is hot and launch one mere hours after it occurred to me. Inspired very indirectly by this popular garden-blog ritual/meme and by the way some people include what they're "Currently Listening To" in forums and blog posts, I thought it would be fun to share with you what's in heavy rotation on my car's 6-disc CD changer every now and then.

Ever since we got this car with such a ludicrous amount of audio options (there is also a plug for an iPod), I've been having fun curating various combinations of albums: an all-Paul Simon set, all-Van-the-Man, all-Janis, all-Radiohead ... and then some looser ideas, like a mishmash of indie-rock and earlier Americana (Matt Pond, My Morning Jacket, Music from Big Pink, etc.) and later a tribute to psychedelia (Hendrix, Big Brother & the Holding Co., etc.). Then I hit "shuffle" and let the fun begin.

At the moment, I'm on an electronic music kick (I hate the term "electronica"--much prefer "synthetic," since that's the general feel of the stuff) for the first time in years, prompted in part by listening to that Burial album all sorts of unlikely people seem to love (me, I'm finding it kind of repetitive and annoying) and an Autechre EP I'd been looking for for years and finally found used in a Toronto record store. So I decided to pull out a semi-random colleccion of stuff I acquired about 10 years ago (can it be? yikes!) when I discovered that instrumental electronic music was ideal accompaniment for writing, proofreading, driving to work, and all sorts of other mundane activities.

So here's what's in the car as of the beginning of February 2008:

1. Autechre, Gantz Graf. This duo is still probably tied with Aphex Twin as my all-time favorite purveyors of unlistenable noise. And I mean that as a high compliment; they have a brilliant (and frequently quite witty) way of balancing rhythm and chaos, although this particular EP dates from the height of their mostly-chaos period. I find myself fast-forwarding through the 3 tracks when one of them pops up--only to discover that it sounds almost exactly the same in fast-forward as it does at regular speed! (Value added: the flip side of the disc contains a trio of nice videos. But I'm not really sure this was worth the $13 Canadian I shelled out, since it's basically a glorified single.)



2. Kosheen, Resist. Bought this used shortly after it came out in 2001 on the strength of the single, "Hide U," and the freaky Natural History Museum cover art. I was fairly disappointed with most of the other 15 tracks and put it aside for years, but now it's turning out to be the standout of the current shuffle mix. I don't normally care for vocals in drum-and-bass-y stuff--to me the deathknell of the synthetic non-revolution of the late 90s was the widespread addition of singers and/or samples of singers--but I gotta say, Kosheen's Sian Evans has a fine voice, and the lyrics are a bit less silly/disposable than most in the genre.



3. Land of the Loops, Bundle of Joy. If you ask me, this is one of the great lost albums of the 1990s, ripe for rediscovery 20 years from now. One-man-band Alan Sutherland put together a wonderful collection of catchy melodies, weird sound bites, lovely ballads, and brief snippets that sound less like filler than like connective tissue. Secret weapons: guest vocalists Heather Lewis, Simone Ashby, and Meadie Ballenger. So, yeah, maybe I'm not as anti-singers-in-synthetic-music as I think I am. But only when they sound this good.



4. Howie B., Turn the Dark Off. Mr. B was the go-to guy for U2 and other rockers who wanted to dip their toes in synthetic music for a while there. Witness the spoken-word cameos by Robbie Robertson here, sounding nothing like his Band incarnation and a lot like a cross between Laurie Anderson and David Byrne.

5. Freaky Chakra vs. Single Cell Orchestra. I either paid a buck for this or got it for free, and I've always enjoyed it, although a friend of mine heard two minutes of it once and said it gave her a headache.

6. Aphrodite, Aphrodite. Another free or buck find, and a good illustration of what I was just saying about how annoying I find vocalists in this kind of music. Oh, no, wait: the only thing more annoying than singers in drum-and-bass? Rappers in drum-and-bass. That was the death knell.

The Year in Music: 2007 edition

Moving right along.

ALBUM OF THE YEAR: I was tempted to give this to In Rainbows, just because, but instead there shall be a tie. One winner is incredibly unhip and the mere mention of his name will cost me valuable credibility points among the cognoscenti, but those will be regained by the revelation of the other winner. Just watch:

Paul Simon, Surprise.



As a soft rock lover from my youth, I was a huge Simon & Garfunkel fan, and followed both their solo careers longer than most right-thinking people did, but they both lost me sometime in the early 1980s. Graceland, which is the one Paul Simon album it's probably cool to like, did nothing for me, and the ones after that left me cold, too. Until this year, when 60something Paul joined forces with 60something Brian Eno. The end result is just kind of great, if you ask me: beautiful production, moving and funny lyrics, catchy melodies. I listened to it over and over again when I first got it early in 2007, and think I will do so again, very soon.

Jens Lekman, Night Falls Over Kortedala.



Much of what I just said about Surprise's strengths applies to this album, too, only its creator is almost 40 years younger. I'm a bit conflicted about giving this Album of the Year status because I've only been listening to it for the last 3 weeks or so, but it's so incredibly good that I'm gonna go with my gut. The guy does sound a great deal like Stephen Merritt, Jonathan Richman, and my main man Don Lennon, but he's also some kind of wild production genius--no album by any of those fine individuals sounds anywhere near this sonically complicated. I'd love to hear all the stuff he samples in its original form, because I don't recognize any of it, and because I suspect that he has transformed it all so thoroughly as to be unrecognizable. It's also hard to tell what comes from somewhere/someone else and what he generated himself, with or without other musicians. His voice (like Simon's, actually) is a bit limited, but he does a great job writing for it. It may take some getting used to. I suspect this is one of those love-it-or-hate-it affairs. Chalk me up as a lover. "Shirin" is easily the most beautiful song ever written about an Iraqi hairdresser operating an illegal salon in her apartment.

Runners-up:
The Flight of the Conchords, Songs from the First Season (or whatever it's called)
Matt Pond, PA, Last Light

CONCERT OF THE YEAR: Lucinda Williams at Artpark (Lewiston, NY). At first I was drawing a blank; this was not a stellar year for live shows, at least not those that I managed to catch. But then I remembered what a magical evening this was: great set list, cool new songs, best of the 3 times I've seen her since the mid-80s. Duet with opener Charlie Louvin was icing on the cake.

Runners-up: Before I remembered Lucinda, I was thinking of giving this one to 3 shows I saw in about 2 weeks, 2 by Ani DiFranco and 1 by Andrew Bird, all at Ani's new venue, Babeville, which immediately made my list as Best Concert Venue in Buffalo. But I felt kind of weird about that since I have had a work connection (tenuous in Bird's case) to both artists and it felt like nepotism or something similar. But hell, they were all great shows.

ARTIST OF THE YEAR: Think I'm going with a tie here. The new car in our household has a 6-CD player, and I've been enjoying cooking up retrospectives and supersets and such, and the best one by far thus far consisted of six recordings by, you guessed it, Mr. Paul Simon. It's not just the new album (see above); I also got several CD reissues of his earlier works that came out a few years ago, each with 2-3 bonus tracks (usually demo versions of key songs, sometimes with very different lyrics or arrangements) that really do hold up. The second best superset came from Radiohead, and while I don't think they've singlehandedly sparked a revolution or anything, that was a pretty damn cool stunt they pulled with their latest album, and the album itself is even cooler.

Runners-up: See "Album of the Year" runners-up.

SONG OF THE YEAR: Amy Winehouse, "Rehab". I know, I know, she is currently on the fast track to becoming the new Lindsay Lohan, better known for actual stints in rehab than for her art, but that is still one damn catchy song. Sort of reminds me of Ray Charles releasing songs like "Busted" when he was busted and "Let's Go Get Stoned" when that was something he tended to do quite a bit. I'm not super-crazy about the entire album, but as singles go, that one is a doozy.

Runner-up: Because this blog is called "Can't Get It Out of My Head," attention must be paid to the many times that Feist's "1-2-3-4" got stuck in my brain, thanks in part to that ubiquitous Apple/iTunes commercial and thanks in larger part to the song itself. I'd give the video "Video of the Year" if I had such a category, which I don't, because videos don't exist anymore, as we all know. The whole Feist album is terrific, btw.

That's all, folks. See you in November 2008!

The Rainbow Connection

Try to forget, whydoncha, that it has been a mere 10 months since my last post here. Believe it or not, I've been trying all spring and summer to find some appropriate occasion to relaunch this blog, reasoning that once I start this thing up again, it will be that much easier to return to it, and while there have been plenty of possibilities--concerts, album purchases, holidays, going-out-of-business sales, and so on--none of them have managed to stick. So I'm choosing The Day After the Release of the Latest Radiohead Album. Sure, a lesser blogger might adopt something as pedestrian as the actual release date, and plenty of 'em did, but you expect more from me by now, and I accept the challenge. Now that everyone else has moved on to something else, I am here to weigh in on this whole crazy phenomenon:

1. First and foremost, I really like the album, based on two and three-quarters listens. I like it a lot.
2. I would be excited about a new Radiohead album even if it were just coming out as a plain old CD in the plain old way. When Hail to the Thief came out, I was right there at my favorite store at midnight, a 45-year-old in a sea of 20somethings.
3. Even so, this whole pay-what-you-want approach is just pretty damn brilliant. I love the questions it raises about art and commerce, for starters. A performance group I am part of strives to provoke similar discussions when we charge "your hourly wage" for our shows--but then we are reaching about 30 people a night, not several million. This is one case where the bigger the canvas, the more interesting the artwork.
4. A friend of mine who is not a Radiohead fan but does know a thing or two about the music industry views the pay-what-you-want experiment as purely a marketing gimmick that has nothing to do with art. I beg to differ: it may well be a publicity stunt (and an effective one at that), but it also works as a conceptual art piece, and is wholly of a piece with the band's M.O., not only in terms of business (I am reminded of the time they toured with their own big-top tent as a portable venue rather than deal with traditional arenas), but also the thematic content of their music (lotsa lyrics about the fate of the individual in a soulless corporatized environment; recurring juxtaposition of samples and electronic beats/noises with Thom Yorke's achingly human voice).
5. Another friend and I found it amusing that neither of us knew the titles of any of the songs yet, so we had to say things like, "I like track 4 a lot" and "Yeah, tracks 1 and 2 are so bombastic that track 3 really comes as a change of pace."
6. Lots of folks who don't really follow music have been hearing about this album via tech podcasts, business publications, news stories, and the like. I've been wondering what the hell they're going to make of such weird noise when they seek it out.
7. To all those netnerds who downloaded the album for free, then bitched about the low bitrate: this is how you say thanks when somebody gives you a present?
8. Then there's the snarkier-than-thou attitude that sneers at the whole idea of everybody listening to the album and then posting "insta-reviews" to their blogs, but I kinda like that part. As a guy with zero interest in Harry Potter, I've been missing out on the chance to experience the same pop culture artifact at the exact same time as everybody else. (I've always been intrigued by stories about the day that Sgt. Pepper came out and was played on a whole bunch of radio stations around the world in its entirety.) And I'm digging the notion that everybody--professional critics, self-appointed critics, megafans, casual listeners--was on a level playing field on Day One.
9. Fun bonus feature: Check out this handy track-by-track collection of videos documenting concert performances of the new songs.
10. Did I mention I like the album a lot?

OK, now that I've broken my silence, I'll do my best to get back into the virtual swing of things. Plenty to say, in due time, about what I've been up to when I haven't been up to blogging here, what I'm listening to, and all that jazz. For now, digging that album.

Head Games

So there I was, a few days ago, raking leaves and listening on my Walkman to Gal Costa's 1969 album (one of two eponymous releases from that year, confusingly enough). Now, if you're not familiar with Ms. Costa, you need to know that she was one of the major forces in the Tropicalia movement (and has continued to release music of varying styles and quality ever since--as always, Joe Sixpack's Slipcue site has a great intro/discography). I've heard her described as the Janis Joplin of Brazil, which is only useful, as far as I can tell, as an indicator of her energy level and perhaps her standing in her home country during the sixties. But trust me, Janis never recorded anything anywhere near as wild as this album. I doubt that many people on any continent have: the songs shift from pop-py Burt Bacharach-style arrangements to ear-shattering screaming, guitar feedback, distortion, reverb, you name it, usually in midsong. I'd say the album art does a fairly good job of conveying the general atmosphere:



Take Zeppelin, Hendrix, and Yoko Ono, lock them in a room with a large amount of hallucinogens, and then soak the resulting master tapes in acid, and you've got the basic idea. You sort of have to be in the right mood to listen to this thing (and when you are, it's the perfect thing). Needless to say, I haven't been in that mood very often lately, but leaf-raking--a task I hate--felt like a good time to listen again. Plus I've been on a real Brazilian psychedelia kick, spurred on by my recent discovery of Secos & Molhados (more on them later), which also led to a closer listen to Os Mutantes (ditto), and Gal seemed like just the ticket.

I got to song three on the album, "Meu Nome É Gal" ("My Name is Gal"), and witnessed the moment where she starts wailing in this totally gutteral, Diamandas Galas-style voice over a fairly accessible pop-funk string and horn section; from there, it was on to track four, "Com Médo, Com Pedro," which brings in the echo chamber and more crazy shrieks. Then things started to get really bizarre--even farther out there than I remembered. Dear lord, I thought, she's doing all this amazing stuff with dub effects and changing the speed of the tape, even slowing it down to total inaudibility--it's incredible! And it just kept going and going and going, getting more metallic, almost painful even, as time went on.

After about fifteen minutes of this, it dawned on me that maybe there was something wrong with the Walkman. Lo and behold, that was exactly the case; even a Debbie Boone album would have sounded like Lee "Scratch" Perry had gotten his corrosive mitts on it under these conditions.

The scenario reminded me of the night I played a new Radiohead 45 (a bonus with my copy of Hail to the Thief) for the first time and marvelled at the utterly outrageous experimentation those boys were up to: the melody buried under layers of sonic fuzz, the pitch distorted wildly, and so on. A brilliant assault on bourgeois convention! It took me at least five minutes to realize that
a) there really was a layer of actual fuzz on the needle, and
b) I was playing the 45 at 33 rpm.
When I heard it the way it was recorded, it was a real letdown. I mean, how conventional can you get?

On another occasion, I walked into a hipster coworker's office to find out what cool underground noise band he was playing, only to find out he was vacuuming the carpet. (Even so, I would love to have a copy of that sound--it was fantastic!)

So, yes, it is possible that I have been ever so slightly damaged by art, and maybe I take John Cage just a wee bit too literally with that whole anything-goes aesthetic. If it's any consolation, I get misty when I think about Seals & Crofts and Loggins & Messina, and even though we all know John was the best Beatle, I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Wings. So please, please, do not write me off as a total avant-garde aesthete. I just appreciate a well-tuned vacuum cleaner and/or broken tape player every now and then; what right-thinking person doesn't?

Every1's a Winner

Every year on around Thanksgiving for the last decade or more, I determine the winners of the Ehmke(e) Awards, my own personal (okay, imaginary) year-in-music review. (Long story behind the parenthetical e; don't feel like sharing it at the moment.) Unlike most best-album honors given out by more legitimate bestowers, mine focus on the listener as much as the producer of the sounds: for me, picking an "album of the year" has more to do with the year I listened to the record than the year it hit stores. (Favorite example: Gram Parsons was my very first Artist of the Year, about two decades after he bit the dust.) I also don't feel compelled to narrow selections down to a single winner. Hell, I just plain don't like awards, period. In a nutshell, the two features of entertainment writing I find most boring are:
1) the annual year-end wrap-up of top ten CDs/movies/whatever, and
2) the annual column where people guess who's going to win the Grammys/Oscars/Emmys/etc. (particularly when they post actual odds, like 20:7, which make no sense to me and only trigger my math anxiety).
But somehow I can't resist the urge to combine these two ultra-boring concepts, albeit on my own terms.

Most years, the Ehmke(e) Awards are a purely hypothetical affair (except in 1997, when my list happened to make its way into The Berkshire Eagle's annual year-end wrap-up for reasons I ... won't go into here, in keeping with tonight's theme of Teasing the Reader). But now that I got me this here blog, I can share the results with ... all five people who read it. The virtual envelopes, please:

ALBUM OF THE YEAR: Brian Wilson, Smile. Hell, it's the least I can do to acknowledge such a monumental musical achievement and cultural event. And I've said more than enough about the album itself already. I'm just happy to see that it's been making a dent "at retail," as they say, and in the CD players of people around the world, some of whom may not even be obsessive megafans.

SONG OF THE YEAR: Outcast, "Hey Ya." And didn't Missy Elliot have some super-catchy single like "Work It" out this past year, too? It's getting so hard to remember which year is which as I approach my dotage. Anyway, those two top my list, for reasons that should be perfectly obvious.

ARTIST OF THE YEAR: Caetano Veloso. Another no-brainer, given how much of the music he has written and/or performed that I've surrounded myself with of late, to say nothing of the many happy hours spent reading his memoir.

CONCERT OF THE YEAR: A tie...
João Gilberto (Nob Hill [I think], San Francisco, June)
Brian Wilson (Massey Hall, Toronto, October)
Wrote about the first of these here already, and one day I will actually get around to finishing the post I started and abandoned about the latter.

If I were a more ambitious sort, I'd look up past winners and list them here--except I don't think they're all written down anywhere. (Face it: honor is such an ephemeral quality sometimes.) I do recall that the 2003 concert of the year was a three-way tie between Robbie Fulks, Don Lennon (both at Mohawk Place here in Buffalo), and Super Furry Animals (at the Continental in Bflo--but how could I possibly have left Patti Smith's unbelievable 3-hour show at the Sphere out of that list??? Perhaps it was actually in 2002?). D Lennon got artist of the year, and album of the year was a threeway tie between The Postal Service's Give Up, Mr. Lennon's Downtown, and My Morning Jacket's It Still Moves. And I know that past album-of-the-year winners have included Mull Historical Society, The Twilight Singers, and Mark Eitzel. Oh, and Radiohead, but something tells me they don't need the extra sales bump which inevitably follows such a prestigious distinction.

(Y'know, anytime I write stuff like this, I can't help suspecting that I sound exactly like the protagonist of American Psycho, who spends his time between murders reviewing the history of the band Genesis, album by album. Is this not the worst fear of all bloggers?)

Any contests of your own to list here? Be my guest. Believe me, I'd way rather hear about the winner of the Bradley Q. Fakename honors than speculate about the Recording Association of America's next Best New Artist.

We Gotta Get Out of This Place (if it's the last thing we ever do)

(Had real trouble logging into Blogger earlier today; I can only assume it was thanks to millions of other folks attempting to post their thoughts on the election. Now that I'm on, here's my contribution to that multilogue. For now at least, the thing I can't get out of my head is not music but the fucked-up decision my home nation just made yesterday: to retain its appallingly inept leader for another four goddam years.)

Ohhhhhh shit.
I've spent most of the day either cursing my fellow citizens or weeping--though I refuse to abandon all hope. Picked up Caetano's Tropical Truth and found the following passage, which brought some degree of comfort. Substitute the U.S. for Brazil and Bush for "military dictatorship" and you've got a pretty good description of how I feel at the moment:

We the tropicalistas, unlike so many of our more naive leftist friends, who seemed to believe that the military had come from Mars, had always been determined to face the dictatorship as nothing less than an expression of Brazil. That view increased our suffering, but today it also sustains what seems to be my optimism. I think and act as I do, knowing in my bones the truth of Brazil's potentialities, having entered into a dialogue with Brazil's deepest desires--and I do not conclude that we are a pure, ineluctable failure. I learned then to recognize the forces of regeneration, and even being aware of the proposition's very high risks, I am always inclined to double my wager.

Tonight I saw the phenomenal Andrew Bird at Soundlab in lovely downtown Buffalo. I was wiped out after the end of the five-week run of the cabaret show I've been part of all month, which wrapped up with a marathon election-night production, and I really, truly wouldn't have left my house for anyone but Mr. Bird, whose lush, delightful music seemed the only thing I wanted to hear under the circumstances--the aural equivalent of comfort food. His recent solo records are beautiful, and live he's even more astonishing, playing up to four instruments (simultaneously!) and singing. Hate to compare artists to other artists, but anyone who likes recent Wilco or Radiohead albums or Rufus Wainwright would be well advised to check him out. Trust me: the perfect soundtrack for this frazzled moment in time.

Now that the Cabaret is on hiatus for a while, I hope to post more often here, starting with several entries I started and didn't quite finish over the past month.

On one hand, it seems hard to write about music when my nation appears to be heading straight to hell. But what else can I do? The only thing that gives me hope and help in such dire times is art/music/culture. This stuff keeps me alive.