A Year of Music

After spending the week wrestling with my own bad conscience, trying to decide just how accountable to hold myself for the music I own by murderers, anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and other sorts of people with whom I do not hold, it’s something of a blessing to listen to something I can wholeheartedly support: the most recent Ministry record is loud, it is pissed, and it is pissed for all the right reasons. We are tangled in the thresher of a very stupid war, we are governed by mendacious, authoritarian idiots who have committed very real crimes against whatever morality we collectively share, and our society is beset by corruption – corporate, environmental, moral – on all sides. Al Jourgenson belts out all these sentiments and more with the same cartoony hard-edged clarity that has always been Ministry’s stock in trade.

The Last Sucker is a very fine Ministry album on its own merits, being at least as good as Psalm 69, and having one or two songs that are far better than anything on that album. Somewhere along the line Ministry transformed from an arty industrial techno parody of thrash metal into the real thing, and on this album they can stand toe to toe with Strapping Young Lad – the band who, in my opinion, took the latent promise of Burning Inside and converted it into something powerful and real, in much the same way that the Pinocchio at the end of the tale is more real than the puppet at the beginning. It’s not real subtle, but isn’t that the point?

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Ministry is a product of Clan Bush. Ministry’s finest albums (StigmataThe Land of Rape and Honey and Burning InsideThe Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste, of course) were a product of Bush I, and during the Clinton years, Jourgenson – and Ministry – sunk into a torpor that has only lifted in the last couple years of Bush II’s seemingly endless reign. There have been tons of distractions in Jourgenson’s life (smack, booze, swingin’ dick contests with ex-bandmates and miscellaneous others), but I have this pet theory that he takes the Bushes personally, and that’s what reignited his fire. They’ve fucked up his country, they’ve fucked up the world, and – most importantly – they’ve fucked up the reputation of Texas, and that shit will not stand.

Looked at in that light, it makes sense that Jourgenson claims The Last Sucker will be the final Ministry album. This time next year, the Texans will have left the White House (at least until the Jenna / Barb ticket in 2024), and the United States will in all likelihood have an entirely different set of problems to confront. Jourgenson’s bête noir will have retired to the ranch, obdurate in his refusal to take any responsibility for the wholesale fuckup that was the 43rd Presidency. In my mind I see Jourgenson with a bottle of Jägermeister in one hand, watching the George W Bush Library burn to the ground as the tears stream down his face, having come as close as he dares to facing down his own Colonel Kurtz at last.

The Flying Lizards were a bizarre manifestation of the post punk / No Wave era’s anything-goes spirit. Even for the times, they were an unbridled Dada mindfuck, releasing one of the most resolutely inaccessible “pop” albums ever made in the form of Top Ten – an achievement made doubly notable by the fact that it was, indeed, the Lizards interpreting hit pop and rock songs, rendered as cold, mechanical deconstructions of the originals. In spirit they’re close to some of the mutant disco groups from New York (the more overtly disco songs remind me quite a bit of the awesome Cristina, who is similarly neglected by history), but with a much more forbidding affect.

The cover effectively telegraphs that Top Ten isn’t a typical collection of standards:

As this patchy but informative Sound Collector encomium makes clear, The Flying Lizards were more an art project than a band, and their music was more sketched than composed. (The Art of Noise were trying for something similar, but were fatally undermined by Trevor Horn’s connection to the self-conscious seriousness of the progressive rock scene he came out of. Which is not to say that Art of Noise weren’t great, just that as a prankish art-fuck they weren’t successful.) The remarkable thing about the Lizards is how fresh they sound even today: their music has lost none of its alien allure, and actually reminds me of a lot of the recent experimental laptronica, which is especially impressive given the shoestring budget and relatively primitive recording techniques available to the David Cunningham back in the early 80s.

One of the most delightful contradictions posed by the Lizards is that the most accessible song in their catalog is the one that had the most high-art credentials: “Hands 2 Take” is a woozy slab of post-Eno art rock, with abrasive sine tones over a bed of horns, winds, deliriously slurred vocals, and one-note piano pounding by none other than Michael Nyman.

Nyman is my favorite minimalist (which, believe it or not, is high praise – Philip Glass’s Mishima and Koyaanisqatsi are favorites of mine, and my ringtone is a bad MIDI version of Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase”). I got to know his work, as did most people, through his scores for Peter Greenaway’s films, but there’s much more to him than his soundtrack work. He takes Philip Glass’s repetitive cell structures and combines them with a prankster’s spirit: my favorite work by him is a savage, ripping piece for solo harpsichord called “The Convertibility of Lute Strings” (available on his collection of commissioned pieces on Argo, Time Will Pronounce). It is utterly uncompromising and intimidatingly beautiful and strange, full of dizzying modal shifts and endlessly mutable rhythms. I bet it’s a hell of a lot of fun (and extremely challenging) to play.

His mastery of minimalist technique makes it all the more delicious that his role on “Hands 2 Take” is to relentlessly pound the same 2-tone octave for 4 minutes, a la Brian Eno’s “Baby’s On Fire” or the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man”. It’s entirely in keeping with the Lizards’ up-yours ethos that they’d make such off-handed use of someone capable of so much more, while still entirely in keeping with Nyman’s own sensibilities. Not only that, the song is an oblique paranoid fantasia worthy of Low-era Bowie. I love it.

The Flying Lizards are now almost totally obscure, although they still have a small but rabid group of fans online. Finding their music is nearly impossible, as all three of their original albums (and, of course, all their singles) are now completely out of print, and the most recent pressing of their albums were Japanese CDs released without the knowledge or authorization of the band. That said, you can find them all via Dualtrack here and here. Fans of ZE Records, the Residents, Art of Noise and the Soft Pink Truth (Top Ten must have been an influence on Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Soft Pink Truth) are advised to give them a careful listen.

Just because he plays black metal for fans of black metal, and is all bleak and black and misanthropic and secretly a dirty San Francisco hippie, Leviathan’s Wrest thinks he can sneak covert science fiction references past us. He cannot. First it was a beefy sample of The Agent from The Matrix on the Leviathan / Crebain split. I’ll admit that wasn’t covert so much as completely blatant, but it was a major WTF moment just the same, given how resolutely inward-looking Leviathan’s airless nightmare closet of a world usually is. Now, on Massive Conspiracy Against All Life, his most recent and supposedly final album, he has a song, “Merging With Sword, Onto Them”, that is ten minutes of black metal carnage culminating in a buried melody that is an unmistakable clone of Vangelis’s indelible Blade Runner theme. I wonder how many other people have noticed.

As promised, here’s the list of what-all I’ve added to my collection since the last time I posted one of these omnibus roundups. As always, the sources are various: Amoeba, Boomkat, the Amazon MP3 store, Mutant Sounds, Dualtrack, The Thing on the Doorstep, No Longer Forgotten Music, The Soundhead, Phoenix Hairpins, and What Fucked You. Some of them are duplicates from the last list big list I posted because I purchased copies of things I had downloaded to check out (like the excellent Au Revoir Simone album).

Some of you may notice that despite my fevered excoriation of Death in June (or, you know, ambivalent musings thereon), there’s a hearty selection of their music here. I decided I needed to hear more of their stuff for myself, and I have to say, extended exposure to their music reinforces my conviction that they’re purposefully playing games with their listeners in a way I find unconscionable, even if some of the (earlier) songs scratch a very specific, Joy Division-esque itch deep in my head. This is something Jessica Hopper deals with obliquely, in the context of indie hipsters becoming fans of black metal bands with questionable beliefs (another thing I’ve had to wrestle with repeatedly over the years).

UPDATE: The conversation continues over Jessica’s way, just as ambivalent and inconclusive as the one that goes on in my head.

Anyway, here’s the list.

1. ABC Mutes: Studio Stuff
2. Ab Ovo: Empreintes
3. Architects Office: 1987: Live
4. Architects Office: 9th Year Gala Performance
5. Area: Arbeit Macht Frei
6. Art & Technique: Diabolus In Mecanica
7. Au Revoir Simone: The Bird of Music
8. Ballet Mécanique: The Icecold Waters of Egocentric Calculation
9. Sir Richard Bishop: While My Guitar Violently Bleeds
10. ビジリバ: ビジリバ
11. Black Sabbath: Black Sabbath [box set remaster]
12. Black Sabbath: Paranoid [box set remaster]
13. Black Sabbath: Master of Reality [box set remaster]
14. Black Sabbath: Vol 4 [box set remaster]
15. Black Sabbath: Sabbath Bloody Sabbath [box set remaster]
16. Black Sabbath: Sabotage [box set remaster]
17. Black Sabbath: Technical Ecstasy [box set remaster]
18. Black Sabbath: Never Say Die! [box set remaster]
19. Blue Mathue: Perfect Pictures
20. Bogart & S·Core: Pilgrim
21. Boys Noize: Oi Oi Oi
22. The Breeders: Mountain Battles
23. Monte Cazazza: The Worst of Monte Cazazza
24. CEDS: Xandosis
25. CINdYTALK: Camouflage Heart
26. CINdYTALK: In This World
27. CINdYTALK: Secrets and Falling
28. CINdYTALK: The Wind is Strong
29. CINdYTALK: Transgender Warrior
30. CINdYTALK: Wappinschaw
31. Cardboard Village: Sea Change
32. Coil: The New Backwards
33. Combo FH: Véci
34. Commando M Pigg: s/t
35. Confetti: Retrospective
36. Crawling Chaos: The Gas Chair
37. Crawling With Tarts: Operas
38. Crevice: Crevice 1
39. Crevice: Think of Pleasant Things
40. Curlew: s/t
41. De Fabriek & Telepherique: PWZ
42. Death in June: The Guilty Have No Past
43. Death in June: Burial
44. Death in June: Nada!
45. Death in June: The World That Summer
46. Death in June: Brown Book
47. Death in June: 93 Dead Sunwheels
48. Death in June: The Wall of Sacrifice
49. Death in June: The Cathedral of Tears
50. Death in June: Oh How We Laughed
51. Death in June: The Corn Years
52. Devo: Recombo DNA
53. Disrupt: Jah Bit Invasion
54. Dom: Fackeln Im Sturm
55. Frank Domert: Kiefermusik
56. Dorothy: I Confess
57. Drahomira Song Orchestra: The Return of 120 Magicians
58. Iancu Dumitrescu / David Prescott: split
59. Alec Empire: The Golden Foretaste of Heaven
60. Enduser: Form Without Function
61. Eva-Tone: She’s-A-Wild
62. Flipper: Love Canal / Ha Ha Ha
63. The Flying Lizards: s/t
64. The Flying Lizards: Fourth Wall
65. The Flying Lizards: Top Ten
66. Folkdove: s/t
67. Francisco: Cosmic Beam Experience
68. Frequency.m: Fm043
69. Genghis Tron: Board Up the House
70. Gorilla Aktiv: Umsonst Ohne Risiko
71. The Hafler Trio: Ignotum Per Ignotus
72. Hajsch: Nagual (für Silvio Manuel)
73. Hands To / Eric Lunde: split
74. Kevin Harrison: Inscrutably Obvious
75. Hula: Black Pop Workout
76. Hula: Cut From Inside
77. Hula: Fever Car
78. Hula: Murmur
79. Hula: Freeze Out
80. Hula: Get the Habit
81. Hula: Black Wall Blue
82. Hula: Poison
83. Hula: Cut Me Loose
84. Hula: VC1
85. Indoor Life: s/t
86. Linton Kwesi Johnson: A Cappella Live
87. Linton Kwesi Johnson: Bass Culture
88. Linton Kwesi Johnson: Dread Beat an’ Blood
89. Linton Kwesi Johnson: Making History
90. Kiss the Blade: The Party’s Begun
91. Kiss the Blade: Young Soldier
92. Hassisen Kone: Harsoinen Teräs
93. Korean Buddhist God: Magnum You
94. Korpses Katatonik: Sensitive Liberated Autistiks
95. Joachim Kuhn: Cinemascope
96. Der Künftige Musikan: Veitstanz
97. LAShTAL: Thoum Aesh Neith
98. Laddio Bolocko: Strange Warnings of Laddio Bolocko
99. Laddio Bolocko: The Life & Times of Laddio Bolocko
100. Leviathan: Massive Conspiracy Against All Life
101. Liquid Visions: Endless Plasmatic Childhood
102. Eric Lunde: V215
103. Eric Lunde: Witness to Disaster
104. M83: Saturdays = Youth
105. Magma: Trilogie Theusz Hamtaahk Live
106. The Master Musicians of Joujouka: recorded live in France
107. Merzbow & John Hudak: The Time Stream
108. Merzbow: Batzoutai With Material Gadgets
109. Merzbow: Lowest Music 2
110. Mesh: Claustrophobia
111. Meshuggah: obZen
112. Jeff Mills: Gamma Player, Volume 1: The Universe by Night
113. Misson of Burma: Signals, Calls, and Marches [2008 Matador reissue]
114. Mnemonists: Gyromancy
115. Mnemonists: Roto-Limbs
116. Mnemonists: Some Attributes of a Living System
117. Monos: Everyday Soundtracks
118. Monos: Generators
119. Monos: Window
120. Monoton: Monotonprodukt 02
121. Monoton: Monotonprodukt 07
122. Mr. Partridge: Take Away / The Lure of Salvage
123. Nailsleeper: Marching Dynamics
124. Neung Phak: Neung Phak (Mono Pause)
125. Kaiser Nietzsche: Non Plus Ultra
126. Hermann Nitsch: Klaviersonate für Arnulf Rainer
127. Gary Numan & Tubeway Army: Replicas Redux
128. Nurse With Wound: Steel Dream March of the Metal Men
129. OAD: Daytona
130. The Ocean: Precambrian
131. Ora: After Rainfall
132. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: Dazzle Ships [2008 Telegraph remaster]
133. Jürgen Paape: Nord Nord-West
134. PBK: Shadows of Prophecy / In His Throes
135. Pearls Before Swine: The Complete ESP-Disk’ Recordings
136. Bob Pegg: Ancient Maps
137. Bob Pegg & Nick Strutt: The Ship Builder
138. Pekka Streng & Tasavalla Presidentti: Magneettimiehen Kuolema
139. PFN: Akasa / Für Cleo
140. Phallus Dei: Pontifex Maximus
141. Poison the Well: Versions
142. Portion Control: Simulate Sensual
143. Prag Vec: No Cowboys
144. Princess Tinymeat: Herstory: 1984-1986
145. Qua: Forgetabout
146. Qua: Painting Monsters on Clouds
147. The Raincoats: s/t
148. Jay Reatard: Blood Visions
149. Reyvision: The Sound Cage
150. Chas Rose: Child of the Universe
151. Jack Rose: Dr. Ragtime & Pals / Jack Rose
152. Rosetta: Wake / Lift
153. S·Core: A Great Lump
154. S·Core: A Jest of Nature
155. S·Core: Dross
156. S·Core: Dysphonia
157. S·Core: Finger Mark
158. S·Core: Morbid Moppets
159. S·Core: Shedder
160. S·Core: Tarnish
161. S·Core: Undersong
162. Rolf Schulz: Tambora
163. Adrian Sherwood: Becoming a Cliché / Dub Cliché
164. Sigillum S: Abstraction
165. Sigillum S: Dispersion: Sliced Carrions & Pixel Handcuffs
166. Sigillum S: Es Database Chronology
167. Sigillum S: Mutilated Terrorism
168. Sigillum S: Terror-Auto Obstetrics
169. Soap-Jo Henshi: s/t
170. Social Climbers: s/t
171. Somatic Responses: Augmented Lines
172. Somatic Responses: Circumflex
173. Somatic Responses: Pounded Mass
174. Somatic Responses: Touching the Void
175. La Sonorite Jaun: Heliae
176. La Sonorite Jaune & The Haters: The Interstellar Destroyed Music Mail Project
177. SPK: Dekompositiones
178. SPK: Live 7 June 1987 Theaterfabrik Manege, München
179. SPK: Oceania: In Performance 1987
180. Stars & Stips: Nevergreens
181. Suburban Lawns: Baby
182. Suburban Lawns: Gidget Goes to Hell
183. Supersister: Present From Nancy
184. Supersister: Spiral Staircase
185. Teddy & the Frat Girls: Audio Suicide
186. Test Dept. / Brith Gof: Gododdin
187. Steve Thomsen: Retrospective II
188. Steve Thomsen: Retrospective III
189. Throbbing Gristle: Discipline
190. Throbbing Gristle: Mission of Dead Souls: The Last Live Performance of TG
191. Throbbing Gristle: Subhuman
192. Throbbing Gristle: The First Annual Report
193. Throbbing Gristle: Throbbing Gristle Live: Volume 1 (1976-1978)
194. Throbbing Gristle: Throbbing Gristle Live: Volume 2 (1977-1978)
195. Throbbing Gristle: Throbbing Gristle Live: Volume 3 (1978-1979)
196. Throbbing Gristle: Throbbing Gristle Live: Volume 4 (1979-1980)
197. Torche: Torche [2005 original version]
198. Torche: Torche [2007 re-recorded version]
199. Torche: Meanderthal
200. The Vaselines: The Way of the Vaselines: A Complete History
201. Vazz: Your Lungs and Your Tongue
202. Vendino Pact: s/t
203. Virgin Prunes: A New Form of Beauty
204. Virgin Prunes: Over the Rainbow
205. Virgin Prunes: …If I Die, I Die
206. Voigt/465: One Faint Deluded Smile
207. Vox Populi!: Half Dead Ganja Music
208. Warning: s/t
209. Trevor Wishart: Journey Into Space
210. Trevor Wishart: Red Bird / Anticredos
211. Xanopticon: Liminal Space
212. Yeast Culture: IYS
213. Yeast Culture: Rena Leica: The Exposition of Nothing
214. Yelle: Pop Up
215. Zanov: Green Ray
216. Zanov: In Course of Time
217. Zanov: Moebius
218. v/a: Alchemy
219. v/a: Angelica 91
220. v/a: Angelica 92
221. v/a: Anthology 1: Come Organisation Archives 1979-1981
222. v/a: Bogata, Luca & Richman: The Devil’s Trill
223. v/a: Dry Lungs
224. v/a: Dry Lungs II
225. v/a: Dry Lungs V
226. v/a: Freedom in a Vacuum
227. v/a: Fridge Freezer
228. v/a: Hands 2/3
229. v/a: La Mort Heureuse
230. v/a: Mutant Sounds Whacked-Out Singles: Volume 7
231. v/a: No Big Business
232. v/a: No Big Business 2
233. v/a: PS1 Volume: Bed of Sound
234. v/a: Project One
235. v/a: Trumpett Sounds

So I sorta fell silent and haven’t been posting much lately. This is due, in large part, to having accumulated a huge pile of music that is entirely new to me. It doesn’t help that it would be difficult for me to write about much of this music even given the advantage of intimate familiarity; most of it was obscure to begin with, and is abstract verging on the obtuse. Jazzy krautrock improv from Scandinavia, broad-spectrum wiggly noise bursts, ramshackle protean compositions that were coming unraveled even as they were recorded: these are highly individual outbursts of noise and creativity, and even when they’re affiliated with a time and a place or from a reasonably well-known artist (depending on how well-known you think Nurse With Wound is), they’re difficult to describe.

But that’s not really an excuse or a complete explanation. The simple truth is that spending sustained periods of time listening to music I’ve never heard before erases my ability to talk about music at all. There are albums where I can confidently say, after a single listen, “I like this,” or “this doesn’t interest me,” but for the most part the stuff I’ve been listening to lately resists that kind of immediate judgment. I can tell after hearing Mnemonists’ Horde or Rota-Limbs for the first time that they’re both interesting and exciting, but I lack the words for putting that fascination into concrete terms, and given the tiny audience for this kind of music, just saying “this rox u shud listn 2 it” isn’t going to do much for anyone. Especially when I don’t really know how I feel about it myself.

I think that explains why I’ve fallen off the soundwagon a little in the last few weeks and have spent some time listening to stuff that’s a little less demanding. There have been a number of great new records put out over the last month, too: the Breeders erase time with a miraculously good / unpretentious / direct set of songs on Mountain Battles, as accomplished as anything they’ve done since Safari; Torche’s new record, Meanderthal, is almost as good as their monstrous debut, putting the “thunder” in “thunder pop”; M83 have returned from the wilds of Elektronikaslavia with a newer, sleeker sound and a new album, the aptly named Saturdays = Youth; and a Dutch label has released a remastered version of OMD’s brilliant Dazzle Ships, with its incredibly infectious New Wave hit single that never was, “Genetic Engineering”. These are the things I find myself returning to when the stress of moving (oh yeah – I’m preparing to move me and my enormous pile of media across town) overwhelms my ability to deal with hours on end of square waves and rambling percussive scree.

But I’m going to try to suck it up and deal, both by documenting the enormous piles of stuff I’ve continued to add to my collection, as well as trying to come up with some kind of game plan for talking about it. It’ll probably be fragmentary and incomplete, but that’s what blogs are, aren’t they?

Stuck in my head this morning, last night, and most of today: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Genetic Engineering” (off their largely unheralded 1983 Cold War concept album Dazzle Ships). A bouncier bit of toy-piano / Read’n’Spell fluff I cannot imagine. “Genetic Engineering” exhibits that puzzling tendency manifested in early 80s pop where the music is upbeat and full of cheer while the lyrics are fathomlessly cynical (think Heaven 17’s “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thing” with its cartoonishly frenetic bass fretwork and sneering disdain for Ronald Reagan). This song has one of those 4-note arpeggiated major-chord melodies that jackhammers itself inextricably into your skull. Back when I used to do a lot of long-distance cycling, I’d get this exact kind of song stuck in my head during long slogs, and would want to never, ever hear them ever again by the time I finished the ride. Under less extreme conditions, though, it’s a super-fun companion to have for a day or two, and a useful counteractive to the bleak and dour stuff I’ve been listening to lately.

For indie rockers with very long memories, one of the only covers of this song was released by Washington, DC’s Eggs on a TeenBeat 7” in 1995. It’s faithful but sort of ramshackle and unravelled, but that was what Eggs were about in the first place, so it’s endearing, if nowhere near as charming as the original.

Courtesy of Joel Johnson, I found out that Paul Robertson has a new animation out. It’s a hearty 320MiB AVI file (I recommend downloading it via BitTorrent) and is a worthy sequel (this time in color) to Robertson’s indescribable masterpiece Pirate Baby Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006. To describe both videos as unholy apocalyptic freakouts is to do them inadequate justice; anyone who ever played Dodonpachi or Metal Slug X and felt that the boss battles just weren’t ridiculous enough needs to give this a look. It really makes former brainbursters like the Emergency Broadcast Network and Tetsuo: The Iron Man look tame. Impossibly dense seas of pixelated pop trash iconography flit by on torrents of blood at 30 hallucinatory, psychedelic frames per second; Paul is quite possibly the most skilled artist of Generation x-chan.

Integral to Robertson’s complex eschatological imagery is the soundtrack, both to Pirate Baby and (especially) to Kings of Power 4 Billion %, and fittingly enough, Robertson gives full credit to the soundtrack’s creator, Cornel Wilczek. Wilczek really goes balls-out on this one, producing disjointed industrial prog-metal electronica that wanders between amped up Clark and something like a more traditionally death metal version of Meshuggah. The guitars are a little rudimentary, but occasionally reach for a sort of Robert Fripp lunacy that, combined with the rest of the swampy, dense electronic mix and the eyeball-searing, brain-violating visuals creates a pure gestalt, a solid block of crushed and compacted pop culture that requires time, attention, and no predisposition towards epilepsy to decode.

Wilczek and Robertson are a natural team, and for a case study that is slanted more towards the Wilczek side of things, check out Devil Eyes. Left to his own devices, Wilczek has a much more pastoral folktronic sound, equally reminiscent of the aforementioned Clark and Dwayne Sodahberk’s second, superior album. Combined with Robertson’s sterile, disturbing vision of supercute zombies filtered through Alien Syndrome, the work as a whole strikes me as deeply melancholic and curiously affecting. There is no subject in these videos, only objects, and it strikes me that Robertson incidentally accomplishes what eluded Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick in *AI* (a movie that would itself work much better without dialogue): an evocation of a world where only our toys survive to carry out a degenerate pantomime of conscious existence.

(On a tangential note, for another, very different example of someone using gamer and anime culture to produce deeply personal pixel art, check out Jennifer Diane Reitz’s Unicorn Jelly. Almost nobody takes me seriously when I make this recommendation, but if you can get past the somewhat slow and obtuse beginning, you’re in for a novelistic experience of incomparable metaphysical depth. It’s very user-unfriendly, but it genuinely changed me, which is more than I can say for almost any other webcomic.)

“Dead Sound” off The Raveonettes’ recently released Lust Lust Lust is perfect streamlined buzzsaw pop. The whole album, in fact, is a near-perfect fusion of their noise-drenched Jesus and Mary Chain worship with the more spacious and reverb-drenched sound of Pretty in Black. It doesn’t have a thought in its head, but it sure is pretty.

Stuck in my head this morning: Mozart’s “Sonata in C Major” K545, as played by an Apple //c. I even found myself whistling bits of it in the shower. How dorky is that?

It’s a huge improvement over last night, though, when I had Throbbing Gristle’s “Hamburger Lady” looping its way through my noggin. The studio version is basically old Tangerine Dream with Genesis P-Orridge mumbling vaguely over the top; live, it turns into a truly disturbing portrait of trauma and pathology. Latecomers to Throbbing Gristle can be forgiven for thinking they were kind of tame or overrated, because on record they’re basically just a strangely diverse synth-driven noise unit. Live, though, everything take a back seat to Genesis’s insistently chanted / shrieked / growled vocals, and the darkness at the heart of the project becomes manifest. “ASSUME POWER FOCUS” live is a totally different animal. They remain strangely diverse.

I love me some Giorgio Moroder. “The Chase” and “I Feel Love” are two of the finest chunks of dance music ever recorded, and I say this even after the time my dad and I were having dinner in the Castro at Rave Thai (not its real name) and upstairs at The Café they played an “I Feel Love” megamix that lasted throughout our entire meal. Actually, that was pretty much awesome, and gave my dad a good feel for what the Castro was all about (as did the dude who wandered by later with the loincloth and club ensemble). I miss Rave Thai.

I also love me some Sigillum S, who are considerably less famous than Moroder and Donna Summer. They’re a completely bent Italian group who started out as a bog-standard noise-industrial group haunting the fringes of the industrial cassette scene and have gotten weirder and wilder as the years have gone by. Their most recent album, 23|20 is an unclassifiable melange of industrial cabaret, arrhythmic dance music, and random hooting. I love it.

However, the combination of the two is horrible, albeit in a funny way. Back in 1989, the bright sparks at Misty Circles put out La Mort Heureuse, a compilation of mostly obscure industrial artists rapaciously violating the corpses of pop songs. They attain varying degrees of horrifying, transcendent badness, with the in-concept-only cover of “Like A Virgin” achieving some sort of benchmark for the loosest and most vile interpretation of Madonna that doesn’t involve death metal. I could fart out something better without trying at all, which I think was the point.

Sigillum S’s version of “I Feel Love” keeps the arpeggiated bass line, but that’s about it. The vocals wander in and of the rhythm, and don’t even have a conversational relationship with the melody. It’s totally ghastly, and I love it. But mostly it just makes me want to listen to the original again. So I think I will.

Once upon a time there was Option magazine. It covered a broad – yet oddly narrowly defined – cross-section of music that was too weird for the mainstream, but maybe not all the way underground. Each issue would feature quarter-page ads for ReR and Cuneiform Records, and generally there was one or more ads for The Bevis Frond. It had features of varying quality (one article on Swans featured the memorable observation by Jarboe that working in the studio with Michael Gira was much like what working with Paganini was said to be like: “like standing in vats of boiling oil, lancing each other with razor blades”), but the real draw for the magazine were the 30-40 pages of concise reviews, typeset in 4 columns of agate type. It took a couple days to work through them all, but doing so always left me with a feeling like I had a pretty good idea what was going on. They covered cassette-only DiY industrial releases as much as they did more established stalwarts of new and experimental music (Fred Frith, Eugene Chadborne, Zeena Parkins, John Zorn – the Knitting Factory crowd).

Option crapped out 10 years ago. It had lost its purpose, crowded on one side by the alternative-izing of Spin and Rolling Stone in the wake of the grunge explosion-implosion, and on the other by the explosion of subgenres and new bands that characterized the 90s. It’s impossible to imagine a magazine with Option’s broad remit succeeding today. There’s way too much music to cover, and the print magazines that do survive (in Pitchfork’s shadow) tend to be more narrowly focused and relatively conservative. Even The Wire, the most self-consciously hip’n’edgy music magazine out there, is much more predictable than Option was in the early 90s.

Even so, I did inductively identify an Option sound after reading it for a couple years, a kind of post-college rock / intellectual psychedelia that lived somewhere in the interstices between Galaxie 500, Robyn Hitchcock, Half Japanese and the aforementioned twisted guitar genii Chadborne and Frith. It was like art-hippy weirdoes Henry Cow tamed for a larger audience, or REM with more unpredictability.

I provide you with all this prolog because Damien Youth fits the old Option template perfectly. Having never heard him before, listening to his The Man Who Invented God filled me with a rush of nostalgia for high school, when my friends and I would swap REM and Let’s Active and Big Star tapes. Youth was contemporary with those bands, even though he never had their success, and he was clearly mining the same vein of intellectual, introspective folky psychedelia. The Man Who Invented God has the insular quality I associate with late-80s home studio recordings, and Youth practically ought to be paying Michael Stipe royalties, but there’s a free-flowing ease to the songs that makes the rough edges and stylistic debts less important. There’s also some eyeliner and goth poetry going on, which you can interpret as charming or grating as you see fit.

This is yet another of the trove of old recordings I got from Mutant Sounds, and it’s worth the download time and Rapidshare hassle to check out if you like gothic psychedelia. Youth outlasted Option and is still going, almost 25 years after he started, and he’s got a bewildering array of other projects he’s participated in. I might have to check some of them out.

Intellectually I recognize that there are people out there who dislike Joanna Newsom. For more than a few people, her mannered, nasal vocals are the deal-breaker. Others find her tricky, polysyllabic lyrics pretentious, or just have a hard time taking seriously an elfin woman playing indie rock on the harp. She can be interpreted, in a word, as twee.

I don’t see her that way at all. I’m a passionate partisan of Newsom and her music. She can bring me to the brink of tears through the power of her songs alone; the only other musicians or composers with that power are Glen Branca and Dmitri Shostakovich, both of whom work in a much higher artistic register than most of Newsom’s folky peers. Where other people see her lyrics as insufferably arch, I see one of the last great lyric poets still writing in English (this:

And, Emily - I saw you last night by the river.
I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water,
frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever
in a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky’d been breathing on a mirror.

Anyhow - I sat by your side, by the water.
You taught me the names of the stars overhead that I wrote down in my ledger,
though all I knew of the rote universe were those Pleiades loosed in December,
I promised you I‘d set them to verse so I’d always remember:

That the meteorite is a source of the light,
and the meteor’s just what we see.
And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire
that propelled it to thee.

And the meteorite’s just what causes the light,
and the meteor’s how it’s perceived.
And the meteoroid’s a bone thrown from the void
that lies quiet in offering to thee.

is one of the most indelible, durable and delicate bits of poetry I’ve encountered since last wrestling with Ruth Stone – and much more cheerful to boot). And both her singing and harp playing are idiosyncratic are deeply accomplished.

She’s also caught a certain amount of backlash for being part of the loosely-affiliated “freak folk” scene that came out of San Francisco a few years ago. If you’d been around here then, you would have known that folks like Devendra Banhart, Vetiver, Joanna Newsom and Brightblack Morning Light were thrown together by circumstance more than anything else; there was nothing schematic about how they all came to prominence at the same time. I can’t harsh on people for getting annoyed at the hypewagon rolling over their toes, but if that’s your most substantive problem with Joanna you should probably give her another listen.

And if, like some critics I’ve read, you think she takes herself way too seriously, what’s the problem? Her commitment to her music is near-total and she’s unapologetic about her intelligence (anyone who makes “…but always up the mountainside you’re clambering, groping blindly, hungry for anything: picking through your pocket linings – well, what is this? Scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus?” work has forgotten more about English than most of us will ever know), and the music she makes is the product of a confident, brilliant mind, and o see how it shines.

Stuck in my head this morning: a vague montage of material from Michael O’Shea’s self-titled solo album on WMO, chopped and reconfigured by my dreaming mind to sound vaguely Chinese. I was dreaming about the NPR affiliate in Portland changing to broadcast all in Chinese, and my mom tuning all the radios in the house to it, you see. Which is weird inasmuch as O’Shea played mostly traditional Celtic folk drones, albeit on an instrument of his own devising (one that sounds like a hammer dulcimer with a built-in flange pedal).

O’Shea’s music sounds like a cross between John Fahey and Roy Montgomery, which is my way of saying it’s great and weird, and I’d like to find more material by him. Too bad for me! The only other record he released is a desperately out of print LP from 1982, all of which is included on the WMO release. Also, the WMO release itself is completely out of print (as are most things on WMO, the private label of Wire’s fan club). I heard this in the first place via Mutant Sounds. You can too, if you like.

I recently picked up Daft Punk’s Alive 2007. It’s pretty good, but has nowhere near the raw fury of the first time I saw Daft Punk live. That was at Even Furthur 1996, one of the legendary series of outdoor raves thrown in BFE Wisconsin by the infamous Drop Bass Network. That year, the main tent had sound by the Badger Sound crew, which meant that there was who knows how many watts going into 32 15” speakers along the front of the tent. The sound was very clean and LOUD. I’ve since decided it was the best sound system I’ve ever heard: it gave everything played through it a brutal, hard-edged clarity that was in keeping with the spirit of the weekend (15-year-olds on K face-down in the mud, 60-watt xenon lasers burning the sky over the tops of the trees, Deadly Buda playing a gabber rendition of the Close Encounters of the Third Kind theme at 220BPM at 7:30 in the morning, Dan Doormouse and friends keeping their Rottweiler with them in their smaller side tent as they rinsed out old Reload records and beat on their speakers with a wiffle ball bat, everyone bundled up against the rain in hoodies and huge pants).

This was before Homework, and Daft Punk were still a cult phenomenon known mostly to DJs and hardcore ravers, so there was a certain amount of anticipation among the crowd, but I remember the crowd were more excited for Phantom 45’s and Woody McBride’s sets later in the night. I think we were all a little caught off-guard when Daft Punk proceeded to throw up a set of headbanging, ass-shaking hard house and acid techno to rival just about anyone who’s ever played dance music live. They didn’t have the pyramid or robot costumes, their setup was minimal, and they barely acknowledged the crowd. That didn’t matter. It was a hallucinatory, blistering half-hour of loops, acid, and slamming electronic beats. I remember the high point of the set being a psychedelically intense version of “Rollin & Scratchin” that practically slammed its way into my head. I don’t know how much of it was the music and how much was the insane sound system, but now you can judge for yourself, because as I discovered today, some kind soul put the entire set online. You’ll just have to imagine the bass and the volume for yourself. And ignore the bald dude.

In my opinion, it’s mostly been downhill for Daft Punk ever since. Homework and the subsequent albums have played up their frothy pop take on French loop-house / electro-disco, and while that makes for awesome videos and it is, after all, what made them famous enough to afford the pyramids and robot suits, I was disappointed to find that the only remnants of the tough, abrasive sound I’d heard in Wisconsin were a comparatively anemic rendition of “Rollin & Scratchin” and a couple other b-sides to their early singles. I’m glad they released Alive 2007, because it shows that they still retain some of that 1996 energy. Still, finding that old set has made me a very happy boy.

I’m so metal that instead of being out tonight getting shithammered (y’know, like I usually do), I’m sitting at home listening to Korpiklaani sing Finnish drinking songs while I rip the Black Sabbath box set (found a cheap copy of it used, as well as picking up the new Meshuggah and Sir Richard Bishop’s While My Guitar Violently Bleeds at Amoeba) and randomly sticking Bjork’s name into Bonnie Tyler lyrics. It’s a party, y’all!

Stuck in my head this morning: “Metal Dance” by SPK. Or, as the incredibly pretentious woman who sang it says, “Metahhl Dahhhhhnsz!” SPK is a perfect example of a group whose quality and credibility went straight off a cliff very early in their career (in fact, SPK neatly recapitulates the entire evolution of industrial from transgressive noise into po-faced clanky dance-industrial into Middle-Eastern tinged coldwave into Delerium-style synth cheez in one tidy package), and songs like “Metal Dance” are why. So cheesy! Yet so pretentious!

It’s hard to believe this is the same band that recorded “Slogun”, one of the noisiest, meanest songs recorded in the entire industrial era. Of course, the later songs are catchy, too, hence waking up with this stuck in my head.

…but one thing is for sure: when I start wading through the thickets of accusations and counteraccusations, rumor-mongering, sectarian and factional grudge-slinging and post-Situationist po-faced “pranksterism” around the neo-folk / neo-pagan scene, I get the exact same headache I used to get when I was a teenager trying to figure out the American Communist left by reading RCP and SWP newspapers (if you don’t know those acronyms, good for you – all you need to know is that they were / are both claiming the True Marxist mantle for themselves, and they loathe each other).

Out on the fringes of politics and ideology there lies a sticky morass of extremism and paranoia that manifests itself in seemingly incomprehensible shifts in belief, where people will go from hard, statist left to hard, individualist right, without stopping at any point in between. It’s the same phenomenon that produces former-Trotskyite neocons like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, only with much less disastrous consequences (Douglas P may be a jerk, but he hasn’t (successfully) started any land wars in Asia lately). In the case of neo-folk, though, art is involved, and art necessarily involves ambiguity. The problem of figuring out who actually believes what and who is a lying sack of shit becomes completely intractable, so there’s this peculiar Schrödinger’s box, within which a group like Sol Invictus is either a bunch of neo-Nazi meat puppets or kindly, misunderstood friends to Jew and puppy alike, or Death In June are either in hock to Croatian war criminals or bemused visitors to the region who donated money to innocent victims of the Balkan war. If you care about not giving your time and money to people whose principles you abhor, sorting through these messes can be troubling and maddening in equal measure.

To get a flavor for the complete vacuum of truth this sort of churning strife engenders, first read this hatchet job on Sol Invictus by Stewart Home (his Wikipedia talk page is more germane than the Wikipedia entry itself), and then read this confused atttempt to grapple with it on the blog of some innocent bystander caught in the crossfire. To me, it seems inescapable that the neo-pagan crowd has an awful lot invested in keeping their politics as amorphous as possible (mostly to keep their audiences from devouring themselves in an orgy of mutual loathing – fans of neo-folk run across the political spectrum. Black shirts and jackboots for some, tiny pagan flags for others!); it’s more telling to me if (IF!) Albin Julius of Der Blutharsch is an admirer of Jörg Haider than if he’s gone out of his way to make friends with SOME Israelis (as my good buddy Joel forcefully pointed out to me recently, it’s possible to find Israelis who are fans of just about anything, which means that you can’t exactly treat Der Blutharsch having Israeli fans as being equivalent to them getting [K] stamped on their asses by the Rabbinate of Jerusalem).

More materially, Home wrote a foreword for a booklet of Sol Invictus lyrics in the 90s. If he thinks Tony Wakeford is a tubby sack of Nazi shit (he seems to be very fond of calling Tony Wakeford a fat man), what’s that all about? And then there’s the Green Anarchism controversy (search for “stewart home” down the page)… it’s all a big fucking mess, and I’m thankful I don’t have to care.

The thing to take away from this is the disorienting sensation that you have fallen completely through the rabbit hole into a world where nobody ever tells the truth if they can wrap it up in a few layers of obfuscatory ideological nonsense first. I’m no closer to determining whether or not Death In June, Sixth Comm, Sol Invictus and a bunch of the other World Serpent neo-folk bands are closet servants of Space Hitler. For now, the fact that nothing conclusive presents itself is probably good enough; I can’t plausibly be a fan of black metal and own records featuring participation by convicted hate criminals and object too strenuously to artists who at least attempt to keep their politics private. (To completely muddy the waters, the most entertaining English-language source on the violent origins of Scandinavian black metal is Lords of Chaos, written by Michael Moynihan, member of Blood Axis and himself despised as a fascist neo-pagan by much of the far left.)

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that my whole train of thought initially started from investigating Death In June’s use of the totenkopf as part of their visual identity – a symbol, paradoxically, that is much more loaded when it is adopted by an English musician than by a German of any stripe, even though its use is illegal in modern Germany. For good and for ill, the totenkopf is part of German cultural heritage, and is much more plausibly adopted as an ambiguous / problematic / “reclaimed” symbol by someone who inherits from that culture than a self-styled “history student” from outside the context – particularly when that same person, like Douglas P, carries around a four-foot-tall metallized version of the logo on a banner he carries with him when he plays live to this day.

Which illustrates, finally, a point that is obvious to me now but wasn’t when I got into the spooky stuff as a curious and alienated teenager, which is that one of the risks of being a fan of dark, marginal and extreme art is that it is easy to fall prey to mental contamination. For every romantic who finds passion in extremity, there is someone much colder seeking to speak to the darkness in others and manipulate it for their own ends. Some dark art is beautiful and much of it is compelling, but it requires confrontation and self-analysis if you’re to avoid succumbing to the bullshit that comes along with it. Just appreciating it for what it is and not paying attention to the context isn’t enough, if you want to keep your hands clean.

Stuck in my head this morning: “Carpe Diem” by The Fugs, from their Second Album. By the standards of The Fugs, this song is eminently gentle, being a delicate meditation upon the certainty of death and the need to do something with yourself now rather than later.

I stress its gentleness because The Fugs are one of the filthiest, most scabrous, and straight-up entertaining bands of the 1960s. Their unhinged hooliganism, coming from a bunch of Jewish East Village Beatnik libertines, is as fresh – and startling – today as it was when their records were first released, over 40 years ago. Songs about mutants with 9-headed penises porking watermelons and farmers having hard times raising them hemp plants and poppy flowers are the rule of the day on Second Album, and there’s a sharp, wild-eyed sensibility to The Fugs that got badly diluted by the time the hippie explosion made it to San Francisco. Everybody name-checks the Fugs, and it’s pretty obvious why. Highly recommended, especially to fans of the Velvet Underground or Tom Lehrer (I bet you don’t see those two put together very often, do you?).

Stuck in my head this morning: …I really don’t want to say. It’s embarrassing.

No, seriously. I’ve been bitching about these guys for years!

…

Oh, all right. I had uh Step On by Happy Mondays playing in a relentless, remorseless, jackhammer loop when I woke up this morning. MAN did those guys suck, but I guess that song had sorta a catchy guitar line.

Anyway, I did not wake up in a great mood.

But seriously, man, fuck Shaun Ryder. Just fuck that guy. His voice makes baby Jesus want to die.

When trying to whistle up some information on the long-departed Factrix, I came across the phrase “archaic fart feasts of yesteryear” on Julian Cope’s Head Heritage. It delighted me. Julian Cope has such a way with words! I hope it delights some of you!

(Factrix’s Scheintot really is an accomplished piece of downer art-damaged weirdness, although I’d say it’s a post punk album much more than any kind of “industrial.” You can download a copy of it – it is, of course, beyond out of print – off The Thing on the Doorstep. Also, the cover features boobies!)