A Year of Music

I posted this comment on this post on Cosmo’s blog, but it’s really too long to be a proper comment, so I’m reposting it here, now with bonus links:

In my alternate universe, there is no TRL, and people find music through their friends and impassioned record store staff and critics who give the music they love the attention and respect it deserves, instead of being prey to marketing and publicity operations and the fifty billion forms of payola that hedge us all in. That’s where I want to live!

I agree that LOTFP is needlessly paranoid; I agree that most of us start with Def Leppard or Lamb of God before we get to Make A Change… Kill Yourself; and I agree that Decibel is not going to suddenly make the trve kvlt disappear in a flash from Avenged Sevenfold’s stage pots. I still think he / they make many acute observations about the relationship between metal’s margins and the musical mainstream, and that the relationship is, and in some ways needs to be, antagonistic. He defends the borders between “us” and “them”, and that kind of policing, as annoying as it can sometimes be, is part of what preserves metal’s energy.

You and I both came up through the e-music underground, so we’ve been through the situation where that tension collapsed, more or less, and it left a vacuum that sucked most of the good music in behind it. It’s not that the mainstream coöpted the margins, it’s that the margins sort of shrugged or ran out of energy, and with the exception of tiny pockets in Rotterdam and Ljubljana and east London, the renegade spirit that animated the early rave / techno / jungle scene is almost totally dead.

At the same time, I agree with Sandy: I want people to like this stuff, because I love it and I enjoy it when my friends enjoy stuff that I love. That’s why I write about music. If it weren’t for the inclusiveness of the metal community (to sound totally corny for a moment), I wouldn’t even be here. In large part it’s the unfeigned enthusiasm of metalheads (in the pit, shivering in long lines waiting to be let into The Pound) that sucked me back into heshing after a long chunk of my life mostly ignoring it.

Metal fans own metal because they control the terms of the debate and have deep convictions about what they like and don’t like, and what they will and won’t accept as “true metal”. Just look at the LOTFP. They can be dogmatic and dictatorial, but also incredibly enthusiastic. Just look at the the wave of American one-man black metal bands (Xasthur, Leviathan and Krieg being the ones with which I’m most familiar – pity about the Twilight album): all those guys are a pain in the ass to work with (or so I hear), and prickly to the point of sociopathy, but they are clearly motivated by deep (if inscrutable) passions. And for all their accomplishments as musicians, I think they’re fans first and foremost. That’s the beauty of metal, or any other marginal art: there is no line between fan, performer or critic. We all have a stake (and the fans and performers get more votes than the critics, which is absolutely how it ought to be).

While I was trying to find a decent link for A Sunny Day In Glasgow, I spied on their MySpace page the news that they put out a new EP, TOUT NEW AGE, sometime last summer, and that it was mostly available online, at a bunch of places.

iTunes is getting much better about making indie artists’ music available DRM-free, and AAC is technically a higher-quality codec, but the vast majority of my music is encoded with LAME, and I’ve come to trust LAME-encoded MP3s more than any other lossy format. Insound wants $10.49 for a downloaded EP. Ha. eMusic does have a download store, I think, but they really want you to subscribe to their service, and their interface confuses me. Other Music Digital it is! $5.99 and no hassle!

Other Music is a boutique record store in New York. I’ve always thought of them as being an east coast counterpart to my beloved Aquarius Records, but they’re clearly trying to differentiate themselves through their eminently competent digital download store. They even have their own download manager, a cute and unobtrusive application (for both Windows and OS X) that takes a lot of the sting out of downloading multiple purchased tracks from a web site (Beatport, by contrast, has an elaborate Flash interface that cossets and constrains you right up to the point where you need to download your purchases, where it forces you to download every track one at a time, and since it’s in Flash you can’t even use an in-browser download accelerator like FlashGot).

Total time from discovering TOUT NEW AGE’s existence to having it on my computer: 20 minutes. Nice.

After reading this inspirational article, I decided to do my part for the music industry and pay a visit to my friends at Aquarius. Some of this stuff had been on hold for me for months now, so it was past time.

I spent a while distracting Andee and Allan while they feverishly tried to finish the newest edition of the infamous and sprawling Aquarius New Releases list. And “feverish” is right – there’s a certain amount of urgency to the proceedings, but they’re also not too tough to distract, the sustained effort of putting together the behemoth list having broken them down until they have the attention span of disease-enfeebled gerbils.

Here’s what I got:

• A Sunny Day In Glasgow: Scribble Mural Comic Journal (notenuf)
• August Born: August Born (Drag City)
• Buried At Sea: Ghost (Neurot)
• Dead Meadow: Howls from the Hills (Xemu)
• Malicious Secrets / Antaeus / Mutilation / Deathspell Omega: From the Entrails to the Dirt (End All Life)
• The Necks: Townsville (ReR)
• Paolo Parisi / John Duncan: Conservatory (San Sebastiano) CD + book (Mascietto Editore)
• Jack Rose: Raag Manifestos (vhf)
• Torche: In Return CD + 10” (Robotic Empire)
• Wolves in the Throne Room: Two Hunters (Southern Lord)
• Xasthur: Defective Epitaph [2CD Daymare edition] (Hydra Head / Daymare)

The Torche is packaged in a seriously beautiful gatefold sleeve with the vinyl in one sleeve and the CD fixed inside the gatefold, with art by John Dyer Baizley (by way of Pushead and Alphonse Mucha):

(Many thanks to Cosmo Lee for his excellent article on John Dyer Baizley’s illustration, which alerted me to the existence of this record. I shamelessly stole his high-quality scans, which are of course © John Dyer Baizley, used only for purposes of promotion and review.)

My record is marbled pale green vinyl; if anybody else with this stops by, let me know what color yours is.