A Year of Music

I think most serious music fans and collectors have private creation myths: little stories they can tell about how they came to be the way they are. Either it’s a friend or a sibling who passed them some ear-opening tapes, or a family that was filled with musicians, or a glancing exposure to something that sunk its hooks deeply into their brains and took them over for life. Or, in many cases, a combination of all of the above, which is how it was for me. Here’s a little piece of my own story.

When I was a junior in high school, I spent one night babysitting some friends who were tripping (this was before we all figured out that mixing the high and the non-high is generally frustrating for everyone involved). They spent that trip mostly playing an already ancient version of Space War on one dude’s PC. I was mostly relieved to be left alone for a while, having spent most of the day feeling like a tool for not wanting to get high myself, and spent the time flipping through channels on cable, something I didn’t have at home.

This was shortly after the introduction of VH-1 but before the introduction of 120 Minutes, and Viacom had unceremoniously dumped a bunch of semi-alternative music videos on an unnamed show late on VH-1, which I happened to catch. The three videos I saw were by Helios Creed, Front 242 and Danielle Dax, and it’s safe to say they changed my life. The Helios Creed video was sleazy and struck me at the time as a not-so-veiled paean to heroin, the Front 242 video was for “Headhunter” and made me desperately nostalgic for Brussels (which I’d visited for all of three hours 8 months previously), and the Danielle Dax video was for “Cat-House”, and was by far the most surreal of the bunch – which was saying something.

“Cat-House” is a weird song, mostly because of the way it plays Dax’s girl-group-gone-feral singing against what seems like more or less straightforward industrialized rock and roll. It sort of sounds like the Sisters of Mercy got a less wildly demonstrative Diamanda Galás to sing for them, and it’s a song that starts out seeming pedestrian, only to get weirder and weirder the more you hear both it and the rest of Dax’s painfully eclectic catalog. The video is basically Dax miming the song run through a battery of cheap video effects (which are done absolutely no favors by YouTube), but it has a hyperdelic intensity that hit me just right, maybe due to spending the day around people who were capable of watching a stalk of grass for 15 minutes without moving.

Dax has been around long enough that most people have forgotten her altogether, but I’ve been listening to her US best-of anthology, Dark Adapted Eye, a couple times a year ever since I picked it up (on cassette!) in 1989. She got her start in the incredibly weird Lemon Kittens, and her music has stayed hard to pigeonhole ever since, borrowing elements of Orientalism, perverse morbidity, cryptic metaphysical references, and a generally goth patina without ever having a fixed sound. She gave up on the music business back in 1995 in a fairly flamboyant fashion, issuing another best-of and obscurities collection with the pithily summarizing title of Comatose Non Reaction: The Thwarted Pop Career. At least she kept her sense of humor.

After recently discovering the bonanza of music to be found on the MP3 Blogs of Blogspotistan, I found Devastate to Liberate. It’s not an album you’re likely to have heard of unless you’re a fan of some of the bands on it (or an old-school member of PETA), but in its way it’s a Rosetta Stone of mid-80s weirdo music, with songs by Nurse With Wound, Legendary Pink Dots, Crass, Coil and a variety of other (talented yet obscure) industrial and anarcho-punk acts. It’s also, I think, the first militant animal-rights benefit album, being released to raise funds for the Animal Liberation Front.

Perhaps my favorite track on the album is one by a band I’d never heard before: the Shock Headed Peters. “Blue Rosebuds” is an unhinged five minutes of feedbacked scree and post-Sabbath guitar histrionics that neatly bridges the gap between heavy metal and the noise attack of Skullflower. It’s not metal, it’s not industrial, and it’s not rock and roll, but it’s definitely crazed and loud and I love it.

Shock Headed Peters were a project of Karl Blake, who was the other member of Lemon Kittens with Danielle Dax, and hearing this track prompted me to finally find the Lemon Kittens’ albums. The least obscure album Lemon Kittens put out was released on Steven Stapleton’s United Dairies, and whether or not you have the faintest inkling what United Dairies is, that should give you some idea how obscure the Lemon Kittens were. Their entire catalog is seemingly irretrievably out of print, and it’s hard to identify why, because their music is not unapproachable; it’s strange and amateurish (Dax didn’t know anything about music when she joined the band), but in the best spirit of post punk experimentalism, ideas are king, and a lot of the songs click after two or three listens. For now, you’ll just have to find one of the internet rips and download those, unless Blake or Dax decides to chance their luck with a label or distributor again (they both have fairly dyspeptic Myspace blogs).

Dax’s kiss-off to the music industry contained a couple songs she did in collaboration with Blake, one of which is an absolutely fabulous reinterpretation of a Shock Headed Peters song, “Hate on Sight”, which is turned from an acidic post-punk tune into something not unlike Curve playing doom metal. It’s enough to make tracking down a copy of Comatose Non Reaction all on its own, because it’s a great song.

All of this has filled me with a burning urge to hear more Shock Headed Peters, but their stuff is also incredibly hard to find (I found this, but I’d like legit copies of this stuff without having to pay extortionate eBay prices). It’s too bad, because Karl Blake plays guitar like a gifted demon (much like Helios Creed, to bring this story back to its beginning). No matter how much music I find, I always seem to find myself wanting more. It’s a pleasant problem to have, especially because I still like the old stuff – I’ve been listening to Danielle Dax’s music a bunch over the last few days and, if anything, I find her outsider take on goth music more charming now than I did when I first heard it 20 years ago.

For a long time, “dubstep” was more or less a free signifier very loosely attached to the music made by a small group of British producers who all knew each other. It was mentioned in print – when it was mentioned at all – by electronic music cognoscenti like Simon Reynolds and Woebot, had a loyal, tiny internet following and was otherwise very much a London scene nobody else knew or cared about. A couple of years ago, though, it became a Thing – it got written about in music magazines, had its own club nights all over the world, generated a couple different series of compilations, and got a lot of breathless hype from Mary Anne Hobbs over high-profile remixes of indie artists. Its sudden popularity caused Simon to instantly pronounce it dead, the producers to start grumbling about how the newcomers just don’t get it, and all the other things kids in the underground do when they suddenly find themselves confronting an expectant public they were never particularly interested in meeting.

Still and all, it’s weird to watch people police dubstep’s margins, to watch fans and DJs try to issue decrees about what is and isn’t proper dubstep. It’s a warning sign that classicism is setting in, and that people are trying to own a style – something that’s patently impossible. That usually coincides with me losing all interest in the style for a while, because being obsessed with “the classics” gets tedious in a hurry. This happened in a major way to Detroit techno, and as a result, there’s been very little new music from Detroit that’s genuinely excited me for a long time. I’ve heard stuff that’s insanely well-crafted and that moved me, but none of it has struck me as all that innovative or different.

I bring all this up because I was reading Blackdown’s newest monthly summary of the dubstep and grime scenes, and something about it set off my bullshit alarm (emphasis mine):

There’s something very timely about Oneman’s selection. Between the rise of funky, Mala’s continuing “broken dub house” direction, and the return of the 2step influence to dubstep, be it through Burial’s beats, Geiom’s “Reminisin’”, most of TRG’s productions, Martyn’s selection or Kode9’s sets, the vital link from dubstep to “house and garage” seems to be rejuvenating (in an interesting parallel to the Berlin/Bristol dubstep/techno axis). Oneman is most definitely at the forefront of this, going so far back in the dubstep continuum that old becomes new, classic sounds fresh, when placed in relation to the dominant styles that fill the bulk of dubstep in 2008. Plus, to much of his audience, pre-2005 or even pre-2006 dubstep is new ground, and that’s not even touching the vast number of current fans who wrote off UK garage in its entirety.

and

To say TRG’s sound owes a debt to Horsepower and to a lesser extent, early Zed Bias, would be an understatement. But set in the context of dubstep’s recent output, there’s something refreshingly welcome to the re-emphasis of swing and rhythmic variation (2008 dubstep producer in “snares-not-on-the-third-beat shocker!”). Increasingly there is the sense that if someone doesn’t re-ignite this style, it might be lost from dubstep’s canon for good. 2002 it seems, is the new 2008.

Come on, dude, 2002 was only 6 years ago. There’s a ton of records coming out that are still obviously indebted to the old garage sound, and the free interplay between dubstep, grime and newer UK garage (funky house and bassline house most specifically – read his past columns for more details on those styles. Blackdown knows the score) makes it pretty clear that the only ghetto dubstep is in is one consciously created by its critics and fans. It’s a little early to be talking about dubstep having lost its hardcore.

At the same time, I think I see his point, or maybe a version of it. Specifically, there’s a whole crowd of drum’n’bass producers – most prominently Tech Itch, who should know better – who seem to hell-bent on translating their fun-free mechanical techstep idiom into something that sounds the same as their usual, idea-free crap but runs half as fast. UK garage was a reaction against exactly that kind of tedious one-note darkness, and although I love Tech Itch’s old drum’n’bass, I really wish they’d leave dubstep alone. At least until they actually engage with all the stuff that happened since dnb and dubstep ended up on parallel paths.

I do really enjoy the totally uptempo, dancefloor-oriented dubstep that folks like Skream!, Caspa and Rusko are making. It’s plastic and pop, and it ditches the weirdness and obsession with dubstep’s musical dialectic with itself that makes artists like Shackleton, Burial and Various Production so interesting. Rusko’s “Jahova”, Distance’s “Traffic” and Skream!’s “Check It” are all slick as whaleshit, and sound even slicker in the mix, but they’re all fun, bass-heavy dancefloor stompers. As DJs crews, Skream! and Caspa & Rusko are unapologetically prejudiced in favor of ass-shaking, and they put together very consistent, slick sets that still encompass a lot of dubstep’s diversity while still being clubber friendly.

I think the club-friendliness is probably the main thing that bugs Blackdown and people like him. It sucks to watch your special thing go mainstream, especially when the people doing the mainstreaming don’t seem to understand what it was that made it interesting or cool in the first place. Maybe it’s easier for me to not care because I’m only a casual bystander (although I’ve listened to a lot of dubstep and grime in the past few years). I don’t know. I’m just wary of the impulse to build a canon, to worship the classics. A good tune will remain a good tune forever, but if you fasten upon the classics of the past, you might miss the classics of the future.

Writing this blog is leading me into interesting terrain, as this recent batch of additions to my library shows:

• The second half of Mordant Music's The Tower has been banging its way into my head far enough to make me take a leap of faith and buy the rest of their diverse and aggressively eccentric catalog.
• I realized that I was entitled to download a bunch of Severed Heads' Op series outtakes due to having bought Op 2 a while ago, so I grabbed those.
• Talking about Surgeon's awesome DJ sets reminded me to check his site to see if he had a more recent set than the ones I have, and indeed he did.
• Finally, I've been accumulating a pile of crud from Mutant Sounds, so I added all that to my iPod so I could get to know it better. There is some amazing music that's been dug out of obscurity by that blog:
  • Tappi Tíkarrass, Björk's first foray into the post-punk sound that she refined in Kukl and the Sugarcubes, before she decided to become the most avant garde pop star ever;
  • a bunch of long out of print Hirsche Nacht aufs Sofas (HNAS) records from a parallel universe where Nurse With Wound were actually German, instead of merely being obsessive fans of Krautrock;
  • a whole pile of European art-damaged gothic post punk (Claustrofobia, Dark White, Epitaphe, Tango Luger);
  • some early records by the fucking tremendous Wall of Voodoo, whose Call of the West combines the miserably American, empathy-drenched humanity of Raymond Carver or Robert Stone with Ennio Morricone's expansive sound and Kraftwerk's electronic pulse – anyone who thinks the Wall of Voodoo story starts and ends with "Mexican Radio" is very much missing out;
  • a couple completely sui generis Japanese electronic / prog / jazz / avant garde records from the 70s, one of which was a collaboration between most of Yellow Magic Orchestra and the one Japanese Pop artist whose work I know well (Tadonori Yokoo – there was a semi-exhaustive survey of his work up at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo when I was there);
  • and a pile of random singles from the Mutant Sounds archives, including an awesomely out of character John Duncan track and a deeply weird couple of tracks by Duppi, a Japanese band I'd never heard of and will probably never hear from again. Mutant Sounds is so awesome that there's no way it's going to last.

Here's the full list. I've appended links to sources for most everything. Downloading the albums posted by Mutant Sounds requires you to deal with quasi-filesharing services like Rapidshare, Zshare, Bodongo and Megaupload; these services' wack-assed stabs at business models make getting at the archives a pain, but I assure you that if you like boundary-pushing music, it's worth jumping through the requisite hoops. A lot of this stuff is begging to be put back into print, if only by somebody like Hyped2Death.

• Claustrofobia: Arrebato (Fobia) [ms]
• Dark White: The Grey Area (private) [ms]
• Epitaphe: Syndrome (private) [ms]
• HNAS: Melchior (United Dairies / DOM) [ms]
• HNAS: Music für Schuhgeschafte (Dragnet) [ms]
• HNAS: Willkür Nach Noten (Dragnet) [ms]
• Haruomi Hosono & Tadanori Yokoo: Cochin Moon (King) [se]
• Mordant Music: Baud With You / Shot Away (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Carrion Squared (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Dead Air (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Fallen Faces / Dead Air (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Filthy Danceheng (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Petri-Dish (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: The Tower: Parts I-XVII (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Travelogues: A Beautiful Vesta (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Severed Heads: Op 1 (sevcom)
• Severed Heads: Op 2.3 (sevcom)
• Severed Heads: Op 2.9 (sevcom)
• Surgeon: Neck Face (www.dj-surgeon.com)
• Tango Luger: s/t (Invisible) [ms]
• Tappi Tíkarrass: Bítið Fast í Vítið (Spor) [ms]
• Tappi Tíkarrass: Miranda (Gramm) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Ring of Fire / The Morricone Themes (Index) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Two Songs by Wall of Voodoo (Index) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Wall of Voodoo (Index) [ms]
• Tsutsui Yasutaka & Yamashita Yosuke: IE (Fiasco) [ms]
• whacked-out singles from the Mutant Sounds archives:
  • Drinking Electricity: Shaking All Over / China (pop:aural)
  • Duppi: Velvet Night / はつねつのみやこ (Night Gallery)
  • Électric Max Band: Mick and Max / Knives, Feathers and Fire (Reprise)
  • Electro Static Cat: Lethologica (Freedom in a Vacuum)
  • Eskaton: Musique Post-Atomique (Eskaton)
  • John Duncan / Andrew Chalk & Christoph Heemann: The Elgaland-Vargaland National Anthem / Old Hive (Die Stadt)
  • Kevin Dunn: Nadine / Oktyabriana (dB Records)
  • v/a: Earcom 3 (Fast Product)

About seven years ago, the Atlantic Monthly published a long, detailed article about the future of copyright and the implications of cheap and easy filesharing. Recently the Atlantic decided to open their formerly pay-only archives up for free access, and so we can read this article and all get bummed out when we realize that essentially nothing has changed in the interim, except that Ross and Bram Cohen came along and invented BitTorrent and basically made it so hard to selectively filter filesharing traffic that Comcast and AT&T are bringing down the ban hammer on their own paying customers in some weird, totalitarian effort to befriend the weird, totalitarian RIAA.

Some choice excerpts:

Within the music industry it is widely believed that much of the physical infrastructure of music – compact discs, automobile cassette-tape players, shopping-mall megastores – is rapidly being replaced by the Internet and a new generation of devices with no moving parts. By 2003, according to the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Investment Research Group, listeners will rarely if ever drive to Tower Records for their music. Instead they will tap into a vast cloud of music on the Net. This heavenly jukebox, as it is sometimes called, will hold the contents of every record store in the world, all of it instantly accessible from any desktop.

1. Rob Glaser, the CEO of Real Networks and one of the driving forces behind Rhapsody, frequently makes reference to the “heavenly jukebox”.
2. I sure do miss Tower.

Technophiles claim that the major labels, profitable concerns today, will rapidly cease to exist, because the Internet makes copying and distributing recorded music so fast, cheap, and easy that charging for it will effectively become impossible. Adding to the labels’ fears, a horde of dot-coms, rising from the bogs of San Francisco like so many stinging insects, is trying to hasten their demise.

That’s a fabulous line. I wish I’d worked for one of the cool stinging-insect dotcoms back in the day.

Last year the worldwide sales of all 600 or so members of the Recording Industry Association of America totaled $14.5 billion – a bit less than, say, the annual revenues of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance.

I love the brutal way this puts everything into perspective, especially because it’s likely that number is significantly smaller now.

After the show I asked [Chuck Cleaver of Ass Ponys] if he was concerned about the fate of the music industry in the Internet age. “You must be kidding,” he said. With some resignation he recounted the sneaky methods by which three record labels had ripped off the band or consigned its music to oblivion, a subject to which he has devoted several chapters of an unpublished autobiography he offered to send me. (He had nicer things to say about his current label, Checkered Past.) Later I asked one of the music critics if Cleaver’s tales of corporate malfeasance were true. More than true, I was told – they were typical. Not only is the total income from music copyright small, but individual musicians receive even less of the total than one would imagine. “It’s relatively mild,” Cleaver said later, “the screwing by Napster compared with the regular screwing.”

This is the essential problem with which the major labels have never dealt, and maybe never can resolve. They’re trying to get new artists to sign “360 contracts”, where the labels get a cut of touring and merchandise revenue in addition to whatever income comes from selling the artists’ albums, and it takes a pretty naïve (or, perhaps paradoxically, ambitious) artist to think that’s a good idea. Musicians have many reasons to distrust and detest the major labels, and ever-fewer reasons to rely on them.

Last year, according to the survey firm Soundscan, just eighty-eight recordings – only .03 percent of the compact discs on the market-accounted for a quarter of all record sales.

The only difference between then and now is that the number of discs sold is likely to be significantly lower. For all the talk of the long tail, the fat, thin end of the tail is still making the major labels an awful lot of money.

Anyway, the whole thing, while being the usual insanely long Atlantic Monthly / New Yorker ramble, is worthwhile, as it provides tons of historical context for the still-intractable situation in which we all find ourselves. The really sobering conclusion I draw from the article is that we’re no closer to resolving the copyright problem than we were at the turn of the century, and if anything, the big corporate interests have taken even more control.

Today marks the beginning of this blog for real.

I recently created a new smart playlist in iTunes named “terminator”. It includes every track on my iPod that hasn’t been played since midnight last night. Upon its creation, that playlist contained 21,433 tracks, which I will now listen to shuffled by release. That’s a whole lot of music, no matter how you look at it: 148 gigabytes (which is all my “160GB” iPod classic will hold), 70.7 days’ worth of uninterrupted listening, 1,998 albums containing tracks by 1,044 different artists. After I’ve listened to all that, I’ll pull in more from my archive, which currently includes 6,102 albums collected over the last 20-odd years.

For the last few years, I’ve been using myself as a test subject for new ways of listening. Playing through huge playlists of incredibly diverse music, randomly-selected album after randomly-selected album, has had strange effects on how I hear music. Genre as a differentiating principle has diminished greatly in importance, and I have definitely learned to privilege songwriting and composition over production and musicianship. I try very hard to give everything an equal chance to be heard (the reason I only started this project now is that I wanted to hear everything on my iPod at least twice), but my subconscious brain definitely plays favorites (consider the relative accessibility and songness of the things that get stuck in my head).

This blog is, in large part, intended to be a scratch pad for me to document whatever random thoughts occur to me during the process of listening through my collection. I’m trying to get in the habit of making quick observations several times a day, and otherwise not decide in advance what and how I write. I firmly believe that we, as listeners, need newer, more rigorous and inclusive ways of talking about music in the thoroughly postmodern culture we all live in now (I know, I know, postmodernism is so 20 years ago, but in many ways, it’s more in control than ever). I’m still trying to figure out what that means and how to do it. My hope is that writing a little every day will eventually help me figure it out.

I may or may not make it through my whole collection. As the subtitle of this blog says – at the time of writing this post – I have 248.8 days’ worth of music in my personal archive, if I were to listen to it 24 hours a day. In reality, I listen to about 8 hours’ worth of music a day, mostly while I’m working, running errands or reading at home. Very approximately it would take over two years to listen to it all at that pace, and of course I’m not planning on stopping my music shopping just because I’m doing this project. I’ve committed to giving it at least a year, but after that we shall see. Finishing things is not my strong suit.

So far today, I’ve heard the FAN disc from New Order’s RETRO compilation, Side 1 of Severed Heads’ Op3, Surgeon’s East Light EP, Janek Schaefer’s Above Buildings, a stray track from The Haunted’s rEVOLVEr (not sure what’s up there, probably some kind of metadata bug), and Troum’s session for the Mort aux Vaches show on VPRO radio in the Netherlands. I don’t intend to write about everything I hear, nor document my listening album by album (people who really care about that sort of thing can check out my last.fm page – almost everything I hear gets logged there). I don’t have anything insightful or penetrating to say about a lot of my favorite music; I just enjoy it, and that’s fine with me. My hope is that the stuff I do write will be interesting to some of you, and that as this project develops, some of you will be interested enough to hang around.