A Year of Music

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.

Colin Newman’s “Round and Round”, the last track from his 1988 solo album It Seems, is a brilliant and maddeningly catchy exercise in looped anti-pop music. It’s especially impressive in the way that it flouts pop song conventions while sounding relentlessly poppy – the song is only Newman singing his elliptic, nonsensical lyrics over layered synths, with no percussion or rhythm section. It builds and builds, paying off in… nothing. It fades out and the album ends. It’s a completely typical move for Newman, who manages to combine both the most pop-oriented and most pranksterish tendencies of Wire (his most famous project) in a single person. And it’s a beautiful little song. I seem to be incapable of just letting it play through, rewinding it back to the beginning each time I hear it.

Talking about my visit to Aquarius reminded me that I’ve already had one shopping trip so far this year. There’s only one store in San Francisco / North America that can really compete for my affections with Aquarius, and that would be Amoeba. I don’t really see them as competing; Aquarius is run by my friends and is a boutique with a high density of specialty items and Amoeba has a huge variety and much better coverage of electronic dance music (such as it is these days). Neither of them has any trouble separating me from large piles of my money.

Anyway, here’s what I picked up at Amoeba last week:

• Akimbo: Harshing Your Mellow (Alternative Tentacles)
• Akimbo: Navigating the Bronze (Alternative Tentacles)
• Cabaret Voltaire: Eight Crepuscule Tracks (Giant)
• Cabaret Voltaire: The Living Legends (Restless / Mute)
• Darkthrone: FOAD (Peaceville)
• Nick Drake: Bryter Later (Island)
• Nick Drake: Five Leaves Left (Island)
• Nick Drake: Time of No Return (Hannibal)
• Echospace: The Coldest Season (Modern Love / Baked Goods)
• Fairport Convention: Liege & Lief (Island)
• Fairport Convention: Unhalfbricking (Island)
• Fotheringay: Fotheringay (Fledg’ling)
• Gravenhurst: The Western Lands (Warp)
• PJ Harvey: White Chalk (Island)
• Daniel “belteShazzar” Higgs: Metempsychotic Melodies (Holy Mountain)
• LCD Soundsystem: 45:33 (DFA)
• Gram Parsons with The Flying Burrito Brothers: Live at the Avalon Ballroom 1969 (Amoeba)
• Pylon: Gyrate PLUS (DFA)
• Seefeel: CH-Vox (RePHLeX)
• Six Organs of Admittance: Shelter from the Ash (Drag City)
• Wiley: Eskiboy – The Best of Tunnel Vision (selected by Logan Sama) (Eskibeat)
• Wire: Read & Burn 03 (Pink Flag)
• v/a: Fabric 36 (mixed by Ricardo Villalobos) (Fabric)

I’d say it’d been a while since I’d been shopping, but this happens pretty much every time I go to Amoeba.

A couple months or so, British post punk old-timers Wire put out Read & Burn 03 on Pink Flag, their own label. Since the last Read & Burn came out a few years ago, it’s sort of strange that they’d continue the old series. It’s especially weird as the record sounds less like the material on those EPs and the album (Send) that drew from them, and more like their late-80s material. I think their 80s output is a brilliant fusion of Dadaistic wordplay with strangely conventional, polished art rock, but a lot of people hated it. Since this carries over the tightness of their new material, it might be appealing to people who thought A Bell is a Cup Until It is Struck and the other albums of that period were a little too slick and diffuse.

Speaking of music with which I have an obsessive relationship, I find myself wondering what, exactly, happened to Wire between Pink Flag and 154. Wire's debut album is all tense, dry minimalism, bitten-off cynicism and single-serving songwriting. Their third album, released only two years later (and shortly before the initial attempt at the band imploded -- what came back is still one of my favorite bands, but a very different entity), is a cold maze of serpentine paths dead-ending into miasmic bogs. Very pretty miasmic bogs full of exotic plants and mallards, but there's definitely more chill than pop here. It's a masterful product of the studio.

Wire's one of those chameleonic bands that has been through so many phases that people have completely lost sight of how remarkable their constant reinvention has been. Pink Flag is recognizably a post-punk product, but next to 154, Magazine at their coldest sounds like a bunch of fuzzy bunnies, and at least Public Image's seminally dour Second Edition sounds human. I love 154 without reservation (there are very few albums I have listened to more over the course of my life), but it is a very forbidding monument. How did they develop into something so forbidding, austere and coherent so quickly?