Darkly Loops

School of Seven Bells- Alpinisms (Released 10/28/08)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt-SNwyxsBM&feature=related

Cast into the mile-high, airy tumult of the mountaincore music scene, School of Seven Bells stays afloat with bouyant beats and soaring vocals. Beginning with "Iamundernodisguise," the near-mick sounding vocals weave a delicate ascent around the heavy bass and synth washes which open up the track. While the vocals don't sound as Irish on the slower, more lush tracks, "Iamundernodisguise" definitely realizes a sound by a certain "Zombie"-fied group from across the Irish sea. While comparisons to other bands are often useful, I find that on top of pigeonholing a sound or group into a genre, they also hurt the earstwhile dignity of the group in question, so I shan't (y) do it!

The twin vocalists (literally) are the dominant force of "Alpinisms," traversing the songs in what amounts to rock-structured (The genre) peaks and valleys. Undeniably catchy, the group provides many handholds within the songs to enable the listener to scale their igneus tower of stratospheric electronica.

Feel free to listen to the song and let your spirit soar through their foggy mountains if you like it!

My first key

This is what the Star Spangled Banner has always sounded like to Rush Limbaugh:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zqz9EJ3Yb_o&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Etreygunn%2Ecom%2Fdiaries%2FEntries%2F2007%2F11%2F14%5FPatriotism%25E2%2580%2599s%5FRevenge%5Ffiles%2Fwidget1%5Fmarkup%2Ehtml&feature=player_embedded

An rhythmic performance by the Finnish Screaming Men's Choir Mieskuoro Huutajat.

Check out the documentary for more primordial re-invention:
http://www.klaffi.com/screamingmen

Let's Get Fucked Up

Instead of any actual content, I've been forced to pass these videos onto all of you or else I'll die in seven days.

Forgiveness, please.

sporkism: Last week I was in a Hot Topic
sporkism: and I overheard this one guy go up to one of the employees and ask, "Do you guys, like, have any emo techno?"
sporkism: and the employee goes, "You mean like Brokencyde? Or 3Oh!3?"
sporkism: And then the guy was like "No, I already have those"
sporkism: I don't think they ever came to any resolution

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlTE5j7aEf0

For the next video, the money shot comes when one of the talented young singers drinks from a bottle of hard alcohol:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TH5ibABP4U&feature=fvw

"BrokeNCYDE was the brainchild of vocalists Se7en(David) and Mikl(Mike). Se7en and Mikl created a band to pass time while having problems with their girlfriends. According to them, the etymology of the band name comes from the idea of their music being fundamentally broken or "broken inside" due to their relationship problems."

and oh hey speaking of bourgeoisie electro

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubfWnIid5J8

everytime i'm at the bar, you wanna pay
go ahead, buy me a drink...you won't get laid.

I'm so sorry.

Two-Face is Dead (Not Tommy Lee Jones)

Michael Jackson, famed destroyer of Macaulay Culkin's childhood and dance auteur, is in Heaven/Hell at age 50.

Spending most of his life being perfectly weird like everyone else, and doing his share to publically raise his children in strange and outlandish ways, much like any Christian family (He was a Jehovah's Witness), Jackson will now be able to escape to a small island off the Ivory Coast where he'll wait to re-appear until songs about Charles Manson and the encroaching wave of light over a sphere earn him enough money to finally perform in front of millions of suddenly disappointed gingivitis sufferers.

Survived by 911 Is a Joke and Good Life, he will live on in the annals of recorded samples for the remaining 9 million heartbeats you have until you die and will be unable to recall anything as you float through oblivion. Lisa Marie Presley, his first wife, is the only living person to know the secret of Jackson's epidermal alchemy and now spends the rest of her days hiding in fear.

Controversial in his day for his use of rhythmic squeezing in promotion of the undead, Michael Jackson's legacy can be remembered for his desire to black out the issues in society which bothered him the most, primarily, the skin color with which he was born.

Any music journalist worth his salt-n-pepa would note that Jackson lived his life, "Precariously. Imagine a candle in the wind being dangled over the edge of a balcony while Huey Lewis and the News looked on. Also, Princess Diana."

Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.
Michael Jackson was a Jehovah's Witness.

Dream Phone

Teengirl Fantasy- CD R (Unrealeased?)
http://www.myspace.com/teengirlfantasy

I can't really begin to describe these guys without pointing out their description on last.fm. Unbelievably soothing and dancing synth-laid house with dynacism that doesn't transcend the genre, and that just means that it keeps you inclusive in the dream!

From Last.FM:

“Sometimes when I close my eyes I picture a club far away where there is free piña coladas. People are happy and no one can hurt me, not even myself. Suddenly a glitter ball light starts pulsating out of a cube that appeared out of the ocean. It slowly walked towards me and asked me to dance. I figured, why not? The night grew into a sunrise, I sat on a rooftop and cried while falling asleep, but with a glimmer of a smile on my face. It was possibly the most beautiful club I’d ever been to. The pulsating ball of light was called Teengirl Fantasy.”

Check out their website at http://teengirlfantasy.angelfire.com/ . This is a must download!

The reason I have this blog...

...is to actually my friends to new music I've listened to. Time to stop being so preachy!

Paavoharju- Laulu Laakson Kukista (Released 07/22/08)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oVyZxvUlPc

Oh, when it came time to find new Finnish girlfriends, I didn't realize Paavoharju had been already scooped up by the indie community! The svelte mix of ambient keyboards, sparse vocal interludes and electronic drumbeats is the deleted movie score from a nature documentary because its warmth and enthralling power stole the show out of the hand's of Earth's natural bounties. Songs range from being entirely instrumental, to Finnish dirges accompanied with minimal bells, chimes and sullen piano. An excellent atmospheric album to put on and listen to for the first time when you're all by your lonesome. I'm probably very late in the CRITICAL CIRCLES for discovering these guys, but I want everyone I know to hear this album!

Download, download, download!

The RIAA makes a stand against the downloading industry

Just in case you haven't read it already, the RIAA has won a lawsuit against a woman for illegal downloading, making sure to send the message to all downloaders that should you be caught, the jury may find you guilty and force you to pay $80,000 in damages per song.

While the defendant definitely didn't make her case any stronger by lying and trying to trick the prosecution, there is nothing better than seeing an RIAA lawyer express glee over the copyright victory of a group of record companies that have been gouging consumers for years.

You might find this funny.

Metastasis

Music criticism is the challenge of describing aural aesthetics with hyperbole. Drums don't just hit, they "pound." Guitars "ram" through the mix, with "bulldozer riffs." Keyboards are the ethereal instrument, combined with synthesizers in recent decades to be the philosophers stone of texture and sound creation. By describing instruments and their sound in a song's mix, a music critic is attempting to accurately, and poetically, relate to the listener the vital importance or lacking of a band's sound. However, the difficulty of effective writing is that describing the salient characteristics of a song has produced a critical environment where the trend towards describing music as a method of promoting or demoting it, has resulted in sluggishly lazy "nothing" writing on music.

Over the course of this blog's existence, I may point out examples from prominent reviews of which I find this sort of guilt, but for now I'll stick to just exposition. The problem is, because music's premium insofar as accessing is slowly being lost, the critic really only works as an informer to the listener and not as a filter. If a listener can find songs and most music for free through downloading or anything, the critic's job is to make that easier by conveying the sonic qualities of a piece to the listener so that they can save time. However, from my experience in reading music criticism in news is that this practice of musical description has gotten completely egregious and out of hand. What appears to be happening is that creative writing majors go into music journalism ready to unleash their salvo of florid prose onto unsuspecting pop music acts. As an aside, in Pitchforkmedia's case, avant-garde writing and avant-garde music going hand in hand results in the absolute train wreck of being unable to decipher from the junction any context of the band or detail from the sound, leaving potential listeners with only a band name and genre.

So at the least, the end result of current music journalism is still favorable. Whether someone reads a review and ignores most of the actual content, they still get to add a band or album to their repertoire. This isn't always a listener's prerogative, though. They still wish to know whether a band's subsequent albums are improvements, or carry new sounds, illustrate artistic development, or maybe if the context of an album represents a shift in the type of popular music or a dawning of a new musical epoch. But even then, this is rarely the case in most reviews. Any sort of diatribe on the overarching change of music is being covered by the major music magazines as independent articles, a process which steals the music review mercenary's task which in this process becomes "use your post-secondary education to give group x enough description so that this news source can claim relevance." No longer are they granted the autonomy to go more in depth.

This isn't to say that music criticism isn't difficult, in that you're trying to fit one's most specifically well-written observations of a lengthy album while at the same time trying to capture the group's evolution (maybe) and relevance towards various marketable age groups. To the defense of music journalists, they are trying to cram as much information into a short paragraph as they can. However, since the division of labor has stolen most of the depth of the music review by abrogating the power of the reviewer to make important observations and granting it instead to the major music journalists who, beholden to most profit driven magazines more interested in politics than music, instead choose to focus on the most obvious and specific "music stories" of the time. The result is that the undercurrents of all music scenes are flooded over with stories on the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Kanye, and magazines like Rolling Stone completely missed the opportunity to dive into burgeoning independent and small label scene. And as we all know, those still waters ran deep.

I think the solution to all this is obvious. For one part, start giving music journalists the power to create their own narratives on albums they want to review, scenes they want to cover. At the same time, music reviewers should learn to focus less on how "hauntingly esoteric" the strings are on a pop song, and cut the verbiage out in favor of actual review of the quality of the music, or at least a detailed list of who should listen to this piece of music, what are its pay-offs, and anything remotely interesting about a song that would require a journalist to do more research than just listening to a single and then finding some sort of relevant article on the first page of search results on Google. Describing an album's sonic qualities and then awarding it two or three marginal stars out of five does nothing but let you know what sort of taste the reviewer has, or what kind of music the established magazine or website favors. We have the ability to listen to so much music now, and it should be the job of journalists to FIND OUT ABOUT IT and let us know. Despite the freak show of literary sex that is Pitchforkmedia, it serves everyone's needs of letting them know about music that is being completely ignored by the mainstream media. Yes, music magazines have stopped focusing on a lot of the music so that they can sell magazines, or they overtly focus on pop in order to sell, but this doesn't have to be the case! The division between popular music and the underground scene is arbitrarily made because cynical corporations think that Kanye and Britney Spear fans buy their magazines when they're on the cover and don't end up caring about the rest of the content. These corporations should realize that if you never appeal to a market, you simply will never capture it.

Record companies are falling into a sinkhole, but as a result, the internet has picked up the distribution and we are now heading towards an actual global music community that cannot be controlled by monopolistic enterprises. Music journalism needs to embrace that and work to create a musical criticism that works as one of my friends put it, as a "triage." Help us become a part of the community by raising our awareness of it. Yes, I still need some description of the music, but don't over-blow it. I know that education is expensive but for the most part, over-writing is a hindrance to clarity and most music reviews I read are guilty of doing so. Star or numerical ratings should be abolished, but that's another entry. I believe that most of what I'm saying, for the most part, is common sense. It becomes frustrating though, when my ability to decide what I want to listen to involves wading through creative writing exercises and knowing that for young music listeners without the internet, there isn't much hope to being an independent seeker of one's own music. While my thesis to this post was a more negative condemnation of obfuscating writing practices, I should end positively and say that music journalism has a lot of opportunity to change, and that there should be optimism for major communities to embrace the proliferation of access to music that record companies are so wisely relinquishing. And if that means advocating internet piracy, well...

Get Low

Eleanoora Rosenholm- Vainajan Muotokuva (Released 12/12/07)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrgxAbiXrlc

Why aren't these guys independent pop sweethearts? Hailing from Saku Koivu's homeland of Finland, the music itself can be described as the wet dream of a developmentally arrested female doll fanatic utilizing the creeks and croaks of her proto-maturated musical box collection. Everything on the album is cheery, with faint early eighties ascending synths floating through the air like dandylion seeds. Lead singer Noora Tommila's voice is wonderful, both accessible and estranged. I linked "Maailmanloppu" from their album listed aboved, although I recommend you check out the other tracks for some of the darker, more PSYCHEDELIC tracks, featuring the group's third eye and maybe some influence from an Icelandic crooner we might all know? Not Jonsi Birgisson, for Bjork's sake. Ooops! By the hammer of Thor Bjorksdotter!

I'm guessing the band would probably expect some kind of Bjork comparison because us North American Scum can't tell any Scandinavians apart. Wait, Iceland isn't in Scandanavia?!!?!

If it would please your beautiful heart, please download this album.

David Bowie- Low (Released 01/14/77)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdxIhNOgwBE

It wasn't my intention to write about albums of seminal artists from before the epochal continental shelf of the last decade, but this is after all, my bully pulpit. I will at the very least try to only review albums I'm hearing for the first time (which numbers in the million billions). Anyways, I'm not sure if my dislike for the album comes from the fact that this was the last of the Berlin trilogy I listened to (Be it Iggy Pop's albums or otherwise) and that I just can't rate this as a Bowie album knowing that although Eno didn't produce it, most of the texture comes from his scintillating, bald head. The rough guitar sounds better on the Bowie produced "The Idiot," and the lyrics are sparse sparse s p a r s e. What's impressive is I think the guitar on most of the Bowie sung tracks is the best instrument, whereas everything else is mired in overly Krautrock smog. Does Bowie sing more than 60 unique words on a total of 7 tracks? Even on Sound and Vision (What he regained metaphorically after trying to detox off of Bobby Brown's drug!) it just sounds lazily done, like he knew he was depressed and instead of actually trying to channel anything artistic from it, he just decided to cut some tracks (To help Iggy Pop cut out his trackmarks). I realize that yes, this laid the groundwork for that WEST GERMAN SOUND, but it's not developed quite well yet, and it doesn't have that sheen and relevance, as well as timelessness that Heroes has (Bob Dylan's son should also please call a press conference to announce that he'll never play his cover of Heroes again). I would end less sentences with parenthetical phrases (if I could ever stop doing that) but isn't the Berlin trilogy a rather large and eminent parenthetical statement within Bowie's own life? More m e t a p h o r s to come!

I can't say that this album is terrible, because it isn't, and most Bowie fans, myself included, can still listen to it and appreciate the imminent (not eminent, or self-aware at all) approach of the Thin White Duke's style. But with so much time dedicated to Eno's soundscapes, where Bowie's contributions are the equivalent of if NASA discovered the noises of an indigenous race of space monsters similar to Native Americans, living on the moon. Also, while Eno was simply tapping into Eastern European music at the time, Weeping Wall has a distinct Steve Reich Music for 18 Musicians feel. Hopefully that isn't obscure enough so that my points remain somewhat relevant to the ear of the common man!

Speaking of common man, I'm going to Bonnaroo this week, where I'm going to be playing in a 48 hour 20 polytonic key jam with the rest of the hoi polloi. If anything fun happens, I'll clue all two of the people I've linked to this blog on the nature of the merriment (HINT: CATCHING AUTISM FROM DAVID BYRNE).

If you have a soft spot in your heart for David Bowie, please listen to Low. If you just want the best of Bowie, download his actual Best of Bowie album, and just listen to the rest of the Berlin Trilogy.

How do you like my Blog Style? How do you Blog? You Plug Blog In

Since I'm such an obsessive fan of both Radiohead and Sonic Youth, (I spend a lot of time outside of Mrs. Kim Moore and Colin "Mozgus" Greenwood's respectable windows) seeing Kim Gordon "slam" Radiohead for their "Pay What You Will Consumer Surplus Bonanza" felt like my parent's divorce all over again. Also, if that's too personal for you then, I just want to reinforce that it was meant more as a way of flavoring the SIMILE, and that anything else of that sort, be it personal or otherwise, should be taken as more ammunition for anyone who reads this to destroy me personally and critically.

Yes, I actually am a poor writer because of my parent's divorce! The reason behind that is because the divorce lead me to reading a lot of Fantasy novels in order to escape the awesomeness of seeing two grown, brain-matured adults accusing the other of failing to fulfill their part of the white parent's burden, and as a result, I came into contact with a lot of overly florid, poorly written prose of a most medieval style.

Anyways, back to Sonic Youth v. the Radioheads. Kim Youth's problem, as it seems, stems from the fact that she believes that Radiohead pioneered a movement where music listeners after downloading In Rainbows and paying nothing or a nominal fee, jumped off the "pay for recorded labor-music bandwagon", and onto the "music should be free it's art" band-faggin' ('faggin being what a bunch of heterosexual brosefs say to one another when they both follow the same trend). Now, I can't speak for the only female member of Sonic Youth currently in Sonic Youth, but her complaint (as what can be surmised from what amouts to 1.9 sentences) is one that a lot of artistes have been making, especially in regards to Radiohead. Their arguments include:

1) Radiohead is super popular and as a result, can basically give away music and Thom Yorke will still be able to fill his Paxil prescription.

2) The precedent set by the Radiohead model (Oh, and the fact that Trent Reznore is giving away everything these days (UNCITED, but please just go to Nineinchnails.com)) is now negatively impacting the record sales of various popular, respected, independent music groups, groups which are decidedly blue collar and not that wealthy. There is also the implication that the pay as you want downloading scheme (or the "take my music for the price of your bandwidth scheme!" which only benefits Big Internet) disproportionately affects all your favourite bands because they seem to have more fans who are tech savvy, into downloading, are also regular piraters compared to Joe Six-pack, who is still going to Best Buy to purchase with physical liquidity the new copy of Buckcherry's latest tour de shit. Joe Six-pack is generally not very tech savvy and the only downloading he will be doing is when Best Buy gives him three free download codes to get demo versions of Buckcherry's "We're an American Joe Six-Pack band." Or, Mr. Joe-Six Pack will be using iTunes and spend whole dollars to purchase master tracks of his favourite country artist. As a result, the indie musician is now reduced to eating the flies off of each other's starving carcasses, due to the increasing entitlement mentality of their fans.

3) Hey mannnn, why isn't "The Eternal" free with a What.CD Promotional code, mannnn. I've bought all your other albums, why should I keep giving you money for you music labor, mannnnnn?

4) Which really translates to finally, that the value of music labor, embodied in the "sold record and royalty payments made," is going extinct and it's thanks to Radiohead, Girl Talk, Saul Williams, et. al, who are making their own music labor mean nothing.

(When I refer to music labor, I refer to all the time spent and money consumed during the making of any given album. This could include studio time, or the Big Macs eaten while Ian Anderson was penning the lyrics to Jethro Tull. That is culturally anachronistic!)

Any old-school Sonic Youth bootlegger will tell you that the reason they got into bootlegging Sonic Youth live wasn't for the gold played Bentley's they'd later go on to drive when they'd sell out and become commodity traders. And that while bootlegs aren't equatable to albums, they represent the free trade of art and music, but especially act as promotion for those bands, especially groups like the DIY Sonic Youth. Any good band wanted bootlegs because any way for them to get their music heard was a victory, and so even if there were obvious compromises on the sound quality and deoderent useages of the bootlegger, if you've never heard Sonic Youth but your best friend is going to totally make you a Sonic Youth mix-tape with a fucking searing performance of "Shaking Hell" you get a great experience and you get it for free. All of a sudden, the utter visceral gut punch of the recorded form of the song might just shred your intestines if you hear it on a live bootleg. You've also just been given the ability to spend no money to hear another facet of a band you maybe only sort of like, or because of touring limitations never had a chance to see perform live.

So what's the point of all this? Bootlegs are not official releases, and they simply fill the market for live performances since most bands don't release live performances regularly (Unless you are a huge Umphrey's McGee fan then hurray, you won the live perfomance lottery!). But the point is, is that if you put up a barrier to listening, and that barrier is price, which is something that still deserves to exist because you should earn money for your hard labor in creating the music in the first place, people will try to surmount that barrier. However, that in itself is a different argument entirely. The main point is, music has to be heard, and that it is just impossible at this point to stop all the bootleggers, piraters, and downloaders from consorting with one another to get your music-labour for free. This mentality is the bootlegger mentality, and it has been around for decades. The relative lack of worth of the album is simply coming to terms now because people can now listen to a hundred fold more bands. If people are paying Sonic Youth less money now, be it by attending less concerts or buying less albums, I doubt that it has to do with long time diehards expecting their albums for free then it has to do with *gulp* this fucking shit economy (YEAH, IT'S BLAME THE ECONOMY TIME WITH YOUR HOST BARRY HUSSEIN. I love Obama! So chill out brosefs). Or also the fact that many of Sonic Youth's new fans aren't necessarily die hard fans but more casual fans who still want to spend money on music, but they don't have a lot of it to spend even though they still like Sonic Youth a bit more than a friend. And even though they're downloading your music, they still have to give their hard earned money to Thurston Moore just so the guitar gets hurt on stage.

In fact, it is the prime opportunity for many of the DIY bands to take a look at the causation, or at least correlation of how downloading over the long term has affected their concert size (And even if the concert size is the same, maybe the new kids are just replacing the old kids grown adults who just don't want to see Sonic Youth for time number 60). Yes, this is hard to track. This is so hard to track in fact, that even doing something to try to ask your shy, assymetrical hairdo fanbase may result in them calling you out on being the exact opposite of Queen of the Stone Age's hit single, "Little Sister." But, and getting back now to Radiohead, their "Pay as You Go" method did give them an idea of what sort of dedication some of their fans had, what sort of interest they can generate in officially giving music away and not letting it go straight to the Pirate Bay or Waffles.fm. They do get server stats, and get to see what portions of the world love them more (Democratic Congo, it's not you). But it also invokes this conversation: Ff music downloading is going to keep going on and on and on and on (Tony Gandolfini's swan song), how are we as listeners and musicians going to account for this while still placing a premium on the music-labor of an album? Or is the musician going to have to pay a steep price in living income as he can only generate profit by touring 7 hemispheres a year for at least a decade? I'm not suggesting that Sonic Youth starts to hold a focus group on whether or not people aren't going to buy the Eternal because they don't think Kim Gordon is hot anymore or because Lee Ronaldo's new avant-garde solo material is Jackson Pollard crap, but because knowing your audience and its habits, at the very least, might help you stay in the music business a tad bit longer. Or help you put your kids through college.

And if you're like me and you're a kid that was put through college, have a bit more disposable income so that I can spend the money I want to reward bands I love for making great music. And if I can't afford an album, I can at least listen to it and if I really like it, go check them out live.

And that also isn't to say that Kim Gordon isn't right, that there needs to be more premium placed by the "downloaders" on music-record labour. But that shouldn't come at the expense of the old DIY vanguard criticizing Radiohead for trying something new, and that fact that Radiohead offered an official venue for non-fans to try listening to their new album for free.