"self-copulation, record collection"

Involuntary posts by Tarwater #5

AC is proud to bring you another installment of involuntary posts by Tarwater, in which our accidental scribe addresses the new LP "Hidden" by These New Puritans. AC would like to give a shout out to DJ Slow for first pioneering the idea of disseminating Tarwater's funny, insightful commentary wholly without his consent.

"Most of the time, "English band receives mad critical love in England" = "enlarge your penis safely and naturally", as meaning and as news, but once in a while weird science makes a breakthrough I guess -- like with the 2nd record from These New Puritans. The first one was a quite good Fall/Wire/beats amalgam, but just-released Hidden is something else entirely. It's so singular in fact that in trying to describe it you(I) end up resorting to cumbersome critical portmanteaus like "if Liars listened to late-period Talk Talk and then found residence inside the PA at Brixton* basement party..." -- well, you still wouldn't really be there. What I can say: by song #2 you've heard a children's choir, a 13-piece woodwind orchestra and Japanese taiko drums**; the drums consequently, are HUGE - they sound like they wanna be scoring North Korean mass games; and in a interview before the record came out, the leader claimed he wanted something like "Steve Reich meets dancehall", paused, and then said "I've been writing a lot of music for the bassoon." Anyway.

*My London geography is practically non-existent - I'm taking this reference from the Clash and 80's British crime dramas (for all I know, Brixton could be Fort Greene by now) - so feel free to substitute any neighborhood where you'd hear a lot of dubstep/grime/dancehall.

Oh: subject heading is from The Fall's 'New Puritan': "I curse the self-copulation of your record collection."

i've always been crazy

waylon jennings - I've always been crazy

I played rock band for the first time last week, after drinks with friends from copywriting class. Our hostess had inherited the apartment nearby from her grandparents, which in the words of her gentleman friend made her "chinatown royalty." True to form, the long and narrow railroad bore finely-tiled ceilings and elegantly dark-wood doors. The chinatown bus departs, literally, from the curb at her doorstep.

I have been reluctant to play rock band or guitar hero, much in the way a tennis player might resist stepping up to the nintendo wii. I found it utterly entertaining, because it's just like playing music only you don't have to try very hard - it's been redesigned for maximum goof-off with your friends satisfaction. You can sing and laugh and screw off or you can put the utmost effort into it - the song plods along all the same. You play for points so there's a bit of an incentive but it doesn't really matter. Personally I find the whole setup very appealling, because I am a big dork. At some level in social situations I occasionally run out of things to say, and I want to start playing with the stereo, because I am specifically a dork about music (surprise). That's in part why I started djing, so I could obsess about records and not have to be burdened with small talk. I don't necessarily want to run out of things to say but sometimes events take their own course. Making the group activity be playing music together in an informal low-pressure setting is thus an ideal way to re-socialize semi-awkward music dorks like myself.

If I were in charge of putting the songs on rock band I would put this song by waylon jennings, because sometimes it's my personal anthem.

The Uncanny Valley / The Floating Head

Dakar - I've Got That Feeling
Junior Boys - No Kinda Man (Jona Remix)
Goyte - Heart's a Mess (Supermayer Remix)

All three of these tracks are awesome. If you played them together, for example, on some sort of list designed for playing, in the order they're presented to you here, you would be treated to a sweet delight of grooving minimalness braised with soulful white male.

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Perhaps the most succinct explanation for the phenomenon known as the "Uncanny Valley" is that provided to Tracy Jordan by Jonah Friedlander on 30 Rock:



The thoughtful reader will have already noted that this valley is a purely visual category. There is no uncanny valley for music, for sound, for the human voice. What unites these three recent minimal tech-house burners is that in all of them, over a relentless electronic churn, a passionate male vocal swoons unfettered, detached, for the most part, from the clanking machine that surges beneath it. It's a song structure built around a dialectics of freedom. For the msot part, none of these songs really has much sounds that bind rhythm to voice, especially the Dakar track. The singing head and the churning beats straddle a big black sonic void. The locked-in techno beats only dialectically emphasize how unbound and free the voice is.

Dakar - is new on Get Physical
Junior Boys - from Get Physical's Body Language Vol. 6, mixed by the aforementioned Boys.
Gotye - remix commissioned by Australian singer Gotye from Supermayer, then, beyond all horizons of reason, inexplicably rejected. It's been floating around on the net for a while, and we present it to you like the glorious, mesmerizing dead butterfly that it is.