Armand van Helden released this trailblazing long-form monster under the Mole People pseudonym on Strictly Rhythm in 1995. It's an acknowledged deep house classic. Rudimentary tribal drums and two endlessly unspoiling laser loops, glowing with phaser swirl and traversing a shimmering expanse, opening up an endless void like in "Tomorrow Never Knows."
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I was speaking with brave about the latest Shed record and he said "it sounds great if I'm driving, but if I'm IMing people it just sounds like some beats." Which pretty well sums up the two kinds of attention you can pay to music, especially the heavily rhythmic minimal-beat kind. but it's not like one form is better than other form. Walter Benjamin (the implicit or maybe not so implicit forefather of AC) made a point of stressing how important distraction is in modern life as a form of experience.
distraction is valuable in modern life because there's a lot of it. there's suddenly alot of things coming at you and most of the time you're not zoomed in on them, they appear in this shifting thicket of sensation, and when images or sounds or words sensed in distraction pass into your psychic self and begin to live there, they will be not as things you really remember or can identify, but as lurking, immortal ghosts.
so pay close attention to 'break night'. or put it on while you gchat. see if I care.
Three songs to inaugurate the days of a hazy, palid, low-temp submergence.
1. I'm mildly obsessed with this release by Thomas Melchior on Cadenza. It's a gorgeous, light-rhythmed minimal bliss-out, with drifty girl vocals. It feels like if you're scuba-diving and you look up and see the filtered sunlight flickering down through the water, a shimmering, diaphanous curtain. It's great for walking around on a pale afternoon, watching gusts of wind scatter leaves across the earth.
2. Track from Fennesz's latest, "Black Sea." Why do electronic musicians associate winter/cold weather worlds with metallic, hi-frequency reverb? like the kind you imagine on a Hannett-produced snare drum. It works for me, I'm just curious about the psycho-aesthetic link-up. Here thrown pebbles of white noise plunk past spare, sonorous clusters of sampled guitar, all ebbing and flowing like ripples on a gentle pond.
3. From his album, the well-titled "Surface of a Broken Marching Band." Feels very much of the Fennesz school, but with some lovely low-tuned fractured hip-hop beats lurking in the murk.
Here are some reasons not to be afraid of dread minimal. Because even dwarves started that way: as one can see, it doesn't mean you have to stay there. You can get up on that big-person Harley and kill that shit.
1: Every generation gets the "Sinnerman" remix it deserves. Who takes care of it for us? Luciano, aka Villalobos Jr. It sounds like he's using a live recording, so he includes the applause but drenches it in trebly reverb, which sounds cool. Actually using the live version in general is a cool idea. This mix is pretty great, now that I think about it. It cuts out alot of the verse, loops the piano riff forever, and then all of sudden Nina's free, impassioned pleading soars like a fiery eagle. Intense - it sounds like she's slamming her body on the keys in exhaustion. I picked it up from the Dirty Sound System blog, Alain Finkielkrautrock, which you should read. It's what I would do if I were French and awesome. I'm only one of those things (not French).
Nina
Luciano
2. Brooklyn Club Jam. Jacques Renault is a much-lauded NY dj who plays at 205 every Tues.
Jacques Renault
I recommend riding for his skills and for this track produced under the "Runaway" alias. Surprisingly it has very little to do with NYC or what New York sounds like, which is good. There's no no wave parts or ESG brittle-bone funk parts or schizo-posturing parts, it's just a deep kind of lo-fi minimal burner with heavy tribal beats and uplifting piano. very solid. It gives me faith that New York can produce straight dance music and not have to 'hot chip'-it up or anything for indie fascism.
3. Stimming's "Una Pena".More latin-tinged minimal. Very danceable, heavy clap, with a gorgeous, invigorating Espanol vocal from Violeta Parra, an older Chilean singer.
Violeta Parra
Guess what? Her brother is the famous Chilean anti-poet Nicanor Parra, who I know about because my friend Pia is writing on him. The Parras were heavily involved in reviving the Penas in Chile, community, arts and political activist centers that became banned by the military coup that overthrew Allende in the 70s.
Here's Parra's original. It is pretty great. Youtube = the whole universe.
Every time I return home to Texas, there is accounting to be done. I have become accustomed enough to reckoning with the detritus of my past that there is little left to confront, few remaining hoary ghosts or embarrassing reminders. The room I occupied through high school is now stripped of character, a carpeted repository for some plastic computer desks and, inexplicably, numerous pairs of doggie-shaped bedroom slippers.
Two days ago I found a box of minidiscs, recorded in college. The recorder itself, and thus the only way to play them back, having been long since thieved by baggage handlers at the Prague airport. The discs are labeled things like "Improv Todd's House Incomplete." "Mud and Buckets Vol. 1" etc. And concluded that the sorrow from lost time doesn't come only from a present disappeared, but from a future that never found its way, the sting of 'it might have been.'
Kompakt just issued its 9th yearly 'Total' compilation, including a jam by Superpitcher, one of my favorite Kompakt artists because of his ability to inject melancholic emotion into minimal dancefloor techno. "Disko (You Don't Care)" has a pretty recognizable vocal sample from "Back to Life" by Soul II Soul. This is one way that art can assuage the sting of searching for lost time - sampling is a way of dealing with 'it might have been' by turning the past into something else.
My girlfriend at the time these minidiscs, now lost and found at the same time, were recorded, gave me this acappella version of "Back to Life", where you can hear Carolyn Wheeler's soaring, soulful vocals unadorned. These versions along with the original are here for your enjoyment. Really the acappella is the standout, especially how the drums kick in as the heavenbound singing descends back to earth. It's featured in the opening to Hype Williams' 'Belly', to intense effect. It's such a killer track that you could use it as the opening to anything - 'Lord of the Rings', 'The Exorcist' doesn't matter.
Here's the intro to Belly, which as any youtube comment poster will tell you, is da illest intro eva. You'll notice that the Soul II Soul song has almost nothing to do with telling you realistically how to feel. Over images of a robbery, it's not tense and dramatic, it's not gritty and aggressive. It's done only to heighten your pleasure of the image. It's like in "Mean Streets" when the soundtrack is "Please Mr. Postman" during the over the top fight scene in the pool hall.
A fan of techno can, in certain situations, become an occultist without any easy frame of reference for those in his company. Any doctor, however, who would grant me even the most cursory of examinations would be hard-pressed to miss a fairly simple biological explanation for why I personally keep company with techno, with repetitive music in general, with things of great duration and minimal variance.
My own mind has at times a marked scattershot rhythm, which like any other mental condition is something one must learn to accommodate and to utilize, to put to work according to its strengths and its limitations. This is why, for example, certain substances or activities that put others to sleep tend to sharpen otherwise occasionally diffuse mental activity in my head, leaving me unable to shut down, leaving me restless in the dawn, while my evening's friends lay silent all around.
And this is why, I'd say, I find myself so often turning to repetition in art, in pictures and in words and in sounds - suddenly a space is opened where a single phenomenon commands terrific attention to the minor subtleties of its unfolding. of its modalities. Like holding a precious stone to the light and turning it slowly.
In life, a predilection for tangents, for horizontal connections, for the subterranean resonance between disciplines. In art, the depth plunge, dragged by the sudden gravity of one event, hardened as if into a dense stellar body, a steel-grey neutron star. A weight and counterweight, a balance.
But of course this is only one example of how art and life respond to one another, one exchange in their infinite conversation.
Regard for art must consider biology, aesthetic criticism must become medicinal. This is not to limit the discussion to art therapy, but to expand the force of those two terms, until therapy loses its self-help connotations, until it expands to become a material science, concerned with the regulation and evaluation of humors, of speeds and intensities.
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Marcel Dettman is a resident at Berlin's Berghain club, recently voted the best overall techno club by readers of Resident Advisor. A hoary, hulking form in the urban desert of East Berlin, walking distance from what remains of the Wall. His new mix, out on Berghain's own Ostgut label, is a testament to minimal techno, trying to balance landmark tracks with contemporary developments. There are some at times off balance transitions that result from this, but the track selection is amazing, and shows all the exciting potentials and rich contours of a genre which most Americans still associate with wearing neon synthetic pants in high school. Ride for it.
Two debut tracks from Brooklyn producer Sextant. The first, Evil Steeple (Is People), is a horror-disco banger reminiscent of Moroder or Zombie-Zombie, with haunting organs and demon-pitched vocals, apparently inspired by the midnight menace of red-lit churches in Berlin's Kreuzberg. The steeple is watching. And it's people in a soylent way, if you follow. It's also rumored to possibly be a remake or remix of an hour-long Dopesmoker-style doom-metal epic called "It's People" and attributed to a group called "Evil Steeple," but I don't know any more than that.
The flip, "The American Friend," is a more tech'ed up burner, with punchy, swaggering drums and groovy, echoey synths. It's a nod to Wim Wender's classic 70s noir (starring Dennis Hopper as Mr. Ripley) and a bit of musical diplomacy, transplanting the German capital's sexy minimalist throb to the streets of Brooklyn, - an ode to Berlin's techno strongholds like Berghain and Watergate, and further evidence that the sonic love affair between the two cities is still going strong.
Don't call it a comeback. Mostly because Bristol's brightest aren't really back, that is, the new record doesn't have much to do with the same place they left off. After ten years, Portishead reappears not to cash in on their mighty trip-hop legacy but to open up a new edgier trajectory out of its ruins. Picked this CurrentTV clip up from Sasha Frere-Jones' New York blog. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/
It's half an hour of Portishead doing all new material live, and it's even better than the album versions. Full band, two drummers, no mercy. whatever you wanna call their new sound, it's a new understanding of the literal spirit of r&b - rhythm and blues, ill kraut-tempered beats together with desolate torch songs. For a band that doesn't like to perform and comes together every decade to record, they could easily, if they wanted, be a pop powerhouse like that other something-head band.
Track List: 1. Fuck Buttons - Bright Tomorrow 2.Ricardo Villalobos - Lazer at Present 3. Paul Kalkbrenner - Keule 4. Fleetwood Mac - Rhiannon 5. Jesse Rose - Evening Standard 6. Fuzz Against Junk - Born Under Punches (DJ Harvey's Punch Drunk Mix) 7. Adam Freeland - Silverlake Pills (Gui Boratto Mix) 8. Jona - Exoplanet Dub 9. Discodeine - Ring Mutilation 10 .Junior Boys - No Kinda Man (Jona Remix) 11. Animal Collective - Peacebone (Pantha du Prince Remix) 12. Roberti di Simone - Secondo Coro Delle Lavandaie
-In 1968, Japanese architect Arata Isozaki presented an artwork for the Milan Triennale which consisted of images of ruined futuristic cities being projected on a screen printed with an image of Hiroshima flattened by the atomic bomb. The name of this artwork was 'Electric Labyrinth'.
-In 1971, George Lucas directed THX 1138, a science-fiction film about a colorless, dystopic world in which the populace is controlled by android police officers and forced to take a litany of medicinal drugs to regulate every facet of their lives. The name of the original student film on which this feature was based was 'Electric Labyrinth'.
Most of the rhetoric surrounding the reissue of Paebiru centers around the trope of the 'lost classic', of which this album is a shining example. The attendant myth involves almost all the original copies being lost in a warehouse fire. A lot of the pleasure of being an obscure music obsessive involves the joy of strange proximity: bringing what has been far, what has been distant and forgotten, once again into the light, to pull something from oblivion and hold it to one's ears. Then one hears not only the sound of the record, but as well the colorless ruins of the past, something almost like the crackle of old vinyl. An album that sounds something like a tropacalian mutation of Amon Duul, aka some deep acid-rainforest shit, and also it was supposed to be destroyed in a warehouse fire, is a stellar candidate for such an obsessive pleasure.
In this way, the context risks overshadowing the content. From Stylus Magazine's review: "With all the murk surrounding the album, it’s easy to overlook the frankly silly nature of what we’re dealing with. Say the following out loud: Paêbirú is an obscure Brazilian psych concept album about the four elements (earth, air, fire, water)... age and scarcity lend this record a legitimacy—and audience—it might otherwise be unable to muster."
Not to say the record doesn't have its transcendental bursts. The opening track, presented here, is evidence enough to the contrary.
The sounds of this 60-70s style of loose, improvised psychedelic music, with its genre-bleeding and unbounded vibe, are often a sonic shorthand for a historical contemporaneous understanding of freedom. It's one bound up with the 'passion for the real' mentioned in the previous post, as Alain Badiou has characterized it. Badiou has said that from a philosophical point of view, the twentieth-century is marked by a 'passion for the real'. That underlying the diverse artistic, intellectual and political movements of the last hundred years is a fundamental reckoning with a drive towards the 'real', in the sense of the visceral, the immediate, the raw, all what supposedly lies beyond the mediated, illusory, ideological facades that distract us in modern life.
It's not hard to connect how bugged-out rainforest jams might participate in this passion, which in the lives of educated urban white persons can often manifest itself as a fascination for raw-dog style, for the sounds and images associated with the concrete, the immediate, the intuitive, the pre-critical, the ecstatic. Psych record collecting = passion for the real.
It should be noted that in The Century, Badiou formulates an alternate passion for the real, but one that doesn't look for the real among any kind of 'thing', any kind of 'identity' - not even a rare record. This passion is associated by Badiou with Malevich's White on White - which is about uncovering the real as the gap between place and taking-place.
In other words, to continue the short circuit between Badiou's philosophy and music, the central claim about The Century is about the passage from psych jams to minimal beats.
------------------------------------------------------- William says: joyous. and another small step for euro-trance rap. but wtf, did they forget to finish the song? Seriously, I'm sort of taken aback by how minimal this is. Remember that part in Pootie Tang where the title character is cutting his hit rap single in the studio, and he turns the beat all the way down and the vocals off, and releases the rap equivalent of John Cage's 4'33"? This is getting there. For real, what's the acappella version of the track supposed to be, the same thing? Sheeet.
Pootie
Cage's score for 4'33". Go here for more on the composer's most notorious piece.
In essence, it should be said that if you ever have to explain to foreigners what 'poppin' is, it's this song, this singing, and these bodies moving around in that way. That's it, sorry. 'Poppin' has now reached its ideal Platonic expression, so you are going to have think up something new for your rap video. Also, maybe best backing vocals ever. what..what...what... AC rides for half-out of it sounding backing vocals, they pretty much seal the deal on any track.
To return to the emphasis on the song's extreme reductive style (to the point where there's hardly any music to speak of, except for the random euro-synths at the end), let's consider for a moment Soren Kierkegaard's writing on minimal beats, from his essay, The Rotation Method:
"..the principle of limitation, the only saving principle in the world. The more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention. A prisoner in solitary confinement for life becomes very inventive, and a spider may furnish him with much entertainment. One need only hark back to one's schooldays, when aesthetic considerations were ignored in the choice of one's instructors, who were consequently very tiresome: how fertile in invention did not one prove to be!...How entertaining sometimes to listen to the monotonous drip of water from the roof! How close an observer does not one become under such circumstances, when not the least noise nor movement escapes one's attention! Here we have the extreme application of the method which seeks to achieve results intensively, not extensively."
There you are, a dominant artistic strategy both in much of 20th experimental and electronic music, not to mention Rye-Rye and NinjaSonik, right from Soren.
The inaugural March edition of AC radio is curated by me.
1. Thief at your Window - Endless Grift Recorded last April at Explosion Robinson, a basement studio on Grand Street in Brooklyn whose name was adopted by the urban clothing store which had previously occupied the space. Engineering and guitars: Darian Zahedi. 2. You May Be Blue (Neighbors Remix) - Vetiver Topanga folkie Vetiver refits his own track from the album 'To Find Me Gone', turning the dark folk-rock number into a very Superpitcher/Kompakt-like brooding minimal-techno stomper. 3. Space Disco - Universal Robot Band Eleven minute epic track that is a very strong blueprint for the now-resurgent 'space disco' style: short on chic/village people/bee gees disco decorations, long on hairy tribal weirdness. Sounds a bit like that 'Cloud One' record if it achieved lysergic velocity. 4. Train (Ewan Pearson Remix) - Goldfrapp 5. Once Upon a Time - The Heliocentrics Belongs in consideration with the DJ-Shadow playing high school band and the Hypnotic Music Ensemble. It seems that live bands have figured out how to play like Entroducing and are ready to start killing shit. 6. Idle Hands - Harlem River Drive Jonathan sent us this, a burning latin funk album lead by Eddie Palmieri. This is the deepest, most muscular track. The kind of intense music that will temporarily erase your memory and make you forget you have other songs you could be listening to. 7. Track 5 - Ulaan Khol Stephen R. Smith's new solo record, very recommended if you are pleasantly susceptible to soaring guitar squalls and other types of mesmerizing sonic excess. 8. National Anthem to the Moon - Bruce Haack From 'Electric Lucifer'. Deeply eccentric outsider-art moogness from the same camp as White Noise, American Metaphysical Circus, etc. 9. Snakedriver - Jesus and Mary Chain From the Crow soundtrack! You know what, as a matter of fact, I want you to go listen to that whole record right now. 10. Anambra - Ozo Renowned for being one of the close-out tracks at NY disco impresario David Mancuso's legendary loft parties. Not even really a disco track at all, just deep spiritual beats from no country. 11. Effective Placebo Effect - In Flagranti 12. Hung from the Moon - Earth 13. Super Inuit - Holy Fuck
Intro: The Wire, episode 59 Pylon – Danger Ebony Bones – We Know All About You Liquid Liquid – Optimo (JD Twitch Edit) The Gossip - Standing in the Way of Control (Playgroup Mix) Ghosttown DJ’s – My Boo Kano – I’m Ready Paradise – In Love With You The Chemical Brothers – The Golden Path (Ewan Pearson Extended Vocal) David Bowie - TVC15 Dondolo – Dragon (Shit Robot Remix) Montell Jordan – Get It On Tonite Gui Boratto – Like You (Supermayer Mix) Supermax – Love Machine Love & Rockets – So Alive Playgroup – Number One Lindstrom – Another Station (Todd Terje Mix) Grinderman – Honey Bee
The Borgata hotel, Atlantic City, NJ
Why f*ck a re-up? Don't we like re-ups, because that's where the goods come from? Aren't re-ups necessary for life? If we diss the re-up, do we still get to listen to Clipse? In episode 59, The Wire's police officials break out from simply catching drug dealers conducting re-ups. Had they remained in the re-up, it would have been like a grey, existential french drama. Re-up after re-up, with no end in sight.
On Friday night at the Borgata hotel in Atlantic City (AC), after having driven down with several close friends of mine for a long night of bro-ing down, I personally had to say f/ck a re-up, and I was all the better for it. Let me say here that if you are to visit the lovely Borgata hotel, and you want to know who there is not on your side, his name is Joe Vanderslice, the manager of crowd control. Mr. Vanderslice, a stocky, stoic man, refused, even after an extended well-argued and even-tempered plea from me, to admit my passport (issued to me abroad, at the US Embassy in Prague) as a valid form of ID, thus allowing me to drink alcohol and to gamble on the premises. While I respect the relatively unpleasant and joyless labor of maintaining order at a busy New Jersey casino, and the attendant lack of human sympathy that I imagine is an invaluable tool in such a career, I remain convinced that I suffered an injustice as a result of Vanderslice's painfully limited knowledge concerning legitimate forms of government-issued identification.
In a casino, while gambling, one's drinks are re-upped periodically gratis by the house. Denied the re-up, I went for re-supply: sympathetic to my situation, my friends agreed to retreat to our hotel room, where room service was entreated to produce a bottle of Absolut, the contents of which were then enjoyed with gusto, the remainder going into a clear plastic water bottle I had procured earlier from an in-hotel Starbucks. I treasured the fact that I would be the only one that night who could get in trouble for drinking, high-school style.
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On scanning the tracklist, the attentive reader will notice that several of the pieces do not make their debut appearances here, but have in fact been utilized in at least one, perhaps more than one, previous mix. It's possible that the reader will greet this observation with a twinge of disappointment. Why this persistent attention to these particular songs? Should today we not look forward, are we not, as it is said, in an era that craves and deserves change?
There is a kind of change associated with upheaval, radical disjunction, and the jolts of sudden difference. And then there is the change of modular repetition, of unfolding, of infinite permutation. The former is what is hungered for by an appetite trained by the rhythms and intensities of industrialized entertainment. In this context, technology is used to deliver the promise of the first change, while a deeper potential lies in its capacity for exploring the second.
The most intense exploration of this capacity in sound is in electronic dance music, and in language, the French postwar nouveau roman, exemplified by the repetitive narrative techniques of Alain Robbe-Grillet (who passed away less than a week ago) and others.
What R-G shares with techno is the engagement with modular repetition as a phenomenological lens on the world. A mental object, be it a condensed literary scene or a four-bar loop, is held, bound, suspended, rotated, its possibilities and potentials unfolded and ignited, again and again, without progress, without tragic arc, without end.
This world is marked everywhere by the permanent tension between possibility and determination. Each object or event carries in itself more possibilities than can ever be realized, all of which make equal claim to the right to be manifested. Modular repetition stages the interruption of the process of determination, holding the object up the light of potentiality and engaging in infinite inspection.
One of the benefits of a blog is that its disposable character, its off-handedness and comparative instantaneity give it a workbench-like atmosphere. The reader is not a tourist in a museum of finished masterpieces, but a casual visitor to a craftsman's studio during work hours. Hence the reworking, the investigations of alternate drafts, discarded revisions, and the compulsive return to old favorites.
final episode 60 of The Wire now available from HBO On Demand. As if you're not so deep in it right now.
In the moment we are born, the spirit that we are before we enter into this world is split. I don't want to say that it is split into two. Because, it's not a matter of the one becoming a two, two symmetric halves, that might one day become again the one. As is spoken, for example, in the famous image from Plato's Symposium. In that scene, the reconciliation spoken of is one of love, and of a relation between two beings of the same kind. Here, instead, I mean that in order for us to take a living form, a form that is alive in this world, there is part of us that is clipped or cut, and sent away. I don't know where it goes to. I don't know if this part is sent to meet with the other parts that have been clipped from all those in the world, and if they know and commune with one another, in some phantom city never seen, erected on an Asian plain, or beneath the ocean's deepest doldrums, where furious currents have gone to die.
I know that there is a way to meet this split spirit again. Or maybe it is not a meeting face-to-face, maybe it is a way only to wear the face of this spirit, the way that one acts on a stage, or wears a festival mask. In the way that there are some things that live in this world as a mask, a disguise, a costume, and when the costume is laid down again on the bed, the spirit is gone.
Often this way involves visiting a foreign country. It can happen that while traveling abroad, this shadow lost before birth can be heard in a silent speech by one's innermost ear. No matter what, you will never see or touch this shadow, at most you will hear its wordless pronouncement: here, in this land, you and I may come to know about each other. And in all that you take in about this land, its foods and languages and music and so on, it is in a kind of mute and private acknowledgment, a recognition, a greeting.
So it is, I think, with Christina and Italy. Who for our all-too-brief trip seemed to be living the life of another, not one which is an escape from one's first life, but which makes the first seem to be an extended exile from the second. In some people, travel is a catharsis, a kind of necessary semi-regular exercise useful in purging built-up energies and tensions. In others, it cleaves the psyche in two for good, such that dynamic energies are sparked for eternity. It is not known whether in this case the soul becomes permanently restless, or turns to face for the first time the restlessness which has always haunted it.
On a trip for five days through Rome, in the ceaseless heat, on the stony earth, each day punctuated by the shot from the noon cannon. Those traveling days where everything bears a faint halo of mythic intensity. We spent three days on the island of Ischia, a volcanic island reachable by ferry from Napoli, and home to several thermal springs, one of which is cava scura, 'secret cave', and that lies at the end of a path one can take from the small beach of Maronti, where we took seafood pasta on the beach for lunch.
Not on purpose is the song structured into three parts. The song is so structured, in three parts which do not repeat in an A-B form, because this form is boring and constraining and I can't do it. Whatever inner daimon it is whose hand moves my creative impulses, it is one that seems to prefer the horizontal flows, tangents, contiguities, unfoldings, and so on, and all those other trappings of nomadic freedom.
(..As much as on the other hand there is another daimon, perhaps one who resents the first, one who craves the brutal cut, the unforgiving amputation, the diabolical reduction....)
Were one to feel a slight pang of doubt, understandable to be sure, as no life on this world, no matter how serene and secure, is free from such pangs, that cosmic disco was not of particular relevance in today early 2008, one would have to look no further than this recent B-side by LCD Soundsystem in order to encounter evidence to the contrary. The beat is discoey, slow, spaced, and at the end following a goof-off drum solo there's a weird synth-ed up detour which appears without warning.
The recent recipient of glowing praise among the purveyors of contemporary indie music, El Guincho has often been described as a heavily tropacalia-inflected mutation of last year's Panda Bear solo album. There is not much reason to contend, dispute or enhance this description. There is reason, however, to dispute the claim made by the recent Pitchfork review that 'there's nobody else making music like this right now': Manu Chao, anyone?
Little is known to this writer about Mogollar other than it can be described by means of the phrase, 'Turkish progressive folk-pop of the 60s-70s.' An ill and mellow jam, all things considered.
Jonathan F. sent us this track, accompanied by the appellate "proto-Weekend Prince", apparently in reference to the latter's respective predilections for "In the Air Tonight" and the narcotized tempos of Houston rap. As AC is concerned with music, its criticism, and the conditions which make its criticism possible, we have to stop and ask ourselves some questions:
1.Is cough syrup addictive? 2. Are slowed-down beats addictive? 3. Why is 'In the Air Tonight' so awesome compared to the nauseating remainder of Collin's solo work? 4. What does the adjective 'proto' indicate? 5. Does Phil Collins like cough syrup?
1. Yes. Physical addiction is debated by experts, psychological addiction is well-documented. In 2005, six pharmaceutical doctors were put on trial in Houston for illegally distributing the drug. A report from ABC News at the time says: "Besides purple stuff and syzurp, the addictive cough syrup concoction has also been known as "lean," "drank," "barre," "purple jelly," or simply, "syrup." Those who have had the drug refer to its intake as 'sipping on syzurp.'"
Cough syrup contains dextromethorphan (DXM), a chemical which when isolated at home via an impromptu extraction method involving a washing machine as a centrifuge and then concentrated at 10x in pill form and administered for recreational purposes to a 17 year old Acknowledged Classic causes the latter to spend the night in hallucinatory sweats and have to call his parents the next morning.
2. Yes. This is part of a larger addiction which I would call something like, addiction to what in French is called ''un petite rien'. That's a nice expression, a 'little nothing'. Oh what's that, oh don't worry it's a little nothing. Just a small little nothing there, over in the corner, next to your briefcase. Forget about it. In other words, AC suffers from an addiction to That Which Is Only One Degree More Than Nothing at All. This is easy to understand when thinking about minimalism, minimal paintings or minimal beats, or the kind of Minimal Social Club that our friend Volker thought about opening: "There won't be anything on the walls, maybe a Malevitch, in an empty room. We'll sit and listen to minimal beats and not talk very much."
But slowness is another variation of this. Jonathan mentioned to us that in the Phil C. remix, the drums almost sound like they're going to stop, like the whole thing is going to fall down. There is so much persistent vitality there in the sounds of beats that keep happening against the threat or pressure of slowing down and stopping forever. It's like Beckett's "I can't go on, I will go on" as music. The sound of DJ Screw is really the sound of a struggle against death, a darkly heroic sound. It's the sonic equivalent of the movie "Flatliners."
3. That's a good question.
4. In Greek proto simply indicates 'first' (eschato means last). In contemporary usage, however, it indicates a kind of pre-appearance of something prior to its full manifestation, the way that certain nationalistic or populist strains in culture or politics in Germany prior to 1930 have been referred to by historians as 'proto-Fascist'. In this sense, 'proto' is a purely historical designation. You can't use it in the present, you can only use it to talk about something past, and then only in light of something that followed it, you're making a historical argument, and one that implies progress: 'here's not the real thing but a nascent, embryonic form of it', in which case you're dealing with looking at something which is not itself. Which always weirds us out. It's a morphological claim. Like if you call the Stooges 'proto-punk', you imply a certain idea of punk and then say that punk is there in the Stooges' sound, but not as itself, as some other ghostly form of itself. Often new musical trends, like the re-birth of electro, will re-engage with an older style at the moment of its proto-ness in order to find all kinds of other paths and potentials that never got developed, that fell away like ungrown branches once the path from the 'proto-version' to the 'real thing' got developed.
5. I don't know.
The affective relation between chemicals and music is of significance to us because it is part of a larger concern for a materialist understanding of music. Not how good the song is, but where you are when you hear it, who you're with, what you're on, what you ate last, etc. The reason that Screw exploded in Houston is because helps set a particular stage: out late at night, driving around an urban metropolis slowly in a car, and making use of particular chemicals that affect sense perception to match the situation's velocity. It's good music supervision.
In honor of Valentine's Day, AC recommends the new Louis Vuitton line of Syzzzurp
AC DOES NOT CONDONE OR ENDORSE THE DRINKING OF COUGH SYRUP. It does recommend those little Cold-Eeze sucky things if you start to feel sick, though. Just slurp a couple of those and they'll set you straight.
Track List: This mix is so minimal, the tracks don't have names. Except for the last track. The last track is "Computer Cowboy" by Neil Young. From his techno-inflected album Trans. Where he sings through a vocoder. (True). It is hard out there to be so minimal. In fact, I can't even hang that small. The fact that this mix verges into disco territory is testament to the great nimble delicacy needs to hang so small for so long - you need sushi-chef precision.
Jonathan F. passed us a remix of Animal Collective's recent single "Peacebone" by minimalist Pantha du Prince. It is a long minimal epic and its serious dopeness causes us to regret that we developed the So Minimal mix prior to encountering it. Consider it a supplement of the highest order.
2. The New York Review of Books' recent contribution to literary minimalism, "Novels in Three Lines" collects items written for the fait-divers in the French daily papers by Felix Feneon in 1906.
Something like having a writer of Flaubertian precision regarding sentence construction write the brief incidental items. The result is a haiku-like distillation of the daily accumulation of murders, fatal accidents, and assorted nefarious hijinks:
"Some drinkers in Houilles were passing around a pistol they thought was unloaded. Lagrange pulled the trigger. He did not get up."
"Napoleon, a peasant of Saint-Nabord, Vosges, drank a liter of alcohol; very well, but he had put in some phosphorous, hence his death."
"Lit by her son, 5, a signal flare burst under the skirts of Mme Roger of Clichy; damages were considerable."
"The former mayor of Cherbourg, Gosse, was in the hands of a barber when he cried out and died, although the razor hide nothing to do with it."
3. Further down the line of literary quotidian minimalism, Scottish designer and writer Oonagh O'Hagan maintains the website Flatmates Anonymous, which in a manner akin to the methods of U.S. publication Found Magazine, gathers written emphemera that serve as odd, funny accidental testimonies to the absurdities, frustrations, micro-dramas and general quotidian mayhem endemic to the sharing of living quarters.
Knowing that Oonagh is currently preparing an American edition of the Flatmates Anonymous book, we cannot imagine she would be disheartened if readers of this site were to visit hers and post their own related texts. For more visit Flatmates Anonymous
4. NYC blogger Self-Divider has written an enlightening post on 'infinite smallness' in Franz Kafka and Robert Walser, a Swiss precedessor of Kafka. He quotes Walser from his novel Jakob von Gunten: "to be small and stay small", and dismisses the idea that such a credo of smallness has nothing to do with modesty, humbleness or cuteness. This is not the smallness of a young polar bear cub.
In contrast, Self-Divider writes, "There is a disruptive element in [Walser's] writing which comes from a force that is more disturbing and radical: the self-destructive desire to vanish completely from society. From 'Helbling’s Story' -
I ought really to be quite alone in the world, me, Helbling, and not a single living being besides me. No sun, no culture, me, naked on a high rock, no storms, not even a wave, no water, no wind, no streets, no banks, no money, no time, and no breath. Then, at least, I should not be afraid any more.
It is a well-known fact that Robert Walser spent the last decades of his life in a mental institution. And that, on the Christmas of 1956, some kids in a town called Herisau found his frozen body in a field thickly crusted with snow."
Regarding Kafka, Self-Divider writes, "in the story “The Great Wall of China,” Kafka retells a Chinese legend to an unnamed “you.” He says that the dying Emperor has sent “you” a message via a messenger. In a gesture that mirrors K.’s oral recitation of a message to Barnabas that is to be relayed to the Castle (in fact, the short legend seems like The Castle condensed, reincarnated into an enigmatic parable), the dying king whispers his message into his messenger’s ear. Being a Kafka tale, of course, the messenger is mired in the infinite folds of the palace’s chambers and courtyards; he will never deliver the message. Thousands of years would pass. “But,” Kafka writes, “you sit at your window and dream [the message] to yourself when evening comes.”
Walter Benjamin tells us that it is not difficult to intuit that the unnamed “you” in the story is Kafka himself. And that Kafka has done everything in his power to make himself unknowable by making himself small.... Benjamin recognizes that Kafka’s smallness is not a contented smallness of a pleasing kind, but a reductive maneuver by which a writer can vanish, become invisible:
It is impossible to overlook the fact that [Kafka] stands at the center of his novels, but what happens to him there is designed to reduce to insignificance the person who experiences it, to render him invisible by concealing him at the heart of banality. And the cipher K., which designates the protagonist of his novel The Castle… is certainly not enough to enable us to recognize the person who has disappeared. The most we can do is weave a legend around this man Kafka.
For the full article and more literary commentary visit The Self-Divider
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