In the first place, the whittling meant giving those things I love a sound caning. Not Malaysia/Singapore style. It meant listening again very carefully to all the albums I loved, especially: Junior Boys, Alva Noto + Sakamoto, Isolée, Ezekiel Honig, and Jonsson/Alter (which also has the honour of being an excellent house/techno album - the exceptional souffle that proves the rule?). These are all amazing albums that really deserve your time/ care/patience/attention, and many of them are not 'obvious' on first or cursory listens. You need to make an effort. But basically there’s nothing ‘important’ going on here, as I see 'em. They’re just talented people doing what they do very well, very comfortably. Polished formulas, highly developed approaches, and predictably excellent results. With ‘all of the above’ I can also recognise how subjective my appraisals are; to some extent they’re all just ‘cold beer and hot chips’ for a guy who loves both those things. Then there’s Peaking Lights and Grouper (both the AIA albums), who have produced two of my favourite recordings to actually listen to, especially of an evening, especially accompanied by a good book and a bottle or three of Coopers Stout. These are high rotation favourites (the stout, too), but, for me, they’re also a kind of BGM. For me. But maybe they also lack that spark, that undeniable glint of the extraordinary.
A few general comments. The interesting newcomers… I’m just not sure yet. And maybe I’m not totally convinced in general. Apart from Autre Ne Veut - that album is genius, and the reent EP is great. But in general, not sure: not about Not Not Fun, nor Tri Angle, nor Hippos in Tanks, nor Spectrum Spools. There’s undeniably something going on there that is both very creative and very interesting, but I’m just not sure any/all of it is prepare to give what people need from it. But that might say much more about the neediness of what is, you'd have to say, a very fickle audience. Needy and fickle, that's us... ...and not very good listeners, for the most part... But very opinionated. It's not a very good combination of traits, really. But in relation to 'all of the above', I’m not ready (or inclined) to comment either way. Still learning, still thinking, not convinced... I will say that the Art School Indie Kids are kicking the absolute shit out of the Dance Music Laptops though, creatively speaking.
Also: the whole ‘dark’ thing… black isn’t a colour, but it’s still a shade we have to be careful in choosing. Black is an extremely subtle signifier; it’s not only possible to clash while wearing black on black, it’s also all too easy to just be... boring. And after all, what are Goths but conservatives alienated from conservatism (but unable to reject it wholesale - hence the mourning, and the ability to leave the mourning, and hence the comforts of the melancholia). Well anyway, there can be something timid with ‘black’, something half-arsed, lazy. I find it in Melbourne all the time (this does NOT apply to Coopers Stout) in the way people dress. A failure of imagination. Or dress sense. Anyway, I think that, along with a lot of the milquetoast kosmische-lite ‘synth’ stuff, for the most part the ‘dark’ thing is going to date very, very badly. And just 'cos you add dissonance to dark doesn't make it interesting. And if you make ‘dark dissonant synth’, well then, good luck to you in 2012, sir… Then there's the 'second coming' of microhouse, with new work from so many of my old heroes (call it Perlon and Playhouse, Kompakt and Krause... and Dial). Are the many returns happy? I think a whole post on Pampa and Re|dial (as the 'houses' of all the microhouse refugees) is warranted. I'm not sure I quite have the interest. That might say something... But really (final general comment), as long as you don’t tell me Nicholas Jaar is good, I’m willing to accept that you’re trying. That album is shit, and if you don't think so, you're not listening. And its acritical reception says a lot. About
us, mostly. Okay, time to canonize…
I think all these albums are significant. There's something important here, important because, in their own way, each of these works offers us signposts or models for different possibilities. Paradigms. We all need paradigms. And/but/fuck, they're all amazing, too. It is, even now, in spite of everything, all about the music, maaaan.
John Maus – We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves
It’s rare that someone makes a perfect pop record. This one is pretty close; it’s not perfect, but it’s still genius – and ingenious and generous and ingenuous. And hell, the combination of that title with that cover...?! Ridiculous... And the album has this incredible, ineffable 'sound' (I'm not just talking about the lo fi thing, I actually think JM has learned something really important about sound from Ariel Pink). It’s not cool, it’s warm. And it has that real audacity that so much other music lacks right now. More than that, these are very good songs (and lyrics), and the whole album plays so ‘suitely’ that I wouldn’t change a note. Short and sweet. (Why don't more people make short albums!?) But what I love most about it is that its centrepoint is impossible to focus on. So it’s actually very subversive, it fucks with you. Every one I play it to, they say, ‘wow, it sounds just like X’ (and they start enumerating Joy Division, the Cure, the Stranglers, ‘the 80s’, 'new wave', whoever). But no sooner do they say that then I see a look on their face that quickly doubts what was so clear only a bar or note before. So it totally resists complete assimilation, no matter what. You can’t flat pack it, vacuum seal it, or turn it in to wallpaper. And so, in spite of absolutely, brazenly deploying irony, nostalgia and pastiche, it totally undermines the three corners of the po mo ‘fire triangle’ – this recording actually gives you an escape hatch to another possible world. But the moment you take it, the album is over. So you have to begin again, again. Radical.
Tim Hecker – Ravedeath, 1972
Well, it’s not really about rave, death, or 1972. But all these points would signal a moment in time. Taken together, Ravedeath, 1972 totally scrambles all these points of reference. There is something wonderfully, purposefully enigmatic about this album,in its sound presence: what do these sounds ‘mean’? How can I ‘hear’ them? Why is it that it sounds like a different recording every time you play it (and depending on what time of day you play it, and the volume you play it at)? Yet at the same time, how is it that, no matter what, as soon as you put it on it suspends you in its soundworld – part sky, part cloud, part blanket? Is it evil? What does it want? I can't quite tell... but I like the confusion... So: a seemingly inexhaustible source of something that makes a subtle change in the whole room, and you in relation to it. Jazz drummers are known for their ability to bend time. I think that Tim Hecker (and Ben Frost) have found a way to suspend time with this record. Yeah, it’s that good.
Kangding Ray – OR
In the making of any album, the gathering of influence and elements is really important. But then it’s like a bouquet: once you’ve gathered it, you’ve got to hold it together, but not so tightly that you might crush all the pretty flowers. Wtihin the spectrum and archive of electronica Kangding Ray works with, (which he showed us so well on his mix for us a few months back, which you must listen to if you haven't) I feel that this is even more the case, because in spite and because of being given so many sonic potentialities, all too often producers don’t quite have the restraint, the musicality, or the horizon to really hold it all together. You can think about it in relation to the past decade (the whole stupid, wasteful she-bang) and our faithful tools, the computers. In the final analysis, they were simply much ‘better’ than most of the people who played on (or just toyed with) them. It was – is! – too unlimited. Just like contemporary finance capital (maybe that’s why we’ve crawled back to synths; computers are uncanny in 2011, they scare the shit out of us). OR seems unafraid of any of this; it’s an album that plays like a head-on tackling of something. There is nothing half-arsed or faint-hearted about it. It’s not minor, an addenda appendix or preamble, the work before the Work. It’s bold. It’s gold. OR is for awesome. It announces itself as what it is through its cover (just like Isolee did for Rest) and plays ‘just so’ from first note to last. The strength of the gestures, the poise with which they are put – this is, simply, a powerfully expressive album.
All three of the recordings I’ve selected here have a very special relation to time, or do something with time – and so tell us something about our time (which is a pretty strange time, definitely Mao's 'disorder under heaven'). We're not living in a non era. Let's not muddle through it, or succumb to anxiety, terror, paralysis, boredom, whatever... I keep thinking of George Clinton’s lyrics from ‘Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts’:
‘Change your mind, and you change your relation to time’.
The rest is practice.