April 2009 Archives

Throbbing Gristle played their first U.S. gigs in over 30 years last week in NYC. It was their first east coast gig ever. Photos and videos can be found here:

http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2009/04/throbbing_grist_4.html

Chris Carter's personal photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_carter_/sets/72157615982120660/

Chris' rigs are only ones that give me gear-gasms. Some folks are grumblin' a bit, but no matter how much they paid for a ticket they had to know the NYC shows were just reversals for Coachella. A festival of that size has to be the largest audience TG has ever played for. I hope they used the opportunity to do something terrible. Something shocking. Maybe Gen will commit suicide on stage.

Regardless of the group's intention, its amazing an act I like when I was 15 is still making new challenging music. TG continue to challenge themselves, each other, and their audience. Few artists with a history as long as TG, as influential as TG, can make that claim. It also makes my day that my guitar hero is a female over fifty years old whose entire oeuvre has nothing to do with blues.

===========

Since TG is touring the USA, it might be a good time to have a midyear music round up. Here's a list of what is laying around my headspace in various analog and digital formats:

Blackalicious - The Craft

Captain Beefheart - Safe as Milk

Chris Liebing & Speedy J - Collabs3000: Metalism

Coil - Megalithomania!

Coil - Selvaggina: Go Back into the Woods

Current 93 - Dogs Blood Rising

Dabrye - Two/Three

David Bowie - Black Tie White Noise

Doubting Thomas - The Infidel: 20^th Anniversary Edition

Ellen Allien - Sool

Exxos - Dune Spice Opera

Frank Zappa - Jazz From Hell

Front 242 - 05:22:09:12 Off

Front 242 - Pulse

iNDEX01 (DiN label sampler)

Get Hot or Go Home: Vintage RCA Rockabilly '56-'59

GZA - Pro Tools

Harold Budd & Brian Eno - The Pearl

Iggy & the Stooges - Raw Power

Iggy Pop - The Idiot

Jessica Rylan - Interior Designs

Jocelyn Montgomery with David Lynch - Lux Vivens

John Cale - Artificial Intelligence

John Cale & Terry Riley - Church of Anthrax

Kool Keith - Spankmaster

Lil' Wayne - The Carter III

Lou Reed & John Cale - Songs for Drella

Lucinda Williams - Little Honey

Mahavishnu Orchestra - The Inner Mounting Flame

Maja Ratkje - Stalker

Mantronix - Mantronix

Matmos - The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast

Matmos - Supreme Balloon

Meat Beat Manifesto - At the Center

Muslimgauze - Emak Bakia

Not Breathing - Old Black Pueblo

Nurse With Wound & Cyclobe - Paraparaparallelogrammatica: Angry Eelectric Finger 2

Nurse With Wound & Irr.App.(Ext.) - Mute Bell Extinction Process: Angry Eelectric Finger 3

Nurse With Wound & Jim O'Rourke - Tape Monkey Mooch: Angry Eelectric Finger 1

Odetta - At the Gate of Horn

Ornette Coleman - The Art of the Improvisers

Pauline Oliveros - Primordial Lift

Peter Brontzmann Octet - Machine Gun

Scott Walker - It's Raining Today: The Scott Walker Story (1967-70)

Skinny Puppy - Ain't It Dead Yet?

Skinny Puppy - Rabies (remastered version)

Skinny Puppy - Back & Forth 2

Skinny Puppy - Brap: Back & Forth 3&4

Skinny Puppy - B-Sides Collect

Skinny Puppy - Puppy Gristle

Skinny Puppy - Doomsday: Back & Forth 5

Skinny Puppy - Back & Forth 6

Soma - Stygian Vistas

Speedy J - Public Energy No. 1

Speedy West & Jimmie Bryant - Stratosphere Boogie

Squarepusher - Maximum Priest

Steve Earle & Del McCoury Band - The Mountain

Sun Ra - Nothing Is

Throbbing Gristle - 32^nd Annual Report

Thurston Moore - sensitive/lethal

Vangelis - Bladerunner

Venetian Snares - Horse and Goat

Viktor Vaughn - Vaudeville Villian

Xiu Xiu - Knife Play

Xiu Xiu - Air Force

When I look back over this list and compare it to a list I made about a year ago, I'm struck by the similarity. Maybe I need to expand my horizons a little more. Stylistically, I'm not sure where else I could go without devolving into ethnographic "world" music cataloging. Such a practice which strikes me as somewhat racist. Perhaps I have it all backwards. Look above at all those anglo saxon white people making noise.

My clichéd closed mindedness aside, I've had some pleasant surprises this year. Coil's Selvaggina was well worth my personal wait. On that live set you can hear more proper versions of Black Antlers / Ape of Naples tracks which (I don't care what anyone says) were just demos. The Carter III is as good as everyone says it is. Reed & Cale's Warhol bio rock opera Songs for Drella brings me to tears every time I hear it. Jessica Rylan remains one of finest living sound sculptors. Everyone should seek out hir work. I've also be listening to a lot of Front 242 the last months. Far too often are they lumped into the regrettable secondwave of industrial bands. Their work has its own formal agendas that should not be ignored. European electro doesn't get much better than them. The best surprise for me though is recent months was Dabrye's Two/Three. I picked it up on a whim because it was release by Ghostly International, a label I respect but regretfully had paid little attention to recently. It's a slab of wicked minimal off-kilter hip hop. It's everything El-P was trying to do a few years back, and despite failing miserably at it, got heaps of praise for anyway. I'm glad someone else got it right. Not knowing of Dabrye before, I was pleasantly surprised to learn the guy has critically tongues wagging all over the place for the past few years. Other honorable mentions: Zappa Jazz from Hell, Xiu Xiu The Air Force, and Mahavishnu Orchestra The Inner Mounting Flame. (I'll be writing a separate blog later about Scott Walker who is someone who I'd shrugged off in past years as just another "rediscovered" singer songwriter.)

Then there are the disappointments: Ellen Allien's Sool, Matmos' Supreme Balloon (the first album of theirs I haven't loved), and Throbbing Gristle's 32 Annual Report. The last was a good concept as a live happening but should never have been released as a recording. TG's original work simply does not translate via the digital equipment they now utilize. That being said, TG's new recordings of all new compositions are wonderful. The single disc version of their reinterpretation of Nico's Desert Shore is one of my most anticipated releases. Another thing I seem to have to teach myself over and over is that Nurse With Wound and Current 93 simply do not resonant with me despite the penetrating vibration brought about in my psyche by their kissing cousin Coil.

Does it need to be said advertising rarely sells a thing, but instead sells image of the life you will "have" if you own a thing? Perhaps no contemporary corporation is better at this than Apple Inc. Few companies can better commodify the image of being a disease-free intelligent wryly successful white upper middle class bohemian. Better yet, Apple Inc has successfully created an anti-corporate brand identity, marketing themselves as some sort of hippie alternative. So successful are they at promoting this image that for the fiscal year ending September 2008 their total profit was in excess of 32 billion U.S. dollars. As with most manufacturers of consumer products, Apple Inc's actual business practices are in direct contradiction to their brand identity. Apple Inc has adopted the most closed software platforms and strictest digital rights managed file formats of any equivalent corporation. Even stricter are they then their symbiotic enemy Microsoft. In a marketplace where software companies compete for a monopoly on DRM formats, the loser is the consumer. As a librarian, I am a proponent of technology that makes information sharing easier, not more difficult.

I recently overheard to coworkers excitedly talking about how a friend was in the library, read a music review, and purchased and downloaded the album to his iPod Touch all while sitting in the same spot. They seemed very excited about this. Funny considering there are any number of mobile devices that will do the same thing. The only difference being those devices will cost 30-50% less than an iPod and you'll be able to place your files where ever you want after you purchase them. Apple limits you to your device and your "sync'd" PC. Why pay more for a device that only lets you buy things things for the company store? It's almost as if the company's goal was to have a monopoly. Not to mention the (oft censored) fact that any Apple product is cost prohibitive to a vast swath of the population. Of course you can hack your iPod if you want. Pay a bloated price and then void your warranty to make your device do what a cheaper open device would do anyway. Now why would a company that guards its code as if were the patent for the cancer cure let their devices be so easily hacked? You do the math.

Some of you might now be thinking "Apple products are user friendly in a way other consumer electronics are not and that is why Apple users are so dedicated. And their products are aesthetically superior." Arguably Apple products are more user friendly, but what you lose is custom-ability. There always a few things I wanted to do in iTunes that I never could not due to the dumber-than-a-stop-sign interface. Such issues really only matter if you are tek nerd, and the too-simple-too-break interface is something they are getting right for most users. True enough. Yet the cost of their products is inexcusable considering that code that makes their hardware efficient, safe, and usable (BSD) is largely open source in origin. (This too is overlooking the political implications of the details of Apple's manufacturing process. Ipods are made in China.)

An iPhone with downloadable(for a fee)apps in place of everyday web tools, has to be the most redundant snake tongued hard sell since the coffee cup mouse. Of course the iPhone is only offered within the super-closed garden of a (competing) cellular networks.

As to whether Apple products are more aesthetically pleasing, well, some are and some aren't. Here the matter of cost appears again. Arguably the designer jacket will be aesthetically more pleasing than the a the plebeian version. Buy whichever you like. Both have the moral and political pitfalls, Nietzschean slave morality not withstanding.

The latent contradictions of the capitalism are no more apparent than in Apple's marketing strategy. It's entire brand identity is based around it being a parasite on the ass of the corporate monster Microsoft. (Microsoft, a company with same flattened hierarchy and casual "anti-corporate" institutional culture as Apple and Google). The catch-22 being that if Apple actually succeeded in dethroning Microsoft, Apple's best selling point, that they somehow represent preferable moral and cultural alternative to Microsoft) would be voided. No longer could Apple fool the populace into believing they were doing something "good" by paying more for one of their products. In the mean time it is easier to just keep selling products by lying. Their business practices are the same as Microsoft, but they just compete with one another like Coke and Pepsi. The parallels between the Coke vs. Pepsi and Microsoft vs. Apple battles is a great essay that has probably already been written somewhere.

The equivalent of Apple Inc in the current war for maximum cybernetic ad space (aka social networks) is Facebook. Both companies use class insecurity to market themselves as cleaner, safer, "better." Has their ever been a more poorly designed piece of programming whose success has been more purely-based on perceived class distinctions? Despite the fact Facebook's perpetually fluctuating interface gets progressively confusing, the essential function of the site remains the same as any other social network: collect your personal information and sell it to advertisers. Of course the two faced shits at Facebook get the ad-busters of the year award by having successfully created a brand identity that is "clean" (nothing says clean like the blue and white of sanitary medicine) while still hocking all the info you provide about yourself to any company that is willing to pay the licensing fee to create an "app" for their site.

Myspace is far more forthright. To paraphrase an NPR commentator: it's the social network equivalent of the bad neighborhood. The site makes no pretensions. It's low brow approach is tacky and in your face. When you log in it is obvious that it exists for one purpose: to sell things for any sleaze that will pay Murdock's fee. It's a jungle gym of quasi-porn ads and obvious spyware traps. I know the score from the beginning, and I can change my font. Thank you very much.

=================

"No hang-ups for me because hang-ups need company."

- Scott Walker

While doing my laundry I found a pendant hidden in my clothes. They were wet from the wash and I was loading them into the dryer. The pendant is figurative and relates to my personal mythology. Fascinated, I began to wonder if it was maybe cursed. I'm reading Gerald Vizenor and there are a lot of tricksters in my consciousness. It feels like I have memories of someone giving me this pendant, and I'd forgotten about it, or I found at work or at the coffee shop and forgotten about it. While washing the clothes the machine was clanking and retroactively I realized it must have been the pendant. There is part of me that thinks only a diseased mind would fear a curse, and that I should just accept the blessing. Even if cursed, it found me for reason.

================

I've been reading Cory Doctorow lately. His essays mostly. Though his ideas are not original, he is a good spokesman for a more open, just, and populist technological future. He's often said it was his goal since adolescence to make a living writing science fiction stories. I wonder how he feels that he probably has a better reputation as technology guru / advocate than a fiction writer? Though he is on top of the world right now, is this his secret shame? Perhaps it is not considering he often points out that writers have always made a living by doing things besides writing. He comes from a long line of day jobbers. All his books are downloadable for free. I've began chipping at his first novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom during slow times on the reference desk. It is as enjoyable as any post-Dickian cyberpunk, regardless of any literary merits or lack thereof. I'll have to report back later. In Doctorow's defense, his newest novel Little Brother was on many respectable YA best of lists and nominated for most major SF awards. I need to plow that bugger too.

===============

Link spill:

interesting, if corporate feeling, design blog

Change the Thought

Basque open noise

Mattin

all for it.