Derivative Remix

One of my remixes has been included on the Derivative Netlabel compilation and…and…and… (Disquiet Junto derivations of The Conjuncts by C. Reider). The track was originally done as part of the Disquiet Junto  project, which posts a set of constraints every Thursday and invites people to share their contribution via SoundCloud. My track is called "mateimartainment".

Nick Butcher - Bee Removal (review)

I wrote this Nick Butcher review a while ago and really liked the record. He even emailed me to say he enjoyed my review, thought I think that was just a pretense to ask if we'd put the correct URL for his website with it. It looks like he does more visual art than music these days: http://nickbutcher.net/

artist: Nick Butcher

album title:  Bee Removal

label: Home Tapes

format: CD

release year: 2008

rating: 8.2

Nick Butcher has no lack of artistic outlets: painting, printmaking, bookmaking, design, and music all emanate from the Chicago studio he shares with girlfriend/collaborator Nadine Nakanishi. His output is tied together by a raw, homemade aesthetic that focuses on raw textures and happy accidents. Its no surprise his music follows the same path, using homemade electronics, field recordings and unorthodox sound sources in long, ambient tracks that are as notable for their aural pleasure as their fine-art qualities.

"Tearing Paper" is 20 seconds of static and what sounds like the remnants of a big-band radio broadcast, opening the album with a brief shot of melody the presage the slow burn compositions to come. "Ryman" uses a soft repeating tone as the base for glitchy noise, sounding not unlike Autechre's recent work.

If it wasn't apparent already, this is pretty much music for headphones-only consumption and nowhere is that more apparent than the first epic of the album, the eight-minute "Geist/Coat", which is nearly inaudible for the first minute before a static drone slowly fades in. A single repeated piano note joins the noise, though its off in the distance as if sampled from an ancient 78. Age and disintegration are common themes here, as the past is manipulated and distorted into new forms. At about the halfway point, what sounds like piano and guitar drop single notes as sampled record skips synchronize to form a syncopated beat. This segues into backwards guitar and the low rumble of feedback before ending with a cluster of melancholy chords. The results, though utilizing avant-garde techniques, create a song with a definite flow between the sections that shows a grasp of composition beyond more primitive noise artists.

"Interior, then a Window" is perhaps the most traditional "song" on the album, owing more than a bit to Eno's work. A droning keyboard lays the foundation for the track, with other tones drifting in and out. There's a gentle melody, played slow enough to render it abstract. Little sparks of notes unfurl and disappear amongst the more chance-generated tones, creating the most aurally colorful track on the album.

The title track is trance music for Luddites; it has soothing tones, a glacial pace and interesting textures, but all of it sounds recorded from scratch and processed though any number of analog filters before painstakingly reassembled. The tones generated sound like they came from barely functioning synthesizers, and the whole song sounds stuck together with twine and glue. There's a dedication to craft here that's missing from most electronic music, which strives to remove the work of human hands.

"Sharp Note Singing" is, like "Interior, then a Window", a droning melodic piece, but at nearly 8 minutes it has much longer to develop its pastoral vibe. Like Boards of Canada it evokes images of nature and childhood, and its spare instrumentation means the listener can be immersed in the pure tones.

Artists like Nick Butcher can’t be stopped; whether it’s on CD, in books or on gallery walls, his style of imbuing his art with all the roughness and imperfections of its human creator means he has nearly infinite possibilities in creativity. Granted instrumental experimental music doesn’t have a very wide audience, but those that discover his little world are in for a treat.

Fuck Buttons review

Back in 2009 I wrote record reviews for a now-defunct website. Here's one I did for Fuck Button's 3rd record Tarot Sport.

artist: Fuck Buttons
album title: Tarot Sport 
label: ATP 
format: CD
release year: 2009
rating: 7.9

The English duo went and made a dance record. Not that Tarot Sport will be mistaken for Basement Jaxx anytime soon, but they've taken their homemade electronics and added grooves that make their lo-fi textures all the more enduring.

Opening with the longest track, the 10-minute “Surf Solar” is also the most intricately produced tracks on the album, combining chopped-up vocals and processed samples with operatic dynamics. That kaleidoscopic sound fades into a cloud of noise before leading into “Rough Steez”, which chops up the static with severe tremolo, making a solid foundation for a multitude of bleeps and gnarly distorted tones.

The group always manages to tow the noisier side of their work even when gentler pastures seem imminent; “Lisbon Maru” rides a soft wave of ambient tones until the soft yet insistent groove kicks in, but it’s the chopped-up spurt of static riding the beat that gives it character and keeps the song from a generic chillout sound. The watery, unhinged sample that springs to life more than halfway through the nine minute running time actually sounds like a hook, though its barbed tone lends it a nice offset to the midtempo drum machine beat.

Combining an organ with what sounds like steam escaping, “Olympians” strives for the same epic sweep of the gods of the title. The shuffling, vaguely tribal beat continues as they pile on hook after hook, with a satisfying 4-note motif appears at the halfway mark that adds even more grandeur. It’s not long before the repetition becomes engulfing and what initially sounded exciting becomes part of the overall groove.

The somber “Olympians” fades into the toy-store-on-acid insanity of “Phantom Limb”, which doesn’t develop much beyond the concept of employing as many noisemakers as possible. It’s a schizophrenic piece, and the sheer unpredictability is interesting, but it lacks the cohesion of the longer tracks. Instead of editing a jam down to its basic components, “Phantom Limb” is like fast-forwarding through hours of improvisation without much of a goal in mind.

“Flight of the Feathered Serpent” is a dizzying race to the finish; layering alternately straightforward and off-kilter drum loops and developing the riff from “Olympians” into an ascending psychedelic tornado. Its one of the longest tracks, and despite its limited palette it manages to survive on adrenaline alone, pounding away as it dares dance floors to succumb before suddenly dropping away. It’s that kind of unpredictability that keeps them fresh as they search for their own sound.

Larry Marder on practice

At some point in the mid-90s, Nickelodean (or maybe it was the Disney Channel) showed a brief interview with Beanworld creator Larry Marder. I think he was being interviewed by a kid, who asked him how to get good at making comics. Larry held his hand about 2 feet above the desk he was sitting at and said something to the effect of "start with a stack of paper this high, and draw on every sheet. When you get done with that stack, get another stack and draw on every sheet. The only way to get better at drawing is to do it over and over."

That advice is identical to the 10,000 Hours rule, though as a child it was a lot easier to grasp a giant stack of papers. 

San Antonio

Google Maps has new, higher-quality street level pics of the house I lived in 88-95 in San Antonio. As with most adults looking back at childhood homes, the biggest surprise is scale.

• I thought we had a huge front yard, but judging by the pictures, I could cross it in about 4 steps. 
• The walk to the corner to catch the school bus always seemed like an eternity. It's 3 houses away. 
• The house on the corner used to have giant bushes blocking the view of the pool. Apparently the new owners aren't as concerned with privacy. 
• There used to be a huge tree in the middle of our front lawn, but it's long gone.
• The house across the street was an incongruous split-level in a plat of mostly ranch houses. 
• The day we moved in I got lost trying to walk back from a house that was about 100 yards away from ours. I managed to mix up left from right and my Mom called the cops. 
• All I remember about the neighbor on the right is that a handyman broke into his house after doing some remodeling for him, and the dog was so used to him that he didn't bark. I don't remember a thing about the people on the left except a tornado knocked down a panel of our shared fence.
• Whoever lives there now has installed a canopy that covers the backyard deck (which ran across the entire back of the house). That's a good idea but imagine the cost of installing a canopy that covers half of your backyard. 
• There was gang activity in the surrounding area, and occasional gang tags on fences, but I never felt unsafe. However, I notice most of the houses have metal security doors that they didn't used to. 

Joel RL Phelps / The Downer Trio

In 1999 I was going to high school in Dayton, Ohio, a town where even in the boom of the late '90s had seen its best days pass by. There was a record store in the city's designated "hipster" neighborhood, a couple blocks of cobblestone roads called the Oregon District. Gem City Records had overpriced new CDs, a couple shelves of vinyl, and an enviable used-CD selection. In fact there was a mini economy of used CDs in the Dayton area, evidenced by the now-defunct chain CD Connection. I later learned that the supply was partially fed by teens who realized the anti-theft detectors at Hot Topic were in fact just cardboard.

My favorite part about Gem City Records was that they seemed to carry every music magazine published in the known universe, though they never seemed to sell any. I'd flip through issues of The Wire and Alternative Press to get an idea of what was cool, then buy the CD at Best Buy for $9.99 (I wasn't about to drop $15 on a CD I just read about just because it was sold at an indie record store full of surly clerks). This was the late '90s, so Best Buy still had a pretty big CD section, though today it's usually no more than a couple aisles of Taylor Swift records.

I was flipping through one magazine (or maybe it was just a free saddle-stitched flyer) and read a 2- or 3- page article about a band whose singer I was vaguely familiar with, The Downer Trio. Joel RL Phelps had previously been in indie stalwarts Silkworm, which he left in 1994 after the release of their album Libertine. I had heard of Silkworm through my subscription to Guitar World, which right before the nu-metal explosion had given the editors free reign, resulting in records like Neurosis' Through Silver in Blood and Silkworm's Firewater being named some of their Records of the Year.

The article was either to promote their second full-length (but third release, depending on how you count), 3, or their forthcoming record Blackbird; they were released within a year of each other. The writer focused on how quiet the band was, and as a recent discoverer of Low, I was intrigued. But it was the description of Phelps voice that made me want to track his records down. Here was generally quiet, folk-based music, but over it was something akin to Jeff Mangum, who had just released In the Aeroplane Over the Sea the year before. However, the nascent internet was no help (we still had AOL and the actual internet was a Big Scary Place), and the multiple ways the records were credited made searching for them difficult.

• Warm Springs Night is technically a Joel RL Phleps solo record, as is the Alita Aleta 7"
• The Downer Trio EP is credited to The Downer Trio
• 3 is credited to Joel RL Phelps : The Downer Trio, though I suspect the colon is a relic of the time it was in the hipster toolkit of graphic designers. 
• Blackbird has its credits written in illegible handwriting, so attribution depends on the mood of whoever entered it into CDDB. 
• Inland Empires EP is by Joel RL Phelps ≈ The Downer Trio, where the designer discovered the glyphs window
• Customs' cover just smashes it all together, though Joel RL Phelps and The Downer Trio are on separate lines. 

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In 2000 I was at college in Bowling Green, Ohio, with a T1 line at my disposal to dig through the waning days of Napster. I finally found two MP3 by Joel RL Phelps: "Apologies Accepted", though the file cut off after a minute and a half, and "Now You Are Found", which was harrowing even before I knew it was about the death of his drug-addicted sister.

However most Napster or internet searches brought back nearly equally obscure Americana musician Kelly Joe Phelps, though the combination of RL/R.L. and the terminology that seemed to equate him equally as a solo artist and part of his own backing band usually only resulted in a (now-dead) fan page, and later his own (also dead) personal homepage.

I can't even find the old fan page on the Internet Wayback Machine; suffice it to say it was sparse, though it did have MP3s of an acoustic session on  KEXP the band had done years ago. A burned copy of that session and the Blackbird CD-R I made in the campus radio station accompanied me on the semester I spent at art school in Italy, surrounded by surly locals and the uniformly sociopath rich white students that seem to be attracted to study abroad programs. This was 2003, when the iPod was still in its infancy; I saw a student with one and I thought it was a tape player. It shows the quality of those CDs (2 of only a dozen I could bring) that I can still listen to them without that exhausting feeling you get when you've listened to a record too much.

The website had some song lyrics, but those (and some guitar tabs) were removed by the site owner because he thought they ruined people's interpretations. I agree: the one thing all of my favorite records have in common is a lack of a lyric sheet.

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By 2002 I had made a couple friends who were DJs at the campus radio station. It was a small room full of stale air in one of the buildings I never had a class in, but the walls were lined with the station's CD library. Me and my friends would cram ourselves into what amounted to a closet to hang out during someone's shift, trying to figure out how to use the high-end CD replicator that sat in the equipment rack. The most recent acquisitions were stored next to the DJ's chair, but in the far corner were dusty relics not touched since the days Pizzicato Five were popular. Scanning the spines I see one that looks like a handwritten CD-R liner, though someone was thoughtful enough to use a sharpie to write Downer Trio Blackbird on the front of the jewel case.  It sounds so cheesy, but I literally had to catch my breath when I saw that. There was no way it could hold up to what I thought it sounded like in my head, but I managed to figure out the CD replicator and made a copy that night.

Side note: This practice of CD copying was generally accepted in moderation, though if you're a fan of one man band Juffage, you should know he pretty much camped out in the radio station for days on end and ripped most of their CDs to his laptop. 

Blackbird sounded exactly how I envisioned it. After years of that article rattling around in my head, I could finally see if my thoughts would match up with the concrete reality of a band barely written about and almost impossible to find. If it had sucked, I guess I wouldn't be able to go back to that mysterious pocket of memories as I transitioned into adulthood. But instead everything sounded perfect: the band was so in sync that the songs seemed to nearly topple over before righting themselves at the last moment. Despite the initial three-song blast, the rest of the album was exactly as quiet and forlorn as the sound in my head that the article had planted.

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In 2004 I had an off-campus studio apartment 100 yards from the railroad tracks when I heard there was a new album on the way. I eventually found the one-page website of Moneyshot records, a name the owner must have been sure would return mostly porn if you Googled it. The single page had a release date and instructions for ordering direct, so I sent a check to an apartment in Washington State and hoped for the best.

A couple weeks later the CD arrived: 2 CD set with two bonus CD-Rs for ordering direct: a radio show (in WMV to thwart piracy) and some MPEGs of a show from 2000. Here's the only one I can find online.

Unlike the recorded version, which rests on a throbbing beat and palm-muted guitars, this rendition of "Kelly Grand Forks" ditches percussion altogether and replaces distorted chords with fingerpicking and slide guitar. Whether this is an embryonic version or just what they decided to do that night, I'm always happy when a band tries out a different arrangement live. Bands complaining they can't do a song live need to remember that The Who used to do Tommy with just bass/drums/guitar/voice.

Of course Moneyshot Records seems to have disappeared not long after this album came out. I wish someone like Merge would step up to the plate and reissue all of his stuff; then again, there's probably not too many people clamoring for it.

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In 2006 I had a full time job and enough money to foolishly label some of it as "discretionary", so instead of trying to find new copies of the rest of his catalog, I just bought them used on Amazon. A previous attempt to buy new copies resulted in Forced Exposure sending me one that I already owned (they were really nice about giving me a refund though). A week later and I had the rest of his discography. No more waiting, no more thinking about a sound for years before I can hear it. The resulting binge was nice, but I can't help but think I would have savored each one more if I'd had to wait a couple years in between.

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So late last year I'm listening to an interview with Karl Hendricks on Low Times. Curious to read more about the Karl Hendricks Trio, I went to one of his labels site. The first news listing was that they had a couple vinyl copies of 3 ready to ship. I'm normally not a completest in that sense, but it was only like $10 and besides, if nothing else the art would look really good in the 12" format.

When I first listened to it I noticed a LOT of high-end crackle; whether it's the mastering or my stereo, it was kind of a bummer, but I still have the CD.

Amanda Palmer

Nobody got hurt when Amanda Palmer made $1 million on her Kickstarter. Personally I think her popularity is a closed loop: Everyone who planned on buying her album has already given to her Kickstarter, and the kind of music she writes is unlikely to hit in a mainstream way. Most of the hate came from people who don't like her music. I don't like her music. But making music that doesn't appeal to me doesn't hurt anyone.

But then she asked fans to perform with her on her tour in exchange for... what exactly? Beer, hi-fives and hugs? The chance to say you performed with Amanda Palmer? Performing for Amanda Palmer for free doesn't prove anything about your talents as a musician. It just proves you'd play with Amanda Palmer for free. With that announcement, she is now hurting people. There are thousands of talented horn and string players in America who are teaching music or working some other day job to pay the bills. Considering the influence musicals and big band have had on her music, many of them are probably fans of Amanda Palmer. They might even be willing to tour with her for a reduced scale wage. But I guarantee right now there's dozens of A- and B-level singer songwriters and their managers waiting to see if this amateur volunteer orchestra will work so they can try it themselves.

Here's what I think happened: Amanda Palmer saw her Kickstarter grow bigger and much quicker than she anticipated, got even more ambitious, and really upped the ante on how she was going to use the money. The album packaging became more elaborate, only the best materials would be used. Then, maybe while choosing what texture of paper to line the limited edition vinyl case, someone showed her how much this would really cost. Careful planning would have kept her from seemingly getting in over her head. $1 million is a lot of money, a seemingly limitless amount. But as she said in her blog post, the breakdown of cost per unit adds up quickly. I think she was intoxicated by the generosity of her fans, and perhaps thought that if they think she's special enough to warrant $1 million, they would give her their talents as musicians so she wouldn't have to skimp on  her (incredibly elaborate) product. But be clear: She is asking for volunteers because she ran out of money. She had more than a million dollars and she ran out. 

Bon Iver's backing band is a small army of incredibly talented musicians (many of whom are popular in their own right) and he's been touring across the plant for the better part of a year. He's getting support from Jagjaguwar and potentially 4AD, neither of whom are known for blockbuster album sales. He's most likely losing a fortune on it, but at least he respects musicians enough to develop a band and pay them (I can only hope) a decent wage .

It sounds crass to say, but this comes down to money and how it's used. Her public persona does nothing to dispel the notion that she's a real-life Manic Pixie Dream Girl, lost in her own imagination and probably annoyed when her managers attempt to discuss budgeting with her. It's not fun to make budgets and plan how to spend your money wisely, but $1 million is a lot of money, and careful planning could have led to her hiring a really great group of string and horn players to accompany her on tour, instead of potentially setting a bad precedent for working musicians.