Dissolved/2

When the world comes crashing down (or the oceans crashing up, depending), I wonder if it's going to be with wind flurries and swirling air currents or if it's going to be atomized via CNN. I vote for the latter, but that's only because disaster seems to happen that way to us middle-class white kids with mobility. I'm hinting at something now. Heavy wink and nod. Think several letters ago. Several alphabets ago, actually. Several ages ago.

But lets say it does happen with air currents and wind flurries and buildings shuddering, turning to dust, boats run aground. Ground run asea. I picture music boxes in childhood bedrooms all going off at the same time while the water rises/the land sinks/the wind blows shit over. I've been Bruckheimered, we all have, maybe - the common mythology of precious sentimentality. Dial 0 for Barthes.

I've been thinking a lot about the end of the world these past few months, what with hurricanes and earthquakes and mudslides and scientists. Sometimes I make peace with it and sometimes I don't. But it's kind of like when I started actually thinking about what it means to die and not exist anymore. One night I thought about it for about 45 minutes - thought about not existing, that is (I know, emo, bullshit, French, whatever, &c.) - and got so completely terrified that I resolved never to think about it for any length of time again. By and large, I've maintained that commitment.

Whenever I pull close to being ok with impending doom, it sounds something like this. And the optimistic part of me includes the afterconversation with landlords. Because when I was getting my atomized mass disaster via Wolf and his 900 TVs, I didn't think about my landlords. But a month later, there they were.

Disco Inferno - Footprints in the Snow

It's all just as beautiful and noisy, so get it here, if you can't find it anywhere else (tho I think One Little Indian may sell it).

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In case you didn't notice, a series is beginning to take shape. There are a couple more serieses being readied, with new records ahoy. Well, not new new, but new to me and (hopefully) new to you. More to come in the Dissolved series.

Dissolved/1

Water keeps rising, like cartoonish. Like pouring over walls and making whitecaps with its own force a little down the street. In their garage, these kids keep playing. The water pools around their feet, soaks their shoes and the bottoms of their amps, but this is one of those pop songs. You don't stop those pop songs - not for anything. If you've ever started playing one in a garage, you know. The shitty reverb off the garage door and the car next to the space you cleared out start to work.

The water reaches the high E, this kid lays off it. But, you know, this is cartoon-quick. The whole guitar's swamped. But you don't stop these pop songs. The strings rust and rattle, you know, cartoon-quick. But physics has never stopped a pop song. The strings rattle and the sound moves a bit slower, thicker, numb-tongued thru the water. It smooths the whitecaps.

And this pop song, you know, it's one of those. If you've ever played one, you know that a split finger, broken string, missed 2 or 4, isn't going to stop it. These kids play a little harder, a little faster, to break up the water. When they float up and run out of room at the ceiling, flat on their backs, like a lazy jam session on the floor. The cello takes a few breaths. The violin takes a few breaths. The guitar's gonna make it, but just barely. He finishes up with his last little bit.

That's the way to go: for one of those pop songs. Those pop songs can beat anything, even death. Especially death.

Ride - Vapour Trail

Buy it here. And what a fucking cover.

Je m'appelle Serge Gainsbourg avec synthesizers

At least, that's what I imagine Le Grand Magistery's Toog would say if I began a conversation with him, preferably via a translator, over croissants.

I picked up this record a week or two ago because it was $0.95 (tho fucking 3.95 with shipping) and because somebody called it something along the lines of "great French electronic music". Between Gooom Disques and Stereo Total, it would seem that something about France just lends itself well to preciousness and electronics. Maybe it's all the vacation time.

6633 (the record in question, BTW) is certainly recommended for fans of the aforementioned Gainsbourg - persons amongst whom I wish I could count myself, but aside from "Je T'aime...Moi Non Plus" with Jane Birkin I really couldn't care less - and possibly Of Montreal and Matmos, in that it's electronic and a bit cutesy from time to time. The vocals are totally Gainsbourg, though I have no idea what he's saying (nor Gainsbourg). It's something about the tone of the vocals.

So, I bring you my favorite track on the record so far, which it displeases me to announce is the first one. I have always had a problem with records wherein the first track shows itself to be unequivocably the best, which is very much the reason that you've heard nothing here about a record I'd been looking forward to listening to for a while, A.R. Kane's 1989 record i. "A Love From Outer Space" is a million machines making beautiful pop music after coasting to Jupiter for 50 years and getting bored and then the rest of the record was made by Dave. You were right not to do it, Hal. Human, all too human. Just average.

I digress. The first track on here is a lovely little odd pop song that lasts for just shy of two minutes, and while other songs cop its off-kilter lexicon, they just don't quite have it (although I had high hopes, too, for the last track, called "L'Amour Dentaire" - "Dental Love"). It's just a touch creepy, and the translation in the insert indicates that the lyrics are about a boyfriend creeping around his girl's house, accidentally going into her parents' bedroom, and then crawling into a hole in the garden to hide, naked. Not bad.

Toog - Le Jugement

Get it here.

Go! Team in Tempe

My ears are overflowing with tiny metallic wasps' nests, which can only mean one thing: that some lucky bastard has played Claudius to my sleeping King. And we'll call the harmonium quicksilver.

Go! Team performed tonight at this venue (in a fucking stripmall) called "The Clubhouse" that I would link to but for the indignity. It was fun, tho much noisier than I would have expected. They still haven't learned to master mixes for their live shows, but theirs is not a music that lends itself to mastery. No, theirs lends itself to leaping wildly, booty dancing, high-speed chases, purple blazers for no reason and, apparently, horrible opening acts.

Yes, local scions Peachcake continue to offend my ears, just as they did the first time I heard them. To summarize, which is what I do best, if you take the worst elements of a Flaming Lips show and a Quintron show and combine them with the beats that Explogasm thought were too tasteless to use, then you'd have a close approximation of the musical abortion that is Peachcake.

Also, the very cute and half-purple The Grates are proving that while it may have taken 15 years for hair metal to make it to Saudi Arabia, it only took 5 for The Yeah Yeah Yeahs to make it to Brisbane. And they went and got all cute instead of singing about dicks.

What we got was an opening act shitty dance-off that was impossible to score and even more impossible to win. Some of my personal favorites:

"The oh-it's-my-shoe" - performed by The Grates - Used to good effect during that song that sounded like "Maps". The difference? Karen O would've rubbed her vagina on something instead of hopping and pointing at her footwear.

"The shaving-in-a-bucket" - performed by Peachcake - Their lack of facial hair didn't stop Peachcake's lead singer and...extraneous guy...from shaving over buckets with electric razors while their Fruity Loops played a kick drum for 7 minutes.

"The leaping-on-beat" - performed by The Grates - This was most effective during the song that sounded like "Art Star".

"The running-thru-the-crowd-playing-a-melodica" - performed by Peachcake - I do not remember a single song during which this didn't happen. You think I'm kidding, don't you?

"The mod-dress-so-mod-hand-dance" - performed by the Grates - This looked best on the song that sounded like "Bang".

This is how we all lose. I was so sore from disapproval that I almost didn't want to stay for Go! Team. That, and Tempe's draconian no indoor smoking laws. Fuck Tempe. Fuck Peachcake.

The Grates I actually have no beef with, I just sorry for them. They're one of those permanent opening bands, kinda like New Orleans' own The Public. Both quite likeable, tho.

This is my first show attended since the hurricane. Feel sorry for me.

My English I teacher would be ashamed.

Not only of my tardiness, but of my form.

Last (Jesus, was it Thursday already?) post was essentially my attempt to convince myself that I have not been entranced by the inside of my own eyelids for the past few months. I did, indeed, listen to some records that came out this year, but might I say that nothing has really, really reached out and grabbed me? Xiu Xiu was disappointing, Akron/Family was good but had (and has, I suppose) a whole lot of distracting elements (such as the track "Ak Ak Was the Boat They Sailed In On"), and I can't really think of any other records immediately from this year. LCD Soundsystem and Juan Maclean? They burned out faster than "The Situation Room". Ditto for M.I.A.

And today's post is some kind of attempt to convince myself that I'm doing something as valuable as Split teaching hungry, cold children how to speak the language of the hegemon. And it appears we haven't been listening close enough. But I'm hooked.

Plus, he's in Europe! Can't argue with that, no indeed.

A great article today about academia that probably won't move you unless you've cleaned up the vomit of a prominent university professor's dog for $2 an hour. And tho we're all tired of hearing about it, who doesn't love taking on the women's studies department? My taste for it has increased exponentially since reading Gardner's "A Midsummer Night's Dream: 'Jack shall have Jill;/Naught shall go ill'" and Montrose's "Shaping Fantasies: Configurations of Power and Gender in Elizabethan Culture". It's not that I disagree, just that I don't care.

We need more feminists like Kate Bush. Take that "we" however you like. When Montrose produces The Dreaming, then I'll read beyond chapter III. Tit for tat, as it were. As it were.

And, in keeping with the "I love 1981" theme that I've seemingly been running for a while, I have to mention that I'm currently listening to David Byrne's The Catherine Wheel for several days now. It's a delightful record in that he never bothered to a) make the tracks flow together or b) separate them out. Ambient soundscapes abruptly end to be replaced by Middle-Eastern percussion and tlinky electronic bleeps. I haven't given it all the time yet, but you can imagine how I'm feeling at this point. It rests somewhere between My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Remain in Light, which, as you may imagine, oft finds honey as a sauce to sugar. I need time to ungoo myself.

Speaking of sugar, 3 tablespoons may sound like a lot, but trust me, the nam plah needs it unless you enjoy anchovy noodles. Not sure? Do you enjoy the smell of your bellybutton lint?

I'm going to pour some sugar on your tongue anyhow, even tho I had indicated that this wasn't what I was going to do and now I'm doing it anyway.

David Byrne - "My Big Hands (Fall Through the Cracks)"

Buy it here

And tho Orbis Quintus already picked it up (see the linkbar), I'm going to repeat that there's one of those lists floating around now of books that Time thinks you oughta read. Interestingly, I've only read 17 of them, but am currently reading 1 (Pale Fire by Nabokov) and just purchased two (Snow Crash by Stephenson and White Noise by DeLillo). Several more are on my wish list, including "The Crying of Lot 49", "The Sportswriter" and "Ubik". I've heard that's the best Philip K. Dick from some sources, but my PKD source, who knows who he is and currently is owed one copy of "Counter-Clock World", has adamantly refused to qualify that one. So we'll see.

Hopefully I can get another thing up here without waiting almost a week. Any thing, really.

Sexy Beast (Lame)

Sometimes it's really easy to tell someone what is quote-unquote important about the music I like. Whether it's a justification game (the one I played with myself for about 6 months before giving over and putting "Toxic" on every mixtape I made) or actual historical contingency (which winds up sounding like a biblical geneaology; and the Sex Pistols begat Joy Division, who begat New Order, Fad Gadget, and the Cure, who begat Echo, son of Bunnymen, etc.), there is this thing that obsessive collectors do where we try to place records in context and then examine how they differ or create the context in which we find them. Whether or not they actually had anything to do with the narrative into which we put them is sort of irrelevant, it's a tool for ordering the world. This, of course, becomes more imminently necessary as one's iTunes begins to bulge and buckle at around 10,000 songs. The only way you're going to remember any more than maybe 150 records offhand is by placing them in narrative context: this begat so and so, maybe I'd like to listen to that today.

Which is why records like Nathan Michel's The Beast tend to sit for long periods of time unused until I stumble around and find them, blindly, without intention. Because, how, really, do you put a record like this in context? I was trying for a while, but as far as I got was Steely Dan.

Nathan Michel is like a cubist painting of Steely Dan. And it's pretty; arms sprouting from heads and shoes with disembodied legs in them aside, this is a pop record made by a food processor. So there's not much separation of flavor. You get it all or you get it none.

This is a friendly record on which things happen. The melodies in and of themselves wouldn't be a challenge to anyone who has heard any crisply produced pop record - hence the Steely Dan (the jazz inflections that occasionally flavor the puree also reek of the Dan) but Jim O'Rourke isn't inappropriate, either - but The Beast uses the same vocabulary with different syntax.

I'm gonna have to show you, aren't I?

Nathan Michel - A to B

Rikki don't lose that intro. See what I'm saying? This is possibly the most unfucked song on this record - scratch that, this is positutely the most unfucked song on this record. But it's a lot of fun, nonetheless. I mean, wah. Who, other than Sr. Chinarro, can get away with using wah? (We'll get to Sr. later, when I'm ready.) The point is, this a tremendously interesting little tune. But I'm gonna have to show you something else to convince you to buy this record, I fear.

Nathan Michel - Planet

Goddamn, man. It's just a Stereolab tune, but with somebody falling asleep atop the pitchshifter. And that's awesome. And, actually, it's only really a Stereolab track in construction - which could be equally well applied to any number of krautrock bands or anybody else who eschews linear songwriting for lots of things at once. But this track is probably the best example of why The Beast is such a fucking record.

Plus, to make things better, the record's on out-ass pseudo-electronic label Sonig, which states its mission as creating "...a space in which new terms for music can be located." Looks like somebody got their master's degree and a record label.

But fuck-serously, get this record, which is one of the better to come out this year. I like to think I'm so past ranking, but I'm not, so there you have it, if you need quantitative and comparable schemata in order to get you to buy records.

So, yeah, buy it here, unless you buy it thru Sonig or somewhere else, which is just as good.

Soon enough, we'll be talking about feminism. Stick around for that if you'd like to call me a pig.

"Post-Music" Music Primer II

My brain feels ready to cleave in two. I think this means I need to leave this town, but it may mean that I need to stop pogoing between Richard Rorty's antiessentialism and the vast libraries of everything else. Blunted.

Anyway, Post-Main exploration, I felt like I'd short-changed those of you who might otherwise be inclined toward picking up a new record. Though Main's Motion Pool is certainly a good one to start with, it's not the record that grabbed my attention right off the bat. The record that really opened the door to me as far as "music my brother calls 'post-music'" is concerned exploded onto ContortYrself all the way backin December.

I immediately associate this record in my head (then as now) with New Orleans fog. Mirages is a viscerally heavy record, almost oppressive in its density. There's a grit there, too, like vines and mud on limestone walls. It's not a swamp record, not the fog of Dr. John's Gris-Gris, which summons evil women to crawl out of Bayou St. John and conjures demons on horseback past Congo Park. This fog is sifted thru skyscrapers. It's just as menacing on Poydras Street as Jackson Square or Tchopitoulas. Or the Lower 9 for that matter. It speaks thru the mouths of news anchors as much as mystics. That buzz might be a transistor radio or a satellite in orbit. That fuzz might be music underwater or it might be cabin pressurization. Those guitars might as well be sighs.

"Incurably Optimistic!" is just that: terminal. If there's any hope at the end of things, then that hope is the same kind of oscillating slow-shifting organ note. Whether the end creeps up or pounces, it will envelop. I can't say whether this is warm or cold, viscous or vaporous. It just is. And on nights like tonight, when my brain is worrying itself to no end and thinking in two directions - like past and future, like that yeah - sometimes the end needs to come in an wrap it up. Like cabin pressurization. Like the end.

They'll get it for you at Aquarius. Search for "Hecker".

"Post-Music" Music Primer

Anybody that has listened to my (former) WTUL show, or ridden in the car with me, has usually found occassion to ask about how the hell I tell the difference between the various CDs I own that seem to mostly involve clicking and buzzing of various frequencies. My brother referred to it as "post-music", a title which I don't wholly reject. A lot of it is ambient, some of it not so much, but it all owes a debt to Brian Eno and Throbbing Gristle. I was thinking for today, since I can't think of much else to do, that I go thru a few of the artists that I think are most powerfully prescient in the genre my little brother dubbed "post-music". My initial plan was to put up some MP3s for yr sampling pleasure, but I don't think I'll do it all at once. We'll see. I haven't planned this yet. Onward, then, for as long as I feel like writing.

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Main - Motion Pool, 1994 (Beggars Banquet)

Buy it here.

I haven't heard much of Main's other work, but they descend from a metal outfit as far as I can tell. This is about as "musical", with one exception, as this stuff gets. They call their compositions (but with these guys you can actually call them "songs" without stretching too much from common usage) "drumless space". Consider these guys the Radiohead of post-music. They generally like to start with midrange droning static and build from there, but unlike a lot of these acts, they aren't afraid to use some actual guitars that sound like guitars, drums, and even audible and non-moaning vocals. For the uninitiated, this record is probably one of the more accesible in terms of being noisier than Sonic Youth but not nearly as academic as, say, LaMonte Young, or as abrasive as, say, Rubber O Cement. Not that I actually like Rubber O Cement, I'm just saying.

In any event, this record has got a lot of different looks, from the proto-industrial of "Core" and "Crater Scar' to the more ambient "Liquid Reflective". A fair amount of dub is buried under the static of this record, so if you find yourself ever reaching for a Pole record (who is iffy as far as meriting a mention here, he's almost too melodic) then you might like this Main record. I don't know if there's any truth in it, but I would be very surprised if Pole had never heard it.

I'm already exhausted, it's been a long week, so hopefully I'll continue this later, and put up some samples when I'm more feeling able.

New additions.

Taking a break from taking a break from engaging with things to do a bit of housekeeping here at ContortYrself, not that I'm at all confident that such things are important right now. Anyway, you may notice that the linkbar (I like that better than blogroll, which sounds like what happens to overweight fifth graders on the playground, and I would know) has been updated with some new names. This is to reflect the expanding focus - which makes little to no sense, but disregard that - of ContortYrself. Among the additions are friends, notably Hot Air Balloons' Split Foster, a tremendous human being in the Nietzchean sense and author of an extremely engaging travel blog, as well as one of my very best friends. I also added Rod Aminian over at his LiveJournal hovel. Usually, I'd be apprehensive about placing a personal blog link here, but Rod remains consistently engaging, even aside from the voyeurism. Add this to the extremely quoted Mike Slaven over at Newsthoughts and you've got a nice little contingent.

I also added Orbis Quintus, not only because he's in Baton Rouge and has deliciously academic sympathies, but also because his most recent post has a bad thing to say about Christopher Hitchens, and just about anyone who can recognize that Hitchens is a bloated corpse of dessicated Anglo-American journalism is delightfully welcome to sit at my linkbar.


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I'd initially intended to write a bit on why you should go over to the Stypod immediately and find their delightful trove of house musics, but in reality you should check them every day, so let this be your one warning. They are responsible for introducing me to the finest song of the new millenium, Polmo Polpo's epochal "Kiss Me Again and Again" as well as my favorite Muslimgauze track, from 1999's Box of Silk and Dogs, "Help Afghanistan to Grow More Poppies".

Also, I'd thought about commenting on Harriet Miers' nomination, but Slate covered it here, here, and, peripherally, here better than I could, though you also must avoid a Hitchens story - be careful where you click. But, really, everybody but Fleshbot has weighed in so far. And they're on their way.

I really must return to the grind of multiple articles about citizenship, but hopefully, the expansion of ContortYrself doesn't sit ill with my three or four readers. I'll get to posting some music when something really compelling happens, which hasn't been the case for the past few weeks.

Oldfield's "Citizenship and community" & peripheral concerns

I've got multiple piles of books that needs finishing, though I can't really seem to couple the time with the motivation to finish them up. You'd think sitting here and listning to Muslimgauze that I'd do something, but instead I'm sitting here and listening to Muslimgauze; not to say that sitting here and listening to Muslimgauze is non-existant, but merely that it isn't the class of activity most elevate to the class of "activity". Who says English needs fixing?

In short, I should've finished Catch-22 as well as Philosophy and Social Hope (Rorty) and Holy War, Inc., but instead I didn't finish any of them. Didn't even touch Rorty. This is disappointing, because I have yet to finish Pale Fire, yet to start Rememberance of Things Past and thus am nowhere near attempting a reread of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Also sitting and waiting are Carnap, Quine, Heidegger, Arendt, Jamaica Kincaid and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Clearly, I'm rapidly broaching worthlessness. However, I have made several runs thru my meagre collective of Musimgauze, and particuarly enjoy the track called "Help Afghanistan to Grow More Prosperous" from 1999's Keffeen Head. I like to listen to it while reading Holy War, Inc. Also filling time have been Van Morrison's Contractual Obligation Sessions, a LaMonte Young record that I believe is called Pre-Tortoise Dream Music, Vol. 1 (but that I ripped from WTUL and was never quite informed of the title), and the new T.A.T.U. single called "Cosmos (Outer Space)" which is much better than it has any right to be.

On the other hand, I have finished reading an article by Adrian Oldfield called "Citizenship and community: Civic republicanism and the modern world", which is a pretty tremendous placental gumbo of Rousseau, de Tocqueville, Mill, John Rawls, and Aristotle. I can't really tell if a point is ever made; it is asserted that community is a good thing, then that citizenship is a good thing, then that we need the one to get the other, and then, in an Isaiah Berlin-esque blast of maddening commonsense, that education is good. Of course, at no point do we really break out of the cycle of using citizenship to justify community or commnunity to justify citizenship, but it seems to make sense while your brain is getting Iron Maidened in the middle of it. Specifically engineered to miss anything vital, so the metaphor tropes off into the distance.

And, still, a Shakespeare play plus one paper, as well as a paper somewhere in the middle of this Oldfield article and three more, are all slated to slide of my loins by this Thursday. We'll see about that. Luckily, the philosophy course that I thought would be Continental, then became (briefly) mathematical logic, then became analytical, has become cancelled for this week, leaving me a whole Wednesday on which to write the Shakespeare paper. Given the level of analyticity of the given Shakespeare course, I expect it should take little more than a quick squat to finalize the character study required.

A trip back home to New Orleans is in the works, but not until there is water. And not on the stoop, either. I need to bargain with the steaks my roommate bought that apparently became a sort of black fluid as of two weeks ago - I desire that they leae peaceably. I also need to see about continuing to rent my apartment. Maybe the fluid can pick up part of the rent. Now I just need a time.