Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Vulture Realty - We Are Vultures (above: “The Joke”)

Enjoyably embarrassing music along the lines of Scritti Politti’s White Bread Black Beer.  These guys are obviously geniuses, but I can’t help feeling like I was on a couch and they sat down a little too next to me.

The great switch to Tumblr of August ‘08 is more meaningful to the Daily Listen than I understood.  It is not just changing the means of writing/storing/archiving the Listens - it’s a complete alternate musical universe with built-in selection mechanisms (ie various tastes) and playback devices (all hail Flash, well, all with broadband connections, at least).

Of course, I am always interested in the process of mainstreaming fringe ideas, and Tumblr is a great place to see this in action.  By definition a blog is a local mode medium with the constant possibility of mass mode discovery (to use phrases from John Corbett’s book Extended Play).  Tumblr extends this idea with “reblogging” (allowing anyone to extract an idea from the most narrowly interested blog and post it in a completely other context) and the Tumblr “Radar” (in which editors make posts, usually those most reblogged, available to the masses).

As a result, one would suspect that the music here is mostly processed, the difficult bits already smoothed and worked into a palatable tub of cheese.  That’s been my experience so far, and it’s a necessary one, because the music depends on multiple tastes for transmission.

Should people be introduced to music which makes them suffer, mentally, emotionally, aurally, spirtually?  It’s a hard argument to defend.  No one should make me shake salt into my mouth, or my eyes.  But I want that salt in my eggs and in my contact lens solution, and that’s where the metaphor ends, because with music, the only way to get the cool bits into the music we all love is for someone to listen to some other, crazy bits and recontextualize them, right?

Get the whole EP at their website:

vulturerealty:

Vulture Realty: The Joke (from We Are Vultures)