Agustin Barrios - The Complete Guitar Recordings 1913-1942
As beautiful as a butterfly in a meat grinder.
Most discussions of this CD will weigh the importance of Agustin Barrios’s performances of his own pieces against the static, noise, and downright degradation present on a recording from a different time and place.
Although that conversation is valid, I would offer that this sound can be enjoyed purely on its own terms. Barrios writes music which is often particularly suited to being distorted and mangled, and at many points in the CD his repetitive passages, filtered by the ravages of time, are downright haunting. Jim O’Rourke or Thurston Moore would be proud to release a CD as compelling as this one at its peaks.
Of course, not everyone will expect a CD subtitled “Augustin Barrios plays his own and other compositions” to be an ambient grinding drone, and that mistake in packaging is likely the reason this collection has passed out of print. Still, even so, it is recommended if you like the Pablo Casals disc on EMI in which he plays the Bach Cello Suites (the original CD master, not the “restored” version).
I often think about making an edit of this music, wherein the grindy parts are emphasized.
I think Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy fits about like Bob Dylan when it comes to writing songs, but bear in mind that I think Dylan is overrated, especially when it comes to the content and not just the form of his songs; and Jim O’Rourke deserves his notoriety as one of the few producers able to swim in the mainstream while walking off the banks. This album should by all rights have been a classic, but somehow it doesn’t come together. It feels as though it was just thrown together from scraps of a sit-down. Still, it could easily be someone’s favorite work of either Tweedy or O’Rourke, if the songs hit just right, or the noodling guitar skronk seems fresh. I might even love it some day, and it deserves to be heard again.
After O’Rourke and David Grubbs quit making music as Gastr Del Sol, in 1998 after Camofleur, I followed them a little bit but not that much. Grubbs was on a Pauline Oliveros album which I liked but didn’t attend to enough to love, O’Rourke did a couple of solo albums which were jokes inside a space I never entered, and so forth. I knew that O’Rourke was involved with Wilco and Sonic Youth, but there, too, I was not really paying attention.
People apparently loved this album back in 2001, and it is really amazing, but it feels just a little bit underdone in 2008. Maybe it’s simplicity is its beauty.
—note, as of May 2009, this album is back in print, so buy it if you like it
I never before realized how much Tears for Fears was like a songful version of the Art of Noise. Check out these B-sides or bonus tracks or whatever they are.
Pop is always just the visible part of a massive culture machine. I often think of the progression from cutting edge to mainstream. Some bands, like REM, start as weird, become alternative, and then are mainstream - whether it’s their content or context which changed is irrelevant to me at the moment. In other cases, you have someone like Jim O’Rourke, who was simultaneously responsible for grating cacophonies and fairly straightforward albums like Smog’s Knock Knock and Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
But hearing these oddities, which Tears For Fears made while one of the biggest bands of the 80’s, makes me wonder if all or most of popular musicians have piles of scary odd experimentation. Like, Cher is sitting on a huge stack of free jazz things which she holds back because people would stop buying her regular albums. She actually plays alto saxophone and sarod, and once played the piano part in Terry Riley’s In C.
Various Artists vs. Disinformation - Al-Jabr (hear Mechos - “Raxor”)
This is one of the least horrible sounding pure noise albums i’ve heard. A lot of people get into noise as a kind of last resort after being finished with heavy metal or punk, a final finger flipped to the winds of good taste. I value catharsis, although it can often fall into masochism. I would not discourage the services of those who let us cast our suffering onto their pyres, although I would question the motives of some of them.
This album is a collection of remixes of electromagnetic noise recordings. It isn’t driven at the core by a desire to hurt people, but out of interest in nature. Conventional tonality is nothing more than a manifestation of the ease with which the mind can process concurrent pitches the frequencies of which maintain simple ratios, which means that conventional music is a sort of discovery of latent nature. This music is likewise an unraveling of natural sound.
In general, I believe that music is best which accesses a place deeper than one’s relationship with society, although of course the understanding of that relationship is deeper than the relationship itself.
This is a Jim O’Rourke free jazz show from 2005. I was excited to see him and Darin Gray collaborating again after Brise Glace’s When in Vanitas…, one of my favorite albums. That album rocks. Recorded with Steve Albini, it’s a cut up and mashed through tour of dark corners of the backwoods of the music of the people.
Mimidokodesuka is really just a straightforward free jazz trio. Electric guitar, bass, drums; they go at it for 40 minutes or so, then it stops. Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear, they try the various bowls of porridge before going to bed.
The thing about free jazz, it’s so easy to make something that superficially resembles the best efforts of the best players. I mean, go to a construction site. Go listen to babies crying. Go listen to the Minutemen when they first picked up their guitars and didn’t know you had to tune them and thought it was just preference: “hey, I play with the strings loose, man.”
So the difference between an intentional success and an apparent success is very difficult to perceive. The music needs to develop and carry forth a common vision which responds instantly to any aberration, intentional or otherwise.
I said before that TV On the Radio sounds better on their live CD than on their mannered studio CDs. Wilco is the opposite.
I saw Wilco live a couple of years ago and loved it, but of course a CD is not a concert - you can’t see the interactions of the performers, it’s usually not as loud, and so on. I often get bored at concerts, because bands tend to play the same song over and over again. Live, Wilco might play a straight folk-rock song followed by a huge Nels Cline loop-driven orgiastic noise-smorgasbord, and I remain interested.
For home listening, though, and I am confining myself here to the popular idiom, I believe a collection of music should superficially have a consistent tone. The listener should be able to depend on a given collection of music to fulfill a purpose in her life. It’s not OK just to expect people to pay close attention all the time to every album, since people simply don’t listen to music in pure environments; the phone rings, the dishes wash, the dog eats poo. (Concert environments are also corrupt, but for different reasons - not a lot of dogs at concerts these days.)
The close listener also should be rewarded, and this is why popular music should be only superficially consistent. The internal workings of the sound, songs, lyrics, structures, performances, etc all direct the active listener toward greater involvement, but should not distract the passive listener.
What A Ghost Is Born expresses most clearly is the breakdown of this popular idiom. For one thing, there is no volume level the passive listener can happily set on his stereo. As Robert Christgau puts it,
Play the soft parts loud enough to hear and the loud parts will demonstrate the limitations of your cheapjack sound system, you pathetic transistorized consumer clone.
As you can hear below in “Less Than You Think”, the band, aided I’m sure by Jim O’Rourke as producer, further prevents passive listening by sequencing a ten-minute radio-breakdown feedback stream directly after a piece of lightly strummed melancholy, welding the parts into one track to foil shufflers and mp3-rippers. That the lyrics invite the pairing is lost on the passive listener, who can’t even make them out, much less pay attention to them while trying to finish an essay on what Karl Marx would think of credit default swaps.
The breakdown of idioms is useful and beautiful in and of itself, and I have written about Cher and Mats Gustaffson making guest appearances at each others shows, but I don’t believe such works to be as important as those which have universal appeal. Wilco already succeeded miraculously in inviting total passivity and/or total activity in listeners to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, so this album seems like a failure to pursue that endeavor, when from another band it would seem to be a good expression of experimentalism.
Jim O’Rourke - Tamper (hear “He Felt the Patient Memory of a Reluctant Sea” edit)
O’Rourke has a certain kind of album which I love. He will play a country-blues thing on the guitar, one chord, one lick repeated into minimalism. Gradually, other instruments (on Happy Days a hurdy gurdy, on Bad Timing a slide guitar and horn band) peek around the corner, then step into the street, until they are playing a big beautiful concert.
This is not one of those albums.
Jim O’Rourke has another kind of album which I love. He writes quirky songs, sings them with ennui washed up from Lake Michigan, and interprets them with post-rock (Gastr Del Sol) or post-folk (Eureka).
This is also not one of those albums.
This album is one of those, which I never loved until now, where Jim O’Rourke alone or with a group of classical musicians, makes long, slow, whooshing noises for half an hour - Terminal Pharmacy comes to mind, maybe I should give it another chance.
Because the album art on Tamper is very similar to Happy Days, I was sure the music would be the same, but this is from 1990 (although the case of this reissue gives 2008), well before the kinds-of-Jim-O’Rourke-album-I-like started coming out.
But this is really cool, actually. It’s much more Pauline Oliveros than Keith Rowe, more hummmla than kkchrrtap. OK?
This is one of my favorite albums, so I’m only going to say one thing about it: this album has almost no information beyond lyrics listed in the booklet, or printed on the CD tray - even online there’s very little. That’s awesome. I really think it is part of why the album works so well.
When I first got this, it was because I was a huge Cat Power - Moon Pix fan. I guess I had heard that Cat Power’s Chan Marshall and Bill Callahan of Smog had been on friendly terms, and so I bought it without further thought. The music didn’t impress me at first - if I had known it was a Jim O’Rourke production, I would have paid a lot of attention, and heard all the awesome detail that puts this album next to Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Airplane Over the Sea, OP8’s album (Calexico, Howe Gelb and Lisa Germano together at Wavelab studio in Tucson in 1997), and the Beatles’ Revolver. As it is, however, ignorant as a mucus-mite, when I finally began hearing the music I heard something much more incredible than the buried background vocals you can hear in the sample above. I heard the songs, one day with my wife, after she discovered Knock Knock in my collection of CDs which I knew were great but hadn’t discovered yet.
