Bjork - Medulla
Bjork creates a weird distancing context around herself, her music, so that it’s impossible to just listen to it if you’re aware of those circumstances. I don’t fault her for it, but I do enjoy her music quite a bit when I get a chance to just listen to it.
I wish she would just do an acoustic album with no overdubs or editing. Really, why hasn’t she already? Someone so self-aware must contemplate utterly rethinking her approach every once in a while.
6 months agoJust West Coast
Fifteen years later, this album still fascinates me. I love John Schneider’s (ahem, not the man who played Bo Duke and country music) playing on the movable-fret guitar. His performance of Harry Partch’s “Barstow” feels just a little bit more ridiculous to me now, but of course Partch’s own performance is a towering masterpiece of hiliarity.
These are works tuned in Just Intonation, ie the tuning of notes to pure intervals rather than to intervals compromised to allow key changes. When used to play music with implied key changes, Just Intonation really just sounds like bad tuning, but it’s kind of delightful nonetheless. It’s like trying to write your name while your arm is dead asleep.
“Barstow” is one of my favorite pieces of music. In general, I like the idea of making regular things special by changing the context. Here, Harry Partch takes little pieces of highway loneliness, hobo screeds and lost travelers’ time-passers, and arranges them in his deliriously odd harmonic mess.
11 months agoTears For Fears - Songs From the Big Chair
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.
That would be something.
11 months agoVladislav Delay makes music somewhere between Pole and Tetsu Inoue, two of my favorites.
Pole pioneered a type of minimalist techno, involving a lot of clicks and static from a broken Waldorf 4-pole filter, as I remember reading somewhere sometime. The sound is very stable and brilliant. At lower volume, it more or less disappears into the dark walls. Listening closely, I am enthralled by it.
Tetsu Inoue creates drunken robot music. His CDs are impossible to understand and can’t be listened to at high or low volume, without some sort of detachment. I have looked at waveform displays of his music in audio editing software. Normal music - and by normal I mean almost all - looks like a line of fish, each biting his neighbor’s tail. Tetsu Inoue sets a cat loose in the fishtank. It’s really quite awesome.
Vladislav Delay is normal music.
One thing I’m interested in is the process of mainstreaming fringe ideas. Look at how Wilco or Radiohead took a bunch of noises and weirdnesses and by placing them in the mainstream context of pretty songs declawed them. Those cats have stopped tipping fishtanks.
Whether Vladislav is an odder Pole or a wilcoed Inoue is really immaterial.
1 year ago
