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.
This album just never gets old. I can’t believe these people only made one album together. Why would they not make another? Perhaps there’s a hatred, or a moral impasse. A few hundred thousand copies sold would have helped, I imagine.
Tom Ze - Fabrication Defect (hear “Defect 4: Emerê”)
Tom Ze may take the most circuitous path to “sounds good” of anyone. To believe that he is too experimental for “the hoi polloi” is to listen too closely to what he’s doing. When Tom Ze kick-drums with his mouth, scrapes balloons, and otherwise makes merry unusually, it never becomes hard to listen to. He never hurts an innocent soul, the way The Books might be trying to do when they record child-parent arguments, or repeat a minimal figure until it becomes a substitute silence. Derek Bailey is a just man, but like Frankenstein’s creature, he provides a rack on which the weak hang their troubles.
To hate Ze, you really have to be a miserable mess of a person. You have to listen past all the superficial loveliness of the songwriting, the choric harmonies, the arpeggiated guitar figures and rythmic invention, to find bothersome details like Ze’s ubiquitous donkey noises, which are really only out of the ordinary because he is making them with his own mouth - barnyard noises are common enough on mainstream records. You have to decide consciously to have a problem with Tom Ze. You have to decide that he looked at you funny, or that when he stopped to tie his shoe, he was actually flipping you off.
OK, so Tom Ze is nonthreatening. If I seem to be belaboring the point, it’s because one time I tried to ask the disc jockey on a latin music program to play some Ze, and actually he said it was “too experimental”. This is on WORT in Madison, the station on which I once heard, back-to-back, a man describing how he used to nail himself on stage, and another man shouting “G.G.Allen has DIED!” for about a half hour. By “nail himself” I mean that the man described combining the two possible meanings of that phrase. So it would seem that Ze’s reputation travels in advance of his music, wreaking havoc along the way.
Ze actually encourages people to think of him as an odd fellow, with his donkey noises and his microbus-housed instruments. He often phrases fairly common ideas, such as mildly socialist ideas or feminism, as though they might be inflamatory. Essentially, he’s a fantastic, fairly normal musician whose craving for attention and eagerness to stop at nothing to get it is the force behind his creative drive. He’s kind of the negative image of Bjork, who takes the Friday night lights commonly directed towards her as an opportunity to put the football on her head and dribble green jello from her mouth. What do I know, though - probably in Brasil he is a national hero…
It’s a spider web of extruded aluminum. Minnows and geese are caught up, bubbling and squawking while the Mrs. winds them up, and the goose tries to eat the fish.
Listen to this stuff loud, if possible. The amount of attention you give to good free jazz is directly proportional to the enjoyment you can reap from it. It sounds like shit if you don’t pay attention. This is only true up to a point - the good associations developed from listening to it eventually overwhelm the disorienting squall and you can do the dishes or cook while it plays.
The texture changes clearly from track to track in this music, which signals that they are not just hacking away at “free jazz” but actually doing something specific in each piece.
There’s some odd dated liner notes in this CD (from 1998) about cyberspace. Check it out in the next post.
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 amusingly marketed collection of modern classical, or contemporary art music, or new music, or as I like to call it, weird music, although some further signifier is in order since this music is rooted mostly in the classical rather than rock or jazz or whatever other tradition, is actually really quite focused and cool.
Probably Krysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” is the biggest eye-opener for me here. His tone clusters are truly gigantic. Unlike Glenn Branca’s vaguely structured harmonic-mass oceans, Penderecki lulls the listener a little before sucker-punching you with a sound which is truly hard to cope with. Great at high volume in the strip-mall parking lot. Rather than the intellectual delight of Branca’s angel-choruses, which your ear gradually synthesises out of the chaos, here we are never given time to make the fear go away - it affects the heart rather than the mind.
Conlon Nancarrow, John Cage, Terry Riley (in a very short or perhaps unnoted edit of In C), and Jorgen Plaetner are among the other heavy-hitters here. The latter is a Danish composer whose electronic sounds are not particularly interesting, but who structures them effectively. Giacinto Scelsi has a piece built on one note and a hundred textures.
Unfortunately I didn’t like the Finn Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Piano Concerto. Too much like a bratty baby banging the piano while mom tries to watch the part of a Gary Cooper movie where he grabs the girl and the music swells.
About the packaging. It seems to me that if Naxos wants to make a CD that kids seeking alternatives will dig, and is going to put spattered paint on the front and call it Sonic Rebellion, they had better come up with some music which will make the kids want to break stuff. This is all a little tame (except for maybe the Penderecki and Nancarrow). Perhaps they should call this one new wave.
