Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Bjork - Voltaic

I much prefer this to Volta - I admit that I simply never want to listen to “The Dull Flame of Desire” again, and hence have rarely returned to the album.  That song, and most of the others, are missing from this live album, which pulls evenly from as far back as Post.

Bjork’s tendency to overthink is here restrained by live performance’s tendency to reduce everything to what can happen synchronously.

Here’s a bjorkish thread I was reading on the internet:

Does the music you like reveal anything about your intelligence? (via Carrie Brownstein)

Obviously there are smart people who listen to any given piece of music. To begin with, the authors of a piece of music must have some degree of intelligence in order to write, play instruments, and record themselves, and they listen to the music they create. However, some of them may be thinking about something other than music, so that the music itself fails to arrest the mind - for example, they may be dancers, or cultural theorists. As a listener, the confusing of domains - ie believing oneself to be enjoying music while in fact enjoying a picture, or a word - is a mistake, and as such is evidence of imperfection. Nonetheless, an intelligent person can find value in any piece of music, as music (or at least as sound), but may not care to bother with it.

But while this means that there is no music which only appeals to the stupid, it is still interesting to wonder whether there is some piece of music which only appeals to the intelligent. For example, what about something complex like The Rite of Spring? Or something that sounds like broken eletronics, like Oval or Tetsu Inoue might make? Or something which _forces_ the listener to think in extramusical terms, like John Cage or Gastr Del Sol?

In the end, though just as an unintelligent person can mistakenly believe that they are enjoying musical qualities when in fact they are attending to image or popular culture movements, one can of course mistakenly enjoy any “smarties-only” piece of music on similar grounds, or because Mom and Dad played it way back before the factory upriver started poisoning the well (leading to lowered intelligence in the community).

Talk Talk - Laughing Stock

The entrance of a voice can instantly locate any piece of music, whatever its inherent character, in a space wholly determined by the character of the voice.  The music practically becomes an afterthought.

Compare Talk Talk to Gastr Del Sol.  It would take a little convincing, but if Laughing Stock featured David Grubbs on vocals it could pass as a post Camofleur GDS album.  “New Grass” sounds like Tortoise mixed with Oval;  the way “Myrrhman” sits loosely in its music, Grubbs could start sing-talking at any moment.

The second Mark Hollis opens his mouth, Talk Talk becomes a band of the 80’s, a new wave, glam-rock, pop-music creature which just happens to have wandered into a hostile environment.

The music becomes very much like what I occasionally try to imagine Cher makes when she’s out of the spotlight, kicking back with her free jazz quartet.  Of course you can see why a band like U2 avoids taking this direction in public.  Talk Talk made this wildly mutated, beautiful chimera, but of course they sacrificed their reputation among casual listeners.

Jim O’Rourke - I’m Happy and I’m Singing and A 1 2 3 4 (download is 70 megabytes)

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