Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Derek Bailey - Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass (hear “Concrete”)

Evidence that drum ‘n’ bass overwhelms whatever it encounters.  Not one of Derek Bailey’s greatest albums, but it is one of his more interesting.  It’s an invaluable piece of sound, for introducing people who might shrink from Bailey’s classics, for listening to when you can’t decide whether to listen to regular sounding techno beats or distorted free jazz guitar, or just as the unique thing that it is.  In a way, Derek Bailey is doing something really cool, as the old free jazz head jamming on top of the new thing - but really, isn’t it surprising that there isn’t a similar disc from every jazz musician?

Supposedly this album sprang from Bailey’s habit of jamming along with the local drum and bass or techno or electronic music station (by the way, are people really happy calling these types of music “electronic dance music”?  Don’t they yearn for a handy term like “rock” or “classical”?).  I think that a simple recording of that would convince better - in a way, this album is like some ethnomusicologist writing down the elements of some faraway music and recreating it in the lab.

It’s out of print, get it here:

Derek Bailey - Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass

or, if you don’t like to see ads, you can go to this emporium of lost classics and deadly noises, I assume the download there is pretty much the same, and you may find some other pretty things:

Blog of somebody calling himself bigfatsatanist

Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest  (hear “Cheerleader”)

Grizzly Bear has taken a real step here towards mainstreaming an esthetic fairly well laid out by Robert Wyatt.  This is an album that will probably turn up on the sound system at Starbucks at some point, but plenty of it is coming out of a tradition of pretty droney, spooked, playfully odd music.  It’s bittersweet to behold, like a child growing up.

The place where this surpasses Animal Collective’s recent effort is in its sonics, its rhythmic stability, its production values in general.  The A.C. has songs, though, which this album does not.

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)