January 10, 2009

Brokeback - Morse Code In The Modern Age: Across The Americas

(download “Flat Handed and on the Wing”)

Seriously cool, empty post-genre half-improvised music you might hear in a bowling alley where the pins are sheep jumping over a fence.

People from Tortoise, Calexico, the Chicago Underground Duo, and the first recorded incarnation of Cat Power make the sort of music you would expect, except expect less whee and more aahmm.  And those are some pretty aahmmy groups to start with.

In the end, I suspect that this music doesn’t really matter, unless it matters to you.  It’s just too cool.  It’s the ultimate rejection of the Led Zeppelin kind of grab-you-by-the-nostrils rock music.  Punk was like a military coup which overthrows a corrupt government and then tyranizes.  Tortoise and the rest of this ilk are like a Swedish utopian society that just moves along happily.  You never would recognize it as important, but conceptually it’s very fit.

Recorded at two of my favorite studios, Tucson’s Wavelab and Soma in Chicago.

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Tags: improvisation Cat Power tortoise cool wavelab studio punk
November 8, 2008
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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.

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Tags: evan parker Jim O'Rourke harmony heavy metal nature punk society tonality