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).

Metric - Fantasies

Over at Rolling Stone, the singer of Metric talks about how one of their songs almost ended up just like a «shudder» Shania Twain song.  In the video, they entertainingly demonstrate exactly what they mean.

But how far from Shania Twain is this music, really?  The thing that characterizes Twain’s music is its second order genesis - that is, she is strongly aware not of the core reality of the music, but of the cultural environment which the music creates and inhabits.  Essentially, she creates it ironically.

My impression is that Metric’s creative process is also rather secondly ordered.  Their cultural awareness itself demonstrates something like a lack of integrity.  The danger in sounding like Shania is associating yourself with her and her audience, and Metric’s fans, I would guess, largely view that association with contempt.  Such ill-considered contempt for other groups is generally accompanied by a blindness to the content of one’s own perceptions.  People rather base their opinions on the social effects of holding them.  In that sense, both the creation and the reception of Metric’s music seem very likely to be second order phenomena.

I know some Shania Twain fans, and I can say that they have no self-awareness whatsoever about their enjoyment of the music.

Various Artist - Ancient Swedish Pastoral Music

I’m struck by the similarities between this music and the Finnish psych-folk bands which I recorded, discussed here: Voyages On Vinlandia. I mean, it should be expected, but the melodic and tonal qualities of these “ancient” singers (they were actually recorded in the latter 20th century, but are performing traditional music) are very much represented in the modern Finnish music. Even some of the frighting wildness of the Vinlandia music can be attributed rather to Scandinavia than to the developing of tolerance which has accompanied us into modernity.

I like these folk music albums. I also listened to “Songs of the Inuit” the other day, which I will revisit and write about sometime. Folk music is not music in common sense. No one can listen to it while they do the dishes, and to listen closely to it is often not a musical but an ethnomusicological experience. That is to say, the first order (see Judas Priest, 22 Jan 08) experience is often extra-auditory. You find out about different cultures and so forth.

Another related phenomenon is “world music”. There’s a certain class of person who, alienated (often with good reason) from their own culture - in the case of world music that culture is American or West European - embraces another culture by adopting its speech patterns, style of dress, and so forth. They then begin playing the music of the other culture or cultures, often with a great deal of attention to authenticity, which is ridiculous because folk music is not essentially a sonic endeavor but one of expressing culture, a culture of which these performers are not members. I guess they’re amateur ethnomusicologists, but they perform as if they are musicians. It’s very confusing.

The confusion of musical and non-musical values is something which continues to interest me.

Judas Priest - Screaming For Vengeance

My wife Lea got this album by Sahara Hotnights, a Swedish band, that sounds just like Judas Priest. I assumed they were some also-ran from the time of The Runaways and The Raincoats, because they had that all-girl punk-rock look on the cover. I guess they’re actually a contemporary band that tours with other Swedish “hard rock” bands like the Hives or whoever.

I love how a band that sounds like Judas Priest now could easily be a critical favorite, as long as they’re from Nova Scotia or Azerbaijan. I have a first-order enjoyment of Judas Priest’s music.

First or second-order love of a thing is an idea Lea and I talk about sometimes. Second-order means that it isn’t the thing itself that you like - you like the fact of liking it, or the effect that your enjoyment has on you or others. I guess people typically refer to second-order liking as ironic, but that seems too dismissive. Irony is not serious, but a second-order love of a thing is honest, in my view.

Judas Priest just kicks ass.

(copied from old Daily Listen)