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
January 9, 2008
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Smog - Knock Knock (copied from original Daily Listen)

This is one of my favorite albums, so I’m only going to say one thing about it: this album has almost no information beyond lyrics listed in the booklet, or printed on the CD tray - even online there’s very little. That’s awesome. I really think it is part of why the album works so well.

When I first got this, it was because I was a huge Cat Power - Moon Pix fan. I guess I had heard that Cat Power’s Chan Marshall and Bill Callahan of Smog had been on friendly terms, and so I bought it without further thought. The music didn’t impress me at first - if I had known it was a Jim O’Rourke production, I would have paid a lot of attention, and heard all the awesome detail that puts this album next to Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Airplane Over the Sea, OP8’s album (Calexico, Howe Gelb and Lisa Germano together at Wavelab studio in Tucson in 1997), and the Beatles’ Revolver. As it is, however, ignorant as a mucus-mite, when I finally began hearing the music I heard something much more incredible than the buried background vocals you can hear in the sample above. I heard the songs, one day with my wife, after she discovered Knock Knock in my collection of CDs which I knew were great but hadn’t discovered yet.

That was a good year.

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Tags: Beatles Cat Power Jim O'Rourke Liner Notes micro-detail neutral milk hotel op8 smog wavelab studio