Saturday, June 14, 2014

Stigmata


According to John Barth's classic tragi-comic existentialist novel The Floating Opera, one of his favorite books and one he's read over and over numerous times since he first discovered it in 1976:
  1. Nothing has intrinsic value.
  2. The reasons for which people attribute value to things are always ultimately irrational.
  3. There is, therefore, no ultimate "reason" for valuing anything.
  4. Living is action.  There's no final reason for action. 
  5. There's no final reason for living (or for suicide).
Healing takes time, but by 1988, he felt like he had been tried by fire.  He tried to silence that untrustworthy narrative that he had been telling himself ("The story of your life is not your life; it is your story," Barth later wrote) with alcohol, loud music, and nihilism until he was partially dead inside, all charred wood and cold ashes like an old burned-out house that somehow still remains standing.  In a manner of speaking, part of him did die that night on the bridge. 

Healing takes time, but during the healing process, it needs a protective layer of gauze and bandages to protect the one recovering.  To keep the painful feelings at bay, he cocooned himself in music that was cold, unemotional, and free of sentimentality, and not necessarily even human sounding.  He had seen where raw emotions could lead (the I-90 Bridge).  Ministry's The Land of Rape and Honey provided just the right amount of cold industrial metal to protect him, and provided his soundtrack for 1988.  



One other note: the sound in the video version of Stigmata is as good an example as any of how digital compression can destroy analog music.  Dynamic range compression reduces the volume of loud sounds or amplifies quiet sounds in music by narrowing or "compressing" an audio signal's dynamic range. On the positive side, this makes it easier to hear the vocals in a recorded version of a song, but on the other hand, it takes away one of a musician's creative means of expression (variations of volume).

In the analog version of Stigmata that he used to own on cassette tape, the opening electronic sounds were relatively quiet, but the first drum line ("bum-bum-DA-bum") was shockingly loud.   As the drum line got repeated several times over at irregular intervals, it created a dramatic tension, an expectation that all hell was about to break loose and break loose very loudly, which it did with Al Jourgensen's scream and initial guitar attack.    

In the digital version heard in the video, everything's at the same volume - the opening electronic sounds are cranked up much louder, but the drum figure is muted down to that same volume level.  As a result, there's no dramatic tension before the scream starts, and when it does, it's not only not louder than anything else before it, it's actually so quiet it's almost lost in the mix.  Boring, and a sad defacing of Jourgensen's original artistic statement. 

It makes him wonder what he's missing out on in music that he's only heard digitally.

Friday, June 13, 2014

In Which Paul Weller Saves His Life




So let's see, where were we?  Oh yes, I was halfway home, I was half insane, and every shop window I looked in just looked the same.  I said, "Now send me a sign to save my life 'cause at this moment in time there is nothing certain in these days of mine."

No, I'm kidding, but just partly.  Those are song lyrics, Shout To The Top by The Style Council, but it was 1987 and it was in fact raining, and he was driving back from the girlfriend's house in upstate New York. She had been distant for several days, and he had been calling her over and over again that day and she wouldn't answer, even though he was sure she was home. That night, he finally decided to drive over to her house and caught her in flagrante delicto with a bearded, grey-haired old man who looked old enough to be her father but was in fact her former boyfriend.

He had unwisely transferred onto her all of his unresolved feelings and emotions about the previous girlfriends, the ones who had stayed behind in Boston and who had moved off to Denver, and this betrayal was more than he could take.  Driving home, the tears running down his cheeks mimicking the rain on the windshield, he attempted to drown out his anguished thoughts and blot out some of the pain by turning the volume all the way up on the cassette tape he was listening to, Internationalists by The Style Council. When the lyrics of Shout To The Top came on, it just sounded too similar to his present condition to believe. 

I was halfway mad, I was half in need
And as the rain came down
I dropped to my knees and I prayed.
I said, "Oh heavenly thing, please cleanse my soul
I've seen all on offer and I'm not impressed at all."

He was, in fact, halfway home; as a matter of fact, at that very moment he was halfway across the I-90 bridge over the Hudson River.  There was very little traffic on the road at that late hour of night, and it crossed his mind to stop the car right then and there in the middle of the bridge, and as he did and got out of his car, he knew that even though he hadn't been impressed at all by all that he had seen, he wasn't getting out to drop to his knees and pray in the pouring rain.

The bridge was about 60 feet above the water, and he reasoned that a five-story fall should be enough to end all of this pointless suffering.  The fact that it would also shame those who had done him wrong was just an added bonus.  Looking back, he knows that this was madness, but he was so enraged and out of his mind with emotion at the time that a single jump seemed like a reasonable thing to do and was quite within his capability.

He could still hear the music from his car as he stood out there in the rain, and Walls Come Tumbling Down, the next and final track on Internationalists after Shout To The Top, came on.

You don't have to take this crap,
You don't have to sit back and relax.
You can actually try changing it.






Hearing those words, a light bulb went off in his head.  Paul Weller was right - he in fact didn't have to take this crap, he didn't have to play the victim, he didn't have to passively accept this role.  He could change things, and simply just by looking at it differently.  Everything is perception, he realized, and he got himself into this situation by perceiving things one way and when confronted with contradictory evidence - when his fantasy collided with reality - he considering it a catastrophe.

The realization went something like this:  he was the one who had left the first girlfriend behind in Boston, just like the second girlfriend had left him for Denver, but he still perceived himself as the victim when the first girlfriend wouldn't leave her own life behind and move down after him.  Later, he perceived himself as the victim again when the second girlfriend left for Denver, even though she was just living her own life and acting exactly as he had when he had first moved to Atlanta and, just like the first girlfriend, when he didn't leave his own life behind to follow her out west.  And then he went and projected all of his confused feelings of abandonment and betrayal onto the third girlfriend in New York, who had no idea she was carrying all of his baggage, and when she went back to her old (in both senses of the word) boyfriend, she was just acting naturally, being who she actually was, but not who he wanted her to be (or something like that).

Anyway, all of this came to him in an instantaneous flash of intuitive insight, not all drawn out in words like above. Simultaneously, he also realized that if he just looked at this whole situation differently, then poof!, all the pain and suffering went away, and there was no reason to examine up close and personal just how far a drop it was from the bridge down to the water below.

"Fuck this," he thought and got back in his car and drove the rest of the way home.  As you can imagine, he listened to the Internationalists album a lot that year after the incident, and took the lyrics as life-affirming exhortations.  Paul Weller, he realized, had just saved his life. 

Are you gonna try and make this work
Or spend your days down in the dirt?
You see things CAN change
And walls can come tumbling down!
Weller, he knew, had absolutely no intention of saving his life or any idea what his lyrics would later trigger in that particular listener when he wrote that particular song.  In fact, listening to the lyrics of the album as a whole, it's apparent that Weller had hoped, if anything, to trigger a sort of Marxist response to Thatcherism and to class struggle.  But if Weller hadn't written those particular words and hadn't performed that particular song in a way that appealed to that particular listener, who knows what could have happened?

This is the first time he's talked to anybody about that night. Not to family, not to friends, not to clergy (why?), or any one else.  He's not blogged about it over at the other site.  Let's keep it just between us - our own little dark, emotional secret.

To be sure, despite the revelation on the bridge, he still hurt and the melancholy of the 1980s continued (healing takes time), but he clearly had turned a corner on that dark and rainy night.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Kishi Bashi at Terminal West, Atlanta, June 11, 2014

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Meanwhile, back in the here and now, Kishi Bashi performed last night at Atlanta's Terminal West.  Added bonus points for the dream-team match-up of Atlanta's own Takenobu opening up for him. 

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Takenobu can be described as the Andrew Bird of the cello (or the Kishi Bashi of the cello, for that matter) for the way he used a loop repeater to build up layers to play over until he sounds almost like a one-man orchestra.  We've seen Takenobu before, but never on a stage this big or in front of an audience as large as last night's sold-out Terminal West.  Despite some technical problems with a fuzzed-out cable, he performed a great set and hopefully took at least a small step forward in getting the recognition he deserves. 



Next up were Kishi Bashi's tour mates Buried Beds. The band includes members Eliza Jones of Strand of Oaks and Dave Hartley of The War On Drugs, some of my favorite bands, and I've long maintained that bassist Dave Hartley is the best in the business at what he does.

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Their songs are inspired by folklore, fairy tales, local Philadelphia legends, science theories, and family stories, and contain underground giants, children of the sea, and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

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Somehow, it didn't all come together for me.  They're all skilled musicians and didn't play a single false note all night, but I didn't warm to the fairy tales and poppish nature of the project.  However, given their pedigree and musicianship, I think this could be a great band if they ever get serious and decide to start rocking. 

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Last night was the end of the Buried Beds/Kishi Bashi tour, 33 gigs in not too many more days.  We last saw K. Ishibashi in Athens back before the tour began, and if I could get my way, I'd try to see him at least every 90 days or so.  He didn't play or do anything new compared to the Athens gig, but that's not to say anything sounded old or stale either - both nights, he served up his own unique, complex brand of pop rock exactly the way we fans want it.

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He opened the set with Philosophize In It! Chemicalize With It!, covered Bright Whites somewhere toward the middle of the set, and held It All Began With a Burst back for the encore.


Amidst all the pop and hit songs, he even found space for a few improvisations, a little bit of experimentalism, and a few spaced-out passages.

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As always, props to his sideman, Mike Savino (Tall Tall Trees) on "space banjo."

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The set ended with three solo songs by Bashi, including a lovely version of I Am the Antichrist.

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The encore included (but was not limited to) a tour finale group shot featuring the band, the entourage, openers Buried Beds, and the audience, followed by It All Began With A Burst, followed by a crowd surf, followed by a cover of Whole Lotta Love.


Good times.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

He Tells You All His Secrets But He Lies About His Past


The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.  He could run, but he couldn't hide.  Everywhere he went, there he was.

Pick your cliche.  They all applied to him back in 1987.  Within a year of moving to New York, his life upstate was almost exactly like it was back in Atlanta again, only worse.  He had met a woman up there, and immediately transferred all of his unresolved feelings and emotions about Denver onto her.  It was fun for a while, but when things ultimately didn't work out, he was right back in the funk again.


It was around this time that he first got into Tom Waits.  It really wasn't all that far of a leap from the country music and western swing of the year before to the distorted Americana of Waits.  He enjoyed Waits' swordfishtrombone (1983) and Rain Dogs (1985), but it was the unsettling Frank's Wild Years, with its dark lyrics and boozy melodies, that matched his 1987 frame of mind.  With a voice sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car" (Daniel Durchholz), Waits' lyrical milieu of run-down bars, degenerate characters, and thwarted dreams and ambitions described well the rust-belt towns of upstate NY in which he was living and working.  Waits provided the perfect soundtrack for the raw emotions he was feeling at the time. 




To be sure, he was listening to a lot of other music at the time as well.  He was still listening to The Art of Noise, still listening to The Style Council, and still listening to all the other music that was being produced that year - he was a contemporary man living in contemporary times.  He owned a radio.  But looking back at that year, he mainly remembers Waits' music and that gravelly voice in his head, singing about the cold, cold ground and being sent off to bed forevermore.

He was in a dark place.

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

And This, Folks, Is Why You Don't Wear White Pants After Labor Day


In 1986, he got the change he was looking for and then some.  He didn't head off to Denver, but instead took an assignment from the environmental engineering firm for which he worked and left Atlanta, Georgia and his life of the past five years and started a new office for them in upstate New York. 

The funny thing, though, is that with the move, he stubbornly became more entrenched in southern culture than ever before.  He was frustrated by his inability to get sweet tea and proper barbecue at northern restaurants, and he bewildered New York drivers by proudly displaying a plate on the front of his car reading Pocahontas Road Church of God, Bessemer, Alabama.

He probably never listened to more country music in his life than he had that first year upstate.  He favored western swing bands like Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and Asleep At The Wheel (who actually came through Albany a surprising number of times).  He listened to Top 40 country artists like George Strait and Randy Travis, as well as old-school stuff like Merle Haggard and Ernest Tubb.  Friends back in Georgia would mail him cassette tapes of WRAS Album 88's Cowtipper's Delight radio show and WRFG's Sagebrush Boogie to keep him current on the latest redneck trends.

1986 was the year that the first Steve Earle record, Guitar Town, came out, and while it was more country rock than country, its twangy sound was still one of his favorites of that year.


He was starting over, making a new beginning, hitting the reset button.  A new location for a new life. He could identify with Earle's lines, "When my boots hit the boards I'm a brand new man, with my back to the riser I'll make my stand."  He was now in his 30s.  It was time for the brand-new him to make his stand.

The problem with this kind of retrospective, however, is that it creates the impression that each selected song is ALL he listened to that particular year.  Yes, when he looks back on 1986, he remembers country music in general, and yes, Steve Earle sort of stands out in his memory. but that's not all that he listened to by any means.  While he was listening to Earle's twangy sound in 1986, he was also still following The Art of Noise, who were also exploring twang as well that year and released their mix of the classic Peter Gunn, featuring twangmaster Duane Eddy on guitar.

Monday, June 9, 2014

The Paris Match


Just as a reminder, these biographical/retrospective posts all began upon hearing the Atlanta bands Tantrum and Hello Ocho cover the Tom Tom Club's 1981 song Wordy Rappinghood, which reminded him of what he was listening to back then, which led to a fond remembrance of the female-fronted post-punk bands like The Slits and The Au Pairs he had liked back in the day, which then led to this current chronological review of what he was listening to between then and now and how he got to be where he is now, musically speaking.  The personal and autobiographical portions of these posts are included only to help explain the context of his musical preferences. Also, "he" is discussed in the third person only because the current author considers "him" to be past incarnations of whatever it is that he now regards as a "self."

In 1985, despite his limited success and upward mobility (trust me, he still had a long way to go), he couldn't quite shake the melancholy that had taken hold of him the year before.  He listened to The Style Council a lot that year and appreciated Paul Weller's diversity of musical styles and willingness to let the mood of the song take precedent over his own role in the band, sometimes even handing the vocals over to others, or letting the band take over and play an instrumental.  Paul Weller, incidentally, would go on to later save his life, but we'll get to that in due time.



He would mail mix tapes to Denver - literally tapes - cassettes containing a mix of Style Council songs (You're The Best Thing That Ever Happened and My Ever Changing Moods) as well as other music - and she would reply with mix tapes of her own, which he would search over and over again for possible hidden clues as to what was really going on in her heart and if she was really ever going to return to Georgia as they had discussed.  She even wrote little cryptic snippets of poetry on the cassette labels, the meaning of which he could never quite fathom:
The heart is a beach, there is no shore to its opening.
Thirty years later, he still has no idea what that means but it still brings tears to his eyes.

It had occurred to him that her leaving to take a job in Denver was the exact and precise karmic retribution he deserved for leaving the former girlfriend behind in Boston in order to take a job in Atlanta, but that didn't make it hurt any less.  Ambition and its consequences were the root cause of his suffering.

It was only midway through the 1980s but he already needed a change.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Are We Living In a Land Where Sex and Horror Are the New Gods?



1984 was another transitional year for him, a year that in many ways saw as many changes as had 1981, the year he left Boston for Atlanta.  In 1984, he left his job with the state and started a new career with an environmental engineering company, a firm for which he went on to work for the next 20 years.  He learned how to make a living by consulting, he traveled the country, and he vacationed in the Bahamas.

Meanwhile, The Art of Noise's debut album came out that year and heralded "the dawn of a new pop sensibility where sequencers, samplers and drum machines held sway" (Charles Waring).  He was fascinated not only by the sampling and the sound of the Fairlight Synthesizer, but also the plasticity of the songs, which were endlessly remixed and reissued.  He became accustomed to the 12" single format upon which those remixes were released, and collected not only Art of Noise singles, but the numerous mixes of Frankie Goes to Hollywood songs produced by the Art of Noises' Trevor Horn as well.  His conception of pop songs expanded from a fixed sequence of notes and words and sounds to a suggestion of any one of an infinite number of mutable possibilities that could be rearranged, mixed up, and blended with other sounds, possibly even DIY-style, implying new roles and a new relationship to music for non-musician listeners like himself. He likes it that the video above embraces that same DIY attitude and involvement.


FWIW, he first heard both The Art of Noise and Frankie Goes To Hollywood on Georgia State's WRAS, Album 88.

It wasn't all vacations and record stores for him that year, however.  To his surprise, he had fallen in love with that co-worker who had moved down from Boston and had become his girlfriend, but 1984 was a transitional year for her, too, as she had accepted a job offer in Denver.  So 1984 also witnessed the start of the long, painful dissolution of the attempted long-distance relationship that followed. Throughout the year, an undercurrent of melancholy and loss darkened the mid-80s party atmosphere, and lingered around him for the rest of the decade.