incidentals and accidentals

rendit: adayum: The Nation Of Ulysses - You’re My Miss...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:22:49 -0800

adayum:

The Nation Of Ulysses - You’re My Miss Washington, D.C.

britticisms: “Lover Of Mine” by Beach House I love the...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:37:30 -0800

“Lover Of Mine” by Beach House

I love the fluctuations in this track. It sounds familiar, so much so that I’ve been listening to it on repeat for the past couple of days, trying to discern what sample is used to craft such a gem of a song (that at once feels contemporary and part of a distant era, the 70s).

(via planettampon)

This is nice. It’s got a very Fleetwood Mac-y vibe, huh? Meets Beach House. That’s not a bad thing in my book (though it has become a bit of a trend, the biting of the 70s soft rock). Still, I’m glad to see Beach House attempting a different kind of song while still retaining their overall personality.

thenotes: Animal Collective /// “On A Highway” /// Fall Be Kind...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:50:10 -0800

thenotes:

Animal Collective /// “On A Highway” /// Fall Be Kind EP

If you were bummed to realize the repeatedly epiphanic Bradford Cox vs. Panda Bear vs. Unsung Sample-Based Ambient Acts From The Late 90s dialogue was winding down, be bummed no longer: tracks three and four of Animal Collective’s newest offering ought to spark another round of counterexample-naming and cross-pollination-chartmaking. Clattering percussion aside, “On A Highway” is also reminiscent of a more analog-y Electric President, a staple descendant (for me) of that whole prescription-drugged scene about which Cox was good enough to remind us in the first place. See? All music is the same; art aligns itself along an arc. Now let’s hurry up and get prolix about it.

"At various moments in the show he pointed a microphone at his flexed muscle — as if biceps could..."

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:37:07 -0800

“At various moments in the show he pointed a microphone at his flexed muscle — as if biceps could sing — and reached into his jeans to perform a variation on indecent exposure that may possibly be legal only because there’s nothing titillating about it. (A set piece from the old days, good enough to repeat.)”

- Ben Ratliff on the Jesus Lizard. (via maura)

If you don’t see Jesus Lizard this year, you fucked up.

songsthataregood: Scratch Acid - Mary Had A Little Drug Problem...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:53:31 -0800

songsthataregood:

Scratch Acid - Mary Had A Little Drug Problem
(The Greatest Gift)

In honor of your humble narrator getting to see the mighty Jesus Lizard this week, it is Jesus Lizard Week around here. It is like Shark Week, but noisier (and with less swimming).

We begin, as we must, with Scratch Acid; the Batgirl to Jesus Lizard’s Oracle. Except instead of getting shot in the spine, the Davids just got a new guitarist and moved to Chicago.

One can hear a lot of what made the Jesus Lizard great in Scratch Acid; the bile, the humour, the sexual deviancy, but also a kind of scariness that largely got polished out in the Jesus Lizard. The Jesus Lizard may have wanted to enjoy filthy drunken sexual relations with your mum, but Scratch Acid wanted to do it while your house burned down around them.

grimmertown: contacthigh: disgustingthingsihaveeaten: Gene...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:27:25 -0800

grimmertown:

contacthigh:

disgustingthingsihaveeaten:

Gene Clark - “For a Spanish Guitar”

iPod died this morning so I’ve been catching up on what all you tumblr-ites are listening to....

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:34:36 -0800

iPod died this morning so I’ve been catching up on what all you tumblr-ites are listening to. Been parked at Britticisms for the afternoon and it’s been a lot of fun. A lot of it is stuff I wouldn’t buy or think to check out on my own (read: it’s dancier and sometimes more 80s-inspired than my usual tastes) but hearing it all as a mix is really lovely. New Hot Chip is pretty good!

Come to think of it I think my brilliant wife would dig a lot of the stuff here. I mention that only so she’ll click the link when she reads this later.

"So while people keep saying it sounds like Atlas Sound is trying to sound like Panda Bear, when I..."

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:04:48 -0800

“So while people keep saying it sounds like Atlas Sound is trying to sound like Panda Bear, when I was making it I was actually kind of thinking about LEN—this Canadian band nobody remembers. I think the younger kids need to realize there’s this whole forgotten 90s that people don’t really talk about. Like, what was that song, Primitive Radio Gods [“Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand”]? That song’s great! But people don’t talk about this stuff anymore. They act like nobody before has used samples in an ambient way or cut up a song and layered it with electronic elements.”

- Not to reblog the same quote twice in a day, but agrammar (below) hits on what I’ve been hearing in Cox’s music in a much more specific way than I’ve previously articulated.

Pitchfork: Interviews: Atlas Sound (via desnoise)

Then later he’s talking about “chillwave” and saying: “[I]t also combines a lot of the stuff I miss about stuff like Casino Versus Japan — some of these older, more obscure electronic artists from the mid-to-late 90s and early 2000s.”

Then later he’s talking about Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier doing a guest vocal on his record.

This is something that’s always fascinated me about Cox’s music, especially the Atlas Sound recordings, and especially given his age: more than anyone else working this vein, his sensibility seems incredibly rooted in a realm of the mid- to late 90s, this era of comfortably blurry ambience that revolved out of style at the century’s end and is surely — as surely as he says — a slightly forgotten past to a lot of his younger listeners.

It’s hard to draw a neat circle around the sensibility I’m thinking of, but his Casino Versus Japan reference is certainly toward the center. It’s a whole wide spread of things, maybe starting with “important” records like Slowdive’s Pygmalion and Seefeel’s Quique, roving on through forgotten stuff like the full roster of Darla Records’ Bliss Out series (Lilys, Sweet Trip, Orange Cake Mix), ranging out in directions like Japancakes and the American Analog Set and (some) High Llamas, certainly a component of better-known acts like the Sea & Cake and Stereolab, deeper or harder-edged on Kranky releases from Labradford or Stars of the Lid — but mostly found, for me, in late-90s CD purchases by chancer acts filed toward the bottom of the shelves: Flowchart’s Multi-Personality Tabletop Vacation and Tenjira and singles comps, Seely’s Julie Only, South’s self-titled (not the English South; the one on Jagjaguar), Olo’s Olorizedcoloralbum, For Stars’ Windows for Stars, a whole run of this stuff.

Don’t take all those references as exact: I haven’t listened to most of those records in years and years, and don’t have them handy to double-check. (I can definitely recommend the South record and For Stars’ “Catholic School.”) But I tend to be reminded of them when I hear Cox — the run off of post-rock and dream-pop and slow-core into a comfortably stoned late-90s cul-de-sac, its revival into “laptop folk” and Morr Music electronics, etc. If I were nearer those lower CD shelves this list would be longer. Obviously a lot of why I remember the chance generic instances of it is because this was a lot of where I sat through the late 90s, a lot of what I was interested in. What interests me these days is that if you’d handed me an Atlas Sound record anytime between 1997 and 2001, it would have fit right in; it’d have felt very natural to love and maybe even very of-the-moment. (It’s interesting, though, how Cox, who’d have been a bit younger at the time, doesn’t discriminate between indie and pop in this regard — Casino Versus Japan shares the era, truthfully, with LEN and Primitive Radio Gods.)

"So while people keep saying it sounds like Atlas Sound is trying to sound like Panda Bear, when I..."

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:38:04 -0800

"This music isn’t easy to write about. It takes a lot of work to get past “soundtrack to the summer”..."

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:29:57 -0800

“This music isn’t easy to write about. It takes a lot of work to get past “soundtrack to the summer” and “makes me want to hit the beach.” So much of this summer-obsessed lo-fi is about atmosphere and feel that it can seem weird to scrutinize it. The music is about kicking back and vibing out, and to zero in on what was happening could, from one angle, seem like missing the point. Which, of course, probably helped grease the wheels as far as mp3 blogs that don’t favor writing are concerned: it turned out to be a frictionless journey from a hard drive through the internet’s tubes and onto the computers of the interested. The music never seemed especially concerned about getting everything just so— even the best of it seemed like it just sort of happened. And so the air of passive acceptance was embedded in the mp3s like a watermark.”

- Pitchfork: Resonant Frequency: Resonant Frequency #65 Mark Richardson on all of the summer-obsessed lo-fi music that dominated indie in 2009. (via perpetua)

I’ve only heard a couple of the bands Richardson is talking about at the beginning of this piece (Wavves and Surf City), and honestly the thought of listening to them at the beach had never really occurred to me. And I’m speaking as someone who goes to the beach fairly often (usually early in the morning, especially in the fall and winter, and rarely to do anything other than be alone with my wife in crisp, cool place with nothing but the horizon, surfers in the distance, and occasional dolphins to accompany us).

That’s neither here nor there for the Richardson’s post, though. It’s a great essay that gets me thinking about music—what it is, what it can be, what it might do. The essay meanders a bit, but the best essays often do. (Don’t let your high school/college instructors tell you different. A perfectly structured and reasoned essay is often the enemy of epiphany.)

Half Visconte: I Tried to Erase I was talking with an old friend...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:20:51 -0800

Half Visconte: I Tried to Erase

I was talking with an old friend over email this week and we got to talking about this record—my old band’s album that no one ever heard (came out in late 01). So I dug it out and listened to it for the first time in a long while. I’m biased of course but I think it holds up okay. This is the opening song on the record—one of the few that has a small enough MB limit to actually post on tumblr. That’s me singing (backing vocals too). There’s also another singer on the record; we’d trade off. Though to be honest I think the album is about 60/40 instrumental. If you want the whole record it’s here.

This is the kind of vanity post I can only do late at night when I’m bored and slightly agitated about major life changes.

Wooden Shjips: I Hear the Vibrations Revisting this mix I made a...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:35:00 -0800

Wooden Shjips: I Hear the Vibrations

Revisting this mix I made a couple months ago. I really like it! All the droney psych & kraut stuff casts a strange shadow over the old country and contemporary indie/electronic songs. And the Jonathan Richman tune to close it out feels like a little bow. I don’t know why all these songs fit together but I enjoy it.

marychrist: songsthataregood: Dirty Three: “Red “(Horse...

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:10:35 -0800

marychrist:

songsthataregood:

Dirty Three: “Red “
(Horse Stories)

standardgrey: grimmertown:cocoku: Scott Walker - Montague...

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:04:42 -0800

standardgrey:

grimmertown:cocoku:

Scott Walker - Montague Terrace (in Blue)

The song I think of when I think of Scott Walker.

Its a toss-up between this, “Mathilde” and “The Old Man’s Back Again”.

Just watched 30 Century Man last night. Awesome.

thenotes: Low /// “Dinosaur Act” /// Things We Lost In The...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:31:57 -0800

thenotes:

Low /// “Dinosaur Act” /// Things We Lost In The Fire

tumbledore:

Was Slowcore like Chillwave for people born in the early 80s?

Amend that timeframe to mid-70s and I’ll buy it insofar as I happen to relish the numbing properties of both; I was born in 1985 and only got into slowcore well after its mid-90s peak. But will Washed Out be releasing an album as good as Drums And Guns thirteen years from now? Hope he remixes “Violent Past.”

"I felt really blessed to have an all-ages venue that by its nature and by the many obstacles that..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:21:53 -0800

“I felt really blessed to have an all-ages venue that by its nature and by the many obstacles that tried to thwart the experience became a genuine experience. It wasn’t easy for Kimber to open the venue or to keep it alive. It wasn’t easy for volunteers to maintain it. It wasn’t easy for bands to perform well. And it was always so damn hot. It was definitely not an “easy” viewing experience. Nothing was really comfortable and nothing came without at least some effort from each person involved or in attendance. And because if it, everything felt genuine. For rock shows especially, if you were at Modified, you were there for the music and to support the bands and venue. For what other reason would be there? There was no other distraction or sustenance. You couldn’t get food. You couldn’t get drunk. You couldn’t get comfortable. You couldn’t even use the bathroom without standing in line, or waiting for some dude to get out of the shower.”

- So Much Silence

Modified, in downtown Phoenix, opened in late 1998. In mid-99 I took it over and ran it for a couple of years before Kimber Lanning, the original owner, took the reins again in late 2001. She’s run it ever since along with help from Leslie Barton and an army of volunteers. Apparently it is changing hands again and is going to head in a more art-focused direction (it always doubled as an art gallery).

So Much Silence is running a series of posts about Modified in honor of the club-as-kids-know-it ceasing. Dave Jensen, an old friend, offers the first post.

I haven’t been back to Modified since I left it in 2001—once I stood in its parking lot but couldn’t bring myself to actually go inside. Running it for that brief time was one of the greatest experiences of my life, though it also taught me a few hard lessons. Even if my participation has dwindled to a blip in some people’s minds, it will always be a significant memory and accomplishment for me. I’ve always been happy to know that it continued on, and remain happy that it will still continue on, even if in a different form.

"That’s a little lazy. Beach Boys is just kinda your go-to vocal harmony band—especially given the..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:30:06 -0800

“That’s a little lazy. Beach Boys is just kinda your go-to vocal harmony band—especially given the fact that there are so many bands right now with guys in them who do legitimately sing like the Beach Boys. I feel like Amber and Angel’s tones are very, very different. They’re much less about that “warm, round” thing than a very linear, angular thing. That’s a little lazy, dude.”

- Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth reacts to comparisons of his music to a wide range of reference points in articles and reviews about Bitte Orca. He says some nice things about Beyoncé and of Montreal, so that’s cool. I guess he’s into insolent sex parties. (via perpetua)

Shared for calling out the limited vocabulary in music. I’ve fallen into this trap as well, but he’s right - too often, these “this sounds like that” comparisons are lazy.

(via bwall05)

Beach Boys references drive me up the wall. “This band harmonizes. What’s an old band that also harmonizes? The Beach Boys? Okay, these guys sound like the Beach Boys.”

newspeedwayboogie: Nirvana - School When I was in high school...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:00:49 -0800

newspeedwayboogie:

Nirvana - School

When I was in high school in 1991—I think I was a sophomore—my band’s first-ever show was a talent show at the high school our guitar player went to. One of the other bands on the bill played “School,” and I think it was the first time I had ever heard anything from Bleach.

My band did a cover by this band Kinghorse, “Lay Down and Die”. I don’t know how I found that record. Yes I do: I walked into the record store and the guy behind the counter saw the bullseye on my back: “Glenn Danzig produced it, and Pushead did the cover art.” So I bought it immediately and fell in love with it.

This weekend I met and interviewed the singer of Kinghorse while I was in Louisville working on the Slint book. It was probably equally exciting as meeting and talking with one of the guys from Slint.

songsthataregood: Can - I’m So Green (Ege Bamyasi) In addition...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:00:08 -0700

songsthataregood:

Can - I’m So Green
(Ege Bamyasi)

In addition to being the second most racially insensitive musical term (behind didgeridoo), Krautrock is the number one coolest genre it is possible to listen to. A properly delivered krautrock reference can reduce a lady’s undergarments to dust within microseconds. And of all the krautrockers, nobody has higher panty-disintegrating power than the almighty Can. ‘Tago Mago’ is basically the ‘abracadabra’ of getting some. ‘Ege Bamyasi’ not so much, but only because it is the Turkish word for okra.

grimmertown: pas-d: whitneymcn: Wooden Shjips - Contact

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:31:20 -0700

grimmertown:

pas-d:

whitneymcn:

Wooden Shjips - Contact