Donna Summer: I Feel Love

A short post, prompted by having just stumbled upon a video of one of the best dance songs of all time, Donna Summer's 1977 classic "I Feel Love." Apparently originally released as a b-side, it, of course, became a massive hit. Amazing, really, how futuristic and forward-thinking the song was, for which most of the credit should go to producer Giorgio Moroder. The video is not all that great in terms of quality, but it's definitely worth a see.

I should add that Giorgio Moroder himself released a few albums, one of which, From Here to Eternity (also from 1977) was something I listened to quite a lot when I was in my early teens (thanks to a friend of mine, Sameena, who, God knows where she is these days, was a big fan). It's definitely worth checking out. The kids these days say that From Here to Eternity was where trance and house music began, which seems a little overstated. Looking up the album on the dreaded wikipedia, it turns out that in the production credits of the album, Moroder wrote: "Only electronic keyboards were used in the making of the album." I think that's fantastic!... Because it completely inverts the kind of self-important claims for "authenticity" that rock musicians would aspire to in the 1980s, about how everything on their albums was played on guitars....you know....no Goddamn synthesizers...but REAL instruments. Giorgio, it turns out, was way ahead of pack in many respects, not just in terms of his music but also in terms of an understanding of what he was doing.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

I'm no good with regular posts partly (well, mostly) (well, completely) because I have so much other shit to do in life. I have no time to write here. Which means that what I do is mostly daydream about my clever, erudite, and oh so witty musings that I will one day post on this blog that people will be impressed with.

I have a long post, which I intend to finish soon, on the state of pop music in Bangladesh. But until then, I thought I'd post on some contemporary news. Pitchfork recently reported that the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor may have broken up. I know in the real world, a band possibly breaking up is not big news, but it is big news when the band in question is Godspeed. I would guess that if I had to name my favorite musical act from the past ten years, Godspeed would be a contender for the top spot.

Rock critics like to call Godspeed "post-rock" but such a reductive (and silly) term does them no justice. Nay, Godspeed's music is the music God might make had God been a bunch of hairy anarchists from Canada. So...Godspeed are a band based on Montreal, more of a collective than a band, a band that resolutely rejects the notion of leaders, individuals, entertainment personalities, and the often absurd travails of modern day musical (conspicuous) consumption. They are anarchists (!) who put their money where their mouth(s) are. The band gives almost no interviews, claims it has no 'leaders,' self-releases their own records, never signed with a major label, organizes their tours themselves, etc. etc. They are political. Not political in the U2 sense of the word--preachy, contrived, and self-righteous--but political in the most personal levels possible. Their music has no lyrics, although frequently, the music is interspersed with spoken word samples that hint at a kind of personal dissafectation with modern day capitalism. But all of this, on some level, is irrelevant.

The main thing is the music. The music combines absurd beauty with galactic-levels of sadness. As a working orchestra (of usually nine or so people), they play ensemble music, each "song" lasting between 15 and 25 minutes. Each track is divided into movements, much like classical music. The instruments are basically guitar, bass, drum, violins, french horns, electronics, vocals, etc. With these instruments, they produce a music that can be as silent as paper clips dropping on the floor-- or raging jet engines in your face....suffused with a sheer and utter melancholia that is both helpless and hopeful at the same time. Once, while listening to a Godspeed track, all that was going through my mind was the following imaginary title, perhaps thought of by a vagabond on a street: "The Incredibly Small Dot That I Am At The Very Bottom of the Giant Fucking Ocean That We Call Pacific Thousands of Miles From Anywhere in a Bottomless Expanse of Infinite Sadness That Cannot Be Described in Words But Is Lived Constantly In My Daily Life."

Their music traffics in the same kind of dynamics of melancholia purveyed by three other favorite bands of mine: Mogwai, Sigur Ros, and Explosions in the Sky. But unlike these three, Godspeed sounds ragged, almost improvised, and undeniably serious. And fucking glorious. And where all three of these other bands have their moments of brilliance and stomach-churning melancholia, Godspeed makes you viscerally disconnect from people around you. You might never want to feel like that, which is fine. Godspeed's music is not for everyone. It is an acquired taste. It is a soundtrack for the moments that make us uncomfortable with our lives. It is the music of discomfort, of strangeness, of incoherence and yes, even of coherence. It is a music of contradictions. I think the closest classical comparison would be Henryk Gorecki, whose Symphony No. 3 probably can conjure the same emotions in even the coldest and most alienated human being. (More on that in another entry).

Godspeed You! Black Emperor (they used to be Godspeed You Black Emperor!) has released one e.p. and three full length albums. Their second album, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, is a brilliant double album, one of my favorite albums of the past one million years. Released in 2000, it has four long pieces ("Storm," "Static," "Sleep," and "Antennas to Heaven") that will bring you to your knees. I guarantee it. "Sleep" especially is Godawfully beautiful, beginning with a wonderful monologue by an older gentleman, someone who is remembering, haltingly remembering, his time as a young man on Coney Island, about the times when they slept on the beach as young men. Now they no longer sleep on the beach anymore. It's never explained why. But a mournful music begins that takes you on three different movements for about 23 minutes before moving into "Antennas to Heaven," which itself is nearly 19 minutes long. Not at all dirgelike.

I saw Godspeed in April 2003 at Warsaw (the Polish National Home) in Brooklyn. They were touring in support of their final album Yanqui U.X.O. which, although not as good as its predecessor, contained "Motherfucker=Redeemer" (in two parts), the first part of which is a roller coaster of riffs, notes, crescendos that left me breathless as I watched it in concert. Beginning with the soft notes of a xylophone, the music lifted the crowd off the ground, made us take deep deep breaths, made us gasp for air as it headed to its strange conclusion of echoes and guitars ringing through the hall. One of their best pieces of music.

I'm glad I saw them since it looks they won't ever be touring again. It was such a beautiful show. I was mesmerized, almost brought the point of tears. Their shows were not just musical affairs, but also fully realized visual extravaganzas, with movies projected on the band and on to the background, vaguely political moving images from history. Their political message can be seen on one level as hopeless and cynical -- after all according to Godspeed the world is fucked. Profoundly fucked. So it was comforting, almost revelatory to see the band end their show with words of hope ("Hope") flashed on the background, as they convened one last time to play a lovely lullabye piece (called "Outro") that was almost playful, fun, and happy (yes, happy) in its tone. The band smiled throughout this last piece, enjoying each other's company, ended the beautiful piece, stood up, clapped, waved, and were gone.

While Godspeed You! Black Emperor may not exist anymore, several of its band members have gone on to other bands, notably Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band who are still around (in fact, they have a new album coming out soon). There's a very evocative review of a Silver Mt. Zion album (Horses in the Sky) which briefly mentions their earlier classic album He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts Of Light Sometimes Grace The Corner of Our Rooms... It's worth a read.

Here's an amateur video of "Albanian" by Godspeed, an unreleased track that they played live on their 2003 tour.



And here's another one from the same tour of them doing a portion of the first song ("Storm") off of Lift Your Skinny Fists. Neither of the videos do remote justice to their music or their live showa but they do provide a sense of the ensemble nature of their work.



Finally, although "Outro" (the almost "happy" track that they ended their shows with) was never released on an official Godspeed album, it is featured in a compilation CD released by Constellation records entitled Song of the Silent Land. The CD is worth getting. In case you're interested, I've posted an mp3 of "Outro" here. A little bit of an acquired taste, but still very cool.

See you later.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Outro [mp3]

Dhaka Calling

I've been here in Dhaka for two days and still getting over the jetlag. The roughly 12 hour time difference completely disorients you. I have only been out once, to the wedding reception of a friend. Otherwise, I've been ensconced at my parents' home. The city is oddly quiet, not surprising given that both the Eid and Christmas holidays have shut everything down. Quiet is a relative term---my point of reference is only the frenetic noise of the traffic infront of our house. There has been none so far. Yet, reading the newspapers, the city and the country seems as madly frenetic as ever. Millions of things are going on. Meetings, conferences, festivals, and most of all, weddings. In Dhaka, weddings (like fruits and vegetables) have seasons, and 'tis the season of weddings every December and January. There are literally dozens across the city every single night. Hotels and convention centers are booked, and some wedding party is facing some crisis at any given moment of the day. Based upon my recent annual visits, the weddings seem quite different from twenty years ago (my other point of reference). They seem much more homogenous and yet more colorful. Urban weddings of a certain class have the same series of events, mutating slowly every year into forms unrecognizable from before. I hear now that at the engagement parties, they make the food on the spot infront of the guests. New forms of authenticity are replacing old ones.

I'll venture out to the city later today. In the meantime, here are two random pictures from the last couple of days of news here. One an image of a street celebration of Eid (top) and the other a guy in a red suit dispensing joy yesterday (below), both here in the city. (Both pictures stolen from The Daily Star newspaper). No -- it's not all religion here, and yes, I'm not a big fan of by any stretch of the imagination. But just to start things off with some color on my musings on the trip to the desh this year.

The Asteroid # 4

Thought I'd do a test to put up mp3 files.
I'll begin with Asteroid No. 4's "The CIA Took My Dog Away."

Seefeel (redux)

Earlier this year, Too Pure records put out a re-release of Seefeel's classic Quique CD, now expanded to a two-CD package called Quique: Redux Edition. Needless to say, the music on it is awesome beyond words -- electronic bliss captured in a moment of almost-genius by this long gone British band. I wrote at length about Seefeel in my zine thing (see Fred issue 7 here) so I won't go on about the band in general but I will say that the new package is definitely worth getting if you are into electronic music that is narcotic, minimalist, and yet not boring.

While the first disc on the set is their debut album released in 1993, the second disc collects a bunch of random tracks from that same era, 3 previously released and 6 previously not. Most are remixes of the tracks on disc 1. The second disc takes the idea of "ambience" ['e' and 'a' interchangeable, apparently] to another level altogether, with little grounding in the kinds of beats and melodies we normally associate with music.

The package comes with two short essays, one from Simon Reynolds, who apparently upon listening to Seefeel coined the now oddly silly term "post-rock," and the other from Seefeel chief architect Mark Clifford, the former, basically a record review written in 1993. Reynolds is a wonderful writer (which is why I hate him) and he says "Quique is perfectly blank, utterly abstract." Indeed, it is. He adds, "Fuzzy harmonics, like a harp played underwater, simply hang tremulously in the air: this really is Rothko'n'roll." (Reynolds' idea of pun is to use lots of funs. Yes, I meant that).

Go get the new Quique if you can. Read more about Seefeel here.

Very rare live footage of Seefeel performing, apparently from the early 1990s, of their track "Industrious" from Quique:

It's all done with GUITARS!!!

Michael Gira

I have not seen that many shows this year, but one of the few that I did catch was a show by Michael Gira, formerly of the Swans, who did a solo acoustic thing at the Highline Ballroom here in New York on September 14. The show was basically a record release show for the new album by his band Angels of Light. The new CD is called We Are Him.

This is not the time for a long post on the Swans, one of the greatest bands of the 1980s (more on that later) but I will say that seeing Gira (pronounced "jeera" I discovered only recently) was a profoundly intense experience. This guy is not fucking around. He's in his early fifties now (amazing!) and he sorta looked it. Walked on stage, still thin, still so absurdly intense that you either want to laugh or be scared. He had his usual cowboy hat and boots on, sat on a stool with a single acoustic guitar, dead center in front of the stage. I was almost to his front, just a little to the left so I barely escaped the spit that flung out of his mouth as he berated, condemned, nay, admonished former lovers, friends, people, God, himself, and God knows what else for a period of about an hour-and-a-half. Bile. I really had no idea what to expect when I went to see him, but after he did the first song, I just muttered under my breath: "Holy living fuck."

Stripped down to acoustic guitar, every word that came out of his mouth (with his spit), hung like drenched blankets in the dead air, unable to swing. I don't remember the set list anymore--a buncha Swans songs, some Angels of Light--but the entire audience was mesmerized the whole time. All the more amazing, when he would pause between his indictments and sing the most tender of songs, something about (gasp) love or human affection. For those few minutes, you unclenched your firsts, love or affection actually meaning something real and not platitudes or cliches.

A young woman, probably in her late twenties, who came to the show alone (like I did), stood directly infront of him. When Gira launched into his first song, looking mad, and talking about filth and despair, she just broke into a most uncomfortable smile, as if she was so so so embarrassed to be having to hear this most personal lyric in a room full of strangers. I have never seen a smile so uncomfortable. Later at the end of the evening, when Gira did a short encore by doing "God Damn the Sun" (the beautiful final track from the Swans' The Burning World album from 1989), the same woman had tears streaming down her cheeks. Streaming. She lost her capacity to be embarrassed. Gira continued:

When, when we were young
We had no history
So nothing to lose
Meant we could choose
Choose what we wanted then
Without any fear
Or thought of revenge

But then you grew old
And I lost my ambition
So I gained an addiction
To drink and depression

The following is not a terribly good version (sound quality is bad) but you can see the man pretty well as he does "God Damn the Sun."

Waves of Plastic

A couple of months ago, I managed to track down a very rare piece of music. I don't normally buy that much music anymore, but in a fit of I-don't-know-what, I decided to splurge something like $71 for six songs. Six songs I have heard before and have somewhere, at least on ancient cassette tapes. In 1987, the band the Replacements released a double 12" single only in Germany that had four rare b-sides. I am not sure why they chose release this stuff only in Germany (maybe so I could buy it 20 years later for an obscene amount of money) but they did. Bastards.

So, for about 20 years, I'd been desperately trying to track this mythic thing down. I'd managed to get pretty much everything else by the band. But this one thing remained. I scoured record stores (back when there used to be such things). I'd do absurd Google searches. Nothing. I'm not even sure why I bothered to try and find it. I rarely listen to the Replacements. I don't even like that kind of music anymore. But it was, you know, some sort of lame attempt at grasping-for-youth or worse, a small material object to make me happy. Blah blah. Twenty years went by.

So, in May or June or whatever, I managed to track it down on-line, forked over $71 and lo and behold it arrived at my house a week or so later. It was like chocolate melting in your mouth. I cleaned it lovingly, played all four sides a few times. I'd heard all the songs before so it wasn't like a revelation or anything. But it was nice to hear the songs (which, at least the b-sides, weren't that stellar) in their original pristine glory.

Later, more recently, I discovered that someone had left my double 12" on top of my cable box attached to the TV. As one knows, cable boxes are hot. They give off heat. Since my Replacements vinyl had been sitting on it for months, naturally, both the records warped beyond....well, beyond playing. The records look like waves of plastic.

Whatever.

The CIA Took My Dog Away

In a fit of nostalgia, I went out and got the new Sonic Youth record Rather Ripped. I have to admit that it's really gorgeous. It's very nostalgic, not at all forward looking or anything like that. It's soft, melancholy, and shockingly melodic. Few of the guitars really "sound" like Sonic Youth. They sound, dry, brittle, but warm, if that's possible, with lots of harmonics. I don't know how or why they decided to go this way. Listening to it, I almost feel like I am back in college (Station), in my shitty apartment wishing that I had a girlfriend.

One of the reasons that I don't write here that much is that no one knows that this blog exists. Well, that is not strictly true. Three people know it exists although I can't be sure that any of those three people have actually seen it. So I write in a vacuum. Which is liberating, I suppose.

I haven't read too many books this year. I typically read at a glacial pace. I get about half way into a book and then give up. A couple that I actually finished: Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier and Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up & Start Again: PostPunk 1978-1984. The former was totally crazy, about two vaguely homicidal and licentuous couples in pre-Great War America who, well you just have to read it. The latter was...well-written. I met Simon Reynolds once at some bar in the Lower East Side called Nu-Blu where he showed up to celebrate the release of the book. He was taller than me and looked very young for his age. I think he's in his early 40s. He was also totally drunk. We spoke for maybe half-an-hour in the middle of total cacophony (bad NY-wanna-be-postpunkdisco music of the early 2000s). He was very polite. The music was loud. He said he'd seen the Slits in concert. I thought he said the Smiths. That was sort of how the conversation went. I invited him to be a guest lecturer in my (still-in-gestation) class on the history of rock'n'roll (perhaps in the fall of 2007). He seemed eager. I am intimidated by him because he writes better, knows more about music, and is better looking than me. (And for sure, makes more money). The only defense I had was to revel in my mediocrity. Proud to be average, goddammit.

Thinking of Simon Reynolds and all that post-punk brings me to my topic for today: over-rated musical institutions. Exhibit A: Joy Division. I understand on a cognitive level why Joy Division remains critically unassailable: their music was rather innovative, they communicated a general darkness that was distant yet palatable, their lifetime was short, their music seems to have dated well, and their suicide quotient is at at a full '10.' But I don't understand how a fairly good band has been canonized, a hagiography taken to absurdly doctrinnaire levels. In the music world, especially critics who write about music, it's agreed but never spelled out that Joy Division is unimpeachable. In the scheme of music writing, Joy Division is one of those sacred things, as Jimi Hendrix was/is for baby boomers. You just don't absolutely ever fucking EVER describe the music of Joy Division as anything but revelatory. I listened to Closer the other day. It sounded vaguely tolerable. I always liked that song "Isolation" but everything else sounds so tinny and dated and tuneless. And tuneless in a bad way, not in a Captain Beefheart/early Boredoms/Keiji Haino-like way. Just plain horrible tuneless. The set of random leftovers collected on Substance is actually pretty good. All those singles and compilation tracks were imaginative and inventive. But the band were not really good with the whole album thing. And the ethos that they communicated was done much better by other people (for example, by the brilliant [early] Swans).

And let's face it, Ian Curtis couldn't sing worth shit. He had this tuneless warble that sounded like he was gurgling water. I'm not denigrating the pain he perhaps felt, and yes, the band backed up that pain pretty well, but hardly on a level, say of some nu-metal band fronting adolescent cliches about suicide and death and meaninglessness and helplessness. Joy Division's clinical, cool, detached shtick was just plastic. Their innovative tendencies (both on stage and in the recording studio) were nothing compared to many of their contemporaries such as P.I.L. I'm already getting bored writing about the band. To me, Joy Division were the Alice in Chains of their era. And I say that with the best of intentions. I'm quite fond of Alice in Chains. They're not the greatest but did what they did pretty nicely. Check out their Jar of Flies e.p. Wonderful stuff. Tragic about their lead singer.

OK, on to obscure track of the day. My old favorite band from Philly, Asteroid # 4, used to be this weird whimsical band in the vein of late '60s psychedelia. They put on fantastic shows and put out a great album (Introducing....The Asteroid # 4) in 1998. Around this time, while I was living in Philly, I discovered them when a friend and I showed up at the record release party for Spiritualized's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, which was held at the Trocadero, the best place to see live music in Philly. They band (Asteroid # 4) were four typical college-looking guys who launched into spasmotic space rock, even introducing a flute player at one point. They had totally ridiculous lyrics and deadpan faces. It was actually pretty funny.

I saw them a few more times but lost track once they veered into a cul-de-sac of imitation; they started getting obssessed with mid-period Byrds, especially the canon of Gram Parsons. It's not that I don't like Parsons' music, but more that it was a tired move for them, and they didn't doo it very well. However, they have a new album out called "An Amazing Dream," and from what I've heard it sounds a lot more fun and creative, harking back to their early days. Go to their myspace page to hear some stuff streaming.

One thing that was lost in the shuffle through their albums was their one-off non-album single from 1995 "The CIA Took My Dog Away" b/w "Mellow Beach," two spectacular tracks that perfectly encapsulate a kind of false nostalgia for never-really-existed late '60s psychedelia. Lots of killer melodies, fake British accents, and Barrett-era weirdness, and throw in some My Bloody Valentine-guitar, and you have these songs. They never did anything quite as good after these couple of songs, which unfortunately remain unreleased on CD. I converted the two songs to mp3s from vinyl (lotta hum) and would post them on this site, except I have no freakin' idea how to post mp3s here (or if indeed one can), so if anyone's interested, I can e-mail the track. That's how lame I am.

There is an old interview with the band here.
And a vide of the band:

Pushed It Over The End

I recently attended a wedding where I was a groomsman. I had to wear a tuxedo and stand up straight and pretend to have good posture. Like all weddings I've been to in recent times, this was sartorial and spiritual mashup. People had integrated two different cultures (Hinduism & Christianity) into a seamless, smart, postmodern version where everything made sense precisely because nothing did. It was a white wedding with saris, a secular wedding with prayers, and a sensible wedding that made no sense. I wish the wedded well. The groom is one of the funniest people I have met in my life. He has good Halloween parties.

In any case, as a mark of his gratitude, the groom gave me a gift, the insanely rare and expensive box set 1970: The Complete Funhouse Sessions by the Stooges. What this was, was 7 hours and 52 minutes of every note recorded in May 1970 by the Stooges while they were recording their second album, Fun House. I won't go into the magnificient supernova that is Fun House--I am consigning that description to my still-in-gestation coming-to-America-history-of-punk-rock memoir. Either you know Fun House or you don't. Fun House da motherfucking shit. Well, at least it used to be when I first heard it, which seems like a long time ago, maybe almost ten years ago. In any case, because I am a completist and because I continue to think that Fun House is crazyassgenius, it never occurred to me that actually listening to 142 tracks spread over 7 CDs, including, for example, 28 consecutive takes of "Loose," would be certifiably insane. That it would drive any normal human being insane. No, not me. I was fully prepared to do it.

Well, the thing is that I have not done it yet. It's been a coupla weeks since I got the box set. I have fondled it. I have treated it like an object of fetish, perfectly suitable in these hyper-object-iPod-gadget-ebay-instant-fetish times. And so, I have now convinced myself that it is more important to own it than to listen to it.

I am like this not only about CDs, but also about books too. I love to own books, to touch them, to flip through them, to read the back cover, to read the "about the author" blurb, but that is enough. How satisfying it is to know that I own Don Dellilo's White Noise, half of which I read when I was younger and thoroughly enjoyed and didn't finish, no doubt because I got too depressed to read because I was lonely or something like that. I started to re-read White Noise recently again. It's quite brilliant. I deeply empathized with the main character (and narrator) Jack Gladney, a professor of "Hitler Studies" at a small liberal arts college who knows no German. Dellilo writes:

My struggle with the German tongue began in mid-October and lasted nearly the full academic year. As the most prominent figure in Hitler studies in North America, I had long tried to conceal the fact that I did not know German. I could not speak or read it, could not understand the spoken word or begin to put the simplest sentence to paper. The least of my Hitler colleagues knew some German; others were either fluent in the language or reasonably conversant. No one could major in Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill without a minimum of one year of German. I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.

This touched a nerve partly because it says something about the ways in which we put ourselves in positions that we are less than skilled to deal with---yet we continue with the charade that "everything's cool." There was a more literal reason why it appealed to me: I am in Russian history and my Russian proficiency can be best described as a skill that is almost totally lacking, but one that is wrapped in the public pretense of fluency.

In any case, in terms of the goal of this blog, having conceded that it is completely self-serving and sickeningly narcissistic to even maintain it--I like the idea of dedicating it to two topics:

1. Officially unreleased songs by musicians; or
2. Strange and/or obscure songs by mainstream musicians.

First song: Neil Young's "Pushed It Over the End," a strangely beautiful and oddly structured song, nearly 8 minutes long that is also (apparently) known as "Citizen Kane Jr. Blues." He played it in a band live version in 1974 and then, I guess, abandoned it. His guitar playing is pretty, understated, but incredibly communicative. You hear it, you almost feel like you're teetering on the edge of something, and then you tip over and make the long deep fall, all the way down. That's exactly how I felt hearing the song before I even knew the title of the song. Think of "Broken Arrow" but a little more loose and electric. Where can you get it? It's on the 5-CD set Archives Be Damned, a collection of 82 songs that Neil Young recorded but never officially released, from the early 1960s to the late 1990s.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

100% of all music that I hear is boring. Everything bores me. This is especially true when I'm not listening to music. It's hard for me to get excited about music when I'm not listening to music. This may seem strange since I have been obsessed with music for most of my life. I have gajillions of records, tapes, CDs, and mp3s. But basically, all of it sucks. All of it is boring. It's a pain to even think about listening to music.

The question is which music sucks more. Old music or new music. And by old music, I mean everything recorded/put out before, say, 2000. That's a tough one. I have a distinct sense that new music is all derivative. But derivative doesn't necessary imply boring (or sucking). I would hazard a guess that both old and new music is boring and sucks.

What was the last piece of music I listened to that wasn't boring? That's such a boring question, I'm not going to dignify it with an answer.