Still Listening

Music to get (in alphabetical order):

The Arcade Fire -- The Suburbs
Besnard Lakes -- Are The Roaring Night
The Books -- The Way Out
Deerhunter -- Halcyon Digest
LCD Soundsystem -- This Is Happening
Mogwai -- Special Moves
School of Seven Bells -- Disconnect From Desire
Phil Selway -- Familial
Wild Nothing -- Gemini
The xx -- The xx

For those that care, "Still Listening" is the b-side to Sinead O'Connor's single "Troy" (1987)

Valhalla Rising

It's 8.12 am. I'm bleary-eyed. I saw the movie Valhalla Rising last night with the unbearably handsome Mads Mikkelsen. The movie was largely impressionistic, about a band of Vikings (actually, Christian Vikings) who go off on a quest to seek the holy land. The timing doesn't really make any sense to me, but whatever. It was grim and violent, with lots of dream sequences, and much gloomy goth guitar music. Mikkelsen gained fame, as a friend pointed out, playing the inimitable and evil Le Chiffre in the recent Bond movie Casino Royale (2006). And yes, Le Chiffre has a wikipedia page devoted to his character. Mikkelsen was playing a role made famous by Peter Lorre and Orson Welles. Big shoes to fill. But he is indeed a very handsome man, although has labored in at least a couple of movies now with a damaged left eye.

Last night had its moments. I've lived in New York for nearly ten years now, and the city still manages to excite me every single day (and night). There are new experiences to be had, new ways to walk to old places, new conversations to be had. The long walk, often from Union Square to Grand Central can be a nice one, depending on the route. Late at night, the street lights illuminate quiet lives, solitary pedestrians, intense lovers, and the tender shadows cast on lovely faces from hats bought at H&M. I want to continue to live here in Manhattan. I'm glad I went out even if perhaps I shouldn't have. You see, I want these things. I want them very bad. I've had trouble putting them in my sight. But I know what I want because these are worthwhile goals. I hope it's not too late...?

Nevertheless I'm feeling sad this morning. It's my early morning melancholia, today exacerbated by some obvious circumstantial issues. I'm tired of feeling sad. Can I not just be fucking happy and cheery? And play with puppies? And make jokes about movies where periodization makes no sense? (9th century? 11th century? WTF get it together, dudes). Can I not have a drawer all for myself and not have to make things so complicated that the drawer disappears from my sight as if in a dream? A dream with a home, littered with the detritus of memories.

out on the weekend

Often I am cryptic in these pronouncements of mine. Some of that is laziness. Some of that is not. But right now, every waking moment is painful. It's hard to describe. "... can't relate to joy, he tries to speak and, can't begin to say."

Having Fun with Friends

I gots dem kosmik blues. Wot can I say. Ho ho ho. And so this is the time fer happy songs!

A to Z: AA Bondy

I am without music because the headphones on my iPod broke. And I dislike listening to music on my laptop with its rinky dink bass-less sound. As far as I can tell, there are no stereos in this house. (I'm at my parents'). There are speakers connected to the desktop that I'm using now, but they appear to be from the early 1990s, so you can imagine the level of their sonic fidelity. So ... that gives me nothing but silence. I listen to music a significant portion of my waking time, mostly through my iPod, so being away from it is an anomaly. Not of epic proportions, but an anomaly nevertheless.

My current iPod has a 160 Gb drive which is quite a lot I think. I've loaded up about 2/3 of my CD collection into it so far, which -- checking right now -- gives it 11, 117 songs. So, by rough calculations, I would guess that I can max out around 17,000 songs. Now, again, by rough calculations, if I assume that each song is roughly about 4 minutes long (conceding of course that I have songs as long as a few seconds and some as long as 45 minutes), I have about 50 days of music on the iPod. That's 50 days of straight listening without stopping for anything. That's actually not that long, considering.

If I listen to my iPod about 2 hours per day, then it would take me about 566 days to listen to my whole collection, which we can round off to about 2 years. Not bad. I think back in the 1990s I tried something like this, to listen to my entire music collection in alphabetical order. I got to G or H and gave up. I get caught up in the details. What should you do if you have to stop a song in the middle, do you start from the beginning the next time? What about albums? Do you break them up? What if you're in the middle of side of Yes' Tales from the Topographic Oceans (or whatever it was called) and need to stop? Do you start from the beginning again?

Anyway, once I get my headphones worked out, I'm going to start listening to everything in alphabetical order. This means that I will listen to entire albums. Sometimes if it's a good album, I may repeat it. And since my blog (let's face it) sucks, I'm going to try and inject some life into it by saying something (anything) about every artist that I listen to, even if the most I can muster up is an inane, this song is from that album by that artist.

Right now the first artist on my iPod is A. A. Bondy, he of Verbena fame who mysteriously remarkably has transformed himself from a second level grunge artifact of the 1990s to folk-ish troubadour of the 2000s. Despite what hipsters think or say, Verbena was a kickass band. Sure, they sounded eerily like Nirvana and had some tenuous connections with them (Dave Grohl produced one of Verbena's albums) but, look, they were a good competent band. They put on a good show. In any case, Bondy, the lead singer broke up the band, disappeared for a few years and then emerged with an entirely different persona, with some weird mix of the Band, Gram Parsons, and Bob Dylan. Here's a pretty good interview at Aquarium Drunkard along with a couple of mp3s. A couple of videos here. My favorite song, "When the Devil's Loose," is below. It's deceptively simple, but it winds your way into your soul. Give it a couple of listens:

Blind

So, today, my iPod (yes, I still have one of those) was on shuffle, and lo and behold, the following song, "Blind," started playing. I'd first heard it in 1995 when Drainland came out, which was technically a Michael Gira solo album. The song later turned up on various other Swans compilations.

I was living in Amherst, Massachusetts at the time on North Pleasant Street at a place we affectionately called "the white house." It still stands there today. I was living what I recognized even then as a deeply aimless existence, working part-time as a computer technician at an Apple computer store in Northampton. In retrospect, life wasn't so bad. I had a few friends, a fair amount of free time, drank a lot, discovered an enormous amount of new music, went out a lot, etc. In those barely-internet days, it seemed totally random that Michael Gira would release a solo album. And it made no sense that it sounded totally like late period Swans. But whatever. I taped Drainland on a cassette and listened to it a lot. Not sure if I liked the whole thing, but this particular song, "Blind," always stood out.

Someone somewhere mentioned how the song slowly fades in as if it had been playing forever and at the end it fades out as if it will play on forever. That's a perfect encapsulation of the whole thing. It has a mournful tone, unlike much of Gira's stuff which is more maudlin than mournful. He seems genuinely emotional in this one, not distanced away from feelings. It's shockingly intimate for him. But even if you know nothing about him, this is an adult song in the truest sense of the word. Beautifully done.

Oh, nowadays, I am an academic and teach in a small-ish private university here in New York. Yesterday the powers that be informed me that I am tenured. No longer a minion here, I suppose. Not sure if this song below, "Blind," is perfectly appropriate or completely irrelevant. Either way, it's on my mind today.

What English Sounds Like To People Who Don't Speak English

Here is the Italian artist(e) Adriano Celentano with the song "Prisencolinensinainciusol," released in 1972. I'm also posting an mp3 at the bottom. The song rocks. Thx to polkadot for the tip.



Adriano Celentano -- Prisencolinensinainciusol [mp3]

A (Medieval) History of Dead Can Dance

A recent essay worth reading here, communicating eloquently and without pretension why Godspeed You! Black Emperor is such an anomaly in the world of pop music. The writer notes that "Godspeed brings to mind trains, that beautiful symbol of tangibility." And also: "One reason no one has filled the void Godspeed left is that no one else could gain a foothold while simultaneously coming over as so pretentious. I have no reason to think the band members aren't all good people, but in terms of presentation, these guys get away with murder, and it's wonderful."

Which all brings me to another "band" from the good old days, Dead Can Dance, now barely remembered, tossed into the dustheap of unhip history. But they were an important track in the soundtrack of my life in the late eighties and nineties. How to describe Dead Can Dance without using tired descriptors? Their early (and better) stuff encompassed everything from Gregorian chants ("De Profundis") to straight renditions of 13th century songs ("Saltarello") or 16th century Gatalan tunes ("The Song of the Sibyl"). Apparently their music was Neo-Medieval, whatever that means. They had a song called "Echolalia" and used glossolalia in their music.

Later in their career, they moved more into what folks today call "World Music" and away from their medieval roots. But it still holds up remarkably well. They were an important aesthetic influence on my musical education, especially in the late eighties but also into the nineties when they (first) broke up. I learned to be cautiously open to intellectual pretension. I understand that there's a thin line between intellectual aspiration and pathetic (and bathetic) parody but for some reason, I never placed Dead Can Dance in the latter category although many other bands were not spared by scorn. Dead Can Dance felt incredibly earnest even as they collapsed time (centuries) and space (continents) into tidy album-sized chunks with lyrics that would not be out of place in Chaucer.

Brendan Perry, one half of Dead Can Dance, was someone who played in punk bands as a kid but having been influenced by the post-punk of P.I.L. and Joy Division took a complete left turn into more expansive music. Lisa Gerrard, the other half, is someone who you imagine should have done her Ph.D. in Medieval Studies in a small liberal arts college in New England. She looks tiny, frail, wispy, and proper. She later scored the music for the film Gladiator.

Here then, are three random selections from the Dead Can Dance oeuvre.

Here is "Saltarello" from the album Aion (1990), first referred to in Napoli in the 13th century:



Here is "Echolalia" from the album The Serpent's Egg (1988):



Here is the band in the latter day / world music phase with a song called "Rakim," actually only released in a live version on the album Toward The Within.

Despicable

Feeling mellow and happy today

Note: John Lennon never played better guitar than on this. He rips the shit out of the guitar. Jimi Hendrix had nothing on this.