tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48090506161320209752024-03-12T21:01:44.082-07:00No One Gives a Hoot About Faux-Ass NonsenseBen Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-6573626715733148462011-05-01T13:07:00.000-07:002011-05-01T13:14:34.628-07:00Bascom Lamar Lunsford - "In the Shadow of the Pines"<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/lunsford.mp3" id="keyboard">In the Shadow of the Pines</a></p><br />I don't generally think there's much point to having a favorite single piece of recorded music, but if I was forced to claim one, this Bascom Lamar Lunsford track might be it. I could listen to Lunsford's delivery of these lines of regret and loneliness on repeat for hours. The words are devastating, but not just bleak: the speaker and his love had split, but he's trying to explain to her that he's had a change of heart and if she comes back they can be happy again. But "in life's dark pathway the sun no longer shines," so she should meet him "in the shadow of the pines." Not too promising for long-term happiness.<br /><br />This emotional ambivalence is matched by Lunsford's creative enunciation, in his touching nasal Western North Carolina accent over droning banjo accompaniment. Listen at 2:20 to the way he holds out "you" at the end of "you took the ring I gave you" and allows an extra breath before moving on to the next line. Or at 4:09 to the bouncy staccato delivery of "I'd give this whole world gladly once again to meet you there / reunited. . ." In the first case, he might be drawing out the meaning of the line. In the second, I suspect he's just being playful with a song he's sung a thousand times. Either way, I'd rank Lunsford's singing with the art of the best instrumentalists. Not that the lyrics don't help. "I awake from bitter dreaming but to call aloud your name / I sleep again to dream of you once more." Ooof.<br /><br />This recording is from a session Lunsford did in 1949 with the Library of Congress. As he explains in the intro -- in which his vocal delivery is just about as good as in the song itself (e.g. the pitches of each word in "this old love song" in the first line) -- this song is part of the "fine old traditions of the southern highlands." I'm no scholar of American folk music, but I understand Lunsford's identity to highlight the historicism that music. Lunsford wasn't some backporch hillbilly subject being caught on tape just before he slid away into the mists of time. He was a lawyer and an ethnomusicologist of his own culture: he curated a music festival in Asheville, NC, for many years. There's plenty to say about that, and I highly recommend <a href="http://www.uncpress.unc.edu/browse/page/333">this book</a> to anyone interested in the weird phenomenon of the construction of the idea of American folk music. All that aside, though, I think it's possible to hear in this song a musical mastery that doesn't need context.Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-81443800362086396672011-03-24T18:57:00.000-07:002011-05-01T17:25:59.385-07:00Hella - "The Republic of Rough-N-Ready"<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/hella.mp3" id="keyboard">The Republic of Rough-N-Ready</a></p><br />This is tied for favorite song from one of my favorite albums, so it's tough to want to do anything but offer it up. Maybe with a side of superlatives like "the high point of contemporary progressive music," or "the most brilliant dense music ever made by two people live in a room" (at least in the realm of rock, because I don't want to get in to comparing this to Interstellar Space, but it certainly kicks the ass of anything I've ever heard by the Ruins), or "the most meaningfully busy drumming ever recorded" (again, I'll stick to a rock context for such a claim).<br /><br />I can say that you should listen to it ten more times if you're hearing it for the first time and it sounds like a big mess of notes and rhythms. That's how I heard it the first time I heard this album -- <span style="font-style: italic;">Hold Your Horse Is</span>, credit for first listen goes to Adam Rigger, fall '03 -- until I got to 2:22 of this track. There's a bouncy almost country-ish guitar lick and a response that goes back and forth three times and never comes back. The phrase was undeniable and I was like "okay, these guys aren't just shredding to show off, this kind of sounds like Yes, or at least like Faraquet." It took me a bunch more listens plus seeing Hella live to realize that all these parts are purposeful and melodic. Not just Spencer Seim's guitar playing, which for all its aggressively physicality (tapping, hammer-ons and pull-offs, blistering picking, etc.) is always subservient to musical phrases. Zach Hill's drumming is even more brilliant in coming off at first listen as an incoherent jumble, and yet ultimately revealing itself as an overcaffeinated deconstruction of rock beats. <br /><br />Take for example his first set of more-or-less repeated phrases when this song starts in earnest at :10. His phrase starts half a second before the guitar's and plays a part filled with off-accents on the snare, but that ends clearly with a fairly conventional closing statement on open hi-hat. The phrase is so busy and off-time that I don't even know how to start counting it, but it's still recognizably a cut-time let's-get-warmed-up intro part. Sort of. Obviously nothing in those last few sentences is going to express why it's a successful part, but what I'm saying is <span style="font-style: italic;">seriously listen to it </span>again and again until you can hear it, if not understand it. My main man Mike Dooling, formidable drummer and trained opera singer, told me he got some software to slow down tracks from this album without changing the pitch. . . and he still couldn't figure out what the hell Hill is doing most of the time.<br /><br />Or take one more example: the weird interjection of a chopped-up hip hop beat in isolation at 1:18. Brilliant, and yes, a bit non-sequitorial, maybe even obnoxious (like: we have so many sick parts we're <span style="font-style: italic;">giving</span> them away. . .) but then holy shit that part that comes right after it. They're in 4/4 actually, but Seim has both hands on the fretboard, making thick clusters of clean tones topped off by a sad pretty almost-melody, Hill is sweeping across his set, no time for fills with a part that busy.<br /><br />Busy at being superlative.Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-72506013275881667842011-03-24T17:56:00.000-07:002011-03-24T19:20:15.086-07:00Bygones - "Click on That (Smash the Plastic Death)"<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/bygones.mp3" id="keyboard">Click on That (Smash the Plastic Death)</a></p><br />Here goes my first foray into writing about something (kinda) new: the Bygones album that I just acquired a few weeks ago, though I'd listened to it online some last summer. Or was that the summer before last?<br /><br />Bygones is the duo of Zach Hill, the drummer of gold-standard instrumental math rock band Hella, and Nick Reinhart, the guitarist of Tera Melos, a band at the center of what I gather is a thriving scene of music like this Sacramento. Both Hella and TM make non-music-school prog rock, with "pop" belonging somewhere in the genre description of the latter. This side project is what you expect from this background, but so far I like it more than anything I've heard from Reinhart's main band and almost as much as the great works of Hella -- who supposedly will release a new album in classic duo format some time later this year.<br /><br /> The song I'm sharing here has been stuck in my head for days, and this album is particularly good at demonstrating that the point of writing dense music with oddly timed changes doesn't have to be denying the listener the joy of hummable hooks. In keeping with this sentiment, Hill actively sublimates his famously IDM-level virtuosic beat chops (cf. this or anything else on youtube from the Hella Japan tour DVD) to verses, choruses, and bridges. This isn't to say that these guys are just trying their hands at writing pop songs. Hill's busy toms pepper the parts with unexpected accents, and the hummable riffs and progressions rarely conform to a straight metrical pattern. Obviously I don't know anything about how these guys write their parts, but I'm happy to think they share an idea I've had (Jake Anodide gets partial credit for this one): that odd time signatures should be the result of feeling out how long a phrase wants to be, then refraining from putting an extra chugga or pause to make the meter even. This rather than writing a phrase and then dropping or adding a beat simply to translate it from regular rock into math rock.Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-45141737522166304982011-02-21T18:03:00.000-08:002011-02-21T18:12:24.678-08:00Bonnie 'Prince Billy' - A Whorehouse is Any House<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/whorehouse.mp3" id="keyboard">A Whorehouse is Any House</a></p><div>I've maintained for years and will continue to maintain until evidence to the contrary arises that Will Oldham is the best there is at the songwriting style of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, et al. The phrase singer-songwriter irks not just because it reminds one of so much garbage music but also because it doesn't seem to really describe anything musical. Terminology aside, this is a recognizable categorization of musicians, if not necessarily a genre -- right?<br /> </div><div><br /></div><div>Anyway, I call Oldham the best at this. His great songs are at least as sublime as those of the more famous aforementioned, his body of work more varied with more success (not counting his lame album of Nashville-style self-covers), his voice richer and more interesting, his collaborators superior. Oh, and he writes good words. That's not my main interest with most music, but dude has made me love the poetry of song more regularly than anyone else.</div> <div><br /></div><div>And so I'm going to share this one Oldham gem, which shines all the brighter for me as I only managed to hear it on a CD-R a friend copied me years ago of Palace / Bonnie Prince Billy ephemera. A quick search turns up that it was the b-side on a Sub Pop 7" from '99. Apparently it bears the provocative title "A Whorehouse is Any House." News to me.<br /></div> <div><br /></div><div>In a perfect gentle harmony with a woman named Glynnis McDaris (according to Discogs), accompanied by first-take casual/lazy guitar, bass, and percussion (is that someone patting on a table?), the narrator of the song describes following a woman home from a bar, both of them drunk. A classic singalong-friendly chorus -- with all the beauty of a pre-pop folk tune and none of the hokiness of almost all imitators of pre-pop folk tunes -- affirms his love of the pursuit of the woman over the actual attainment: "And I needed so much to have nothing to touch / and I wanted so dear to have nothing so near." Or maybe it's not even that straightforward. Does he lust after having nothing? (Recalling the epic line from <i>Days in the Wake</i> "When you have no one, no one can hurt you" -- that might not seem so epic being quoted, but <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5J-1t3K_Mk" target="_blank">listen to it sung</a> and be convinced). </div> <div><br /></div><div>Apparently that's not it either, as right after the chorus he's in her room (though "her room is my world"?) and he slips in to her bed, still apparently unacknowledged, and "she doesn't stir, so I saddle up warmer and warmer to her." There follows a transcendent musical goof: four bars of synth sexy time.<br /> </div><div><br /></div><div>And then one more time with that chorus that I can hear a thousand times and keep wanting to hear again.</div>Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-81412875134160328862011-02-02T19:38:00.000-08:002011-02-02T19:41:52.853-08:00Jimmy Cousins & the Crime Spree - "Coo Coo Brain"<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/cousins.mp3" id="keyboard">Coo Coo Brain</a></p><div>Jimmy Cousins writes southern rock songs that you swear you heard before, and has the voice to justify such an act. The last time he lived in Philly I had the good fortune to play bass in his band, along with Jake Anodide on drums and Eliot Klein on keys. This track is from a CD-R that Colin Langenus from USA is a Monster put together, and which I'm happy to share since I haven't the slightest idea how you'd get a copy if you wanted it. The disc is half Colin's Brooklyn funk band (with members of Talibam and Gwar!) backing Jimmy, half us (credited as "The Crime Spree"), and a few other tracks to boot. Several tunes are recorded with both bands. Whatever. You'll never hear it unless you really like this song and you come over to my house and ask me to put it on.</div><div><br /></div><div>The song is a winner from start to finish. A pleasure of finally getting the CD-R (thanks Eliot and Richie for heading south on tour!) was hearing Jimmy's psyched out vocal doubling, but the song stands even without the manipulation.</div><div><br /></div><div>I believe Jimmy's in Shreveport now. Maybe he'll be back at some point. In the meantime, come over and I'll play you the rest of the songs. </div><div><br /></div><div>p.s. This doesn't count as "self-promotion" (see other page of this site) because this was me being subservient to the song. Jen Rice also played in Jimmy's Philly band, and it could just as well have been her on this track as me.</div>Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-27041703575719709582011-01-25T20:53:00.000-08:002011-01-25T21:02:23.925-08:00A Minor Forest - So Jesus Was at the Last Supper. . .<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/forest.mp3" id="keyboard">So Jesus Was at the Last Supper. . .</a></p><br />This song is from a true forgotten masterpiece, A Minor Forest's <i>Flemish Altruism</i>. Sometimes I let myself fantasize that the world of independent rock bands will rediscover and want to imitate this band and its brilliant balance of visceral punk energy stripped of adolescent rage crossed with sly composition stripped of chamber/prog pretense. And that I'll still be going to shows when that happens.<br /><br />As much as anything, I love that A Minor Forest rocks lean. Their songs aren't simple and they certainly aren't concise, but every element steps in and makes its statement without flailing sonic excess or unnecessary instrumental duplication. I picked this track less because it's one of my favorites on the album -- I love it, but there are ones I love more -- than because it's such a nice illustration of this leanness, despite running for an almost totally linear fourteen minutes.<br /><br />It opens with a syncopated 4/4 drum beat soon joined by a dead-simple 3/4 guitar arpeggio and then eventually a teutonic slow bass line. None of the parts would be particularly exciting in isolation, but together they make a lattice* as tight as the math rock analog to the parts of a James Brown tune -- that's a pretty loose comparison, but feel me on the syncopated simple-part combo, if you would.<br /><br />Another great AMF feature is the drummer (I'm pretty sure it's the drummer) screaming starting at 2:38 while the guitar remains undistorted. Hello? How come no one else ever does that move? Why does it have to be that if one dude is rocking out at 11, all distortion pedals must be on?<br /><br />Other great features are all the other parts and how much they rock. So about that '90s indie post-punk math-metal revival. . .<br /><br /><br />*It is hearby acknowledged that I used the metaphor of a lattice earlier in this blog. I think it works well for music I like, so whatever. I'm surely the only person who noticed of the four people who actually read these posts.Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-89177635066536735662011-01-17T18:31:00.000-08:002011-01-17T19:28:49.701-08:00Circles - "Away With the Tide"<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/circles.mp3" id="keyboard">Away With the Tide</a></p><p><div>My friend Nick Millevoi plays guitar in a lot of different contexts. Most of it falls in the umbrella of free jazz, or at least of free-thinking jazz moves applied to music in other genres. He used to be the leader of a band called Cirles, though, which at its most exciting moments played what I like of think of as free rock.* Free rock, in my lose conception, isn't rock dudes totally shredding with lots of dissonance and improvisation (as in Nick's excellent current band, Many Arms) -- that's more like rock fusion. Free rock has songs, and songs that would make sense as rock songs of one subgenre of rock or another, but that are being muddied, confused, and ripped apart by the musicians' rendering.</div><div><br /></div><div>On "Away With the Tide," the plaintive melody and it's slight variation with double-Nick harmony repeat with only a quick break for the duration of the song, ceding the foreground to the two drummers, rumbling faster and slower, like Sunny Murray more than any other classic free jazz drummer (maybe. . . someone correct me if there's a closer comparison). Despite his formidable ax abilities, Nick approaches his instrument only for accompanying arpeggiation, speeding and slowing, but never varying from his chord progression. The entrance halfway through of Dan Blacksberg on trombone brings only brilliant coloration of the harmonies, but no wailing. We're left humming along with the vocals -- and four years after I first heard it I'm still happy every time this song gets stuck in my head -- and marveling at how much better a piece of music this is for lacking the bland drumming of the radio country rock that could accompany that melody.</div><div><br /></div><div>Alas, after many line-up changes since this recording, Circles has been inactive for a while now. Perhaps we'll find out in the comments section below whether they're "broken up." </div><div><br /></div><div>*Yeah, I know, Nick. Many Arms has songs. And Storm & Stress, who I think of as the height of free rock, just barely did. Maybe I still need to work on this theory.</div><p></p>Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-37665295675076332012011-01-11T18:26:00.000-08:002011-01-11T18:34:13.678-08:00Tiala - コトバのナカ<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/tiala.mp3" id="keyboard">Tiala</a></p><p>This raw burst of energy is the first track of two on a CD-R that I got when I lived in Japan in 2004. The band is called Tiala, and I saw them at one of a string of shows that I went to with an Australian guy named Jordan who somehow knew and loved the band <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UT2LIC6-n0&feature=related">Neil Perry</a>, which band I hadn't imagined anyone knew outside of New Jersey. Judging from the shows that Jordan took me to, '90s American screamo was blowing up in Japan in the mid-aughts, but I remember thinking Tiala was the best of what I heard. In fact I remember thinking they were better live than most of the equivalent stuff I heard in New Brunswick basements during my time there ('98-'03). Maybe it was just hearing it in such a different context.<br /><br />Either way, I remember this band destroying a packed room of well-mannered Japanese. This track suggests why. Also I'm pretty sure the freak out part in the last few seconds of the song was the sort of thing they did a lot more of live. This isn't a particularly groundbreaking piece of work, but I'm psyched every time I re-find this disc in a pile and put it on again. Since there's approximately zero chance that anyone in the United States of America would ever hear it, I figure it's worth sharing.<br /></p>Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-25825959484333437232010-12-25T09:39:00.000-08:002010-12-25T09:50:07.946-08:00Harmonia - "Dino"<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/04 Dino.mp3" id="keyboard">Dino</a><br /></p>This collection of music appreciations would be incomplete without something on the German bands from the '70s loosely grouped together under the label "krautrock." Rather than highlighting an obvious masterpiece, I feel like picking out a perfectly generic track to draw out a few things about why this retroactively reified genre rules so hard.<br /><br />This is from the debut of Harmonia, which was two the dudes from Cluster and Michael Rother from Neu! (who was also an original member of Kraftwerk) cloistered in a studio making side project recordings that often exceed the considerable excellence of their primary bands. The track fades in and and out, and in fact these recording sessions sound like an extended summoning of a mood, rather than a conscious laying down of a "piece," much less of a song -- I suspect that each track on the album is culled from a much longer jam. The mood summoned captures, as well as anything in the krautrock corpus, a perfect balance of mechanical propulsion and pastoral beauty. The three musicians (jamming live and overdubbing, I imagine) tightly weave together simple synth and guitar parts so that none is ever quite in the lead -- the entire lattice of sound is at the forefront in way that I don't think is too farfetched to call baroque. Every phrase marches along, or enters and exits, cleanly and clinically, as though assembled on a cost-efficient music assembly line. The miracle of the thing, though, is that it does this without sacrificing warmth. Maybe that's not much more complicated than the musicians having a bunch of really sweet analog synths. The only thing that doesn't sound pre-programmed is Rother throwing in some short subtle guitar phrases that color in the spaces but pass up the chance to take the stage and solo.<br /><br />At the root of the thing is the interlocking of drum machine in dead-simple 4/4 and bass in lightly syncopated 7/4. This groove make the track downright danceable if you're the sort of person who likes to dance to rock music. I'm not one of those people, but I'm in luck because this track -- along with the rest of the album -- can be heard as pure ambient music as easily as it can be heard as music to move to.Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-70904392374493398122010-12-12T20:51:00.000-08:002010-12-12T21:04:16.675-08:00Busta Rhymes & Ol' Dirty Bastard - Woo Haa!! Remix<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/_oMQ4ZFdH5c?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/_oMQ4ZFdH5c?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br />I don't have to tell anyone who was alive in the '90s about the original version of this song, but it's my experience that most people don't know this remix. It's also my experience that this might be the weirdest act of rapping committed to tape. If that's not true, I'd love to hear what's weirder.<br /><br />The track starts almost identical to the original, just a notch slower, but wait. . . what's going on in the background? Yes, buried in the mix, hollering and howling like a drunk singing in the subway, it's the Ol' Dirty Bastard. This anti-intro hardly prepares the listener for the insanity that follows once we can mostly make out what ODB is saying, and once we can clearly hear his positively Beefheartian vocal melodies. He turns Busta Rhymes's song -- which, with its tritone bassline and eerie "yaa yaa yaa" chorus, was already pretty cartoonish and irreverant -- into something that can hardly be heard as pop music.<br /><br />Busta opens telling us how dominant his squad is, to which ODB responds that "we on some outerspace shit like you watch Star Trek." It's pretty clear from what follows that "we" might just be ODB and his various personalities (Big Baby Jesus, Dirt McGirt). Each free associatively nasty ("I had a wet dream that I was boning Jody Watley") or crazed line is half-rapped/half-sung/half-shouted in a different psychotic voice, and many are elongated long in to the next line as though the rapper is too drunk and high to realize that something else is going on. One could in fact speculate on the state of the Wu Tang maestro's consciousness, but whatever was going on the recording studio that day, it must be acknowledged the advanced musicality involved in taking rapping to this level of experimentation.<br /><br />If you don't buy that, take a listen again to the third minute of the song. After a trippy bridge where several of the sounds play backward and both men rap simultaneously kind of like they don't want you to hear what they're saying, Busta seems to try to bring the song back to earth with a verse of fairly conventional content and meter. ODB will have none of it, though, as he comes in at 2:59 with a half unintelligible verse (what does he say about a "fungus bowl"?) that's based around a short melodic phrase that has nothing to do with the rest of the song, and is laid down with a rhythmic sensibility as free any free jazzman's. The verse ends with two seconds (3:18-3:20) during which he sounds like he's choking on his tongue. . . then spits out that phrase one more time.<br /><br />Oh, and the video's pretty weird too.Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-55802908733657365362010-11-30T18:01:00.000-08:002010-12-01T07:10:45.404-08:00Terry Riley - "Keyboard Study #1"<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/keyboard.mp3" id="keyboard">Keyboard Study #1</a><br /></p><br />All praise due to the University of the Pennsylvania's Ormandy music library for <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Keyboard-Studies-Terry-Riley/dp/B00006O0P6">this album</a>. While working at Penn I spent a bunch of time digging into Ormandy's deep deep shelves and this was one of the very best finds. <br /><br />Despite several years of listening to Terry Riley's discography, I'd never heard of these pieces -- Keyboard Study #1 and Keyboard Study #2 -- and the names certainly didn't suggest that they'd be anything special, particularly vis-a-vis the vision-quest-ish appellations of most of Riley's best songs. But it turned out to be one of my very favorite Riley works and, accordingly, one of my very favorite minimalist compositions. <br /><br />Kicking off without the slightest prelude and ending abruptly 22 minutes later, the track keeps a joyfully upbeat and major key pace without ever getting dull. The left hand part* plays simple arpeggios (mostly just octaves and fifths?) in constantly changing metric patterns that are impossible to count (at least for me -- readers who went to music school, please comment otherwise to the effect of "it's in alternating measures of 17 and 15, duh") but still imply enough of a 4/4 to rock solidly. I could probably listen to just that part and be as happy as I'd be listening to any <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdEHZfzq_08">Charlemagne Palestine</a> recording. But the right hand part makes the track as much fun as a great pop song, filling in quick melodic syncopations that repeat enough for you to start humming them but never overstay their welcome. Fittingly for someone with a Who song named after him, Riley has a rock and roll understanding of not boring his listener with repetition for repetition's sake. Tell me you didn't pump your fist and headbang a little when the chord changes for the first time at 5:05. Tell me that and I'll tell you that you ought to listen to this track fifteen more times to get your ears right.<br /><br />The performer here, by the way, isn't Riley himself, as on most of his recordings, but some guy named Steffen Schleiermacher. For the record.<br /><br />*I have no idea if the two voices are actually played by left or right hands -- for all I know it's two separate tracks -- but, you know, I mean the part that functions like a left and right-hand piano parts would, more or less.Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-35283985537080669542010-11-23T19:43:00.000-08:002010-11-23T20:04:15.983-08:00The Grateful Dead - "Blues for Allah"<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/allah.mp3" id="allah">Blues for Allah</a><br /></p><div>Revising one's own views is one of the great pleasures of maturity, and I've been happy to have to reevaluate the Grateful Dead in the past year. I had and liked a Dead greatest hits tape when I was 14 or so, and I'd always thought knee-jerk Dead hatred was immature (and in many cases epitomizes punk's aesthetic conservatism), but I'd also never thought there was any reason to delve into the Dead's catalogue, or even to go out of my way to listen to any of those greatest hits. I remember how "Uncle John's Band" goes. It's nice. Whatever.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>But thanks to my friends Jake and Eliot I ended up being in a Dead cover band last April 20th. I thought I was agreeing to do it as a joke, but after some deep listening and a practice or two I was ready to argue -- and I currently maintain -- that at their best the Dead were a late-'60s / early-'70s genre-bending psychedelic band on par with early-Floyd/Barret or the Byrds or the Band or the Soft Machine or any of the other bands more readily revered in independent record stores across the land. I'm still not sure why people think it's worth listening to a million different versions of their live shows, and I still think Jerry Garcia lived twenty years too long, but I'll maintain that they have some fantastic songs and go to some genuinely far out musical realms.</div><div><br /></div><div>"Blues for Allah" represents both the Dead's serious songcraft and their far-out-ness. I learned about the track when I was asked to be in a choral performance of it by my friend Nick. Yes, 2010 will forever be known as the year of the Grateful Dead Cover Bands. </div><div><br /></div><div>The song opens with a country guitar lick (reprised to conclude the free-out section) and moves seamlessly into a proggy druid melody (about some weird vaguely Muslim stuff -- I'm not asking anyone to buy that Robert Hunter is a good poet) over a some subtly free percussion. Any fan of the band USA is a Monster cannot deny this section. The preceding long midsection is the sort of whoa-now-I'm-on-drugs-. . .-weird part that some listeners may find to represent exactly why they think of the Dead as idiotic, but at this point in my musical development I can see the spirit of what they're going for and the impressive extent to which they're achieving it. The percussion, bass, and rhythm guitar play around with cohering into regular parts nicely while Jerry Garcia's guitar sings over the mess, taking long rests to avoid falling into anything like a traditional lead guitar free-out role. There are cricket sounds, which are a little corny, but I also kind of love. Then at about the seven minute mark a poignantly jazzy slide-guitar / trombone melody starts to bring us back to not-(necessarily)-on-drugs song land. And what a pleasant land that is, as the last section is a gorgeous sing along chorus with Garcia doing exactly the sort of guitar playing he's either loved or hated for. I guess I love it now. At least in this instance.</div>Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-31659266928243127872010-11-21T20:59:00.000-08:002010-11-21T21:54:27.026-08:00The Flying People - "FU = (Heart)U"<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/fu.mp3" id="fu">FU = (Heart)U<br /> </a></p><p></p><div><i>First in a presumably occasional series of posts here about my friends' music.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>The Flying People were (are?) a project of Philly bedroom genius Michael Bonfiglio. I only know of his music -- and <a href="http://www.shiverbones.com/grotesquerie/" target="_blank">his amazing comics and other art</a> -- because his bedroom used to be next to mine a few years/apartments ago.</div> <div><br /></div><div>This song is brilliant little construction, from the drum programming to the Zombies/Kinks/Elephant6 harmony bursts. And of course the lyrics rule. They rule all the way through, but I'll highlight just the line I've been quoting for years: "If you love somebody let them go / well I don't think so / 'cause that's called <i>not</i> loving someone, you asshole."</div><p></p>Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-63861237861926528792010-11-21T20:50:00.000-08:002010-11-21T20:58:22.924-08:00Autechre - "Pen Expers"<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/penexpers.mp3" id="penexpers">Pen Expers</a></p><p><div>It's hard to pick a track to highlight by British computer-music kings Autechre, since it's tough to remember what the hell happens in any of them (say nothing of their nonce titles). This one, from the devastating-all-the-way-through Confield, stands out for starting with what could almost be a hip hop break beat. Of course it's cut up almost instantly and sent through some mysterious sonic filtration system, but it still maintains boom-bip syncopation and solid head-nod-ability for the first couple minutes. </div> <div><br /></div><div>Autechre are masters of the slowly evolving abstract transition, and at 1:22 some of the sandpaper sounds take on pitches, suggesting and slowly building into the power-ballad chord progression that almost fully shows itself around 2:48. For the next few minutes the chords continue to gesture towards a ballad while the brilliant complexity of the funky scratchy sounds make you think that maybe all free-out drummers should just give up and learn how to program. </div><div><div><br /></div><div>At 5:30 there's a rare abrupt change and we get a reprise of the boom-bip part from the beginning. It's much more chopped up, though, in the manner of Squarepusher and other lesser proponents of this genre. No major diss on Squarepusher/Warp/et al, but for my money no one has used the ability of computer software to make abstract sound with as much beauty and funkiness and tact as these guys.</div> <div><br /></div> <div>This is not a genre I'm on top of, though, so anyone reading who can recommend something on par with this track, I welcome recommendations.</div></div><p></p>Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-2544374212409834302010-11-21T20:43:00.000-08:002010-11-22T14:50:48.770-08:00The Advantage - Air Fortress<p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/advantage.mp3" id="advantage">Air Fortress</a></p><p></p><div>The Advantage were a dead serious Nintendo cover band. It's easy to do fun nostalgic cultural reference, but not at all easy to do the revisionist practice of finding great art in the sea of mass marketed crap. I know plenty of people already take video games seriously as an art form, but during all those hours of staring at our little avatars trying to get to the right side of the screen, did it occur to us how good the music was that was looping on each level? Maybe not, and maybe because some of it wasn't. Thankfully the dudes in the Advantage did the easy work of finding the best of the Nintendo music and the hard work of arranging it for rock quartet.</div> <div><br /></div><div>Their two albums are both fantastic from start to finish. The track here is from Air Fortress. I never played that game and have made no attempt to research it, much as I have no nostalgic relationship to most of the Advantage's music. It can be heard out of context for what it is: great prog rock minus the fat of narcissistic virtuosity.</div> <div><br /></div><div>Worth noting: the drummer, Spencer Seim, played guitar in Hella -- who maybe is going to reunite? and who I'll surely end up writing about here. </div><p></p>Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-22383530613516141372010-11-21T20:03:00.000-08:002010-11-22T14:29:04.849-08:00Rod Poole - "December 96"<a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/duration.mp3" id="duration">December 96 [excerpt]</a><div><br />This album came into my life in a weird way. I stole it from my old roommate Jesse unintentionally, having somehow become convinced that it had been long-term-loaned to me by my music colleague Jake. I'd imagined this story that Jake had told me to check out this guy playing an hour long improvisation in just intonation. It sounds like something that would have happened, but Jake denies it.</div> <div><br /></div><div>And so I would look at it in my old house for months -- maybe years, I can't remember exactly. But every time I thought about finally giving it a listen, I was defeated by the cover.</div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Ox5droJFQSk/TOruVz2J5bI/AAAAAAAABI8/swEWDTZxpS0/s1600/0094_0001.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 316px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Ox5droJFQSk/TOruVz2J5bI/AAAAAAAABI8/swEWDTZxpS0/s320/0094_0001.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542504349894829490" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div><div> And even more by the back cover.<br /><br /></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ox5droJFQSk/TOruhScBI3I/AAAAAAAABJE/wM2XyNbmkzc/s1600/0095_0001.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 275px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ox5droJFQSk/TOruhScBI3I/AAAAAAAABJE/wM2XyNbmkzc/s320/0095_0001.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542504547085263730" border="0" /></a></div><div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Terrible, right? The front makes Poole look like it's some soulless Yngwie-ish music school chief, while the back looks like a stock image found by the search terms "rootsy folk." In this context, I imagined the use of just intonation was probably a gimmick that this guy was using to market himself as a new important voice in the guitar festival circuit after the failure of his prog band and the disappointing sales of his album of Bach chorales. <div><br /></div><div>But so then I stole it accidentally and, only this summer decided to listen to it. . . having no idea I was in for a heavy minimalist masterpiece. This clip is from the middle of the thing, which is a 50-minute single-sitting improvisation. Poole starts off with some Derek Bailey-style dicking around, which I skip past every time, but then comes into a long section of arpeggios played with what the aforementioned Jake and I usually call True Minimal Spirit -- repetitive just to the point of sounding mechanical, but always with a rock and roll sense of not letting a chord or riff overstay its welcome. Poole varies his right hand patterns to add and subtract notes and little flourishes to and from a few base chords, moving us purposefully through an ethereal tonal field that's only made more otherworldly by his altered tuning system (see Wikipedia on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation">just intonation</a>). I'm also particularly inspired when he pulls out the rubato: dragging and rushing phrases in a way that I find as touching as any version of the Moonlight Sonata (as at the beginning of this excerpt, and again at about 15:55). Or more touching, since this is something I've been doing on acoustic guitars for years, but never with the minimal stamina of this recording. Or Poole's other album from the same period, The Death Adder, which I also stole from Jesse. And which I'll give back.</div></div><p></p>Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-34487357335275199902010-10-08T19:00:00.000-07:002010-10-24T21:18:46.116-07:00Don Caballero - "Haven't Lived Afro-Pop"<script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script><br /><a href="http://fauxassnonsense.myideaofyou.com/afropop.mp3" id="afropop">Haven't Lived Afro Pop</a><br /><br /><br /><div>The first post here can't not be a Don Caballero song. I guess that's mostly because the blog itself is named for a (not quite as good) track from a (not quite as good) album. It's also because Don Cab has consistently been my favorite band that's not already other people's favorite band, and the album this track is from seems to me to be their best. </div><div><br /></div><div>I first heard Don Caballero at a friend's house the night I graduated from high school. It took a few months to fully come around to how different it was from what a high school kid thinks rock music is supposed to be (just not having vocals seemed experimental at the time), but by my first couple years of college I was obsessed with <em>2</em> and <em>What Burns Never Returns </em>(their first one, <em>For Respect, </em>is pretty forgettable, directly attributable, I've always assumed, to Ian Williams not having yet dominated the songwriting). The music seemed impossibly dense for a standard line-up rock band, and it was repetitive just up to the point of ridiculousness, but also constantly in motion. I hadn't yet heard Steve Reich et al, and so the classical minimalist move of mechanical repetition with subtle variation was brand new to me. Nor had I started liking the drumming of Bill Bruford or the various other prog drummers Damon Che draws on so heavily. What I had heard was a lot of other late '90s math rock bands, and the music of Don Cab seemed so much more purposeful than its contemporaries. It's complexity was confident, and the dense patterns created by the guitar and bass were playful and fun in a way, say, June of 44 could never be. The opening beat of "Slice Where You Live Like Pie" sounds like you could rap over it, while the guitar entrance sounds like an arpeggiator malfunctioning.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>And, then, there I was, nineteen, having seen Don Cab a couple times that year, thinking this is pretty much my favorite band that's not the Beatles or Fugazi and these dudes drop <em>American Don. </em>At this point Ian Williams had muscled the other guitar player out of the band and had taken over all composing with the help of his various looping pedals and a new bass player who was happy to assert no personality on his instrument. He has also somehow managed to talk Damon Che into chilling out and submitting his drumming to the music more than ever before. (After a hostile break up, Che would start a Don Cab cover band with him as the drummer and go tour for several years claiming to still be the band. I saw it. It was okay). On this track, Williams's loop-generated compositional style is realized more fully than anywhere else. For the first four minutes it's all short tight melodic phrases layered on top of each other, coming fairly evenly, every four or eight bars. The guitar and bass are clean-toned (as throughout the album) and we're mostly in a joyful D-major. The song title, which I've always assumed should be seen vis-a-vis the idea of "living the blues,"* refers to the afropop guitar lines that Williams draws on so heavily here, not as homage or pastiche, but as faithless inspiration -- though I would only more fully hear that years later when I started listening to highlife and soukous, etc. Then at 4:02 that ass-kicking bass line comes in, the tangle of guitar patterns has its last minute of glory, and at 5:24 we get a demonstration of how a such a tangle is constructed. At 6:53, Che is cut loose to drum like he did back in the day. His crazy long fills rule, of course, but in a way that can't touch the beauty of the rock-minimalist masterpiece that they conclude.</div><div><br /></div><div>*My high school music teacher said to the jazz band when we complained about having to be at school at 7am to practice: "You've gotta live the blues to play the blues." </div><br /><script type="text/javascript" src="htt//mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script>Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4809050616132020975.post-30122174573784253012010-10-08T17:43:00.000-07:002010-11-08T10:18:46.887-08:00<div><br /></div>Ben Remsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11149028757474682922noreply@blogger.com0