Mark Richardson

I'm the editor-in-chief of Pitchfork and I wrote Zaireeka, a book about the Flaming Lips album.

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This is great.

(Source: abigailgarnett)

Posted at 7:41am.

June 2nd 2012

Reblogged from jakec|258 notes

Charlie Brooker. This must be the most relatable thing I’ve ever heard about writing. (via jakec)

Sounds familiar. 

Posted at 7:27am and tagged with: writing,.

I’m one of those people who lives in constant fear of being found out as not any good. Whenever I’m writing anything I’m just thinking “This is fucking shit, any minute now someone’s gonna come and slap this computer out of my hands.” And every week without fail, if I write a column, every week without fail I finish it and I go and I’ll turn around to my wife and she’ll go “How was that?” and I go “Just fucking shit, I’ve just written the worst piece of fucking shit anyone’s ever written, I’m such a cunt.” And then it’ll come out and people seem to think it’s okay, and so then I just think people are fucking idiots.
Dave Hickey, Air Guitar

Posted at 11:14pm.

I still endorse Peter Schjeldahl’s advice on how to become an artist: ‘You move to a city. You hang out in bars. You form a gang, turn it into a scene, and turn that into a movement.’ Then, I would suggest, when your movement hits the museum, abandon it.

Paper Trail: Fear of Music | Features | Pitchfork

Fascinating stuff here from Jonathan Lethem in Jayson Greene’s interview w/ him about his Talking Head book.

Posted at 1:28pm.

This gets into the really ticklish area of the difference between me as the 15, or 19, or 23-year-old fan, and me as the strange amalgam of fan and cultural artifact-maker that I’ve become at nearly 50. Oddly enough, I can now identify with the position of the person who plops the monolith onto the planet. There are all sorts of ways in which that is a really complicated situation. As its maker, you sometimes want to pretend to impassivity, but the truth is that when I make a book, and someone has these intense feelings about it, I both am and am not the monolith. I’m all wound up in that relationship, but it’s also really displaced for me in place and time. I’m not there when they’re experiencing the book. I’m nowhere near the scene when those feelings happen.

When I think of that, I suddenly think about David Byrne singing in 15-year-old Jonathan Lethem’s bedroom. He’s not there. He’s not located at site of my worship; he’s like the women who pose for Playboy. The artist freezes himself into these weird postures that are meant to be impressive and involving, then he flings them out into the world like Polaroids, and then he moves on. And I’m stuck in this intense relationship to the Polaroid.

itscomplicatedproject:

Feminists have never hesitated to dissect and attack art whose misogyny offends and repulses us. But what happens when we fall in love with the work of a musician, writer, or painter we see as anti-female? Do we rationalize our cognitive dissonance away, turn our back on the offending artist, or…

Excited about this project.

Posted at 11:48pm.

“The Wrecking Project” | Postmortem « trailerpilot

Chicago dance critic Zac Whittenburg wrote a very thoughtful thing about the latest performance project by my wife, Julie Mayo. Quoting this part b/c he talks about her use of sound. In general, Julie and I collaborate on ideas for sound for her work and it’s always been tremendous fun for me. Someday I’ll write about it in more detail. 

Posted at 9:15pm.

Mayo’s music choices for her works, and the sequence in which they play, might be the most effective way she sets tones you can’t find anywhere else. True to form, Man in the City utilizes a compelling set of recorded tracks, faded in and out of silence: “Wanna Say Faux” from Co La’s Daydream Repeater; “Starbucks, Dr. Seussism, and While Your Mac Is Sleeping” by James Ferraro; and “Genrecide (I Wish Tricky’d Die Any Way I Hope)” by Terre Thaemlitz. “I love Julie’s sound design,” Young gushes. “The whole first leg of her rehearsal process [includes] no sound, or just voice. No music, not even [before beginning work,] to set a tone. And then she layers [music into the work], after it’s pretty fully conceived and made.… How that fleshes out, for me anyway, what I’m doing with the movement and what it might mean — Sometimes, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around what’s going on in her pieces. And then the music comes in [during rehearsals] and I’m, like, ‘Oh!’ For me, it lubricates things. It’s one of my favorite parts of her process.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
297 plays

This is an early live version of Bruce Springtseen’s “Born to Run”, taken from a show in February 1975 at the Main Point coffee shop in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. About 275 people were in attendance. The show was a benefit for the Main Point, and happened just before Springsteen the E Street Band were to head out on tour. It was also broadcast on radio that same evening. Though the two studio albums he’d released sold relatively poorly, Springsteen was a big concert draw on the East Coast and down into the Mid-Atlantic area. He had a large following in and around Philadelphia. The album Born to Run was being worked on but was still six months from release, and “Born to Run” wouldn’t come out as a single until August. Springsteen had turned 25 a few months before.

This show has been widely bootlegged for years, and this is an absolutely incredible performance. “Born to Run” is a complicated song, it has like 20 chord or something crazy, along with build-ups, break-downs, tempo changes. And the band doesn’t miss a single beat. It’s also interesting that the arrangement is so completely fleshed-out, considering that the song would be tinkered with in the studio for many months following. The Live at Hammersmith version of this song, recorded in November later this year and officially released in 2006, doesn’t come close to touching this one for energy and precision. This is as loose and flowing as drummer Max Weinberg ever sounded; Ernest “Boom” Carter played on the studio version of this track, and it sounds to me like Weinberg is trying to mimic his lines. By the later Hammersmith version, he’d settled into the approach he’d use going forward, which featured a bashed snare on 1 and 3. Here, his playing just rolls along with the song.

It’s fun to imagine what it might have been like to either be in the audience or listen to this broadcast when it aired that night on FM radio. I wonder if, in hearing this song for the first time, which surely many people did (though he’d been playing it in concert for a while), they thought “Wow, this is amazing and sounds like a classic” or if it didn’t sink all the way in the way new songs in concert sometimes don’t. But Springsteen knew he had something very special. He played the song third, a good slot for “Here’s a new one that we feel pretty good about.”

It should also be noted that at this point the future of Springsteen’s recording career was by no means assured. There were important people at Columbia who thought he wasn’t panning out as a recording artist. Springsteen himself was worried that he had been given an amazing opportunity and wasn’t making the most of it. 

The romanticism of this song, man, it’s so over the top it’s almost hard to believe. “The amusement park rises bold and stark/ Kids are huddled on the beach in the mist/ I wanna die with you Wendy on the street tonight/ In an everlasting kiss.” Who thinks like that? Kids who’ve seen too many movies and read too many books and want to walk like the heroes they’ve seen in them. Which is, IMO, beautiful. You don’t have to spend your entire life in the real world. A wonderful thing about being young is blowing up the details of your life to absurd proportions. Romantic kids get a pass when it comes to self-importance. I encourage them to wallow in it. 

When the DJ introduces the band at the start of this set, he says that Springsteen has two performances in the area in the the next two days and that’ll be it for Philly for a while as he and the band are heading out “to conquer America and the world.” He couldn’t know how right he was. This night, Springsteen was playing a relatively new, unreleased song for a few hundred people in a coffee shop. Eight months later, would be on the cover of Time and Newsweek during the same week.

Posted at 4:21pm and tagged with: Bruce Springsteen, writing,.

Stevie Wonder attended the Michigan School for the Blind in Lansing. One of his music teachers there later went on to teach piano at East Lansing High School, my alma mater. I took her class. I hoped she would see some kind of innate, undeveloped musical talent in me, but it never happend. I was awful. But one of her students went on to do this.

Posted at 11:26pm.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
75 plays

“I couldn’t find the words and then I found the words.” Destroyer, “Untitled”, 1997.

Posted at 10:37pm and tagged with: destroyer,.

I think we can agree that Dr. J is the greatest sports nickname of all time. The elegance, the simplicity—fit his playing style so perfectly. You might not know that in 1981 Julius Erving changed his nickname to Dr. Chapstick. I saw this on TV at the time and found it very confusing. 

Posted at 9:00pm.