markrichardson.org

This is Bow Wow Wow’s “See Jungle (Jungle...

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:01:17 -0500

This is Bow Wow Wow’s “See Jungle (Jungle Boy)”, essentially the title track from their 1981 debut LP. Listened to it about 15 times today on the train to and from the YMCA and then on the stair machine. It’s the kind of song that seems perfectly designed to make me feel good no matter what else is going on. It also sounds oddly “now” despite being almost 30 years old, the way it takes 1960s girl-group and bubblegum bits and lays them over a beat and guitar tone borrowed from Africa.

I really love the section about halfway through where Annabella Lwin sings, “In the jungle, I have a rumble/ With my BOY-friend”—the tune in that short section is just so classic, been used in songs a billion times but it will never get old. It makes me think of Best Coast, I guess b/c she writes a lot about her boyfriend, and this beat makes me think of High Places. No wonder it seems current.

The same general template would be used a year later for Bow Wow Wow’s version of “I Want Candy”, which was their one big hit in the U.S. That song is amazing too, but I like how loose and repetitive this track is, just kind of going from one section to the next. It feels like they are jamming a little.

Would kill to have Todd Terje to do an edit of this.

One more Takagi Masakatsu piece, also from Journal for People....

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:50:01 -0500

One more Takagi Masakatsu piece, also from Journal for People. I’ve never been on ice skates.

Great Pitchfork Festival this past weekend. One of many...

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:42:00 -0500

Great Pitchfork Festival this past weekend. One of many highlights for me was Lightning Bolt. I’d never seen them live before, and I knew it would be slightly different than most of their shows because they played onstage instead on the floor with the crowd. But the energy was awe-inspiring. This video is from that documentary on them from a few years back.

I’m fascinated by the imagery of a Lightning Bolt performance: the mask, the microphone in the mouth like a ball gag, the headphones, Brian Gibson barely moving while Brian Chippendale goes insane on the drums, the people crowded around and the sense of risk from having performers and audience so close together.

Talking to a few people at the Festival this weekend, I was trying to get at why Chippendale’s masks are so compelling to me. Plenty of bands have used this sort of theatricality, from Kiss to Slipnot on down, but somehow it works differently for me in this context. Part of it is that Lightning Bolt live signifies danger in a way that these other bands don’t: the stack of amps might fall over, Chippendale looks like he could hurt himself or someone else because his playing is so physical, in a moshing crowd, someone could be injured at any time. So the presence of a scary dude horror-movie mask in this content actually kind of seems “real,” somehow, like it fits in with something that is happening right now at this moment in this space, rather than just pointing to some external media that we’ve all internalized (Chainsaw Massacre, etc.)

There is also the specific construction of his masks. The fact that they are torn and pieces of fabric are flying around suggests that some a dangerously unstable person made it. You think of Hannibal Lecter in that protective mask in Silence of the Lambs, and the mask is precisely constructed and clinical to go along with his deeply crafted and deliberate sense of evil (not to mention that someone else put it on him). Michael Myers and Jason, their masks are off-the-rack things used for play (Halloween, hockey), which speaks to their damaged childhoods, maybe. A mask like Chippendale’s seems like the work of someone who wanted to make something more orderly and symmetrical but was too fucked up to pull it off. So he winds up with this ragged thing that he jerks over his head before doing his evil thing for reasons we can’t understand. This is probably a very personal interpretation that makes no sense at all.

Point being: Lightning Bolt rules.

This is from multimedia artist Takagi Masakatsu’s CD/DVD...

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 21:50:00 -0500

This is from multimedia artist Takagi Masakatsu’s CD/DVD Journal for People, on Carpark. I wrote a column about his work a few years ago, but his videos weren’t on YouTube then. Several good ones still aren’t. All are worth a look.

Why turntables have dust covers.

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 15:43:00 -0500

Why turntables have dust covers.

"The extension of advertising to the domain of private chatter undermines the competitiveness of..."

Wed, 12 May 2010 07:55:41 -0500

“The extension of advertising to the domain of private chatter undermines the competitiveness of anything that costs more than private chatter to produce.”

- n+1: The Intellectual Situation

Long piece, still haven’t read it all, but some interesting ideas here. Via anythingcouldhappen.

agrammar: So Natalie Merchant has this new album, on which she...

Tue, 11 May 2010 20:27:21 -0500

agrammar:

So Natalie Merchant has this new album, on which she sets poems (by people like Christina Rossetti) to music (involving people like Wynton Marsalis). Not sure what to say about that.

Funny, though, because her band was setting poems by Wilfred Owen to music 30 years ago, only back then they were giant waver weirdos on a Horrors of War kick. Honest: their reputation wound up elsewhere, but when they started off, in the early 80s, in upstate New York, 10,000 Maniacs were pretty weird. Every now and then I wind up getting re-attached to the particular weirdness collected in their first recordings, which pull wildly and happily from dub reggae, new-wave, west-African guitar, post-punk, and Merchant’s college course schedule. (You can practically figure out which classes she’s taking from the lyrics.)

And during most of these moments of re-attachment, I realize more and more that the late Rob Buck was a seriously great and ahead-of-the-game guitar player. He is also the reason I feel weird playing a Les Paul without hiking it all the way up to my chest.

This new-wave noisemaking is “My Mother, the War,” as played during an early-80s TV appearance in the UK. (“Death of Manolete” and “Katrina’s Fair” were pretty good, too.)

Always loved this song & I’ll still rep for Hope Chest and The Wishing Chair. Natalie Merchant getting into it here.

If you grew up in Michigan in a family that cares about sports,...

Wed, 05 May 2010 21:52:00 -0500

If you grew up in Michigan in a family that cares about sports, Ernie Harwell’s voice counts as music. I was talking and emailing with friends today and we remembered how any time you were outside doing yard work or sitting on a porch or throwing a ball around, the Tigers game would be on somewhere, coming through a transistor radio. His play-by-play was very much part of the atmosphere. I liked listening to the Tigers on the radio, but it was more that Ernie Harwell was just there, like the sound of the furnace in the basement or something. RIP.

My friend Josh made this, sweet video & a good...

Mon, 03 May 2010 19:48:53 -0500

My friend Josh made this, sweet video & a good song.

joshlowman:

Just finished this music video for Oakland’s Man/Miracle.
Shot by Josh Lowman and Rinee Shah.
Edited by Lee Gardner.

perpetua: As it turns out, Ebony was kinda wrong about Michael...

Mon, 03 May 2010 09:45:45 -0500

perpetua:

As it turns out, Ebony was kinda wrong about Michael Jackson. (via lastbutnotleast)

They’re Running in the Street Among Us All! This is a...

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 23:37:00 -0500

They’re Running in the Street Among Us All!

This is a track called “Sunshine + Gasoline” from Godspeed You Black Emperor!. It originally came out on a split 7” included with the print zine aMAZEzine, a copy of which I have around here somewhere. Though I believe this recording pre-dates the band’s debut album, the theme was adapted for “Moya” from the Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP. I love this track for its cheap sound and epic (but simple) melody, but I really love it for the spoken intro. Godspeed did this sort of thing often, but this particular monologue is my favorite, as a man talks about the good old days when “geeks”—wild men who were either alcoholics or on drugs, and behaved like animals—were kept in cages and toured in sideshows, as opposed to mixing with the general public.

My latest Resonant Frequency is about Godspeed. It’s a grab-bag of ideas about a band that went away for a while and seems even more important and interesting now. I also talk about trains.

33 1/3 Odyssey: You Have Three Friends, Right? And Do They All Have Stereos They Can Bring Over?

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 18:29:00 -0500

33 1/3 Odyssey: You Have Three Friends, Right? And Do They All Have Stereos They Can Bring Over?:

A nice review of Zaireeka by Chris Estey for Seattle’s KEXP.

If I were going to compare it to anything in the past, I’d...

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:50:00 -0500

If I were going to compare it to anything in the past, I’d compare it to the acts I was talking about here, who had the same kind of sound, light trippiness, warmth, whimsy, nostalgia, the same digging through the past for hazy sounds to pair up with pleasant rolling beats: Casino Versus Japan, Flowchart, Darla’s “Bliss Out” series, etc. That’s always how I hear them, anyway.

That’s Nitsuh responding to a question about shoegaze vs. chillwave, and yes, I know what he is talking about, and I hear this music in that way, too.

Something that’s been on my mind is how there was music in the mid/late 90s that was in some ways related to chillwave but it existed for a very small audience, and how that level of exposure seemed organic to what the music was about and how it was created.

There is something slightly weird when this music gets “big” and fans pack shows in New York or Austin or wherever else to see people bring their bedroom projects to the stage. Some music, it seems to me, works best with not too many people watching. Not that you don’t wish every artist success, and hope that they will gain as large an audience as they hope for. But sometimes the aesthetic would seem to dictate a more modest scale, and a lot of this recent hazy bedroom pop feels that way to me.

This is something I’ve talked about a bit with Marc, and I’ve shared with him some of the music in this vein I listened to in the late-90s—esp. artists on the Slabco label, like Land of the Loops. The track above, “Multi-Family Garage Sale” (I think Marc posted it at one point), doesn’t sound “chillwave,” but it does share some of the same concerns, including those Nitsuh articulated—warmth, whimsy, nostalgia—along with a focus on childhood and, through its title, an emphasis on middle class suburban life. It came out in 1996, it was great, not that many people heard it but some of them loved it (it was even used in a beer commercial I’ve never seen), and all of that worked out OK. Maybe Alan Sutherland would think differently.

What it is: “Around the Dial”, the opening track...

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:33:00 -0500

What it is: “Around the Dial”, the opening track from the Kinks’ 1981 album Give the People What They Want.

Why it interests me:

1) My brother must have bought this one around the time it was released, which would have made me about 12 when I was listening to it. We probably had 20 or 30 LPs in the house total at that time, including the few records my brother had and the small handful of things my dad had picked up over the years (Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, Elton John’s Greatest Hits, The Best of Loud Reed, amazingly, NO idea why he had that). Because we had just these few albums, I started with the assumption that there was something special about all of them. I heard many of them over and over, and without thinking about it too much, I figured that they were all the best of their kind. Why else would someone have bought them? So I grew to love this album, and then I didn’t listen to it for probably 20 years, and then I bought it for a buck or so a few years ago. Did it hold up? Not really. Not in terms of sounding like what I would now consider “good music.” But it doesn’t matter. It’s like looking through a scrapbook—fun to do once in a while, regardless.

This song, which kicks off the album, seemed to me in 1981 to be this huge, heavy thing with a crushing riff, but now I mostly notice how lame the drumming sounds. But there’s still a reptilian brain thing happening when I hear it, where I can be swept away by my memory of the song’s force.

2) I’ve always wondered if the Flaming Lips’ “Turn It On” is a reference to this song. Certainly the radio static bits sound very similar. They both start their respective albums. They both have great riffs. They both talk about the weird connections that happen with new technology. I can’t hear one without thinking of the other.

3) The most significant development in radio in the last 15 years or so has nothing to do with music—it’s the rise of talk radio as a political force. What I read suggests that people have a strong connection to the format because radio fosters an intimacy other media can’t touch; this song is about the airwaves connection taken to an extreme. The narrator of the song had a particular DJ change his life and now he can’t find him anywhere: “FM, AM where are you? You’ve gotta be out there somewhere on the dial.” Maybe the DJ was fired because he wouldn’t sell out and play trendy music; maybe he was depressed. The important thing is that he’s gone, and the dude in the song doesn’t know what he’s going to do. He’s frantic. I listen to this song and wonder what the DJ might have played.

"And that kind of provocation, that spur to further discourse, is all criticism has ever been. It is..."

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:15:07 -0500

“And that kind of provocation, that spur to further discourse, is all criticism has ever been. It is not a profession and does not stand or fall with any particular business model. Criticism is a habit of mind, a discipline of writing, a way of life — a commitment to the independent, open-ended exploration of works of art in relation to one another and the world around them.”

- Arts and Leisure Preview - Is There a Future for Arts Criticism? - NYTimes.com

I’m sure every critic posted a quote from this today, but…yeah.

I like the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album a fair amount,...

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 11:14:00 -0500

I like the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album a fair amount, and “Suite: Julie Blue Eyes” in particular (easy for me to understand why people despise that band though). The last part of the song, where they do the wordless “doo-doo-do-doot” vocal bit and Stills sings something in Spanish, has always made me happy. I can remember hearing it on the radio in the 70s. It felt like a kid’s song, then and now.

When I started downloading Todd Terje edits a couple of years ago, I hoped that he had re-worked that section of “Judy Blue Eyes”—it just struck me as the sort of thing he could transform in an interesting way. Eventually I discovered that he did re-work it, but a different version of the song, one called “Al Carnival” by early 70s Madrid-by-way-of-Columbia duo Elkin & Nelson (I don’t have the original record and I don’t know the songwriting credits, but I am pretty sure that E&N were covering the CSN song, even though that section was, I think, based on an older folk song of some kind). There it is up above. It’s a pretty good example of the kind of thing Terje is drawn to in his edits: lush sound that’s clear and spacious but still forceful, sections with unique textures that can be shuffled and re-looped. I talk about some of these qualities in the context of a broader discussion about the blurred lines between listening to music and making it, in a new Resonant Frequency that went up at Pitchfork on Friday.

I can’t condone how Steve McQueen cared for his records,...

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 22:43:38 -0500

I can’t condone how Steve McQueen cared for his records, but this looks more fun than scrolling through iTunes. From this.

Школа музыкальной журналистики: Pitchfork / Статьи / Znaki

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:45:00 -0500

Школа музыкальной журналистики: Pitchfork / Статьи / Znaki:

A blog from the Ukraine interviewed me about Pitchfork. You probably won’t get much from this unless you can read Cyrillic. Looks like my name is spelled Марк Ричардсон.

Tom Waits’ cover of Daniel Johnston’s “King...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:30:00 -0600

Tom Waits’ cover of Daniel Johnston’s “King Kong”, illustrated with all the shots from the 1933 movie. Imagine Johnston jotting down the lines as these scenes came up, or maybe he could do it all from memory.

Zaireeka in The Stranger

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:41:00 -0600

Zaireeka in The Stranger:

Always been a big fan of The Stranger. I lived in Seattle in the mid-90s, pre-Internet days, and used to look forward to it every week. In those days it sort of split the difference between a proper weekly and The Onion, throwing in surreal jokes in unexpected places.

Anyway, very nice mention of Zaireeka by Paul Constant that also brings up my favorite book in the 33 1/3 series, Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love.