New Resonant Frequency up today. I wrote about Dirty Beaches, Retromania, David Lynch, Lana Del Rey, and music-making as re-blog. If you follow me here you may have seen me talk about a few of these things in 2011.
Mark Richardson
I'm the editor-in-chief of Pitchfork and I wrote Zaireeka, a book about the Flaming Lips album.
Resonant Frequency | Reviews | Highlight Reel | invisible music | twitter | email | "Ask"
Resonant Frequency | Reviews | Highlight Reel | invisible music | twitter | email | "Ask"
New column up today — first one in a few months and first one with this new image (what can I say, I like plants.) It’s about 9/11 and music and the difficulty of art that makes use of recent tragedy and it also has a bit about the avatar I use in most places online.
This week Pitchfork has been doing a 15th Anniversary thing, with features looking back at the site and talking to artists about music since 1996. We introduced it here and you can find everything we published here. I’m proud of how it turned out, and I’m especially proud of the piece 15 Writers/15 Songs, where some our contributors talked about a song that meant something to them during this period. We also had three fantastic interviews, with Björk, Beck, and ?uestlove (be sure to check out the latter esp., it is wildly entertaining).
Today we ran a retrospective feature where we highlighted some of our best features over the years. Many of our columnists chose their five favorites. These were the Resonant Frequencies I chose.
- Not Magic Yet
tUnE-yArDs, Christina Aguilera, and ideas of beauty and self-loathing. - Watch the Sound
On rap music, fear, aggression, Swans, and what happens when we feel music but don’t necessarily identify with it. - Green Eyes and the Other Guy
The intimidating prospect of making a mixtape for a new girlfriend who has heard everything. - YouTube and Memory
The astounding implications of the ever-growing digital archive. - Soothing Sounds for Hipsters
An early piece on the intersection of ambient music and new age.
Reblogged from marathonpacks|26 notes
Andy Beta, “A New Age for New Age Music.” (via marathonpacks)
Great piece from my friend Andy Beta. It reminded me that I wrote a column in 2002 called “Soothing Sounds for Hipsters” that talked about some similar ideas, only then I was grappling w/ new age in the context of Gas and Kompakt’s Pop Ambient comps. It’s interesting how these ideas cycle in and out of culture over time.
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‘I always enjoyed the idea that krautrock was considered highbrow, yet New Age textures signaled something more cheesy and lowbrow,’ said Lopatin. ‘But there’s also a superficial dissolution of the ego in both New Age music and Western mysticism that I find amusing.’ Animal Collective’s Brian ‘Geologist’ Weitz agrees: ‘I think the reason there is a stigma attached to a lot of New Age music is because of the personalities associated with it and the naive optimism to their aesthetic.’
New Age music preached spirituality, environmentalism, self-evolution and the like, yet when musicians and the major record labels saw the successes that an auteur like Halpern had with his cottage industry, big money soon followed. ‘New Age music was one of the very first completely amateur-driven genres,’ said Mcgowan. ‘Yet it became commercialized around the same time as Ronald Reagan’s remaking of America in 1984, where something that started as a countercultural hippie movement was completely co-opted.’ New Age became big business, leading to subsequent Halpern releases with oddly utilitarian titles like ‘Music for Your PC’ and ‘Attracting Prosperity,’ not to mention the international success of Enya, who has sold more than 75 million records worldwide.
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Three years ago I wrote a column about “perfect songs” and someone made a YouTube playlist with a bunch of them. Not sure about “perfect” but these are all at least “pretty good,” I think you will agree.
New Resonant Frequency today. It’s a bit of a departure, or maybe a return to the form of some of the earlier columns, in that there is more personal stuff here. I wrote about rap music, aggression, fear, Swans, more.
(Warning: there is some Odd Future content, but I didn’t want to call this an “Odd Future piece,” in part b/c the idea for this column has been germinating for about a year, and in part b/c I know and understand how sick everyone is of reading about them. Still, it’s there, a little bit.)
Essentially, this was my attempt to do something I mentioned a while back when Ann Powers’ “In Defense of Nasty Art” piece was going around, which is to write about having an attraction to music that doesn’t nec. fit with your image of yourself as a person. Instead of writing about why some people might be drawn to music with objectionable content or why the person creating it might be compelled to make it, I wanted to write about why I like it (and here I am not talking about Odd Future specifically, they’re actually a smaller part of this piece and I use their music to discuss something else), what it does for me, how it functions for me as a listener, how sometimes immersing myself in music where terrible things are happening can be a good thing for me.
So I also talk about my earliest interest in rap music, which was basically Run DMC when I was in high school, and how the aggressiveness of their music connected to something major in my life at that time, which was playing football. Oh yeah, I also wrote a little about playing football. This photo above is the one picture in the world that shows me doing that. I am the guy with his hands on the ball.
Is today. I hadn’t actually been to one of these before. I am in record stores a lot so the idea of fighting crowds didn’t really appeal to me. But my favorite shop in town, Laurie’s Planet of Sound, asked me to DJ for an hour as part of their festivities, and it was great fun. The store was packed and I really like everyone who works in the shop a lot (I am in there several times a week—it’s a block from my apartment). DJing, esp. when the pressure of getting people to dance is removed, is one of my favorite things in life. At one point my hands were shaking a little because I was so excited and happy. That was weird. Glad they asked me.
I thought of pulling some kind of theme together for my hour, but in the end I just played a bunch of songs that I love. Some I’ve discussed here recently. My guiding principal was, “What would I be excited to hear playing when I walk into a record store?” Here are my answers.
For the past few days, I've read all of your "Resonant Frequency" articles on Pitchfork. Really interesting stuff and interesting to see how much of your life has tied in with music. I've got a few questions for you.
1) Do you still buy records from the ''dollar bin?"
2) What does it take to become a writer/critique in the field of music and what kind of advice can you give for those who want to be a writer?
3) My dad is 49 years old and he hates "new age" music. He'd rather listen to his old albums from the 60's, 70's and 80's and I try to get him to listen to recent music that sounds nostalgic and/or similar to what he use to listen to and he still can't stand it. It seems to me that a lot of adults that grew up in the 60's and 70's have a hard time in listening to new music. Does being relatively older change the way you listen to music, or have you just adapted to the culture of modern music?
1) Do you still buy records from the ''dollar bin?"
2) What does it take to become a writer/critique in the field of music and what kind of advice can you give for those who want to be a writer?
3) My dad is 49 years old and he hates "new age" music. He'd rather listen to his old albums from the 60's, 70's and 80's and I try to get him to listen to recent music that sounds nostalgic and/or similar to what he use to listen to and he still can't stand it. It seems to me that a lot of adults that grew up in the 60's and 70's have a hard time in listening to new music. Does being relatively older change the way you listen to music, or have you just adapted to the culture of modern music?
Wow, how touching that you would go back and read those. I was thinking recently: this year marks the 10-year anniversary of Resonant Frequency. The first one ran in July 2001. Though I’m not always happy with the results, the column means a lot to me. For better or worse, it’s a decade in the life of one guy who likes to think about music.
On to your questions:
1) I assume this is in reference to the RF I wrote about shopping in the dollar bin, and how it functioned as my Napster, kind of. I had dial-up Internet at the time, so my way of gorging on music was to buy as many interesting vinyl LPs as I could. I lived in Richmond and Plan 9 had a dollar bin in the basement that was second to none. I do still shop in dollar bins, but not nearly as much as I did then. I still buy a lot of used vinyl, though. I’m in the record store near my apartment (the wonderful Laurie’s) probably three or four times a week looking through their used bin’s new arrivals. I don’t buy dollar records as often because I now prefer LPs to be in really good condition. Only so much space. But I have the same sense of discovery. I never go in looking for anything in particular, so I wind up with a lot of records that are completely new to me and that I can learn about.
2) I always feel weird giving advice about writing because my own path was pretty haphazard. I started writing about music around the age most people stop writing about it. I feel like I did everything backwards. But for what it’s worth, my main advice when people do ask is to focus on reading as much as listening. Find writers you enjoy, follow them, and think about how they do what they do. Read books about music, lots of them. From the way I’ve been asked this over the years, I get a sense that a lot of aspiring young music writers think the field is more about cultivating a certain taste or digesting as much music as possible. But nothing else will matter if the writing part doesn’t work. And reading seems like the best way to get better at writing.
3) From the way you phrase this I think by “new age” you mean “new music”? In any event, it does seem very common for people to stick with the music of their youth, and my take on that has always been “whatever works,” basically. But it’s interesting to me that you are trying to connect with your father through music. If he’s got three decades of music that he likes, that sounds like a lot to me, to be honest.
I think about my age and listening a fair amount, especially in relationship to my writing. And my take is that it evens out perfectly. I have experience and reference points at my disposal that someone 20 years younger may not, but then there are some things that I won’t get in quite the same way, too. One example is that I’ve never watched Nickelodeon in my life, and I notice among a lot of people in their early 20s that it was a big part of their childhood. Sometimes references from things like that seep into music and I may not comprehend it completely. But I like learning about how people from a younger generation absorb and process music and how it fits into their lives, so that helps.
Thanks a lot for these questions and sorry for clogging up everyone’s Tumblr feed.
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.
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