Wow, so!
I woke up this morning hot and ready to write a capsule Music Diary Project entry. After I looked at the facts, it seems like Music Diary Project 2012 is actually about to start. Maybe I’m like the Music Diary Project groundhog? Probably not. But I did “see my shadow” (“‘end up’ ‘getting’ about 2,500 songs on Friday”), and I’ve been working through some of them, wanting, as I said above, to document a bit of it.
What I did was go through some lists of the best albums (personal atavism: consumes music on an album by album basis) album lists for 70s/80s/90s/early 00s lists and some others to catch up on stuff I’ve never gotten to or that has slipped slightly into obscurity. I remember joking that I never listened to any music pre-2000, but maybe it didn’t seem like a joke to everyone. I ended up not ever having heard most of the 70s list, and having heard a bit more as the years converged on today. But, then, as well: there’s a lot of weird music from the early 00s that I believe no one listens to anymore, but at the time it seemed like it was pretty great. (I think, maybe, Rock Plaza Central will or does fall into this category.)
Anyway, some of the artists I listened to since Friday (for first time ever):
- Cocteau Twins
- Mouse On Mars
- Braniac
- Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force (for a whole album, at least)
- Electric Birds
- The Fall
- School Of The Seven Bells
- Teenage Fan Club
- George Harrison (All Things Must Pass definitely passed me by)
- Television Personalities
- Buzzcocks (can that be right?)
And on and on… Sorry, world. But as someone who’s recently and often had about enough money to have to choose between coffee and vegetables, well, I’ll pay you back if you let me build up a store of at least experience in this whacky, wonderful field of music writing that seems to pay about half a month’s worth of rent every three months.
So! Yes! I’m still quite excited, seeing as how I have seven days worth of music to digest from now until whenever, and definitely during Music Diary Project week.
I found a distinct trend in my downloading, and I’m pretty spiffed about it. I don’t know if you could tell, but I’ve been pretty bearish on guitar-based rock music lately. I basically had an eargasm yesterday listening to the Deftones. I have about 4,000 ecstatic words written about The Men that my editor (probably rightly) saw fit to edit, slash, then kill before it saw the light of day. I might post it here at some point because, well, you get what you pay for? (Or what pays you is what you’re for? Yuck, that’s much more cynical.)
So anyway, yes, blah blah blah: I downloaded, I’d say, roughly, if we’re counting those Can remasters and and Surf’s Up, oh…, about 90% guitar music and 10% other. So color my shocked (or perhaps not, if you consider the premise) that the album that hit me the hardest, the one I listened to like four times, was the self-titled album by Electric Birds, an obscure IDM-type of electronic ‘outfit’, the performing name for a fellow named Mike Martinez. Their self-titled debut sounds sort of like a more pleasant Autechre. I think they sort of scraped their way onto the 00-04 Pitchfork list or something. They seem kind of obscure. But this album sounds great to me, almost ageless, like the disembodied bleeps and bloops — bits of electricity and ideation (though if you think about it, everything is “bits of electricity and ideation”, even like throat singing and solo acoustic M Ward concerts because of phenomenology/Kant’s transcendental aesthetic/neuroscience).
Anyway, it seems like, improbably, electric guitars have lost again. Or, well, they’re just playing a markedly different game. That new Japandroids album sure got a lot of spins (“spins”) this weekend.
Why do so many bands suck? For instance, a thought experiment: say you’re oOoOO, and you’ve sort of glommed on, organically or not, onto this ‘witchhouse’ thing. And say I saw you perform once and it was literally so boring I chose going home early, riding my bike through L.I.C. over standing there in perfectly fine company — because you were so boringly witchhouse, with no deviation or outward signifier of aesthetic taste or decisiveness. Now say you’ve released a new album or EP or whatever it is called Our Love Is Hurting Us, and it starts out pretty witchhousey, but then it sort of cops to a Portishead-cum-Clams Casino vibe (picking up, to be honest, a pretty cool Prince-like guitar solo in the process), before descending into some ungodly combination of juke, wane autotuned shit talk, and that pervasive EDM-dubstep wobble-bullshit. Yeah, say that happened. Now what the heck am I supposed to say? You tremble like a leaf in the wind. You have no backbone, no ideas, nothing to express. This isn’t music so much as an aural screensaver showing snapshots of your existing iTunes library. This sucks.
Compare to Electric Birds, which, as I said, is very IDM-y. Now, I wasn’t totally immersed in the style (though I’ll admit I smoked an awful lot of pot and listened to an awful lot of bouncing-ball-bearing-on-metal sound. But, still, somehow, Electric Birds ends up sounding totally ageless and present. There are certain sonic landmarks that orient you: a certain piece of distortion that sounds like a CD skipping, for instance. But even that is cool since who the heck listens to CDs anymore? It’s sort of ageless, in that joke record scratch zzzZZzzzzzzzzzrrzz way.
So, anyway, this thing you’re reading is something of a warm up for Music Diary Project week, and also a reminder to myself, a corrective, that visceral-and-sorta-stupid guitar music is not implicitly better than abstract aesthetic experience music. Because, as much as I liked The Fall and The Buzzcocks (seriously, dunno how I missed out on them), I still really like this out-of-time whackadoo electronic music.
