Monday, October 23, 2006

this one is called natures duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuub

god, i've really gone over the cliff w/ the dub madness. my unendorsed opinion is that this shit is mind exxxpppaaannnding, though i never have and never will endorse a transcdental, chemically derived or otherwise, opinion 'bout the role of good art. so, nature's dub, is a mid-80's dubber from JA ex-pats living in n-y-c. not on this record, but other wackie's records, they incorporate digital sound (and my general lack-o-knowledge re:dancehall may be revealed here) but not in the way that resident JA artists did in the 80's. wackie's is more of a straight continuuuuum from 70's reggae in another direction. lots of the same musicians, singers and lloyd barnes who *was* a 70's producer in ja before moving to the u-s-a.

and it's good. i've never been very good at describing why one song is better than another etc. but this is good stuff. perhaps i should think more critically about my music (and i try, a la this f'ing blog) but the value in that is limited. it might add to my sure-ness of opinion (but who could it) but it definitely won't help me find more music to enjoy. if anything you run the danger of starting to appreciate music for non-musical reasons. because you can justify it in the way that you justify something you do like.

so i don't know how to make it happen to let it be known and why i like this nature's dub lp, but needless to say, i do, like it, and it is, good.

Monday, October 16, 2006

kraut kraut kraut kraut

My current musical fixation has been krautrock. In the 90's, when stereolab was first mining the motorik neu-beat, kraut-rock was more obscure and less talked about. Since then, and I think somewhat to do with the new york/brooklyn rock revival (liars, dfa, black dice, animal collective) and a general record-collecting -> hipster convergence (along with other obscuro-psych genre hipster cravings -- psych folk anyone) kraut rock has become more talked about, less obscure. This is also fed by the reissue of some classics: the first three neu albums on astralwerks, can reissues, etc. and going from my heavy rock to hawkwind to pink floyd to amon duul II getting into krautrock is only natural. here are some of the more obscure records i've heard so far:

agitation free - malesch: berlin freak-hipsters travel to egypt and at that to their psych brew. good stuff. i saw it compared to the greatful dead somewhere but it's closer to trippy parts of early/mid floyd.

cluster & eno (and eno's before and after science) among the big early boosters of krautrock, which was reasonably popular in the uk where prog/heavy bands like hawkwind, king crimson, man already treaded, but the first wave of popular outside-the-de kraut was amon duul and faust and tangerine dream. the wankier or the heavier. i don't think can, neu sold a lot of records in the uk. that said, eno was one of the first boosters. jumps on the bandwagon lauding harmonia/cluster/neu as the 'most important band around' and the neu beat as one of the most important beats of the 70's (along with jb and fela (i think)). but late 70's he makes the trip to berlin, along w/ bowie & iggy & reed, to start tapping into the forward deutsche sound. out of this comes more ambient stuff, a collab w/ the cluster boys and the b&as record, which members of can and cluster are also involved with. all said it's typisch eno ambience ala the 2nd side of low/music for airports etc. pretty good stuff. need to listen to it more.

and somehow they all come together ( http://www.jahsonic.com/ManuelGottsching.html ). Gottsching the guitarist of Ash Ra Tempel - and pretty soon Ash Ra itself went on to write this 30' electronic jam that is heralded as a seminal techno moment. who knew?

and that links to the new track from lcd soundsystem/dfa. a 40 min nike jam. wierd. i picked up the new black dice lp used, yet another techno/kraut/noise confusion. great. and some more wackie's dub (reissued by basic channel) and some seminal dancehall -sugar minott. looking forward to finding the white mice lp to hip myself to seminal digital dancehall. what is it all about?

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

contemplation on suicide and techno

In part to stem my impulse to buy more records than I can listen to and part a desire to put my critical think-cap on I once decided to write a brief review of every record I purchased. A review that'd be required before venturing to the record store again. I'd be forced to actually listen to all the records I buy and form a thought-out opinion on each, hopefully becoming a better music listener with more records that I'd something to actually say about than just bulk records to flesh out my record collection. and well...it hasn't happened yet, but that doesn't mean I can't still try.

Yesterday I bought Suicide's first lp. I found it used for $6 and was happy to pick it up. I've owned the cd for awhile, but along with Trans Europe Express it's a record that I've owned on cd and wanted to own on lp, because now when I DJ (god forbid that ever happens again) I'll be able to break it out on thew wheels of steel. Nick Hornby, in his book about music or maybe it just collected his music crit., sort of panned Suicide. His point being that maybe Suicide was provocative, forward-thinking and all but he wanted something more life affirming for his rock dollar. Not that I listen to "Frankie Teardrop" every time I wake up to get me ready for the fight in the urban jungle, but me and Nick just don't listen to music the same way and Suicide ain't all doom and gloom. More than anything it rocks. It's music that moves forward and through. The eternal rock equation of repition repition pushing on and on and on. Hornby quips "I don't want to be terrified by music anymore" and though I wasn't at ground zero punk rock, but has punk rock really ever scared anyone in the last 20 years? Least of all people, like Hornby and me, who are hip that punk rock isn't the ahistorical id it purpots to be? Maybe GG Allin was scary, but I've never been to a GG Allin concert and most of the time punk rock performance always has the requisite distance that makes it performance/representation/etc w/o ever being "real" violence or scary. The distance is even greater when put on record. I can't be freaked out by a record because it's obviously an art construct. Something someone put a lot of time and thought into being as it is. It's not reportage of frontline violence. That said I'm not proposing that music aspire to the real violence of war but the opposite, that it embrace the fact that it is performance and construction. A commodity in the marketplace and all. Another tool for the man to keep you DOWN. I think Suicide appreciates this fact too ... or should.

I've also been tracking down some mid-90's Berlin Techno from Basic Channel. So far that includes two of the nine total 12"'s released by the label. The "i love music" board recommended a few so I picked up Octagon/Octadre and Phylps Trak. And there good, don't know if I'm ready to go full bore into techno, but this is a good start. Although I don't have a strong opinion or deep reasoning why I find them interesting, they're intringuing enough to continue persuing dance music though the well might end up dry before too long. In general that's how it seems to work out when exploring a new genre. I'll buy a couple "seminal" releases on whispers in the air or recommendations of people who'd know and either think their great or not-so-great but keep buying them until the curiousity runs out or I'm the next BIG techno fan in the world. For example: I own around 15 disco records and right now I don't have any desire to buy anymore but for a while I was tracking down obscure disco and every piece of a scent of a good record I could get my hands on. Though I might return to disco at some later point, right now I'm not tracking'em down, because you know, a lot of disco is boring and I already own too many boring disco records that I don't listen to. Probably the biggest thing that happens to prevent me from persuing a genre is when I later listen to something I was over-excited about to be underwhelmed. Was "Push in the Bush" always this so-so, did "Get on the Funk Train" sometimes lack the moving sound? Whatever, it happens, maybe techno is doomed to the same fate.