555 Enterprises 2.0

2012-02-11T18:34:00.000-08:00

Death Factory, Revisited

2012-02-02T09:41:00.000-08:00

I have a hefty piece up at PM on Throbbing Gristle and the amazing, essential set of reissues that came out late last year. There was a bit of a lag in publishing this, I suspect because of all the year-end lists, but I hope you'll give it a read and let me know your thoughts.

RIP Etta James

2012-01-20T08:53:00.000-08:00

The Sun Always Shines on TV

2012-01-19T09:20:00.000-08:00

I wrote two blurbs for the best of television list at Popmatters on Enlightened and Treme respectively.

Coincidentally, I wrote the blurb for Enlightened after watching the third episode (subtitled "There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed") of Adam Curtis's brilliant four-part documentary The Century of the Self. Far more words than I have time for right now need to be said about the correlations between the individuation schemas described by Curtis that transformed communal hippies into selfish yuppies and Mike White's so-far brilliant workplace drama, but if anything the show illustrates how self-betterment is only achievable for those who already operate according to the rules of a luxury economy.

As for Treme, I continue to be a fan of the show, but I was shocked to learn that my entry would be fore the number one slot. There were many frustrating aspects to the first season (not least of which being the deification of preservationism as kind of saintlihood- it's as if Simon was trying to cement support from New Orleaners while critiquing nearly everything else about their city) that I thought were vastly improved by Season 2, but it was hardly my top pick for best show of 2011.

That honor would go to the harrowing, dark, and uncompromising (well, except in the letdown finale*) American Horror Story, a thrilling slice of hauntology that picks up the mantle of body horror long ago dropped by Cronenberg and includes among its cast a breakthrough performance. No, not the return of Jessica Lange, who is just fine, if a bit over-the-top at points. I'm talking about Evan Peters as the school shooter Tate Langdon, who provides the show with nearly all of its edge as being one of the show's only sympathetic leads. Hopefully, more words on this too when I get a chance.

*The series of events that transpire in the final episode have the unfortunate effect of making the entire season look like a lead-in to an episode of Tales from the Crypt (with hints of Scooby Doo).

RIP Jimmy Castor

2012-01-19T09:14:00.000-08:00

Stop SOPA/PIPA

2012-01-18T11:40:00.000-08:00

2011 Finalized

2012-01-05T13:43:00.000-08:00

My final thoughts on 2011 (for now) can be read in my new PopMatters column over here, touching on Skillrex, the death and afterlife of Altered Zones, radio pop's delightfully techno bent, maximalism, reissues, industrial house, and more.

Overall, an exciting year.

2011

2011-12-23T10:36:00.000-08:00

2011 Albums

5 Post-Industrial Apocalypse Albums

Perc- Wicker & Steel
Ekoplekz- Memowrekz
Surgeon- Breaking the Frame
Tommy Four Seven- Primate
Andy Stott- We Stay Together

4 Synth-Ecstatic Albums

The Advisory Circle- As the Crow Flies
Com Truise- Galactic Melt
Blanck Mass- Blanck Mass
Salva- Complex Housing

4 Hypnagogic Delights

Vatican Shadow- Kneel Before Religious Icons
Black Zone Myth Chant- Straight Cassette
Forma- Forma
Sun Araw- Ancient Romans

4 Weird Pop Albums

The Weeknd- House of Balloons
James Blake- James Blake
Diddy Dirty Money- Last Train to Paris
Junior Boys- It's All True

3 Hazy Fever Dreams

Grouper- A I A: Dream Loss/Alien Observer
Balam Acab- Wonder/Where
Walls- Coracle

2 Four-on-the-Floors

Container- Container LP
Virgo Four- Resurrection

5 Slugs-ish EPs

Deadboy- Here EP
Julio Bashmore- Everyone Needs a Theme Tune EP
Mr. Beatnik- Synthetes EP
Jacques Greene- The Look EP
Jacques Greene- Lay it Down EP

Top of the Pops

The Weeknd “What You Need”
Dev- “In the Dark”
Rihanna ft Calvin Harris- “We Found Love”
Britney Spears- “Till the World Ends”
Rihanna- “S + M”
Ke$ha- “Blow”
Chris Brown ft Busta Rhymes and Lil Wayne- “Look at Me Now”
Nicki Minaj- “Super Bass”
Katy B ft Ms. Dynamite- “Lights On”
Magnetic Man- “I Need Air”
Dev ft the Cataracts- “Bass Down Lown”
Drake- “Dreams Money Can Buy”
Diddy Dirty Money- “Strobe Lights”, “Your Love”, “I Hate That You Love Me”

Uncharted Pop

Metronomy- “The Look”
Lana Del Ray- "Video Games"
Ford & Lopatin- "emergency room"
Blood Diamonds- “Lasting Love”
Pale Sketcher- “Seventh Heaven”
Clams Casino- “I’m God” (Instrumental)
M83- “Midnight City”
Panda Bear- “Last Night at the Jetty”
Grubby Little Hands- "Uneek"
John Maus- “Believer”
AlunaGeorge- "You Know You Like It"
Holy Other- "Know Where", "Yr Love"
D’Eon- “Transparency”
Peaking Lights- “All the Sun that Shines”
Dylan Ettinger- "Lion of Judah"
St. Vincent- “Cruel”
Pure X- “Easy”

Hipster House

Innergaze- “Shadow Disco”
Octa Octa- “I’m Trying”
Maria Minerva- “A Little Lonely”
Stay+- “Stay Positive”

TUUUUUNES

Slava- “Dreaming Tiger”
Jamie XX- “Far Nearer”
Surgeon- “Radiance”
Blawan- “Getting Me Down”
SCB- “Loss”
CREEP- “Days (Deadboy Mix)”
Perc- “My Head is Slowly Exploding”
Salva- “Wake Ups”
Jacques Greene- “Tell Me”, “The Look”
Raffertie- “Not Asleep, Not Awake”
Deadboys- “Wish U Were Here”/”Afrika Starr”
Funkystepz- "Fuller"
Peter Van Hoesen- “North 6th”
Baobinga- "Make Me Feel", "Transpennine Express (w/ Jack Sparrow)"
Burial- “Street Halo”
Mike Dehnert- "Palindrom"
Friendly Fires- "Live Those Days Tonight (Lone mix)"
Steffi- “Mine”

Unearthed:

Throbbing Gristle- 2nd Annual Report, Third and Final Report/20 Jazz Funk Greats/ Heathen Earth
Bruce Gilbert- This Way/The Shivering Man
Cabaret Voltaire- Johnny Yesno Redux
Sweet Exorcist- Retroactivity

TeleVisual:
An American Horror Story
Enlightened
Louie
Community
Children's Hospital
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Game of Thrones
Treme
Fringe
Parks & Recreation

Tree of Life:
Tree of Life

Re-doomed

2011-11-28T08:12:00.000-08:00

Greyhoos responds to my response to his Burden piece:

"One thing: Doomed actually dragged on for nearly 45 hours, not minutes. Burden later said that going into the piece, he'd expected it'd only end up lasting a few hours, tops. [Ed- I changed the time length in the original piece. A critical typo on my part].

Funny that you mention the Milgram experiments. Initially I'd though of referencing them, but that wound up being one of the tangents (among many) that I jettisoned for the sake of brevity. Instead, I chose to just imply the matter through more generalized references to the whole matter of socialization.

But yes, I believe you're probably right. Milgram's experiments have always been widely cited, and I'm fairly certain they were at the time in question (even in the years shortly before he finally published his own book). And Milgram's experiments fit in a certain broader discussion that was going on at the time; an anxious discussion about the character of modern society, whether people were becoming more callous and unfeeling -- whether there was a pervasive loss of empathy starting to emerge. Milgram's experiments were usually cited in the context of their relation to the military and to the war in Vietnam, but they also discussed in a more generalized psycho-social context, as well.

Another example that comes to mind: The famous 1964 case of the slaying of Kitty Genovese also fit into this broader discussion. Of course, we were to find out years later that initial reports of the killing had been exaggerated and distorted by the press for the sake of optimal dramatic/sensationalits effect. Nonetheless, it dovetailed with the dominant anxiety about the direction society might be heading. (Additionally, it also dovetailed perfectly with the anti-urban sentiments that were growing at the time -- since it was allegedly urban environments that bred such "dehumanized" behavior.)

So yeah, I'd say your hunch is most likely correct. These were all ideas that were very much "in the air" during that time. "

I think it's also notable to point out that, like Burden's pieces, the Milgram experiments are often used in abbreviated format as diagnostics working towards a confirmation bias for those predisposed to damn the modern world, to paint the banality of evil as a simple relationship between man and his master, one that could be directly abrogated with the elimination of pitiless and vile leaders.

But Milgram's experiments capture a more complex dynamic. Subjects only rarely carried out their duties without resistance or frustration. Each of their reactions were different, but nearly all of them were emotionally and even physically depleted from stress by the end of the experiment. In the end, the only thing that binded them was their obedience to authority, their respect for the authorship of the experiment and faith in the institutions supporting it (the experiments took place at Yale, where I currently work). Much of this can probably be attributed to what K-Punk has called "class unconsciousness"- that ingrained/planted feeling of inferiority that causes the lower castes to accept the wisdom and moral authority of those above them. Who are the plebian subjects to question a group of Ivy League scientists? If the man with the heart condition's life was really in danger, surely these learned men of science would do something about it, right?

One can only speculate without having been there, but I'd imagine the curators of Burden's performance underwent a similar anxiety regarding Burden's exhibition as waiting for a sign that the performance was over(that sealed envelope that never arrivived). But who were they to stand in the way of an artist's vision? If there is a deity in the art world, it is autonomy. If Burden wanted to die under that plate of glass, who were they to deny him that last statement- a performance that could not be fully comprehended understood until it was complete, until the clock was smashed and time had stopped for Burden, either figuratively as a dead man or literally as it so happened to play out? Art's audiences are wont to take art often more seriously than it takes itself (as Greyhoos's article deftly points out), often confusing, or even substituting, art's staged realities with the ones outside of the gallery. It's hard not to see why, what with the implied theater of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Patty Hearst, and, as Stockhausen infamously noted, the September 11th attacks.

I remember seeing a discussion online a few years ago about the allegations of animal abuse in Jordowsky's The Holy Mountain which lead a few posters to declare that no amount of dead birds who be too few to create a masterpiece of beauty like the film in question. Some even declared that human sacrifice would be warranted, with one poster even offering himself up.

RIP

2011-11-27T12:58:00.000-08:00

God, what a voice

The Experiment Requires That You Continue

2011-11-22T18:59:00.000-08:00

Very interesting post by Greyhoos at Our God is Speed on Chris Burden. I'd heard of Shoot and seen some of Through the Night Softly, but he has a really interesting CV. Of notable interest is Doomed (curious about whether this was the titled before or after the event), in which the artist held himself under a plate of glass with a clock above it for 45 hours. Burden had filled out an envelope with instructions to the museum staff to end the exhibition at any point they saw fit, but did not actually give the envelope to the staff. Thus, it was up to them to sense if Burden was putting himself in any true danger and stop the project themselves.

"And as it turned out, Burden hadn't thought that it would take them so long to act. At most, he expected Doomed would wind up last a few hours. In an interview given some years later, Burden said that as the hours ticked by and the work began to stretch towards its third day, he realized his miscalculation and began to wonder if the attendees were going to continue to stand back and leave him to die."

Greyhoos rightly points to Kafka as a precedent for this piece, but it also got me thinking of Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments wherein participants willfully shocked what they understood to be a man with a heart condition, seemingly to death, because a research scientist instructed them to. In Doomed, art too was acting as an authority. The passivity of the spectator allows him or her to mitigate actions framed by their own set of reality principles. In a sense, Burden's piece exposed the religiosity of the artistic performance. Burden created an environment that screamed for intervention, but discouraged it by the faith of the spectators in the totality of the act. In a system abiding by this kind of logical detachment, belief and authority in and of themselves are arbitrary.

As I push the wrong buttons, I disappear

2011-11-22T18:55:00.000-08:00

review of the collaboration between The Flaming Lips and Lightning Bolt

The Occupied States of America

2011-11-19T20:15:00.000-08:00

Despite everything that has happened in the past few days with the reports of fascistic violence against peaceful protesters (and deafening silence in the Obama administration), Occupy Wall Street remains the most potent political movement the left has seen in decades. Their very refusal of terms of compliance and defiance of the calls to issue a list of demands are perhaps their greatest strengths and their most revolutionary concept- the idea that we don't need to wait for millionaires to tell us to cut their taxes. We don't have to beg the corporations not to poison us, not to push us into privation, not to enslave us to jobs designed to service the luxury of those who forever remain above us, not to steal from the collective goodwill of government while lobbying against the levelling power of the state, et al. State and private power are right to be afraid of OWS. What they are proposing is an end to the end of history, a cap on the final judgment of capitalism as the epitomical system of the evolved man, the beginning of the end of settling for the way things are, a final stripping of the institutional chains of bondage that grip us all.

Family obligations prohibit me from participating in the mass actions. This is perhaps the first time in my life though that I've felt optimistic about the future. Yes, ever. As a father, I fear bestowing upon my daughter the dread I felt growing up that adulthood was a continual series of disappointments and compromises, that the entirety of life was a downward spiral that descended from an epoch of community and nurturing to a lonely death wherein the majority of hours lived were spent away from family and loved ones, parked behind a desk where one's intellect is undermined, individuality is suppressed, creativity is wasted, self-worth is decimated, and empathy is systematically proven redundant. After graduating to the "real world", the world of capitalist realism, the opportunities available, even to someone of relative privilege like myself, have mirrored all my most terrifying fears about the end of childhood. I can offer then nothing but solidarity to a cause who refuses this reality for my daughter and for future generations. Let us all be the last men to live for a mistake.

As OWS dominates the news, every other bit of everyday business feels trite and silly. You feel like history is happening without you an you're just a bystander. You can even sense the envy in those who take the system so seriously, those who hold an enormous stake in the success of the status quo (my work requires interaction with quite a few of them). They want to believe that OWS is a hiccup, the work of lazy assholes afraid of a hard day's work and under a spell of mass hypnosis permeating from an ideological vacuum. The apprehension is strong because the potential of OWS's success is far more frightening than its eventual withering and dispersal. The protesters succumbing to infighting and its cooption by petty showmen and hucksters is far more in line with our cynicism. It has historical precedent in the hippies-turned-yuppies, Obama, Kerry, Bansky books in Urban Outfitters, Che Guevara t-shirts, "Think Different" campaigns, and vanguard music in car ads. OWS can come off as just another space for capitalism to itself occupy, a consumer populace that its own mechanisms can accommodate.

If OWS does manage to pull through and create something new in spite of the friction and abrasion of all the history repeating surrounding it, it'll leave the guardians of the new a bit naked, like Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost- finally free of the deadbolts of the Garden, yet still burdened by the original sin of having created this massive empire of suffering in the first place. No one knows what happens next if OWS achieves its goal of revolution. We can only be sure that whatever the next step is, it needs to happen together or all of it will have been for nothing. As Jack Shephard is wont to say, "we either live together or we die alone".

That's why it's important to not give in to the demands of the old world who want to break this movement down into digestible soundbites or a scriptable action-item list. This is not a reality TV narrative and OWS is not looking to prove a thesis using the scientific method. The fact that the source of this frustration eludes the wealthy and the powerful only proves how disconnected they are from the world they command.

We all know what's wrong; everything, everything, and everything- the whole goddamned rotten parasitic system, an idea rotting away like a virus in the hearts and minds of an entire race. An entire species working diligently on a massive, complex, multinational project of self-extinction. A planet whose ballooning population is under work orders to render the earth uninhabitable. And if we don't follow our instructions to make the world slightly nicer for a few at the expense of the welfare of the many, we may lose our sweet source of sustenance, the nectar of Capital, which holds in its hands the tools of survival (doctors, food, housing, protection from corporate predators).

But it's not the bosses and the managers who are issuing the orders, mind you. No, they're just the conduits and they're just as compromised as the rest of us, with very little power to break free of their business models without betraying their legal obligation to the shareholders. No, our orders and theirs come from Capital itself, a self-preservational artificial intelligence that can adapt to any state or social model, can incorporate any tradition or custom, and can accommodate any desire. Frankly speaking, it's everywhere, controlling everything, commanding everyone.

An earlier movement in the 90s sought to "reclaim" the territories that the globalizing tentacles of Capital had conquered, but the language or "reclamation" suggests a mere changing of the guard, an exchange of power. Much better to occupy then, to simply "be" in a space whose authority is manifested aribitrarily or illegitimately. In a sense, OWS is existential, because its resistance comes in the form of being. If there is a demand coming out of OWS, it's a cry for that age old philosophical leap of faith, the acknowledgement of the self-outside-of-the-self; the other. Since we can never occupy another person's consciousness, we can never truly know them. We can never truly be clear of their motives or their feelings. We have to trust them, despite all the horrible shit they've enacted upon their own species. We have to trust others, as King and Christ did up until the moment they were killed. We have to contrast the human animal to property, propriety, ideology, and territory. If we don't want future generations to continue growing up in fear of dying alone, we need to stop pretending that we're alone. We're all occcupying everything together. We're already here. The rest is illusion.

Human Sacrifice Mix: Halloween 2011 pt 2

2011-10-31T12:25:00.000-07:00

Human Sacrifice Mix: Halloween 2011 by Timh Gabriele on Mixcloud

halloween mix 2
SATANIC RITUAL
1. children of the stones theme
2. coil- in memory of truth
3. jean-pierre massiera- l'estrange mr whinster-horrific child
4. univers zero- la faulx
5. jerry goldsmith- ave satani
6. diamanda galas- the litanies of satan

DEATH AND LAST BREATH
7. swans- a hanging
8. faust- knochentanz (bone dance)
9. pierre henry- breath

BURIAL
10. loop- circle grave
11. la vampire and zola jesus- eulogy
12. bohren & der club of gore- constant fear
13. forcefeel- coffin love

REBIRTH
14. ceramic hello- footsteps in the fog
15. xylitol- ghost office
16. patrick cowley and jore socarras- i'll come see you
17. franz fulckenhaus- trident crisis

We are the Monsters we Dreamed About: A Mix for Halloween courtesy of 555 Enterprises

2011-10-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

1. the end of all existence- the end of all existence (2010)
2. reign- skeletons march (1996)
3. British Murder Boys- All the Saints have Been Hung (2005)
4. Nine Inch Nails- memorabilia (1994)
5. surgeon- prowler (2001)
6. reeko- witchcraft (2009)
7. t++- voices no bodies (2010)
8. paul damage- mothra (2001)
9. chris mccormack- they feed you scraps like starving bongo dogs (2007)
10. adam x- faces of death (1993)
11. rave creator- atmos-fear (1994)
12. lenny dee- forgotten moments (1997)/kanye west-monster (2010)
13. skinny puppy-deadlines (1983/1984)
14. flowerpot men- jo's so mean to josephine (1984)
15. terre thaemlitz- hush now (dj sprinkles broken record mix) (2006)
16. adam x- state of limbo (2008)
17. anne clark- our darkness (1984)
18. test dept- pulsations 2 (1983)
19. dj tron- murder the world (1996)
20. sped heller- satan is your friend (2009)
21. coil- the last rites of spring (1987)

Slow Down, Keep Dreaming

2011-10-27T12:33:00.000-07:00

M83's newest reviewed by moi

Can't help but think I went a little light on them here because they're old favorites. Count me among the camp though that thinks the earlier material trumps the new stuff by leaps and bounds.

Walls- Coracle on the other hand, is a big improvement over their debut and all of the Walls stuff is miles ahead of the solo stuff by the two members (Banjo or Freakout and Allez-Allez respectively).

2011-10-21T18:57:00.001-07:00

The Survival of the Industrial Sonic in a Deindustrialized West

2011-10-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

I've got a new column up at PopMatters on Industrial Music throughout the 90s- that is, not the music most of us in our teens encountered as "Industrial" (though that stuff gets a mention too), but the ways in which the sonic of (de)construction and manual labor survived as an aesthetic in a time when it was becoming a ghost in the Western world.

There's some discussion of this over at SR's blissblog in this post (and makes reference to my first of these columns, as last year's column on minimal synth), which is actually part of a discussion started here about how the eighties is now the endless well of referentiality that the 60s once were. Some useful links in there too, including an interview with Blackest Ever Black/FACT's Kiran Sande, a nice coinage piece by Kek-W on "Work" music, and a link to a Guardian piece on Perc as London riot soundtrack music (More on that in part 3 (hopefully of 3) in my industrial trilogy set for PM.

Catching with Retarde Mode

2011-10-21T12:37:00.000-07:00

I've kind of lost track of this blog with busy season at work. Here's a bunch of reviews I wrote recently (and some not so recently)

Balam Acab- See Birds (always my favorite of the witch-house crew, this was reissued on CD this year and he's got a new album which seems quite nice too)

Tommy Four Seven-Primate (One of my favorite albums of the year, though it deserves the 6 rating it got. Too much dull stuff, but the good stuff is great and Emika here is much better than our self-titled debut)

Pure X- Pleasure (another album that's pretty nice, though resoundingly dull in parts. That seems to be the point in this one. Chillwave as Prozac. Served me well during my unemployment stint visiting the beaches of East Haven with Alice).

Various- Laid (More bizness from Dial. I might take this down a point or two would I rewrite it today, but I can't really get on board with the attacks on the Berghain sound. Sure, it's conservative, but it's still great music. Just as pub rock can occasionally be exactly what you know, Dial does the body good even if doesn't exactly propel us forward into the future

RIP Bert Jansch

2011-10-05T18:26:00.000-07:00

Listomania

2011-08-27T10:46:00.000-07:00

I reviewed Simon Reynolds's Retromania. Lots to say about this work. It's a pivotal read. Hopefully, I can post some "bonus beats" on this piece on this blog sometime soon. In the meantime, read the review...and the book. It's fascinating.

I Went For That

2011-08-27T10:41:00.001-07:00

I wrote roughly 2500 words on Hall & Oates's "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)", a song that has no particular personal resonance with me, but which is plenty interesting. I don't think I can keep up at this rate though, I wouldn't finish the series by the time I die.

RIP Nick Ashford

2011-08-27T10:37:00.000-07:00

Part of another songwriting duo, Ashford & Simpson, who wrote many classic soul records like this

RIP Jerry Leiber

2011-08-27T10:02:00.000-07:00

Along with Mike Stoller, the songwriting force behind these classics:

RIP Conrad Schnitzler

2011-08-08T18:10:00.000-07:00

Building a Society from Bodies in Transit to Death

2011-08-05T18:04:00.000-07:00

There's a million things I'd love to write about David Cronenberg if I ever had the time. The title above alone is from notes taken while piecing together a bio for a PopMatters feature on the 100 Greatest Directors that can be read here. From his seldom-discussed early films like Shivers (mentioned in the above article, also an odd parallax to Ballard's High Rise released in the same year) and the underrated student film Stereo (a clinical study of polymorphously perverse psychics) to the finer points of masterpieces like Existenz and Videodrome, Cronenberg definitely ranks near the very top of that list for me. Just consider three films offered to Cronenberg and imagine how amazing they would have been had they ever been made; Return of the Jedi, Total Recall, Basic Instinct 2 (yes, Basic Instinct 2).

In lieu a lengthy dissertation, I'll leave you with two quotes:

“There are a lot of bad things that happen to people as they get older. When you’re young, I think you anticipate those things and (watching horror films) is almost a rehearsal for coping with those things later in life”

“The idea that you carry around the seeds of your own destruction with you always and that they can erupt at any time is a little scary because there is no escape from it”- Cronenberg, on the body.

Joy to the World! More activity over yonder

2011-07-27T06:17:00.001-07:00

Speaking of early 1970s post-hippie rock, there's a new post at Documentary Mixtape on Three Dog Night's smash hit "Joy to the World"

RIP Dan Peek

2011-07-27T06:08:00.000-07:00

Can't say I'm an enormous America fan, as I am under 50, but I do quite enjoy the following two song, as well as "Children" (which I can't find anywhere). Also, to name your band America is pretty bold. To put Native Americans on the cover of your debut album is even bolder. As far as Christian rock is concerned, "Lonely People" ain't half bad either.

Post-Industrial Devolution

2011-07-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

My latest column is a reading on early Industrial music and how its shifts reflected actual shifts in the industrial labor force in late capitalism.

It focuses on the genre's troubling fascination with fascism and rock's avoidance of it, also tracking the ways in which industrial and techno overlapped (with only the latter surviving in the popular imagination).

FYI, I did not choose that image at the top of the page of Kraftwerk, who don't really figure into this story at all.

There will be a part 2 coming soon with information on where industrial sound continued in IDM, Glitch, Downwards Records, Gabber, and other modern musics.

Glory Be to the Resurrection!

2011-07-17T10:23:00.000-07:00

A look at Virgo Four's fantastic new reissue Resurrection, which rivals their self-titled debut.

Building Upwards

2011-07-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

A review of Moritz Von Oswald Trio's Horizontal Structures

For the historical record, here's my review of their first album.

Blood, Sweat & Tears- Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie (1st and Second Movements)

2011-06-24T09:57:00.000-07:00

A post on the second track of the first year mixtape is up at Documentary Mixtape. It concerns womb music, Satie, Eno, Blood Sweat and Tears, and, as usual, memory.

Wuppdeckmischmampflow

2011-06-24T09:50:00.000-07:00

Robag Wruhme's very pleasant autumnal Kompakt mix reviewed.

Everything's Gone Gray

2011-06-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

30 Years later, Basquiat's band makes an album and I review it.

I Am the Alphabet

2011-06-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

Finally got a chance to talk about Black Moth Super Rainbow's awesome Dandelion Gum on the occasion of its deluxe reissue. Read the review here.

Documentary Mixtape

2011-06-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

555 Enterprises long ago dissolved into a series of links about keeping up with whatever I'm writing and whoever's dying any given week, but I've started a new blog with original writing on it and I hope you will all keep it in your blogroll as I do promise to make it as interesting as possible.

The series is called Documentary Mixtape and it is a series of essays devoted to every single song on 28 (so far) mix CD-Rs that I've made, each one representing one year of my life. The earlier years promise to be both intensely personal and somewhat not at all, but each essay will mix personal recollections with historical and sonic surveys of the artists and songs in question.

You can find more about the impetus behind this blog in the opening essay here.

And you can read the first essay on the first song of the first mixtape, Bing Crosby's "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That's An Irish Lullaby)" here.

RIP Martin Rushent

2011-06-06T05:35:00.000-07:00

Just a smattering of his amazing production work:

2011-05-31T11:13:00.000-07:00

The Pendle Witches in Eternal Agony

2011-05-30T17:53:00.000-07:00

Demdike Stare are one of those bands that seems to have lit up the entire critical community (at least those I respect), but seem far too ascetic to make as lasting impressions as these reviews suggest. With all the kind ink, it seems these words are better reserved for conjuring peers (foremost, Coil) who came first and did it better. With that said, Tryptych is not bad, but for the almgamation it supposes (horror soundtracks/ deep drone/ Modern Love style dubtronics/ Caretaker or concrete Radiophic hauntology/ Shackleton style Fifth World rhythm) it should sound better.

Here's the review

This Island Earth

2011-05-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

New review of Friendly Fires' maddeningly enjoyable Pala, an album which is sonically smart and pretty lyrically idiotic.

More Music About Housing Projects

2011-05-30T17:35:00.000-07:00

Albeit with a completely different vantage. A short review of Salva's Complex Housing

RIP John Walker

2011-05-09T11:19:00.000-07:00

Kangding Ray- Pruitt Igoe

2011-04-29T06:38:00.000-07:00

A review of the great new EP

For more in Pruitt-Igoe, here's a trailer to a new film coming out on the projects.

There's some footage of the demolition here:

Here's a lo-res version of the sequence from Koyaanisqatsi

A news report from 1968

Hunt in the Garden of False Opportunity

2011-04-29T06:35:00.000-07:00

My review of the surprisingly good Magnetic Man disc

Hopefully, I'll have more to say about "The Bug" soon.

Moebius- Blue Moon Soundtrack

2011-04-29T06:31:00.000-07:00

A review of the Cluster front man's lone bid into the soundtrack game.

Bjorn Torske- Kokning

2011-04-29T06:25:00.000-07:00

new review of the aforementioned

Here's a video from that Open Skies EP mentioned in the article for the old skoolers.

RIP Poly Styrene

2011-04-26T20:34:00.000-07:00

RIP Max Matthews

2011-04-22T13:49:00.000-07:00

Father of computer music

Evil is Real

2011-04-20T06:05:00.000-07:00

A review of Univers Zero's remaster of Heresie

Univers Zero’s music, both performing and listening to it, is labor—a conscious, concentrated, and exhausting effort full of unresolved tension, illusory endings, and alchemical combinations. It’s ritual magick, seemingly in service of mystical elements that defy communication (it’s largely instrumental music except for the invented language used for the chanting throughout “La Faulx”) or easy comprehension (the odd time signatures, the complex structure, the long periods of atonality, et. al)...

Post-Structuralism

2011-04-20T05:09:00.000-07:00

a review of ANBB's new album (Alva Noto and Blixa Bargeld)

RIP Sidney Lumet

2011-04-12T06:41:00.000-07:00

Unfortunatey, all clips of Network on Youtube restricted embedding, so here's a tune of mine from 10 years ago (probably recorded earlier). It's not great, but it has that fantastic corporate cosmology speech in it.

DMX Krew

2011-04-05T18:14:00.000-07:00

Wave Funk/Prolapse of the Wave Function reviewed

Sixteen F***ing Years of G-Stone

2011-03-26T20:15:00.000-07:00

Review a la PopMatters.

Catching up on RIP

2011-03-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

Nate Dogg

Joe Morello

Mike Starr

Smiley Culture

Pirate Day Riddims

2011-03-10T04:44:00.001-08:00

Jack Sparrow- Circadian

No Longer a Ghost, Still in Colour

2011-03-01T18:50:00.000-08:00

Cut Copy- Zonoscope

Candid, Americana Shots

2011-03-01T18:48:00.000-08:00

Mark McGuire- Living With Yourself

Traversing the Wormhole

2011-03-01T18:28:00.000-08:00

A review of Adam X's brilliant Traversable Wormhole project

Re: James Blake and What Makes an Enemy

2011-02-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

Dear internet,

Back before the turn of the millenium, underground music found enemies in above-ground culture and waged war against the ongoing celeberation of these figures. There was a sense that the discussion, mediated by a limited number of forums (MTV, Radio, Major Music Pubs), was being dominated at the expense of valid alternatives. At times, the ubiquity of these people (for a partial list, see all the people listed in Negativland's "Michael Jackson") was so vast that it seemed like you couldn't turn around without being forced to hear their name or listen to their crappy music. The cultural assumptions were that you belonged to one of the preordained cliques of commercial claptrap and you could only choose between these culturually approved icons in order to participate in polite society. Furthermore, the burgeoning yuppie culture, which embraced standardization and the pursuit of money (and, tacitly, misogyny, class division, homophobia, racism, et al.), welcomed these enemies as their own- winners. The battle for the conversation was a battle for historical recollection and sacralization. The underground was not necessarilly against commodification, it just wanted to be able to allow itself to be commodified without compromises. The underground wanted a capitalism with meaning as opposed to a capitalism for capitalism's sake, which seemed to be the new mint for the artists that came of age in the wake of neoliberalism.

Therefore, James Blake is not an enemy. His overexposure is the result of an overabundance of media, not a corporate annointment to sainthood. Internet, your backlash stands on weak legs and your vitriol is idiotic. If any of you had ever bough a fucking album in the past ten years, Blake would not be whoring himself to every half-cooked URL. Just because you and your stodgy friends simulatenously bitch about the same artist on message boards does not mean you are inundated with said musician. Guess what? The underground won. It's no longer being drowned out by Lady Gaga. There are hundred of forums that can talk about the new James Blake album for a month and a half before moving on to something else that we'll all hate before it even comes out. Guess what else? People are still listening to Lady Gaga anyway. I'm sure these two things are perfectly coincidental.

This is by no means a call for less valid negative criticism of a flash-in-the-pan when he/she/it deserves it. Just please stop complaining about how you're "sooo sick" of hearing about someone who doesn't even make the charts of an industry that can't top a 40,000 album selling number one. I'm sorry James Blake stole exactly half of your 10 second attention span, but Tumbling your disgust at this fact is not going to accomplish anything save create a culture too afraid to ever welcome anything new for fear they may be laughed at the next day.

I hope this comes out better than I think it does when I re-read it in the morning.

With all this said, here is my review of James Blake

and here's a few other recent reviews:

Sistol (Luomo, Vladislav Delay, Moritz Von Oswald Trio) with a new album and a reissue

Cosmo Vitelli's band Bot'Ox

RIP John Barry

2011-02-05T13:38:00.000-08:00

The Science of Sleep: An Electronic Lullaby

2011-01-30T18:19:00.000-08:00

My latest Difference Engine column. Usually, I try not to get personal with my criticism, but for this one I couldn't help myself.

2011-01-17T17:11:00.000-08:00

"Will there be another time
Will there be another time
Another year, another wish to say?

Will there be another time
Will there be another time
Another year, another wish to stay?

When the evening light wants to be so bright
And the morning sound is out of sight
Can there be another word to say
Or do we have to give it all away?"
-Nico "Sixty-Forty" (also covered by Broadcast)

A few recent reviews

2011-01-17T09:46:00.000-08:00

Haven't been keeping up with blogging my reviews lately. Illnesses, upcoming lifechanging events, and the like slowing me down more than usual. Here's a few thing:

A short on the fence take on Shed's The Traveller that seems like it was written eons ago and was finally published:

"The bits and sketches on The Traveller feel like cropped portions of a painting, delineated fractions of the whole lost in transportation, spilled out of the luggage and shattered into shards on the hotel room floor."

A bit longer on Plastikman's career-spanning Kompilation:

It wasn’t a music that sought to expose the secret organic mess of industrialization a la post-punk. Rather, it dispelled the rhetorical agitprop and questions of control/agency altogether and found quiet glory in the pure automatization of late capitalist production, the churning out of military equipment and records equal gears in the same engine.

And then a brief one on Shoegazey wide-eyed Tears Run Rings

I've also got a brief blurb on Arp in the Slipped Discs section on albums that escaped our Top 60 Albums at PopMatters

Make Her Sleep My Song

2011-01-14T17:17:00.000-08:00

Absolutely devastated to her about Trish Keenan passing...
Broadcast have been my favorite group for some time now, even as they whittled down to a duo as of late. And though I rarely hold much stock in vocalists, Keenan's gorgeous commandingly sirenic voice was the epicenter of it all. Broadcast could easily fill 3 if not 4 of my top 20 of the naughts list (if I ever get around to making one).

So many incredible ones...might as well revisit the entire discography.

RIP Trish

Best Television of 2010

2011-01-08T19:34:00.000-08:00

I really didn't see that many films in 2010 due to the whole having a kid thing (still waiting to see Black Swan, Enter the Void, Red Riding Trilogy, Never Let Me Go, The Other Guys, Let Me In, True Grit, etc.) Instead, my wife and I did watch a ton of television.

As such, I've contributed to PopMatter's list of Best in Television with blurbs on my top two picks. Here's the full list.

1. Louie
2. Party Down
3. Friday Night Lights
4. Community
5. Dead Set
6. Fringe
7. Treme
8. Children's Hospital
9. Mad Men
10. Lost

Of the films that I did see, my top picks would probably be Splice, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, and the criminally underrated Shutter Island.

A Dark Corner of the Multiverse

2011-01-05T15:04:00.000-08:00

A review of the Multiverse (Tectonic, Kapsize, Vertical Sound, Caravan) comp from 2010, finally published at PopMatters.

Here's a taste:

"Music has been tracing in dark directions recently. Think witch house, Ben Frost, minimal wave, Miasmah Records, Ancient Methods, Ekoplekz, LA Vampires & Zola Jesus, Type Records, the sadly shortened Throbbing Gristle reunion, Demdike Stare, John Carpenter and Alan Howarth obsessions, et al. Perhaps this gravitation towards more sinister realms has come about because it’s easy to imagine austerity 2010 as dystopia now, a journey from the light, the dreaded cyberpunk end-product of corporate colonization where government and media are functionary arms of business ontology and the slow subtraction of quality of life standards is accelerated to repay the gambling debts of the permanent aristocracy. It seems appropriate that the music of the shadows would match the mood on the streets. Any modern day eschatology of this kind can find roots in the Rastafarian apocalypticism of dub, with it’s becoming-third-world backdrop. Thus, a re-examination of the dystopian origins of dubstep (first made in a far more dubby form than exists now) seems appropriate, as the genre seems to have imagined our current predicament before the fact.

"The compilation Dark Matter: Multiverse 2004-2009 is acutely titled. The “dark matter” of the title refers to both the shaded hue of much of the content (Joker’s neon Rayleight scattering being the major exception) and the astronomical concept of “dark matter”, which is a hypothetical gravitational force that is undetectable, but inferable from the surrounding observable matter. Dark matter in the latter sense is an argument for the influence of the space between, those negative dub apertures which imbue those notes and interspersed riddims with so much more intensity. The paranoia of dubstep then is theoretically proper. Whereas psychedelia seeks to unite all notes until one is indistinguishable from the other, dub estranges and alienates them, examining how one note can never really know another."

RIP Mick Karn

2011-01-04T15:11:00.000-08:00

A fantastic talent and a bass genius. So crucial to the Japan aesthetic, their albums would have been miserable flops without him.

To Top It Off in 2010

2010-12-22T07:04:00.000-08:00

Ten EPs

1. Balam Acab- See Birds EP

2. Blondes- Touched EP

3. Raime- Raime EP

4. LA Vampires and Zola Jesus-LA Vampires and Zola Jesus

5. James Blake- CMYK EP

6. James Blake- The Bells Sketch EP

7. Pariah- Safehouses EP

8. Various Artists- Let Me Shine For You

9. oOoOO- oOoOO EP

10. Milton Bradley- The Unheard Voice from Outer Space EP

Twenty Albums

1. Emeralds- Does it Look Like I'm Here?

2. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti- Before Today

3. Arp- The Soft Wave

4. El Guincho- Pop Negro

5. High Places- High Places Vs Mankind

6. Seven Fields of Aphelion- Periphery

7. Sun Araw- On Patrol

8. John Roberts- Glass Eights

9. Mark McGuire-Living With Yourself

10. Traversable Wormhole- Vol 1-5

11. Flying Lotus- Cosmogramma

12. Various Artists- Numbers 1

13. Four Tet- There is Love in You

14. Kanye West- My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

15. Scuba- Triangulation

16. Oneohtrix Point Never- Returnal

17. Monolake- Silence

18. Stellar Om Source- Trilogy Select

19.Pantha Du Prince- Black Noise

20. Altered Natives- Tenement Yard Vol 1

Fifty Singles
1. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti- Round and Round
2. Jam City- Ecstasy Refix
3. Balam Acab- See Birds (Moon)
4. Starkey- Stars
5. Cut Copy- Where I'm Going
6. Darkstar- Gold
7. Girl Unit- Wut
8. Raffertie- 7th Dimension
9. Jamie XX- Far Nearer
10. Roska and Untold- Myth
11. Deadboy- If U Want Me /If U Want Me (Brackles and Shortstuff mix)
12. El Guincho-Bombay
13. Delorean- Stay Close
14. Kanye West feat Pusha T- Runaway
15. Azari & III- Indigo
16. Bob Holroyd- African Drug (T. Williams Keye Mix)
17. Hackman-More Than Ever
18. Wiley and Chew Fu- Take That
19. Cee-Lo- Fuck You
20. Forest Swords- Rattling Cage
21. Lando Kal- 3d Action Jackson
22. KOF- Fire It Up (Funkystepz mix)
23. Rihanna- Rude Boy
24. John Foxx- Flightpath Tegel
25. High Places- Can't Feel Nothing
26. Submerse- Stay
27. Deftones- Sextape
28. Drake- Fireworks
29. Cosmetics- Black Leather Gloves (20JFG mix)
30. Grouper- Hold
31. The Dream- Yamaha
32. Skream- Where You Should Be
33. Dennis Ferrer- Hey Hey
34. Neon Indian- Sleep Paralyst
35. Janelle Monae- Tightrope
36. Altered Natives- Rass Out
37. Factory Floor- A Wooden Box
38. Jamie Vex'd- Saturn's Reply
39. The End of All Existence- The End Of All Existence
40. Scuba- Before
41. LD- Shake It
42. Ok Go- This Too Shall pass
43. Active Child- Wilderness
44. Here We Go Magic- The Collector
45. Low Sea- Never Yours
46. Pearson Sound- Down With You
47. D-bridge- Love Hotel
48. Keepaway-Yellow Wings
49. Conforce- Intimidation
50. Ke$ha- Tik Tok

"In They Live, everyday life is Moriarity"

2010-12-15T07:04:00.000-08:00

I have a review up over here on Jonathan Lethem's book-length essay on John Carpenter's excellent film They Live

Here's Zizek's article that Lethem quotes liberally from in the book.

A few other notes:

1. With regard to the infamous fight sequence, Lethem goes to great lengths to try to unlock its power and justify its existence. I’m still not entirely convinced that the whole sordid ordeal wasn’t just a contractual obligation either by the studio or Roddy Piper’s agent that ensured he be given ample time to showcase his wrestling skills in the film. Perhaps, such a contract did exist and Carpenter decided to make it the most ridiculous thing in the world as payback, “wagering the film’s whole stakes decisively on a pop culture/’termite art’ bet”, as Lethem says.

In the end, the best justification for its existence though is Zizek’s; “Liberation hurts. You have to be forced to put on the glasses”. For Frank, being black in America is hard enough. He feels that he doesn’t need the extra struggle, the middle class malaise of living amongst superficial hideous monsters. Solidarity with white America undercuts minority struggle because it’s ultimately white values which are always given political urgency. It's thus best for black America to invent its own mythology about its detachment from power. All the conspiratorial hubbub (seen all over the place in hip-hop literature) about the illuminati and William Cooper (detailed excellently in Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop) contains a hint of truth, the conspiracy is there (see Julian Assange's essay linked to below), but it's nothing so obvious as a secret society or a specifically totalitarian ideology.

In order to be so hesitant, Nada has to at least expect that something awful lingered on the other side, enough to drive a man who just a day previously said he “believes in America” to go on a shooting spree.

2. In the chapter Los Angeles Plays Itself, Lethem documents briefly the history of Hollywood’s resentment toward television as a systemic complex of cultural degradation, ignoring its own complicity in such affairs. Yet, in They Live, the inclusion of Hollywood in its invectives would not only ring hollow (being a stupid horror movie and all), but also carry with it the unwanted side effect of self-reflexivity, posing the cognitive arena as an ironical field, a lark almost. In order for They Live to be successful, it has to be played completely serious (all hammy one-liner puns aside). After all, They Live is not a farce, but a tragedy posing as a farce.

3. Lethem has good fun poking fun of the cheapness of the sunglasses (Hoffman Lenses), which is fine, but there does seem to be a pretty practical reason for them being so cheap (apart from prop department budget constraints)- they’re being made in private on the black market by what seems to be at best pretty blue collar revolutionaries. In all likeliness, the lack the financial capital (not to mention the aesthetic finesse) to fashion Ray-Bans at the drop of a hat.

4. Holly’s motivation does remain a mystery throughout, as Lethem briefly points out. Is she a spy the whole time? Has she been bribed with something that makes betrayal of the species that much easier a la Drifter? Or is genuinely loyal, being in a comfy middle/possibly upper middle class position for the local TV affiliate? One would think the ghouls would never allow anyone human too close to their precious signal unless they were certain they could be trusted not to blow up the satellite dish. Holly seems to “know” as much as Nada, but her allegiance remains with the ghouls. She’s quite believable when Nada first accompanies her to her apartment and she gets down on her knees stating “I’ll do anything you want.” Perhaps, she prefers subjugation, playing master and servant, if you will. If power is indeed sexy, as Hollywood continually tells us it is, does our compliance with it suggest that the obedient get a sadomasochistic thrill? Consider the following by Deleuze and Guattari, cited several times before by K-Punk: (quote)

"The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolutions of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in morning and evening."

5. Lethem tries to find a precedent in Drifter’s speech about how “there ain’t no countries any more” and how the ghouls already own everything, citing it as kind of a birth pang to the nascent globalization movement that surround the Berlin IMF conference in 1988, which was after production on the film ceased. But Lethem fails to recognize that this speech bares a slight resemblance to the one given by Ned Beatty to convert Peter Finch’s Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network. As owner of the conglomerate that operates Beale’s network, Beatty’s speech is the perfect enunciation of postmodern financial capital a good 4 or 5 years before at happen, back it was just a neoliberal fantasy. Beatty espouses that the real nations of the world are DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, IBM, ITT, AT&T, and Exxon; “ one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.” The world is thereby subject to the “immutable bylaws of business” and hints, a la Fukuyama roughly 15 years later, that all of history has been pushing in this direction for a long time. “The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.” And the world is now so close to achieving its end, to become an “ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.” Sound familiar?

During the film’s “perfect sequence”, Nada encounters a ghoul paying for a newspaper with money that declares “This is Your God”. It’s also notable that Finch’s Beale ends this exchange with Beatty by confirming his faith in the beautiful and perfect math of the markets: “I have seen the face of God”.

More Best Music Lists

2010-12-15T04:38:00.000-08:00

PopMatters is still running their Best Of Music 2010 features, and I've got a couple of blurbs here and there

at the Best Albums list, a small piece on Emeralds

Really glad they expanded this to 70 entries this year. 70 is quite a lot, but the most interesting stuff seems to be in the last 20 entries or so.

Here's the original Emeralds review again
at the Best Reissues list, a bit on the Neu! Box Set

PopMatters Presents The Best of Electronic Music 2010

2010-12-10T19:17:00.001-08:00

I edited this significantly cool feature, which you should read in its entirety and then listen to all of the music associated with it. Big up colleagues David Abravanel, Jason Cook, Mike Newmark, Alan Ranta, and Dominic Umile.

Wicked Leaks

2010-12-07T17:37:00.000-08:00

Any one with even a passing interest in the Julian Assange/WikiLeaks drama as it plays out should read Giovanni Tiso's take on it and, particularly, a brilliant article he links to which examines two essays written by Assange in 2006:

There's little to say about Julian Assange's arrest today sexual assault charges. It'd be naive to assume these are trumped charges, despite their convenience to the authoritarian regimes who'd like to eradicate WikiLeaks from the planet and resume business as usual with regards to state secrecy. Assange, like anyone, is fully capable of doing what he has been accused of and all one can really hope for in this instance is a fair and unbiased trial where justice is ultimately served, be he guilty or not.

The question then is not whether the UK is right in cooperating with extradition, but whether the UK would have extradited just anybody on rape allegations? What about Roman Polanski? Would they arrest and extradite others, such as Henry Kissinger, wanted for War Crimes in several countries?

One could never uneqivocally proclaim that the charges filed against Assange, the Manchurian Candidate, have political timing, but come on, could it be any more bleeding obvious? The U.S. and the other world powers being scrutinized by the leaks know the rape charges have exactly zero to do with WikiLeaks the organization. Furthermore, so does the media. But both institutions also know that the public's faith in ad hominem arguments guarantees that all it takes to discredit an ideology (here, Wikileaks) is to deface the public persona of said ideas.

With Assange out of the picture, Visa and Mastercard acted quickly to cut off the site's source of revenue, online donations, establishing that the old order is still in charge. It may just be a matter of weeks before the site is cut off completely, having spent the last week or so swapping servers until being discovered. These governments are quite naive though if they think this is the end of information leaks. It's only a matter of time before something else replaces it. They've got a million different mirrors and a million different names for it. You can't shut up everyone.

PopMatters Best Singles of 2010

2010-12-06T19:24:00.000-08:00

I've got an entry on here for Ariel Pink, but check out the rest of the list as well, of course.

Who'll Fall

2010-12-02T15:34:00.000-08:00

My Obit for Sleazy @ PopMatters

Fuck Dance Let's Art

2010-11-30T03:07:00.000-08:00

An exploration of art in pop and the new American Underground

Goodnight Sweet Prince

2010-11-30T03:05:00.000-08:00

RIP Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson

2010-11-28T19:08:00.000-08:00

Incredibly saddened to hear of Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson's passing. Coil music's had an incredible impact on me and did wonders to shape my musical palette, all for the better. I will deeply miss hearing new things from him in whatever incarnation he happened to be in. I hope to write more about Christopherson in the near future, but for now please enjoy some of the great tunes below, which show just a piece of his incredible breadth.

Downward is Hellward

2010-11-21T19:03:00.000-08:00

Giovanni Tiso with a really fascinating piece on cartoon falls and implicit anxiety within the cell frames

The Strange Case of the Digital Larynx

2010-11-19T18:36:00.000-08:00

David Bevan at Pitchfork has a really interesting column on the newer uses of voice manipulation. Seems interesting in relation to my Radiohead article. Bevan does trace a lineage, but does note exactly get at what makes these newer uses unique, the ways in which the whole concept of vocals in a song becomes wraith-like in and of itself. In these tunes, there's the distinct sense that the joy of Western song has already been depleted, that the desire to sing like that is itself an extinct precarity, that times have becomes so sad (Burial) or confusing (James Blake) that the voice can only be memorialized or sacralized (the gigantic church of sound that is Balam Acab's "See Birds").

Also, Simon R has tipped me off to this new project from K-Punk, which set sites at audio hallucinations and other perversions of the voice.

Obviously, there's tons of examples of this phenomenon, but here's a few more examples:

DISCONNECTION by stalker

Did it Get Cold in Here?

2010-11-10T17:33:00.000-08:00

This has been posted a million places already and I'm a million days late, but it's bears repeating: Phil Sherburne on the dark gothic shades of modern music, particularly electronics

A Crisis of Capitalism

2010-11-09T19:11:00.000-08:00

First, on the recent election, Lenin's tomb nails it by taking a looking at the truly silent majority, the vastly understudied nonvoter demographic:

"Class still profoundly determines voting behaviour, and it determines it all the more if you consider non-voting one form of that behaviour."

It's kind of amazing how the discontent of a slim minority of independents always seems to garner so much lip-time, while the vast number of people not voting in any given election is scarcely even mentioned, just assumed.

-----

Elsewhere, I discovered this fantastic lecture by David Harvey that attacks the whole of the crisis and puts it in surprisingly lucid terms.

Choice cuts:

On how the crisis originated out of a need to resolve tensions leftover by the postmodern fictions created by neoliberal policy status post the 1970s recession:

"The current crisis originated in the steps taken to resolve the crisis of the 1970s. These steps included:

(a) the successful assault upon organized labor and its political institutions while mobilizing global labor surpluses, instituting labor-saving technological changes and heightening competition. The result has been global wage repressions (a declining share of wages in total GDP almost everywhere) and the creation of an even vaster disposable labor reserve living under marginal conditions.

(b) undermining previous structures of monopoly power and displacing the previous stage of (nation state) monopoly capitalism by opening up capitalism to far fiercer international competition. Intensifying global competition translated into lower non-financial corporate profits. Uneven geographical development and inter-territorial competition became key features in capitalist development, opening the way towards the beginnings of a hegemonic shift of power particularly but not exclusively towards East Asia.

(c) utilizing and empowering the most fluid and highly mobile form of capital – money capital – to reallocate capital resources globally (eventually through electronic markets) thus sparking deindustrialization in traditional core regions and new forms of (ultra-oppressive) industrialization and natural resource and agricultural raw material extractions in emergent markets. The corollary was to enhance the profitability of financial corporations and to find new ways to globalize and supposedly absorb risks through the creation of fictitious capital markets.

(d) At the other end of the social scale, this meant heightened reliance on “accumulation by dispossession” as a means to augment capitalist class power. The new rounds of primitive accumulation against indigenous and peasant populations were augmented by asset losses of the lower classes in the core economies (as witnessed by the sub-prime housing market in the US which foisted a huge asset loss particularly upon African American populations).

(e) The augmentation of otherwise sagging effective demand by pushing the debt economy (governmental, corporate and household) to its limits (particularly in the USA and the UK but also in many other countries from Latvia to Dubai).

(f) Compensating for anemic rates of return in production by the construction of whole series of asset market bubbles, all of which had a Ponzi character, culminating in the property bubble that burst in 2007-8. These asset bubbles drew upon finance capital and were facilitated by extensive financial innovations such as derivatives and collateralized debt obligations."

On (late) capitalism's long-term survival rate:

"Can capitalism survive the present trauma? Yes. But at what cost? This question masks another. Can the capitalist class reproduce its power in the face of the raft of economic, social, political and geopolitical and environmental difficulties? Again, the answer is a resounding 'yes.' But the mass of the people will have to surrender the fruits of their labour to those in power, to surrender many of their rights and their hard-won asset values (in everything from housing to pension rights), and to suffer environmental degradations galore to say nothing of serial reductions in their living standards which means starvation for many of those already struggling to survive at rock bottom. Class inequalities will increase (as we already see happening). All of that may require more than a little political repression, police violence and militarized state control to stifle unrest."

You're obviously seeing this in Greece and France and American conservatives seem intent on ridding the earth of "unsustainable" pensions over here, particularly the defined benefit plans which rely on set formulas to determine payouts. It's unlikely pensions will be disintegrated by sweeping federal legislation though. More than likely, it'll be a confederated platform of gradualized slash and burn, state by state business by business. One of the great strength of American capitalists is their ability to make the deferral of earned and hard-fought rights so subtle that the larger populace forgets that they even had these rights to begin with, and thus avoiding the need to resort to statist repression, which almost inevitably carries with it a democratic backlash. Best to avoid the backlash (and the democracy) altogether by assigning middle management the task of de-libertizing the general population.

On the narrow sight of diagnosticians of the crisis and its defeat:

"We urgently need an explicit revolutionary theory suited to our times. I propose a “co-revolutionary theory” derived from an understanding of Marx’s account of how capitalism arose out of feudalism. Social change arises through the dialectical unfolding of relations between seven moments within the body politic of capitalism viewed as an ensemble or assemblage of activities and practices:

a) technological and organizational forms of production, exchange and consumption

b) relations to nature

c) social relations between people

d) mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs

e) labor processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects

f ) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements

g) the conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction.

Each one of these moments is internally dynamic and internally marked by tensions and contradictions (just think of mental conceptions of the world) but all of them are co-dependent and co-evolve in relation to each other. The transition to capitalism entailed a mutually supporting movement across all seven moments. New technologies could not be identified and practices without new mental conceptions of the world (including that of the relation to nature and social relations). Social theorists have the habit of taking just one of the these moments and viewing it as the “silver bullet” that causes all change. We have technological determinists (Tom Friedman), environmental determinists (Jarad Diamond), daily life determinists (Paul Hawkin), labor process determinists (the autonomistas), institutionalists, and so on and so forth. They are all wrong. It is the dialectical motion across all of these moments that really counts even as there is uneven development in that motion."

On the futility of decentralized leftist efforts:

"Broad adhesion to post-modern and post-structuralist ideas which celebrate the particular at the expense of big-picture thinking does not help. To be sure, the local and the particular are vitally important and theories that cannot embrace, for example, geographical difference, are worse than useless. But when that fact is used to exclude anything larger than parish politics then the betrayal of the intellectuals and abrogation of their traditional role become complete."

Electronic Music Needs a Few Solar Panels

2010-11-09T18:37:00.000-08:00

Fascinating new article at mnml ssgs on the state of electronic music, comparing it kindly to the insurmountable disaster of climate change

The Signal and the Violence of American Identity Politics (Director's Cut)

2010-10-31T17:21:00.000-07:00

first published at PopMatters, here's the director's cut version of my essay on the underrated, underseen film The Signal, a film I (believe it or not) saw by accident when trying to attend a screener of Be Kind Rewind.

"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system, set up by the non-dreamers"- William S. Burroughs

" Do you hear that? It's past the noise in your head. That is the natural world. That was here a long time before us. It's going to be here a long time after we're gone."- Ben, The Signal

Upon the theatrical release of The Signal in early 2008, the movie was received timidly by audiences and critics alike. The cumulative totals on Rotten Tomatoes (55) and Metacritic (63) betray a disparity amongst filmgoers, who mostly found the film's three acts jarring and disjointed, but an enjoyable break from convention. Viewers disagreed about where the film's narrative heart lied and to what exactly it spoke. Most felt cheated either by the inconsistencies in tone or the broadness of its perceived thematic cathexis, both of which they felt spoilt an otherwise rewarding thriller. Whether they saw Transmission II as the film's point of rupture or its saving grace, or whether they envisioned the film as a wry commentary on consumerism or just a vapid genre exercise, no singular conclusion about The Signal could be reached.

Ironically, the fracture of these parallax views is correlative to The Signal's themes of identity and perspective, and how each are vulnerable to interrogative manipulation by mass media. The creation of these divisions in the film threatens to completely alienate each individual from his or her community and thereby strengthen the stranglehold of the transmission and reinforce its ideology of violence as communication.

[What I hope to offer by this essay is not a finite exegesis of The Signal's interpretive subject matter nor an attempt at a universally applicable tautology for future readings of what the film might tender to 21st century audiences, but rather the first in what I hope is a series of critical analyses of a film that seems to carry the torch from cerebral horror classic like David Cronenberg's Videodrome and George A. Romero's work, which are directly referenced in The Signal. As a product of more modern era, The Signal approaches the problems of media and cultural violence through a fresh lens, but it shares with the texts of Cronenberg and Romero the transgressive thesis of Western society as pathology, viral and dehumanizing. Unlike many of its critics, I find the film and its wandering gaze to function well as a complete project with each of its many elements imperative to the themes at play. I hope to keep The Signal's already expansive dialogue open.

Many of those initial reviews tended to focus more on form and process rather than product. The Signal has a central gimmick in that it was divided between its three creators (David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry, and Dan Bush), who worked exquisite corpse style on the script and took turns in the director's chair for each of the film's three "Transmissions" ("Crazy in Love," "Jealousy Monster," and "Escape from Terminus"). Knowing that each "Transmission" is attributable to a separate directorial personality makes it easy to dismiss the film's tonal temperaments as dilettante experimentalism for experimentalism's sake, especially as it relates to a crew of cinematic virgins with no longform films on their resumes to buttress the depth of their form experiments.

Yet, The Signal is supposed to be a film infected with its own crazy. It is mercurial precisely because its characters are and driven to abandon reason in favor of emotion and to abandon emotion in favor of rationalization of their outrageous behavior. The presupposition of reality is questioned at every turn in the film. In fact, the script's most dramatic mood shift, which occurs between the gripping psychodrama of Bruckner's "Crazy in Love" and Bush's sardonically funny "Jealousy Monster", is absolutely integral to understanding both the ideology of and the sheer brutality behind the wave of violence sweeping over the film's fictional town of Terminus (an aptly appropriated 19th century pseudonym for the Directors' hometown of Atlanta).

In fact, in many ways, the plot is perfectly in keeping with many of the conventions of Aristotelian drama (a three act piece taking place within a 24 hour period). Yet, the ways in which the directors toy with these conventions is perhaps their true masterstroke. With each curtain of the film's three acts comes a shift not only in filmmaking perspective, but narrative perspective as well. Transmission I or "Crazy in Love" follows Mya, visibly careworn even before the outbreak, as she discovers and subsequently tries to evade the infected. Transmission II or "Jealousy Monster" follows a paranoid trio of partygoers, dividing the film's triptych further, though mostly focusing on Mya's husband Lewis as he struggles to understand his newfound illness. Transmission III or "Escape From Terminus" mostly adopts the vantage of Mya's extramarital fling Ben, who is infected, but has taught himself how to control it, or at least he thinks so. His confusion makes the narrative increasingly unreliable and deteriorative. Transmission I is mostly realist, its indeterminacy of causality shared by Mya and the viewer. Transmission II is a farce. With intentions of the signal revealed to the viewer, the film shows us a slice of how everyday life has adapted to its influence in a fiercely satirical cracked-mirror view of our own world. Transmission III is completely hyperrealistic, wherein the viewer completely loses his or her connection to any singular cinematic reality.

The plot of The Signal centers around Mya (Anessa Ramsey), a twenty-something trapped in a not-entirely-loveless, but not-entirely-fulfilling marriage with an exterminator named Lewis (A.J. Lewis). Mya becomes entangled in a tryst with a photographer named Ben (Justin Welborn), who, after a night of bliss, begs her to run off with him

Anything is possible, Ben informs her, eager to dissuade her hesitancy. "We could go up to the rooftop and build and exotic flower garden. Or take one of my cameras and dress up like homeless people and infiltrate their society. Or we could throw my TV out the window and replace it with coloring books. Or we could leave Terminus tomorrow", Ben rattles off, somewhat presciently. Though she secretly wants to submit to his promise of absolute freedom, Mya doesn't feel she can abandon her obligations to her husband so hastily. Concurrently, a transmission is sent out from an unknown source through all electronic media that begets a massacre at the hands of everyday citizens turning against their loved-ones, co-workers, and the random passerby.

Mya's refusal to act becomes, in turn, as much the catalyst for the events that transpire as the signal's simultaneously-occurring mass brainwash across the minds of its recipients, at least from her perspective, a perspective which guides the start of the film and thus becomes the center of our engagement with the alternate realities that arise from the infected plotline. To Mya, it is only within the moment that she surrenders her independent will, the minute she appeases the hegemony of tradition (her failed marriage, her life in Terminus), that her options become a clear path to death, manifested by the nightmares that await her at the moment she reaches the parking lot of Ben's high-rise. To escape her restraints, she must leave Terminus, with Ben, and, as he suggests "fuck our way to freedom".

Mya's mistake was in thinking that her identity was fixed, which is a premise the signal reinforces, strengthens, and regulates using innate violence within its frustrated working class hosts as a kind of self-defense mechanism for cultural conformity. It is bred familiarly, tribally almost, particularly within Mya's husband Lewis, who sees family as the only unit worth saving. All impediments to his (and to a lesser extent Mya's) happiness become perceived threats. Lewis's perception of Mya and what she represents becomes an abstraction, a kind of nationalism and absolutism of identity. This is not his own conclusion, the film suggests, but one reached through contact with the signal and its rendering of fear and desire.

"It's telling me what I should do and what I should want", Lewis says at one point. "I want my wife and I want my home and I want all of you people to stop bothering us".

The signal, like Max Renn's producer Masha says of Videodrome in the film of the same title, has "a philosophy. And that is what makes it dangerous".

It's no secret that the signal itself functions as a critique of mass media. At a pre-screening of the film in Philadelphia, Bruckner made the unexpected revelation that much of the script had come about in the wake of overdosing on 2004 election coverage. He recounted a crippling depression over the media's role in such a dire debate, how it transformed rhetoric into reality and created a shallow framework for understanding. Indeed, while the results would by no means inspire men and women to go out gratuitously murdering one another, these were matters of life and death. People's lives for the next four years were literally on the line; in Iraq and Afghanistan, in American hospitals, in hurricane-torn regions, etc. The public, given such critical circumstances, was not given a sufficient enough platform on which to make a decision, regardless of what their options were. It was driven by fear and the media's determinism of American identity.

The absolutism of Lewis's ideals becomes a stopgap for analysis. For him, problems can no longer be solved by any means other than pure visceral, primal response. Yet, Lewis's aggressive impulses are never engendered from any kind of Darwinian bestiality (like, say, a movie werewolf) or a hopeless automatonism (like, say, Romero's zombies), but from constant fear of losing control over his life. Lewis fears not only physical threats on his person and his wife, but also attacks upon his value system. To the infected Lewis, these two are proportionately identical threats and require appropriately proportionate reactions.

Thus, Lewis represents the psychosis of the modern American dream, which is cold, individualistic, self-aggrandizing, and contingent upon the destruction or marginalization of other viewpoints. He is the red-blooded red state alpha male who feels tragically powerless in the face of change. Which is a fear that is not entirely baseless, though his scapegoats are falsely targeted. At this juncture in the American saga, it has become widely accepted that the price of happiness is paid for in blood (be it through the blood of soldiers, the blood of victims of foreign wars, or the blood of those who perform functions that we consider to be beneath us). When conflicts are settled using only violence, it reduces language to no more than a perfunctory byproduct of the violent action itself. The signal, while seemingly avoiding rationalism in favor of survivalism, becomes its own rationale. Every killing has its justification ("He had it coming. Probably." Clark, one of the partygoers from Transmission II says), but the violence itself is the end communication. And like Burroughs’ language bug, the message is viral, a meme that spreads rapidly throughout Terminus, escalating the tension with every fresh corpse. Killing begets killing. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

This leads to mass uncertainty about each other's motivation. This uncertainty is voiced by Rod, Lewis's friend who at one point tries to stop Lewis from bludgeoning a third friend with a baseball bat. Rod eventually becomes Mya's guide out of her apartment complex, where the film's bloodshed begins. He recounts his encounter with a man on the rooftop whom he slayed in self-defense while trying to escape. Rod realizes that the man did not necessarily mean him any harm, but had instead only perceived Rod's defensive weapon as a threat. "He's not crazy. He thinks I'm crazy", Rod says. Even those who have not been switched on by the signal catch the bug via close proximity to, and hence the socialization of, the utter madness of life in Terminus.

This sense of alarmism and bewilderment comes from a concept the filmmakers seem to have borrowed from George A. Romero's The Crazies, a movie about a military occupation trying to contain an outbreak of a rage-like virus (a thinly veiled metaphor for Vietnam and the attempt to halt the spread of communism). The Crazies, like The Signal, poses the ethical quandary; how can you tell whether someone is being defensive or offensive when they feel that their homeland and/or their person is threatened? The citizens of Terminus face no looming authoritarian symbol of oppression like the omnipresent military in The Crazies. What the infected of The Signal can't seem to fathom is that their disease constitutes a form of mental colonialism. It is accepted as a substitute reality due to the pandemonium that surrounds them. Instead of lashing out at their TVs, the perceived threats from their friends and neighbors become a manufactured source of oppression. The oppressor in The Signal is an underlying, parental figure in absentia. It is culture itself, madness personified in its elusion of guilt. Western culture as pathology.

Similar to the way in which counterterrorism as a methodology strives to exploit divisions within its enemies, be it between rival Islamist factions or Soviet and Chinese communists, the signal, fulfilling its function as a part of mass media, seeks to create these divisions between every single person on the green earth. Each household unit becomes a tribe, each consumer preference a character trait, each opinion a valid one, each decision the correct one. This leads to a society of individuals, holistically alienated from one another, intimately oppressed within the panopticon and hence unable to huddle as masses to overthrow their jailers.

Mya seemingly avoids infection by plugging herself in to a closed-circuit system in the form of her portable Discman. As she walks around listening to Ola Podrida's cover of Joy Division's "Atmosphere" ad nauseum through headphones on the mix CD Ben made for her, her headphones make her able to shut out the signal's technological domination over other media. The discman and headphones may be an allusion to Lynne Ramsey's cinematic adaptation of Alan Warner's novel Morvern Callar, another film about a young woman who uses music as a means of escaping an unbearable reality. For Morvern, her mix tape allows her a way to simultaneously detach herself from and reconnect with her dead husband, still rotting in her bathtub. Mya's disconnection appears to be strategic, yet she also maintains a, perhaps unrealistic, fantasy of reengaging with Ben by meeting him at the train station and righting her erroneous decision to leave his side.

Television is the major method of infection in Terminus. Television, unlike Mya's headphones, is connected to a network of satellites and fiberoptic cables broadcasting the same signal out over the airwaves. Television, perhaps moreso than any media, is ingrained with a kind of functional and structural hypnosis in its DNA. Whereas film is a projection, the reflection of light onto a surface, television is a light source, projecting itself onto your eyes, making the objective act of TV watching more similar to staring at the sun than watching a film.

Beyond its mesmerizing power as a substitute for fire and warmth, television belongs to the stratum of what Marshall McLuhan refers to as "Cool Media", or a media that requires high levels of user participation to properly engage with it. Much has been made about television's power to shape its viewership into passive receptors of synthesized truths. Romero's zombies, for example, while not the dupes of television specifically, are an outgrowth of cultural hegemonic enslavement, opiatized masses driven to mindless consumption (Dawn of The Dead) or forced to accept their role as underclass via distractions of spectacle (the fireworks in Land of the Dead). In these films, the victims of culture's stranglehold (the zombies) act en masse to convert and destroy everything that does not conform to their ethos. The "crazy" (as Rod dubs them) in The Signal are not out to transmogrify the masses into a facsimile of themselves. Instead, they remain delusionally convinced that they are the only sane remnants of a fractured society. 'My actions are justified, because every one else is crazy'.

Videodrome is a similar treatise in that it presents its afflicted as the victims of a predatory (and corporate/fascist) power that punishes its audiences for the depraved morals and transgressive desires that the videodrome itself has instilled in them. The signal, on the other hand, ossifies the notion that the choices made under television's influence are empowering, the unspoken backdrop being that much of the rest of life under the American system does not grant us the control available through violent recourse. Any kid who shoots up his school or any downsized worker who runs into his office or the nearest McDonalds or Unitarian church with an automatic weapon can attest to such.

Television allows its viewer to be wired into an exclusive community, a community constituted of the very culture industry its pervasive influence has created through the fetishization and demonization of various images and ideologies. We feel like we are part of that community, but unless we are part of the privileged elite, we remain unable to democratically alter its trajectory in any meaningful way except in those that mass media allows (mainly consumption and social rendering).

At the Philadelphia pre-screening, the filmmakers revealed that the signal itself, as it is portrayed on screen, was composed of famous disturbing images from television and popular culture that were manipulated and scrambled until they were unrecognizable. Though they're not visible in film, one could imagine any number that might fit perfectly (Budd Dwyer's televised suicide, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan's execution of a Vietnamese prisoner, the aftermath of suicide bombers in the Middle East, Nazi atrocities, 9/11).

The use of this footage may seem arbitrary since the end product is so obfuscated, but there's a sense in this editorial choice that the violence to which the film speaks is already embedded in the collective unconscious (the first few scenes of Transmission I also suggest that many of Terminus's would-be killers were already a little crazy before the signal tipped them over the edge). The 20th century was by far the bloodiest in history, even when adjusted for population density. And the 21st is shaping up to be no better, with a handful of conflicts raging at any given moment (Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Georgia, etc.) and the rapid growth of sectarianism not only globally but within microcommunities throughout the U.S. Indeed, watching the film from my hometown of Philadelphia just months after our murder rate had risen to the largest per capita of any major American city made the film's thesis of viral violence feel particularly pointed. Not long after, it seemed as if the simulacrum were escaping; two men at a Fullerton, CA showing of The Signal stabbed each other in the movie theater while the film played as background (both survived and the incident was unrelated to the film).

Upon first being exposed to the natal culture of violence that begins to rage throughout the apartment complex in Transmission I, the viewer can safely assume that what is happening on screen is actually happening within the film. The violence is stark, brutal, and random, and thereby familiar within the horror and thriller genres. By Transmission II, we're encountering characters who are already, only hours later, desensitized to this culture and facing the prospects of living within in it. The film's second act then becomes a kind of Brechtian farce (complete with the deus ex machina ending of Ben slamming a pesticide tank into Lewis's face) wherein violence becomes, as much for the viewers as the characters, normative.

The casualization of violence is an important factor for the horror genre. The everyday event, such as showering, swimming, talking on your cell phone, breaking up with a girlfriend, or camping, is exploited for its vulnerabilities in the horror film. The fear of death and the trivialization of its finality is part of what makes a horror film thrilling, rather than hopelessly sad. As viewers, we invite this danger into our lives (and our nightmares) in a sense because there's part of us that empathizes with this bloodlust. We want to see the dumb teens succumb to the serial killer's machete blade. Videodrome's Max Renn and his response to each video nasty is a perfect example of this stimulation. He is not only allured by the rush of the torture films, but also eroticized by the power of the imagery, the camera's ability to render heaven as hell and vice versa.

Max Renn, however, seeks out his transgressions. The Signal subverts its viewers while they think that the cable's gone out. I'd posit that the reason most viewers found the transition to Transmission II jarring is because it invites them to participate in the absurdist perspective of its mass murderers and then punishes them emotionally for this complicity.

In Transmission II, housewife Anna prepares for a New Year's Eve party as the signal overtakes her husband Ken. In self-defense, she kills him with a balloon pump. Soon after, Clark the landlord comes over asking if he can reclaim his hatchet and garbage bags that Ken borrowed. Unbeknownst to Anna, he needs them so he can chop up Rod, whose car crashed in the front of the housing complex. Soon after, Lewis arrives looking for Mya, who appears to him via hallucination in the form of Anna, who, for her part, simply thinks Lewis has arrived for the party. Thing get even more convoluted as an oblivious guest actually shows up for the party, eager to scout out loose women and do terrible, degrading things to them.

Throughout the sequence, there is a nervous tension that inspires a kind of slapstick violence, mostly perpetrated by Lewis who is eager to "exterminate with extreme prejudice". In the course of events, Lewis figures out that Anna is not Mya and flips out, convinced that Anna and Clark have done something to his wife. Just as the expectations of comedy become ripe, the film takes a decidedly grim turn. Lewis's on-screen execution of Anna is horrific, disfiguring her face by spraying pesticides in her eyes and mouth. Yet, for Lewis, the slapstick continues as she stumbles around, crashing into a wall in her blindness, nearly tripping over the couch full of corpses in party hats that Lewis has modelled. Now that such carnage is being perpetrated against characters we've has come to care about, the viewer immediately becomes culpable in the atrocities, having laughed over similar crimes just moments before.

Rather than wagging a finger at its audience like Michael Haneke's Funny Games, The Signal understands its own complicity in the reproduction, exploitation, and manufacture of tragedy. Its penitence is to expose its violence as bitter and denigrating. Gory and thrilling to be sure, but never something to be relished. At best, even violence in self-defense (and the film is especially deliberate to single out acts of preemptive violence, likely in defiance of the Bush doctrine) is a gray matter. After titillating us in the beginning of the second act with the prospect of normative superficial aggression, it pleads with us by the end of Transmission II to never adopt this perspective outside the realm of fantasy, to never become Lewis.

Transmission III jumps-off with Ben rescuing Clark by cracking Lewis's skull open with a pesticide tank, setting the stage for a finale wherein Ben can reunite with Mya and ride off into the sunset at train terminal 13. However, true to form, the film affords its characters no such simple resolutions. The pesticide tank assault, it seems, never really happened, or, at best, it was an exaggeration of Ben's psychotic mindset. This leads us to question what in the film, from the opening reel to the closing credits, is mere representation and what is true. Is any of the violence real? Or is all of the violence real, including the pesticide tank incident, depending on how you look at it? Or is the film's only reality that which we choose to believe, making us as delusioned by media as those infected by the signal?

Ben seems to believe that there is a natural world breathing and billowing beyond the societal static, the albatross of mental interference that constitutes the signal's presence, and thereby culture at large. "Do you hear that? It's past the noise in your head. That is the natural world. That was here a long time before us. It's going to be here a long time after we're gone." Anything beyond that is merely perspective. "It's a trick", he says. "If we change the way we look at things, the things we look at will change".

It follows then that the world of Terminus has become indistinguishable from its representation. The characters' hallucinations are far removed from their experiences in the natural world, which has become old reality. The television set has supplanted reality and supplied them with a new version of reality. In a culture so obsessed with believing its own fantasies, where every aspect of tis delusions is validated by a system eager to sell you your next one, each representation can only be replaced by a different representation. Hence, erasure of the new reality can only be temporary. As Videodrome's McLuhan-esque figure Brian Oblivion puts it, "Life on TV is more real than life in the flesh…and reality is less than television".

Ben discovers, through observing the signal via terminal 13's departure screen while Mya sits catatonic nearby staring into the void, that the only way to defeat Lewis is to strip him of his identity. Left without the one thing that defines him, Lewis is pure conditioning, without the will to self-actualize. He is only the sum of his aggression and the consequence of his actions.

Yet it is the film's final vision that prompt perhaps the most disturbing variation on these themes. Mya, after being forced by Lewis to stare directly into the signal, is rendered catatonic (not unlike Barbara in Night of the Living Dead, though it is mass media not the shock of change that renders her mute). Lewis, the tragic figure of the film, finds himself without a purpose and commits suicide, but not before strangling Clark as Ben daydreams that he is some kind of psychosomatic hero. Ben snaps Mya out of her trance, they hug, and a wordless montage appears on the screen that features Ben, Mya, and Clark rebuilding their lives and hopping that train out of town. All seems well, until the façade of their grand finale dissipates and Ben is still trying to reawaken Mya. He finally puts Mya's headphones back on her head. As Ola Podrida's version of "Atmosphere" is heard one final time, she closes her eyes and a single tear runs down her face.

There are plenty of ways to interpret this coda. Throughout the film, Ben seems to survive his struggles by returning to a flashing image of Mya staring at him on a train. Many see the montage as a flash forward, the anticipation of Ben's heroic fantasy completed. Yet, the themes discussed above would suggest a different interpretation. This is not Ben's reality, but Mya's dream, fantasized from within her signal-trance. After all, it's a vision that ends when Ben puts on her headphones. Ultimately, Mya's delusion, her vision to join Ben and "fuck our way to freedom" is just as abstract and untenable as Lewis's concept of the perfect family unit. It's that which puts her in the chair at the terminal and nearly kills her. This kind of simulated reality, albeit an idealistic one, is equally capable of replacing the actual, laying down our defenses, and making us vulnerable and unprepared for the harsh truths of the world around us. Mya, sleeping around, marrying a husband she doesn't love, placing her faith in a plan for an uncommitted train ride as her lasting salvation, is unprepared to meet the consequences of her actions.

Hence, the signal ends on by inferring that the ideal will always be more attractive than the actual. But there are no fantasy endings, no short ways out, no romance that can defeat modern horrors in and of itself. Beyond the noise, beyond the construct of identity, there's only the natural world. Only that has been here before we started ascribing our mythologies to it. Only that will be here after those mythologies destroy us.

A Pasture of Evil

2010-10-31T16:28:00.001-07:00

I'm loving all the dark music podcasts for halloween this year. I can't say I've had a chance to listen to all of these, but here's a nice repository.

Blackest Ever Black for Mnml Ssgs

Demdike Stare's Unsounded Mix

Alan Ranta's Soundscape mix for PopMatters

Chris Weingarten's Anti-Witch House Mix

Jon Brooks (of the Advisory Circle)'s Samhain Mix

Alan Howarth's Mix for Resident Advisor

The Outer Church Halloween mixtape

Answers Come in Dreams

2010-10-29T18:36:00.000-07:00

Meat Beat Manifesto's Answers Come in Dreams Reviewed here.

Still love, the sampledelic stuff, particularly Subliminal Sandwich, but I'm glad it's being phased out.

As a historical bonus, here's my review of their last one, Autoimmune

Death Comes to Those Who Wait

2010-10-29T03:31:00.000-07:00

A halloween podcast available here:

Tracklisting:

Orville Stoeber/Walter Sear- Let's Scare Jessica to Death 5
Cosmetics- Black Leather Gloves (20JFG Mix)
AIDS-3D- Zombie
Vito Acconci-You're Going to Die
Kid606- Dancehall of the Dead
Bam Bam- Where is your Child?
Forcefeel- I Can't Stop Raving (Make It Stop Mix)
Dmitri Shostakovich- Chamber Symphony for Strings op11
Biochip C- Fucking Evil
Rufige Cru- Ark Angel 3
Vito Acconci- You're Going to Die (continued)
Topaz Rags- Sightings
Broadcast and the Focus Group- Make My Sleep His Song
Orville Stoeber/Walter Sear- Follow Me Jessica
Black Mass- Voices of the Dead
Les Vampyrettes- Biomutaten
Inca Ore- Churpa Campurrado
Throbbing Gristle- Dead on Arrival (DOA)
Yello- Assistant's Cry
Carl McKnight- The Devil's Out Tonight
The Cats- Swan Lake
Venetian Snares- Devil's Totem
Gatekeeper- Tomb
Delia Derbyshire- The Phantoms of Darkness
Max Romeo- Chase the Devil (Paulstretch mix)
Orville Stoeber/Walter Sear- Jessica Final
Belbury- Poly- The Hidden Door

What Was It That You Tried to Say?

2010-10-28T19:23:00.000-07:00

What Was It That You Tried to Say? The Degeneration of the Voice in 'Kid A'

is an essay I wrote for PopMatters's excellent 10th anniversary of Radiohead's Kid A.

Although, I wish I'd mentioned at the end how media's tendency to marginalize outside voices has served to hold back experimentation in the music industry as much as political voices. Pop can remain unadventurous and secure in its own mechanizations, because the long tail will take care of all those who want experimentations. Here every one is allowed everything all of the time, but we're only offered what our personal marketing robots think we want. Hence, a post-Kid A diaspora of widely divergent sounds celebrated in their indigenous circles, but rejected by the institutional mainstream and thus failing to survive as breathable commodities. As great as all the album we praise online all are, they fail to chart and make an impact on popular culture. The greatest way to attack Animal Collective or Noam Chomsky is not to censor them, but to exclude them from the conversation, making them seem perhaps more fringe than they would if we were all forced to talk about them the way we discuss Lady Gaga and the Tea Party.

El Guincho- Pop Negro

2010-10-28T19:06:00.001-07:00

New Review of El Guincho's Pop Negro, an insanely fun, joyous album (musically, can't speak for the esp. lyrics).

RIP Ari Up

2010-10-21T14:24:00.000-07:00

TV Party Tonight

2010-10-12T18:56:00.001-07:00

Reviews up of Party Down Season 2 DVD

and The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret

There’s a difference in me lifestyle

2010-10-05T18:14:00.000-07:00

Fascinating post at this newly discovered blog on the above-posted mythical song by "Sex Boots Dread". It speaks wonders to the still-prevalent homophobia in the reggae scene that these goofy songs of a gay rasta still remain somewhat of a mystery.

Meat is Mirror

2010-10-05T18:07:00.000-07:00

The ever-wonderful Anwyn Crawford on the history of meat as outfit, misogyny, and metaphor in music at Frieze.

What? No Mention of Skinny Puppy, though?

Of Good Stock

2010-10-03T18:28:00.000-07:00

Great breakdown at Lenin's Tomb of how racism has moved it's basis from biology to culture and how market forces drive this (using British culture as it's case study, but it wouldn't be hard to draw up an American correlate)

It's not that Obama's black, it's the type of black person he is...

Forever In Your Debt

2010-10-03T17:34:00.000-07:00

Interesting post at the BBC by Adam Curtis (Power of Nightmares, Century of the Self) with an interesting conspiracy theory on how the neoliberal debt economy was potentially grown out of a need to satiate a public au courant of growing class inequalities. The idea is that if you create an economy where the poor can afford to climb up the ladder by wafting through a mountain of debt, it'll keep them out of the streets. Credit was the great equalizer, except that it inordinately made rich banks richer and indebted consumers bankrupt.

He shows some videos from the Beeb too that bear witness to the old attitude, which painted people spending "beyond their means" as terrible people (ie, they didn't recognize their place in the lower castes). You see this puritanical sentiment reiterated consistently among the Adbusters left (ie, we should all simplify our lives, consume less, not enjoy the excess products of a corrupt/exploitative system, and ignore culture to build some kind of utopian alterna-capitalism with no real stakes against its rival power structure), preaching an ascetics that kind of functions as the countercultural equivalent of catholic guilt. One kept help but suggest that the prevalence of this attitude is one reason the radical left has remained relatively impotent amidst the vast neoliberal takeover of the public and semi-public sectors. More prominently, you saw this attitude as the immediate defense of the CNBC crowd in the wake of the recession of '08 (ie, Rick Santelli's admonishment of the "losers" who couldn't pay back their adjustable-rate loans). The money of these awful people was, of course, welcome by Wall Street and incorporated into the deluge of nubureacracy that showed perpetual growth where there was none, a falsified public relations paperwork complex whose sole design was the recursive expansion of itself as prognostic mechanism.

Google's Earth

2010-10-01T18:04:00.000-07:00

"Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species." - William Gibson

NYT needs more op-eds like this.

Be Seeing You

2010-09-25T15:56:00.001-07:00

Fantastic post here from a while back by good ol' Rob Horning of Marginal Utility on the deceptive cordiality of our public sector officials and how their personal manner ensures that nothing ever changes.

Choice quotes:

"I like these people, and that renders me untrustworthy. Abstractly, I think some of them should be replaced and perhaps disgraced. But having chatted so cordially, I’m far less likely to take up pitchforks against them."- Steve Waldman

"This strikes me as a basic and important point of how power functions. There are not really evil geniuses in government or elsewhere plotting to be cruel and relishing the misery of the little people—such people are rare sociopathic anomalies, even if capitalism as a system fosters incentives to developing a sociopathic subjectivity. Because they are situated within a bureaucracy, people in positions of power lose sight of the big picture and reconfigure their typically good intentions in terms of the limited scope of their job responsibilities "

"The degree to which the officials are not “cruel people” is the degree to which they can convince themselves that helping the “system” helps ordinary people. But to have any kind of critical perspective on society, you have to be able to recognize the status quo—the people who are already profiting from existing relations—as something that is not inherently worth defending in order to explore possible relations that might be more equitable, more just. The problem is that power invests us in the status quo and at the same time makes us feel moral only by preserving that status quo. To put that a different way, power is contingent on the ability to sell the status quo as necessary—to qualify for power within bureaucracy one must convincingly demonstrate that one has made that association of incumbent interests with the “good”.

"The alternative is a form of power that takes an explicitly revolutionary and “dangerous” form that typically threatens personal identity. One is no longer a collaborative and cooperative part of society but its enemy"

I can't help think of the BBC series The Prisoner and the village's aggravatingly pleasant authorities, whose emphasis on providing the inhabitants with non-stop leisure kept them obsequious and credulous. To those like number six who did seek change, the power to reform at a structural level was made to seem accessible, but always remained just beyond any one individual's grasp.

On a Ragga Tip

2010-09-24T18:23:00.000-07:00

Great republished scenic overview on Ragga Techno from 92 published here

Accentuate the Positive

2010-09-22T17:59:00.000-07:00

Guess the editors didn't like my original choices of media, shown below (from Sesame Street and The Singing Detective, respectively)

Anyway, looks like this article is generating a little bit of noise, which is nice. New editorial on why music reviews tend to be more positive (not a good or bad thing, merely an observation).

Read all about it on PopMatters

Cosmic Euphoria

2010-09-17T18:01:00.001-07:00

reviews of:

Oneohtrix Point Never's Returnal

Emeralds's Does it Look Like I'm Here?

Slow Technology

2010-09-05T06:18:00.000-07:00

windy and carl + paulstretch (the effect used on the justin bieber slowed by 8x mix)= grouper. plus, bbc radiophonic or any classical music + paulstretch= leyland kirby. is this one effect the engine of hauntology?

Either way, this piece of software is fantastic! Should do for ambient music what auto-tune did for pop!