A Pasture of Evil

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

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

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?

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

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

RIP Ari Up

TV Party Tonight

Reviews up of Party Down Season 2 DVD



and The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret

There’s a difference in me lifestyle

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

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

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

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

"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

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

Great republished scenic overview on Ragga Techno from 92 published here

Accentuate the Positive

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