New Oramics

"We also have soundhouses, where we practise the healing powers of sound; where we analyze each human being's innate waveform and induce those harmonics to resonate which have fallen out of sorts; where the criminal is put into a harmless restful sleeep until his mental powers have come to terms with themselves and he is again in harmony with mankind; where man and beast are given the means of communication, one to another, so that man despises not the animal kingdom, nor any other form of life, no, nor even the 'inanimate', but humbly learns the wisdom derived from contact with another aspect.

"Here we learn the harmonic series of the elements, the cycles of the years, the oscillations of the tides, and the induced resonances from those forces far out in space.  We explore the sounds which move boulders, the overotones which transmute the metals, but moreover, we acknowledge the wavelength of our own time and respect the existence of beings without that time, finding thereby means to produce summation tones penetrating the very fundamentals of these worlds beyond our frontiers.  For here we excite the subtle higher frequencies the inner consciousness of man linking him, in truth, with the infinite timelessness of that still point where all is comprehended"

--- Daphne Oram, revision to New Atlantis

New Atlantis

"We have also sound houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep; likewise divers trembling and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear to do further the hearing greatly. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as if it were tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in tubes and pipes, in strange lines and distances... "


--- Sir Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (1624), pinned to the wall in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop by Daphne Oram before she left in 1959.

Take Me in the Hoooo

A new post at the Documentary Mixtape blog on Toni Basil's "Mickey"

Storage Wars

My thoughts on the death of the record store are a little ambivalent.  I'm a large advocate of physical media and am a proponent of the idea that commodity fetishism breeds a kind of mystical and persuasive power within the object that can either be used to either align people with an ideology or place them in opposition to it.  However, I find that my best experiences in record stores involved finding ways to game the vermin collectors, whose demise I secretly cheered when Napster's implicit (though misguided) altruism came along.  Even now, most of the record stores I encounter (particularly as I've moved to the suburbs of CT) price albums way too high, figuring maybe people don't have access to the internet where they can order items at cost, pay shipping and handling, incur occasional international customs charges, and still get them cheaper than the in-store deals at said hoarder-type emporiums.  At least the competition of the cities drives prices relatively low, but in the 2010s when you can get a used DVD or video game for 5 bucks, why the fuck should anybody be paying $10 for used LPs unless said item is super duper rare?  Production costs are so much lower on music.  Why haven't we found a way to price it down and still make money without resorting to hawking mp3s/m4as?

So, often, my biggest joys were finding record stores too stupid to know what things were valuable; finding the first Gas LP for $10 at a punk store that probably had no idea what it was, discovering Trans Europe Express in Near Mint condition at the Salvation Army in Poughkeepsie, or finding dirt cheap out-of-print stuff by Loop and Spacemen3 in stores where those groups didn't provide use value for one's cultural capital.

With that said, I'm excited to be going to Record Store day at a store I have never been to before (Red Scroll in Wallingford, CT).



Fave Record Stores (still open version):

Amoeba- Berkeley, CA
Philadelphia Record Exchange- Philadelphia, PA
Other Music- NY, NY
Mystery Train- Amherst, MA
AKA - Philadelphia, PA


Fave Record Stores (RIP version):
Trash- Danbury, CT
Hospital Records- NYC, NY
Spaceboy- Philadelphia, PA
Volt- Danbury, CT
Rhino- Poughkeepsie, NY

American Bandstand Performances of Note

Wedding Songs and Cover Versions

Another new post at Documentary Mixtape on Blood, Sweat, and Tears's "You've Made Me So Very Happy"

This Generation Rules the Nation

A new entry at Documentary Mixtape, even more delayed than regular blogposts here! (Blogpost is now a compound word).

ForceListen

I'm a pretty third-rate blogger to begin with, but this blog has been sadly inactive for about a month. The reason for the lack of updates is for a number of reasons: 1) currently buying a house 2) not writing as many reviews recently, which I thought would free me in other dimensions, but doesn't seem to have done so 3) focusing on other projects including a series of personal music projects, the likes of which are below. I don't like to use my writing blog to promote my own music (the vast bulk of which has been posted over here: Here), but in the interest of someone ever actually listening to these songs, even if for the sole purpose of having someone tell me they're piss poor, I'm going to begin posting new albums or tracks here without comment when they are released.

XX

A brief and way-too-small smattering of women who continue to inspire in music for Intnernational Women's Day:

Ellen Allien
Au Revoir Simone
Azeiala Banks
Meriel Barham (Pale Saints)
Bebe Barron
Bjork
Blondie
Amanda Brown (LA Vampires, Pocahaunted, Not Not Fun/100% silk)
Vashti Bunyan
Bilinda Butcher (My Bloody Valentine)
Inga Copeland (Hype Williams)
Alice Coltrane
Delia Derbyshire
Dev
Diamanda Galas
Ectoplasm Girls
Missy Elliot
Elizabeth Fraser (Cocteau Twins)
Lisa Gerrard (Dead Can Dance)
Vivien Goldman
Kim Gordon
Rachel Goswell (Slowdive, Mojave 3)
Grimes
Liz Harris (Grouper)
PJ Harvey
Julia Holter
Inca Ore
Grace Jones
Trish Keenan (Broadcast)
Pameila Kurstin
L7
MIA
Nicki Minaj
Ikue Mori
Dorothy Moskowitz (United States of America)
Alison Moyet (Yaz)
Nico
Pauline Oliveros
Yoko Ono
Daphne Oram
Sarah Peacock (Seefeel)
Rihanna
Clara Rockmore
Jessica Rylan (Can't)
Laetitia Sadler/Mary Hansen (Stereolab)
Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star, Opal)
Martha Schwendener (Bowery Electric)
Seven Fields of Aphelion (Black Moth Super Rainbow)
Nina Simone
Siouxsie Sioux
The Slits
Stellar Om Source
Linder Sterling (Ludus)
Donna Summer
Andrea True
Cosey Fanny Tutti
Veronica Vasicka (Minimal Wave)
Windy Weber (Windy & Carl)

Suburbs on Flame with Un-Rock N' Roll

The Michigan Theatre in Detroit


For my latest Difference Engine column on PopMatters, I wrote about the ways the blighted landscape of Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s influenced Detroit Techno and why the new post-crash ruins not only lack the ability to inspire, but make today's music feel more trapped in the past than ever.

I'm admittedly quite amateur when it comes to talking about architecture and (sub)urban planning. In fact, I've never even read a book on it (though I'd be open to suggested readings), but as an outsider it's interesting to observe the ways in which territorialization has been used a process of division in the past. Now, it seems, division is secondary to conquest- the entire great American panorama is a putrid vista of marked territory from trendy compact starter homes to maladroit retail outlets. What remains after the razing of constant development is not even a palimpsest of the modernism or even New Deal functionalism that came before, but rather a snapshot of the Roman Empire at its last drunken orgy.

Interesting too how Kevin Boyle's study of Detroit (referenced in the above piece) reveals tensions that were escalated by the UAW, revealing how the union itself, long championed as a bastion of Fordism's racial equalization, excluded non-whites and females, and how their struggle for living wages resulted in a trade-off that left negotiating power at the superstructural level completely off the table.

Reminds me a bit of Paul Schraeder's Blue Collar, which I watched recently, and explores the tensions of auto workers driven apart by a union too closely in collaboration with the managers and owners. In the film, Zeke (a never-better Richard Pryor), Jerry (Harvey Keital), and Smokey (Homicide: Life on the Steet's Yaphet Kotto) conspire to rob a union safe only to find it empty. Instead, they uncover some mob-related criminal activity, but any conspiratorial notions that the film may lend it to are undercut by the fact that it was the auto company's legal tyrannies that really caused the brunt of the group's miseries.

Liberal film critics at the time dismissed it as anti-union, while ever-libertarian Schraeder himself said he was surprised at how decidedly Marxist it turned out to be while he was writing it. While it probably falls a bit short of turning out a pointed critiques, the ambivalence and impotence of its protagonists makes it a sharper film than Schraeder may have even intended. Interesting to contrast how Norma Rae, a film in which the good guys win and, presumably, life just goes on getting better, won the oscar the same year Blue Collar came out. It was perhaps because the unions thought they were in such great shape that they were allowed to be gutted, along with their corresponding cities, by Reagan and company in the next few years.

Death Factory, Revisited

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

The Sun Always Shines on TV

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