The corner of Monitor Street and Greenpoint Avenue is the location of Uncle Paulie's, a modest truckers' coffee-shop/pizzeria by day and recently the scene of live underground rock shows put together by the redoutable Todd P. Its location is right across the street from the Newtown Creek-Greenpoint Sewage Treatment Plant, the daytime aspect of which is suitably post-apocalyptic (you can check this Flickr set for more views) but at night, when the tops of its towers are illuminated in some kind of ultraviolet light and the neighboring buildings are all scrap metal yards with guard dog signs and concrete structures with their gates left open because they really contain nothing but the most unsalvageable refuse, you can feel that you've just arrived outside Mordor.
Fortunately a quick right turn (as you dodge the sweeping eye of Sauron) places you amidst friendly faces and interesting rock bands - most recently, on April 7th, Double Dagger drove up from Baltimore (I'll let you find their MySpace page yourself - hints for Googling: they are called Double Dagger and they are from Baltimore - you may not however, immediately find singer Nolen Strals' collaborative art blog 99 Drawings In 99 Days, well worth a look), Metalux drove in from elsewhere in Brooklyn and Green Milk From The Planet Orange flew in from Japan.
As the sole band about which I had no notion, Double Dagger proved to be the unexpected surprise which every evening out should have. A vigorous drummer and bassplayer, as the sole instrumentation, provided a necessarily minimalist but tensile backdrop to Nolen Strals' vocal and physical method acting - on record, his singing seems a little more conventionally emo, but live it's all pretty much transformed by his interaction with the audience. At first his persistent caroming around, singing right into people's faces and bumping into them seems like predictably confrontational tactics, but it becomes clear that he's too gentle about it for that analysis. Ultimately the effect he creates is more like one of the more manageable forms of autism, as if he is operating by a different set of rules about how to interact with people. It's still a bit disconcerting but any number of factors (from his between song remarks to the implicit social contract of the young artist circles in which the band travels where the weirdness tends to be rather contained) combine to make it feel more collaborative than threatening. Of the various approaches to challenging the performer-audience relationship, from G.G. Allin's ordure-flinging to Robert Fripp perching unceremoniously on a high stool, this one seems worth a return visit.
Also worth a return visit (now that I've completely run out of steam for writing about the evening) are Metalux, an electronics duo you should also have no trouble locating on the Web (add the term "carbon" to your search) - part of why they are great is they are not "electronica" - they play electronic music without an Apple logo in sight or an audible rhythmic pattern that could function on anyone's dance floor anywhere. Jenny Graf plays some guitar and has this amazing looking homemade synthesizer with alligator clip connections and a pre-digital era touch-pad controller, while M.V. Carbon combines keyboard and reel-to-reel tape loops made on the fly, which she then modifies by manipulating the metal reels as if they were turntables.
Green Milk From The Planet Orange are yet another Japanese power trio, of which there are currently quite a number - not as alien as Fushitsusha, as inventive as Minimokoto or as needles-in-the-red as High Rise, the three nonetheless purvey a high energy brand of drone/hard-rock psychedelia that was thoroughly convincing while it was happening. They sit down to play as well, which in a packed venue with no stage was a bit of limitation, although occasionally at the start of a song, they stood up on their amps, made the devil horns hand sign to the audience, swung their hair around - generally conveyed "we come to rock" - and then sat down again to resume their intricate finger motions.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Back On The Horse
Sorry for the gap - too much to write about rather than too little!
Just finished George Gissing's New Grub Street, a late Victorian novel focused on the struggle between art and commerce, with the latter, justifiably or no, the clear winner. No character in the book who does not have money ends up anything other than dead or obscure and the characters who become well-to-do by luck, initiative or both, continue to prosper as we wish harder and harder that the novel's deeply cynical point of view were not so vindicated.
It is also, in a sense, a meta-novel, as the characters themselves, all striving in the literary world of their time, continuously debate the relative merits of M. Zola's naturalism versus Dickens' use of farce and melodrama to make his novels tick. Gissing himself, considered a naturalist who evolved into a realist (someday I'll really understand that distinction) is not above a bit of farce and melodrama himself when it serves to keep the plot moving, ennoble an otherwise doomed character with a dignified death and so on.
Although it is not an accepted literary school, Gissing might best be called a pessimist. He is not dispassionate enough in his presentation of grim realities to hide the fact that his sympathies lie with the losers, yet the two main characters who come out on top at the finish (and who he has constructed skillfully enough that we can't actually despise them, at least I don't think we are supposed to), end the book with this bit of dialog:
"Ha! isn't the world a glorious place?"
"For rich people."
"Yes, for rich people. How I pity the poor devils!"
Just finished George Gissing's New Grub Street, a late Victorian novel focused on the struggle between art and commerce, with the latter, justifiably or no, the clear winner. No character in the book who does not have money ends up anything other than dead or obscure and the characters who become well-to-do by luck, initiative or both, continue to prosper as we wish harder and harder that the novel's deeply cynical point of view were not so vindicated.
It is also, in a sense, a meta-novel, as the characters themselves, all striving in the literary world of their time, continuously debate the relative merits of M. Zola's naturalism versus Dickens' use of farce and melodrama to make his novels tick. Gissing himself, considered a naturalist who evolved into a realist (someday I'll really understand that distinction) is not above a bit of farce and melodrama himself when it serves to keep the plot moving, ennoble an otherwise doomed character with a dignified death and so on.
Although it is not an accepted literary school, Gissing might best be called a pessimist. He is not dispassionate enough in his presentation of grim realities to hide the fact that his sympathies lie with the losers, yet the two main characters who come out on top at the finish (and who he has constructed skillfully enough that we can't actually despise them, at least I don't think we are supposed to), end the book with this bit of dialog:
"Ha! isn't the world a glorious place?"
"For rich people."
"Yes, for rich people. How I pity the poor devils!"
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Busman's Holiday
Club music songs are very much like Marimekko fabrics - a few elegantly simple design ideas in sort of modular pieces that can be reliably recombined and usually work out, as long as you're not expecting anything other than what they are.
Pulling a mid-90s UK house 12" named "I Believe" by an ensemble called the Happy Clappers out of the "to be listened" pile pretty much guaranteed a certain kind of listening experience, with the only variable being whether it would actually be good or not (it proved to be pretty good).
Were there any doubt that this was to be a well-crafted specimen of its time and place (and not much more), a glance at discogs.com shows that they had two hits, "I Believe" and "Hold On," which they rereleased in endless 12" vinyl and CD configurations and then recycled them through a series of compilations, most containing the word "Ibiza" in the title.
The lyrical phrases "I believe" (sometimes punctuated with "in love") and "comin' to ya" alternate over a 4/4 kick drum, some congas, the standard slightly gospel-inflected three-chord piano vamp and some synthesized strings, and, of course, hand claps.
None of this explains why these records are sometimes convincing and often not - the precise tension and release structure (where the kick drum drops out for a bit, the piano chords pause or accelerate and so on) is not obviously quantifiable. For that matter why is "If You Should Need A Friend" by Fire Island (hmm, who are they appealing to?) better, or in what ways is it better?
For one thing the piano part has four chords and more chromatic motion between them and there are synthetic horn blats in place of the strings. The lyrics, although banal, attempt to be about something rather than just generic feel-good dance floor hollers and singer Mark Anthoni injects a little gritty expressiveness. At the opening, before the lyrics start, he takes a simple two-note wordless melodic fillip and jumps back and forth between his falsetto head voice and high tenor register to very good effect.
The record label, by the way, is Junior Boy's Own which I've found to be pretty reliable - I'll have to see what else is kicking around here on their imprint - in the meantime, should you (for example) find several hundred in a dumpster, give them a listen!
Pulling a mid-90s UK house 12" named "I Believe" by an ensemble called the Happy Clappers out of the "to be listened" pile pretty much guaranteed a certain kind of listening experience, with the only variable being whether it would actually be good or not (it proved to be pretty good).
Were there any doubt that this was to be a well-crafted specimen of its time and place (and not much more), a glance at discogs.com shows that they had two hits, "I Believe" and "Hold On," which they rereleased in endless 12" vinyl and CD configurations and then recycled them through a series of compilations, most containing the word "Ibiza" in the title.
The lyrical phrases "I believe" (sometimes punctuated with "in love") and "comin' to ya" alternate over a 4/4 kick drum, some congas, the standard slightly gospel-inflected three-chord piano vamp and some synthesized strings, and, of course, hand claps.
None of this explains why these records are sometimes convincing and often not - the precise tension and release structure (where the kick drum drops out for a bit, the piano chords pause or accelerate and so on) is not obviously quantifiable. For that matter why is "If You Should Need A Friend" by Fire Island (hmm, who are they appealing to?) better, or in what ways is it better?
For one thing the piano part has four chords and more chromatic motion between them and there are synthetic horn blats in place of the strings. The lyrics, although banal, attempt to be about something rather than just generic feel-good dance floor hollers and singer Mark Anthoni injects a little gritty expressiveness. At the opening, before the lyrics start, he takes a simple two-note wordless melodic fillip and jumps back and forth between his falsetto head voice and high tenor register to very good effect.
The record label, by the way, is Junior Boy's Own which I've found to be pretty reliable - I'll have to see what else is kicking around here on their imprint - in the meantime, should you (for example) find several hundred in a dumpster, give them a listen!
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Brass Monkey
There was a flurry of rediscovery around here centered on The Acoustic Folk Box, which was inversely inspired by missing Martin and Eliza Carthy (and Norma Waterson) at Symphony Space a couple of weeks ago.
The box itself has many pleasures, one of which is a track from Martin Carthy's early 80s quintet called Brass Monkey. The group combined Carthy's guitar and voice with fellow Albion Band alumnus John Kirkpatrick on concertina, along with percussion and brass instruments, trumpet, trombone and saxophone (sorry not to list everyone's name and dozens of other affiliations). They made two vinyl records on the legendary Topic label in 1983 and 1986 and the two were combined onto one CD, The Complete Brass Monkey, in 1993.
The Acoustic Folk Box includes "The Maid and the Palmer," the single best piece from their eponymous first LP, and the second LP, See How It Runs, has one equally astonishing song, called "The Handweaver and The Factory Maid." On both, Kirkpatrick's playing on the various small accordion-type instruments (concertina, melodeon, button accordion) has a remarkable propulsive quality - you can feel the air pumping in and out of the device, urging on the rhythm like a bellows stoking a fire. The brass parts, lending throughout an air of the concert hall or military band which takes us away from the farmyard, have an almost modernist edge, with their repetitiveness and the slightly off-kilter folk metric patterns - lots of dropped crochets and two beat measures. The parts, to my wildly free-associative way of thinking, are reminiscent of Rhys Chatham's marvelous "Waterloo, No. 2" (try this snippet on Last.fm which should give you the idea).
Finally, the lyrics to "The Handweaver and The Factory Maid" are intriguing as, according the liner notes, the song was originally titled "The Handweaver and The Chamber Maid." The change of focus from petty rural class rivalry to the industrial revolution, the factory maid now representing the new class that is replacing the handweaver, is quite brilliant. Furthermore, despite his family's disdain for factory girls, the narrator seems only too happy to give up the "wearisome trade" of the weaver who is "so bent that he's like to crack" and instead "trudge to the mill in the early morn", where the girls are!
The other big reminder upon revisiting the box was find out more about Eliza Carthy - her closing track, "10,000 Miles," is one of its high points and her 2002 release Anglicana, currently digitally unspooling for my delighted ears, suggests that was no fluke - more to come!
The box itself has many pleasures, one of which is a track from Martin Carthy's early 80s quintet called Brass Monkey. The group combined Carthy's guitar and voice with fellow Albion Band alumnus John Kirkpatrick on concertina, along with percussion and brass instruments, trumpet, trombone and saxophone (sorry not to list everyone's name and dozens of other affiliations). They made two vinyl records on the legendary Topic label in 1983 and 1986 and the two were combined onto one CD, The Complete Brass Monkey, in 1993.
The Acoustic Folk Box includes "The Maid and the Palmer," the single best piece from their eponymous first LP, and the second LP, See How It Runs, has one equally astonishing song, called "The Handweaver and The Factory Maid." On both, Kirkpatrick's playing on the various small accordion-type instruments (concertina, melodeon, button accordion) has a remarkable propulsive quality - you can feel the air pumping in and out of the device, urging on the rhythm like a bellows stoking a fire. The brass parts, lending throughout an air of the concert hall or military band which takes us away from the farmyard, have an almost modernist edge, with their repetitiveness and the slightly off-kilter folk metric patterns - lots of dropped crochets and two beat measures. The parts, to my wildly free-associative way of thinking, are reminiscent of Rhys Chatham's marvelous "Waterloo, No. 2" (try this snippet on Last.fm which should give you the idea).
Finally, the lyrics to "The Handweaver and The Factory Maid" are intriguing as, according the liner notes, the song was originally titled "The Handweaver and The Chamber Maid." The change of focus from petty rural class rivalry to the industrial revolution, the factory maid now representing the new class that is replacing the handweaver, is quite brilliant. Furthermore, despite his family's disdain for factory girls, the narrator seems only too happy to give up the "wearisome trade" of the weaver who is "so bent that he's like to crack" and instead "trudge to the mill in the early morn", where the girls are!
The other big reminder upon revisiting the box was find out more about Eliza Carthy - her closing track, "10,000 Miles," is one of its high points and her 2002 release Anglicana, currently digitally unspooling for my delighted ears, suggests that was no fluke - more to come!
Saturday, March 3, 2007
Pourquoi Je Chante
I was browsing through the track list of "Ultra Chicks Vol 1: Filles In The Garage!" (a collection of French 60s female pop - there were at least 6 volumes in a bootleg series) and noted "Stella" among the many first name-only noms d'étape. I recalled that this was almost certainly the same Stella who subsequently married Christian Vander and they founded the still extant progressive rock band Magma in 1969 and with a few seconds of Web searching, my recollection was proved correct.
Rather than repeat myself on Magma, you can read a quick and entertaining summary in this Time Out New York piece and I'll do a post culled from my secret desert island discs catalog on my two favorite Magma albums at some later date.
Meanwhile it is Stella Zelcer Vander who is of interest today. One of the so-called Yé-yé Girls, Stella apparently became disenchanted with the superficiality of the musical style, hence her eventual move to a rather more esoteric musical realm and now bills herself as "the anti-yé-yé girl" on this rather elegant MySpace page (it's so rare that these things look good, it's sort of a cause for celebration when they do - compare Magma's own page).
My friend's digital copy of "Ultra Chicks..." proved to be corrupted on her track "Nouvelle Vague Blues" - it was just white noise, and surmising this not to be the original intent, I went on the hunt, only to find everyone on Soulseek had the same corrupted copy. Finally, I tracked down a 2-CD compilation that came out in France in the late 90s called La Collection Sixties des EPs Français. Forty tracks of this stuff may be more than the casual fan needs, but it is thoroughly enjoyable in the right doses.
The "Nouvelle Vague Blues" itself fulfills the promise of its title, with a jazzy backing track and lyrical references to "Jules et Jim." The song "Beatniks d'occasion" (audible on her MySpace page) also takes an ironic look at fashionable Bohemianism, although some of the songs recorded when she was very young (she started at age 13) are charming for the opposite reasons - "Douée Pour La recré" is a schoolgirl complaining about how tedious all her academic classes are and she's best suited for recess, and "Les parents twist" is (I'm assuming) a complaint about oppressive parents based on some sort of Americanized teenage slang ("Mon Dieu, que c'est triste, d'avoir des parents twist!") - just the sort of linguistic borrowing Jack Lang campaigned against during his tenure as Minister of Culture!
Finally, don't miss this interview. Also, I noticed a lot of this French 60s pop is tagged with "velocipede radio" on last.fm, a phrase I can't find anywhere else, so I'm going to contribute to its spread by using it here (but not on Del.icio.us which doesn't support two-word tags!).
Rather than repeat myself on Magma, you can read a quick and entertaining summary in this Time Out New York piece and I'll do a post culled from my secret desert island discs catalog on my two favorite Magma albums at some later date.
Meanwhile it is Stella Zelcer Vander who is of interest today. One of the so-called Yé-yé Girls, Stella apparently became disenchanted with the superficiality of the musical style, hence her eventual move to a rather more esoteric musical realm and now bills herself as "the anti-yé-yé girl" on this rather elegant MySpace page (it's so rare that these things look good, it's sort of a cause for celebration when they do - compare Magma's own page).
My friend's digital copy of "Ultra Chicks..." proved to be corrupted on her track "Nouvelle Vague Blues" - it was just white noise, and surmising this not to be the original intent, I went on the hunt, only to find everyone on Soulseek had the same corrupted copy. Finally, I tracked down a 2-CD compilation that came out in France in the late 90s called La Collection Sixties des EPs Français. Forty tracks of this stuff may be more than the casual fan needs, but it is thoroughly enjoyable in the right doses.
The "Nouvelle Vague Blues" itself fulfills the promise of its title, with a jazzy backing track and lyrical references to "Jules et Jim." The song "Beatniks d'occasion" (audible on her MySpace page) also takes an ironic look at fashionable Bohemianism, although some of the songs recorded when she was very young (she started at age 13) are charming for the opposite reasons - "Douée Pour La recré" is a schoolgirl complaining about how tedious all her academic classes are and she's best suited for recess, and "Les parents twist" is (I'm assuming) a complaint about oppressive parents based on some sort of Americanized teenage slang ("Mon Dieu, que c'est triste, d'avoir des parents twist!") - just the sort of linguistic borrowing Jack Lang campaigned against during his tenure as Minister of Culture!
Finally, don't miss this interview. Also, I noticed a lot of this French 60s pop is tagged with "velocipede radio" on last.fm, a phrase I can't find anywhere else, so I'm going to contribute to its spread by using it here (but not on Del.icio.us which doesn't support two-word tags!).
Thursday, March 1, 2007
The Name Of This Blog
The phrase Sold By Volume is the title of a 10" vinyl record by the band Tono-Bungay (which I am in). It was actually coined by Robert Dennis, so I am hereby giving him credit, even though I have now appropriated it.
You can hear a track from the record on the band's MySpace page, read clever blog entries there, look at long lists of experimental rock bands - and so on!
You can hear a track from the record on the band's MySpace page, read clever blog entries there, look at long lists of experimental rock bands - and so on!
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Never Bought A Ringtone
Like any self-respecting music fanatic, I prefer to have heard of or heard everything first (preferably before it comes out) but awards like the Grammys serve an effective winnowing function for figuring out what to listen because it is culturally significant in some way that might not have to do with musical merit. With that in mind, I still couldn't get past the third song of Stadium Arcadium, but the Dixie Chicks' Taking The Long Way Around (a band I always wanted to like but never quite made the jump) has proved to be a keeper. The title track retells the classic American rebel/road myth with economy and style. There's the self-consciously girly but still charming "pink RV with stars on the ceiling" and a passing reference to the anti-war remarks upscuttle (belabored subsequently on the song "Not Ready to Make Nice") but also a couple of awkward lyrics - the opening quatrain's reference to "...houses in the same zip codes/Where their parents live" is a little too sociological and "wouldn't kiss all the asses that they told me to" is sort of trite Nashville vulgarity, "take this job and shove it" redux.
My absolute favorite songs, the ones currently on endless repeat, tend to be where the vocal harmonies are so dense and gorgeous that I don't even notice what the songs are about ("Bitter End" and "Silent House", the former distinguished also by 12/8 meter, which I favor unreasonably). "Lubbock Or Leave It" is powered by a grainy Telecaster riff that evokes the Bakersfield modern of Dwight Yoakam, for me a preferable California country-rock reference point to the Eagles from whom I have a lifetime prejudice against the word "easy". Apparently the seemingly thin-skinned country music audience has a problem with this one too - I'm just reminded that I need to find and relisten to Terry Allen's semi-legendary Lubbock (On Everything). Finally, I was struck by the use of banjo (presumably played by Emily Erwin) - we are, I hope, through with the authenticity police scolding pop-country bands for using traditional country instrumentation as window dressing, and in fact the staccato, tactile timbre of the banjo tends to sit in the mix more like whatever the East Asian sounding stringed instrument is on the East Flatbush Project's "Tried By 12" (perhaps having Rick Rubin as producer has something to do with it).
My absolute favorite songs, the ones currently on endless repeat, tend to be where the vocal harmonies are so dense and gorgeous that I don't even notice what the songs are about ("Bitter End" and "Silent House", the former distinguished also by 12/8 meter, which I favor unreasonably). "Lubbock Or Leave It" is powered by a grainy Telecaster riff that evokes the Bakersfield modern of Dwight Yoakam, for me a preferable California country-rock reference point to the Eagles from whom I have a lifetime prejudice against the word "easy". Apparently the seemingly thin-skinned country music audience has a problem with this one too - I'm just reminded that I need to find and relisten to Terry Allen's semi-legendary Lubbock (On Everything). Finally, I was struck by the use of banjo (presumably played by Emily Erwin) - we are, I hope, through with the authenticity police scolding pop-country bands for using traditional country instrumentation as window dressing, and in fact the staccato, tactile timbre of the banjo tends to sit in the mix more like whatever the East Asian sounding stringed instrument is on the East Flatbush Project's "Tried By 12" (perhaps having Rick Rubin as producer has something to do with it).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
