I’m fortunate to have this great, huge window right in front of my desk. And at night, the light from my desk lamp attracts a good number of moths up to my window. They fly right into it, a dull thud, and then hover there, against it, their furry undersides flush against the pane right in front of me. It’s really fantastic. They’re beautiful, these large-ish ones. I sit here and inspect their heads, bellies and restless wings until they are able to pry themselves away from the light’s gravitational tug and flutter back into my dark, jungle-y backyard.
In fact, I share my whole apartment with a good number of smaller ones. This morning, I carried one on my finger out of my shower to keep it from drowning, which felt like a symbolic gesture in opposition to the genocide my father has wrought upon the New York moth population. He has long been convinced that moths are trying to feast on his suits, so he stockpiles cases of canisters of shady-looking moth poison that he obtains from a mysterious source. Saving that moth today felt like an insult to my father, to my genes.
I took a photo of one recently. And, trying to convey a bit of my San Francisco everyday to a friend, I sketched it out on the back of a Joseph Cornell postcard and sent it to her.
On the surface, this blog-y surface, I’ve been dormant. But in the real world, I’ve been busy. Busy-ish. As my California days are now numbered – or my San Francisco ones, at least – I’ve been developing a premature sense of nostalgia. Lenses have shifted and my surroundings seem a little more attractive than they once did. I miss them, but I’m still here. Making the most of the moment, I’m reading some Steinbeck, upping my wine intake and spending time in neglected parts of town.
That said, I can’t shake this 80s British pop bug I caught. I’ve tried to lure my ears back to more local sounds – American Music Club and Comets on Fire, lately – but my ipod somehow ends up on Prefab Sprout, Lloyd Cole, The Blue Nile or OMD. Low on analysis here. Here are a couple songs and two bay photos. One is from the other end of the Bay on the train ride from Sacramento. The other is a frame of gorgeous and misty New Year’s day moment in which Julia and I lingered on the Golden Gate, staring at a ship passing Mount Tam.
After posting my somber electronic songs, Tom referred me to the Glaswegian band, The Blue Nile, who play low-tempo, sparse-ish electrobummer jams (and admittedly my first dip into the murky waters of the stigmatically-termed “adult contemporary” genre). They retain a somewhat mysterious air, which I think has to do with their instrumentation that sounds like early-MIDI. The strings, drums, horns, chimes – everything feels artificial, a disjuncture between sound and source, as if the instruments themselves are wearing rubbery masks.
A few years ago, Destroyer, on “Your Blues,” foregrounded this aesthetic, playing nearly everything on MIDI and making it tackily obvious. When you hear a trumpet or a string section, you can practically hear fingers pushing the plastic ivories of a flimsy electronic keyboard. And this is how people remember the album – as a silly experiment and an artifact of Dan Bejar’s humor – which is unfortunate because the songwriting is his best. Form eclipsed content.
Well, the reason I’m writing about all this is because I finally picked up the new Animal Collective and was immediately struck by how synthetic most of it sounds. Songs like “Brother Sport,” lack any sense of reality; the generated sounds don’t resemble – or strive to resemble – anything acoustic (although the melody recalls plenty of influences; most notable are steel band fanfares, which is a carefully ironic choice because the steel pan, I believe, is considered the only acoustic instrument to have been invented in the 20th century, when electronics monopolized musical innovation). Even when something acoustic appears, a drumstick hitting the side of a tom or the jaw harp loop on “Lion in a Coma,” it’s abstracted away from its native sound. The live instruments come off sounding more like synthetic samples, drowned in a context of electronic gargling. Ultimately, the songs mirror the cover art; they’re strange and otherworldly spaces, dynamic, textured and abstract, full of artificial life.
A stretch? Probably. These totally synthetic beats are far from novel. But the aesthetic jumped out to me because, when I think of the band, I still think of “Winter’s Love” or “Purple Bottle” or “Fireworks.” I think of something organic, which I had naively associated with guitars and drums and clean vocals.
Anyway, I’ve also recently been spinning Orbital’s second album. Techno, man. It’s great. Not much to say about it but seemed appropriate to mention in a discussion of electronic music.
Here’s a Blue Nile song, “Saturday Night,” the gorgeous coda to “Hats,” aching for a Greg Dulli cover:
Lastly, I wanted to post a track from “Your Blues,” but there is not a single song on Youtube. The album is that despised. So here’s a random, awesome video from Panorama, the big steelband festival in Trinidad. If you’re not sold on the Animal Collective connection, jump to 6:25 in this vid and then spin “My Girls.” Also, nothing looks like more fun than playing in this band:
busy week. i’m typing from a bus cruising north on the east coast highways, which, unlike california’s, are lined with trees and feel more isolated, or at least separate from the cities they connect.
and hey! here’s something i forgot about the east coast: epically cold. it was immensely strange contrast, coming from san francisco’s erratic january heat to the northeast’s relative tundra. i arrived in new york a few mornings ago to a heavy and steady snowfall, which i haven’t seen in a couple years. it seemed foreign and i thought of it less like a normal process of weather than some kind of special effect, say the bright confetti on new years – the three thousand pounds of it that are dumped on times square. trudging through the slush, i was transported to new years 2007, when i got off the subway around 2am at 42nd street and plowed my way through the sloppy mess of confetti and booze and trash that blanketed the streets.
on sunday, i got off the subway at 34th st, listening to a particularly folksy and sunny ry cooder tune, which added a surreal lens to the moment but was truly warming. i’ll most likely leave california soon, and i’ve developed there a deep appreciation and awe of the connection between music and place- or, rather, the interaction between the two. which is one of the things i’m trying to get at – or at least, you know, feel out – with this blog. these jams and the settings they evoke will certainly warm snowy winters to come.
here’s a song by the one am radio, whose music has always seemed to me to be perfectly suited to bus-riding, ever since i first listened to it during a trip to providence and boston in the spring of 2005 with adam. somber, lonely and distant.
I was waiting in line at the coffee place a couple weeks ago and the man in front of me, shaggy and clad in a moth-eaten sweatshirt, turned to me and started talking. He was talking rreeaalll soft and I leaned in close to hear him, still only catching a few words of each sentence. “We have…” he started saying when he turned to me, but the rest of the sentence dissolved into the store’s clamor. There were a few “we have”’s. As we moved closer to one another, it occurred to me that he looked like the dude from Bon Iver, but older and emaciated. And, then, he whispered “but we have this,” pulling something out of his frayed jeans pocket very carefully. His movement suggested he would reveal a large and majestic ruby or a handgun or a piece of human flesh. Something precious and delicate and secretive, threatening and truthful. He held his fist at the rim of his pocket and loosened his fingers, exposing a knotted black shoelace. He explained why it’s so important, but, over his coarse mumbles, I couldn’t really make it out.
He ordered a cappuccino, thanked me for listening and we parted.
As those close to me know, I’ve recently struck a small obsession mining the Beach Boys’ post-”Pet Sounds” discography. There’s a handful of Brian Wilson gems, but “Sunflower,” “Surf’s Up” and “Friends” are when Carl and Dennis Wilson – and even Mike Love – came into their own as songwriters. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that my interest has emerged concurrently with my infatuation with Fleetwood Mac, Sparks and other California bands that matured (read: discovered cocaine) during the 70’s. This is an amazing resource.Here are four of my recent favorite Beach Boys jams from the era:
Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song): Strange subject matter for the band (it’s a cover of a standard, if that helps) but perfect pop harmonies and climactic 1-3-2-5-1 chord progression at 1:52-2:00, which I’m trying to learn from.
All I Wanna Do: Subdued pop ballad, layered under a wash of dreamy “Pet Sounds” reverb. Structurally kind of a linear. But there is a sense of a central chorus, just not clear what part exactly. Reminds me of Destroyer’s bestsongs, which seem to operate on their own logic of pop song form. Glory.
Little Bird: Dennis Wilson’s songs were the band’s grooviest or, rather, sleaziest, and I’m sure this song is one big double entendre that I just don’t get.
Lastly, their most triumphant, Long Promised Road:
Four songs I wrote over the course of 2007 in roughly equal intervals, parallel with the seasons. I’ve never been too personal with my music – not for any reason other than not being very good at it – and always felt like I was writing the story of an alternate self. But, around this time last year, when I sifted these four songs out of the mess of pop-ier Pixels tunes I had accumulated, I was struck – or, rather, endeared – by how well they captured my life during the season in which I wrote each song. Not so much in content or style as in tone. If that makes any sense.
I admit they’re a little unfinished or silly at moments. Especially the gratuitous nature sounds at the end of the fourth track, which I think sounds kind of cool when you’re walking around Manhattan or San Francisco or wherever we live and the music drops out and you’re left with the hum of the rainforest in the city, and it doesn’t sound all too incongruous. But also because I’ve been obsessed with the idea of preserving manuscripts in the digital age ever since my freshman year of college when I heard Susan Howe talk about exploring Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts and suggesting that, because of computers, we won’t leave behind similar evidence of our works in progress. Not to get too lofty here. But I consider these songs artifacts. Personal artifacts, I guess. Enjoy.
In fact, I share my whole apartment with a good number of smaller ones. This morning, I carried one on my finger out of my shower to keep it from drowning, which felt like a symbolic gesture in opposition to the genocide my father has wrought upon the New York moth population. He has long been convinced that moths are trying to feast on his suits, so he stockpiles cases of canisters of shady-looking moth poison that he obtains from a mysterious source. Saving that moth today felt like an insult to my father, to my genes.
