Story time

"Don't you EVER say that to me!"

Bowie 😭

A bit older but more contemporary than rave archaeology:

this
and that with soundtrack

2017 could use some punk magic.

Overthinking my commute soundtrack: I could listen to LFO. Or I could listen to the new Audion. The excitement of LFO is the palpable feeling of a new world coming into existence. LFO's sounds are both a reference to the new world of rave and the central shared experience - the reality - of that world. The excitement of Audion is the excitement of what's possible now, but also the excitement of stripping away, rather than building up. Dance as escape not from ordinary boring reality, but from an ever-present central shared experience. Escaping from mediated reality to now.

:) :) :)

björk reddit ama

"Now, the workaday everyday now, always looks relatively less glamorous than the rose-tinted then (except for those magic hours when your finger is right on the pulse, and those moments only happen when you've abandoned the lifeline of your own history.)" - via

I'm going to try something new in 2015: I'm going to write at least a little about every book that I read. (Ok, I'm going to try. This isn't a job.) I just finished "Tune In", the first volume of a projected three-volume history of the Beatles by Mark Lewisohn. It was really surprisingly fascinating and I want to try to explain why before all the images and impressions the book created fade from my memory.

Why do you care about those old men anyway?
I feel like an apologia for Beatles fandom is kind of required at this point. They're so central to the rockist canon, such a touchstone for the type of reactionaries who would dismiss hip-hop, techno and everything living and vital that I care about in music, that caring about them enough to read a book on them (three books!) seems suspect.

First, a generic defense of the study of history:it's not only not opposed to a progressive outlook, it's an important part of any understanding of the present. I say this as foundation-laying, I doubt any of the three people reading this would disagree.

Second, a more specific understanding of the Beatles - actually grokking their context, their rise, their loves, hates and ambitions - helps in understanding them as a specific group of people operating in a specific context, reacting to the music around them, expressing a particular Liverpool sensibility. All the talk about them as "timeless, central to rock history, giants" just obscures who they actually were and why they did what they did.

Finally, their rise coincided with - helped bring about - the rise of a new kind of music, a new youth culture, a new music industry ... every stage of their story so far involves people doing things no one had ever done before. Even if you think rock would have reached more or less the same place without them, a lot of things changed in the Sixties and the history of the Beatles is a fantastic lens for viewing it.

I'm pretty sure you were going to tell us about a book
It's engagingly written, a tiny bit amateurish in the best sense of the word, astoundingly well researched but wearing that lightly, and packed with memorable quotes and scenes. Lewisohn does well sketching milieu, and this is the foundation of the book.

Say something about the Beatles? anything
They weren't fantastic musicians, Paul maybe excepted. Fantastic singers and songwriters, yeah. But it's funny to think about how many people yearning tiresomely for "musicianship" put the Beatles at the top of their list.

They wanted to make black music. They had other influences, but when Little Richard told them they had that "authentic Negro sound" I can't imagine how happy they must have felt.

They were direct, funny, often assholes. Lewisohn keeps emphasizing how they refused to do anything that felt fake, that they were always true to themselves. He maybe hits that point too hard but you do finish the book feeling that part of their success came from aggressive disregard for what other people wanted or expected. I'm not sure that I would have been friends with John, but I would love to have spent time in his company. Even just reading the book you get inspired by how original his behavior - all of their behavior - was. You start to feel it's possible to live life less by rote.

Finally, when the group starts producing great work (they definitely didn't always) there starts to be a steady stream of little eruptions in the book, the Beatles doing something new and amazing. I'm not sure how much of this is their musical originality. Maybe Lewisohn could have done more to show how novelty comes from recombination - but he already does quite a bit of that. Maybe they had something.

20 years after Frequencies still vital and urgent:



What it's all for. Ken Downie posted "you made a difference" about Mark today and I felt a little odd about it. But on reflection, yes.

"Its Been A Week Since The Carnival"

"Like Your Ideas. We Live In A World Where People Dont Even Like Their Own Ideas, That Why You Have People Copying One Thing Thats Working So Much"

• A short letter
• Longer essay

It was spring in 2008 when I was walking down a road in California feeling sorry for myself and talking on my cell with Lou. "There are so many things I've never done that I wanted to do," I said.

"Like what?"

"You know, I never learned German, I never studied physics, I never got married."

"Why don't we get married?" he asked. "I'll meet you halfway. I'll come to Colorado. How about tomorrow?"

"Um – don't you think tomorrow is too soon?"

"No, I don't."

"i had a guy round fixing my boiler a couple of years ago when i was doing tac lacora so i played him that cos he was asking
he just said 'who listens to this then? loads of guys sitting in their houses smoking weed?'
and i went 'yeah, pretty much'"

I guess what I love most about this interview is that they are clearly fully committed to it. You want to know if they have any deep theories about music? They will answer. What would they do if one member died? Answered. Haiku, if you please? Here's one. These guys do not do anything by half measures.

But this was tumblr before tumblr, and I'm loath to leave it. Anyway. What does Bill Drummond have to say?

aquifer mp3

So now Brooklyn is turning out awesome electro-techno. Not fair.



That's some OG New York synth wizard, Oneohtrix Point Never in the middle and Laurel Halo to his right.

A friend of mine was in the same NYC studio while Paul was putting together some of "Memory Almost Full" [album released 2007] and his story is Paul was super nice and asked him if he wanted to come downstairs and take a listen to some tracks he was putting down. My friend obliged and once they were in the room Paul proceeded to sit behind the drumkit and overdub some stuff, singing along. After they were done Paul supposedly asked for "your honest opinion" and my friend could only come up with "Yes, Sir Paul, sounds great!" I told my friend he probably wanted to hear "Could use a tighter snare sound" or something.

From a thread entitled "I hate Paul McCartney so much".

Composer John Adams turns out to be a fine writer on his new blog. I wonder if the lucky tagger knows where his work ended up.

We live in a time I think not of mainstream, but of many streams, or even, if you insist upon a river of time, that we have come to a delta, maybe even beyond delta to an ocean which is going back to the skies.

-John Cage

I'm following: @skinnermike (aka The Streets: real, updates a lot), @brian_eno (probably fake, updates reasonably often), and @davidbowie (probably real, never updates.)

"I never did understand that. I'm a cunt man myself."

Possibly the most easily predicted link from this blog ever. Berlin's laptoporchester is my favorite out of this bunch of laptop orchestras from around the world. My first reaction was that this is a bit gimmicky, but actually I think there's a stupendous amount of possibility here. Of course the eternal question with live electronic music remains - why not just set everything up beforehand and hit play?

Wire interview

Some of the kids make it, and some of them don't. I lose some of them to the war. Some of my baseball players, they're young, they're full of testosterone, they want to prove themselves, so some of them join the Marine corps. One of my favourite players, man, he joined the Marine corps. I was so sad, because I thought he could have made it in baseball. But the recruiters, like in that Michael Moore movie, they're on their ass, they're challenging these boys, almost like challenging their manhood. It's a kid, and of course he's going to step up and defend his manhood, so they end up joining. It's tough. I lose some of them to that, I lose some of them to the street, some of them start selling drugs, that drug life is so appealing to them, cos of the money. Some of them carry on with baseball. It's like slavery. You lose two thirds of them on the trip. I'm thinking about not continuing coaching, because you lose so many of them.

Dude, Mike Banks lives it.

via ilm

"Nintendo" translates into English as "Leave Luck to Heaven".

Too many half-empty rooms and blank white walls even for me.

LA-based dj, show at the Red Buddha on Cahuenga on the 20th. Hip-hop and grime and such. Betting on white belts and fauxhawks in the crowd, but whaddaya gonna do.