Tag: music
Doug Deep playing Vancouver? You know where I’ll be.
A dear acquaintance, (an accurate twist of language), has come up from California to play us some really damned good shows. (And hopefully party with some friends. Rock the hell on.) Bonus: Patrick Haavisto, the charming fellow who intodruced us, will also be playing.
November 10th at the Blu Lounge and November 11th at The Cellar.
turning an itch into a bruise
A rattling Arab Strap song, Love Detective, on repeat like the unofficial brother to another sophisticated story where ‘the stars on his dressing room door take flight’. (here) Every time, it’s such a perfect line. Green rooms across the border, I want it written on the walls. Let’s go global. Band names scratched into mortar and paint and that line, that one elegant line, like a silent war against every badly crooned oh baby to make it top ten.
I watched a clip today of Trent Reznor encouraging his fans to steal his music, saying, “If I could do what I want right now, I would put out my next album, you could download it from my site at as high a bit-rate as you want, pay $4 through PayPal.” Very much like the digital revolution ideal that Jane Siberry’s already got going strong and that the Bare Naked Ladies are apparently following. (She offers songs next to a posted average of how much people have been paying for each, though you can download them for free.) Go Team Canada. Thankfully, now that he’s finally free of his label, he’s putting his money where his mouth is. Or rather, your money. Or lack of it.
So, news of the week: Finally free of his label, Trent Reznor has teamed up with Saul Williams to produce his latest album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, and offer it on-line for Pay-What-You-Want.
Instead of obsessively selling albums, they are focusing on building their fan base through the release of quality art and making their money through positive response, touring and merchandising. The beautiful bones of an antidote to the ugly, overly packaged music industry that spawned the RIAA. To be able to directly pay for what you’re getting, rather than knowing that a considerable percentage of the money is going to a label, it means a lot. Finally, direct influence, the ability to unequivocally encourage the artists we appreciate and wish to support.
Of course, I’m foolish enough to forgo the free download, and not because of the sly guilt the phraseology of the website provides, (that I completely applaud), but because, even though they’re both successful artists and could suck it up better than some of the other musicians I regularly pass around, I feel what they’re doing should be rewarded and encouraged. I want highly successful artists to start abandoning label-distributed albums. They’re the ones that can pave the way. The higher up the food chain, the finer they understand the game, so the more we prove them right, the better. The more that collectively decide that this is the way to make money, the more this sort of distribution will become the norm.
Betty Boop & Cab Calloway’s ghostly Minnie the Moocher
stress
Chasing shadows across the streets, neon signs beginning to look too timeless to be real, my paragraphs are walking barefoot next to the side of a highway, lost in the sound of a voice it doesn’t quite remember. To compensate, I stay up excruciatingly late learning a contemporary calligraphy designed for my favourite of the things my last boyfriend worked on – an L.A. based Alice in Wonderland music video, its director born in Vienna, that features English couture, shot-for-shot rips-off Czechoslovakian stop-motion art direction and starring a woman appropriating Japanese Harajuku culture, (a reassembling of American/English fashion) – just so I can write a four word letter and mail it to next month. It’s a toss-up, either I need new hobbies or I’m just continuing my life out of habit, going through the motions because they’re so deeply ingrained, doing things because they seem like the sort of thing I would do. Neither option particularly comforts me at three a.m., when I keep myself busy with these preposterous things.
socalled music
I have a new musical obsession.
Brainchild of musician, photographer, magician and writer, Josh Dolgin, they’re a Jewish-culture Montreal Jazz-Klezmer Hip-Hop group with shimmering 1920’s piano and Romanian/Latin-American percussion.
Seriously.
Their latest single, You are Never Alone, begins with a soft clip, reminiscent of The Avalanches, and drops down into a catchy riff which positively throbs with promise, clearing the way for a theatrical bout of MC story-telling. It all works exceptionally well with the video, a fantastical transformation of Mr. Dolgin into a complicated, high-tech re-imagining of an antique theatre. (You might remember their rough video with (these are the) good old days too).
“Truly these are the good old days where man, woman, and child can all log on the internet and text message each other across their own house, where there is any form of contraceptive from solid, liquid, to gas, we have reached the point of civilization like the Incans reached when they had gold roads and the Egyptians reached when they had, like, magical buildings and secret things, so what you do is you kiss whoever you kiss, grab whoever you grab, because these are truly the good old days and it does not get any better than this. When it does you wake up and then you’re dead.”
I’ve had their latest album, Ghettoblaster, on infinite repeat since I found a copy. I can’t not. From the clever intro, the sound of someone slotting a cassette into a car tape-deck, to the bonus hidden remix track, it’s eclectic, relevant, wickedly smart, funny, and perishingly sexy. It groans and grins, powerfully melodic, full of cultural anthropology, swinging horn solos, splashes of Yiddish rap, layers of juicy, highly literate rhythms, and a willowy, elegantly stretched sense of timing. Even unexpected clips of musicians talking in the studio are beautiful, adding a charming depth of personality and character to moments that might have been weak without them. As a hint, their wikipedia entry states some of their almost inexplicable, modern style as “…drums & bass and other types of folk music.”
It’s only when you start to really listen do you realize how gracefully strange their punchy melding of cultures really is, how tightly they wove what should have been a vocal sprawl. Every song is really its own mysterious and wonderfully imaginative mood, an entire exploration into genre. Each time I pay attention, another thread of creativity manifests. Banjo, for example, it has banjo? I missed that it’s practically glittering with banjo? Yes, apparently, I think, rewinding and playing again. How rare.
BUY THE ALBUM: it’s not even $10.
(find them on MySpace)
(the socalled video blog)
let’s go dance ’till we die
Andy Smith of Portishead is playing SHINE tonight. Tickets are only ten bucks. Who’s with me?
I, BRAINEATER and 12 MIDNITE: LOUD LOWBROW: The Art, The Cars, The Music!
Saturday, September 22nd
12 noon to 12 midnight at The Chapel
(304 Dunlevy St. Vancouver)
THE BAD BOYS OF CANADIAN ART BRING LOUD LOWBROW TO FUNERAL CHAPEL
    Count on Canada’s crowned kings of Lowbrow art to choose The CHAPEL, a converted Downtown-Eastside funeral home as the location to mount the show that is destined to breathe new life into the corpse of Vancouver’s modern art scene.
THE ART!
    It is in these grand environs that I, Braineater and 12 Midnite will present an 8000 square foot show of the art that has kept these two at the front of the rat pack for the last two decades. From Braineater’s classic blockhead paintings or his buxom devil-girls and Midnite’s graffiti imagery and neon art to the newest work that’ll be so fresh it’ll still be sticky, fans old and new will get a chance to see Lowbrow as it was intended: really big and a little scary.
THE CARS!
    Of course, hot rods have always been a key ingredient in the Lowbrow culture and this show’s got them in spades. “One-man-hot-rod-gang” 12 Midnite will very fittingly, considering the venue, be unveiling his in-progress hot rod 1963 Pontiac “Boneville” Hearse along with a slew of his other cars in all their battle-worn and flat black glory, while not to be left in anyone’s exhaust cloud, “Lowbrow lout” Braineater will revive his 54 Desoto custom, “Draconia” for the occasion.
THE MUSIC!
    Both I,Braineater and 12 Midnite have always included musical performances in their art shows, and this one will certainly continue that tradition.
    I, Braineater is a musical chameleon so we can only guess at what form his music will take this time, be in sweaty glam-punk or cool electronica, it’ll be Braineater through and through.
    12 MIDNITE will be debuting songs off his soon to be released CD “Sweet Turns Sour” which will be available as a limited-edition pre-release at the show. This will also mark the professional debut of Midnite’s son, Harley Slade who will be playing guitar and keyboard in the band which will also include Pointed Stick Tony Bardach on bass and drummer Marc L’esperance.
Though the day-long show is free to attend and all ages are welcome, the evening performance will have a $5 cover charge from 8PM on and tickets will be available at the door.
“somethingsomething the bees knees somethingsomething try to please”
The One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s beginning production.
Fourty-five minutes until freedom. There’s a loud show downstairs, lacing the air with frantic piano, lathering the foyer with a nervous energy. Some student thing. It’s the sort of music I would choose to unsettle an audience with, as if I wanted to dislodge their perception of time, kick it disjointed and paste filters all over the lights. In my head, the dancers are testaments to fanciful make-up and Cirque-style motions. They kick, scream, and astonish.
It’s actually a ballet performance. Something bleach-blonde and mild, culturally appropriate for the family and friends in attendance, many of whom were too old for the stairs. Many of which, I’m sure, are currently wincing at the thrashing rock music that’s replaced the piano, that’s begging for big hair and glittery tight pants lined-up outside of cheap bars where the floors are perpetually sticky with spilled and stolen beer. Of course, any minute now, this will all segue into something hideously classical.
And, yes, there it went. French baroque, rather, and overcooked, dreaming of soulful arpeggios that might travel barefoot on horseback in the rain along the Seine into the sunset. And it didn’t do the dishes, either.
Oops, no. Now it’s faux-traditional Irish rock, a la Riverdance. Mixed with beat-mix 60’s remixed retro-pop.
Thirty-five minutes until freedom.
some days silence is like time stretched over a rack
“A two-part video featuring the compositions “Terra Aria” and “Concerto Rotondo,” performed by Giovanni Sollima. Directed by Lasse Gjertsen, who worked on this for the past five months. He has commentary at YouTube about how the video was made” via neat-o-rama