August 7, 2017 On Music Suzanne Ciani and the Subliminal Property of Being Human By Dave Tompkins Suzanne Ciani. I’m being sold the memory of a weed-eater dream at the speed of August. The motor’s vortical hiss, slowed into an alligator groan. A commercial for the Black and Decker Cutter appears on a split screen, now a quadrant, continuously subdividing, each cell occupied with its own product activity, vying for attention and competing with human physiology, the maxed bladders and empty guts that threaten to spirit us away from our sponsor. A GE dishwasher offers to pamper the china. The Merrill Lynch bull walks into a popular idiom, a commercial space that is shiny but not as clean as ITT’s “Clean Room,” which, as claimed, is quantified a thousand times cleaner than an ER: “hyperclean.” It all seems to be happening at once. (I am suddenly compelled to trim the patio near the statue of a headless saint by the garden where I once interred my pajama bottoms beneath a geode.) To the ear, the weed-eater spot could be selling the Buchla 200 synthesizer, if not the work of Suzanne Ciani herself, an electronic-music composer who mastered Don Buchla’s switchboard of patch bays and oscillators. She’s a classically trained pianist who abandoned the keyboard interface (and its muscle memory) to revolutionize music, sometimes anonymously, right under your TV tray. The grid of old TV ads flashed on the screen in A Life in Waves, a documentary about Ciani’s life and career directed by Brett Whitcomb. Now available, it screened at Moogfest at the Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina, last May. An original plug tuner, Ciani created identities for logos and products in the seventies and eighties as a way to support her own music projects and studio. Brands and their sonic referents may have been owned by the client, but the sounds themselves belonged to a woman whose work was singular in a field that was then undefined: routing signals and ideas into tiny spaces and “microcosmic time slots,” all while creating her own signature in the male-dominated world of advertising. Electronic music was largely mysterious then, a time when a modular synth for “Planetary Peace” would cause a bomb scare at the San Francisco airport. The media was no less baffled, but especially so with a woman behind the controls. “This is an album,” said one awkward TV interviewer, doing his best Perd Hapley. That’s about as far as he got. Cut to a commercial. Read More
August 1, 2017 On Music Skiffle Craze: An Interview with Billy Bragg By Alex Abramovich Billy Bragg. Billy Bragg’s new book, Roots, Radicals and Rockers, is a history of skiffle—an art form that was looked down upon when Bragg himself began to play music, in the 1970s. But as Bragg explained a few days ago, in a fascinating talk at the Library of Congress, skiffle was England’s first teenage subculture—a working-class, DIY youth cult that set the stage not only for the British Invasion but for punk. It’s ironic, if not especially odd, that Bragg, a member of the first generation of British rockers who owed little or nothing to the skiffle craze, should end up writing about its influence. “As pop became profound in the 60s, artists who had learned their chops playing skiffle tended to leave it out of their biographies,” Bragg writes in the book’s introduction. “If you wanted to be taken seriously, better to claim you were initially inspired by Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly rather than Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whiskey. Thus skiffle became a bit of an embarrassment for Britain’s sixties rock royalty, like an awkward photo from a school yearbook, a reminder of shabby realities of postwar, pre-rock Britain. Even when credit was given, skiffle often found itself edited out in the search for a snappier sound bite. Take George Harrison’s famous quote about how his band was influenced by the blues: ‘No Lead Belly, no Beatles.’ What Harrison actually said was: ‘If there were no Lead Belly there would have been no Lonnie Donegan; no Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles. Therefore, no Lead Belly, no Beatles.’ ” Among musicians who grew up with the music, Van Morrison has been one of the very few to give it its due. I watched Bragg’s talk the other night, then hopped over to Bragg’s website and saw that he was playing in New York City on Tuesday. Naturally, the show was sold out. But just before sound check, I walked over to Bragg’s hotel for a pot of tea (Earl Grey for me, mint for the author) and a chat about the book. This was a treat: I’ve been listening to Bragg’s music since I was a teenager, and spent much of the money I had then seeing him live. (I’m not the only one. The Paris Review’s editor, Lorin Stein, saw Bragg play the 9:30 Club, in Washington, D.C., on the Back to Basics tour. It was Lorin’s first rock show.) Bragg touched on a few of the stories he’d told at the Library of Congress. (The remarkable story of Ken Colyer, an English trumpeter who joined the Merchant Marine just to make it to New Orleans, only to find himself sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, on his way to Australia, was new to me.) But the conversation itself weaved in and out, going—as the best conversations tend to go—in any number of other directions. Read More
June 29, 2017 On Music In Stargoon’s Car By Paul Grimstad AI is changing the way we write songs—but music has always embraced machine language. Soon after I’d arrived in New York in the late nineties, I found a job in a vintage synthesizer shop (now gone) where I presided over restored Moog monophonic keyboards and was paid in rubber-banded rolls of twenty-dollar bills. I devised a lunch-break ritual: I’d walk a few blocks up to Gourmet Garage at Broome and West Broadway, where I would get a sourdough baguette and seltzer water. Then I’d head over to the bus shelter around the corner, where I’d sit and write in a spiral notebook. The entry for October 16, 1998, has the title “Franchise a rock band.” Meaning: invent a logo, which would be both the band name and the brand; then write, record, and copyright a bunch of material, post it online as a step-by-step kit that anyone could download for the licensing and intellectual property, along with PDFs of lead sheets (shorthand scores with chord diagrams and notated melody), and some further specifications about instrumentation, lighting, sound effects, outfits, and so on. Anyone who had the kit could set up wherever they were—Orlando, Helsinki, Tokyo, Cairo, Ann Arbor, Madrid, Singapore—and perform the material as the band, just as someone with overhead and staff could open a Taco Bell or a Dunkin’ Donuts. Different locales would introduce shades of difference in performance—surely the Helsinki band would sound different from the Orlando band—and then live recordings of the different instantiations could be compiled and released in elaborate vinyl anthologies with liner notes featuring various experts discussing the nature of authenticity, the vexed relation between art and commerce, and so on. This wasn’t about trying to get rich; I had no interest in making a profit. It stemmed rather from my desultory toilet reading in Andy Warhol’s POPism and also with my sense of the dreary uniformity of “indie rock”: always the same lanky guys (and the occasional girl) with carefully mussed hair looking identically “authentic,” dispensing more or less indistinguishable chords and melodies. Since my days not working in the Moog shop were spent making nine-minute songs with titles like “The Continuing Adventures of Cardinal Caterpillar” on a cassette multitrack recorder in a tiny room in Brooklyn, subsisting entirely on street-vendor coffee, bagels, SweeTarts, tap water, and Parliament Lights, the Franchised Band idea was a desperately contrived fantasy meant to achieve a conceptual sophistication along the lines of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, but within the constrained format of the rock band. This all strikes me now as completely preposterous—and to some degree it’s been superseded by the hyperefficient Swedish studio wizards that crank out perfect megahits for Britney Spears, Katy Perry, et al. But at the time I thought it was revolutionary. I pitched it to a bunch of label people in New York. As I explained it, every last one of them started to giggle. Read More
June 19, 2017 On Music A World of Shared Ecstasy By Adam Shatz A new suite for string quartet weds Western and Arabic music with intelligence, integrity, and feeling. Photo: captain.orange, via Flickr. Mathias Énard’s novel Compass, which won the 2015 Prix Goncourt, has been hailed for its elegiac, meandering portrait of Western scholars of the Islamic world. Few critics have noticed that it’s also a novel about European musicians and composers enchanted by the sounds of the Middle East and North Africa. The narrator, Franz Ritter, is an Austrian musicologist, or, in his words, “a poor unsuccessful academic with a revolutionary thesis no one cares about.” His thesis, which Énard obviously cares about, is that modern European concert music “owed everything to the Orient”: All over Europe the wind of alterity blows, all these great men use what comes to them from the Orient to modify the self, to bastardize it, for genius wants bastardy, the use of external procedures to undermine the dictatorship of church chant and harmony. Ritter’s compass invariably points east, and delirious exaggeration is his rhetorical signature, but the novel offers a suggestive account of Western music’s encounter with its Eastern other. Beethoven, Mozart, and Liszt all wrote Turkish-style marches; Debussy, Bartók, and Hindemith were fascinated by Arabic and Asian scales. The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski was so besotted by North Africa that he wrote “Songs of an Infatuated Muezzin,” whose lyrics at one point cry out “Allah Akbar!” Some Western musicians reinvented themselves as Arabic musicians, notably the late Swiss qanun master (and Muslim convert) Julien Jalal Eddine Weiss. Music, Énard suggests, has proven a uniquely fertile ground for cross-cultural dialogue and exchange, “a world of shared ecstasy, of a possibility for change, of participation in alterity.” It has rejected the “violence of imposed identities” in favor of “the dual, the ambiguous.” Read More
May 2, 2017 On Music Who the Fuck Knows By Robert Christgau Covering music in Drumpfjahr II. From the cover of YG and Nipsey Hussle’s “FDT.” Whatever else you were doing the last three weeks of November, chances are you weren’t sleeping enough. Chances are you felt trapped in the same nightmare that had been waking most of us up all year. To fend that nightmare off, I’d phonebanked and canvassed for Hillary, although not enough, and published my first Village Voice piece in a decade urging readers to pitch in—or at least see through the sit-this-one-out dodge and the third-party scam. After the nightmare came true, I spent long breakfasts splitting hairs with my obsessed wife, called and emailed many old friends, and tried to figure out how to cover music while devoting my working hours to Twitter and Talking Points Memo. The only thing that cheered me up was my daughter’s new kittens. My gig with Noisey requires me to find three or more albums worth praising each Friday, but I file earlier—which meant I’d written my November 11 post before the election proper, a dilemma I finessed by saving up five artists of seventy-five or older, all explicitly on the left, including the unbowed eighty-eight-year-old communist Barbara Dane. I’d stockpiled Tanya Tagaq and Pussy Riot for a post-election fallback. After that came the Tribe Called Quest comeback keyed to the rallying cry “it’s time to go left and not right,” and after that Southern progressive Mose Allison, dead exactly a week after electoral Kristallnacht, and his anti-imperialist “Western Man,” plus old music master Hoagy Carmichael, who I informed my readers was a liberal Republican back when there still was such a thing. And then I ran out of propaganda and had to ease up. If rock criticism is to be a political calling, which has always been my angle, that’s obviously not because it’s a fountainhead of protest songs. In fact, many rock critics look askance at explicitly political lyrics, which I think is pretty stupid, without denying that some political lyrics are also pretty stupid. Thing is, to quote the recantation of the devout contrarian Simon Reynolds in the politics-themed eleventh and final issue of The Pitchfork Review: “Why was I so down on the idea of preaching to the converted? When history is against them, the converted need to have their morale maintained, their spirits kept stalwart.” Read More
April 21, 2017 On Music Surface Noise By Damon Krukowski In an excerpt from his book The New Analog, Damon Krukowski looks at the aesthetics of noise in analog music—and what we’ve lost in the transition to digital recordings. Guillermo Galindo, Fragmented Surveillance/Vigilancia fragmentada, 2014, pigment print, 11 11/16″ × 16 1/2.” Currently on view at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. My favorite records sound the worst, because I’ve played them the most. Each time a needle runs around an LP, it digs a little deeper into the grooves and leaves its trace in the form of surface noise. The information on an LP degrades as it is played—as if your eyes blurred this text, just a bit, each time they ran across it. Analog sound reproduction is tactile. It is, in part, a function of friction: the needle bounces in the groove, the tape drags across a magnetic head. Friction dissipates energy in the form of sound. Meaning: you hear these media being played. Surface noise and tape hiss are not flaws in analog media but artifacts of their use. Even the best engineering, the finest equipment, the “ideal” listening conditions cannot eliminate them. They are the sound of time, measured by the rotation of a record or reel of tape—not unlike the sounds made by the gears of an analog clock. Read More