Saturday, April 30, 2005
drum machinessssssss
last night, people kept passing me wine. mixmaster mike, I heard, forgot that scratching was art. but, our heroes brought logic from Venezuela to help us forget the sunlight. I ended up having a tipsy conversation with a middle-aged couple I had never met from Chile and Peru in a swanky restaurant about political representation of the subaltern in texas and mexican futurism. they were nice.
our friend in synthesizers, Philip Sherburne went to Mexico to experience when shiny machines and people with remixed evolutionary cells in their bodies intermingle. plus, theres purty pictures.
ausente
violins creaking. and the thick leaves of laughter.
cities of sentiment.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
(headspace)
Edan is like waking up and theres a bed--the size of a small European nation--of turntables out your back window. There they are, just waiting for you. Then, someone spills red paint and Norbert Weiner books all over them and theres swirls of molecular syllables that date back to the 3rd century. You do realize I'm talking about music. This track is fire.
And you thought history was like, so twentieth century.
(courtesy at the friendly folks at fluxblog)
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
muted nouns
People, I've noticed, forget the simple joys of enunciation. Like, how important it is to be understood by those outside your studio speakers. Hip-hop is one of the few forms where intentionally blurring the meaning of words during a song is less prevalent--though early Tribe Called Quest hooks, everything from ODB and most things Screwed point in the other way. The list could fill a house. And it works sometimes: stretching out syllables is like bending guitar strings when it matters or tapping MPC pads with baseball bats. Some bands need to be more earful of when its important to spread the love of easily understood lyrics and when its cheery to overlap verbs. You weren't listening, were you.
Monday, April 25, 2005
always missing
check the new issue of this magazine. free has never sounded so right. The Real World kids walked by my work again. I never felt so absent watching cameras stare at people waiting for the light to turn green. hyperreal, dun.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
je suis plastique
If you think science is messy and untruthful than you should never go to a Medeski, Martin and Wood show. They're the Phish of jazz-ish bands. Science has proven, over a thousand years ago, that white people think that dancing means acting like rhythm isnt there and jerking their bodies on some "yo, you should call 9-1-1 cause I dont know if I'm having a seizure" shit. Science also tells us that if 99.88888889% of the people at a show are shaggy-haired, collegiate-aged white kids and they're not wearing backpacks: something is wrong. And indeed, Sherlock, there was.
It was the music. It was no good for many reasons. As musicians, these three dudes are great--they can tap, pluck and slap with the best of them (they are on Blue Note, after all...like sixty years too late). but, as a performance this is the worst thing I have ever seen in my life--that includes a Garth Brooks performance, a drunk Lee Perry-lookalike playing Blind Lemon Jefferson in Houston and some wack opening group for Sage Francis named Mac Lethal. Worst, I tell you. They noodled and acted like Bitches Brew only came out in France.
Ah.
Three words: Fu-s-ion.
G'night.
Friday, April 22, 2005
typewriters of the future
The Austin Chronicle people are letting me write for them now. Weeklies! Weeklies!
And I've decided to write a paper for next year's EMP Pop Con (or a Ph.D program if one comes up) out of the idea I had for a book. Its going to be called 'Brown Noise' (pace, Tricia Rose) and its going to have to do with Ivy League rock bands---no, wait. Thats not it. It has to do with questioning identity in Latin-Amerikkkan pop/avant-garde/electronic music--from Ricardo Villalobos, Ely Guerra and Prefuse 73 (even the Spanish roots count) to dalek and Cafe Tacuba. Prog-ethnicity. Postanalog thesis. Drum machines.
(more on this as it develops)
these fingers are air
I just watched my nine-year old niece go Beyonce and sing four songs in one play. Little kids sat in the cafeteria audience wearing the word "befuddled" on their face and occasionally staring at me like I was the latest cartoon hero on a walking television. Supposedly, before I got there, my niece fell onstage on some slippery stage shit, nawmean? But like all great actresses and football players...she got up, son. Word.
Don't listen to the youth: being an Uncle has its perks.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
there is no reason
Houston rap has gotten too big. I feel bad for the aural umph K-Otix, VG Skillz and the host of other underground rappers whose talent have been pushed aside by Mike Jones' boring flow and the rest of the post-Screw collective. Bitterness and nineties nostalgia aside, Houston rap requires a whole different aesthetics and shinier boombox. Slow flows, beats sprinkled with glitzy synthesizers and downtown NY minimalist strings that pop up from time to time: the sound of futureghettos. Its hotness divided by fifth ward racialized realism and drum machines squared.
I like it like I like pan dulce.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
montreal in the clouds
today, I looked up and saw a tongue in the clouds. i didn't realize it belonged to bob dylan. or maybe it was mike jones.
eitherway, it was wordy.
Monday, April 18, 2005
those aren't pennies
Wiley & Kano make the hair on my dreams frizz. They make me want to run back to my old university and overthrow the philosophy department with a grime compilation. epistemology + Lady Sovereign = joyful noises. Oh, and cut-up vocals are so 8th grade now. Scissor beats and taped conversations with British cement.
there is sunlight outside.
tomorrow is the day you forget
I'm finishing up another short story--finally following up "neuro" with something altogether different. its called "the absent" and involves a math professor who when he was twenty-two wrote a letter to his future wife detailing how he would leave her. it takes place solely in an apartment hallway and no children were hurt during the writing of it.
now finding a publisher is another thing.
birds
holy mashed potatoes, people, Antony and the Johnsons are fire. Nina Simone came back as a wavy voiced white person. the pianos look at you with soft eyes and theres no one behind you. like hearing eazy-e or bob dylan for the first time, the voice tip-toes out of the speakers and walks all over your ears--just relax, it feels like long walks on Spanish beaches.
Sunday, April 17, 2005
fewture
the music of the best future:I should account as the foremost musician one who knew only the sadness of the most profound happiness, and no other sadness at all; but such a musician has never existed yet.
-nietzsche, the gay science, 1887
pocket full of stones
so, I'm working on an as-yet untitled book about avant-latinamerikkkan musicians. a profile book with sprinkles of theory and the dust-soaked pages of history. mexicans as purveyors of remixology/showing the complexity of latin-american musicians (historically, etc). and how their music is and is not "latin-american" [whatdoesthatmean?] some names will be familiar (kid606, murcof, ricardo villalobos) others will be on the wall (dalek, cafe tacuba, cypress hill [oldstuff]). experiments&identity. scalpels&selfhood. pop sociology and anti-pop aural architecture.
any suggestions are welcomed.
(click on the pound sign for comments)
its all politics.
Saturday, April 16, 2005
(talk)
welcome home. kick off your shoes and say hello to the rest of today. there is no back door and people with two left feet run the establishment here. don't look at me like that.
rubberknees
some things I've learned as my twenty-fourth year approaches:
-basketball is a young man's game
-knees are not forever
-there is not enough birthdays on a calendar to read all of Philip K. Dick's novels
-comics are like, really important to people
-I am un-american like tacos (more on this later)
-as you change cities, you realize how good friends aren't malleable
-crab-stuffed chicken is what jesus must have ordered at the last supper
-the pope's record contract with Sony resulted in no collabos with the Neptunes
-where is Timbaland?
-oil will run out
-hello, gray hair
-the houston astros will probably never win a world series
Thursday, April 14, 2005
it ain't me
if I was in Barcelona I'd stop by and say hello: a meaty thanks to jace (and pitchfork) for giving me hits from Norway, Australia, England (University of Cambridge), Germany, Puerto Rico....and Maryland.
"do you feel Mormon?"
"yeah, actually, I do"
- two guys wearing the same white shirt and tie walking out of a restaurant at lunch today
p.s.s.s.s.s.s.s. I should be writing for The Austin Chronicle soon.
member discount
no, really. listening to lee "scratch" perry at work makes you think hard. it turns out David Byrne is a huge fan of the Mexic-Arte Museum and comes around pretty often. watching him come in without me knowing it would have been bonkers.
and last night, at a local bar I was watching on three screens the Red Sox wear skirts on the field against the Yanks, the Astros swinging with straws against the Mets and the Rockets shoot golf balls against some team whose jersey looks like a little league uniform. its like Soren Kierkegaard said: the instant of decision is madness.
yesterday I was driving home in downtown from a jazz club where covers of black sabbath and zeppelin were tossed around and a cab ran a red light and by inches almost swiped me and my significant other. its moments like these that--
you get the idea.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
you walked passed me
Working at an art museum makes you realize how many people are truly not that interested in Mexican art as more than Frida and Diego sitting in a tree. On the upside, I still get paid to listen to all the Tito Puente I can take. And damned if I'm anyone to say no to that.
and to those thugs at the Austin Museum of Art and the Tate Modern in London:
don't play devendra banhart too loud--it scares the little kids.
take it to the streets
I just saw one of the Real World kids walk by in downtown Austin (which has vendors selling bottles of sunshine to Northerners at 2 dollars a pop). Yesterday I saw two others. When television screens have limbs and are moving like the Fat Boys, I get worried. Like, drop the biology homework mom. People stared at a crew of five chase around a skinny white girl and her friend in a wheelchair as they talked about nothing, really--maybe ice cream or the weather in Brazil. Yesterday, the token black dude had a cowboy hat on that looked like a banana with cancer. That's what I call multiculturalism.
And I accidentally stepped on the shoe of one of the members of the the Youngbloodz. He didn't look too happy.
Friday, April 08, 2005
dash, dame
"Like the preachers say: On your tombstone will read two dates and a dash, and its only what you did with the dash that matters"
- greg tate, "howlin' wolf", from The Blues: a musical journey
+ -
Progressive sometimes is not good. Transnational sameness is eating up air like the Black Eyed Peas, only worse (if you can believe that). In the end, democracy needs to look up.
andwhenwassomebodygoingtotellmewelostthewarof1812?
Thursday, April 07, 2005
non/pop
Watching the Kronos Quartet last night is a reason to get people off the roof. As in, keep the heart looping. Almost two hours of scuffy NASA images--scratchy, grainy, fuzzy--and cerebral vibrato. They played a Terry Riley piece that went nowhere sometimes, but in pockets reached heights that few of us could see inside. Like a quieter shoegazer group, Kronos left emotion at the entrance and internalized all feeling for a brainy interpretation of horselipped compositions. Symbols (Hebrew Kabbalah? Alphabet soup? A dyslexic's view of a Chester Himes novel?) spilled onto the ceiling during certain pieces, flashes of empty ghosts slid across the huge screen behind them like whispery glitches.
Afterwards, I spoke to David Harrington (far left). I talked to him about his collabo with Cafe Tacuba and if they were going to do any other stuff with DJ's in the future (they worked with Christian Marclay in the 80's)--which he answered yes. Matmos is writing something for them next year and Amon Tobin is involved in a remix project as well. Matmos and the Kronos Quartet: the very idea makes the heart loop faster. I'm supposed to interview him for Signal to Noise later this year--makes me want to build instruments out of paperclips and watch old episodes of (insert program about a hispanic at MIT) genre: fantasy.
thumpthump.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
am/or
'printing did not really develop in [North] America during the eighteenth century until printers discovered a new source of income--the newspaper'
-Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 1976
Already in the 1550's, 10% of Lisbon's population were slaves; by 1800 there were close to a million slaves among the 2,500,000 or so inhabitants of Portugal's Brazil.
-Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1983
Saturday, April 02, 2005
without clouds
I have a job here, now. Look for my picture and words in this magazine.
and for the two of you who are all interested and stuff, I'm working on two books:
a collection of microfiction entitled Subterraneo and one of aesthetics, brainy street theory, music history and honest talk called Invisible Turntables that I'll probably independently publish and slang like Houston rappers do tapes out of their trunks.
the new Beck album makes me feel all waked up. Quasimoto's new record is like looking into Rene Magritte's mouth while watching a television in there of old Good Times episodes. some guys from England named Weevil sent me a record called Drunk Light that sounds like Radiohead on a good day. and we all know good days are like, good, son.
(whats up there, anyways?)
