Special Holiday Treat courtesy of Monsieur Johnny A.
Let's Paint, Exercise, & Blend Drinks TV! This extraordinary broadcast is brought to you by the folks at public access Santa Monica. The guy's name is John Kilduff, who's (I understand) an MFA candidate at UCLA and if this is his work then he's a certified genius. It's unreal how many cholos are watching enough public access to want to harass this poor jackass. If you're interested he's got around 170 you tube clips up at http://www.youtube.com/user/letspainttv. His activities range from painting pies, performing open heart surgery, playing chess, painting meatballs, and shaving. The fun does not stop there. Anyway enjoy this bliss filled entertainment and happy holidays.

Hecuba, a local L.A. band from a label now becoming sort of ubiquitous round these parts, Manimal Vinyl, has a weird accumulation of parts. Some part plain old indie pop, vocals a bit dead pan like Ms. Friedberger from Fiery Furnaces (who cribs it from Yoko Ono and Patti Smith anyway), playful repetitions of lyrics, kiddy toy noises, but with a tendency for some squonky glitch, some doomy dub, and a feisty temper that comes out of no where. Something darker lurking underneath to be sure, hard to place it exactly. They definitely like hip-hop but they won't flirt with high production values or fancy synths opting instead for old oscillators, a moog, and a roland juno or something. Irreverent as hell. But also completely quixotic and catchy as fuck, especially that arpeggiating bleepy synth lick in Tom and Jerry which is cut straight from Pharrell's book of tricks.

Tom and Jerry
YES
Sir

Barry Prophet's 'Synthecycletron'. Amazing installation/instrument from Toronto based composer and instrument architect, Barry Prophet. It's basically a pedal-powered synth that allows anyone (up to 4 people) to create improvised music by pedaling and moving their bodies to shape the sounds. Here's his own intro to the work which exhibited in Toronto over the summer and into the fall.
He gives this break down of the title of the piece:

synthesis: Combination, composition, putting together; building up of separate elements esp. of conceptions, propositions or facts, into a connected whole, esp. a theory or system.

cycle: Recurrent period. Cycle per second. One complete wavelength. What is technically a double vibration is conventionally called a vibration, cycle or oscillation.

bicycle: Two wheeled mode of transportation powered by foot or hand crank.

cyclotron: Apparatus for acceleration of charged atomic particles revolving in magnetic field.

Synthecycletron is a site specific pedal powered sound sculpture containing electronic sound components within structures of steel, sheet metal, rattan and wood. The dimensions of the sculpture are approximately 8 ft high with a 14 ft. square foot print. Four stationary bicycles serve as turbines to generate electricity to power synthesizer components housed in a metal tower. The bikes radiate out from the tower to connect with Theremin pedestals which house Theremin synthesizers. When a person pedals a bike, they will generate energy which powers the synthesizer components creating patterns of sounds. When they or someone else wave their hands in front of the Theremin Pedestals, pitch bending electronic sounds are generated from the Theremin synthesizers.
Visitors to the Synthecycletron will be encouraged to pedal and play with sound. From a distance, observers will see people pedaling and waving their arms at the base of something that looks like a wildly painted space ship. What they will hear will be improvised sound art.

Here's an example of the kind of sounds this thing will make:

Field Recordings of the Synthecyclotron

Here's a photo:



I kind of love the dorky 6 year old paint splotch job although if he was really going for a space ship, I think he could have done something a bit more technological seeming. But this is pretty lo fi technology that makes this thing work, I mean it's pedal powered and uses theremins...not that I could put it together or anything. Just sayin...

A kind of tribute here to the late George Brecht, who died Dec 5. One of the primary forces in the Fluxus art movement from the '60s, Brecht started out making chance oriented paintings and print work and then like so many, took a class from John Cage at the new school in experimental music and started making chance music and conceptual scores often with little or no reference to noisemaking whatsoever as a primary condition for music making. In that sense he really pushed the boundaries of what music could be defined as and at the same time opened up art making (along with Naim June Paik and co.) to a praxis of music score oriented work. His work is often modest in its size and use of materials, but has the conceptual punch of other great prankster provocation artists. I posted a couple of his event score pieces that have been really influential for some of the scores I've been working on, as well a video piece called entrance to exit that's about as spare and clean as you can get. It's really refreshing to get back to stuff like this, it reminds you how not to think when you're trying to understand.

Switzerland based band Low Motion Disco put out a dreamy downtempo record over the summer that I'm glad I'm finding midwinter as 08 closes down. God bless end of the year lists (I promise mine before the year is through). "Things are gonna get easier" is a reimagining of "O-o-h Child" for a a blissed out, airy perspective. It's like if you just decided to lay down in the middle of the dance floor: it's not exactly useful and it's a little embarrassing to all your disco friends who are dancing their ass off, but it produces EXTREME relaxation. And I'm all about extremes here people. Let's get sleepy y'all! Apparently Sebastien Tellier did a remix which is probably getting more play than the original. Unfortunately he must have decided that the original was just a little bit too sleepy so he basically cleared room for the vocals and Frenchified the beat and bam, the song loses all mysterious charm. So tough, I posted the original.

Things Are Gonna Get Easier

Hudson Mohawke is a precocious 22 year old kid from Glasgow making beats, soon to come out with his first record on Warp (not a bad start). He belongs with this newish subgenre of music that combines house and techno, early video game music, IDM and glitch, maybe some dubstep and hyphy, and all with sense of a hip-hop beat pushed so loosely on the backbeat that it almost sounds like a drummer making mistakes. The affect of this trait is a kind of humanization of beat programming (something some IDMers, those who weren't attempting to obfuscate the beat so much that it became alienatingly other, were after) in that it approaches the beat more in the way a jazz drummer would. Jazz drummers (or really any drummer with any sense at all) know that where you place your hit, either on top of the beat or behind it, changes everything about how the sense of the rhythm is conveyed. A beat on top pushes the piece forward, drives it, while being behind feels lazy, or halted. The way these beats seem to work (although it's frequent enough that one feels some other type of alchemy involved) is that there's enough going on before the beat as after it, and they 'errors' kind of cancel each other out. But they also call attention to themselves so the process of humanization isn't really that it sounds like a human playing a drum kit (badly), but rather human rebelling against and breaking free of the grid clock of computer programs. Tic toc tic toc boom.
The term that often gets used to talk about this is 'wonky' although the confusing thing is that 'wonky' came about in describing a music really more rooted in techno. It was dudes making techno with rubbery funk bass lines and a steadily shifting beat structure (mostly in London, Glasgow, and to a lesser extent Berlin) that were thought of as 'wonky'. These guys, on the other hand, owe their sense of rhythm and instrumentation to hip-hop - slow stoned tempos, big downbeats, shakers, pitched up high hats, claps, glossy synths and obscured soul samples. In particular, it seems that pretty much everyone (including LA's Flying Lotus and Mike Slott, SF's Lazer Sword, Montreal's Megasoid, and fellow Glaswegian Dustie) references J Dilla often enough that one could pretty safely call him a kind of absent dad unknowingly fathering a sort of freakish offspring from his blend of downtempo, soulful, hip-hop. The thing they share most with him isn't just the self conscious placement of the snare, or the warmth and depth of his mixes, but the underlying sense of a dorkish studio wizard, staying up too late drinking Dr. Pepper and taking bong rips and living a kind of hermetic lifestyle. In that sense, many of these artist's beats feel like an inside joke, or a tangential point in a stoned internal monologue in which the train of thought begins and ends without direct reference to anything except feeling high and happy and kind of dark, but mostly free. In the world of instrumental hip-hop, where the gloomy posturing of Burial marks one overbearing end, and the euphoric pop collage of Girl Talk who shuns any sense of crafting one's own sounds from scratch, marks another exciting but slightly vacuous end, with Prefuse 73 lying somewhere uninspiring for either moody or dance advocates in the middle, this emergence of...I read someone call it 'aquacrunk' but I had to get creative and think of something else and I vote that it start getting called 'thunk' - apparently thunk isn't just a funny way of saying thought (although that's not a bad connection either) but it's a word used in computer programming in order to describe a piece of code used to perform a delayed computation which I find fitting for numerous reasons (see above's discussion of rhythm)...this emergence is as fascinating as it is healthy for the future of hip-hop.
Hud Mo, the diminutive, puts together a banger with "Polkadot Blues", a soul sample squeezed into chipmunk territory, a lopsided but headstrong beat, and a very strong resemblance to a J Dilla production. Heralds of Change's "Spotted" is a glamorous anthem, blinged out bleepy synth, a cowbell hammering out "my drink and my twostep" like the drunk uncle joining in with the wedding band and playing way too loud, and a warm pad and some gauzy bass wrapping everything up in some secret sauce. And Mike Slott's 'Flunky' is a like a etude on this whole scene. I get the weird feeling he's gonna be the next to get heard.

Hudson Mohawke: Polkadot Blues

Heralds of Change (Hudson Mohawke's project with Mike Slott): Spotted

Mike Slott: Flunky

Super pleasurable shoegaze from Oregonians band Paper (formerly Landing).  The record 'As As' came out just less than a year ago but I don't think it really got any attention. Nice woody bass line and some waify crooning in "Boy" but "Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy" is the better of the two and sports a beat that's totally cribbed from my favorite shoegaze band Ganger (see track "lid of the stars"). It's bouncy, bubbly, and fully diverting.

Boy

Cloudy, Cloudy, Cloudy

Nisennenmondai are an all girl three piece from Tokyo. Apparently the band name means 'computer bug problem' which is cool enough only the implied electro hacker sensibility doesn't exactly fit here. A lot of the double ep Neji/Tori is rougher and tougher than the track I'm posting but hey, I only like the tracks on Sonic Youth records with comparatively less distortion. The pummeling DNA style drums is what gets me, and I'm a sucker for guitar harmonics...and offbeat punchiness (le sacre du printemps returns in the form of a grizzly all girl psych punk band...anyone?). This should remind us why the Tokyo noise rock scene is always cooler.

Kyuukohan

Andrew Bird - Sectionate City


Andrew Bird - From the Basement from QandnotU on Vimeo.

Reliable (and beautiful) source found this clip of Andrew Bird playing a new tune of his in Nigel Godrich's (the longtime producer/engineer for Radiohead and many other essential bands Pavement, Air, Beck etc) web show called 'from the basement'. You know I was just recently feeling glum about Andrew Bird after listening to a tune of his I used to dig in a J. Crew but then I realized I was the one paying J. Crew and they were paying Andrew Bird, plus I got an awesome red cap. Also Andrew Bird works really well with lyrics despite the fact that they make as little sense as Beck's lyrics, they sound good coming out of his mouth. Plus a nice paired down song optimizing that loop machine; stacked pizzicato lines, a nice self chorusing effect, some col legno ethereality (that's when he plays with the wood of the bow instead of the hair, and his old school big vibrato whistle. Boy's got some skills and he's made a nice niche for himself writing these offhand, crafty songs that are really pretty affecting.

Snuggies. Get into it.

Little Vic. New York rapper, makes you feel like old style hip-hop is still worth it especially now that Kanye is aping Gary Numan. Dope beat, nice flow and something about that sample that's just hyped enough.

It's My Turn

These are electronic instruments made and performed by Simon Blackmore, Antony Hall and Steve Symons, Manchester based sound artists/sculptors, instrument building woodworkers calling themselves the Owl Project. Generally called the iLog, they make different ones with a variety of functions; tone and beat generators, voice samplers, AM detector (this one is called iLog Photo-Synthesis because it converts sunlight into sound), and effects and feedback modules. Pretty cute and has a slick enough design although it sounds like there's a fair number of glitches in the engineering. Some of the videos on their website show they're actually not bad for music making either. Instrument companies should be developing ideas like this and selling them for absurd prices. I suppose it wouldn't be a particularly 'green' instrument for its use of materials, even though conservation, or at least conscientiousness, must be in the conceptual backdrop of the whole project.



Also I'm posting a couple tracks off the new Black Milk album just because it's crack shit.

Losing Out (feat. Royce Da 5'9')

Holding It Down

This is a track from John Zorn's record that came out last spring only I just found out about it now. It's a exotic pop oriented record leaning towards surf, lounge, santa style latin rock, and lou reed simplicity. Marc Ribot's meaty exactitude rules throughout, and only on a few occasions do we get the skronk and squeal we're used to from Zorn's sax. It's über-pleasing and has to be a bit tongue in cheek as if it was a record made for TV show licensing in the 60's. But that's fairly reassuring. Mow Mow, the track I have posted, has a drooping melody that just seems to cycle back on itself. A loose brushy beat, some B3, vibes, a lazy night on the beach. It's harder than it looks to pull this off.

Mow Mow

Tussle is a dub/dance band out of San Francisco. Their new record is called Cream Cuts on Smalltown Supersound. Kind of Can/Cluster-ish Krautrock, not much changes throughout the song but the beats are hard and true, there's ample and woody bass, and some found sound thrown in for experimentalist cred. By the way, what in hell does 'experimental rock' mean anyway? Are they conducting rock experiments? Is it just a futuristic way of saying that it's not your average rock? Let's drop this term experimental for all bands who aren't actually trying to use experimental procedures (i.e. testing phenomena in a controlled setting without commitment to the particular outcome) and are merely confused about what to call themselves. Anyway, Meh Teh the last track on the record hits the sweet spot and sticks to it. When was the last time the last track on a record was the best one?

Meh Teh

Richard Prince at Gagosian.

Ridiculously good Richard Prince collages that I scooped from the NY Times round up of galleries in the city today. The two that I am posting are my favorites but the gagosian site has a bunch of nice big shots here.  It seems like a big flesh fest at first and they're arresting in not a particularly polite way.  Prostrated, highly endowed pinups with facial features blotted or masked, rastafaris with guitars thrust upon them awkwardly, bodies cramped together, floating awkwardly in space or lopped off at the stomach and half in the frame.  They're clearly a kind of updating of 'Demoiselles', or Gauguin's exoticized Tahitian women, but he's smirking too hard to eat the charge of colonialism. In the gallery shots, you can see how big and badass they are. Plus there's a 1987 Buick Grand National with a bunch of photos of biker chicks pasted on to it (someone asked me at the Martin Kippenberger show at MoCA why it seems like every contemporary art show he sees has a car in it. I'm pretty sure it's Richard Prince's fault).  It's all a bit vicious for sure, the cut outs, the aggressively haphazardous composition, the burlesque.  But it's also hot, punishing, and real.