DNA IN CAMBRIDGE BEFORE WATSON AND CRICK

Today would have been Douglas Adams' sixtieth birthday and it is massively unfair that he is not alive to celebrate it. I can remember reading The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (it was a rite of passage in my house, along with reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, that signaled one was an adult, with adult tastes and opinions, etc.) in grade six and boring my friends by reading long passages to them. It was the most brilliant thing I'd ever read at that time, and the whole series remains one of the funniest things ever committed to paper. I know that my sense of humour and my outlook on life can often be traced back to his writing ("Life: loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."), and I'm grateful for every minute I've spent reading him. I almost walked out of the 2005 movie version of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy--it felt overtly Disneyfied, more an insult to his legacy and a betrayal to his vision than anything else (even if he approved it)--but not even that could dim my love for his books (though it did increase my appreciation for the wonderful BBC television series a hundredfold).

Dig that theme music! 

While I love how madcap and zany he could be, I also love the darkness of the last three Hitch Hiker books. He may have felt they weren't in keeping with the tone of the early books and radio serials, but they were still wonderful, even with the humour absolutely pitch black and the characters succumbing to all sorts of horrible events. What's more, they felt in line with the Dirk Gently books, particularly The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, in a way that helps to unite his entire corpus (not that someone with as distinctive a voice as Adams could really write something that wouldn't be recognizably his). There is--and it's unfair I can't find it online (though my own stunning ineptitude is probably the reason)--one of the more beautiful passages in the English language, one that I often find running through my head at the end of a long day, in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and it's moments like that, when you suddenly realize that you've been laughing hysterically because someone managed to write something so profoundly true, to get the universe and what it's like to live in it so right, that make Adams such a pleasure to read.

Happy birthday, Douglas Adams!

REVIEW: BURIAL + FOUR TET - "NOVA"

Burial and Four Tet

Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) just tweeted a link to "Nova," the latest collaboration between Burial and himself (this follows their previous collaborations "Moth" and "Wolf Cub" from 2009, and their work with Thom Yorke last year on "Ego" and "Mirror"). This is a treat, coming so soon after Burial released his Kindred EP, and at less than six minutes it feels like something of a counterbalance to its lengthy suites. "Nova" is, as you can imagine, wonderful, starting off like a half-remembered song from a dream, all disconnected snatches of vocals just beyond comprehension and far away glimmers of melody. I particularly love the stuttering chords and vocals over those Burial drums in the first half of the track, and when everything takes off in the second half after a brief lull, "Nova" goes to another level. Achingly melodic, the climax is like the best moments of both artists distilled to deceptively simple elements, what every imitator and detractor has clumsily attempted to grasp, but with an obvious level of mastery and craftsmanship that transcends well-worn sonic signifiers. The close, with its static and what sounds almost like whale noises (a Burial favourite), is pretty, if a little inconsequential, but at that point the heavy lifting has been done.

This track hits the sweet spot for a collaboration between these two in a way that none of their other tracks have quite matched, with the lushness of Four Tet's work offered a propulsive lift from those 2-step drums that Burial favours and the approach to the vocal meeting somewhere in the middle. Both "Moth" and "Wolf Club" had moments of brilliant, but they felt stitched together, the boundaries between the two artists too clear to work as anything more than a Four Tet track added to a Burial track or vice versa. Here, though, there's a give and take that suggests two artists who are comfortable with each other and able to push each other into new territory. The idea of an album length collaboration between the two has become an increasingly tantalizing prospect over the course of their collaborative history, and this track really makes that seem like a masterpiece waiting to happen.

All in all, "Nova" is seriously, compulsively listenable and one of the best examples of  "glowing" music--as Burial has described the music he tries to make--I've ever heard. Indeed, this sounds more "glo-fi" than most of the chillwave stuff that got that tag a few years ago, bright and colourful in just the right way. Come December, I can see this fighting for track of the year. If it's any indication of what's to come on a new Four Tet album, the follow up to 2010's There is Love in You is going to be something special.

REVIEW: RADERE - I'LL MAKE YOU QUIET

Radere - I'll Make You Quiet
Future Sequence, 2012

Back at the start of the year, Big Shot put out an article on "75 Dance/Electronic Music Albums to Look For in 2012." One of the releases highlighted on that list that caught my eye was Radere's I'll Make You Quiet. Described as an album constructed out of "found sounds and processed guitar and electronics" that was "captured on single takes, a rarity in this cut-and-paste digital age," I marked the album down as a definite "must-hear." That description called to mind Tim Hecker, whose work I love, and I wondered if I'll Make You Quiet might be this year's Ravedeath, 1972. In many ways, Hecker is not a bad comparison for the music Carl Ritger makes as Radere. The physicality of his music, the weight and presence it seems to have in the room as it plays, certainly calls to mind some of the best attributes of Hecker's work, but the tension between silence and noise, the co-mingling of beauty and violence within both of those dynamics, also calls to mind the work of Laughing Stock-era Talk Talk or Bark Psychosis c.Hex. Another recent touchstone might the Sight Below, whose It All Falls Apart used a similar tonal palette, though to more melodic (and ultimately more rewarding) ends.

While Radere calls to mind all of these artists, I'll Make You Quiet is not quite at their level. Most of the tracks here work not in terms of linear development or narrative, but through stasis and repetition. This can be quite an effective technique, but I'll Make You Quiet often suffers from a fatiguing insistence on its static qualities. Given the power and force of his sounds--even at its sunniest and lightest, nothing here could be called gossamer or be said to shimmer; this is solid music throughout--Ritger is often able to construct his tracks in a topographic fashion, using layers of sounds to construct worlds with a great deal of variance from top to bottom. The cover image, which is absolutely gorgeous and probably my front-runner for album cover of the year right now, describes the movement of sound on the album well: while there are often peaks and valleys, huge banks of cloud (in the form of drone, hiss, or hum) shift throughout, now obscuring those peaks and valleys, now revealing them. When this approach clicks, as it does on the album-opening title track--whose structure of a slow build to a monstrous wash of noise (aided by the grainy, lo-fi texture of the recording) that gives way to a brighter, almost angelic bit of melody reminds me a great deal of "Hex"--and the closer, "Stay Away," which uses dynamic shifts, feedback squall, and the arrhythmic propulsion provided by what sounds alternately like keys jangling or bits of broken metal and glass being dragged across a floor to great effect, Radere's music achieves a beauty and power that can breathtaking.

Those two tracks, at twenty two minutes combined, make up just under half the album's forty six minute running time. Unfortunately, the other twenty four minutes are not similarly thrilling. "Sometimes, I Can't Make Full Sentences" is the best of the rest, calling to mind the more interstitial moments of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (I half-expected a female voice to tell me about Arco AM/PM Mini-Markets), but there is a frustrating lack of development. An entire world is being constructed, one that sounds like what Arthur C. Clarke imagines might be beneath Jupiter's clouds in 2010: Odyssey Two, but nothing happens beyond that construction. That Ritger is able to create such vivid and detailed tracks in one take is impressive, but I can't help feeling that multiple takes might allow him to do more in the way of development. The remaining two tracks, ". . . So I Left" and "Good Evening, Ghosts (Version),"* suffer from the same fate. While ". . . So I Left" introduces a new colour to the album with its mock-organ guitar and chattering denouement (the most alien sounding moment on the album), "Good Evening, Ghosts" is nine minutes of static repetition, a swooning, swooping loop (a very pretty loop, to be fair) repeated while being swathed in noise and sonic debris. The materials are there, but Ritger seems content to put them together without asking them to do anything.

I'll Make You Quiet, then, is ultimately a missed opportunity. Its opening and closing tracks show just how strong and interesting Radere can be, but the middle of the album suffers from being neither ambient enough to serve as aural wallpaper (music this weighty and physical commands attention) nor active enough to repay close listening. At its best, the album suggests that Ritger has a voice distinctive enough to contribute to the kind of power ambient music that Tim Hecker has been the master of for the past ten years, which is high praise. That the longest tracks on I'll Make You Quiet are the strongest bodes well for Ritger's ability to make this kind of music appealing on a large scale, but for now, too much stasis and repetition and not enough development compromise his vision over the album as a whole.


*You have no idea how much I wanted to like a track called "Good Evening, Ghosts."

RIP "THIS MONTH IN GRIME/DUBSTEP": OR, WHY IT MATTERS WHEN PEOPLE STOP WRITING ABOUT MUSIC (EVEN IF IT'S JUST ON THE INTERNET)

I just noticed this post on Blackdown last night, so I'm a few days behind here. I was pretty disappointed to read that "This Month in Grime/Dubstep" would be no more. It's even more distressing to read Martin Clark's narrative of events:

Before we get into any light messenger shooting, the column is being retired, I did not choose to stop writing it. I've been invited to pitch to other sections on Pitchfork but my grime/dubstep column doesn't fit into the new editorial strategy. I'll be honest and say this isn't something I really understand but naturally recognise their authority to make this call.

While Clark goes on to point out that in some ways the end of the column comes at a very opportune personal moment, something about the phrase "doesn't fit into the new editorial strategy" bothers me. Does this herald, not too far down the line, the end of "Show No Mercy," also (Pitchfork's metal column for those unfamiliar)? What about something like "The Out Door" (a column focused on outre/experimental music)? Is that destined to fall afoul of the "new editorial strategy?" I understand the desire to move away from a single genre/scene focused column--if that is what this new editorial strategy entails--but surely first grime, then dubstep, and now UK bass music more generally have demonstrated over the past seven years (the length of the column's lifespan) their vitality, vibrancy, and importance to contemporary electronic music. If nothing else, Clark's voice has been an energetic, excited (and exciting), and informative one. He closes his sign off with "If you took the time to read [a "This Month in Grime/Dubstep" column] in the last seven years and came across someone you'd not noticed, well then bigup: my work here is done." Trust me, Martin: your work here is definitely done.

I feel as if I've written about this a dozen times on this blog--I'm too lazy to check and see--but when I first got on the internet, my exposure to new music came primarily via reviews, interviews, and, had they existed (or I been smart enough to find those that did exist), columns exactly like "This Month in Grime/Dubstep." Sites like Pitchfork and Allmusic (and later Stylus) were incredibly important to me because they gave me access to new music even if I could only read about it. Up until just before I went away to school, getting music that I heard about online was an incredibly time consuming and expensive proposition, usually limited to a CD as a Christmas gift or a trickle of music found on bad P2P networks, music that was difficult to access given the speed of dial-up modems. Reading about music, then, and imagining what it sounded like, piecing it together slowly through networks of references, was what I spent most of my time doing. I didn't get to listen to a lot of this stuff for a long time, but in some weird way I knew it backwards and forwards.

In high school, probably as a result of the amount of time I spent reading about music on the internet, I decided I was going to be a music journalist when I grew up. What could be better than writing about music for a living? Not only would I still be able to read and talk about it, but, I gathered, as an actual journalist, I would get to hear it. I'd sort of vaguely had ambitions about being a writer before this, but puberty led me to the distressing realisation that reading, writing, and talking about science fiction weren't activities that were likely to impress girls (plus I was, and am still, pretty rubbish at writing SF). Obviously, I was not in any way farsighted enough to see that the idea of becoming a print music journalist was not the smartest career ambition for any number of reasons. That didn't stop me, though; I even remember asking my grandfather, with whom I don't particularly get along, about being a journalist (he was one--a financial columnist, I believe). He told me he didn't think that music journalists made good money on the scale of journalists' salaries. I ignored this.

This desire to be a journalist continued on and off throughout undergrad, and to a certain extent it shaped how I listened to music (and what music I sought out). I spent a lot of those four years catching up on all the music I'd only read about before. It was a little like doing my homework. I listened to (almost) all the things I'd seen referenced and tried to get myself familiar with them. I discovered a lot of the music that I now love and consider central to my concept of myself as a music listener by doing this. Equally important, I discovered a number of music writers whose work I found to be both inspired and inspiring as I sought out information on the bands, genres, and movements I felt I needed to become an expert on. I was taken with Stylus' "Soulseeking" column, especially those by Nick Southall, many of which seemed unutterably elegant and eloquent. Pitchfork's features like Tom Ewing's "Poptimist" and Mark Richardson's "Resonant Frequency" were also playing an important role in shaping how I was thinking (and how I wanted to write and talk) about music. Nitsuh Abebe's article for Pitchfork on early British and American post-rock was then and remains now one of the best pieces I've ever read: dense with information, but accessible, full of obvious affection for its subject matter and welcoming for those less familiar. It also introduced me to the work of Simon Reynolds, the man who coined--for all practical purposes--the term "post rock," and whose Energy Flash and Rip it Up and Start Again! proved essential reading (again, part of that idea of "doing my homework"--I'm still waiting to get a chance to read Retromania).

The upshot of all this was that from high school to the end of undergrad, I started and abandoned (usually pretty quickly) a number of music blogs designed to emulate what I was reading. I was not successful about this, largely because the people I mentioned above are all quite good writers. In my final year of undergrad, I wrote a (pretty terrible if I'm honest) thesis on music, memory, and the interaction between the two for both musician and listener.* It was my last attempt at doing what I saw the people I admired doing. I did not find it an enriching experience, and I gave up the dream of becoming a music journalist, or even of writing about music. Clearly, I couldn't do it--at least not as well as the writers I admired could--and if I wasn't up to their quality, there was no point in writing. I still read and talked about music all the time, but I wasn't going to make that the central goal of my life. I was starting grad school and the idea of being a writer of any kind, but especially a music writer, sort of faded away.

Concurrent with all of that, I started listening to more and more new music. It's not that I ever stopped doing that, but now it was the primary focus. Starting about four years ago, I began to try to keep up to date and current with what was happening in the genres and styles I liked, rather than catching up on what had been going on five, ten, or twenty years before. This coincided with a move away from rockism toward more catholic listening practices (a move that had begun during my undergrad years but that has intensified over the past few years). I started to listen to (and, more importantly, to enjoy) things that I never would have considered in high school (electronic/dance music and electroacoustic/noise stuff) at the same time that I grew tired of some of the enthusiams of my teenage self (namely prog rock and krautrock, both of which sound pretty tired to me now, by and large, though perhaps I just need a break. I listened to a lot of that stuff). The fall of 2009 was a time of pretty significant changes for me, and my relationship to music--what I listened to, how I thought about it/talked about it, what I used to listen to it--was not immune to those changes. In a lot of ways, it was the point of maturation of the developments of the previous two to three years, and what led to me writing these words today.**

To bring this back to where I started, "This Month in Grime/Dubstep" was an important part of helping to shift and develop my tastes in that period. I would dip in and out of it, but at some point over the past few years I started reading each installment. I saw Burial's name pop up on a number of year end lists in 2007, so I picked up Untrue.*** I'm by no means an expert in grime, dubstep, or UK bass music, but they've been a healthy interest of mine ever since. I've found other sources since to discover more of this music--Fact, Resident Advisor, The Quietus, Boomkat's product reviews--but I've always looked forward to Clark's columns. They were expertly curated, and guaranteed to turn up something interesting even when talking about things I otherwise didn't enjoy. I know there are Rinse FM podcasts and a simple search will turn up loads of people talking about this stuff, but that monthly digest was handy. It helped me feel like I was at least somewhat keeping up with what was going on half a world away.

So, RIP "This Month in Grime/Dubstep." You will be missed. I'm glad to hear that Clark plans to continue writing over at Blackdown. All I can say at this point, I guess, is bigup, Martin. You've done a fine job these past seven years. Thanks for all the music.



*This is obviously why hauntology so grabbed me. It was like a more interesting, less regressive version of everything I wanted to talk about in that thesis.
**I started this blog (in its first form, before I moved it to blogger) in the summer of 2010. I didn't know then that it was a blog--it was mostly just a bunch of stuff in a long word document--but I decided to formally make it one in the early parts of 2011. A couple months (and a few posts) later, it ended up here. Actually, the first thing in that word document was an anecdote about listening to "Hyph Mngo" (which I discovered via "This Month in Grime/Dubstep") with some friends while in the middle of the Redwoods.
***It feels very appropriate that I'm listening to Burial's Kindred--which I'm enjoying even more this time around--as I write this.

REVIEW: SHLOHMO - VACATION EP

Shlohmo - Vacation EP
Friends of Friends, 2012

As I am currently on vacation (well, sort of: I haven't gone anywhere and I'm still doing work, I just don't have to go into campus or teach this week), this seems like an appropriate confluence of subject matter and state-of-being.

I picked up Shlohmo's Bad Vibes last year on something of a whim; a few reviews compared it to the stuff coming out on Brainfeeder these days, which was enough to get me to at least take a look (sort of like how the letters MBV in a review are almost guaranteed to get me to give something a listen), though it already felt like I was up to my eyeballs in woozy deconstructions of r'n'b and hip-hop spliced with IDM. I came to like Bad Vibes quite a bit, though--it made it onto my Albums of the Year list in the Honourable Mentions category--partly because it served as such an able foil to other albums that caught my fancy last year. It was blurred and bleary, true, but it was also quite warm and inviting. Thinking about its sound, I always come back to the word humid: rust and moss slowly accumulating over a world while thick, damp air rests on top of everything.  This is in many ways the antithesis of something like the Weeknd's House of Balloons, whose music is so clean and stylish even at its blurred-est and bleariest. Nevertheless, there was a link in the way that both Shlohmo and the Weeknd took various of-the-moment signifiers and forced them into the service of distinctly personal visions (that Shlohmo recently remixed Drake's "Crew Love," a song co-written by and featuring the Weeknd, draws some attention to this shared approach).

The humidity hasn't decreased on the Vacation EP, and if the material here is not miles away from what Shlohmo was doing on Bad Vibes, there are enough new wrinkles here to keep things interesting and to suggest development. While he doesn't abandon the dying machinery sound palette that has such emotional resonance, nor the blues and r'n'b inflected guitar playing (though it's used sparingly here), Shlohmo pushes vocals to the foreground on Vacation. Whereas on Bad Vibes the vocals often sounded like they should come covered in a bedsheet with eyeholes cut out and some cheap chains to shake, here the vocals are at times more in line with what UK bass music has been doing over the past half decade and at other times a call back to turn of the millennium glitch, seemingly lifted from a volume of Clicks & Cuts. Lead-off track "The Way U Do" is in line with the former, an r'n'b vocal pitched up and disembodied, never quite able to say something, to make a connection, but present to do some of the heavy emotional (and melodic) lifting. Indeed, the foregrounded vocals of "The Way U Do" work to make it feel something like a 2012 version of "The Great Gig in the Sky," a comparison not quite as ludicrous as it might seem on the surface. "Wen Uuu," on the other hand, is in line with the kind of music Milles Plateaux used to put out, the syllables sliced, diced, and reconstructed beyond comprehension--if there is a contemporary analogue for it, "Aidy's Girl's a Computer" might come closest, though the vocals in "Wen Uuu" are clearly and recognizably human.

Beyond Shlohmo's more upfront work with vocals, though, Vacation's tempos feel quite a bit more sprightly than those found on Bad Vibes. These tempos are paired with arrangements that often feel quite busy and full (though not in a bad way) when compared with some of the more skeletal tracks on his last album. This doesn't always work out--for all its glitchy vocal work and magical backing (it sounds like an entire environment coming to life in a rainstorm and singing for you), "Wen Uuu" doesn't do a whole lot, content to unspool its way to a reverb and echo drenched retreat into the fog--but when it does, as on the second half of "The Way U Do" when the two vocal tracks merge and duet in a satisfying payoff (and one that's not far from the ground Burial explores on Kindred), Shlohmo's skill as an arranger becomes clear. The way that he constructs his tracks is quite similar to BNJMN, whose Black Square I like quite a bit.

The best track on Vacation is its final one, "Rained the Whole Time," though. Bringing back the guitars over a beat that calls to mind Disco Inferno's "Summer's Last Sound," Shlohmo largely does away with the vocals here while offering one of his most compelling productions. In the middle of the track, the song undoes itself--the drums dropping into a straight 4/4 before becoming a lone snare and then disappearing entirely--sounding like an r'n'b slow jam forced to go so slow that it comes apart at the seams. Without its beat, the song is at once weightless and impossibly heavy-limbed, a nicely disorienting effect. The reentry of the beat offers a jolt of energy and momentum before the song undoes itself once again to close, the pauses and hesitations of the beat giving way to that same lone snare and finally nothing.

Vacation is not a perfect release and at only three songs (plus some remixes on some versions), to have "Wen Uuu" feel so underwhelming is a disappointment. Nevertheless, "The Way U Do" is a strong update on the template laid out by Bad Vibes and "Rained the Whole Time" suggests just how far Shlohmo can push his sound. I wouldn't be surprised if Shlohmo makes a Cosmogramma style leap on his next full length, but given his name, modus operandi, and the tinkering on display on Vacation, Shlohmo seems more likely to take a path similar to that of Four Tet, gradually subsuming larger and larger amounts of sound under his own identity. On a slightly larger scale, this feels like one of the most obvious and fruitful cross-pollinations from Los Angeles' beat scene and the UK's post-dubstep milieu yet, connecting with Flying Lotus and Brainfeeder at the same time that it nods to Burial, James Blake, Kode9, BNJMN, and others. It might not be a tropical paradise, but you could do worse than to spend your vacation in the world conjured up by Vacation.