Remix of Yeasayer’s O.N.E. (Vote MAE)
Hit that tiny play button below this paragraph to listen to a remix I did of Yeasayer’s song “O.N.E.” from their latest album Odd Blood. The stems were made available as part of a contest mc’d by Diplo’s Mad Decent label.
If you dig what you hear, please do me a favor and VOTE FOR IT.
Here’s a link to see the video for the original.
Field Recordings: CTA Vs. Wheelchair
This recording was made on the CTA Redline, run 9-19, heading southbound after a Chicago Cub’s game on April 15th, 2010. What initially prompted me to turn on the recorder were the hilariously shit-faced antics of a handful of Cubs fans (regrettably, those recordings didn’t come out so well). Apparently, one of them had been ejected from the game, and was (loudly) formulating his letter of complaint, much to the entertainment of some CTA riders, myself included. From what I could understand, his defending argument was, “I didn’t say shit.” But, as one of his friends pointed out, “you, uh, did say ’shit,’ though, dude.” It was all downhill from there.
Today’s minute-long field recording documents what happened soon after the die-hards left the train car. In the first few seconds, you hear the conductor give his all-aboard call, and his usual “please stand clear of the doors.” The train, however, was very crowded and, as you’ll hear, one unfortunate patron in a wheelchair was unable to exit, preventing the doors from closing. Drama ensued, but the most interesting detail, which the recording fails to capture, was the prolonged embarrassed silence that followed.
For more CTA boners, check out Kevin O’Neil’s CTA Tattler, one of many interesting Chicago-centric blogs found on Chicagonow.com.
All Aboard
punkplay @ Steppenwolf’s Garage Theatre
This is the last week to see Pavement Group’s excellent punkplay by Gregory Moss. And Wednesday is pay-what-you-can for those of us living on a punk rock budget.
I highly, with all of my heart, recommend seeing this play. Punk was a very important part of my upbringing and continues to shape my approach to music and life. As I am with anything that attempts to address the importance of punk, I was preparing myself for disappointment as I sat in the audience listening to the worst music the 70s had to offer (a brilliant conceptual approach to the preshow music by the sound designer). I was skeptical, thinking that punkplay wouldn’t offer anything beyond the most superficial impressions of punk as a cultural phenomenon. But, I am happy to say, this play fucking gets it. See for yourself.
Btw – happy 4/20 everybody.
Devon Clifford (1979-2010)
I’m sorry to report that Devon Clifford the drummer for You Say Party! We Say Die! passed away this past weekend. While playing a gig in YSPWSD’s hometown of Vancouver, Devon collapsed mid-set, apparently suffering from a massive brain hemorrhage. Paramedics were called and were unable to revive him. Devon died early Sunday morning surrounded by family and friends.
I only knew Devon for a few hours, but I found him to be a very kind, very cool, and sharply funny person who loved his life and fellow bandmates. I am greatly saddened by the knowledge that I will never see him again, and my heart goes out to his family and the members of his band.
New MAE: Nip The Bud
Here I present to you a new song by Motorcycles Are Everywhere entitled Nip The Bud. Click the artwork above to hear it, or right-click to download.
This track makes use of sonic elements I’ve been experimenting with since moving to Chicago, and it should be a pretty strong indication of what to expect from MAE in the future. The percussion for Nip The Bud was derived from acoustic drum samples by my friend David Foley of the band Cinder Cone.
The name comes from the 1958 novel Nip The Buds, Shoot The Kids by Kenzaburō Ōe, one of my favorite authors. Ōe was a child living in Japan when the United States used nuclear weapons to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. In my assessment, the intense feelings of fear and distrust that were awakened in the Japanese are likened to a plague in Ōe’s book, which also bears a resemblance to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (another favorite). Like the boys in Golding’s 1954 novel, the orphan children of Nip The Buds are left to fend for themselves in a purgatorial world afflicted by wide-scale disaster, moving back and forth between civilized cooperation and primitive anarchy.
Both novels were published within four years of one another in an age when mounting tensions between two of the world’s superpowers made nuclear annihilation a very real possibility. Today, however, we find ourselves in a time when a nuclear explosive can be carried in a backpack and be detonated by a single, and particularly cranky, person. The Cold War is long over, but one could argue that the line between civilization and chaos is as thin a veneer as ever.
So here’s wishing you, a couple days in advance, a Happy St. Patrick’s Day. In case I don’t see you.
Temporal Disturbances: loopdiver
This past Saturday night, I went to The Dance Center at Columbia College Chicago to see Troika Ranch totally fuck up my sense of time with their latest project loopdiver.
Troika Ranch are a performance troupe that use interactive technology to create a live experience where lights, sound, and movement are tightly fused together to expand your mind. The computer program used to manipulate the trippy visuals and sound is called Isadora, and was authored by TR’s co-director Mark Coniglio.
For me, loopdiver was about temporal distortion – moving back and forth at varying speeds with long sequences of repetition. It immediately made me think of “scrubbing,” which is a technique editors use to examine one particular moment in a project by adjusting the playback speed and the direction of the audio/video. It is also similar to what turntablist DJs do with records, isolating one precise spot and rocking it back and forth. In VJ culture, it’s becoming more and more a common practice to digitally scratch with video, rapidly moving back and forth between different points and editing in real-time.
Now imagine people – dancers – mimicking the movement of a person caught in one of these video time-loops. The interval could be a few moments, or it could get really glitchy, with the performers totally tweaking out, jerking back and forth in fractions of seconds. It was some total Jacob’s Ladder shit (check out the hooded dude at 1:47).
To develop the strikingly unique choreography of loopdiver, Troika Ranch made use of computer software that took video footage of a fully developed five-minute dance piece and cut it up beyond recognition, expanding it into a full, fifty-minute performance. The dancers then learned the resulting sequence of actions, mimicking the quick, sometimes seemingly impossible, movements to the best of their expert ability.
Moving along perfectly in sync with these rapid time shifts were the lights, video, and dreamy music, deftly creating the effect that not merely the dancers were affected by these temporal distortions, but the entire reality that they inhabited, taking the audience right along with them.
The choreography could range from everyday actions, such as looking over your shoulder or hugging a loved one, to much more stylized and skillfully complex sequences. What was lovely about the more quotidian movements is how they became so amplified when the dancer would constantly, say, reach out to touch another, fail to make contact, and retreat to the beginning all within the span of a quarter second – over and over.
Executing the most basic motion became a task of Sisyphean proportions, as the performers constantly struggled against shifts of time. But the tiny differences that emerged in each iteration are what stayed with me most. An ordinary, small gesture took on new significance as we were brought to confront it again and again, with each instance subtly different from the last. It was quite affecting to be reminded that humans are, by nature, unable to truly repeat an action, emphasizing that each moment we experience is a truly unique one.
Below is an excerpt from loopdiver, but like the best of life’s moments, you had to be there.
Free Music: Fang & Darling
Fang & Darling: Self Titled
I recently became acquainted with a duo who call themselves Fang & Darling. Because of their electro-clashy East-German ways, they disdain all things capitalist and commercial. That’s good for us because their bouncy/trashy/sometimes-pretty eponymous album is totally free and can be downloaded by clicking that artwork up above.
Chicks On Speed. Delta 5. Crystal Castles. Stick Fang & Darling right in there with them, and try not to break anything when you’re dancing your cold, Soviet heart out. Yis, yis.
Big Guys Get Real Tired (Remix)
The Last Two by Cinder Cone
David Foley is the drummer for the Los Angeles band Cinder Cone. He’s also a good friend of mine and Andy’s. A two-piece fronted by guitarist Anthony Fournier, Cinder Cone have a new album out called The Last Two. It rips, and you should hear it. Pay close attention to the song Lunge & Flutter. It will give you a space monkey.
Foley, who is NOT David Foley from The Kids In The Hall , also makes music as a solo artist. He asked me to remix his song Big Guys Get Real Tired, which he made for his friend Jeremy Neigher. Neigher is presumably a large man who gets kinda grumpy sometimes.
Watch, listen, and learn.
Free Mp3: Big Guys Get Real Tired by Motorcycles Are Everywhere
Field Recordings: The Infinity Man aka Who Got The Power?
In the recent past, three musicians and a marine biologist, all of whom may have been drinking, made the acquaintance of a cosmic philosopher out in front of a bar on a cold Chicago night. He revealed to them the secret hierarchy of the Six Cosmic Beings birthed by Infinity and Eternity: Time, Space, Reality, The Mind, The Soul, and Power.
One of those in attendance to this impromptu piece of theatre happened to have a recording device with him. Below is what they heard, albeit slightly edited for clarity’s sake.
I later Googled these mysterious beings, and was amazed by what I found. Behold!
There is a remarkable similarity, and one of us was definitely wearing a Silver Surfer t-shirt. I should also add that this man made a couple bucks for his five minute performance, but let’s not jump to conclusions just yet. A shakedown is only one possibility among infinite possibilities, but it is not the most unlikely one either. Were we had? We’ll probably never know the answer to that, but here’s another question… does it fucking matter?
Flight Of A Navigator
This past Saturday night, I went to the Gene Siskel Film Center to see Celestial Navigations: The Short Films of Al Jarnow. Since the late sixties, Jarnow has been responsible for a number of very recognizable short animations that have appeared on children’s educational television shows like Sesame Street and 3-2-1 Contact.
Saturday’s screening (the last of two, sadly) was put together by culture-miners and obscure music aficionados The Numero Group to promote the DVD release of Celestial Navigations on February 26th.
Um, this shit was completely sick. Similar to yesterday’s posting, I was very impressed by not only Jarnow’s willingness to throw tough concepts at little kids, but also by his cleanly executed ideas. However, what totally scorched my mind was his non-commercial animations.
Like Cosmic Clock (see below) may hint at, Jarnow’s work appears largely concerned with exploring the passage of time and the definition of space. Like the hypnotizing Four Quadrant Exercise, several of his animations used a mathematically determined process to address time and space. All this before the advent of computer-assisted animation, I’d like to add.
Using hand-drawn grids, he might begin with something as simple as animating a spinning cube by advancing its rotation by a precise degree for each frame; a basic demonstration of mathematics realized in three dimensions. From here, he would continue to build upon this concept, until he had realized a whole, geometrically-determined reality, growing and destroying it again and again, so that we might trace a discernible arc of evolution.
With this in mind, many of his films weren’t structured with a typical beginning, middle, and end. They were merely segments of something boundless. A little slice of infinity.
Be sure to check out the DVD, ’cause the best shit ain’t to be found on YouTube or Vimeo.