monstershark

William Basinski – ‘The Disintegration Loops’: Round 55 – Rob’s choice

All songs and all records have stories. Some arrive preceded by them, either by artificial hype, by personal testimony or by the weight of historical significance. Some music comes to us completely fresh but within seconds we begin to weave a tapestry of our own tales and experiences into their fabric, helping us to make our own sense of them.

William Basinski’s ‘Disintegration Loops’, a set of works which span 5 albums, has a story. As we listened to it this evening, the subject of whether the music and the story could or should be separated worried us like no other I can remember in our preceding 50+ meetings.

If you’ve never heard the pieces before, you may choose to seek them out and hear them free from their associations, their assumed and imposed meanings. I’ll add a link to a YouTube clip of ‘d|p 1.1 below, but you’ll want to avert your eyes and use only your ears if you want a completely association-free experience. Certainly this was one of the possibilities we struggled with when we listened. Tom hadn’t heard the origin story before and we couldn’t help feeling that we’d somehow blighted his experience by allowing the myth to precede the music. But then, who but Basinski and a few of his friends has ever heard this music without the story?

To be accurate, ‘Disintegration Loops’ has two stories. One concerns the way it was made. The other concerns the way it was used. Both stories are told here in a long interview with Basinski by John Doran of The Quietus.

It seems inappropriate, somehow disrespectful, to describe this monumental work as a product of luck. Would that be good luck? Even worse perhaps. And yet without happenstance, fortune, unplanned calamity, it would not exist and without yet more serendipity, coincidence, unplanned connection, it would not have gained such resonance and meaning.

In large part, it is the beauty in unplanned occurrence, and specifically the uncontrollable, unpredictable march of decay, which this work captures intrinsically and has come to symbolise extrinsically. That the work – a series of repeating, slowly changing loops – when shorn of its accompanying backstory and the palimpsest of meaning which it has since has accrued, remains as powerful, moving and beautiful as it is, is perhaps the real miracle. It does seems to me that even freed from what we come to know about the pieces, this is heart-stopping music. But then, I can never truly know.

And yet, and yet, even from this simple flow and ebb of sound, amidst all these noble and humane reactions, new meanings emerge each time I listen. Tonight I find myself contemplating trust, of all things, because, and whisper this, there’s 0.1% of me as listener that can’t quite accept that this ever actually happened, that this work was ever produced as the story would have us believe. Some of the detail doesn’t quite seem to add up and, ultimately, I find myself wanting to know more and more about the minutiae of its production, more in fact than I have wanted to know about any other record I can remember. Ironic, knowing that conscious thought and ‘production’ in the sense of the deliberate act of making, was apparently not so big a factor.

Perhaps the reason this music ties in so perfectly with what it has been asked to symbolise is that in their own unimaginable ways they each tell us that sometimes the fantastical, the impossible, really does happen. In fact, they say, look around you. It’s happening all the time.

And on we go. We debate the story and we debate the context and we debate the manufacture and we debate the impact and we find so many ways to question and praise and doubt and affirm the work but ultimately that seems so much piffle. The work transcends.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYOr8TlnqsY%5D

Nick listened: Rob’s done a very good job of not actually revealing any of the backstory to this record, so (despite my reputation for spoilers) I’ll endeavor to do the same.

I’ve been wanting to hear this for literally years; Stylus was one of the first and most vocal places to praise it way back when (don’t click that if you don’t want the backstory) but it seemed almost impossible to get hold of and inordinately expensive, so for some reason I never got round to hearing it. I pretty much squealed with delight when Rob pulled it out, and enthusiastically joined in imparting the whole context and narrative that goes alongside it.

It’s hard if not impossible to disentangle the music from its context, and any description of the music sans context sounds prosaic to say the least, if not downright dull; it is, essentially, just slowly, minutely changing ambient loops that go on for a long time and, somehow, seem loaded with sadness and profundity. Sonically, aesthetically, it’s not a million miles away from Stars Of The Lid, or Aether by The Necks, or Discreet Music by Eno, or a Buddha Machine, or a dozen and then some other minimal drone loops that exist. Is it better? Is it more mystical, more profound? The context is, to be blasphemously cynical for a moment, an amazing marketing gimmick.

I borrowed this from Rob and played it at Emma a couple of days later, sans context. She said she found it comforting and familiar, and that it felt more part of an art installation than a piece of music-qua-music, even more so than some other ambient stuff we own. When I explained the context, though, she felt immediately that it was somehow perfectly connected to it, that she somehow knew this already, and wondered whether we’d already seen the above video somewhere, somehow. Maybe we have, or maybe it really is a piece of serendipity.

Tom Listened: Emperor’s new clothes or a brilliant innovation…or a bit of both? I have no idea and have given up trying to work it out!

Poliça – ‘Give You The Ghost’: Round 54 – Rob’s choice

Poliça - 'Give You The Ghost' Poliça are a band from Minneapolis. I pronouce their name “pol-ee-sur” but my fellow DRC members seemed to default to “pol-i-saah” which sounds more sophisticated. According to the band the word is Polish for “policy” so anyone out there who speaks the lingo, please do fill us in.

I buy records and nowadays I buy records which I don’t really have to. ‘Give You The Ghost’ is a case in point. I first heard one of the tracks ‘I See My Mother’ on a playlist of Pitchfork’s Best New Tracks of 2012. I was drawn in by the burbling insistence of the bass and drums and then enchanted by the cascading wonder of Channy Leaneagh’s processed vocals. By the time I came across a vinyl copy of the album (on Record Store Day 2013) I’d been streaming it fairly incessantly for almost a full year, knew it inside out, loved it and had no hesitation in paying for it. Some of us use Spotify to find records to buy, not as a way to avoid buying them.

In all that time I’ve probably reached for this record more than any other. I still haven’t quite worked out why it has such a delicate hold on me. Perhaps the secret lies in those beguiling vocals which are deliberately auto-tuned to a place just beyond human capability. It’s a trick which seems to have achieved much more than mere novelty and its effect has yet to wear off.

There’s the pure pleasure of the sound, a voice transformed into a tumbling, twitching thread of energy. And then there’s the impact this has on the wider music. By so purposefully de-humanising the very element which would ordinarily draw the listener towards a song, Poliça create a distance and then entice us to lean in across it to hear more closely. One of the results is to open up more space for the other components of their sound, one which pulses away at the intersection between R’nB, synth pop, soul and rock. And once you start to get closer, there are monsters lurking, not least a frequently incendiary double-drummer rhythm section which goes off like an explosion in a fireworks factory given half a chance.

Best of all though, this mannered and deliberate approach simply enhances the songs, rather than dissolving into just another bag of tricks. What we’re left with as the album fades away once more is a pixelated wisp of smoky melody, the metallic tang of 21st century regret and remorse and the urge to reach in and spin the record one more time.T

Tom Listened: Interesting comment from Chris Barett. I know what he’s getting at but I am not sure whether he is saying this is a good or bad thing. That said, the term ‘Pitchfork hype’ is almost always pejorative these days and I find myself more cautious than perhaps I should be about the latest Pitchfork approved release. Stupid really because whilst Pitchfork definitely have championed some questionable fare over the years (and I have never understood the appeal of Funeral by Arcade Fire..surely the zenith (or nadir, depending on your point of view) of Pitchfork hype), they have also led me to some of my most cherished purchases of recent times. And, sure enough, despite scoring a respectable, but maybe not quite hype-worthy 7.6 at Pitchfork, on an initial listen Polica sounded pretty good. In fact my reservation was that maybe they sounded too good; as in too good to sustain interest over the years, to keep drawing me back – I was reminded throughout of the slightly detached, de-humanised sound and atmosphere of Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People, a record I fawned over at first but never listen to any more, its fires burning brightly for a brilliant, but only brief, time. But when I made this point to Rob on the night his response was empathetic to my point of view and emphatic enough to convince me that this wouldn’t be a problem.

Nick listened: When I was a young teenager I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time fantasizing about discovering the perfect album, the One Record To Rule Them All, that would be so awesome it would depose of the rest of your record collection, and you’d never need to listen to anything else. The mythical Best Album In The World Ever. My 14-year-old self imagined it would be exactly 47 minutes long, and would be played by four guys with scruffy fringes and guitars, and would be just weird enough and just straight enough at the same time.

Poliça are a name I’ve seen floating around a lot over the last year or two, always with positive associations, but I think I ignored them because a; I didn’t like the cover, and b; I didn’t know how to pronounce their name. It’s the little things.

I can kind of see where Chris is coming from in the comments below, but also where Rob is coming from, too. This was a pleasure to listen to, that’s for sure, but it didn’t feel in any way earth-shattering (I can’t fathom that Bon Fiver guy claiming that Poliça are the best band ever ever ever, for instance). I can comprehend the r&b references, but it didn’t actually sound like any r&b I actually know. It also didn’t sound like ‘indie’ music, where the etymology of that word encompasses something to do with Pavement and guitars and the late 80s and early 90s and so on and so forth. But it DID sound like post-internet, post-Ableton, post-genre, and yes, post-Pitchfork music, whatever that is. Layered, processed, a little strange but not bizarre, taking ingredients from anywhere it likes, like a magpie picking up shiny things regardless of their origin, yet somehow maintaining some degree of unity, of cohesion, of gestalt, despite this, using software as a binding agent to bring these things together. (Caveat: I have no idea if this was recorded on an iPad or on a 4-track or onto a wax cylinder at Abbey Road, but I have suspicions.)

There are a lot of records, a lot of artists, who have a similar approach, and they all sound different, and we like (and love) an awful lot of them, from Dirty Projectors to Animal Collective to Caribou to Efterklang to Liars to The National to The XX to Radiohead to Arcade Fire to Chvrches to Flying Lotus to MGMT to Braids to a dozen others and some more and then some. None of these artists quite sound the same, in fact many of them sound completely and radically unalike, but my brain often lumps them together. Poliça are in that same lump. I can’t quite identify why.

As I progressed through my teens I further reasoned that the One Album To Rule Them All would have to somehow combine all the music in the world, picking the best bits like a magpie picking up shiny things, in order to be truly seriously amazingly all-time awesome and world-conquering. As I got older still, and moved through my 20s and beyond, I reasoned that the teenage me was an idiot.

Deerhoof – ‘Deerhoof vs Evil’: Round 53 – Rob’s choice

Deerhoof vs Evil Deerhoof sidled their way into my life. I can’t be sure when, but let’s say 2004, some website or other, let’s say Pitchfork, which I can’t be sure when I started reading but let’s say 2004, linked to a Deerhoof EP that was available for free download. Back then, way back then, this seemed an incredible, bounteous novelty so I clicked, saved and, as seems to be the average with free content, forgot.

When ‘The Runners Four’ did well in the End Of 2005 lists, I bought it. I was carefree back then. In fact, I bought almost everything from the Pitchfork top 10 of that year and listened to some more often and intently than others. It was months, maybe more than a year, before I really tried with the Deerhoof record. I found it intriguing, if perhaps a little too sprawling and obtuse for immediate gratification. It did provide one breakthrough however: the realisation that the odd music which had infrequently popped up on my shuffling iPod over the preceding couple of years, with no track, album or artist names, must have been that ignored free EP, now of 2 years vintage. Even heard at arms length, whilst washing up or driving, the ingredients were so distinctive – slanted constructions, meticulous instrumentations and a beguilingly detached Japanese vocalist – and were, once placed, impossible to mistake.

If you’ve only read about this San Franciscan ‘noise pop’ outfit without hearing them – and even now written words are still easier to come by than recorded sounds – then you could be forgiven for expecting a smart-assed barrage of slanting dissonance, jazz inflected jiggery-pokery and obscurantist capering. In fact Deerhoof are one of the most delightful, endearing and rewarding bands around, writing tightly focussed but jubilant songs which absolutely bubble over with ideas, fun and weirdly saccharine hooks. Atop this lie Satomi Matsuzaki’s famously deadpan vocals which perform the neat trick of severing Deerhoof from any immediate associations. It’s a useful, perhaps vital, effect, buying time for the listener to focus on the music and become enchanted, rather than scrabbling to reach the right comparison.

‘Deerhoof Vs Evil’ is their 10th studio album, released in 2011. It’s brief, barely over 30 minutes, and punchy, its 12 songs averaging slightly less than 3 minutes in length. Despite, or perhaps because of, this each track is focussed, polished both in sound and performance, and each packs at least one, sometimes two, maybe three, great ideas be they daring rhythms, nagging or infectious guitar lines, insistent bass-lines or gigglingly gleeful lyrics. Where the band can drag at times, on this record they don’t. Every song is a winner with at least one moment almost guaranteed to raise a smile even on a face as worn-out and hard to move as mine.

Some critics saw this album as a regrettable consolidation from a band they had grown used to hearing break new ground. It’s actually the sound of a band distilling what they do best into a delightful confection.

Tom Listened: I was pleasantly surprised by Deerhoof vs Evil finding it far less discordant and difficult than I feared it would be. That said, Deerhoof are still some way from sidling into my life…I remember finding the experience of listening to this record interesting and enjoyable, but I have yet to feel compelled to pull the copy of Apple ‘O I own off my shelf and give it a spin (it’s one of the few records I posess that I have yet to listen to all the way through), yet I think it’s the idea of Deerhoof and the perceived awkwardness of the music that puts me off rather than the actual songs they sing. I know this makes me weird and I am sure that at some point I will give Apple ‘O a proper chance but, judging by Rob’s own relationship with the band, perhaps this is the way it is meant to happen!

Emeralds – ‘Does It Look Like I’m Here?’: Round 52 – Rob’s choice

‘Does It Look Like I’m Here?’ was my first Spotify-driven record purchase. I read a Pitchfork review of the album in June 2010 and, were it not for my new ability to check it out immediately via Spotify, it would undoubtedly have languished on an imaginary list of records which sounded intriguing but would likely never be heard. Instead I was hooked within a couple of minutes and bought the record soon after. It was my album of the year and still seems to be twinkling away in the background of many of my days, if only I listen hard enough.

In Summer 2010 a double album of instrumentals by an ambient kosmische electronic trio from Cleveland, Ohio, who had previously self-released most of their stuff on cassette or CDR, looked like a left-field choice for record of the year, but ultimately it struck many commentators in the same beguiling light and found its way onto several end-of-year rundowns.

For me its music box pointillism was the sound I reached for when I didn’t know quite what I wanted. Sometimes I listened intently, drawn into its dissolving structures, and sometimes I used it as a warm and bubbling background wash. It works beautifully as both, and it remains one of my most returned-to records of the last five or ten years.

I have no idea about the creative process behind Emeralds’ music, and I don’t want to know. I love the idea that this record could have been played and recorded as a one-time event, with instruments and machines set to follow patterns, phasing in and out and then to black. That it could then go on to provide such a multivalent listening experience, one which effortlessly bears endless repeats, seems to me to be magical, transcendent.

I have a few other records by Emeralds and solo efforts by Mark McGuire. They mostly share an exquisite balance between the improvised and the deliberate, drawing me into their open spaces and enticing, shifting structures, rather than forcing me away as improvisation sometimes can. Rather than seeming to say, “This is what it was like in my head when I made this recording. Keep Out!” ‘Does It Look Like I’m Here?’ feels much more like a careful and expert revelation of some shared universal music.

Tom Listened: I vaguely recall listening to this record and I vaguely recall liking it…a lot. It was a long time ago now!

Black Sabbath – ‘Paranoid’: Round 51 – Rob’s choice

I was a punk, in spirit and predilection at least, if too middle class and too young to actually, like, be one. I knew nothing of Black Sabbath, but had them bracketed with both Led Zeppelin (hippies, basically) and heavy metal (a laughable music which took the sonic force of hardcore punk, largely removed the humour, replaced the desperate energy with technical proficiency and then wrapped the whole package in spandex).

Then in 1999 I was sent a review copy of ‘The Last Supper’, a documentary built around the Black Sabbath reunion tour of 1999. I watched it and within ten minutes realised I was wrong. Three things particularly struck me. Firstly, they rocked. They were four guys who seemed about to blow the walls out from whichever faceless Enormodome they happened to have rolled up to. Secondly, they were genuinely down to earth, funny, thoughtful and entertaining. They’d been to the ends of the earth in all sorts of ways, but still seemed like people you could enjoy hanging out with. Thirdly, Ozzy Osbourne, by then known as a reality TV freakshow, and on the evidence of these shows barely able to perambulate about the stage effectively, is one hell of a frontman.

So I bought a ‘Best Of…’ and then a while later I bought ‘Paranoid’ and I came to realise that much of the music I have loved or been intrigued by, can be found somewhere downstream from Sabbath, drinking from this dark wellspring.

‘Paranoid’, released in 1970, is Black Sabbath’s second album. It’s everything it’s reputed to be but not at all what you might expect. Perhaps the reason I get along so well with it is that unlike so very much of the music it inspired, it is unpretentious, direct, humane and, frankly, charmingly shoddy in parts. Spot the times Ozzy has to stretch a syllable to cover the space of two because the lyrics just don’t scan to the music. Accept that the opening lines of ‘War Pigs’, easily among the finest, most evocative in rock history, JUST REPEAT THE SAME WORD instead of finding a rhyme: “Generals gather in their masses/Just like witches at black masses”.

Nonetheless, ‘Paranoid’ succeeds through the sheer blunt force of its intention. ‘War Pigs’ is amazing, ‘Iron Man’ a spiralling riff-fest and ‘Fairies Wear Boots’ boogies and rolls irresistibly. And amongst this, none of the high-school satanism we’ve been conditioned to expect from the band. Instead they deliver forceful social commentary, chilling portraits of mental illness and disintegration and oppressive nuclear paranoia. ‘War Pigs’ is as powerful an anti-war song as I know, at least the equal of, if not better than, ‘Masters of War’. ‘Hand of Doom’ is a genuinely frightening warning about where drug abuse would lead you. Nowhere are we invited to take Lucifer’s hand and skip off to Hades for a tea party.

Critics were snooty about ‘Paranoid’ on its release and sure, it had little of the sophistication the early Seventies may have revered. But it smashed a sledgehammer through a wall no-one never suspected was there and music has not been the same since.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Pw83GXdDvfI%5D

Tom Listened: Of all the genres of music, ‘heavy metal’ (not sure this fully qualifies) is the one I find the hardest to appreciate – I have never found anything remotely pleasurable or interesting in anything I have heard that would fall under that banner. I am intrigued about why this would be, what it is about the music that causes this aversion but have always come up short.

I was delighted that Rob took Paranoid because so often the motherlode sounds so much better than what it spawned – DRC has exploded so many misconceptions for me that I was fully expecting a similar reaction to this….but, alas, I didn’t get it, and now I doubt I ever will. My loss I suppose.

(Really like the album cover though).

Nick listened: The vicissitudes of cultural memory being what they are, I’m more familiar with Ozzy Osborne’s wife and children than I am with him, except as a bat-eating, delirium-tremor riddled caricature. And part of the soundtrack to a Robert Downey Jr superhero movie. I’ve always avoided metal for myriad reasons, from heavy to black to doom to nu to hair, but it is sometimes worth going back to the progenitors: I quite like some Led Zep, if you strip away the lyrics about hobbits. So this was actually really good, but in an “I’m glad I’ve heard that” rather than an “I must own this” way; the riffs were awesome, the rhythm section brilliantly unsophisticated (but not hidden in the mix), and Ozzy, well… he wasn’t batshit, he was really good.