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August 8, 2006
Terrible timing
How is it that the three bands I am most interested in at the Bleeding Edge Festival are all playing at the same time?!
That would be Black Dice, Frivolous and Yo La Tengo, for your reference. YLT I can live with missing, but scheduling Black Dice and Frivolous at the same time presents major dilemmas. Black Dice have been nothing short of amazing every time I've seen them but even in the largely minimal-friendly Bay Area how often is it you get to see someone on Karloff throw down? Seems like we're criminally overlooked by techno acts, unless they're from LA...
Tags: Art
Posted by Andrew at 11:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 7, 2006
What was I saying about a new type of drug?
WaPo:
Government researchers announced yesterday that they have had striking success in treating depression in a matter of hours, using an experimental injectable drug that acts much more quickly than conventional antidepressants.---
In the study, 18 patients were injected with a drug called ketamine...[which is] a controlled substance and can produce mild euphoria.
And, as we all know, ketamine has already had some impact in the techno community. Geez, maybe The Klaxons were on to something after all, though I'll still take any Villalobos track over the Klaxons songs I've heard on their MySpace page.
Tags: Rave
Posted by Andrew at 11:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Lloyd Bradley and the Roots of Rave
Came across this interesting passage on black British dancehall parties in the late '60s from Bass Culture:
It was standard for the joyous racket of whistles, tambourines and compressed-air horns to...accompany the opening bars of unanswerable specials.
Tags: Caribbean , Postcolonial , Rave
Posted by Andrew at 5:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 6, 2006
Should be Interesting
As part of the evening program for the IASPM "Futures of Music" Conference:
I got about halfway through my copy of Interrogation Machine before I had to shelve it to make way for more pressing reading, but I'll have to bring it along and try to finish it. I found the section on Noordung/Red Pilot/Scipion Nasice to be especially interesting.
Also, Surgeon! Now that's what I'm talking about!
Posted by Andrew at 2:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 5, 2006
Housecleaning
I've put up some old posts from a short-lived group blog I was on called Blueprints for Architectural Warfare, which I understand may be going away soon as the Slumberland/Dropbeat empire makes some changes...
Tags: Blueprints
Posted by Andrew at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 4, 2006
Are These Guys Reading the Same Newspapers I Am?
The Klaxons feel things are as dismal now, musically and politically, as they were before the first wave of rave, and have decided it is their mission to bring "celebratory music" back into vogue.
Uh, wouldn't you need a contemporary equivalent of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, or at the very least, glasnost, not to mention a new kind of euphoric drug hitting the streets, for this to really take off?
Tags: Rave
Posted by Andrew at 9:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 2, 2006
Guess He's Not A Fan of "Launderette" Then...
Reading Paul Gilroy's "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack," I come across this footnote regarding the coffee table books on Jamaica which spread in the wake of Bob Marley's popularity:
Soft core porn photographs of black bodies...interspersed by journalistic commentary about the brutishness and the hedonism of this Caribbean idyll. Typical manifestations of this genre include...Adrian Boot and Vivien Goldman's Bob Marley Soul Rebel-Natural Mystic.
Gilroy argues that Marley was aware of the effect that promoting his music and persona to white audiences through major record labels would have in "watering down" the music and its message, but chose to do so knowingly as a way to also increase his visibility in underprivileged black communities in Europe, America and Africa. The full effects of such an undertaking can never be anticipated, however; as Gilroy subsequently points out, Marley's death left his figurehead status to be "usurped eagerly not by the next generation of Jamaican and British artists who had been groomed by their record companies to succeed him, but by a new wave of post-punk white reggae musicians" of whom he singles out The Police for particular crimes against reggae.
But what of the "post-punk" in that sentence? When tracing the development of a genre over time, it can sometimes be difficult to track the kind of subtle changes in nomenclature over time that would make a sentence like that fully parseable. For instance, is Gilroy referring to what we currently call post-punk, or merely the generation of (white, British, rock) bands that sprung up after the punk hullabaloo in the late '70s? Gilroy's disapproval of some of Goldman's publications notwithstanding, surely there must be some difference between The Police and, say, The Slits or The Pop Group in terms of shifting reggae away from its black and Caribbean roots in popular music of the time?
Tags: Caribbean , Post-punk , Postcolonial
Posted by Andrew at 4:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack