Zero Bldg.
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
You are a Theory Slut. The true elite of the
postmodernists, you collect avant-garde
Indonesian hiphop compilations and eat journal
articles for breakfast. You positively live
for theory. It really doesn't matter what
kind, as long as the words are big and the
paragraph breaks few and far between.
What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla
I can't believe I got the same outcome as Derick. How the hell did that happen? I guess we're both writers, took a lot of the same classes, read a lot of the same books (okay, he finished them though) and uh...lived together for a while. Follows that we'd have rubbed off on each other. Otherwise--hell--he might have been a Deconstructionist Weirdo or a Tourtured Conceptual Artist (though I'm sure Sarah wouldn't let him build any of that shit in the house). And I certainly would have been a Cyberculture Floozie, I'm sure.
I realize I've been spending more time on Quizilla than any human being should, but what are you gonna do? I'm working on an Are You A Music Geek? quiz. It may or may not see completion before I lose interest.
Still--that chick is pretty hot. I wonder what university she attends.
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Sunday, December 07, 2003
You're Generally Indie. There's nothing wrong with
this. You like music all over the map and
aren't adversed to listening to some Top 40
here and there. You just know to comment that
The Neptunes are the best producers around
right now. You don't feel the need to debate
constantly with other music geeks, because you
know that Pavement were the best band of the
90s.
You Know Yer Indie. Let's Sub-Categorize.
brought to you by Quizilla
Splendid eZine just ran a Damn List on how record collectors are different from regular people. Pretty funny. So here's a piece I wrote a while back about my own subtle differences:
An Anecdotal Account of MGPA (Music Geek Panic Attack)
I had a music geek panic attack last night. One of my first and, presumably, the first of many to follow. For the uninitiated among you (and may whatever deity you follow not lead you toward this endless Purgatory of the Obscure), MGPAs is an early warning and chronic symptom of owning far too much recorded music.
A friend of mine lent me a copy of his last band’s demo (Moniker: Micro Boy, Title: Just A Boy) to enjoy and critique (often a bitter cocktail, and not recommended to those with any wisp of sympathy, empathy or caring feelings all the same). I got as far as the first chorus of the second song when the twitch hit me. There was this little ascending/descending upper-register guitar pattern being played in the pre-verse bits after the chorus had done its business. It was noodly, infectious, and I swore to God that I’d heard that fucking lick before.
But where? Who? Did I even have it in my collection? I backed it up and listened to it a few more times, just to commit it to memory. Yeah, I’ve definitely heard it before, slightly altered, faster, maybe in a different key and probably a slightly higher register. It started with a note sliding up a couple frets, then a similar slide on the next lower string (all this action was happening on the high E and B strings, I’m sure) with a little bend going on before the similarity with this mystery lick ended abruptly.
Deciding to hold off on tearing my hair out, I went at my CDs and records like an auditor cracking Enron’s books and began pulling out anything remotely jangly, poppy, with a penchant for high-end guitar noodling. My first target was the only Sea and Cake album I own, The Biz, a breezy little record that I only devoted a couple late spring drives to. “If it’s this, it’ll be the first track,” I knew. The guitars nodded in, very AM Lite, and jangled for half a verse before I determined that, though pleasant, this was not It. Just to make sure I wasn’t deluding myself, I skipped to the last thirty seconds of the song, and indeed, the lead guitar was copping some old Motown sax riff that was wholly unlike what I had in mind.
My next suspect was a Built To Spill/Marine Research split 7” on K Records, with each band covering one of the other’s songs (BTS: “By The Way”/MR: “Sick & Wrong”). I slipped on the headphones, readjusted the turntable speed accordingly, dropped the stylus...and hoped.
I love Built To Spill for their sheer “why-didn’t-I-think-of-that?” ability to pull beautiful guitar figures together into insanely catchy little songs. I haven’t delved any further into the Marine Research catalog, but this MGPA episode might just remind me the next time I’m faced with a store full of music and no idea what to grab. So as I realized that what I was listening to was not going to reveal the magic guitar figure that I sought, it was rather hard to pull myself away. But I couldn’t let the scent get cold.
By now, I was crouching in front of my CD cabinet, sleeves and jewel cases strewn hopelessly about, just eyeballing them, Aereogramme to Zwan. I’d exhausted the vinyl: if I had what I was looking for, it would be something semi-recent, not before ’98. My gut told me (as it often does) that my record collection was simply not comprehensive enough to handle all that criteria (this is an instinct that will only quell somewhat given time, money, and more shelving). However, one last desperate pass over the couple armloads of records that sit in my nightstand brought my trembling fingers to a record that I only bought because I’d bought this one other CD, and now rarely listened to either. I yanked out my lone Gardener record and examined the painting on the cover: sloppy contemporary rip on impressionism. No, this was not it by a long shot, these guys played a sort of Pacific Northwest maritime folk rock with an unsettling nod toward the ubiquitous grunge movement. But I remembered why I bought the damn thing in the first place—I’d heard one of their songs (the album’s lone gem, as it turned out), “Shakedown Cruise,” a trumpet-led ode to Ed Wood’s Hollywood, on this little live compilation that I’d bought years before. Live at the Blue Room was its name, released by Yanstar. I’d bought it for the live Dismemberment Plan songs on it, and was pleasantly surprised that this little theatre venue in SoCal had been host to a lot of good bands, Burning Airlines and Edith Frost among them. My gut, which I have to thank for being more helpful than my brain in these matters at least 47% of the time, told me that the magic guitar figure was buried somewhere in this CD. Find it and you can get some sleep!
I tossed the disc into my computer, queued it up and hastily scanned over its 18-odd tracks. At first pass, my heart sank. There was very little jangling going on here. Lots of rock with its requisite feedback and mixing board compression. As live compilations go, it had no more or less than the usual trade off of brilliance and boredom that the record buying public (most of whom know to stay well away from these things) have come to expect. I had high hopes for “Silver Shifter” by Tsar (the only band on this comp to hail from a major label, I believe), but it was not to be. I’d almost given up when it occurred to me that perhaps that this simple six-note guitar figure had buried itself in my subconscious long enough to trigger MGPA owed as much to catchyness as it did to the always effective element of surprise. Perhaps jangle pop was a red herring, and I needed to widen the nets.
It was as I was coming to this epiphany that I had a second...Braid.
Fucking Braid; a band who, beyond their split 7” with Burning Airlines (DeSoto Records 27, ’98. BA covers Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Back of Love,” Braid covers Bacharach’s “Always Something There to Remind Me”) and the song “Frame and Canvas,” I had largely disregarded as just another punk band trying the coattail act on Jawbox. But there, in the last minute of the live version of “First Day Back,” were the magic notes! Indeed, just as I’d imagined they’d be, sped up slightly, in a higher register and in a different key. Also, with just the right amount of gain to make it crackle slightly, it was the carrot at the end of an otherwise plodding bit of sub-category punk.
Now here’s the kicker, and where MGPA crosses the line from an irritating conundrum to a compelling malady: once a resolution is reached, it simply goes away. Once that magic guitar figure was identified, all desire to listen to it vanished. It was as if a synapse, unable to connect, send or receive any information, had shut down all other processes until I sorted this goddamn thing out. It was like a loop in a computer’s programming, only in my head. Similar occurrences have been known to happen in any profession or hobby where being scatterbrained, far from being a hindrance, is an absolute boon. Mathematicians, history professors, philosophers (especially philosophers. And especially anyone following the pre-Socratics), as well as collectors of most any stripe are known to suffer from similar periods of lapsed knowledge.
What does this say about us? Obviously, there are deep-seated emotional needs that are not being met, but that’s usually the case and the very thing that leads to a life collecting records or balancing equations or whatever. We’re all terrible solipsists, trying to prove to no one but ourselves that we do, in fact, know something.
(8/26/03)
An Anecdotal Account of MGPA (Music Geek Panic Attack)
I had a music geek panic attack last night. One of my first and, presumably, the first of many to follow. For the uninitiated among you (and may whatever deity you follow not lead you toward this endless Purgatory of the Obscure), MGPAs is an early warning and chronic symptom of owning far too much recorded music.
A friend of mine lent me a copy of his last band’s demo (Moniker: Micro Boy, Title: Just A Boy) to enjoy and critique (often a bitter cocktail, and not recommended to those with any wisp of sympathy, empathy or caring feelings all the same). I got as far as the first chorus of the second song when the twitch hit me. There was this little ascending/descending upper-register guitar pattern being played in the pre-verse bits after the chorus had done its business. It was noodly, infectious, and I swore to God that I’d heard that fucking lick before.
But where? Who? Did I even have it in my collection? I backed it up and listened to it a few more times, just to commit it to memory. Yeah, I’ve definitely heard it before, slightly altered, faster, maybe in a different key and probably a slightly higher register. It started with a note sliding up a couple frets, then a similar slide on the next lower string (all this action was happening on the high E and B strings, I’m sure) with a little bend going on before the similarity with this mystery lick ended abruptly.
Deciding to hold off on tearing my hair out, I went at my CDs and records like an auditor cracking Enron’s books and began pulling out anything remotely jangly, poppy, with a penchant for high-end guitar noodling. My first target was the only Sea and Cake album I own, The Biz, a breezy little record that I only devoted a couple late spring drives to. “If it’s this, it’ll be the first track,” I knew. The guitars nodded in, very AM Lite, and jangled for half a verse before I determined that, though pleasant, this was not It. Just to make sure I wasn’t deluding myself, I skipped to the last thirty seconds of the song, and indeed, the lead guitar was copping some old Motown sax riff that was wholly unlike what I had in mind.
My next suspect was a Built To Spill/Marine Research split 7” on K Records, with each band covering one of the other’s songs (BTS: “By The Way”/MR: “Sick & Wrong”). I slipped on the headphones, readjusted the turntable speed accordingly, dropped the stylus...and hoped.
I love Built To Spill for their sheer “why-didn’t-I-think-of-that?” ability to pull beautiful guitar figures together into insanely catchy little songs. I haven’t delved any further into the Marine Research catalog, but this MGPA episode might just remind me the next time I’m faced with a store full of music and no idea what to grab. So as I realized that what I was listening to was not going to reveal the magic guitar figure that I sought, it was rather hard to pull myself away. But I couldn’t let the scent get cold.
By now, I was crouching in front of my CD cabinet, sleeves and jewel cases strewn hopelessly about, just eyeballing them, Aereogramme to Zwan. I’d exhausted the vinyl: if I had what I was looking for, it would be something semi-recent, not before ’98. My gut told me (as it often does) that my record collection was simply not comprehensive enough to handle all that criteria (this is an instinct that will only quell somewhat given time, money, and more shelving). However, one last desperate pass over the couple armloads of records that sit in my nightstand brought my trembling fingers to a record that I only bought because I’d bought this one other CD, and now rarely listened to either. I yanked out my lone Gardener record and examined the painting on the cover: sloppy contemporary rip on impressionism. No, this was not it by a long shot, these guys played a sort of Pacific Northwest maritime folk rock with an unsettling nod toward the ubiquitous grunge movement. But I remembered why I bought the damn thing in the first place—I’d heard one of their songs (the album’s lone gem, as it turned out), “Shakedown Cruise,” a trumpet-led ode to Ed Wood’s Hollywood, on this little live compilation that I’d bought years before. Live at the Blue Room was its name, released by Yanstar. I’d bought it for the live Dismemberment Plan songs on it, and was pleasantly surprised that this little theatre venue in SoCal had been host to a lot of good bands, Burning Airlines and Edith Frost among them. My gut, which I have to thank for being more helpful than my brain in these matters at least 47% of the time, told me that the magic guitar figure was buried somewhere in this CD. Find it and you can get some sleep!
I tossed the disc into my computer, queued it up and hastily scanned over its 18-odd tracks. At first pass, my heart sank. There was very little jangling going on here. Lots of rock with its requisite feedback and mixing board compression. As live compilations go, it had no more or less than the usual trade off of brilliance and boredom that the record buying public (most of whom know to stay well away from these things) have come to expect. I had high hopes for “Silver Shifter” by Tsar (the only band on this comp to hail from a major label, I believe), but it was not to be. I’d almost given up when it occurred to me that perhaps that this simple six-note guitar figure had buried itself in my subconscious long enough to trigger MGPA owed as much to catchyness as it did to the always effective element of surprise. Perhaps jangle pop was a red herring, and I needed to widen the nets.
It was as I was coming to this epiphany that I had a second...Braid.
Fucking Braid; a band who, beyond their split 7” with Burning Airlines (DeSoto Records 27, ’98. BA covers Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Back of Love,” Braid covers Bacharach’s “Always Something There to Remind Me”) and the song “Frame and Canvas,” I had largely disregarded as just another punk band trying the coattail act on Jawbox. But there, in the last minute of the live version of “First Day Back,” were the magic notes! Indeed, just as I’d imagined they’d be, sped up slightly, in a higher register and in a different key. Also, with just the right amount of gain to make it crackle slightly, it was the carrot at the end of an otherwise plodding bit of sub-category punk.
Now here’s the kicker, and where MGPA crosses the line from an irritating conundrum to a compelling malady: once a resolution is reached, it simply goes away. Once that magic guitar figure was identified, all desire to listen to it vanished. It was as if a synapse, unable to connect, send or receive any information, had shut down all other processes until I sorted this goddamn thing out. It was like a loop in a computer’s programming, only in my head. Similar occurrences have been known to happen in any profession or hobby where being scatterbrained, far from being a hindrance, is an absolute boon. Mathematicians, history professors, philosophers (especially philosophers. And especially anyone following the pre-Socratics), as well as collectors of most any stripe are known to suffer from similar periods of lapsed knowledge.
What does this say about us? Obviously, there are deep-seated emotional needs that are not being met, but that’s usually the case and the very thing that leads to a life collecting records or balancing equations or whatever. We’re all terrible solipsists, trying to prove to no one but ourselves that we do, in fact, know something.
(8/26/03)
Monday, December 01, 2003
Torch Songs for the Night Rally
A walking bass line rumbles to life on my Winamp and "Fuck," I wonder aloud to myself, "why don't I have more Unwound?"
The guilty party here is the grinningly macabre-titled "Corpse Pose." But by the time I've hit this sentence, it's gone and "Decension" has chimed in to take its place.
And again I wonder, why the fuck don't I own any of these albums? Surely there are quite a few. A quick trip to allmusic.com reveals six LPs between '93 and '01, two compilations and, dubiously, one ep (who knows how many 7" singles and various other compilation contributions they've made. I only own one).
Unwound, as far as I can tell from my corner of the indie realm (and mine is a rather small corner, admittedly), holds a place somewhere below ...Trail of Dead and--oh, let's say June of 44 in recognizable. Another case of the predecessors taking a backseat to those they've influenced. Mournfully typical really, one of those bands whose name you hear dropped in interviews with the aforementioned influensees (or influenzas...yeah, it's term-coining time) but who go more or less unheard by the majority of the influenza's fans.
But enough blind elitist categorizing and assumption, what of the music damnit? Allmusic.com lists their tones (and this category never fails in bringing the laughs) as Tense/Anxious, Visceral, Cathartic, Angst-Ridden, Bleak, Volatile. Thems a lot of adjectives to throw at a band whose name really sums it up quite nicely.
Unwound; it implies a tension that has been released with not a small amount of struggle or exasperation. The visual put across is likely a heap of frayed rope or a loose spiral of snapped wire. However you choose to see it, the idea's the same--there's been some trouble that's likely to come back, and that right soon. Very few bands have the wits about them to pick a name that embodies their whole MO. Fewer bands even have a defined MO, even if they could tell you what that meant.
Still, no mere moniker or string of descriptives has ever glued anyone to the stereo. Only the music can do that.
Last go 'round I mentioned the newest Sufjan Stevens album. I've got it and I've listened to it and I absolutely love it. That's another entry though.
Peace Outside.
A walking bass line rumbles to life on my Winamp and "Fuck," I wonder aloud to myself, "why don't I have more Unwound?"
The guilty party here is the grinningly macabre-titled "Corpse Pose." But by the time I've hit this sentence, it's gone and "Decension" has chimed in to take its place.
And again I wonder, why the fuck don't I own any of these albums? Surely there are quite a few. A quick trip to allmusic.com reveals six LPs between '93 and '01, two compilations and, dubiously, one ep (who knows how many 7" singles and various other compilation contributions they've made. I only own one).
Unwound, as far as I can tell from my corner of the indie realm (and mine is a rather small corner, admittedly), holds a place somewhere below ...Trail of Dead and--oh, let's say June of 44 in recognizable. Another case of the predecessors taking a backseat to those they've influenced. Mournfully typical really, one of those bands whose name you hear dropped in interviews with the aforementioned influensees (or influenzas...yeah, it's term-coining time) but who go more or less unheard by the majority of the influenza's fans.
But enough blind elitist categorizing and assumption, what of the music damnit? Allmusic.com lists their tones (and this category never fails in bringing the laughs) as Tense/Anxious, Visceral, Cathartic, Angst-Ridden, Bleak, Volatile. Thems a lot of adjectives to throw at a band whose name really sums it up quite nicely.
Unwound; it implies a tension that has been released with not a small amount of struggle or exasperation. The visual put across is likely a heap of frayed rope or a loose spiral of snapped wire. However you choose to see it, the idea's the same--there's been some trouble that's likely to come back, and that right soon. Very few bands have the wits about them to pick a name that embodies their whole MO. Fewer bands even have a defined MO, even if they could tell you what that meant.
Still, no mere moniker or string of descriptives has ever glued anyone to the stereo. Only the music can do that.
Last go 'round I mentioned the newest Sufjan Stevens album. I've got it and I've listened to it and I absolutely love it. That's another entry though.
Peace Outside.
