Requiem For Nena

Whenever possible, I try to play imaginary producer. I pick a couple of musicians and imagine what it would be like if I could pair them together in a studio, or in the case of Nena, if I could just rescue her from herself or whoever has been in charge of her career.

Unfortunately, Nena is known primarily for 99 Luft Balloons and not much else. That's because there isn't much else - some middling synth-pop also rans on her first album, and then some dreadful late-90s dips into the Euro-trash and pop-rock pool that did nothing to present her to a new generation.

And maybe that's fine for her... I think in North America, within my social group, the default thinking about European mores goes that the continent is an enlightened little space full of progressive types wielding their pens against globalism (if you're Naomi Klein-inclined - okay, I'm not really friends with those people), or against philistinism (if you're, uh, my friends), forgetting that there is a gigantic lumpen-proletariat that's perfectly content to live on a high-starch, high-carb diet and, um, fight and fuck and lose their teeth just like American hillbillies. I know this, because I've seen them represented in Danish and Dutch movies filmed in digital video.

So, maybe Nena can hustle and do great business on the retro circuit, playing county fairs or whatever the German equivalent is - OktoberFest country fairs.

But, God, her voice! She has such a great throaty, evocative voice - a voice that, had she been born many years prior, would have been used as some siren-like German version of Tokyo Rose... I would have defected, jumped out of that B-52 with a parachute and made it across the Ruhr to Berlin to find it. It's such a shame that we've got 99 Luft Balloons (a great song, don't get me wrong) and nothing else of value to show for those pipes. I mean, at least a Neneh Cherry & Nena duet, rather than (God!) Nena and Kim Wilde?

Too Lazy To Blog: Stop Ou Encore Interview

I've been too busy for the past week to update, so in that place, here's a small interview I did with the film-buff and Nightlife Magazine blogger James Lynch on music, misery and mirth. And some trash-talking.

Future Mix

Bag Raiders Nil By Mouth (Knightlife Remix)
Tom Trago Voyage Direct
Jamaica I Think I Like You Too (Breakbot Remix)
Tigerskin Non Chalant (Original Mix)

Zdar How Do You See Me Now?

Savage Furs: Throne of Satyricon

Savage Furs Thrones of Young Ice

Savage Furs Satyricon

Former Vancouver resident Jack Duckworth (A Luna Red, Radio Berlin) continues to pursue his idiosyncratic musical vision, this time across the Atlantic in his adopted home of London. Consistently one of the most talented musicians I've had the pleasure of knowing, Jack in this latest post-punk exploration by collaborator Delaney Jae (Silicon Vultures, Crystal Wrists), as they cut a swath through all of the clueless revivalist landscape with a sound that's equal turns sinister and endearing.

Buried beneath the crushing slabs of post-industrial production and over-driven paranoia are some actual pop chops - vocal melodies and hooks that you might find in the Human League or on Simple Minds' Reel to Real Cacophony... While these are only demo tracks, I'm glad to say that Savage Furs are a continuation of Mr. Duckworth's stellar discography (well into its second decade now), and also an interesting departure point.

Also, I know there's a fair contingent of readers who'd be interested in this, but Mr. Duckworth has recently been sorting through old records and put up a new mix on his blog, titled Dye Your Hair Black and Absorb All Waves. This encompasses just about everything I was listening to back in those days, Antioch Arrow, Satisfact, 6 Finger Satellite, Brainiac, The VSS, GoGoGo Airheart, The Audience (das?), Ex-Dead Teenager, The Rapture, Trans Am, Glass Candy, and much more. If you don't want to take the time to walk down memory lane, it's worth it for the tags he's assigned to it alone ("Discussions about that die-cast Locust belt buckle, black "highwater" Wrangler trousers") Oh, and the Long Hind Legs song: damn, that's good. (LHL were a side-project of the Unwound guys).

17 Veins

Seventeen Veins Añoranza

I was talking last night to Tom Smith & Chris Clark about how you evaluate a press-release when it ends up in your inbox. Tom ignores anything press release with an all-caps title. I scan the subject, the title, look for other band names or musicians highlighted in bold (that they've worked with, no "influenced by", thanks) and then look for the download button. Seventeen Veins might not have highlighted other band names in bold, but outside of that, it was a perfect press release made all the better by my actually appreciating the music.

Seventeen Veins are two: Cristina P.B. and new Montrealer (via Tunisia and Paris) Neil H, both handling production and vocal duties on a variety of remixes (Noob & Brodinski, Riva Starr) and original productions. A lot of 17 Veins' work is more harder-edged than I'm accustomed to (I didn't grow up with a techno background), but in instances like the track above, Añoranza's twisted, doomy synth melodies won me over. Check out the Seventeen Veins website for more crisply produced tracks.

September 7, 1980: New Order's First Demos

Giasco Bertoli, Maryon Park (2007)*

New Order Homage
New Order Dreams Never End (Mix 1)

Only a few months after Ian Curtis' suicide, even less time after their debut at the Manchester Beach Club, and six days before I was born, New Order recorded these songs (along with three others) at Cabaret Voltaire's Western Works studio.

* Thanks, Mike Chui!

Monochrome

Self portrait by Yulia Gorodinski

The DB's Black and White

I've been trying to maintain a regular pace to my posting, but then I re-discover a song like this and because of the weather, my bonhomie and friendly feeling towards this blog's readers, I've got to post it. Pitch-perfect power pop, with that sense of urgency they share in common with the Feelies. This is the first track from their debut album Stands for Decibels, written by Peter Holsapple, who would go on to play with R.E.M.

La langue glorieuse de notre collectivité quatre!

Herve Roy & Pierre Bachelet Emmanuelle
Zouzou Ne Cherche Pas
Dominique Walter Les Petits Boudins

La langue glorieuse de notre collectivité trois!

Louis Chedid J't'aimerais Toujours
Lio Sage Comme Une Image *
Francois Feldman & Yellowhand You Want Every Night

* Production assistance by Sparks

La langue glorieuse de notre collectivité deux!

Garcons French Boys
Deux Felicita
Deux Paris ORLY

La langue glorieuse de notre collectivité: un! *

Alec Mansion Trop Triste
Taxi Girl N'import Quel Soir
Milkways Astroport

* Title courtesy of Lil' Andy

Jeep Beach Party

 Fonda Rae & Wish Touch Me (All Night Long)

Taylor Dayne Tell It To My Heart

Janet Jackson Escapade

Lyrical profundity was never Freestyle's strong suit, which is why I generally resist playing it out when the temperatures are many, many degrees away from balmy.  Also, I think the syncopated rhythms and electro bass-lines can be a bit jarring for a dancefloor in the middle of the winter in Montreal, when even the most skilled pop and lockers suffer from creaky arthritic joints.  However, now that summer's around, it's the perfect time to bust out Debbie Deb, Lisa Lisa and other mixtape classics you'd find in the cassette deck of your older cousin's Jeep after she got back from the beach.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

"Clever they may be, but like all Swedes, their genius is derivative. Search, Delmore, search! Find the source!"

Yo La Tengo Everyday
The Knife Colouring Of Pigeons

Yesterday, I alluded to the nagging suspicion that the first released track from The Knife & Mt. Sims' Darwinian opera reminded me of some other song (also the Penguin Cafe Orchestra for Depressives, I remember Jack Oatmon at The Montreal Mirror comparing it to alley cat copulation), and halfway through my shower, things began to clarify for me. At first, I thought that it could have been one of the songs from Low's 2001 album Things We Lost in The Fire, but that didn't quit stick enough to make it an Eureka! moment (and as we all know, since the days of Archimedes, Eureka and bathing have been forever linked). I hummed through it a couple more times, my mind skipping a year back, and what came to mind was the above Yo La Tengo song Everyday from their 2000 album And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out.

I have a very lengthy to-do list, and for some reason, (maybe the Delmore Effect), it's nonsense like this that receives priority over the more pressing things like the Sonic Youth piece I should be finishing for the summer issue of Maisonneuve Magazine. Which is what I'm working on now.

Free Screening: Montreal Premiere of Women Without Men

FILM SCREENING

Tuesday, June 1, 2010 @ 7:00 PM

Maxwell Cummings Auditorium

Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion

Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal

1379 Sherbrooke Street W.

The Montreal premiere of acclaimed Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat’s first feature film, Women Without Men. This film marks an assured shift from her beautiful multi-screen gallery installations to the grand scale of the cinema.

Adapted from Sharhnush Parsipur’s magic realist novel, Women Without Men movingly chronicles the intertwining lives of four Iranian women in the summer of 1953 – a crucial moment in Iranian history – when an American led, British backed coup d’état brought down the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and re-installed the Shah to power. Opposition to the monarchy ultimately led to the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Brought together over the course of several days against the backdrop of political and social turmoil, the destinies of the four female characters converge in a beautiful, mystical orchard where they find solace, independence and companionship. Sumptuously photographed and majestically paced, the film captures a complex moment in Iranian society, while offering an imaginative archeology of the recent protests, which, although met with brutality and repression, remind us that the struggle is alive and well.

Shirin Neshat was born in 1957 in Qazvin, Iran, moved to the United States in 1976 and lives in New York City. She has gained wide international acclaim for both her photo portrait series of women overlaid with calligraphy Women of Allah and for producing a series of lyrical video installations addressing the complex social and religious forces shaping the identity of Muslim women, among them Rapture (1999), and Turbulent (1998), which won her the International Award at the Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York, The Serpentine Gallery, London, the Hambuger Bahnhof, Berlin and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal. Women Without Men is her directorial feature debut.

Israeli Telecommunication Network

March Hutchison,
“North American real estate salesmen celebrating the year's successes by
undergoing a mock initiation ceremony. Photograph taken in Manaus Brazil,
by Alex Webb", 42” x 54” 2009, oil on canvas.

Telefon Tel Aviv Helen of Troy
Telefon Tel Aviv You Are The Worst Thing in The World

There's something far too abstract about most electronic music, with its emphasis on textures and rhythms over song-craft, melody and traditional capital-p pop tropes that has meant I've never truly come to embrace it like a great many of my friends and acquaintances. And it's true, chances are, that if you went to raves during the 90s or liked Aphex Twin, there's going to be an instant aesthetic gap between us that might seem minuscule and unimportant at the time, but will extend to other mediums and art-forms. I practically guarantee it, actually. And I know that, on your end, you'll not as easily understand how my taste. In a certain respect, we're all individuals and we all have our own unique tastes - that's a conceit of good ol' Western civilization and classical liberalism that I'm not about to let go of, thanks - but in another respect, when it comes to pop music and its bastard children, there are certain things we expect from a song, elements we demand, and elements we can predict. We like things in a certain way. If I'm skimming through a bunch of MP3s, for example, I skip to about the 1/8 point of the song, listen for a second or two; skip to the mid-point of the song and listen for a little longer, and by that time I can tell whether the song is worth me investigating further or whether it's not for me. It's like being able to know when something sounds "Christian." After years of absorbing all forms of music, you internalize standards, expectations, norms.

So I guess when I say I don't think of electronic music as album-oriented genre, my rockist roots are showing. Last year, three albums that a lazy record store clerk (when such things existed, outside of the last gasps of a dying empire reflex that is Record Store Day) would dump into the electronic category made me think a bit differently about that. The Junior Boys Begone Dull Care, Rokysopp's Junior and Telefon Tel Aviv's Immolate Yourself.

As much of a fan as I was of the Knife, the Fever Ray album I found overwrought, humourless and oppressive in its demand for emotional attention*. I had hoped it was a case of an artistic misstep, but maybe the Knife's previous work was anomalous and I was guilty of loving too early and too strongly, because the collaborative track with Mt. Sims, Colouring of Pigeons, failed to capture my attention. (Except for that cello - where'd they rip that off from? It's been driving me crazy. I want to say it's from an Eno solo album, but I feel like it's actually a film score.) I expect the rest of the album to continue with The Penguin Cafe Orchestra for Depressives theme.

Much has been written about the tragic circumstances of Charlie Cooper's passing that precluded the release of Telefon Tel Aviv's album, and I don't have anything to add about that. What I do have to say and present to you, just in case you missed it, or maybe forgot about it momentarily (like I did!) is the music. The album itself is expansive, neurotic, vocally impressive, emotive but not pushy... From album opener The Birds, which operates at a level above M83, to the positively euphoric Helen of Troy, the album exhaustively covers all of the area within the confines its set for itself. (If I wasn't so tired, I'd re-write that sentence: it demands elaboration.) The strength of the production and the songwriting manages to transcend the stop-start dynamic-less drum machine beats (a la Junior Boys) employed in You Are The Worst Thing in The World. Immolate Yourself was recorded on analogue equipment with analogue synthesizers, so perhaps all of that preamble about being able to detect certain sensibilities was a bunch of nonsense and I'm just responding to that. I don't really know.

In years gone prior, Marc Nguyen Tan's Colder album and Cut Copy's In Ghost Colours were also albums that affected me in similar ways, though I have the feeling that they were created by people with rockist inclinations.

By the way, the painting above is by March Hutchison, one seriously talented artist whose work deserves more attention than I can give right now. If you're in Montreal, you can see for yourself, as she'll be opening a drawing show at Ethecae (2131 St. Catherine East) on Thursday, May 6th from 6pm - 9pm. (I think the above painting might have been posted on Said the Gramophone before, but I can't recall.)

* Remixes of Fever Ray songs, however, were much more enjoyable.

Raúl Baduel & The 48 Laws of Power

Fontan Early Morning
Shout Out Louds Walls (Fontan Rework)
Turzi Buenos Aires
Time & Space Machine Zeitghost

In Early Morning, Swedish (associates of ear-candy creators Studio) Fontan take the kraut-rock genre back its hidden roots, stripping the noodly elements of Hawkwind, while maintaining the genre's expansiveness into one tightly wrapped package of compact rock kosmisch. For all the avant-garde talk about Can, Cluster and their Germanic ilk, it's easy to forget that was a reaction to and celebration of rock. Damien Suzuki didn't take it all that seriously (I've been pushing for an archive of misheard Can lyrics for years now). I have an incredibly soft-spot for the Shout Out Louds and think they're also as adept at working with space and mood as Fontan (and more so than the XX - zzzzzzz), which is why it's delightful to hear Fontan's take on Walls, which takes it time teasing out the baroque elements from the original, surrounding it with richly produced psych elements, Eno-isms and a fabulous guitar lead. The Shout Out Louds will be here on May 7th, playing at Cabaret de Musee, tickets available from Greenland. (Fortuitously enough, I got an e-mail from Big Hassle with the Fontan rework in it just as I was writing this post up. Psychic PR agents.).

In the same vein, the Parisian group Turzi seemed to have lost the plot and ended up in the same deep, dark swamp of self-seriousness that produced Iron Butterfly's Innagadavida and Vangelis' more paranoid elements. Moderation in all things is key. Time & Space Machine show us that it's good to feel young and gifted again.

Shrewd Appraisals: How To Make Anything You Want Happen

Cristina You Rented A Space

Take Ivy

Duncan Hannah, The Weekend Mystery, 2008

"Around the celebration in Cannes were set the boundaries of a certain style. The boundaries of this style coincided with the area held in common by two ethics (each of which had been composed of bits and pieces of other, older ethics, but each of which could be recognized by 1971 as having an identity of its own). What met in Cannes was the ethic of café society (which is the ethic of aristocracy shorn of its specific responsibilities, its specific etiquette, and its specific geography, and reduced to self-parody) and the ethic of high drag (which is the ethic of satire shorn of its politics). The boundaries of this style encompassed wit, perversity, commercial utility, and an interest in finding the cutting edge, wherever that should be."

- George W.S. Trow, I-eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse. New Yorker profile of Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantic Records head.

Six Finger Satellite, Live in NY

Six Finger Satellite Live in NYC (Video)

Cockfight
Simian Fever
Parlour Games (MP3)
Where Humans Go
Pulling a Train
Rabies (Baby's Got The)
Massive Coke Seizure
Man Behind the Glasses
Board the Bus

46 shrill & thrilling minutes with Six Finger Satellite in 1995 at the Westbeth Theatre in New York, New York. They were touring in support of Severe Exposure, so most of the selections are primarily from that album (Montreal favourite Rabies (Baby's Got The) appears, for example), as well as Man Behind the Glasses, which only appeared on a 7". Singer J. Ryan plays a Moog keytar and dresses like he's fronting a nightmare prom band. John McLean has a white-belt on and is doing a lot of palm-muting, laying out the blueprint from which the Swing Kids' house was built. I stumbled across it while checking out the Pessimist Club blog, which, naturally, comes highly recommended.

Hovatron Mix on Discobelle

Phil Aubin in Thom Browne meets Kraut-Rock Mode

A long time in the making, check out Hovatron's mix for Discobelle, inspired re-workings of Rihanna, Cassie, Janet Jackson and Jeremih.