This is a test.
Future Islands - Tin Man
Last night’s show at the Danger Danger Gallery was moved to Elena’s. It’s a soul food bar/restaurant with a very nice second floor venue area.
I really liked two bands that played: ROAR and Carol Cleveland Sings. They had a really similiar sound but that might have been due to the fact that the same members were in both bands. Anyway, I liked ROAR better. CHECK THEM OUT! LISTEN TO THE GUITAR LINE IN “I CAN’T HANDLE CHANGE”. Very good.
http://www.myspace.com/roarftw
Check out Carol Cleveland Sings if you’re into that some more.
http://www.myspace.com/carolclevelandsings
I’m booking shows for my new pop band BURBERRY POSSUMS, with myself on guitar and vocals and Dave Hanyok on the drums.
I made a facebook page for us, so search for us! Also, we have a bandcamp, which is just demos from earlier this summer currently. New songs will be on the way.
http://burberrypossums.bandcamp.com
Last night was my 5th show working at the Danger Gallery. I got to see Sam Herring, the lead singer of synth-pop band Future Islands, perform in his rap side project Flesh Epic. Sam Herring was bad-ass, confident, and good - very unlike what I would have expected being accustomed to his Future Islands work, in which he exudes a completely different persona and does completely different music! Basically, to turn this blog post into a pedantic rant about how there are many sides to all of us, there are many sides to all of us. I would say go check out Flesh Epic, but they have only recorded instrumentals right now, so just check out Future Islands!
What if record labels operated more like scientific journals? Instead of a band getting signed for a length of time, these “record journals” would just release one important release from a band at a time. Everyone would have to compete for a spot in the prestigious record journals (perhaps titled Music or Sound…) so obsolete bands that subsist on long contracts would die out or be pressured to improve their music. Sagely, accomplished musicians would decide which music appears in a journal, and we as consumers would only have to turn to the prestigious music journals - or specialty journals (The Future Sound of Hardcore) - for what music to listen to. Also, in music journals, musicians would list what equipment was used, discuss the implications of their project, report musical techniques, and cite inspirations and influences in end notes.
Or, what if selling music was more like selling art? An artist would only release maybe 50 records. Each record would be a lot of money, like a painting. And instead of music being a mass produced item that has been deflated so much that its value is now “free”, records would be an investment.
Don’t take these ideas too seriously, I just think it’s interesting how different fields have different structures, and I wonder what would happen if the ways in which they operate were switched around.
It happens in cycles. My faith in music - not my faith in the state of “Music” itself, I think music is doing just fine for itself - is often not with me. This consists of me believing, or not believing, that I will find a band that will specifically appeal to me. Because as I get older, I find that I’m looking for certain things in music, so it’s less easy to be satisfied. Here’s a quote from Jack Endino’s website: “I don’t “get into” records the way I used to as a naive listener anymore.” In essence, music isn’t about emotion to me anymore. Music used to be a drug to me; it would sedate me, hypnotize me, energize me, sympathize with me. But, echoing Endino, I was a naive listener, which wasn’t a bad thing - because it was very empowering then - but I’m not sure that I knew, specifically, why I liked the bands that I did back when I was 15. Like, now I could give at least three, technical and factual sentences why my favorite bands are my favorite, not just “That band is awesome, and weird, and mysterious.”
So searching for music can be despairing because it’s harder to find what I’m looking for. Music doesn’t just latch onto me like it used to. But, whatever, I do find what I’m looking for, and I just want to stop that thought there so I can supply this quote which I think is more poignant than me just saying “Oh, yes, I do succeed in finding music I like still, it just takes more searching,” which was how this post was going end. This quote is from The Savage Detectives. The quote is about books, and it is really long, but it definitely applies to music I think, and I think it’s a great quote.
There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you are sad. And then there’re books for when you are happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we’ll soon see. Let’s take, for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you’re calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That’s how I see it. I hope I’m not offending anyone. Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. Second: he’s a limited reader. Why limited? That’s easy: because he can only read the literature of desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who’s unable to read all the way through In Search of Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain ( a paradigm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Miserables or War and Peace. Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall. Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or late they’re exhausted! Why? It’s obvious! One can’t live one’s whole life in desperation. In the end body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up turning away from books. Inevitably he ends up becoming just plain desperate. Or he’s cured! And then as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly - as if wrapped in swaddling clothes, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives - he returns, as I was saying, to a literature written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what’s called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood. And by that I don’t mean that once someone has become a cool-headed reader he no longer reads books written for desperate readers. Of course he reads them! Especially if they’re good or decent or recommended by a friend. But ultimately, they bore him! Ultimately that literature of resentment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs, doesn’t pierce his heart the way a calm page, a carefully thought-out page, a technically perfect does. I told them so. I warned them. I showed them the technically perfect page. I alerted them to the dangers. Don’t exhaust the vein! Humility! Seek oneself, lose oneself in strange lands! But with a guiding line, with bread crumbs or white pebbles!
Check out this video from Hold Your Horses, who are from France. Every scene has the band portraying a famous piece of art. Very neat, and very funny at times.
And guess what…they’re coming to the Danger Gallery this Saturday!
I really like Post Post. Their lead singer, and I think lead songwriter, Michelle Zauner writes beautiful, complex melodies - she’s so good at writing them she barely reuses them within a song, she just goes from one catchy line to another one. Check them out!
I read a nice Leonard Cohen interview yesterday. Here are a couple excerpts:
DO YOUR SONGS COME EASILY TO YOU?
No they don’t come easily at all.
DO YOU FEEL THERE’S A TIME WHEN YOU WILL CEASE WRITING?
I think you always feel that, I think you feel it if songs are longer coming and it has happened to better writers than me. If the gift dries up I think the best thing is to turn your back on it and walk away and never look at it again. I find it hard to write songs or anything else, so it’s always on the edge of extinction so if anything comes I’m always grateful for it but if it stopped coming I would hope, I would know and wouldn’t keep pressing it. I think the quality of the work has already in certain instances been too low. I think some of the stuff isn’t too good and wish I’d have held it back.
How do you know when the gift is gone? Leonard Cohen never stopped writing and performing, yet in 1971, he had doubts about the survival of his creativity (I guess he didn’t follow his own advice).
There’s two consciences that debate within the artist’s mind; one likes to say, echoing a few inspiring peers and famous figures, “Never stop! You have failed when you have given up!” while the other, sadly pragmatic conscience says “Stop, there is nothing left. Continue and it will be emotionless and tired.” The first conscience seems like naivety, the second, painful honesty - when creativity is stagnant. But when something does come, everything melts into ecstasy, and you start to believe the first conscience a little more, for a little while.
Last night was my second night volunteering at Danger Danger Gallery. The bands were not that great, very abrasive, but not abrasive in an innovative way, just plain abrasive, or maybe they were just poor musicians. What kind of kills me though is that, at least for the most abrasive sounding band, they had such nice equipment! One had a ~ $1500 guitar and a ~ $1500 amp! That’s a lot of money just to sound bad, in my opinion. I mean, you can sound even worse for a lot less.
