Channel 53 Introductions.

-  Two new bands I’ve discovered via the power of satellite radio (XM/Sirius’ ‘Chill’):

Brothomstates-  This guy is unreal.  He’s a Finnish composer and programmer.  Doing a little research on him, it seems most of the praise lobbed his way is aimed squarely at his melodies.  Which are catchy and unpredictable, but I think he really excels at making beats.  His beats are very technical, tricky little things, still head-nodders though.  Very very inspiring stuff.  Apparently the last album he made though was in 2006.  So I don’t know if he’s started a career, does more commission work for things like commercials, or what.  Head over to his official page, you’ll be as perplexed as I am.  Still though, if you can find this shit on the Net anywhere, I’d recommend it.

Grimes - Little more uptempo than I’m used to, and maybe more uptempo than the average “Chill” listener is used to, but the female vocals really pop.  This stuff is kinda like Cults but more dreamy and the music is more outright Electronic.  Okay apparently this is this project of the singer, and the singer alone: a Vancouver born musician named Claire Boucher.  The story of her and her then boyfriend renting out a house boat from Minneapolis to sail down the Mississippi to New Orleans is batshit crazy enough to like her.  Relatively new, her debut came out in 2010.  Her newest album, “Visions”, just recently released and is on the top of my list for electonic albums of these first couple months of 2012.

Gotan Project - This group is French, based outta Paris.  It consists of three major members, all of whom came from a variety of other projects.  This stuff is the most trip-hop of everything I’ve posted here.  There are vocals, but it’s essentially talking/story-telling.  You can really hear the French influence: the accordions, the notation and scales used, even the subtle production style.  I haven’t heard a ton of French music, but from what I have there seems to be this thing going on where they let things play out quite a bit, no over-producing.  This band particularly does that; it almost kinda reminds me of a Jazz LP, where the producer is trying to hit that sweet spot of a live, carefree sound with an organized batch of songs we call an album.

Washed Out - Layers upon layers of ambient synths and waves of sound, this Georgian musician (Ernest Greene) almost sounds European, both his production style and voice.  He’s relatively new, with only one official studio album under his belt, the 2011 SubPop release “Within and Without”.  Not sure how everyone slept on that, including me; I don’t ever remember seeing anything about it last year.  Interesting going from Gotan Project to this, the levels of monkeying with the sounds are on opposite sides of the spectrum.  Not that it’s over-produced, that’s not what I’m saying… but it certainly is more Phil Spector wall-of-sound than a lot of other Electronica going on today.  Definitely worth looking into.

(There’s soooo much good music out there worth checking out.  You’ve just got to put the time in nowadays.  It isn’t brought to your front doorstep anymore the way it once was.)

-  I also came across a “Chill” mix on the net by a guy who calls himself Hard Mix.  This is his Tumblr.  He’s a musician and designer.  He did a chronological order chart of the events in “Pulp Fiction” that’s downright brilliant:

Here’s the mix he made for Sirius/XM.

-Sonny

I’ll Take The Speculative Fiction, On Paper.

-  Jonathan Franzen — the acclaimed author of Freedom and The Corrections — recently spoke of his, I guess, disdain for ebooks (the author famously cuts his access to the Internet while writing):

The author of Freedom and The Corrections, regarded as one of America’s greatest living novelists, said consumers had been conned into thinking that they need the latest technology.  “The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,” said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing.

“I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change.  Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball.  But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

-  Since the announcement that the White Stripes were no longer going to be a band, Jack White has been busy.  He’s been involved with a litany of side-projects (most of which are good) producing, writing, drumming, and playing guitar and singing.  Now, he’s announcing his debut solo album on his own Third Man Records.  I would assume he’ll be doing damn near everything on it, he’s an excellent drummer at least.

“Jack White has launched his solo career, announcing he will release his debut LP in April. Recorded over the last few months, Blunderbuss is “an album I couldn’t have released until now”, he said, revealing the first single on his new website.

“I didn’t really even think of recording under my own name for a long time,” White told Radio 1′s Zane Lowe on Monday night. “I thought, ‘I’ve got the rest of my life to do that.’” The release comes almost a year after the White Stripes split. The singer and guitarist has hardly been twiddling his thumbs: he continues to play with two other bands, the Dead Weather and the Raconteurs, and is one of rock’n'roll’s most sought-after producers and songwriters. But his solo album was an accident, he told Lowe.”

-  Should Art Be Austere In A Recession?  It’s an interesting question, and one that Guardian writer Jonathan Jones tackles sure-handedly.  His answer is no.

In art, thinking about luxury is not the same as grasping it. Art can imagine everything from a feast to a fast – and yet it is always an idea, an image. This is not confined to artists: it is an aspect of how people think about food and fashion – we don’t necessarily leap from thought to action. Fashion fans do not all have the money to purchase everything or anything they see in a magazine, any more than an art lover has to have the clothes they see on a fabulously dressed person in a portrait. Fantasy is part of looking and thinking.

Leave it to clergymen to blame society’s ills on images of the unattainable. Imagining luxury is as human as imagining want. The real ugliness of the age of austerity would be to limit innocent pleasures, to force misery on the modern mind. It’s bad economics (someone has to buy some stuff if the economy is to grow), and it’s hopeless human psychology. You can’t impose austerity on the imagination.

-  And, also on the Guardian, Damien Walter examines the connections between the corporations of speculative fiction and the ones we have today.

The corporate society has been an enduring wellspring of stories over the last century. Inspired by the factory production line, Aldous Huxley predicted a future where humans were born and bred only to fulfil a corporate function in Brave New World. The cyberpunk vision of William Gibson’s Neuromancer charted a future where government had collapsed entirely, and society was ruled by a few super-powerful corporations.

In the midst of a global economic crisis that has shed light on the darker workings of the capitalist system, these days corporate society seems less like SF fantasy and more like a living reality. Whether it’s the revelation of the “super-cluster” of 147 companies who have grasped control of 40% of the world’s entire wealth, or the barely-reported $16tn loans made by the US Federal Reserve to banks and business soon after the 2008 financial crash, multinational corporations seem to wield incredible and unaccountable power over our democratic society.

-Sonny

Google Knows You.

-  So the Doomtree crew, who may as well be called “Super Friends”, has a new project where they’re combining the music of one of my favorite punk bands of all-time with one of my favorite hip-hop collectives of all-time:

FUGAZI + WU-TANG = WUGAZI

They have a Tumblr-based website for the project already, and they’ve so far released two tracks on their Soundcloud.  Here’s the newest, delicious track:

-  Want to know what Google thinks you’re into?  CLICK HERE.  Apparently I’m into comics, meat and seafood recipes, radio, myths and folklore, astronomy, hip-hop, visual art and design, and movies.  That isn’t 100% wrong…

-  Iron Fist Clothing makes some pretty cool stuff for the more punk-aestheticized amongst us.

All for now,

Sonny

Felt 3: Protagonists.

MP3 for the day.  Weeks ago a teaser was released from Rhymesayers Entertainment that looked something like:

Murs + ? + Slug = Felt 3, a Tribute to ___________

Well, now it’s been leaked that the question mark in the equation is a guy from Brooklyn named Aesop Rock.  He’s producing the disc.  Rhymesayers released a song from the album called “Protagonists” a couple of days ago and here it is (here’s the LINK directly the MP3 also).

-Sonny

Lethal Liars and Peeling the Onion.

- A friend of mine gave me a copy of Mac Lethal’s “Love Potion 5″, and it’s awesome.  There’s a whole lot of funny and dead-on one liners here.  Enough to last me the rest of year.  Targets include stuck up women, hipsters, Prius drivers, Italians, Twitter, politicians, the government, the American Dollar, tight jeans and more.  MySpace.

- A thread opened up @ White-Chapel about David Lapham, writer of the current and excellent Young Liars, possibly coming to Avatar Press. William Christensen, one of several Avatar representatives, can “neither confirm or deny” this… but he adds: “But it would be fucking cool, eh?”.  Yes it would sir.

- Star Trek is getting an impressive 95% on the Tomato-Meter after its first weekend.  I NEVER said it sucked (how could I?  I never saw the damn thing!), I just said in my opinion it isn’t “really REALLY Star Trek.  Its an impostor”, and I’m maintaining that.  What’s funny is what I tried to explain in my post was reiterated in satirical hilarity by everyone’s favorite fake news organization (no not the Daily Show) The Onion.  This was basically what I was trying to say:

-Sonny