In the Village Voice last month, some thoughts on Ben Folds, Snoop Dogg, and Dragonette.

In this week’s Village Voice, a feature on giving up formerly Brooklynite weirdo-pop duo High Places.

Bad news, folks: This new High Places album is easily their best yet. Since they no longer live here, this deals a blow to New York’s collective musical ego, which, quite frankly, might actually need a bit of a takedown post–”Empire State of Mind.” So here goes…
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Last month in the Village Voice, brief spots on Anamanaguchi (also covered previously), Alice In Chains, Alkaline Trio, Habib Koité (above), and Benga.

Two short items last month in the Village Voice’s concert calendar about Daniel Lanois and Little Boots. More of this to come.

A new piece for eMusic about Alan Lomax’s mammoth new collection of field recordings of Haitian folk music.

In this week’s issue of The L Magazine, I talk about Massive Attack‘s new album Heligoland, which is actually more interesting than a lot of the other stuff I’ve heard recently but nonetheless still makes me grumble a bit, not unlike Massive Attack often do themselves.

The formula behind Massive Attack’s pioneering trip-hop: the Jekyll-and-Hyde combination of Robert Del Naja’s mumbled back-alley baritone pseudo-raps and the somewhat more melodic leads, all with keyboard-laden backdrops hinting at fairly inept visions of the future. Remember that all of the above, roughly speaking, were contemporaries of movies like Hackers and The Net, artifacts from an awkward digital puberty where you’d get only one button on a mouse, if you even knew what one was in the first place.

Insofar as Heligoland still tries to be a Massive Attack record, the results are remarkable: “Rush Minute” and “Atlas Air” can stand alongside anything else this band has ever released. But those are also the only two fronted by Del Naja, and when he gives the keys to the van to guest lead vocalists, it all falls apart. The foreboding songs are usually made even more upsetting by all the confusing amorphous edges, for one thing, but these guys just enunciate too damn clearly.

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Some thoughts (eight, to be precise) on the latest installment of Blip Festival, the awesome annual chiptune festival. (I went last year too.)

Fighter X: Youngish probably-hipster dudes in tight pants and floppy hair shoveling out manic, skittering Game Boy duels. Even if they sometimes came across as a sort of sleazy fun-loving Europop compared to their fellow performers (hey, there’s a place for that stuff too), the lengthy continuous set was very impressive, as was their tendency to abandon tending to the devices and instead jump around the stage or go crowd surfing, especially given that they have such small memory banks. The Game Boys, I mean.
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My Brightest Diamond has released a very long new remix album. I have written a very short new review thereof.

The big winner is bleeding-edge composer Son Lux, who handily flips the second installment upside down largely by placing digital drums and chirps alongside perversely overeager pseudoclassical instrumentation, vaguely in the template of Björk’s remarkable unhinged-camp Sinatra-shrieker “It’s Oh So Quiet.” (He reportedly didn’t actually listen to the full songs he was remixing until he had finished his new versions, which seems to have worked out surprisingly well.)
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I’ve been glued to Four Tet‘s lovely new album There Is Love In You for the past couple weeks (“Love Cry”, wow) and I chatted with Kieran Hebden for New York Magazine’s Vulture blog.

Many rock bands have moved toward incorporating electronic sounds over the past decade or so. Do you think that has left listeners more open to your music?
Yeah, definitely. When I started out ten years ago, people thought about electronic music and they instantly thought about quite extreme ends of it. Synthesizers and drum machines, lots of digital processing. Nowadays, everything is mixed together a lot more, and people don’t even know what they’re listening to.
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Legendary hip hop producer Just Blaze just closed down his Baseline Studios facility, where a lot of crucial Jay-Z records were made over the past decade or so, and he sent out an open invitation for people to drop by on the last night. I went, and I was so struck by the way he was interacting with his fans that I wrote about it for the Village Voice.

A surprisingly small turnout all things considered (the extent of Just’s influence, in particular), but that just made it more intimate and personal: Just just sat around in his control room surrounded by everyone, giving demos on how to use his MPC and turntable, with a Rick Astley LP for the latter. (Biggest laugh of the night: He called one dude over to the MPC, only to be asked, “Hey, you got those Just Blaze sounds on there?”) Eventually he pulled together a quick and dirty beat for his fans to freestyle over, joking with them as he encouraged them all to join the cipher while rapping a little himself, liberally quoting Wu-Tang’s “Triumph,” and even reading lyrics off a flushed Queens fan’s phone. (“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” the latter gushed later.)
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PopMatters and I would like to test your GWAR knowledge.

I can’t tell you who the opening band was because there was too much blood dripping from their logo to actually read it. GWAR, on the other hand, turned out to have a surprisingly listenable dose of perfectly competent high-powered id-metal. Listening was not the point, however. Outlandish costumes aside, you also have the accompanying rock-opera storylines and the Gallagher-esque constant spray of hopefully-washable liquids into the crowd from a variety of severed limbs and other distressing sources (penises, giant cannons—the latter had some serious range, as did the former, I guess, all things considered).

Question #7: Which of the following was not used as an excuse to spew fake blood into the crowd?
a) Cow being skinned alive
b) Michael Jackson in a spacesuit getting his face ripped off, naturally starting with the nose first
c) Deformed “sin baby” fetus being aborted
d) Obama being decapitated after presenting them with the “presidential medal of ass-kicking cool shit”
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I have a small spot this week with the Village Voice for the 2009 “Pazz and Jop” music critics’ poll.

(Not me.)

There’s my ballot, of course, and Glenn McDonald’s usual statistical analysis (he was quite fittingly tapped by the Voice to run the official numbers this year), but also this time a short bit in the commentary portion of the program.

As a displaced second-generation, it warmed my heart a bit to see legendary Indian film composer A.R. Rahman finally get his due in the States thanks to the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack, the ensuing performance during the Grammy Awards broadcast, and, of course, that crucial assist from M.I.A.’s tidy soundbite referring to him as “the Indian Timbaland.” It’s a shame, however, that it took six years to come up with a suitable follow-up to Jay-Z championing Panjabi MC. Come on, second-most-populous country in the world, get your act together.
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(Also not me, but getting warmer, I suppose.)

Since the Petey Pablo song is a good six years old at this point and “Jai Ho” as sung by the Pussycat Dolls makes me die a little inside with each masochistic tick of the iTunes play count (yes, I downloaded it, shut up), I’ll instead point you here to “Mann Chandre” from his decent (if ultimately not quite ballot-worthy) ’09 album Connections. I’m not so sure about the Voice’s section heading, which is “Yes, I ‘Actually’ Like It: More music to love, loathe, fear, and tragically fail to avoid,” but I’ll guess I’ll just assume the first option there unless explicitly told otherwise.

Now, I’ve voted before, but this time my guiding logic was a lot more interesting (a relative term there, I realize).

First, the unranked singles portion. I was far better equipped to handle that part this year, in large part because I’ve been closely following former Stylus Magazine writer Will Swygart‘s awesome new Singles Jukebox blog, in which he aggregates the scores and witty blurbs about current pop singles from his own fairly killer lineup of music critics; it’s a bit like a daily P+J pill, in a way. The Jukebox first crossed my desk around the time they skewered Parachute, a pop-rock band based in Charlottesville which I wrote about on several occasions for The Hook; it was both brutal and captivating, and I’ve been addicted ever since. The caveat here — and it’s a big one — is that I didn’t manage to get around to sifting through Pitchfork’s 2009 best-of yet. It’s been compiled into a single handy download, available via your favorite troublemaking website. Say what you must about other aspects of their editorial coverage — there’s some baggage there, at least — but I really can’t argue with the taste; 2007 and 2008 (also available via the same) were superb. (I will also point out, however, that somehow my stated preference for the wonderful remix of Das Racist’s otherwise grating snack food devotional chant “Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell” was not preserved, and the votes for both were apparently collapsed when tallied.)

The album portion will require a bit more explanation.

See, while I am a voracious listener and obsessive hoarder, for the most part I am quite over the album as an arbitrary grouping construct for listening; Smart Playlists > iTunes Genius > Shuffle, and so forth; no big surprises there, I’m sure. But in addition, I still tend to listen more as a fan and a musician rather than as a critic, which means that I’m looking for things I can love and/or learn from (ideally both) rather than pontificate on or publish about. Come to think of it, even when I’m wearing the critic’s hat, I’d say it’s of far more value in the long run to spend my energy making friends with established works of far-reaching cultural relevance than running around trying to obsessively catalogue everything that’s new and undocumented. More bluntly, and obviously: I care more about what it sounds like than when it was released. However, I write in various forms for what can only sensibly be considered the mainstream music press, which overwhelmingly tends toward discussing new albums. Thus, I have a little conflict on my hands.

I should therefore be considered fairly incompetent with this sort of thing, grand statements about evaluating the best albums of the year and so on, hence my even-steven ten-point ratings across the entire group. Honestly, it all just amounts to a mad dash every November or so to find ten that I’m not horribly embarrassed to throw my support behind. (I realize there’s plenty of amazing stuff being made, though, so that’s less a cynical humbug in which I hate all contemporary music and more like an admission that I’m not particularly inclined to look for it in my increasingly-rare elective listenings when there’s still so much Mingus or whatever which I haven’t learned yet.)

Anyway, last year I barely made it to the tenth. This year, I found nine. This brings us to another substantial disconnect between my head and my writings, and then to what just might be the strangest album represented in the poll this year.

Thanks to other facets of my life (I have them, I swear), I have a substantial amount of training in things like music theory, arrangement, audio engineering, and production technology, and though they all certainly inform my evaluations when I’m writing critically, they’re fairly difficult subjects to address directly unless I’m dealing with a specialty publication like Tape Op, Create Digital Music, or Indaba (although I did recently get away with dropping some theory on Lady Gaga for PopMatters). So given the opportunity, and finding myself in a bind just hours away from the submission deadline, I decided to give slot #10 over to my hyper-technical side.

I’ve been doing a lot of web development in PHP lately, specifically with the “object oriented” paradigm, in which the functionality is captured in small modular chunks and recalled asymmetrically instead of simply run from the beginning of the script through to the end. That logic is just a way of organizing concepts, though, and has also been used to great effect in several audio-specific programming platforms that I’m really interested in learning as a way of taking my interest in controlling audio technology to its logical extreme. They essentially let you sculpt sounds using the most low-level fundamental elements your computer can possibly control — oscillation frequencies controlled by mathematics controlled by data flow structures, and so on. Max/MSP and PureData are the most popular graphical options among these, but I’ve lately developed a particular interest in a similar textual platform called SuperCollider, mostly due to its elegant program infrastructure and also its ability to export to Apple’s industry-standard Audio Unit plug-in format, which allows finished projects to be run as fully-integrated elements of more common audio workstations like Ableton Live or Apple’s own Logic and GarageBand.

It’s quite incredible. It runs on code and equations, like so:

And I find putzing around inside quite fascinating even though I don’t really know how to drive it yet. It even shares vague syntactical similarities with PHP.

So then a funny thing happened earlier this year among SuperCollider users: presumably as equal parts a show of coding virtuosity and a means of much-needed social interaction, the finest among them started sharing their sound creation codes using Twitter, which obviously meant that a complete idea had to be executed in under 140 characters (in some cases even leaving room for the #supercollider hashtag, which is of course all the more impressive). Some of them are quite captivating, all things considered. Immediately after submitting my ballot, I fully intended to write my own 140-character tidbit by the time the issue came out, but damn, this shit is hard! Not quite there yet, unfortunately. So instead…

By Batuhan Bozkurt:
play{AllpassC.ar(SinOsc.ar(55).tanh,0.4,TExpRand.ar(2e-4, 0.4,Impulse.ar(8)).round([2e-3,4e-3]),2)};// #supercollider with bass please… [mp3]

By Micromoog:
play{VarSaw.ar((Hasher.ar(Latch.ar(SinOsc.ar((1..4)!2),Impulse.ar([5/2,5])))*300+300).round(60),0,LFNoise2.ar(2,1/3,1/2))/5}//#supercollider [mp3]

(As far as I can tell, the code is also the title of the piece, which is either cute or infuriating, depending.)

A sort of best-of was promptly curated by UK tweako-tune mag The Wire for digital release (aka “woohoo we made a zip file!”) as SC140. I am sure you’ll be shocked to learn that I’m the only guy who voted for it.

In case you missed the big news yesterday, eMusic has landed Warner Music Group, meaning that two out of the four major record labels are now represented in the catalog and there’s now a ridiculous new collection of awesome music over there which is just begging for editorial. I started with Built To Spill.

There Is No Enemy recalls album-friendly 90′s alternative rock with a delirious fondness, reminiscent at its most hectic points of an appropriately-medicated Screaming Trees or Sunny Day Real Estate, elsewhere even scaling the dreamy guitar bobbles back into hummable-hooks territory about halfway to the Gin Blossoms.
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Lookin’ pretty good on page 20 of the January 6 issue of The L Magazine: my review of Owen Pallett‘s new album Heartland.

Just when you’re lost in an intricate waterfall of arpeggios or perhaps bopping your head involuntarily as a killer new drum pattern enters, Pallett will hit with you with a clever lyric or a memorable hook or something else that just shouldn’t be there, not according to the standard blueprints anyway. Foremost among these successes would be the refrain from sort-of title track “Oh Heartland, Up Yours!”—actually less amusing in execution than the punctuation might make it seem on paper, instead coming across as a tender Sufjan project gone awry, perhaps lamenting the various cruelties of 50 women instead of celebrating their home states.
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From the Department of Obvious Things: there were other contenders here, but I came on fairly late for The L Magazine‘s “albums of the decade” article series and was a little shocked that nobody had already picked it, so I took the not even remotely controversial position that it was Radiohead’s Kid A.

Radiohead, having long cultivated and complained about and composed around these nebulous fears about our souls being liposuctioned out from beneath us — “Heat the pins and stab them in/You have turned me into this/Just wish that it was bullet proof,” and so on — had finally decided that since nobody was quite getting the message, they needed instead to embody it, themselves becoming something too challenging to be ignored, too terrifying not to at least be remembered, whether by way of a temple or a crater. So if you could find an emotion in the throbbing cryogenic Jell-O of “Treefingers,” maybe there was still a heart in there somewhere (by which I’m not really sure whether I mean in you or in the Jell-O, but either way).
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See also:
Ys by Joanna Newsom
The College Dropout by Kanye West
Silent Shout by The Knife
Funeral by The Arcade Fire
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco
The Con by Tegan and Sara

I’m part of a really cool Yearbook project over at eMusic — they asked ten writers to submit essays about musical trends during one year from the last decade in an attempt to sum it all up. We were basically given carte blanche with regard to possible angles and approaches, so what resulted is an intriguingly varied set of reflections on and refractions of the last ten years, both musical and otherwise.

For example, my piece zeroes in on retro R&B and soul label Daptone Records, which put out some of its strongest in-house records thus far in 2007 while simultaneously helping coax out chart-topping releases from Amy Winehouse and Jay-Z. (This was actually the second time I’ve had a chance to shoot the breeze with Daptone head Gabe Roth, the first being the technically-oriented interview [PDF] I did for Tape Op that year inquiring about his production techniques.)

The other essays are all very much worth your time too, though. I suppose I’ve already done quite enough gushing over eMusic’s editorial crew, but it bears repeating briefly here — these are all writers whose work I’ve been following for years, so I’m delighted to have made the shortlist for this.

• 2000: Slate‘s Hua Hsu on the awkwardness of technological puberty
• 2001: Rolling Stone‘s Melissa Maerz on New York’s rebirth after September 11th
• 2002: The A.V. Club‘s Michaelangelo Matos on the role of DJ’s
• 2003: Magnet Magazine editor Matthew Fritch on the Canadian indie rock invasion
• 2004: Needs-no-introduction Douglas Wolk on geopolitical unrest
• 2005: Living legend Chuck Eddy on the last gasps of major label hard rock
• 2006: Pitchfork‘s Jess Harvell on emo’s maturity or lack thereof
• 2007: Yours truly on old-soul funk as the anti-Radiohead
• 2008: The Village Voice‘s Christopher R. Weingarten on the election as the end of days
• 2009: eMusic editorial director J. Edward Keyes on erasing elitism

Still stuck on the prehistoric animals: my recent profile of indie-pop duo Dinosaur Feathers in the Village Voice works in a quick homage to an old forgotten storybook, one of my childhood favorites, which narrated a day in the life of the highly unusual dino-bird Archaeopteryx. (This here would be the opening illustration.)

“I wanted to create something that seemed sort of fantastical, but when you broke it down into its elements, was still very organic,” explains [frontman Greg] Sullo, who immediately thereafter describes “taking a look back at those old ’50s and ’60s songs and reimagining them with modern technology that the Beatles and Os Mutantes didn’t have.” Either way, Dinosaur Feathers are evolving nicely—from this summer’s free-download Early Morning Risers EP to the full-length scheduled for March—but Sullo still worries about his favorite paleontological theory. “It’ll be interesting to see where that information goes in 20 years,” he says. “I wonder how much of it is getting into literature and textbooks and the sort of books you’d have as a kid. Maybe we can do our part to help.” Not necessary, guys: It’s already out there…
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My review of Asobi Seksu‘s new unplugged album Rewolf went up at eMusic today.

With the touring lineup left behind, core members Yuki Chikudate and James Hanna have a lot more canvas across which to paint their surrealist watercolor keyboard washes and twinkling, fingerpicked guitars which, now entirely buzz-free, recall in equal parts Joni Mitchell and Vashti Bunyan. “New Years,” no longer anchored by the drums and arguably one of the only songs here that doesn’t definitively trump the original full-band version, instead just drifts off on a hazy cloud of whimsy that starts making funny impressionistic shapes by the time it gets to “Urusai Tori.”
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I just interviewed Brann Dailor, drummer for Atlanta metal quartet Mastodon, for New York Magazine‘s pop culture blog.

Why all the thematic complexity?
It allows us to go to a bunch of different places artistically; there’s just more to experience. Putting out a record without any of that stuff would be short-sighted, like you didn’t put everything you had into it. With each album you get to try it again and get it more cohesive and more thought-out and more psychedelic.
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Some cool recent pieces:

At the Indaba blog, I jovially report on the tremendous recent drop in price of Pro Tools and consider how emerging online functionality could shape audio production software in the near future.

For Tape Op, I complain about Simon Cowell some more and then ponder McNugget rappers Das Racist and — wait for it — the implications for audio professionals of the remarkable remix of “Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell”.

In related news, I’ll be hanging out with the Tape Op guys at stand #849 at the AES convention in Manhattan today.