As of today I am no longer working at the Hook, because they’ve decided to shutter all music, arts, and culture coverage as a drastic cost-cutting measure. This is a pretty surreal development, both because it takes them so far from the usual blueprint of an alt-weekly paper and also because the music section I operated performed quite reliably for several years as their #2 source of web traffic (after the news blog run by the full-time reporters, obviously).
The really upsetting part is seeing all the work we all put in behind the scenes go down the tubes for good. Expanding the online culture coverage was a really ambitious project for which we designed some awesome technological features — for example, the calendar listings controlled a podcast that could shoot MP3s from the bands performing that evening directly onto your iPod each morning, and we later started syndicating our content back out separately for each venue so the promoters could use it on other sites to make their own jobs easier. Even several years after the initial launch, I have yet to see another publication or web outlet try anything remotely comparable. I’d hoped to eventually find myself handing off the keys to an excited intern instead of watching the whole endeavor shut down, because landing that job at 23 was one of the best things that has ever happened to me.
With all that said, it’s very hard for me to be angry about any of this, since I quite literally owe my writing career entirely to Hawes. On to other projects now. I am extremely excited about them.
The most notable new addition is the certainly the optional new “Gen” object add-on, which blurs the lines between Max patches and the compiled C code used to create custom external objects, and then there’s also a partial implementation of the HTML5 JavaScript API into the canvas element which should allow… HEY!! WAKE UP!! OK, there are probably better places to find out about all that. So instead, I just wrote down the best one-liners.
It was fantastic and I learned a lot — enough to compel me, finally, I think, to actually patch together some of my ideas instead of just admiring the platforms from afar (don’t get too comfy, SuperCollider, because eventually I’m coming for your ass too).
So maybe that’s the big landmark for post #100 on this blog. I didn’t have much time last night when all the drinking and writing was done, but my resolve did manifest in a blitzkrieg attempt to program an alarm clock in Pure Data that would wake me up the following morning with a reminder to get this show on the road. Surprisingly, it did not take me long at all. Even more surprisingly, it actually worked, and I made it to my 10am appointment on time.
I’m sure I will eventually find this patch extremely embarrassing. But, well.
Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue – Where The Wild Roses Grow
“Why do they keep calling me the wild rose?” she keeps asking. “My name is Elisa.” You know the drill — boy meets girl, boy kills girl, boy plants rose between girl’s teeth. But what makes this so fascinating are the dueling accounts whereby both killer and victim describe in parallel each of the three days leading up to the murder. He says, “I kissed her.” She says, “He hit me with a rock.”
Unfortunately I couldn’t include it in the roundup, but this article idea came to me while I was listening to “Old Judson,” a fantastic song by Charlottesville songwriter Peyton Tochterman‘s short-lived mid-00′s bluegrass trio Fair Weather Bums, in which peppery mandolin runs and subtle vocal harmonies populate a small world of places and characters only to slowly darken them on the way to the big reveal at the end. I really want more people to hear this.
Moments before the clock runs out on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, here’s an introspective and retrospective piece for the Voice about one of my coping devices at the time. If you like it, you might also proceed on to the companion interview with a somewhat confused rock star.
The most violent guitars turn up on a song about suppressing the urge to retaliate and trusting in cosmic retribution. This, of course, was not the way the 9/11 aftermath played out.
My second concert ever was Bush’s tour in support of Sixteen Stone. (I can’t bring myself to tell you the first.) This necessitated an extra ticket for a friend’s parent, who drove a van full of kids up to the arena an hour away while we giggled in the back about girls and whatever, and then sat up in the stands while we went down to the floor to explore our first-ever mosh pit. We promptly discovered crowdsurfing. “The rest of you guys, sure — but I swear, every time I looked down, Vijith was floating across the crowd,” said Jefferson’s dad after the show. As an awkward 14-year-old who couldn’t play any sports and took forever to work up the guts to admit to anybody at school that I was trying to learn to play the guitar, that’s as proud as my moments got. Bowery Ballroom in 2011, though? Totally different story — I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but it was upsetting to realize as soon as I entered that it looked and smelled like a room full of Shinedown fans (hair gel, beer, sweat, shame). more
Nanoloop 2 for the Game Boy Micro somehow packs unbelievably sophisticated filters and oscillators for subtractive synthesis into a gorgeous minimalist greyscale grid, which makes for one of the most soothing and meditative music composition spaces I’ve yet seen on any platform, bigger dogs like Pro Tools very much included. Nanoloop might actually be the best way for non-chiptune musicians to dip their toes into this world–you can’t very well duct-tape a proper keyboard to your acoustic guitar, now can you? More
I’m fantastically excited about my latest essay for the Village Voice (and tickled that they started the “appreciations” tag just for this piece). It can be hard to cut through the torrential weirdness of the British experimental electronic duo Autechre, so they often get filed away as music to academically respect rather than passionately adore. Here, I defend them as a band that’s well worth your emotional investment, filtered through the autobiographical story of my own decision to move to New York City.
By the time Quaristice came around in 2008, just a few months before my big move, almost all the sensible time signatures had been subverted by experimental ambition, and sure, there was probably also a little ego in there too. “Perlence” was an especially difficult track–just two minutes and change, but I still can’t figure out how to count its pulses, and when the inevitable remix came, its running time had been expanded to a full 58 minutes. Even the song titles grew stranger: from “Flutter,” “Chatter,” “Eggshell” and “Further” to “fwzE,” “ThePlclCpC,” and “90101-51-6.” It’s mostly from these obnoxiously antisocial shenanigans that we get the common but misguided notion that if Autechre’s music displays any beauty at all, it comes in a sterile and mechanical form, like a sculpture built from gears or animations made with a glitching graphics card.
