June 2009
1 post
Overheard Moving Over
NB!! Overheard is no longer. I’m starting a new music blog (Overheard’s better-written and better-looking successor), Phono Op. I’ll continue following you all from there! Meanwhile, I can also be found at:
http://twitter.com/UFODNAHELIX
ufodnahelix@gmail.com
March 2009
1 post
Is music a physis or a techné?
For the last year or so, some physicists have been conducting experiments in manipulating the direction of sound waves for the purpose of improving performance hall acoustics.
Its an interesting corollary to the neurological experiments I’ve been reading about, many of which tend to treat music as something received by the brain rather than imagined in/created by the mind. As far as I can...
February 2009
7 posts
Mixtapes are for lovers (in this decade, too).
Next year’s Valentine’s Day present, and/or springtime lovers’ delight:
It’s a digital music player, that uses limitations and physical movement to create a unique music listening experience. Keeping with the 45/60/90 minute limits of traditional cassette tapes, the NVDRS Cassette forces you to carefully select the songs you’d like to hear, and not just dump thousands upon...
No, but seriously, friends: Fever Ray.
I...
The Rest is Online
One thing I’m reading these days is Alex Ross’s book on 20th Century music, The Rest is Noise. I’m not fully ready to comment on it yet, in part because I’m not finished with it and in part because Nikil Saval will likely do a much better job in his upcoming (March ‘09) review of the book for n+1’s new online Book Review Supplement, N1BR.
That said, it’s...
Fever Ray
I’m really, really feeling Karen Dreijer Andersson’s solo project, Fever Ray. Her singularly elastic vocals take on different textures and tones than have come through in her work with the Knife, and the while the music has just as much darkly ticklish movement as some Knife tracks, it’s far less given over to techno—both in terms of rhythm and production. The gorgeous...
Anatomy of a Pitchfork Record Review, or,...
All right, look. Let’s just take this line-by-line, if we have to. Okay? Let’s just take it apart and then spell it out. Because the point of criticism is to name explicitly what insidiously pervades social experience, and thereby liberate consciousness from its subjugation to the givenness of that aspect of social experience. To obviate the obvious, to disabuse opinion of the burden...
YESSS!! New Eminem is awesome!
Mendelssohnorous
The Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor was my first-ever favorite piece of classical music. I used to listen to the 3rd mvmt. before lights-out time, jumping up and down on my bed to the bouncy bowings of Isaac Stern with the Ormandy-conducted Philadelphia Orchestra.
…Oh, yes, I *was* that awesome a seven-year-old!
And while I’ve more or less remained a seven-year-old,...
January 2009
20 posts
Only 1 of my 2 best buddies spends 16 hrs. a day...
Stereogum published an update on Islands’ progress with the new album that features a picture of my most famous and culturally influential family member, Chewie the Dog. See here!
The faint din of low-frequency brainwaves
I’m embarking on a project that entails reading through a selection of the many popular nonfiction books on music and the human brain. Bio-determinism is *so back*, you guys!
Most of the literature is out to prove that the grammar and aesthetics of pop (yes, pop) music are part of a genetic package we’ve inherited from our late, great homonid ancestors.
The thing is, I’m not...
Aesthetics for synesthetics
Huh! I always have E with green (and the number 5, too. E is the 5th letter of the alphabet, and that spurious association with green can’t be accidental). D is definitely yellow; there’s nothing brighter. To me, though, that kind of pink belongs on F (or, really, F#). B is definitely blue for me, too, and it’s kind of gratifying to see that here, since I always suspected the...
Critique of Everyday Life: Merriweather Post...
Unlike the nostalgic Americana of Fleet Foxes, Jenny Lewis, Sufjan Stevens et al, Animal Collective arguably represents something like a contemporary Americana. This isn’t something I could ever have said confidently before — though critics have tended to dance around it by designating them “Freak Folk” — because their psychedelic sound tends to distract from the...
the hard questions
from maura:
a thought that just flashed across my mind: “whose music would i be able to sit through longer: fleet foxes’ or the pussycat dolls’?”
trying to figure this little battle of the hegemonies out should be fun.
I meeannn … Fleet Foxes, but that’s a conclusion drawn strictly on the basis of the temporal criterion “longer.”
The popularity of Fleet Foxes...
According to something I read on the internet,...
The Stradivarius of turntables! Holy god.
Drop it
Most pop music writing comes with a past-due date on its phraseology, but the cliche that stands out as the most consistently irritating to me — not to mention bizarrely physiological — is the phrase “album drops,” as in “the album drops this month.” Why does a record release share a category of action with testicles, placentae and excrement?
Simon Sez:
From Simon Reynolds’ blissblog (I know, kiiind of a cringe-inducing name), the good old Eff-You to mediocrity in a series of pithy little reviews of the pop critics’ 2008 favorites:
Bon Iver A voice like shredded wheat with no milk. Nothing about the sound or the backstory made me want to persevere long enough with this to find the vaunted brilliance. Deerhunter Someone somewhere...
As if music mattered: the Small Is Beautiful...
Jamie Thompson is giving me and any other music lover with the good sense to visit his amazing website a virtual musical (re)education. The Small is Beautiful shares a name with Jamie’s own musical project, a beat laboratory located in an abstruse and hermetic part of his miraculous cerebellum. I’m reposting a playlist of his newer work here, but if you’re a music head bored by...
Critics, still in compulsive list-making mode,...
The new Animal Collective record, Merriweather Post Pavillion, isn’t officially out until tomorrow, but indie rock critics are already chorusing its triumph in unison.
Stereogum rushed the gate and is calling it the likely best album of the year, a “masterstroke” of pop genius.
Spin and Pitchfork agree, calling MPP both a new direction for Animal Collective and a refined...
2009 Releases (January): Out with the old, in with...
Reissue of the month: The Breeders! InSound has the January 20 re-releases of Pod and Last Splash available for pre-order now.
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Another exciting reissue, limied to 500 copies: The Zombies’ first-ever record, Begin Here. You can find that on InSound, too.
Adrian Shaughnessy on .JPGs as Album Art →
“[I]s the determination of the micro-labels to continue producing CD and vinyl packaging anything other than the remnants of a fanboy obsession with recorded music common amongst people who grew up in the pre-digital era? … Does music need some sort of physicality to maintain its intrinsic value? If our favourite music merely exists as a sliver of invisible code on a computer, do we...
“Elephant March,” from Noah23’s...
What the hell is Guelph?
Guelph, Ontario is a super-suburban town of about 100 thousand people outside of Toronto. It’s coordinates on the map are being staked out by some of the freshest, most innovative and exciting musicians and bands around. Here’s a sampling:
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Jim Guthrie, whose work I’ve posted about before (an older song from the album A Thousand Songs, “Sexy Drummer,” is here,...
Blonde Redhead at Terminal 5 - New Year's Eve
December 2008
5 posts
Does this mean I don't get to call myself a pirate...
The Wall Street Journal reports that the music industry is dropping its gazillion lawsuits against file-sharing pirates. I kind of liked being a pirate!
Clipse v. Pitchfork
Here’s to the Clipse for their public charge against Pitchfork, which is accumulating lots of attention from music sites and blogs and firing up a long-overdue dialogue about the poverty of pop music criticism. Generally, anti-Pitchfork sentiment tends toward the kind of resentment and dismissal that only serves to fortify its authority, and indeed, the Clipse are reacting to a disappointing...
My special friend just turned 27. He makes songs....
November 2008
2 posts
WatchThanks to Howie Doo for the footage!
Busta Rhymes at the Knitting Factory - 10/29/08
While my hometown baseball team was taking care of business at the World Series, I had the good fortune to be at the packed Busta Rhymes show at the Knitting Factory. Without question, one of the best shows I’ve seen in my life. Flip Mode’s musicianship, the whole crew’s flawless performance, their awesome professionalism as seasoned entertainers, and the refusal of Busta or...
September 2008
1 post
Underdogma
Weakness has been a prevailing aesthetic of what is now called indie-pop long enough to warrant some serious reflection. Its brand of ressentiment — the geek shall inherit the earth! — is now available for purchase in the form of thick-framed glasses at your local Urban Outfitters, courtesy of Indonesian sweatshop labor. A lilting, grade-school cursive is its signature font, and anemic...
August 2008
2 posts
Lest we forget this is a music blog, here is the...
Interlude: Thorstein Veblen, or The Critic as...
It’s taken a certain amount of restraint on my part to keep from posting the visage of Thorstein Veblen, seen here posing as a voluptuary for his Yale University Library portrait. In fact, Thorstein here lived a fairly ascetic life, mostly not by choice. Like Hegel, he was in his forties when he published his first definitive, recognized work (the brilliant “Theory of the Leisure...
July 2008
1 post
I never thought I'd say this, but:
Hooray for Rick Moody! In the most recent issue of The Believer, he delivers a well-meaning and not tremendously far-off-the-mark defense of prog.
June 2008
3 posts
Amazing, Possibly Fraudlent-B.S., Discovery!
I was perusing music theory on the Google labyrinth, and came across a software that uses algorithms to depict music visually. It’s called “The Shape of a Song” — a title I quite like, but not for a visual rendering. Sound has a shape! It does! Shape and texture are obviously not just tactile or visual. Sound engineers work with what they call a “sound picture,”...
ear to the ground
The reign of Pitchfork in contemporary music criticism has come under scrutiny for what has been widely perceived as a snarky tone in the writing, a stylistic snideness that is not only pervasive throughout the site (captions that wink to insiders, subtitles delivering an elbow to the ribs), but that is uniformly maintained by each individual reviewer. The number of writers that regularly appear...
name that tune
I have noticed a particular riff, a certain sequence of notes at particular intervals, that appears far too frequently to be coincidental. It can be concealed by different phrasings, meters, keys, etc., but once I identified it as either a hook or a primary counter-melody in several hit songs, I began to notice it in a variety of pop tunes, old and new. In the key of D major, for example, the...