AU - “Solid Gold”
From this Portland experimental pop band’s forthcoming album, Both Lights. Featuring a pretty glorious sax solo by the one and only Colin Stetson.
03.16.12 ♥ 0
AU - “Solid Gold”
From this Portland experimental pop band’s forthcoming album, Both Lights. Featuring a pretty glorious sax solo by the one and only Colin Stetson.
Chad VanGaalen - “Inside the Molecules”
Playing Subbacultcha! tonight, and this afternoon on our rooftop!
U.S. Girls - ‘If These Walls Could Talk’
Playing Subbacultcha! in April
First edition of the new Subbacultcha! Red Light Radio show, featuring nervous commentary by yours truly.
Schoolboy Q - There He Go
Featuring a sample from the wonderful Menomena song “Wet and Rusting”
Best Songs of 2011
Just in time for New Year’s, 100 of my favorite songs from this past year.
When it comes to music, MP3 blogs help us navigate the internet’s unfathomable depths. But where everyone has an opinion, whose do you trust? There’s no denying that the internet a useful tool for finding new music. But if we have to consume information faster and more efficiently to avoid drowning in a sea of information, do we put ourselves at risk only skimming the surface of things? We ask online music experts for their take on the situation.
Words by Carly Blair, with insights from Mike Sniper (Captured Tracks), Amanda Brown (100% Silk), Derek Evers (Impose Magazine), and Justin Gage (Aquarium Drunkard)
The internet didn’t always exist. It’s hard to imagine and easy to forget that sometimes. Since its advent in the late ’80s, the internet has gone from a bizarre underworld frequented by only the hardcore-est of geeks to, quite simply, omnipresent, absorbing other technologies and becoming progressively more integrated into every aspect of our lives. With it comes a lot of promise – of access to an essentially infinite store of information; of the ability to connect with like-minded people all over the world; of the democratization of information. The challenge now is to figure out how to navigate the internet’s unfathomable depths. When it comes to music, mp3 blogs increasingly serve as our guides.
Back in the day, downloading music was a fairly dodgy endeavor – you were nearly as likely to get a virus as what you were searching for, and anti-piracy propaganda and legal crackdowns by the Recording Industry Artists of America (RIAA) made it feel like you were a Robin Hood-style cyber bandit. Looking back, it’s funny that the RIAA ever imagined they would succeed at stopping online file sharing. Fortunately (at least for us naughty little pirates), they didn’t. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, as they say, and the record industry is gradually doing just that. Digital music sales are now a multi-billion dollar industry. Beyond that, many traditional ways of discovering new music, like listening to the radio, or watching MTV (ha!), or going to an actual record store and (gasp) BUYING SOMETHING YOU HAVEN’T HEARD, are giving way to finding things online.
The first mp3 blogs (e.g. Fluxblog) were started with the pragmatic mission of sharing hard-to-find and/or obscure music. In the decade since, mp3 blogs have not only proliferated, bloggers have come to be viewed as modern day tastemakers. The power of blogosphere hype to influence record sales has been widely touted, and has of course not gone unnoticed by labels in search of a bit of free publicity, who flood higher profile bloggers with promos and romance them at networking events like South by Southwest. Blogs used to be more of a means of self-expression. Nowadays, many historically “indie” websites and blogs (e.g. Pitchfork), presumably formed in hopes of giving greater exposure to deserving bands overlooked by the mainstream media, are infiltrated with nearly as much mainstream content as leftfield stuff. While this is probably due in part to an increasing acceptance of musical omnivorousness, of the admirable notion that we should listen to everything that’s good, without being limited to old-fashioned notions of genre and scenes, some less idyllic forces are also at work. These days, people can make a living off of blogging, and more page hits mean more advertising revenue. Why not mix in a bit of mainstream coverage, or try to ride the latest hype wave? The end result is a blogosphere that is surprisingly homogeneous, given the infinite possibilities for individual self expression the internet offers, and also one that ultimately caters the to mainstream it was originally supposed to be rebelling against. Not to mention one that favors staying current over covering stuff that’s meritorious.
There are of course also exceptions: passionate blogs with commitment to their own aesthetic, and hope-inducing tales of amazing bands rising to deserved fame on a sea of blog buzz, some without so much as a record label to promote them or any physical media whatsoever. We used to rely on gatekeepers with extensive knowledge and expertise, such as labels or radio DJs, to select the music we were exposed to. Now that information is freely available and everyone can share their opinion, these gatekeepers have less and less power. On the one hand, the reduced need to rely on a limited number of experts to get your music heard has been a boon for creativity. As Amanda Brown observes, “People are working harder now to get heard than ever before, because with the internet it all seems possible.” But in the absence of traditionally vetted expertise, whose opinion does one trust? “What you have is a community filled with amateurs, with everyday people, all with opinions and attitudes and ideas to share. Only for a fraction of society does that pose a problem; most see it as an extension of democracy, evolution. Some of us are still a bit traditional in our thinking about knowledge and culture - in that we want to receive it from valid, experienced, thoughtful sources,” says Brown. By virtue of caring enough to write about music, perhaps bloggers are discerning enough - “If lots of music nerds like you, you’re probably pretty good,” Derek Evers notes - but Mike Sniper sees it otherwise. “I used to think (pre-approval by elitist music snobs) was a bad thing, but the more I think about it, maybe it’s for the best, because the majority of bloggers aren’t richly educated in music history and where things come from.” In any case, by completely opening the floodgates, we put ourselves at risk of drowning in an ocean of opinions.
It’s of course not just opinions that have flooded the internet. If one chooses to acknowledge it, the amount of new music (not to mention videos, remixes, photos, news, and opinion pieces) available to sift through on a daily basis is pretty overwhelming. “Forget posting, anyone can RECORD an album for free. That’s scary to think about,” quips Evers. It’s easy to get lost down what Sniper refers to as “YouTube music k-holes”, only to reemerge some time later completely baffled by how much time you just wasted. “I think the amount of people making great stuff is pretty consistent, (but) the internet has opened us up to all the people making average music,” Evers observes. You can focus on a handful of blogs, or a single (micro)genre, or you use an aggregator like the Hype Machine or Elbo.ws to skim the internet’s surface, but even trying to be picky can be fruitless in the battle against information overload.
While the proliferation of digital music and of information in general is a natural consequence of more and more people getting online, it’s also an indication that the way we consume information is changing. Because there is so much to choose from, and we feel pressure or temptation to know as much of it as possible, we’re taking in smaller chunks at a faster pace. This certainly facilitates discovering a larger QUANTITY of music. But as Justin Gage observes, “Here in the second decade of the 21st century there is an unparalleled opportunity to explore and listen to more music than any other time in history. Because of this we are also now faced with the challenge of quality over quantity — meaning on what level are you able to engage with the 20,000 albums on your computer? In a lot of ways the connections people had with music are not as deep as they were, say, a decade ago.”
This touches on precisely what troubles me most. Music listening is becoming a cycle of “in one ear and out the other.” As we’ve traded purchasing music on cheaply manufactured media that fall apart for accessing an online repository of files that will “last forever”, the music itself has ironically started to be treated like something cheap and temporary; our memories of songs end up like so much landfilled waste, buried under a pile of other stuff and slowly decaying. In our obsession with recognizing as many things as possible and consuming information efficiently, we sacrifice revisiting the familiar and beloved. What’s even more disturbing to contemplate is that we may also lose our ability to appreciate complex music by only ever offering it cursory attention, thereby depriving ourselves of the opportunity to truly understand and appreciate it.
I like to think of assimilating complex ideas and experiences as something like having a stubborn explorer blaze a trail through a one’s neural jungle. It costs less effort to follow the familiar paths of 4-4 tempos and na-na-na choruses, and being confronted with music that challenges those expectations is difficult and time-consuming. However, once the knobbly branches and thorns of the old way of thinking have been hacked away, you not only realize how much more beauty people are capable of than you’d previously thought, but also that your own capacity for appreciating beauty is more than you realized. How many albums have you disliked at first, only to grow to love them upon repeated listens? Is savoring complexity not one of the most profound experiences life has to offer us? To what extent is the rapid consumption of information online causing us to forget to do that, perhaps even rendering us incapable of doing so?
People fear change, as they say, and skepticism about the internet falls into a rich history of ultimately doomed resistance to technological innovation. Video indeed killed the radio star. Hell, even Socrates himself lamented the advent of writing (writing!) out of fear that it would make people “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” and by facilitating the transmission of information, would fill them with “the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” It’s difficult to predict all the benefits that will accompany new technology, but something is indeed always lost in the process.
I think I’m not the only one having a kind of existential crisis nowadays, feeling like the fuller life gets, the emptier it feels. When we used to have to struggle to fulfill our basic needs, simple pleasures were like a godsend. Now, when everything is so easy and so abundant, we become less and less satisfiable, not realizing how amazing the things we already have are. Milan Kundera once said, “To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.” I’m not saying you should throw your laptop out the window and disconnect completely, but I do think peace is worth finding, and that finding balance is a crucial part of that. Embrace the internet, but do so critically.
Maybe I’m just a whiny old fart, fighting a Sisyphean battle against the boulder of changing times. You 21st century kids can go ahead and consume music however you want. But if you ever feel a sense of despair at the realization that no matter how many blogs you read and how much time you spend listening, you will never know all of the wonderful music there is to know in the world, you’re welcome to take a break with me and my dog up on that hill. As Brown advises, “You can’t avoid the cycle, you just have to make sure you have better things to do than pay too close attention to it.” After all, having more cool shit to choose from than you could ever possibly find time for is actually awesome, we might as well relax and just enjoy it.
stand-out track from atlas sound’s upcoming full-length, parallax
Nurses - Dracula
On their follow-up to 2009’s Apple’s Acre, this Portland psych pop trio headed into a proper studio for the first time and enlisted production assistance from Scott Colburn (Animal Collective, Sun City Girls). The production quality isn’t a huge departure, but Dracula does feature more fleshed out and brain ticklingly polyrrhythmic percussion than Apple’s Acre. I think Aaron Chapman is one of the most appealingly odd-sounding singers out there nowadays, and Nurses’ delicately ramshackle pop is both distinctive and utterly winsome, containing all the nervous uncertainty, addictiveness, and giddiness of a newfound love affair.
The sophomore offering from North Dakota trio Secret Cities maintains the breezy, eclectically orchestrated baroque pop of their debut. Instrumentally and production-wise, Strange Hearts is very indebted to sweet ’60s pop. However, unlike so many contemporary bands mining this fruitful musical era, they capture not only the sound but also the feeling of the music of those times, and then transcend it. It’s easy, but lazy, to write off a band for using the musical tools of a bygone era as derivative. The music here is, quite simply, more complex and more relevant to a modern audience, and for me, more deeply moving. Their debut was underappreciated; I sincerely hope this even more wonderful album brings them the attention they deserve.
Strange Hearts is out now on Western Vinyl
Shabazz Palaces - Blastit
Featuring footage from the upcoming documentary by Village Beat, Tough Bond, a film focusing on street life in Kenya’s disappearing villages and exploding urban slums. Shabazz Palaces do the entire score, and their new full length Black Up drops in June on Sub Pop.
The Babies – self-titled (Shrimper)
In a time when bands can tour overseas on the basis of a few mp3s, but blogs like whoisarcadefire.tumblr.com also exist, it seems simultaneously ridiculous and apropos to refer to The Babies as a kind of supergroup. Former flatmates Kevin Morby of Woods and Cassie Ramone of Vivian Girls formed this side project as a means of reliving the sweaty basement show days they enjoyed before their respective main bands “blew up”. Genre-wise, their debut isn’t a huge departure, not surprisingly featuring harmony-laden retro-sounding lo-fi pop. However, it is surprisingly focused, propulsive, and often extremely catchy - a sum of parts that as a whole supersedes either’s previous work. Quit your day jobs, kids!
