A couple of nights ago I had something of a revelation while talking to Todd B. about notes I had been making for a girl group article on Stylus (watch out J. C-L, I haven’t forgotten) about the way I weave morality into the music I hear. I’ve loved music as something of a savior since I was a kid; I’ve always seen it as something of a potential source of salvation or transendence. It sounds grand, but it’s sort of true. Why else, I wondered, would I so passionately prop up things I thought were just and good in the world: the cosmically kinky, the cryptically romantic with a touch of hard-assed melancholia, and the rawly earnest/earnestly raw? It’s not everything, but it’s about 85% of me.

I want to palm the nut without art or nuance; I want to crack the nut without remorse. I watch Scarface and like it fine, but why did it take me so long to realize that enjoying We Got it 4 Cheap is basically the same thing? Am I dense? Do I really have that much faith in music? Why does music polarize me on moral grounds before I can always let the art of it seep in?

It might be that I secretly really love people, and music’s got inherent community down like no other medium. Take mixtapes; while I’ve had friends that copy out poems for other people, it’s got nothing on the feeling you get throwing a friend’s comp. in the stereo and having it blow you away and you being able to feverishly call the person, tenuously gripping the phone and muttering “YES,” riding the warm highs of discovery. When a great song comes on in the car, at the club, in the living room, everyone drools “YES” in unison. People don’t high-five when they finally get to see Nude Descending a Staircase; while art and cinema transpose themselves into the idea of “community” in interesting ways, I still think that music is as readily a collective experience as they come.

Now what I’m getting around to is that it’s hard for me to imagine two friends bonding over Clipse (or whomever); I still can’t play the stuff in the car for my girlfriend, who still winces a little at the occasional jets of misogyny or homophobia that pollute even the most incisive, intelligent hip-hop. Maybe it’s that when I hear something as music, it doesn’t have the safe distance that the printed page or celluloid or most of visual art’s “object” status and therefore I feel as if it’s actually so deep within me that I shake with dissonance when I feel something that isn’t right to me, morally speaking.

Still, I’m coming around to it all, I’m dropping some of my moral pretenses in order to try to see what other people see in things I would otherwise find immediately conflicting. Really though, I’m not sure if that’s something I want, or dare I say I should do; I mean, is it misguided to think that music could have some kind of moral redemption in it? When politics betray the polis, when love feels backhanded, when the world feels so damn cold sometimes, is it naive of me to think that this thing we do - this music thing - shouldn’t mirror the depravity so much of the world as to try to counteract it or at least provide us with some relief? Savagery doesn’t seem voluntary (show my hand, it’s full of Hobbes & Beckett), but art is, and that’s why I’m gagging on the issue.

Sometimes I’m dazzled by my utter humorlessness.

The ever-elusive Erick Bieritz has a Stycast on John Carpenter up today, which is a little uncanny given the last post’s reference to The Thing. It’s always tough to get into the Classic Burns Monotone reading other people’s scripts (which always look prettier when you make the leap to mentally retranslating the words onto the printed page), but whatever. I was never Totally Wild about Carpenter’s music, but I think this is a pretty good selection, even if he witholds the “Escape from New York” theme until the end. When it comes to horror soundtracks, I always enjoyed the primal synth-crust of Fabio Frizzi more; perhaps I’ll have to do a little mining for another similarly-themed Stycast. A little disappointed by the omission of Carpenter’s steamy perm-rock version of “Big Trouble In Little China” performed with his blazered pals in the Coupe DeVilles; a minor flaw, overall.

Let’s get simple. Took a few days, watched The Thing, The Brood, and a slew of Jacques Cousteau Odyssey episodes (underwater picnics, even); crafted heartfelt indie pop, hit the town with visiting friends, ran straight into a pole like a cartoon character and busted my face open, took a good long nap, and re-joined the fray.

Did you read the address of this site?

2005 REVELATIONS + TREATS:

Doo-wop. Jaysus. The ballads more than the bangers, but still, pound-for pound a form that I’d have a hard time getting sick of. I remember reading that Brian Eno called it “martian music” but I didn’t get that until recently. I know that I’m wont to project all kinds of nonsense in order to prop up my bonkers musical continua; I got whiffs not only of of other persistent loves (Cocteaus, Animal Collective), but also of throbbing ghost sex bottled up deep in the vocal flutters and bedroom-eye subtlety. Slinking auras move closer but never break the field; in doo-wop I heard fleets of phantoms jangling bodies without letting it out through the hips. Dead can dance, but keep a ruler between you. Triple hot and for spirits only. When I want you I just call for you; it sounds like setting a bird free after stuffing its beak with stars. I’m still tasting the cream of the classics, but still, I think that of all hearts I’m juggling, this is one that won’t break for a while.

Moondog. Louis Hardin, Viking outfit and wacky street performance aside, so accurately crafted the feeling I get walking around New York that it’s uncanny. The music looks backward and forward: for every shred of “primal” rhythmic takka takka you get, you also have to swim through pentatonia, patchwork modern classical, stretches of speech, and other otherearthlies. It does the distant future/past blend well, but it’s more akin to the mystical/innate vibe I get in Sun Ra: incredibly avant-garde music that isn’t so much concerned with breaking down new boundaries so much as it is taking the time to go back and re-explore older avenues unapologetically forgotten before they were pushed as far as they could go. What you get is the sound of horses clopping in time with your feet, frogs croaking on Madison Avenue, the cartoon bustle of the city translated into some cheery ruckus; you look up at office buildings long enough to turn them into trees. Psychogeography in action.

Ariel Pink. I knew about him in 2004, but by the time the year closed, I had only heard The Doldrums and Worn Copy; since, I’ve heard Scared Famous, FF, House Arrest and some other odds and ends found on slsk. I know, he’s been called a charlatan, a piss-take, a sham, even a harlequin baby, but seriously, really give yourself a good steep in one of these and just tell me you don’t feel swept with a rare melancholy that begs gently to be revisited. I could talk for a long time about where he takes me, but it doesn’t seem to be the point. The point is that with every song the degradation becomes clearer; even the jaunty ones are starting to add up for me. It’s the world on wholesale rot, up all night and stumbling through its best efforts with a tank scraped empty. I used to feel like I was getting a glimpse into a nightmare, but the longer I spend with him, the more it just feels like an alternate reality. Not even alternate so much; you know those subway ads that say things like “if Hepatitis C attacked your outsides like it did your insides, you’d look like a Cronenberg still, too”? Well, it’s sort of like that, except with the secret surge of feeling you get from life’s careless squalor amplified to pornographic levels and showing up like boils on your belly. If you can’t dig any of this with your slacks on, try quitting showering for a few days, putting on some dirty socks, turning the heat in your house way up, huffing some household cleaner, and masturbating to soap operas with the volume off (just another day around here).

I’m being a windbag. More reflections soon.

If you’ve stuck with me for more than a day, you might realize that

A) I’m a little omnivorous and

B) I don’t stay in one place for long

Right!

Chhom Nimol is the singer of Dengue Fever, an L.A.-area band that plays a kind of patchwork South Asian psychedelia; if you’ve ever heard Cambodian Cassette Archives, any of the Cambodian Rocks comps or just imagined Nuggets in Khmer with a bunch of miscommunicated flair, then you’ll have an idea what they sound like. Anyway, I’m not sure that Escape from Dragon House is really a *great* record; the Sublime Frequencies Radio Phnom Penh comp, while much different in character, is probably a slightly more enjoyable Cambodian-related psych-ish release form this year (though it’s also a lot more varied than Dengue Fever and has that archival allure). Still, my song of the moment is “Sni Bong,” which can be listened to here. The band’s sound is a little anemic/Guitar Center-y, which, compared to the unusual production/archival mystique/lo-fi charm of the Cambodian rock comps, leaves something to be desired. But DAMN, the chorus is like a thousand high school garage bands gleefully steeped in sloppy swamp-disco getting hoisted out of the bog by one of the most hypnotic vocals I’ve heard in a while.