Nonwrestler Blog

Weekly mp3 #15: Sonmi451 - Vladivostok

Download this tune, or all of The Quiet EP, from Monotonik.

Soft, chiming chords, muffled clicking beats, and echoing voices yabbering away intermittently in Japanese and English. Something along the lines of Shuttle 358, Biosphere or maybe the quietest moments of Electric Birds.

Sonmi451 is a Belgian guy, named after a robot from the David Mitchell novel Cloud Atlas. He’s done a bunch of albums and the above netlabel release reissues material from an older, out of print CD.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  1 Comments Links to this post

Some Good Ol' Bureaucratic Nonsense

So I got a letter from IRD the other day. I paid off my student loan last year, and this letter said:

1. IRD had made interest write-offs on my student loan last year, which I wasn't entitled to because I wasn't living in NZ at the time.

2. They had now reversed each of 4 write-offs.

3. They had also reversed the reversals of the write-offs. i.e. made a one-off payment into my loan account to bring the balance back to zero.

4. They would be sending me a statement soon itemising what they were already telling me, but they just wanted to explain what I was about to see on my statement.

Then I got another 2 letters.

The first one was the statement, which:

1. Confirmed all of the above.

2. Had an opening balance of $2.78 in credit and a final transaction that was a debit of $2.78.

"Hang on, I thought, I've been gypped out of $2.78!"

The second letter was a cheque for $2.78.

Wonder what the difference is between that $2.78 and the costs associated with the write-offs made in error, the decision to reverse them, the discussions about how to record the reversal of the reversals, the typing out of the initial personalised letter and the subsequent processing and sending of the 3 letters...

Labels: life

Posted at 11:04  0 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #14: Some Water And Sun - Gloomy Town

Download the song from Better Propaganda.

A very simple soul vocal meets blippy electronica instrumentation. Percussion and slow-mo beats carry a repeating vocal hook sung by a Japanese guy in English. The instrumentation and treatments are very indicative of John Hughes's later output, really. The bassline reminds me of Herbie Hancock's 'Chameleon' (I think it's the dotted-quaver, ascending semitone thing) with added squelch.

I don't know much about the singer, but, yeah, John Hughes. John Hughes III. Hefty Records label boss. Indie rocker turned post-rock solo act turned glitch+Black American music traditions producer. I imagine being the son of the guy who directed The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and all that leaves you in a weird position PR-wise. It's not like John & Julian Lennon or whoever. There's not really a definable audience overlap to milk, you're obviously doing something completely different, working in a different medium, etc. etc. but, man, dad's really famous, so you'll at least pique people's interest if you mention the connection... I guess the best angle is to hook up members of Tortoise to write the soundtrack for your dad's next movie. Then release soundtrack on your label and, yay, you have some relevant connection for journos to go on about.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  0 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #13: Songs: Ohia - The Lioness

Download 'The Lioness' from the label's website . Completely different from the last couple of weeks, this one. Liking immaculately chiselled electronic production doesn't preclude appreciating the exact opposite...

My wife has called this crash-your-car music, but I have a soft spot for a certain kind of gloomy slow rock stuff. The vagely country bits, I guess - Mark Kozelek / Red House Painters, stuff like that. Lyrics like "I want to feel my heart break, if it must break, in your jaws / want you to lick my blood off your paws". This one's not Steve Albini-produced, but has a similar aesthetic to the Songs:Ohia tracks that are. That is, it avoids contemporary standards for sheen and polish in studio recording, and leaves heaps of space for some decent dynamics. Works really well.

Songs:Ohia was essentially Jason Molina's project. He's more recently been recording as Magnolia Electric Co. This tune is another one of those cases where I heard this song and thought "Shit, got to hear more of this!", then heard more of this and went "Ah. Shit." Molina does have other really good songs, but just not much that suits my tastes. Again I find myself pondering what the X factor is, but I won't go on about that again... Just go read Equus to understand my dilemma. ;) Heh, that's probably about as cheerful as this song!

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  0 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #12: Dabrye - Smoking The Edge

Download 'Smoking The Edge' from Epitonic .

Dabrye is probably my favourite producer of this century. Heh. It’ll get harder to make such crazy-sounding statements as time goes by, I guess. I'm also probably more deeply influenced by music from the last century, but, still, I love the direction he pushed a sound that I was already in love with. It’s easy enough to trace his influences, especially as he (Tadd Mullinix) does things in a bunch of styles under different names, so when it’s Dabrye time he’s clearly rounding up a particular set of genre tropes and working with them.

This is the first track I ever heard from Dabrye and still one of his better ones. A jagged, wordless robot voice acts as the main riff, swung against the super-crisp drums. It's got a hip-hop feel but Tadd's background in techno is blatant. There's some great staggering drum fills and tweaks but to a large extent you know exactly what's coming from the first 20 seconds. The key with this kind of approach is making the elements sufficiently awesome that you want to hear the same thing over and over again. :) He also knows to keep the track short. Good call.

Since this track came along Dabrye's sound has got grubbier and hazier, and there's been a big surge in people doing things in a similar territory. Things start to get interchangeable to those who aren't already into the sound... I swear most would think it was all one producer if you made a mix from tracks by Dabrye, Flying Lotus (who is getting big post his Warp signing), Lukid, Take, Caural, and other artists on compilations like The Sound of LA and Beat Dimensions. Chuck in some appropriate J Dilla instrumentals to show the common starting point...
So I think I've past saturation point for this kind of sound - while there are undoubtedly good things still going on, after however many albums of similar sounding stuff the pay-off feels pretty diminished. Still, Dabrye. You could nitpick aspects of his sound that make him stand out, but what separates the good from the bad is not something you can neatly map against formal elements... Maybe it comes back to the emotivist assertion that "I like it" is the same as "It's good".

Anyway...

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  0 Comments Links to this post

Art with issues

Went to the revamped Dowse gallery yesterday and saw some interesting stuff there, including an exhibition that was essentially a series of portraits of people who identify themselves as trans gender or trans sexual, called "Assume Nothing".

There was a little sign at the start of the exhibition that said something like:

Warning: This exhibition, which deals with an important issue within our society, contains some nudity and images which may offend some people.

That's from memory, but that was the gist and I think I've got the tone about right.

I reckon it's fine to have a sign like that, but that relative clause, "which deals with an important issue within our society", annoyed me. First, seems very righteous to assert the importance and, second, seems like a weird assertion about the circumstances in which it's OK to show cocks in public. "Don't worry, this penis exposure is by no means frivolous!"

Beyond the signage, I found it interesting that the exhibition actually did deal with the issue it claimed to in a very explicit way, inasmuch as it was basically an entirely documentary thing about identity politics, consisting of the portraits, text from the subjects and the photographer, and then, for another layer of info, video documentaries about the same.

As a way of communicating ideas about an issue, that seems to be a much more successful approach than something that requires specialist knowledge of art history, post-modernist theory or both. The flipside is the exhibition had a very different feel from others in the gallery, and the photographer and film-maker both seemed fairly outside the art establishment - not in the sense of being "outsider artists" or savants or whatever, but in that the work shown was much more in line with a TV crew, a coffee table book or maybe a library display (barring the subject matter).

I found it all fairly dissatisfying, which has lead me to wonder if I ever like art to be about politics. I'd got much more excitement out of looking at some abstract felt pen drawings, some pretty photos of Antarctica and an incredibly detailed mock blueprint for a "brothel or prison" elsewhere in the gallery.

To draw a crude analogy to music, I much prefer to listen to lyrics that are either dumb and rude or arty and obtuse than to conscious political music. I like conscious political views, but I don't listen to music to get educated, and I don't know if I want visual art to be trying to educate me either.

Thinking out loud here, probably not as black and white as all this. Interested to hear what others reckon.

Labels: misc time-wasting

Posted at 12:08  4 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 # 11: Lukas Nystrand & Karl Johansson – Untitled R&B Instrumental

The net label Ageema Music Club mainly seems to be a vanity press for one guy, Lukas Nystrand, with a couple of friends in tow. I could’ve linked to a bunch of different things here, cos there are plenty of good pickings, from Lukiss’s Gameboy-in-dub stylings, through the J Dilla-gone-glitchy / Avalanches territory of Glenny #417, to Julien Love's punky dub-disco tracks.

I’ll be cheeky and link directly to the MP3 , because the page is a bit hard to navigate. It’s on We Shall Not Be Moved from 2005.

The track title should give you a good idea of what you’re in for, but given that R&B extends over the past 40 years and most recently seems to include stadium trance (looking in your direction, Timbaland! ), I’ll make some notes anyway. It’s downbeat and grubby, and sounds to me like they digested what ?uestlove unimaginatively called the “dirty sound” the Soulquarians were reaching for on D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Common’s Like Water For Chocolate. It’s grubbier than that, though, much more of a 4-track home recording vibe. Live bass guitar, by the sounds of it, wonky keys, programmed strings and beats. Always been a fan of those oomf and clap beats and this kind of slightly awkward, staggering rhythmic feel.

Overall, the track has the kind of vibe I always hope to hear from Madlib, but, frankly, he’s about the most over-hyped producer working today. Ridiculously inconsistent anyway.

No idea who Lukas Nystrand & Karl Johansson actually are, other than that Lukas seems to be a designer by trade and they’re presumably both Swedish.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10  1 Comments Links to this post