Nonwrestler Blog

Weekly mp3 #54: Kuroma - In New York, Everything Is Tropical (El Guincho Mix)

Weekly mp3 #53: Kuroma - In New York Everything Is Tropical (El Guincho Mix)
This fine track comes to you courtesy of Mountain Dew. (Haha, what?) Yeah, they've started a web label thing. The El Guincho mix is the second one down if the crap interface is not helping.

This really is ridiculously tropical sounding, if you include having some kind of weird fever with accompanying hallucinations as part and parcel with being in the tropics. What was a fairly straight (and fairly shit) 60s-ish poppy song is mixed into a swung thing that sounds like layers of digitally-generated analogues of marimbas (ahaha). Pizzicatto synth plucks jab away at the top end. The beat suggests all that post-Dilla instrumental hip-hop stuff, but the instrumentation is really bright and cheery. Vocals from the original are reduced to fragments, repitched, slurring, and reversing as required.

Someone somewhere made some reference to a psychedelic Spongebob Squarepants and I can see why.

I have no idea who Kuroma is / are or why he / they took the Japanese word for "car" as a name, and am really not interested. It's the substantial distance from the original that gives this mix any chance to be good, I reckon. El Guincho is yet another one-man production outfit, Pablo Díaz-Reixa. He's from Spain. He played my town recently and I didn't bother to go because he seemed young and trendy. Gah, if only I was joking. Gah, classic example of the DJ = producer conflation I complained about a while back.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 6:00 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

TV, computers, reading... thinking up titles sucks

I've been waddling through another David Foster Wallace book of articles, and got particularly excited about one essay on US fiction writing and television. He's basically looking into the impact of the oft-touted 6-hours-a-day of TV-watching on Americans and therefore American authors.

He digs deep into how he thinks TV functions and how a society of watchers are in turn more and more paranoid about being watched... It's the kind of thing that's probably more persuasive when you read through all his explanations about it, but he's really on the money, I reckon: TV's rewards to the viewer are indulging fantasies and that's not in itself a bad thing, but near-constant indulgence will fuck you up faster than your mum & dad. ;) He returns multiple times to the image of a treat - e.g. chocolate cake is not actually the devil, but eating chocolate cake even 50% of the time wouldn't be good for you.

There's a lot more in there about irony and passivity and how the powerful tools of post-modernism (rebellious / destructive / not offering alternatives) have been happily absorbed into TV's own content so we get to feel like the cognoscenti smarter than the mass of TV viewers while still being the mass of TV viewers. It's good times, I promise you. It's also almost painfully balanced and well thought out, which my summary probably doesn't convey.

ANYWAY, the most intriguing bit in the article is where Wallace's mulling over the future. It's written in 1990. He does a kind of mini-review of a book about how the TV techology is the issue and that once that's revised things will be sweet. The revised tech the book talks about is removing the master-slave relationship of broadcaster and TV set, replacing them with some device that allows you to receive the video and images you want, manipulate and tailor them to your whims, and feed your versions back into a collaborative space where othes can continue to do the same.

Wallace dismisses this pie-in-the-sky talk as no kind of fix for the underlying problems. I obviously don't have to spell out the irony in either me being here blogging that I agree with him, nor that he seems to see the possibility as far-fetched. Still, I think the current state of play vindicates his predictions about what would happen if such "telecomputers" did start to muscle out traditional TV. That the passivity and people's assumption of the role of viewer rather than real participant still remain, in the very real sense that you're still sitting in front of a box and the coolest stuff for the largest number of people still comes from media companies. If anything it's yet more seductive - that increased feeling of your own personal power with no actual effect.

I'd love to hear Wallace's views on how things have transpired, but he killed himself last year.

I've deliberately skipped over all the stuff about literature, because I'm feeling sour about people bothering to read anything more than a few lines of text on a website anyway. :p

Labels: life, meta

Posted at 10:24 AM  4 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #53: Will Gresson + Luke Munn - Six Oh Seven

Luke hosts this on his band The Ribbon's Soundcloud account and it's also available via the Audio Foundation website.

Another ambient cruiser. The track starts with some distant, hollow noise and develops through a series of bell tones, quietly building pads and towards the end of six minutes and seven seconds there are some woobly synth tones making things downright melodic. The end.

Luke Munn and Will Gresson are two Aucklanders. Don't know anything about Will but know bits about Luke via the mailing list attached to the Audio Foundation, bods committed to "innovative audio culture" in New Zealand. So far as I can tell "innovative audio" means replacing the genre constraints of e.g. rock or dance music with another set of genre constraints, but whatever... my snarkiness is really limited to the attitude around the music and some of the AF list members. I like enough of the music discussed on the list to stay subscribed.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 6:00 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #52: Mobius Band - Friends Like These (and another whole EP of goodies)

Well, I guess week 52 means I've done this for a year. Or maybe next week will be a year, like how 2001 is the first year of the 3rd millenium... Crazy maths!

Anyway, this week's mp3 is from the Mobius Band's own website.

Major pop hooks and quirky production. The verses are all crashing drum machines and weird bendy synth chords, with a guy singing in a slightly country rock vibe, then the cheery straightahead chorus reminds me of nothing so much as Nik Kershaw stuff like 'I Won't Let The Sun Go Down On Me'. Then we're back into syncopated drum machine land.

I've found Mobius Band a bit patchy over the years, but have been enjoying this tune a lot for the last year and a half or so. I've already linked you to the band's site above. They're an American 3 piece and have put out a few albums. If you liked this tune, I'd recommend checking out the free release they put out on Valentine's Day, Empire of Love. It's a bunch of covers, ranging from Gram Parsons to Kanye West. I'll certainly be checking out their next release...

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 6:00 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

DJ = Producer = DJ?

Since some time in the 90s, a person who makes "electronic music"¹ tends to be called a "DJ". I find it a bit frustrating. Most producers I know are not DJs. Most DJs I know are not producers. I should throw up some illustrative video clips rather than expect anyone to read anything on the web, but I'm in the mood for writing...

Those great masters of not-understanding-process, music reviewers, provide many obvious examples of this. I don’t think they’re shaping people’s views, though, because people that merge the ideas of producers and DJs together aren’t usually interested in reading about music.

Still, the confusion is really very understandable, and I only get sour about it because I produce music myself and am not a DJ. Well, OK, I’m a radio DJ, but here I’m thinking of a DJ in the sense of someone who can mix.

It’s this "mix" business that I think is the biggest cause of confusion. In the above para I mean "mix records live by matching their tempo". Could be vinyl, could be CDJs, could be any number of setups involving software. It’s a performance thing - it happens in real time in front of an audience - and the vast majority of time the records are other people’s. A person doing this is a DJ.

Then there’s the idea of "mixing a track", which usually means remixing someone else’s music. In most cases the person doing this has been given one or more components of a recorded song (e.g. vocals, a keyboard melody and a guitar riff) and re-arranges them, adds new parts and basically writes a track of their own incorporating something from the original. There are many, many ways this may happen, but the key thing is it will as good as never involve any of the tools involved with DJing. It may involve a bit of performance, e.g. playing (piano) keyboard parts or tapping out beats on little rubber pads, but not in front of people. Still, the end result is a track to listen to later. A person doing this is a producer.

A large number of people make music that includes samples of other people’s stuff and for many of them the process is largely the same as remixing. Maybe with less compunction to use specific samples and more nerves about covering your tracks (sorry) by concealing sample sources. So it’s no surprise that the above idea of "mixing a track" extends to someone producing their "own" track. Needless to say, a person doing this is a producer.

There’s all kinds of ambiguity and weirdness.

Heaps of people are both DJs and producers. Plenty of bods making dance music clicked that either DJing would be fun or that they could make more cash by it. On the flipside, heaps of DJs saw the next step from working with other people's tunes was to making their own music.

Among fans of dance music, there’s prestige in being a DJ. This translates to expectations on a producer to act like one. If you happen to go to a gym that plays lots of horseshit Ministry of Sound also-ran crap, you’ll have the joy of hearing music that shows no trace of DJ mixing at all while watching vids featuring awkward producers miming strange gestures over DJ setups. Not that this pains me at all. I mean, mad respect and big ups to those guys. One love.

Tracks produced by DJs often get credited "DJ whoever". There's two scenarios here. DJ Spiller feat. Sophie Ellis Bexter. DJ Tiesto. DJ Hell. DJ Koze. These people produce tracks that to my ears sound like they have nothing to do with anything these people might do as DJs. Maybe some of them aren't DJs at all? Then there's DJ Premier. DJ Krush. Others I can't think of. ;) People producing tracks and scratching on them. I'm not suggesting for a minute that in either case people should not bill themselves how they like, but both scenarios do help to confuzzle what the hell a DJ does and what the hell a producer does. Especially when combined with what I was writing about in the para above.

Scratch DJs in bands. The conga players of the 90s.² I guess they’re not DJs in the way I’m defining DJ mixing above. Regardless, when they’re on stage doing baby scratches before the guitars kick in, they’re not producers. Things get murkier when their role is actually to mix in beats etc. that were done earlier. A detailed study of ‘Encore / Numb’ by Linkin Park & Jay-Z suggests generally that shits sequenced, not beat-mixed.

More extreme are turntablists, who use a DJ’s tools and techniques to meticulously slice and dice other people’s music into short tightly structured tracks, which are surely as much their own as any made by sample-wielding producers. Sometimes they release remixes of other people’s tracks put together like this. None of the varied tools a producer might use come into play here. There’s no way they’re not DJs in the traditional sense, but they’re using exactly the same set of skills when performing or when recording a track. For the purposes of the distinctions I'm trying to clear up, the key thing is that the proportion of DJs who do anything like this is as good as zero. Generalising anything about how tracks are written from checking out turntablists is therefore fairly crazy.

People like Richie Hawtin (both producer and DJ) took drum machines on the road with him and would sequence new beats on top of multiple layered DJ mixes. I guess the thing for me here is the performance aspect, as well as the long format of a DJ set – he’s not doing something intended as a track to be listened to later. He’s also already a DJ and a producer, so ... whatever.

I feel like I’m spelling out the obvious throughout all of this, but sometimes I need to pretend that someone will be interested and/or learn something. I wish I had a pithy closing remark here, but I don’t.

¹ Don’t get me started on what "electronic music" means and the logic of who is in or out of that club. Contemporary hip-hop producers out, even Britney is out, but indie rockers with keyboards are in...? I guess "acoustic music" is a similarly ... informal ... description - generally it's about the overall sound, rather than the technicalities. A good thing?

² I do know there are bands where a DJ is fully involved in the music with other band members, I'm just having a smirk at the nu metal bands.

Labels: music

Posted at 6:34 PM  3 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #51: The Phoenix Foundation - Going Fishing

Spinner hosts this number.

Country-rock stylings, high-drama organ melody and a man singing a chirpy melody. The guitars go FRANG for the chorus. Boy-boy harmonies. Big nods to Grandaddy all over the shop.

I doubt any of my buddies in NZ reading this blog need any introduction to The Phoenix Foundation, from my hometown of Wellington. Others may have already heard my remix of the same song. That'll do for now.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 6:00 PM  0 Comments Links to this post