"the 15th"
154
Wire - The 15th (1979)
via televandalist
One of my favourite albums of all time.
it was
not
there
Below is a link to my other high school band—The Poseurs, not the Cure cover band—doing “Pink Flag” from a basement in July of 1994. We were a duo. This was recorded live to TASCAM 4-track and post-processed through a piece of shit Alesis WEDGE a few years later, at my college’s radio station. I’m playing my old CB700 drums, and he’s on a legendary battle-axe, the G&L F-100.
(Source: eye-you)
(via HMV Dummy Store, 1985 | Retronaut)Days of my youth!
I need that Style Council poster.
Look at the placement given to “All the Daughters of Her Father’s House”, part of the Icicle Works’ flailing mid-’80s search for a new identity. A whisper to a groan.
Kicker Conspiracy
I just want to point out that you are the only person I know to have even mentioned Kitty Pryde. And you have written about her, like, ten times now. Isn’t *that* part of the problem? Even meta-hype articles…
To Dave’s last point re: commerce, there’s a wall of intention there. If people are unwittingly working to preserve the classical music industry, due to their investment in said construct, can we, all of us who’ve rejected or are by-now amused by this pattern of obliviousness, start calling it out? There’s no “release cycle” anymore, there’s no value to a “release date”: it’s when and whether people respond to your material, that’s it. Your album doesn’t exist unless we all decide its existence is worthwhile, e.g. that it’s worth our investment—and my brain aches to put it in these terms but what we’re investing is time. Not a new idea, but to put it explicitly we’re trying to find trusted sources to help us make the most of our daily information intake, and so information has an experiential premium. Advertising cannot penetrate our selective/elective use of time, it can only accompany our journey, as it does on the subway. This extends to brand moves like Pitchfork’s Best New Music, which casual fans are happy to rely on as a high water mark in their discovery process. But for its massive audience, their “Best New Music” delegation is no different than a re-tweet from a trusted source.
Kaskie talked about this at his recent con appearance in Boston, about how the site’s focus is listener trust and they view themselves as proven evangelists and curators and the site’s preeminence is solid evidence millions of people trust their over-arching stamp of approval. I see this as illusory, because in the background we know that the BNM stamp is commercially far more important than anything their writers have to say. Over the years it’s gone from a loose collection of biased, frenetic, and inconsistent writers (like me) to a very professional, and often impersonal issuance of valuation. This is over the top, sure; nobody at Pitchfork thinks that way, I guarantee it, but I can further guarantee that they can’t see how other people view them. Anyone who writes for a publication feels some sense of self-identification with the brand, and through the various real-world and virtual interactions you have with your compatriots, you feel a separation from the world you write at (key here: you cannot write “for” anyone but yourself, please see Neil Kulkarni’s excellent rant on boilerplate industrial music criticism, highlighting pallid NME blurbs imbued with the emotional sweep of an astrological forecast).
The inescapable separatism that goes on here, with good writers and even young hacks who puke makeweight content and go on gushing, ridiculous interview assignments, is extremely problematic. You live in a value bubble. You inherently “respect” the views of your peers, whether out of professional duty or personal affinity, but that transaction is colored by your shared status as critics, and as partners in a brand. It’s a kind of cultural cabin fever, and your perception of and response to the culture around you is irretrievably altered. For better or worse, you are no longer your own voice, you’re you@pitchfork.com or you@drownedinsound.com—which can be you-plus or you-minus depending on the audience’s view of your employer.
This sounds sort of Everett Truthy, I know. Getting on tumblr has exacerbated my po-faced sense of DON’T JOIN, but we’re all victims if the thing we’re talking about—or using as a water wheel to talk about other things—isn’t what it used to be. And it just isn’t. There’s no answer for it, no halcyon past you can point to and worship. You can’t seriously write something like, “FILES MEAN NOTHING, YOU CAN’T LOVE A FILE, MAAAAAAAAAAN” because I can. I can love files for as many reasons as you can love album art. You can’t reduce the music world in 2012 to some State of Affairs With the Following Effects on Culture because music has always been more than music. It’s always been a movable feast, of tradition, art, attitude and emotion. You put your Venn intersects together, you know, you want this much attitude, art and tradition, you listen to Kiss. You want this much emotion and tradition, you listen to R & B, whatever. From the critical vantage, music’s purpose is not that complicated. But when the music is presented INSIDE THE REVIEW? When you’re reading the lead graf and seeing some factorial value ascribed to this music as you hear it?
You know, in the past the review is protecting you or helping the artist; beware this record, it sucks. Or, you suck if you don’t own this record. Or this record will fill the hole in your life. That reviewer, from that world, knows his or her brief. The artist knows, the label knows, and the fans know. And you will or won’t buy that record and the magazine will or will not have influenced you there. When you’re getting the record as part of a review—when the review for all intents is the release of the album—on a website funded by advertising from a NASDAQ-traded multinational videogame publisher, that is a fucking Lutheran scenario.
People in the field (looking @tomewing) already know that advertising is worthless unless it is confirming and affirming the prejudices and expectations of its already-existing audience. “Great ads” are always for things you already want, or that already exist as a palpable social phenomenon. Those campaigns refine diffuse but real excitement for a product or brand, and so work as coronation more than promotion. Yes, they re-promote the product/brand and extend that excitement out to the advertisement as a form—best ads list-icles, find me something more terrifying—but their function at that point is to demarcate and dominate a lower tier of “aspirational consumers”.
Anyway, the architecture here, the Album, the Artist, the Magazine, the Review, the Critic, the Reader…we keep propping this up and the magazines keep interfacing with artists along classical lines and yet—how bizarre!—the records don’t take off. The old patterns of promotion no longer engender traction. Why? Because the only real traction is driven by the audience, by their referendum, and their excitement. You can’t lead them anymore because the Internet is a map and they can find their own way. Added to which, they’re really fucking annoyed at your presumptuousness in thinking they need help.
Promo: Shallow Rewards eBook free today + tomorrow
My eBook is being promoted as a freebie on Kindle today and tomorrow. Make me poor! Downloads away.
“This house will become a shrine!”
Let’s hear it for the boy. John Simon Ritchie, 10 May 1957 – 2 February 1979.
"To Here Knows When (OOPS mix)"
Tremolo EP
Whatever arguments rise from the new My Bloody Valentine reissues—and Analog Loyalist is right, the DAT time-code squelch in “What You Want” is a terrible oversight—the bottom line is that the two 1988 EPs and Isn’t Anything were in desperate need of sonic adjustment. Kevin Shields has done a fantastic job with them, and for anyone wondering, yes, the leaked “analog” Loveless and Isn’t Anything remasters from 2008 were real; these are the same recordings.
Loveless is an island unto itself. Until the Glider EP (specifically “Soon”), My Bloody Valentine were very much an outgrowth of the C86/American indie/Jesus and Mary Chain fuzz guitar scene, with the exception of “No More Sorry” and “All I Need”, which work as a central interlude for Isn’t Anything, as drone exercises presaging “To Here Knows When”.
With these new releases, we now have five or six official mixes of “To Here Knows When”, which I have listened to more than any other song. It remains my favorite piece of recorded music twenty years later, the most psychedelic, visually suggestive noise the world has yet known. It is the sound of a grandfather clock chiming in a wrecked galleon on the ocean floor, as recorded from the eye of a hurricane.
(It’s My Bloody Valentine—I get one).
Across today’s long-coming reissues, you get three versions of “To Here Knows When”, and they’re actually wildly different. My go-to was always the brighter mix on Tremolo, an “extended EP” of four songs strung together by unfinished riff studies and variously incomplete fragments. Among them is my favorite My Bloody Valentine song. “To Here Knows When” is the most important song ever recorded, but it’s not my favorite My Bloody Valentine song; these are two different things.
The ninety-seven second coda faded in at the tail end of “Honey Power” (from Tremolo) sounds very much like a hushed turn on “I Believe”, from their 1988 single “Feed Me With Your Kiss”. “Feed Me” is where My Bloody Valentine breaks from the naff paisley jangle of their first few EPs (Geek, Strawberry Wine, and Ecstasy) to arrive at the woozy, throbbing chaos they’re now famous for. “I Believe” was the standout for me, a song that nearly falls apart three times in three minutes and shows a deft understanding of the power of lazy phrasing. Slightly late vocals are critical to druggy, mopey pop; this is lost on many musicians but was as important to My Bloody Valentine’s sound as the Alesis Midiverb II, or the whammy bar.
Even after you learn to replicate the basic core of Kevin Shields’ endlessly-finessed guitar effects, you have a ways to go to unravel all the tricks in his kit. For starters, you need the aforementioned Alesis box for the “Bloom” effect on Isn’t Anything-era material (patches 47 and 49), and then any number of early-’90s Yamaha units can get you the underbelly of Loveless, the “reverse reverb” (actually “reverse gate”) that produces Shields’ signature whale yawn. This patch appears on everything from the SPX-90 to the GEP-50 and even REX-50, but throughout the 2000s people were paying ungodly money on eBay for SPX boxes, thinking it was the holy grail. These days, every vanity pedal outfit sells some variation on the circuit. In the past I’d kind of nod in appreciation and enjoy bands like the Fleeting Joys, who were able to suss out the bulk of Shields’ shapes, but today it’s so easy, I wince whenever anyone goes there. It’s one of the most beautiful sounds you can make with a guitar, but unfortunately for future shoegazers, it is also an unmistakable creative trademark. (Unless it turns out that “To Here Knows When” was sampled from It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, but nobody’s thought to ask Kevin, and so the assuredly coincidental similarity remains a wasted opportunity for a great interview question.)
The track I’ve posted here is an OOPS of the Tremolo mix of “To Here Knows When” that’s been floating around the internet for a few years. OOPS mixes unmask phase tricks that isolate and “push” particular tracks away from each other, usually further out in stereo space. Against “To Here Knows When” and indeed most of Loveless, OOPS reveals that Shields phase-shifted his most melodic drone guitars, and in the case of “To Here Knows When”, also hid a very late, reversed tambourine loop. This is one of the subtle reasons the chorus sounds so disorienting: the tempo is constantly falling off a cliff.
Back to the coda from “Honey Power” (which itself is massively improved—the drums come alive, stereo space is doubled). This is my favorite My Bloody Valentine song, because it is redolent of my favorite My Bloody Valentine song, which is “I Believe”. The coda also sounds, inexplicably, like a particular shot of the ocean from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Now that I think about it, the cover of Loveless does somewhat invoke the sinking, exploded carcass of that great white, but the shot this coda reminds me of occurs roughly one hour and four minutes into the film (just after the shark bites a man’s leg off), and is obviously some kind of film student secret handshake.
After attending to his dazed, terrified family, Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) looks out at the ocean as a wavering string drone lilts on. His point-of-view perspective is queered to such a degree that, as the lens zooms and widens, it stretches into a surreal, sea-green blear. In that moment, Jaws briefly ceases to be a movie, and becomes a captured documentary of time and space. More than an image or a series of images or a plot device, it is a tunnel into a memory of my youth, of a trip to Nantucket, during which I nearly drowned in a riptide. Which I can tell you is experientially indistinguishable from listening to Loveless for the first time.
Knowing that so many millions of people have yet to experience this album—that it waits for them, an awesome great white silently patrolling the musical sea—is the closest thing to broad human optimism I can hold onto. Which for me makes Loveless an object of faith.
I guess that’s two.
What I remember most are the screams.That was annoying. But what the hell, the audience didn’t come to listen to music. They came to vent their oppression. Before we went on our first tour, I saw the Beatles at Dodger Stadium in 1966. I couldn’t believe the kids were not listening to them. Here was the single greatest musical operation of all time and they wouldn’t listen. It was just screaming. The Beatles did about twenty minutes and I don’t blame them.
When we toured England, Jimi Hendrix was our opening act. Once Jimi came along everybody said, “Gee, if I turn up my amps, everybody will go berserk.” But what they were really going berserk for was Jimi Hendrix’s pioneering musicianship and his art. No matter what kind of inspirational thing happens, somebody will latch onto the external details and call it that. It’s called mistaking the finger for the moon. You point to the moon, and somebody looks at your finger. It’s inevitable.
