The Sound, It Resounds

Democracy is killing music, well...kinda

A few weeks back I read an interesting op ed on Mashable  regarding Rebecca Black’s ode to everyone’s favorite day of the week. Despite the fact it’s about as engaging as a Barney sing-a-long and twice as cringe-worthy with its insipid, hackneyed mangling of rhythm and meter, It made me ponder an unsung casualty in the music industry.   

The crux of the Mashable story was both a) how the song’s popularity was a testament to mediocrity in mainstream pop music and b) how the democratization of music and the free tools at our disposal to create music, has enabled “everyone” to feel that they need to share “everything” no matter how humiliating it is (the cornerstone of reality programming) and despite how little talent and artistry is brought to bear.

Let’s face it, no one (artists, indie labels) mourns the multi-nationals losing control of their monopoly on distribution. Much like the heyday of the studio system, monopolies like MGM, Paramount, Fox and RKO owned and operated the film distribution pipeline (film theaters). Ironically this shift in power gave rise to an unprecedented proliferation of a new form of artistic film making whose aftershocks still hold sway in art house, auteur and indie film making to this day. MGM musicals, Andy Hardy films, and 40s war pictures ceded territory to the “method”and the Actor’s Studio’s contribution to film making. Their singular and uncompromising approach to the art of film reshaped the film landscape with dramas that espoused the human struggle, social conscience pieces, and psychological dramas, most notably by filmmakers like Nicholas Ray, Elia Kazan and Edward Dmytryk (the latter two paid for their intransigence by being blacklisted and caught up in the net of HUAC and the Hollywood 10).

Where the studio system’s demise in the 1950s gave rise to a greater form of artistic film expression, the same can’t be said for the major labels implosion throughout the 2000s. The most conspicuously overlooked casualty of the majors relinquishing their hegemony over popular music was not control over production and distribution, but their loss of the gate-keeping mechanism of quality control. Now before you roll on the ground in fits of laughter think again. During the 90s, for every American Idol also-ran, there were bands like Sonic Youth, Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam, Flaming Lips and countless others that were fostered by the record companies and developed over time. This effort in time and money, and its incumbent business model,  is now completely untenable in 2011, why? Because there’s no incentive to the majors and its shareholders,  to develop the long tail of talent, and instead it has given way to easily marketed You Tube sensations, reality TV stars turned pop singers, oh.....and mall urchins like Rebecca Black.

Look, I’m the last person to defend the major labels. I think the hole they’ve dug for themselves, starting with completely missing the boat with digital, is a text book case of hubris. I laugh when I think of the majors failed efforts to control digital distribution in the early to mid-2000s. And while they stumbled around in the dark firing blanks (Press Play, Music Net et.al) a slick computer manufacturer surreptitiously stepped in and gerrymandered the digital map and yanked the proverbial rug from under them. That said, even with its blinkered obstinacy and Eric Clapton Christmas box set releases, you have to believe that a Rebecca Black wouldn’t get a job as an errand girl let alone get a record deal. Say what you will, but there is a great legacy of folks like John Hammond, Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun that engendered a real meritocracy for artist development. Sadly the pop music landscape, as it exists today, is anathema to this credo.

YouTube, Flipcams, iPhones, Facebook and Twitter have become the great equalizers in pop music culture. They are Andy Warhols’s 15 minutes of fame re-defined and re-aligned for a new empowered generation of expression. But just because you can say anything you want, ask yourself this: is adding your pithy narrative to the clutter empowering creative expression or merely your own narcissism.

Gary Jansz

Defining and defying time with Talk Talk's 'Laughing Stock'

By Gary Jansz, Curator, The Sound, It Resounds

1991 was allegedly the year punk broke, or so say Sonic Youth in the documentary of the same name. As an already devout fan of the punk rock of Black Flag, X, Bad Brains, Fugazi and others, I could never quite understand the need for mass media legitimacy that '1991: The Year Punk Broke' seemed to want to ingratiate upon viewers. Its 'see-I-told-you-so' sentiments, not to mention the somewhat veiled dilettantism that always seems to pervade everything Thurston Moore says, was seemingly at odds with a form of music that was by definition an outliers domain. But what kind of bugs me more about the early 90s Nirvana age is that it dominated so much media space; consequently very few people actually knew about or heard stuff like Slint's 1991 masterwork Spiderland, until years later. At least Spiderland has revisionally  been given its due, as influential and iconic. But another album by a band previously regarded as a poor man's Duran Duran would do a complete artistic 180 and come up with an album, also in 1991, that would really come to define timelessness for me like no other record: Talk Talk's Laughing Stock.

Laughing Stock followed the equally majestic Spirit of Eden (1988) and would effectively continue much of that album's style of minimalist avant-rock, taking the blueprint even further. The blueprint in question included both unorthodox recording methodologies as well as setting up a surreal and sometimes disorienting studio environment. Similar to the recording environment of Spirit of Eden, the band and producer Phill Brown worked in almost complete darkness, only lit by a psychedelic oil projector and occasionally a strobe light. Working for months on end in this fashion, both the band and Phill Brown have said that the environment had created a level of alienation and disorientation when having to deal with people on the outside during the sessions. Sonically the bands' recording approach was more akin to the methodologies of jazz bands from the 40s and 50s. Apart from using almost exclusively old analogue gear, mics and amps, the technique of "distant mic-ing" was used extensively. Traditional recording techniques usually involve placing a mic within 1-2 inches from its source, by way of example a drum kit usually has an average of 10-12 mics. The drums on Laughing Stock were recorded by only one mic placed about 30 feet away from the kit. As for the songs, much of them were completely conceived, jammed on, and worked up in the studio yielding the six songs that make up the album. A seventh song, "Swabi," was labored over for close to three weeks but finally abandoned.

I can't honestly remember the first time I heard Laughing Stock, but it was roughly around 2001. I like to think my inability to pinpoint an exact time  is due in part to the fact that the album neither fit into the current musical trends but nor was it remotely out of sync with them at the time either. It dawns on me that making any kind of demarcation in time as to when I first heard it is not only difficult but ultimately irrelevant, and I think that's the crux of Laughing Stock. It really does belie and blur time and place. It's also virtually impossible to not listen to the entire album in one sitting, to do otherwise is to rob it of the hugely important sum of its parts. I used to love playing first song  "Myrrhman" for friends and then have them try to guess who the band was. As expected, when they found out it was Talk Talk, the look on their face was equal parts bewilderment and fascination. "This is Talk Talk? you mean 'It's My Life' Talk Talk?" How does a band go from throwaway 80s electro pop fluff to avant-minimalist jazz influenced art rock. That was certainly the question EMI had asked after the band took almost a year to complete Spirit of Eden, and now Talk Talk's Polydor A&R man was equally baffled, quoted as saying "he couldn't stand to be in the same room with Laughing Stock." Legend has it that Polydor actually thought the title was a veiled in-joke the band had hatched at the labels expense.

Of the tired musical tropes (and there are many) that people and music journalists throw around, the term "timeless" has to be one of the most overused. It's not that it's used incorrectly, it's merely an ambiguous term that effectively says so little when it's used to actually try and say so much. Records by the Band, Nick Drake or Scott Walker are timeless because their importance defies era, generations or years. Conversely, if you take a random sample of current bands such as Vivian Girls, Best Coast (think the Pastels, the Primitives, early Pop Will Eat Itself) or The xx (The Cure, Young Marble Giants) they are lauded for excavating and re-inventing  shambolic C86 indie rock or early 80s post punk, respectively. These too, are all somehow given the designation of creating something timeless. Ironically, the common denominator with all the aforementioned bands, is this: if you drop the needle on any of the records by any of those bands, you know or have an approximate knowledge of when those records were released. One of the under appreciated pleasures of Laughing Stock is you can literally plunk the needle down anywhere on this record and I would defy anyone not familiar with it to guess what year it was from. I have listened to and been enamored of Laughing Stock since I first heard it. It continuously fascinates me, mainly because it is not anchored to a specific time, place or flavor of the month, yet it continuously sounds fresh and unfettered by trend, hype or musical whim. With that in mind, and almost 20 years after its release, I would hope that Mark Hollis, Tim Friese-Green, and Lee Harris would be having the last laugh.
 

Gary Jansz - August 2010

For more info on Talk Talk and Laughing Stock check out:

Within Without (a fairly comprehensive fan website with some great interviews with both Mark Hollis and engineer Phill Brown on the making of Laughing Stock)

 

In Praise of Girlfriend’s Musical Tastes...and Múm’s ‘Finally We Are No One’

by Gary Jansz, Curator-The Sound, It Resounds

 For the majority of my life, I’ve been a music pusher. In high school, my friend Rich and I were the designated vinyl junkies who bought music regularly and shared it with our little gang of misfits. In college I was music director of the campus radio station and would get tons of promos from the majors—most of it crap. That said, I did get advance copies of some pretty cool new wave and punk rock stuff which I would once again share with our little group of friends. Eventually, working in independent distribution and then digital distribution gave me unprecedented access to the new releases of some of the most exciting, burgeoning new bands, and artists of the day.  These too, I would share with friends throughout my late 20s and 30s.

Unfortunately an over-consumption of available riches eventually lead to a blasé attitude towards a lot of new music and familiarity began to breed contempt . It was kind of the musical equivalent to gorging yourself on your favorite food for so long that eventually the thought of another bite makes you sick to your stomach. Ironically, it was in the above context that Múm first came to my attention, some eight years ago, well before I would eventually appreciate them, and in a new and enjoyable context.

I was working for a record company that was distributing the Fat Cat label (just around the time Sigur Ros was getting big) and I remember getting a generic, anonymous looking promo—like most label promos tend to be.  Having given it my usual cursory, lackadaisical listen, I recall that it was pleasant enough but hardly something that would set the hairs on end in any memorable fashion. It was added to the growing heap of promos and unheard new releases on my desk like a stray log tossed onto the fire.  Here’s where the context with a capital “C” comes in, and for many guys reading this, you'll know what I mean, and what’s more, you’ll appreciate it. For any girl reading this—yeah we know, we can sometimes be gormless dorks who really haven’t evolved much beyond a Nick Hornby/High Fidelity stereotype.

With some exceptions, most relationships I’ve been in have followed the pattern of music pusher (outlined in the first paragraph) when it comes to sharing music.  When it’s come to musical tastes, girlfriends have ranged from the embarrassingly appalling to the reasonably well-versed. But in 2007 I met a girl who could also bear the title of music pusher; a title I would gladly relinquish. I think I pretty much knew I was in love with her when she heartily espoused the merits of Pink Floyd’s Meddle and Slint’s Spiderland. Not only did she like Spiderland, but she was also aware of its importance in the canon of post-rock and how influential it was. It certainly helped, of course, that she was a cute, nerdy, intelligent, opinionated girl who could speak quite eloquently about a number of topics—music being one of them.

Our early days together jump started a new fondness for discovering new music that I hadn’t enjoyed in years. Taking the role of music pupil instead of music pusher was not only liberating but was an initial bonding dance that initiated many discussions, listening sessions and concert experiences solidifying the formative first few months of our relationship. And one of the records that I have come to recognize as the apex of this awakening and enjoyment was Múm’s  Finally We Are No One.  Far from being a major benchmark or bellwether in electronica, to an indie rock kid, Finally We Are No One possessed all the tenets that would appeal to someone dipping their first tentative toe in the genre. Lovely, hypnotic, cooing helium-like female vocals, mixed with real instrumentation and lush beds of samples and organic electronics were just the right fit for my ears at the time.

Finally We Are No One had such an impact on me that it literally was the gateway to the likes of Four Tet, Efterklang, Lali Puna, Dntel, the Notwist, and much more.  I will also concede that it inspired the formation of the last band I played in.  In a lot of ways Finally We Are No One is a bit of a random choice out of that heady time of reclaiming an enthusiasm for music; I could have written about any of the above really.  But Finally We Are No One is endearing and enduring because it will always remind me of that first nervous, awkward, goofy and exciting step of new love; only this time it actually came with a soundtrack leaving us both to fill in the narrative together. Happily, we’re still filling in the narrative today.

Gary Jansz - July 2010

If God Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade...then go out and buy Pink Floyd 'Meddle'

by Gary Jansz - Curator: The Sound, It Resounds

I was 12 years-old  growing up in the suburbs and living on a musical diet of my older brother's musical hand-me downs (Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, the odd Rolling Stones and Beatles greatest hits albums). Conversely, my best friend Donny had a hippy brother named Robbie who's room was festooned with black light posters, sundry drug paraphernalia and the raddest stereo setup and accompanying record collection known to mankind—or at least to me.

I remember Donny and me sneaking into Robbie the hippy's room and flipping through records with exotic band names, album titles and artwork that blew the lid off of any parochial  Elton John or Fleetwood Mac album. Amongst the ornate album covers were records by Cream, Hendrix, Yes, King Crimson and more. But nestled innocently near the  bric-a-brac of dirty jeans and sundry hippy detritus was an album with no title and no band name. As a precocious and inquisitive 12 year-old trespasser I naturally felt I had to find out what this album was. Picking it up and studying it like a mystified caveman discovering the wheel, I saw that it  was  an album called Meddle by some dude curiously named Pink Floyd. As it turns out, it wasn't some dude, but a band, who by the looks of the group pic inside the wonderful gatefold sleeve, appeared to be a hippy band of revolutionaries who would likely kick the shit out of anyone who listened to Elton John, Fleetwood Mac or a Rolling Stones greatest hits album...ummm that would be me then.

  

Donny said, “Oh that's a good one, it's all bouncy and has this monster's voice in the middle that's really funny” (referring to lead track 'One of These Days' and its bubbling bass line).  Donny slipped the record out of the sleeve and placed it very carefully on the turntable, dropped the needle on and then we waited...and waited. Ahhh OK, there's the "bouncy bits"  he was referring to, so far so good. But all of a sudden it's got all these backward loops that sound like flashes of light stabbing someone in the dark followed by what sounds like Godzilla, with a chorus of muted chainsaws, banging on Mothra's  door  issuing the most menacing fucking thing I'd ever heard, short of my father yelling at me to clean up my room. The voice went:  “One of these days I'm going to cut you into a million pieces.” The song abruptly explodes into what can best be described as: the soundtrack to someone running for their lives. I was stunned, I was excited and I was scared shit-less.

Knowing that we probably shouldn't risk sneaking into Robbie the hippy's room again, I realized that I had to have this record for myself; this way I would be free to scare the shit out of myself at my own leisure,  without fear of illegal trespassing. Like all suburbs, we had our requisite shopping mall: an oppressive, nondescript, building that had all the charm of a windowless prison. The one redeeming oasis in this concrete gulag was an actual, bona fide mom and pop record store called “Steve's Music.” It was here that I found a lovely shrink wrapped pristine copy of Pink Floyd Meddle for $4.99.  Being 12 years-old without any disposable income I racked my brain trying to figure out how I could raise the money to buy it. It dawned on me that a good old fashioned lemonade stand outside my house would probably be just the ticket. Fact—lemonade stands were invented solely as an ingratiating Dickensian-like “alms-for-the-poor” ploy to separate gullible adults from their money.

It was a bright summer morning, perfect day to fleece....I mean offer the local Townie's some fine lemon-y liquid refreshments after a hard morning of grass cutting and car polishing. I recall I got off to a decent start but then lost steam around lunch time, ceding territory to the competitive lunchtime crowd at every mom's kitchen on the block. Enter the catalyst to this story. We had a relative staying with us from Toronto, a young lady who's name completely escapes me. I guess she took pity on my pre-pubescent Willy Loman-like situation and decided to make the following prescient offer: “If you raise half the money for your album, I will put up the other half.” Whoa – so we're wheelin' and dealin' here huh? Do I kibitz, try to low ball her, turn on the charm and dimples to get her to foot the bill for the whole thing? Nah – a benefactress in hand, is worth two in the bush, or whatever ornithological idiomatic reference applies here. So by mid-afternoon, with the lemonade supply depleted and the onset of sunstroke making me hallucinate, I decided to tally up my proceeds: $2.25...just short of the half-way point when factoring in taxes. Shit!

Well at the risk of sounding anti-climactic, I ended up getting Meddle at Steve’s Music as planned, thanks to the accommodating largess of the Toronto benefactress. I sometimes think about the purchase of Meddle and the stealth planning, cunning salesmanship and sweating in the sun, every time I hear some asshole bragging about how he just bit-torrented the entire Flaming Lips catalogue. Don’t get me wrong, I download music occasionally as well but I would like to think that I’ve developed a more personal relationship with the music I've consumed over the last 30 odd years of buying vinyl, cassettes, and CD’s, than say, developing a relationship with digitally encrypted binary code. I’m not trying to make a self-righteous argument or statement about downloading vs. buying CD’s here. It’s more about pervasive ease and laziness vs. the thrill of the hunt, owning the artifact and the collective nature of sharing music with friends and peers.

I remember being in high school and we would all congregate at my friend’s place listening to records on a Friday night, sitting around in a circle together in some kind of quasi-monastic listening ceremony. One of the more odd and memorable listening sessions was listening to side 1 of Brian Eno’s Discreet Music (30 minutes of near silence - and the musical equivalent of listening to wind blowing through a lone tree in the desert - yeah we were kinda freaks). After side 1 finished we passed around the album, fascinated by Eno’s cool diagram of the tape loop process he employed on the record, studying the back sleeve of the album jacket. Then we’d share our opinions and discuss what we thought of side 1, while smoking cigarettes, cross-legged on the floor, drinking really bad wine.  These were easily some of the most memorable times of my teen years spent with some of my favorite people in the world, listening, sharing and enjoying music.

So tell me Steve Jobs:  Is there an app for that?

Gary Jansz - July 2010

Reinvention 101 via David Bowie's 1977 Masterpiece 'Low'

by Gary Jansz - Curator of S.I.R

David Bowie's 1977 career redefining album Low has been discussed and dissected by critics, fans and even academics for over 30 years. But one of the most interesting stories behind the impetus of Low that is not discussed nearly as much is how the album became a necessary odyssey of rebirth and recalibration of mind, spirit and body for the troubled Bowie. Recently I've revisited Low and it's become a divining rod of inspiration, not so much for its artistry, but for my own current re-examination of new possibilities, new directions and hopefully rebirth. So It's fitting that this inaugural post for The Sound, It Resounds doesn't so much peel back the layers of the mystery or music on Low as much as it focuses on reinvention and rediscovery.

I first heard Low in the early 80s having been a longtime Bowie fan since I was 13 (Diamond Dogs was my second ever album purchase). By the time I heard Low, years after its release,  my own personal and nerdy musical odyssey would take me through the risible trajectory of prog rock and arena rock,  somehow depositing me on the road to punk and new wave, where an appreciation for Low was not only palpable but made sense in the context of what I was listening to. Since then Low has been one of those albums I always come back to when feeling nostalgic or just bored of whatever hyped indie band is being canonized on Pitchfork. Each listen over the years, and with increasingly mature ears, has given me new appreciation for Low; everything  from its  jarring yet ingenious sonic palette (ie: how weird the drums sound) to more rarefied and arcane observations (ie: how side 1 symbolizes the faded glamor of post war West Berlin and Side 2 symbolizes the oppression and isolation of East Berlin). But it was after reading the Thomas Jerome Seabrook novel Bowie in Berlin and my leaving a secure job after 5 years that created a perfect storm in my head, crystallizing an inescapable question: where do I go from here and how do I get there? Seabrook's novel, while incredibly entertaining, underscored some real insight into where Bowie needed to go and how he would get there in late 1976.

 During much of 1975 (but probably even before) Bowie's state of mind and general well-being were characterized by a spiraling out of control addiction to cocaine, paranoia, and an obsession with the occult and dabbling in black magic. Friends and colleagues at the time have commented that Bowie lived on a pure "white diet" consisting of milk, vanilla ice cream and cocaine whilst holed up in Los Angeles. Pictures of Bowie during this time show a frail, gaunt, and dangerously thin frame tenuously holding onto reality. Ironically, and probably unbeknown to him at the time (Bowie has stated that he remembers almost nothing of the Station to Station sessions), 1975 was also the genesis of the krautrock and electronic influences that were merely hinted at during the making of Station to Station.

Station to Station is an album that many see as laying the ground work for the trio of albums (Low, Heroes and Lodger) from 1976-79 that would come to be known as the "Berlin Trilogy." With touring Station to Station completed around the middle of 1976, Bowie and Iggy Pop  (going through heroin addiction and all but creatively dormant) would decamp to Berlin to escape parasitic L.A creatures that had ensnared both of them in a vicious circle of real and imagined demons and ghosts. Living modestly above an auto parts shop in an immigrant neighborhood in Berlin, Bowie and Iggy initially assimilated into the city as anonymous American exiles regularly checking out small cafes, art galleries and early 20th century Weimar influenced sleazy cabaret bars.

After several months at this pace Bowie took tentative creative steps emerging from the fog of L.A, not to work on his own projects, but  to write, craft and produce Iggy Pop's debut solo effort The Idiot. The time-lines have been disputed here, but sometime during this period Bowie would also begin sketching out very rudimentary ideas for Low. Indeed, upon entering the studio to record Low, Bowie had, at best, only a general idea of where the road was going. Consequently, strange aberrations like songs fading in haphazardly and seemingly coming to an abrupt end, as well as spartan lyrics and arrangements,  really speak to Low's general  feel of making things up on the fly. Bowie, always an evocative lyricist, actually completed the album having not written any lyrics yet, and eventually left certain songs as instrumentals not wanting to labor under the task of lyric writing. In some cases, most notably 'Warsawa', he merely moaned and intoned a phonetic incantation, resulting in a stirring and emotional highpoint on the album―all without the benefit of any lyrics.

While it's true that Bowie is known as a mercurial and chameleon-like artist, sometime to the derision of critics chastising him as a carpetbagging opportunist, he's also undeniably someone who recognizes that stasis leads to creative and emotional turbulence. His laying to rest the overblown glam-pomp of Ziggy Stardust and wresting control of his career from manager Tony DeFries in the mid 70s, are perhaps emblematic of the same thought process that led him to flee Los Angeles and live a life of anonymity in Berlin while hoping to regroup, renew and redefine.

I recently found myself rediscovering Low as a compass and guide taking cues from Bowies’ baby steps and his willingness to take creative and commercial risks. In some ways Low really feels more like someone taking stock of their situation to heal their bruised ego and emotional psyche. Ultimately, for me, Low feels not so much like getting back on track, but rather like finding a more sustainable track with longevity and a renewed sense of self. The last track on side 1, 'A New Career in a New Town', was left as a blank lyrical canvas, Bowie had intended to write lyrics but decided against it in the end.. I like how the title is merely a “suggestion” of possibilities or an idea to explore and that its absence of lyrics is a blank canvas perhaps suggesting one to fill in their own story. Right now for me a blank canvas is the next chapter of my life waiting to be written, and who knows to what new career in a new town it may lead me to. I think I'm ready to find out though.

Gary Jansz - June 2010