Category: Music

A little while ago, I co-directed a video with Jonathan Crow for the Boston-based band Freezepop. Well, we at last finished post production on it and premiered it last weekend to a select group of people in the house and backyard of my producer (but not of this video) Sabrina. We had a small but appreciative turnout, but for those who couldn’t make it, here it is for you to watch on your computer or download to your iPod.
Inspirations were early ’80s “all-white” videos (the background, not the people) and educational film strips from the ’50s-’70s. Thanks to Danny Gregory, who has a great book on those filmstrips, and who also has been an inspiration to me in his outlook on art and life. His blessing meant a lot.
WATCH: .MOV file (16.9 mb)
DOWNLOAD: MP4 iPod file (17.6 mb)
Also available on YouTube!

Simple and clever!

Dead at age 64, from a heart attack. One of the greats! R.I.P.

Paul Morely writes in this Observer piece on the history of Manchester’s music scene about the nights that changed music as we know it–the Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, June 4 and July 20, 1976.

Devoto, let’s just say, for the hell of it because the story has to start somewhere, with a bang, or a legendary punk gig, was the man who changed Manchester because he had an idea about what needed to happen at just the right time in just the right place. He arranged for the Sex Pistols to play in Manchester before the rest of the country had caught up with the idea that there was any such thing as a Sex Pistol. In the audience for the shows were Mark E Smith, Ian Curtis, Morrissey and Devoto himself, four of the greatest rock singers of all time, directly challenged to take things on. Johnny Rotten was like a psychotic lecturer explaining to these avant-garde music fans exactly what to do with their love for music, the things they wanted to say, and their unknown need to perform.

A good, short history for the uninitiated, filling in Liverpool’s punk history as well.

Photo by Brian Damage from this Flickr set.
[Warning: Geeky, obsessed fan review follows]
I’ve had few transcendent moments watching live music (many more on headphones and/or driving, thanks), but this weekend I had an damn near out of body experience at The Fall concert at the Knitting Factory. It helped that I haven’t seen the group since 1993 and that the new album is just brilliant, and also that I was second from the front of the stage, dead center, and located right next a giant bass floor speaker that I’m sure has now rendered me sterile through low frequency vibrations. But it was worth it!

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I’ve enjoyed K-Punk’s Lacanian takes on Cronenberg, Lynch, and Doctor Who, among others. This week, he starts a two part series examining The Fall, primarily the early albums. It’s good stuff, as usual:

On ‘Specter versus Rector’, any vestigial rock presence subsides into hauntology. The original track is nothing of the sort – it is already a palimpsest, spooked by itself; at least two versions are playing, out of sync. The track – and it is very definitely a track, not a ‘song’ – foregrounds both its own textuality and its texturality. It begins with cassette hum and when the sleeve notes tell us that it was partly ‘recorded in a damp warehouse in MC/R’ we are far from surprised. Steve Hanley’s bass rumbles and thumps like some implacable earth-moving machine invented by a deranged undergound race, not so much rising from subterranea as dragging the sound down into a troglodytic goblin kingdom in which ordinary sonic values are inverted. From now on, and for all the records that really matter, Hanley’s bass will be the lead instrument, the monstrous foundations on which the Fall’s upside-down sound will be built. Like Joy Division, fellow modernists from Manchester, The Fall scramble the grammar of white rock by privileging rhythm over melody.

And just in time for the M.R. James anthology I ordered to come in the mail…

Us, being, the denizens of the Internet, and one particular blog called Scarstuff. They’ve dug up and posted the MAD Magazine
Super Spectacular Day flexisingle that I owned back in 1980. The single was particularly interesting for having eight different endings, all randomly determined from where the stylus landed. This meant that as you tried to listen to all eight endings, the song got stuck in your head. I’m almost scared to relisten to it– I still have that obnoxious “UNTILLLL!!” knocking about my brain all these years later.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is being reissued. And OMGoodniz, they are doing it up properly. Bonus tracks, new cover art, a Bruce Conner video to Mea Culpa, and, on the website only, the ability to remix two tracks by downloading the full multitracks (page not up yet). The site also features behind the scenes photos (both Eno and Byrne have perfect hair) and alternative polaroid cover art. Releases April 11.

Back in 2000, Headless Household (under a pseudonym) scored my short film “Walk Cycle.” The music (minus sound effects) has finally come out as part of Headless Household’s new release Blur Joan. I just got the album in the mail and it’s their funkiest yet…or ever. And funky is not a word I’d usually use to describe HH. Jeff Kaiser and Jim Connolly appear on the album too, all people who have helped out on the Mills Movie Soundtrack front. Nice.

The Amen Break is the most famous drum sample in modern music. Just six seconds of a drum solo on an obscure B-side by gospel group The Winstons (for a song called “Amen Brother”) has become the main ingredient on rap songs like NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” and pretty much all of drum and bass. Nate Harrison’s Installation is really a way of making a documentary without having to clear rights, which is what the second half of the doc covers. It’s also what I hoped will start happening to docs–with a need to make a visual essay, doc filmmakers will have to go underground or create installations in order to bypass restrictive copyright laws. Then maybe we’ll start to see film and video versions of Greil Marcus or Lester Bangs.