Albrecht Durer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. — Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

The end of the year prompts all sorts of rituals of recollection. We’ve once again revolved around the sun, and to prepare us for the celestial rhythms of the next cycle, turning our gaze backwards allows us to reflect on where we’re heading, as if no great distance separated the before from the after. To some remarkable extent, we’re still here, alive on the planet, although we might not be so confident of our stay for much longer. This year, the proliferation of apocalyptic tales, natural disasters, eschatological nightmares, and the perpetual recycling of end of history lamentations have permeated the inclinations of both popular and unpopular culture, especially in music (and film, too, as Hydra’s Jose-Luis Moctezuma relays), spreading its virus through the subterranean fringes, and whatever one might still call the avant-garde.

Perhaps we’ve come to take seriously some of the unnerving considerations proposed by philosopher Ray Brassier, that our impending extinction requires our deepest reflection, one which should reorient our thinking away from the anthropocentric framework of the Copernican Revolution, to regions unbound by the gravitational pull between earth and sun. Enlightenment requires an absolutely unhuman mode of thinking, living, creating. Unhinging ourselves, as Brassier prescribes, would certainly follow to its end the internal logic of what Simon Reynolds recounts in his book published earlier this year, Retromania: Popular music has turned its activities to the past, bewitched by the ruins of history and recordings, disjointed from its temporal circumstances by the internet’s diffusive mode of networking and distributing information. But if the difference between past, present, and future no longer holds in any simplistic chronological order, what then becomes of history, of world-annihilation, without an end in sight?

Mark Fisher, who has written imaginative politico-economic examinations of  music on his blog, K-Punk, suggests in his recent book, Capitalist Realism, that our current obsession with annihilation reflects a stifled awareness that, in our post cold-war malaise where we are frozen by the never ending war on terror, we can no longer even envision an escape from late capitalism–a horizon outside the ever expanding frontiers of the market system in which everything is swallowed. His diagnosis certainly gains some weight from the year’s many events of unrest, from the revolutions invoked by the Arab Spring, and its continuing struggles, the Eurozone’s teetering on the edge of collapse, to the global eruption of physical occupations of the idea of Wall Street. Nevertheless, earlier this year, a Christian radio broadcaster’s warnings of rapture did not come to pass. Twice. But now, the dawn of 2012, and the fabled end of the Mayan calendar, is upon us.

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As for music itself, few releases captivated this year’s disoriented, apocalyptic zeitgeist as well as James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual. Conceptually daring, alienating, horrifically ordinary and optimistic in the most disturbing way possible–Far Side Virtual is a nearly unlistenable musical theory of the technological dream in which we are all enraptured. Ferraro pulls sonic detritus from iPhone apps, computer start-up noises, ringtones, late 1980s and early ’90s infomercials and commercials, Pixar films, and music scrapped from video games menus and end game sequences. While anchored in references to synth-pop, Far Side‘s virtually encoded soundscape is modified through an Apple laptop with digital beds of drum patterns and glowing, synthetic shine.

At first, I couldn’t quite figure out Ferraro’s stance: sincere, ironic, critical? What I’ve determined, though, is that his intention doesn’t matter much. Ferraro’s artistic talent lies in a phenomenological sensitivity for hyper-realism: the way contemporary, digitally networked technology is altering our way of desiring, connecting, committing. In interviews, he has reported to tap into this hyper-realism in strip malls in Los Angeles, St. Marks in New York, and the global non-space of Starbucks cafes. After listening to the album a few times, just on tinny laptop speakers, I’ve come to find myself exiled to a strange sensation of lost, endless time within an enhanced world, one whose cycles arhythmically (un)balance the rapid production and satisfaction of distributed desire. It’s spontaneous and overwhelming.

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Many music journalists come to understand and listen to Ferraro’s music in terms of the theoretical framework of hypnagogic pop, a concept initiated by The Wire’s David Keenan set to mark the recent emergence of lo-fi rock evoking a nebulous psychological state between being awake and dreaming. Is this space something of the last frontier? Given the kind of anxiety and unrest Ferraro’s work inspires, and the hyper-sterilized space within which it puts into motion its labor, the hypnagogic might just establish the deterritorialized boundaries for a new sort of mobilization. Simon Reynolds sums it up concisely: ”Perhaps the secret idea buried inside hypnagogic pop is that the ’80s never ended. That we’re still living there, subject to that decade’s endless end of History, killing time as we wait for something (seismic, subaltern) to rupture the dream.”

Ferraro wasn’t the only musician this year to harness the kitsch of the dream and remagnetize the tech-utopia of waking life. John Maus, also working within the sphere of 1980s synth-pop, produced an excellent record of romantic solipsism and city-living despair. In short, he wrestles with the Enlightenment myth of our alleged autonomy over our desires, and seeks out his true desire in the most unlikely sonic resonances. Maus named his record We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves after the 12th thesis of French philosopher Alain Badiou’s fifteen theses on contemporary art, published in issue 23 of Lacanian Ink:

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

Maus, like Ferraro, struggles to pass the threshold, without contamination, into those spaces unheralded, neglected, or forgotten by Empire–post-industrial detritus, everyday noise, abandoned infrastructure, lost time–where the markings, traces, and graffiti of outsider desire thrive. The young hip-hop producer of Dipset fame, Araabmuzik, found the source of his scrawl in the shadow of 1990s trance, some of the most ecstatic, optimistic, and highly marketed music to ever subject millions of alleged Dionysian initiates to the rush of the rave, the utopian reveries of the bass drop. I wrote on Araabmuzik’s record, aptly titled Electronic Dream, in late summer, and still marvel on its way of uncovering the dark, even tragic motivation, of classic Eurodance cheese. The haunted underbelly of trance is revealed through unsettling bass patterns, nearly arhythmic percussion, and a gurgling dose of demonic synthetic keys, all which suffocate the false idols, kitschy optimism, of the source material which he attacks, perverts, and desiccates. An unliving, underground stream awakens.

Any end of the year recap also has to account for the resurgence of the overground stream of raves in 2011. A resurgence which helped a previously unknown emo screamer turned dubstep producer, Scrillex, garner five Grammy nominations, including best new artist. Yes, dubstep has gone mainstream, a sequence launched at the beginning of the year by Britney Spears, and culminated in the easily digestible electronic rhythms of Scrillex (and a dubstep Korn album?). But despite the increasing monotony, and consistently conventional masculinity of the genre, sometimes disparagingly, or lovingly, labeled bro-step, something is left to be said of Scrillex’s bizarre music video for “First of the Year (Equinox).” If we could generalize from its narrative, and the video’s popularity at nearly 30 million views, then I have to say something is disturbing about millions of festival goers across the country identifying with a little girl who resists a pedophile’s advances through the angsty violence of Scrillex’s wobble, wobble, bass. This music doesn’t exactly mirror the utopian trance of Paul Oakenfold’s ’90s, but has mutated in the conditions of depressed times, diagnosing the general disillusionment with, yet attachment to, the dream plaguing a great deal of America’s everyday, middle-class populace.

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Some more unsettling explorations of masculinity come from Los Angeles’s Odd Future collective and Sacramento’s Death Grips. While Scrillex sycophants scorn the figure of the pedophile-like good upholders of resentful ethics, Tyler, the Creator surprisingly found a way to incarnate a kind of moral decrepitude in Goblin that prompted music critics and listeners to wage in ceaseless battles over censorship. Although Tyler fell just as quickly he rose, it seemed like no one from either side of the debate actually listened to his music. Whatever your stance on the moral caliber of his raps, Tyler’s serpent-like nihilism holds up as an antithesis to Alain Badiou’s call for us to become the “pitiless censors” of ourselves: his free reign of desire somehow taps into an illicit territory which resists facile consummation. I credit this to Tyler’s musical schizophrenia more so than any rebellious talent, one whose psychological disintegration produces a multiplicity of contradictory perspectives on a festering decay haunting both our most banal-seeming and repressed desires. Hugely popular R&B saviors, Drake and The Weeknd, on the other hand, promote a kind of self-indulgence and sexual decadence that fits all too perfectly into typologies of capital. Although, I have to admit that I find great, thoughtless pleasure in listening to The Weeknd.

Drummer Zach Hill’s side project, Death Grips, also has just as little remorse for moralists. Their release, Ex Military, sounds like the biological weaponry of Cannibal Ox, deconstructed into feverish noise and maniacal slaps of bass–nightmarish landscapes of sound recalling the destructed bio-mechanical ecologies of dystopian films from the likes of Ridley Scott and George Miller. On “Guillotine,” MC Ride spits raw verses, his voice barking a kind of incomprehensible language, whose tenor joyously approaches the precipice of apocalyptic implosion. Music, even sound, becomes dehumanized, embodying to the extreme Ray Brassier’s concept of “the unlife”. The specter of Brassier, implied in its extreme nihilism, haunts a number of releases, this year. Another brilliant record from Hype Williams, One Nation, begins with pure morbidness: a gruff voice appears from the shadows in an untitled track over sparse dub rhythms and swirling John Carpenter synth lines, insisting on the need for the living to face up to mortality: “but of course everyone dies, and you will too.” The record heeds this wisdom, playing with the fleeting character of recycled sounds from UK bass, as if they are all about to wisp away as soon as they appear.

One of the most evocative listens of the year, Kuedo’s Severant invokes the lost paradise of Scott’s Blade Runner with a recharged urgency. “Vectoral,” in particular, beautifully echoes Vangelis’s soundtrack, reframing the synthetic pulse within footwork rhythms, programmed breakdowns, and drum machine gusts of digitally-manufactured liquid wind. More than a few musicians found inspiration in the frenetic, tinny grooves bubbling up from the hoods of South and West Chicago in the form of footwork. Descending from the same sort of post-industrial depressed economies that brought about Detroit techno and ghetto-tech bootlegs, footwork sounds strangely like UK drum n’ bass or grime, as if the Black Atlantic diaspora of electronic rhythms cyphered towards synchronic destinations despite their regional dislocation. DJ Rashad’s Just a Taste EP booms with poly-percussive rhythms that shift abruptly in winding drum patterns while vocal cuts dissolve into looped beats of flittering noise. A good introduction to footwork is the second volume of Bangs & Works on Planet Mu, a compilation tracing the grooves in their constant ascension, without any final horizon in sight–after all, this is music essentially made for the dance floor.

What Kuedo’s Severant does best is guide desire to take pleasure in loss, transforming nostalgia into renewal–invigorating the shadowed wastelands perhaps once formed and shaped by Empire, but since forgotten, thrown into the gutter to rot and decay. The two releases of the year which I keep coming back to, Laurel Halo’s Hour Logic EP and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica, conjure a kind of mournful alienation that bridges the apocalyptic character of melancholia with an ecstatic resoluteness. While Laurel Halo prefers a symbiosis between percussion and ambient fluxes pushing bio-engineered corpse of techno to new heights of potency, Oneohtrix’s alchemy consists in the sounds of analogue ambient–flooded synth melodies, electric surges, and sparse piano keys–eerily unbounded in a ghostly absence of percussion.

From turning our gaze backwards, and recycling lost time, a new music is emerging: hyper-real, intensely emotional, richly theoretical, outside anachronistic sentiments for the acoustic or authentic–slowly paving way for the impending rupture to come.

It’s been nearly a month since I saw Drive in the theaters, and like many others, I still can’t get the soundtrack out of my head. In this case, though, it’s a good thing. Few films have soundtracks that attract so much attention, that take music as absolutely essential to the imagery itself. I’ll brave treason here and argue that not even John Carpenter’s haunted scores have the audience coming out of Halloween whispering in hushed tones about how the music captivated and terrified, and at the same time produced frenetic streams of pleasure.

It’s a wonder why the music works so well. It’s fused into the expressive substance of the film, rather than just gracing the surface or compelling audience reaction by brute force–the acts of anticipation and relief exploited to no end by more typical renditions of Hollywood cinema. Instead, the music of Drive expertly signifies and exemplifies and produces the emotional narrative immanent in the film, circulating themes of loss, mourning, nostalgia, alienation, and the horrible acts of romance and violence provoked by the abyssal mechanisms of lonely uprootedness in the gutless, sprawling metropolis.

Synthetic keys indulge the neon lights of Los Angeles, as Ryan Gosling’s unnamed character drives through the streets to the rhythm of a festering drum machine in the absolute isolation, and full metallic enclosure, of his vehicle. As the driver awakes from solipsism, inspired by a growing love of his neighbor, the too cute Irene (played wonderfully by Carey Mulligan), as well as her son, the music follows the driver, flows outwards from his solipsism, and saturates the hallways of their concrete apartment building, pouring into the open air of the theater.

You can already hear the inward and outwards tensions in the music, too–the open, warming synthetic melodies curdled upon the axis of the cold and claustrophobic, motorik drum programming. The music quite directly references certain forms of sonic expression that reached an apex in early 1980s synth-pop (often subsumed under a certain strand of dark or cold wave), which stemmed from Krafterk’s experimentations in the ’70s on the nebulous limits dividing man and machine. In recent days, the genre has seen a bit of a revival, from the explosion of DIY lo-fi electronics to the computer programmed minimal disco-funk of labels like Italians Do It Better or the glimmering sheen of Euro club hits from Ed Banger, like Kavinsky’s burning seducer “Nightcall.”

References of cinematic genre also shoot backwards, escalating the abyssal feeling of loss and the glimmer of recovery, never to be redeemed. So here we are, or go, to a Los Angeles of the 1980s, ’50s, a nearly timeless place recorded on reel of the noir and the car film. I hear/see Repo Man from the auspicious year of 1984 (a surely post-apocalyptic as well as post-punk Southwest America, a dystopian land, a promised land of tragedy, like any noir or Pacific Coast drive), and this Juicy Bananas’ track, “Bad Man,” surfaces.

Johnny Jewel of Desire and Chromatics features two sonic centerpieces in Drive: “Under Your Spell” and “Tick of the Clock,” which both evoke the emotional wakening of the protagonist from a mechanic to a lover, and finally, a mass murderer induced by romance–or perhaps a “hero,” according to an NPR interview with director Nicolas Winding Refn. Jewel’s musical partnership with Refn goes back to Bronson in which “Digital Versicolor” from Jewel’s third group, Glass Candy, played a crucial role in instigating the emotional narrative of the film. (I’ve also added a couple of Jewel’s personal sketches of scenes from Drive, which he used to motivate his musical imagery.)

Jewel was initially asked to complete the whole soundtrack for Drive, but for a variety of mysterious business-related reasons his project was shelved and given over to Cliff Martinez, who nonetheless executed a beautiful score oscillating between the hypnotic and erotic. It doesn’t quite stand on its own, though, as few soundtracks do when you listen to them outside of the theater in pure abstraction. But I’m hedging bets that the axed Jewel project, allegedly titled Symmetry and scheduled for release at some point in the near future, will discover the subtle alchemy to ride the noir pathos of hope, loss, and despair underwritten by the film itself.

Until that release, I’ve compiled a few songs which might work in parallel with Drive, a bit of historical formation to the sounds of synth-pop geared by the rhythms and isolation of the car, some contemporary renditions, and a bit of the more propulsive side of the progeny as well.

Kraftwerk “Man Maschine”

Glass Candy “Computer Love”

Chromatics “In the City”

Kavinsky “Pacific Coast Highway”

The Normal “Warm Leatherette”

On the road in southern Utah

Thelma left the soundtrack up to me. She would plan out our five-week trip from Los Angeles to New York and all I had to do was come up with some music to play. Our first stop was Las Vegas. We would stay in Circus Circus for a colorful slap in the face of the spectacular. From there we would abruptly shift from gambling and buffet-gorging in stale casinos to hiking and camping in the southern Utah desert, a sprawling and extraordinary landscape of red rock and blue sky. Some of the rocks were massive, unapproachable. I nearly collapsed from exhaustion three times in the shining sand. Maybe it was from shock.

We would then trek through Roswell–just to satisfy my childhood obsession with alien conspiracy theories–and through the endless truck pastures of the Texas panhandle. When returning from a relaxing jaunt in a swimming hole outside of Austin, a white Dodge Ram armored with a gleaming cattle herder would rear-end us, spin us sideways, and send us shopping for a beat-up hoopty in the many used car lots of East Texas.

The heat wave across the country, which fittingly skipped over our California point of departure, would assure profuse sweating for the rest of our escapades through the south: a horridly swampy New Orleans knocked me near-delirious. The driver of the Ram, a young Texan dressed in business casual, blamed his missteps on the sun. He was reaching for a bottle of water and didn’t notice the slowed down traffic zone. He just wanted to go home and have a beer. He tried to swerve but still hit us. His car had no dents. Ours was destroyed. Glass stormed down onto the asphalt and our bodies flung like Slinkies from the chairs. He was sorry he ruined our trip.

Hardly ruined. Road trips across America, I realized, aren’t like they read in the books. They are more difficult, tiresome, often filled with stretching moments of static, boredom. Sometimes, unimaginable violence. While Denis Johnson hit the mark with his short story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” I found our travels neither as loopy nor alienated. “And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth,” writes Johnson. “I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”

The songs capture the road trip better. For one, they are able to movingly navigate that tension Johnson pinpoints between reality and imagination. Since our expectations on the road met brute forces of resistance, our soundtrack required flexibility. And music is also precisely the sort of thing that can adapt to the friction of the world. Folk songs fold into blues into gospel into electronic dirges and driving chants and slapstick raps. We would finally cool off under the puffy white clouds of the Appalachians and come to a sudden stop in our home to be, New York. The city greeted us with crashing markets, an earthquake, and a hurricane.

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Since my duties didn’t seem all that difficult compared with organizing a road trip throughout a great stretch of America, I devoted serious time to them. Coming up with a soundtrack isn’t as much of a precise science as an unarticulated form of alchemy. An art of summoning the ghosts. So I did fairly extensive research. I started with humble beginnings: the cheesy, overwrought, and overused, yet signature moments which mark the kernel of the genre. First, I watched the late Dennis Hopper’s 1969 cult classic film, Easy Rider. In the film, the duo of Hopper and Peter Fonda travel on cruiser motorcycles to Mardi Gras after a successful drug deal somewhere in the southwest makes them rich.

The story, however, ends tragically. The two outsiders lose their poetico-alcoholic ACLU lawyer friend (played brilliantly by Jack Nicholson) to xenophobic locals. The film closes when the duo are shot off their bikes and killed by vindictive truck drivers somewhere in the thickets of Louisiana. It’s a pretty straightforward 1960s story of undermined liberation, but I’d argue that the soundtrack is what really holds the film together. A mix of psychedelic rock and folk from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds, and Steppenwolf (including the “Born to be Wild” theme) casts the personal story into a broader narrative charged with the urgency and tarnished idealism that spread across America as the shadow of Civil Rights movement faded on the horizon.

Clip from Dennis Hopper's 'Easy Rider' (1969)

Easy Rider‘s carefully curated soundtrack recalls how Jack Kerouac underpinned his novel On the Road, published just a decade earlier, with the jumping bop of the 1950s. For instance, while residing in San Francisco, Sal, Dean, and Carlo channel the firey pulse of live jazz played in the black clubs of the Fillmore district. They get wild in the jukebox bars on Central Avenue in Los Angeles and to the landmark radio shows blasting the new music across America. But it’s not just specific scenes in the novel that sing of bop, the whole off-the-cuff lyricism and spirit of adventure spiral around the improvisational flow and melodic breakdowns and screaming horns of Charlie Parker-era jazz.

In his substantial notebooks for On The Road, Kerouac wrote with the frenetic pulse of bop: “Let’s hear no more about jazz critics and those who wonder about bop:–I like my whiskey wild, I like Saturday night in the shack to be crazy, I like the tenor to be woman-mad, I like things to GO and rock and be flipped, I want to be stoned if I’m going to be stoned at all, I like to be gassed by a back-alley music….” But Keroac’s understanding of  American music, and in this work primarily black-American jazz, did not stop there. More than anything else, he associated music with the very constitution of American identity: “That grand wild sound of bop floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the American night.”

Going ever deeper in my research of the American road genre and its pairing with music I learned that Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank culled inspiration for his book The Americans around the same period Kerouac published his groundbreaking novel. Indeed Frank met Kerouac one evening at a party in the Lower East Side and asked him to write something for it. Kerouac agreed and began an introduction to the work by identifying Frank’s photos of the Americans with the music they make:

That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a near-by funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car . . . with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.

Traveling across America on Route 66, Frank documented the doldrums and the rumbling and the fragmentation and the violence and the dreams forming the people of America in the places of their time. By 1972, The Rolling Stones would commission Frank to design the cover of their outsider record Exile on Main St with photos from his numerous road trips across the country. This was a surprising displacement of Frank’s photos. They were reassembled to represent a British rock group who left their home on the run from tax debt–an analogue for another young and anxious generation on the rise, an unsettled multi-national grouping of nomadic people including those on the other side of the Atlantic. Frank also took footage of the group on a Super 8 camera, which eventually became the now bootlegged Cocksucker Blues, during their own journey on the road across America to the Sunset hills of Los Angeles.

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In pursuing all this research over the past year–of which many segments of my findings were published on Hydra–I began to wonder whatever happened to the on-the-road genre of Americana. Certainly the theme of the quest for self-reconciliation or exploration still permeates American lore. But music, I think, has lost its crucial role of both organizing these stories with the rhythm of adventure and charging their lyrical flesh with something larger, the movement of the times. (Vincent Gallo perhaps comes closest with his mawkish attempt at a loner rock odyssey, The Brown Bunny.)

The themes of travel, migration, and free spiritism have underscored Americana music as far back as we can collectively remember. Perhaps the most famous early excavation came from eccentric ethnomusicologist Harry Smith who arranged a broad selection of regional blues, cajun, country, and gospel in his Anthology of American Folk Music for Folkway Records in 1952. Smith carefully crafted the anthology from his own collection of 78 rpm phonograph records dated from the years 1927-1932, a lush period for recorded music right before the advent of radio and television would supersede the local, and the Great Depression would snare small-town sales.

Smith divided the anthology intro three parts: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs. Despite these categorial divisions, the poetics of the road–travel brought on by economic pressures, commercial exchange via train, anxious callings of unrest, or the many seductions of exploration–saturates the whole collection. On the cover of each album Smith put an etching of the Celestial Monochord, an instrument of allegedly mystical powers pilfered from the work of alchemist Robert Fludd. According to Fludd, the monochord linked musical intervals to the cosmic cycles of the Ptolemaic universe. Smith, in turn, incorporated the instrument into his own embedded cosmology which oriented around the water, fire, and air of the living Americana ghost.

Print of the Celestial Monochord.

About the time we cruised through thunderstorms in Mississippi in our lugging Subaru Forester–without working windshield wipers and with a huge leak in the trunk–Furry “Memphis” Lewis’s rendition of the hypnotic folk tale “Kassie Jones” whirled through the speakers. Lewis’s haunting voice, covered in layers of distorted buzz and electric humming, spun ciphers around his expert guitar strums. He waned about the life and vital rhythms of a train engineer whose train eventually crashed:

I woke up this mornin’, four o’clock
Mister Casey told his fireman get his boiler hot
Put on your water, put on your coal
Put your head out the window, see my drivers roll
See my driver roll
Put your head out the window, see my driver roll

A couple days later we found ourselves in a blues joint on a commercially redeveloped Beale St. in Memphis–the historic black music strip was remade into an amusement park of itself. An original Furry Lewis guitar hung on the wall with big blocky white letters spelling out his name on the case. I thought of Casey’s crash and our own as if the song meandered through a portal in time and struck us in a lightning storm on the Texas highway and sent us on some sort of alternate course of discovery. But then it all seemed too silly. Kerouac’s novel is too earnest and abused to be taken seriously today; Easy Rider pivoted around a cosmopolitan paranoia of the backwoods southerner, while Lewis’s guitar stayed lifelessly framed on the wall; none of it really worked anymore.

Perhaps I’ve been too much of a historicist, concerned with collecting and archiving and researching in order to inform my own experiences and give them weight. Perhaps many of us young people have become too dusted in our nostalgia–inclined to praise the avant-garde of yesteryear rather than throw those generations and their work into the wastelands and start afresh. Isn’t that what’s required of us? But it’s hard to think Keroauc or Hopper or Frank did that so categorically to Smith’s anthology. Nor did The Rolling Stones a generation later.

So we listened to music on the road. Araabmuzik’s haunted trance in Vegas. The synthetic droll of Ford & Lopatin, the electronic drone of Emeralds, and other self-effacing music rotated under the sun in Utah. In the desert, even songs exploited for years by commercial interest, and identified for so long with an older generation’s heritage, (yes, America’s “Horse with No Name“) burned deep into our marrow.

We circled through the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico listening to jazz and beats and techno on BBC Radio 1 and Rinse FM. We bought cheap cassettes and CDs in thrift stores in Texas with names we never heard of, hoping to find occultist religious rock from the ’80s, but didn’t find a single one worth listening to besides a Quickflight vinyl which melted and broke in the heat. Local radio, sadly, was primarily homogenous and awful everywhere.

We were disoriented and pleased by Kraftwerk on the Panhandle. By the time we got to Louisiana, we cycled through two huge compilations of pivotal and overlooked New Orleans funk on Soul Jazz Records. Through the rest of the South, we listened during rubbery hours from dawn to dusk through Smith’s entire folk anthology. By the time we floated out of North Carolina on the Blue Ridge Parkway we eased our weary travels with the lull of Washed Out, the gurgled boogie of Toro Y Moi, and the plastic funk of Com Truise.

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Smith’s anthology featured regional sounds of Americana not only before radio and television became commonplace in the typical American household but also before the forces of mass commodification would streamline our music into product and business. Even children and teenagers can no longer sidestep the threat of sonic inculcation as they once were able in the baby boomer generation. But at some distant point in the gunning American memory, music was just the stuff of myth, ephemera.

Now, music is global, worlding, in a different way. Our soundtrack, I think, reflected that. We’re restricted neither by space or time nor vertical structures of marketing; 1928 blues from Tennessee in collusion with 1977 German techno and 2011 digital synth-pop; live radio from wherever (and whoever) and recorded broadcasts from whenever.

Yet we still haven’t lost a sense of place. Surely the Internet and new technologies programmed for social networking have reshaped the road, wired it to the globular layers of computer networks and information databases, connected it to unstable modes of movement and direction, restructured its linear geometry into a great big open possibility of blinking dots. But the music still filters through the speakers and spills out the openness of the car, overflowing into the rush of the wind, and into the thickness of the earth. The soundtrack on the road, formed and reconfigured in collage from the far reaches of recorded time and space, now taps into something more diffuse and nebulous–maybe even a strange spirit again, unruly, mystical.

What a soundtrack can achieve is the opening up of a place. The highest aim of a soundtrack undermines the familiar callings and purposes of a place and works through them to uncover the richness of its substance. Music has a mysterious way of letting what things are shine forth. Ours seemed to channel the highly networked road, lightly suspended in an ethereal recorded body of sound and heritage, as if we called up the spirits of the American past and tapped into a resonating present–still alive, still circling in the shadows of the road, and wandering in the glow of the horizon.

“On the road again/ Natural born eastman on the road again,” Lewis crooned through the rumbling time machine. And so we drove on.

An altar of rave flyers.

I never liked trance. Still don’t. But in the 1990s you couldn’t escape it. As a teenager I would go to Project Blowed hiphop shows in Los Angeles and still return to a car covered with flyers for Paul Oakenfold concerts. When I was in middle school, it was practically a rite of passage into the seemingly defiant world of drugs and music to end up at whatever crowded rave in some abandoned lot in who knows what part of the sprawling desert. I’m still not sure how I was coaxed more times than I care to admit to stay up past sunrise listening to droning rhythms and squeaky cartoonish hooks (you know, those anime girly choruses about seduction, or ecstatic intoxication, or rowing a boat down the river of your mind). I even threw my hands in the air to endless synth drops and watched white dudes with dreads, dressed in puffy army pants and neon candy-colored regalia, dance in circles around themselves, light sticks in tow.

If you can relate at all to my trance-inflected background then you might enjoy a surprising musical experiment from hiphop producer and tinkerer Araabmuzik. And if you were born in another era, or have absorbed some of the trance revival in today’s pop, you might still be interested in Araab’s unlikely strategy for reimagining this horribly mawkish genre of dance music.

Araabmuzik quickly rose in the rap production circuit making beats for the likes of Dipset and Busta Rhyhmes. But for his debut record, Electronic Dream, Araab reoriented his chops from boom bap to the emotive formulas underpinning trance. He took some of the most memorable and cheesiest trance records from the 1990s, deconstructed them in a drum pad, overlaid the surface textures with shattered noise, grime, even more bass, and then reconfigured the rhythms into beats that sound like southern drum programming curdled with dub-step wobble on hyperdrive.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXxhjM_O09M

The effect of Araab’s technique is exhilarating. Those campy angelic hooks, e.g., Fall in love with music/ Fall in love with dance/ Fall in love with anything/ That makes you want romance in “Golden Touch,” all of sudden sound not just fresh but provocative, as if the formula of the cliche has been spun into a musical element with rejuvenated spiritual vitality.

Those same campy romantic melodies that make up the architecture of trance hit hard in completely unexpected ways when drowned with Araab’s aggressive off-syncopated percussion and siren synth loops. In “Underground Stream,” a sampled voice culled from a late night T.V. horror film broadcast provides insight on the technique:

“If an initiate can perfect the great work from death and putrefaction, he will have a chance at eternal gold on the underground stream.”

Appropriating cheese and investing it with new life is taking off in other music circles too. A couple months ago I interviewed Sabo on the rise of Moombahton, a new musical genre inspired by slowing down Dutch House to the pulse of the reggaeton. What becomes of conventional club rhythms when pitched down, rearranged, and recalibrated through the work of computer bricolage is nothing short of stunning. We may have finally discovered tools beyond irony to re-compass our desires.

There’s also a whole undercurrent of lo-fi indie rock explicitly channeling late night television circa the early ’90s, or new age meditation tapes, or unabashedly diving into ’80s synth pop a la John Maus without the slightest shame. Maus agrees that something musically interesting can happen when you take pop more seriously than it takes itself.

I’d suggest that David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is the model and articulated foundation for precisely this sort of technique for appropriating cheese. For Twin Peaks, Lynch adopted the rigid formula of soap opera television and pivoted the pop algorithm around ghosts, haunting spirits, absence–a horrible violence at the core of our narratives of American telos and happiness (the dream). In much the same way, Araabmuzik and these other pop bricoleurs stir our listening dispositions to the fantasies of desire that permeate our subconscious. The underbelly of teenage trance romance is exposed as deformed and mutilated, yet lovely to listen to in its unadulterated form. I’ll stand by one learned lesson: Cheese tastes so much better when you can digest the funk.

A clip of the alien consciousness from Tarkovsky's "Solaris."

It’s been a few months since our last cosmic rundown here at Hydra. Another lunar eclipse has come around, so perhaps in the spirit of celestial cycles, I feel called once again to contribute to this thread. For the uninitiated, we initially birthed the idea of a cosmic rundown in order to sketch out disparate, marginal, and systemic connections underlying artistic explorations of the beyond, both spatial and temporal, and the natural phenomena upon which these events orient themselves. With such a broad category as the intergalactic, you’d think that we could write a rundown a bit more often.

But I’ve become a bit concerned with the somewhat sedimented notion of futurism which informs our typical methods for determining what counts as the cosmic in the arts. The visuals tend to fall under the prevailing authority of Kubrick’s Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky’s Solaris; the sonic sphere meanders between the bleep and blap big band orchestral jazz of Sun Ra and the driving motorik pulse of electronica (especially under the starship of Baldelli); the literary texts navigate dystopian near-futures and the Cameronesque ills plaguing technological demolition of the natural world. Yet I don’t mean to dismiss any of these concerns. Indeed they all still seem quite relevant and even urgent in an age where we are rapidly exhausting natural resources, raising the local to global access in vast online fabrics, and persistently threatening our very own existence with weapons powerful enough to destroy life as we know it. Nonetheless, I’d like to grapple with the cosmic a bit from the peripheries, and attempt to zigzag through alternate ways of thinking through the future, one perhaps not so engorged with technological bedazzlement and fear.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_ukfGAd8T4

This article will serve as an experiment; consider it something of a multimedia DJ mix on futurism loosely viewed through the lens of the cosmic. Let’s start with a marginal yet still paradigmatic musical rendition from the French disco ensemble Space. Like their German counterparts of the 1970s, Kraftwerk, Space forged a soundtrack for what they understood as the future. But Space’s music has an embedded lushness that Kraftwerk eschewed in favor of sparsely programmed rhythms. It’s partially owed to the full band’s incorporation of the live backing elements of American disco, fusing delay percussion with drum machines and warm synth lines. They also brought into play the sonic trajectories of local experiments with synthetic melodies and deconstructed noise ushered in just a few years earlier in 1970s France by the iconoclast composer Jean Michel-Jarre.

Space, Summers, and the Sound of the Future

Space released Magic Fly–a record that topped the charts in Europe and crossed over surprisingly in America– in 1977, just a couple months before Donna Summers forever changed popular music with her concept album I Remember Yesterday. Produced by the forward thinking studio wizard Giorgio Moroder, I Remember Yesterday was structured in two parts, past and future. How the future side fit into the equation of remembering yesterday raises all sorts of disorienting questions about mind, memory, and time. Disregarding such conundrums, the now infamous and absolutely hypnotic anthem “I Feel Love” pulsed with a driving artificial momentum and washes of synthetic harmony that seemed to take the time of the dance floor itself into warp speed. Brian Eno infamously called the song the sound of the future, and since, the future of popular and unpopular electronic music has been, well, pretty much right along those lines.

Black to the Future

An alternate strand to this narrative, and one that has recently been rejuvenated, is Black Futurism. Initially just an intriguing essay by Mark Dery published in 1995–with the potent title “Black to the Future“–Black Futurism has become something of a movement. I recently attended a small exhibit “The Black Futurists: Black Progressive Thought to Science Fiction” in the Sargent Johnson Gallery nestled in San Francisco’s historic black and jazz neighborhood, the Western Addition. The exhibit was put on by an East Bay coalition of artists, thinkers, and writers, Black Diamonds Shining, who openly take Dery’s seminal essay to the heart of their project.

In the gallery, there were walls layered with figures and streaks of color, faces, cut-out ephemera, words, and coagulations of musical and historical references that brought to mind the assemblage graffiti approach cultivated by Basquiat. George Clinton and the Mothership Connection got down with Prince’s funkified hybridization of genre and gender. A Betty Davis/Cleopatra collage oozed sexuality with a wink to Miles channeling the gods from his horn. Sun Ra vibrated in the call from the extra-terrestrial spaceship he reportedly heard in his home of Alabama so many moons ago, and Lee Scratch Perry took on the ghost of a mystic, a dub sorcerer, a machine bricoleur. Designs linked all the panels like chains or spirits in a sort of poly-rhythmic flow that guided my eyes across the shadows, ghosts or hieroglyphs brought to life.

After a few times moving around the room, absorbing from near and far, I concluded that the exhibit illustrated a sonic visualization of the Black Atlantic–the cross-breeding of fictions, musical narratives, travels, exchanges, and mythologies across the rhizomatic spatial configurations of the African diaspora. The internal tensions of that diaspora wrestled in the poly-rhythmic wall panels, fighting for an affirmative sense of future that was rooted in a unified but hardly stabilized cipher of the past. One nation under a groove.

Techno Rebels

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg8ktVDbWlg

Another East Bay music collective Deepblak Recordings riffs off themes of black futurism in synthesizing the sonic spheres of techno, jazz, and Afro dance records. That’s a rare feat for Oakland, a town known for the hustling wordplay of Too $hort and the bounce of hyphy more than black electronic music. Label head and producer Armon Bazile (aka Aybee) recounted a telling story of a club-goer spitting on his friend’s turntables because he didn’t have any E-40 records. Few casual listeners of the genre recall that techno originated in the industrial failings of Detroit by the black and brown Belleville Three who flipped the “techno rebels” concept from Alvin Toeffler’s The Third Wave into a pulsating mode of rhythm and blues.

A personal favorite of mine from the Deepblak camp is the uplifting cosmic groove of Afrikan Sciences. I also have on Blaktronics on heavy rotation–a name lifted from Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrel’s Blaktronic Science record, which includes some choice soothsayer poetics on the aura of cosmic funk in the liner notes: “reports and manifestoes from the nether regions of the modern Afrikan American music/speculative fiction universe.” Deepblak’s podcasts are also a good place to start for a full on dive into their techno-jazz wavelength, a sort of cyclical moving forward-backward-around a celestial map of the many musical incantations called forth by Sun Ra.

Speaking of the myth himself, the origins of the ever enigmatic Sun Ra may begin to become clearer starting next month–or rather, more robust. The first volume of a huge 20 disc box set from the Sun Ra archives will cover early recordings of his be-pop 1940s and 50s period, including some obscure 78rpm recordings and more than a few lost tapes. Although, I must admit that I’m still working on Professor Ra’s recommended reading list and what might be the only recording of his 1971 guest lectures at UC Berkeley.

Groove, Light, and Another Future

www.youtube.com/watch?v=je0VXof1j7Q

Rethinking the future might necessitate a redistribution of our spatial relationships. For one, I’d suggest that we have to undertake a highly challenging project of attempting to unwind the regimented dichotomies that parse space and time as diametric relationships. Perhaps Africa Hitech, the duo of Mark Prichard and Steve Spacek, reflect this vision most acutely. Their musical futurism spins time forward not so much in terms of drum programming and cascading synthetic keys as by way of traveling through the poly-rhythmic spatial arrangements of Black Atlantic traditions from the clubs of England to the shores of West Africa, right back to Detroit’s techno dirges and chants.

“Light the Way” off of the recent and excellent93 Million Miles from Warp accomplishes this best. It’s a soaring song, cycling through lyrics on how light makes vision possible while the interlocked rhythms brings to light that groove writes the future.

Mochilla's Eric Coleman (on the left) and Brian Cross prepare for the gallery opening. (photo Mike Park)

I dropped by San Francisco’s Peek Gallery last week for the opening of an exhibition on Mochilla, the Los Angeles production company composed of photographer/filmmaker/DJ duo, Brian Cross (B+) and Eric Coleman. Talk about a party. Less than a half hour in, the spacious gallery — part of the new third-space unit of The Summit SF — filled to the brim with enthusiastic Mochilla followers and the occasional straggler called from the Mission streets to the banter, blue glow of the Mochilla’s music-films, and surely, the deep crates of free alcohol at the bar. I made out with more than a few freshly made Caipirinhas and cold Tecates on the closest to a summer evening it ever gets in San Francisco.

There was barely enough room to look at the collection of large, handsomely framed photographs placed on the long slice of gallery wall. Cross and Coleman chose only 20 pieces respectively to represent the past 10 years of Mochilla in action, selecting from a broad range of work loosely tied together by musical themes of rhythm and melody, with a primary focus on the subjects of instrument, urban and natural environment, and of course, the musician.

Among a few standouts, I particularly enjoyed portraits of a shadowed J Dilla in the studio and a looming Madvillain, clad in signature mask and mixer. A couple documents of an overturned car and collapsed home depicted the ghostly spaces–remnants of vibrant life and color–which populated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Perhaps the most striking, though, was a simple photo of a boy jumping head first into a deep blue body of water, the ripples sprawling to the contours of the frame.

10 years of Mochilla

Last year, Los Angeles-based production group Mochilla released Timeless, a trilogy film series documenting three concerts performed in L.A., early 2009. For these concerts, Brian Cross and Eric Coleman shined light on three composers who have helped influence and shape hiphop in different ways: the originator of Ethio-jazz, Mulatu Astatke; leftfield Brazilian arranger, Arthur Verocai; and a gutsy rendition of J Dilla’s beats arranged by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson with a 60-piece orchestra. The films paint intimate portraits of musical exchange and live performance while paying tribute to some of the overlooked giants of the sprawling African musical diaspora.

In many ways Timeless is a culmination of themes explored in Mochilla’s films from the past decade. Their first project, Keepintime: Talking Drums and Whispering Vinyl (2001), and the follow-up live recording and DVD release in 2004, captured improvisational collaboration between L.A. hiphop producers and DJs, such as Madlib and J.Rocc, among others, with some of the powerhouse session drummers who inspired their sample-based work. Brasilintime: Batucada Com Discos (2007) also navigated the dynamic tension between an older generation of drummers, this time including legendary Brazilian percussionists and the new school of analog producer/turntablists.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kbwRoikF9o

But not only did Mochilla depict creative partnership between these two forms of percussionists, they also translated the cut-up aesthetic of the DJ and rhythmic momentum of the drummer to the inner workings of the films themselves. A pastiche of words, music, and imagery composed of still shots and footage drive forward the fragmented stories and striking moments of reconciliation that unfold on screen.

More recently, Cross set off to Columbia to document the Petronio Alvarez music festival, as well as collaborative work between Will Holland (a.k.a. Quantic) and Ernesto “Fruko” Estrada, who could be credited with forging the rootsy, Afro-Columbian take on salsa. Mochilla also shot a good deal of the footage for Banksy’s street art disaster film from last year, Exit Through the Gift Shop; caught wayward rapper Jay Electronica at the Pyramids in Egypt and recording in South Africa; and documented Nas and Damian Marley on tour. To put it short, the dudes put in work.

“I look more for the off-handed moments that can be sustained as photos in themselves,” Cross tells me over the phone, while working in the darkroom basement of his home in Los Angeles. “I’m trying to be iconic, but at the same time I don’t want to make publicity photos for record companies,” Cross says. “The videos, in a way, can be much more interesting because the fluidity allows for a certain kind of candidness.”

Brian Cross, hip-hop, and working through the diaspora

Cross, 44, has quite a history with such candidness in his work. Born in Limerick, Ireland, he moved to San Francisco’s Mission district in 1990 before attending CalArts in Southern California to study photography. While still completing his degree, Cross started writing what would become a landmark book on the emergence and socio-political implications of hiphop in L.A.: It’s Not About a Salary: Rap, Race, and Resistance in Los Angeles (Verso Books, 1993). He is responsible for a number of iconic album covers of underground hiphop acts, from Freestyle Fellowship to Ras Kass and Mos Def. And Cross also made headway with more than a few magazine photo spreads and music videos throughout the past couple decades, including, notably, an arresting multi-textured piece for DJ Shadow’s “Midnight in a Perfect World” off Entroducing….. (Mo’ Wax Records, 1996).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=InFbBlpDTfQ

Looking over Cross’s ever-growing body of work, some primary themes consistently arise: Through the lens of hiphop, Cross orients a number of conversations, multi-generational interchanges, rhythmic confluences, and resistant divergences that weave through the diaspora of African musical traditions in the Americas. “There’s an anthropological side as well as an ethnomusicologist side to it—an attempt to make a map of the diaspora in terms of the music set by the present,” Cross explains. “The goal is ultimately to document in a way that is not strictly historical, but to let the past speak to now rather than the other way round.”

Michael Krimper I find an interesting dynamic in your film work and the documented live performances. On the one hand, you’ll take hiphop producers and DJs and pair them with percussionists, so as to put the contemporary in tension with the recent past that informed those contemporaries. On the other hand, there’s another element of featuring the music of those composers themselves. In what way do you think the past speaks to the present, as you put it, in both those approaches?

Brian Cross The idea is that somehow you don’t want to frame it off. In other words, for Keepintime, we didn’t want to get Paul Humphrey or Earl Palmer involved in something and frame off the dialogue in terms of, ‘Ok Paul, we want you to play the classic break on “One Man Band (Plays all Alone),” and now we’re going to layer something on top of it and develop a routine.’ But that’s not what’s interesting about Paul Humphrey. Yeah, it’s amazing he did that, and that’s why we’re choosing to work with him. But Paul Humphrey is somebody living and breathing; he’s our past, but he’s also our present. We want to open up a space of dialogue that is open to this series of works but isn’t limited to it.

For the Brasilintime project, we could have gone to Brazil and found obscure musicians who made amazing recordings and complete the narrative in the way that normal Eurocentric or Western versions of the story go: We bring them to Carnegie Hall, we do a concert, venerate them, and show them that Carnegie Hall is in fact the best venue in the world and is the most important place to see music. Whoa whoa whoa, back it up, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to go to there and engage, and try to actually build a bridge to the music. Let’s not have this as a one-sided sentence that leads in a single direction.

Generally, what we try to do is to de-center, to find ways in which we can open up, because, invariably, when you do these things, that’s when you make discoveries. Oh, Mamao and Wilson das Neves played on the Jose Mauro record, he died before the record came out, and then Dilla sampled it … that’s when you make these discoveries.

The musicians of Brasilintime (photo Brian Cross)

You know I don’t mind the Buena Vista Social Club [1997] record. Ry Cooder is a great producer and a great musician, but the film is fucking awful. It’s so fucking wrongheaded. And that director, Wim Wenders, is smarter than that, man. We’re people of the left, he knows better than that. Of course, everybody got involved and was super happy that these guys were finally discovered, and we can fully appreciate how beautiful their music is and the contributions they’ve made. But then Carnegie Hall is put into the equation; we don’t need to reaffirm the same set of cultural values. We don’t need that. Maybe that’s kind of a trite example, but I’m interested in trying to forge ways to talk about music, or to explore possibilities of music, that don’t fall into the same set of traps that most writing and television and documentaries about music fall into.

MK Yeah, there are standard methods for placing outsider music, or the marginal narratives of musical traditions and musicianship, into the mainstream narrative, one of validation internal to our own frameworks of understanding. As a photography and filmmaker, how do you approach a sense of the outsider, or the musician who is resistant, or peripheral to the grand narratives? What techniques do you take up in order to engage these musicians and traditions and make them visible for a broader audience?

BC Well, when it comes to Brazilian music, I’m pretty serious about my shit. I do my research thoroughly. I try to put my best foot into it. But other than that, it’s pure human relationships, man. For me, here’s my pet peeve: Too much of the stuff happening right now is done without real social engagement. It’s through the Internet, whether it’s digital digging, or people paying 800 dollars for an obscure record from Ethiopia or Angola, when you could buy a ticket to go there for the same amount. You should be going. That’s the responsibility. The responsibility is to go there, actually experience it, and see what works on the ground.

To go back to Ry Cooder, when he went to Cuba to make Buena Vista, that wasn’t the music people were listening to in Cuba. People were listening to Timba, and Timba is a completely different thing. I just think there’s a lot more to be gained from actually going to say, Baranquilla, and spending time there in the town—meeting people, buying records, meeting musicians—than there is from surfing the Internet and finding the latest hot cumbia re-groove from Argentina or whatever. If you’re serious about your shit you have to go there, engage on the ground, and see what makes sense. You like Wu-Tang? Go to Staten Island. Go for a walk around the projects. Go visit P.L.O. Liquors where all those songs came from. That’s the kind of compliment you need to be paying people. And there’s ways to do this that aren’t touristic. You can go and feel the vibe there. It might seem obvious, but it gets lost in these discussions.

MK Do you see that as your primary motivational force? That your projects are prefaced on this desire to travel, meet these musicians that inspire you where they live and make music; find out what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and be a part of it?

BC Well, the two things are kind of contingent. It’s cyclical somehow. I’m there, experiencing, helping to build bridges as best as I can, and I’m also thinking about photographs because that’s what I do.

MK How do you think this approach fits back into your earlier photo work in Los Angeles and your book, ‘It’s Not about a Salary?’

Clip from It's Not About a Salary (photo Brian Cross)

BC It’s an extension of it, really. You know the book is a very primitive thing, if you actually sit there and read it from cover to cover, which I did for a project a couple years ago, and I was highly embarrassed (laughs). But there was no model. It’s not like Can’t Stop Won’t Stop [Picador, 2005] existed, and someone had put that work down. I was 26, I had been into hiphop since I was 17, and I gave it a stab. And, of course, I put myself into a cultural debate that I didn’t know much about, for my own peril.

Ostensibly, the work isn’t much different. In that book, yeah, it’s about hiphop in Los Angeles, but I also managed to talk to Roy Porter, The Watts Prophets, Kamau Daaoood, Horace Tapscott, and a whole slew of other people who didn’t straightforwardly have anything to do with hiphop in Los Angeles. But in another way, they had everything to do with it. What has always been interesting for me with hiphop is that it has this historical reach. That’s what I tried to bring into the book. There’s definitely things which I don’t agree with now, and suppositions that I made or thought what would happen which didn’t. But it was a critical moment, right before The Chronic [Death Row, 1992], which I think was really a world changer.

The amazing thing about the golden era of hiphop, as they call it now, that era up to ‘95 or ’96, is that it was incredibly inclusive music. There was Japanese Koto, all sorts of rhythms from the Caribbean, rock, jazz, funk, you name it. That sourced people into record stores in different ways. The categories didn’t make sense as they did previously. That’s the magnetic lure of it. Somehow, hiphop allowed this extraordinary ability to look at previously recorded things and make them work in the present. For me, that was a critical modernist moment, or as the prevailing discourse has it a post-modernist moment—the collage and montage.

MK That brings up another interesting point in your work: the idea that when listening to hiphop not only is the origin of the break or the sample concealed, but also the artist’s background is concealed. The identity of the artist is mystified. Would you say that your projects aim towards making visible the musician as a person rooted in an environment or social setting?

BC The two-sided sword of the invention of youth culture is that it posits a kind of energy and dynamism to what we call youth. The problem is that the way it’s commodified is made contingent on the exclusion of anything outside youthful values or youthful thinking. I don’t agree with that. And if you look at the music of the diaspora, it’s not there. These kind of generational fishers don’t exist in other traditions of music: not in Latin, not in African-oriented music, and in my understanding of European folk traditions, they’re not there either.

While I find aspects of youth admirable, it shouldn’t ever be considered an exclusive category. For instance, David Axelrod is in his late 70s, and he has as much to contribute, and as many interesting things to say now as he did when he was 30. The thing is we’ve consigned him off to a category as if he doesn’t exist. And that seems ridiculous to me. I mean James Gadson still has fire now as a drummer just as he did when he played with Bill Withers. Why would we decide that he no longer has importance? It’s not like people have stopped listening to Bill Withers. But that’s how our music culture works. We fetishize the appearance of youth, but we’re not entirely clear on the implications of that. So, I like the idea of putting the person in the room if I can. For inclusivity, it has to be that.

And we have to get past the old ways of thinking, too. When I was first doing this, it was all super secretive. No one was supposed to know what your samples were or where your drums came from, because that was your tool kit, and if everyone had the same tool kit, it wouldn’t be interesting anymore. But I don’t buy that. In the end, there’s a deluge of information out there, it’s what you do with it that’s important. Your understanding and ability to manipulate the history is what’s important.

James Gadson (photo Brian Cross)

MK Even when you put out ‘Keepintime,’ I imagine that people worried that you would unveil the alchemic creative process, otherwise covered up, behind a hiphop record.

BC It goes back even before that. Take the video I did for DJ Shadow’s “Midnight In A Perfect World.” It plots out a series of concerns that I’m still interested in. You know, Earl Palmer is in there, and the sample is from a David Axelrod record. And they didn’t clear the sample. Shadow was terrified that Earl was going to recognize the song. But Earl didn’t even remember David Axelrod the person, let alone the record (laughs). They weren’t hits! Earl wasn’t sitting around listening to Axelrod records. But if you’re going to be too scared to talk to him, we’ll never learn anything from the guy. And then he shows up, and we’re transported to a whole different world: New Orleans before World War II.

You could say rock n’ roll came from the soles of Earl Palmer’s shoes. He was a child vaudeville performer, a tap dancer, and he battled against Sammy Davis Junior, and a lot of cats from that era. But he was never the best dude, and he was always interested in drums, so he taught himself how to play drums. So, that shuffle beat, that swamp beat as they call it, which became the foundation of rock n’ roll drumming, came from a guy who’s a tap dancer in black vaudeville as a child, who figured out a way to transform his tap dancing onto a drum kit. Think of the multi-billion dollar industry that rock n’ roll has become, and we still don’t know these things. We have to sit down and talk to these guys to find out these stories.

If It Fits in the Backpack: 10 Years on the Road with Mochilla
Thru 06/30
Peek Gallery @ The Summit SF

An earlier version of this article was published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

I heard the news of Gil Scott-Heron’s death while visiting friends in New York. We spent much of our evenings waxing intoxicated under the violet canopy of early mornings, yelling and laughing, talking The Watts Prophets and Melvin Van Peebles, bumping jazz and hip-hop, falling silent and being silent, listening to Jamie xx’s remix record of Scott-Heron’s latest and last effort, I’m New Here. Our own peculiar brand of mourning.

Over cartons of dumplings, we entertained alleged causes of death. Weakness stirred by drugs? Complications from HIV? Exhaustion? I saw Scott-Heron perform in San Francisco two years ago, I professed, and he warned us not to trust the many rumors circulating about his ill health. Was it just a strategy for the satirist to protect himself?

But then a year afterward, the New Yorker published Alec Wilkinson’s haunting profile of Scott-Heron’s struggle with crack. He smoked openly in front of the reporter. His body was thin and twisted, his face gaunt, and his voice, once a sweet baritone, now battered and gruff.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7c3wRzUUjs

Scott-Heron took no credit for the album on XL Recordings, the brainchild of former UK rave producer Richard Russell. He may have wanted to give Russell due credit for organizing the deeply evocative record, pairing Scott-Heron’s gravelly lyrics over sparse beats and menacing bass; but even so, he would neglect to mention that many of those recorded words were indeed his own–a collage of poems culled from his early 1970s book, The Vulture, captured asides in the studio, covers of blues and fettered demons that he made his own, that were his own.

In a radio interview last year on BBC, host Mark Coles attempted to address the subject of Scott-Heron’s personal trials. Scott-Heron interrupted, “Very few things have been autobiographical that have been included in my work … If you do a good job on a song and convince people of it, they’ll attach it to your biography as though it’s actually something that’s part of your life instead of a good acting job…. And so we’ve made a lot of characters come to life for people, because they needed them to come to life.”

At one point during those drunken evenings, during the first humid wisps of summer in America, Edgar wondered why Scott-Heron didn’t own it. He could have owned it; whether he suffered from HIV, or became a victim of the crack epidemic that still plagues  our inner cities, or however he might have spiraled down the caverns of his own troubled soul.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b2F-XX0Ol0

It’s reasonable to wonder why the bluesologist infamous for tapping into spiritual and political unrest, known for “The Bottle” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “Angel Dust,” remembered still for his masterpiece recording in 1974, Winter in America, didn’t openly reckon with his transfiguration into the protagonist of his own cautionary tales. And maybe we would have listened. Maybe the time had come that we would have paid attention to Scott-Heron, again. That he would not be just another black musician, poet, shaman, political defiant, visionary, tossed to the history books or the hip-hop samples, the category of dead before they’re dead, and then when they’re really dead, we can finally remember again.

Greg Tate wrote for the Village Voice of the spells of ruin, momentary rejuvenation, and ghostly disappearance of Scott-Heron. He was wiped away in prison, became a drugged hermit in his Harlem apartment, showed mere glimmers of life as a passerby in the New York subway. Tate saw Scott-Heron locked in the all-too-familiar story of American musicians ”who’d figured it all out by puberty and were maybe too clever and intoxicated on their own Rimbaudean airs to ever give up the call of the wild.” He was caught in a gyre of self-destruction and renewal, as we sat by idly, just hoping he would find his way out of the tragic cycle. Whereas white musicians like Bob Dylan and Keith Richards mustered popular support for their healing and peace of mind, black musicians like Hendrix and Scott-Heron and James Brown vanish to the wayside.

Strangely, Scott-Heron prophesied it all in his songs. He spoke and sung seemingly from a distance, sketching out the horrors and demons that haunted a scourged American dream. But he always implicated himself, quietly and sometimes secretly, in these songs. In “The Bottle,” he sang, “If you ever come looking for me/ You know where I’m bound to be — in a bottle. / If you see some brother looking like a goner/ It’s gonna be me.” Scott-Heron spun private confession into the appearance of political protest.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOUMvjw9RlA

Many of Scott-Heron’s older songs now feel more damning, fresher and more troubling than before. He sings of the sick redemption found in drugs in “Home is Where the Hatred is,” and revisits the pain of being uprooted, of not finding a place of rest, and of not coming from a place of settled warmth, in “Home.”

Stand as far away from me as you can and ask me why
Hang on to your rosary beads
Close your eyes to watch me die
You keep saying, kick it, quit it, kick it, quit it
God, but did you ever try
To turn your sick soul inside out
So that the world, so that the world
Can watch you die

“Because I always feel like running,” Scott-Heron intones on his latest, “Not away, because there is no such place/ Because if there was, I would have found it by now.”

Blu's commissioned mural on the side of LA's Geffen was promptly removed after completion.

The first retrospective on the history of graffiti in an American museum has proved immensely contentious. (The very first retrospective worldwide was at the Fondation Center in Paris in 2009, “Born in the Streets”). A couple months ago, Jeffrey Deitch, the new director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and spur for the graffiti exhibition, commissioned a mural from Italian graffiti artist Blu on the side of the Geffen. When Blu painted a critique of the cycle of money, violence, and war, Deitch had the controversial mural promptly removed. Censorship was a strange way for Deitch to preface an exhibition tracing the contemporary history of unsanctioned graffiti art.

Placing a show called “Art in the Streets” in a museum is also strange, if not something of a paradox. Hence the clunky title of this article, Art in the Streets in a Museum.

More recently, a few writers have pointed out a commercial conflict of interests. To curate the exhibition, Deitch hired Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose, both of whom have close ties to an increasingly lucrative marketplace where in many ways graffiti’s gripping aesthetic is commercialized.

In addition to these tensions, I haste to mention the abundance of conservative lash backs and policing frustrations: mostly concerning the horror that vandalism and hoodlums should be celebrated in a museum, in addition to the fear that graffiti has spiraled in the vicinity around Geffen’s downtown location, and finally, the anxiety that the exhibition will convert more of Los Angeles’s susceptible youth to a lifestyle of graffiti and crime. With all of the ink already spilled, what more can I say?

Perhaps I should mention that a great deal of the art in the exhibition is pretty good. In entering the spacious Geffen building, I immediately noticed something typically absent in art exhibitions. Excitement. Enthusiasm. A huge block letter masterpiece spelling out “WOW!” at the entrance (shown above).

I came to gather that the colorful works covering the walls, installations placed throughout the building, many films from the likes of Spike Jonze and Tony Silver’s Style Wars, Henry Chalfant’s and Martha Cooper’s documentary photography of the early days of New York subway graffiti, and various pieces of ephemera actually mattered to the people visiting the exhibition.

Some of the installations sought to produce an immersive experience of bringing the streets into the museum. “Street Market” by Stephen Powers, Barry McGee, and Todd James is a clustered array of rotted buildings and thin alleys that evokes the decay of the urban environment in the last few decades. Piles of trash and empty beer cans are strewn about. Tags cover the sides of the claustrophobic buildings and metal fences which surround them.

Swoon’s elaborate paper and glass sculpture, made out of the basic materials of stencil work, played with light and shadow. The dramatically set work called attention to the fleeting nature of graffiti–an ephemeral form of art that is typically buffed just as quickly as it makes its appearance in the city streets and infrastructure.

A more trite example of this immersive tactic comes from Neckface who installed a dark corner alleyway, littered with trash, and even a fake sleeping homeless man on the floor. But it is possible that someone else planted the homeless doll there, as if there could not be any more lack of subtlety. There’s even a scrawled Neckface tag on the black wall and some ghostly sound effects which gurgle from hidden speakers. Immersion quickly degenerated into the artificiality of a Disneyland-like spectacle.

One of the more transporting spaces was a room dedicated to the bizarre work of Rammellzee, the late graffiti artist, toy maker, and avant-rapper who teamed up with Basquiat for “Beat Bop” back in 1983. Ram wrote what are perhaps the earliest manifestos of New York letter-based graffiti circa the early 80s golden era. He connected graffiti’s pseudonymous form to medieval calligraphy and conspiracy theories regarding cryptic secrets hidden beneath the letter and number.

Unfortunately, copies of those manifestos were not present in the recreated “Battle Station“–a space that resembles Ram’s one time flat in Manhattan–where a great deal of galactic sculptures, neon lit and heavily armored, hang ghostly from the ceiling. It is a trip into the embodied psyche of one of graffiti’s more peripheral personalities.

Banksy, of course, also gets a spacious room all for himself. His work suggests a critique precisely of the tension of bringing street art into the museum. For the centerpiece of his work, Banksy asked local high school students to tag panels in a range of vibrant colors. He then framed the panels in what resembles a tri-partite stained glass window of a Church. Near the bottom is a stencil of a figure kneeling in prayer to the tags.

Banksy steamroller and stained tag window, credit Billyburgwick.

A great rupture explodes between the work and the audience, and the distance between them stretches far in the sanctified space of the museum. At the other end of the room, a security camera guards its nest of baby security cameras and unhatched eggs. Near the middle, a steamroller looms near as if warning us of the onslaught of the commodification of the medium.

The question still remains: What do we lose when we rip street art from its natural world in the neglected spaces of the urban core into the carefully planned and articulated space of the museum? Is graffiti the sort of art that can retain its meaning in a strictly aesthetic form?

At least the documentary footage and photography, even some of the installations, helped orient us back to the natural origins of graffiti.

Much of the exhibit was predicated on the idea of inserting graffiti into a grander narrative of art history, primarily I would say, as some sort of marginal descendant of Pop Art and maybe even of some of the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, such as Dada. I suppose it was a necessary choice on the part of the curators. In order to legitimate street art in a museum, it has to make sense within the historical narrative of what is considered museum art.

But I would have much preferred a framing of graffiti that focused more extensively on its internal narrative outside the boundaries of, and at times at odds with, the historical trajectory of contemporary museum art.

A room upstairs traced the different temporal stages of graffiti’s development: 1970s New York subway art and Los Angeles cholo graffiti, the gallery scene in the 80s, and graffiti’s infectious spread to other parts of the country (San Francisco, Chicago) as well as to other parts of the world (Paris, Sao Paulo). Also explored was how graffiti influenced skate boarding, tattoo art, and some realms of street fashion.

1970s New York: Lee Quinones and Vaughn Bode

Surely, for more than a few “Art in The Streets” mattered negatively. The scourge! Vandalism celebrated! Property crimes not condemned! These are the people still convinced by the argument that graffiti, in its pure unsanctioned form as vandalism, can never be art. Why you ask? Because it damages property! These are the same subtle rhetoricians who then go on to insult graffiti artists’ intelligence. What a world.

I wonder why it is so important for these critics to dismiss the artistic status of graffiti on the basis of its illegality? Is the value of art still, or has it ever been, so powerful that it should be based on its legality? I imagine not. Graffiti is illegal and art. Let’s move on in the conversation.

Art that transgresses property rights and the bureaucratic institutions that grant permission is problematic and intriguing enough in its own regard. We need to start raising questions about the symptoms in our cities that have generated graffiti. What is happening to our public space? Who has a right to this public space? Do our laws regarding property rights, in the public and private spheres, require revision? Is vandalism ever tolerable? At what point do we draw the line?

Oh, and let us not forget the incontrovertible broken windows theory. No matter how many times the problematic research has been called into the doubt, and severely interrogated, the beast keeps on rearing its ugly head.

A fairly crude formulation might go like this: There’s a domino effect instigated by graffiti. Once social and parental order has broken down in a neighborhood, a.k.a. there’s apparent graffiti everywhere (the paradigm broken window), then all sorts of crimes will arise from the spoiled crevices of that moral decrepitude. First robberies. Then drugs. Murders and rapes will soon follow.

Here’s some choice selections from the LA Times Opinion section:

– “The exhibition honors such alleged high points in graffiti history as the first cholo tag on the Arroyo Seco parkway and the defacement of L.A.’s freeway signs, without the slightest hint that graffiti is a crime, that it appropriates and damages property without permission and that it destroys urban vitality.” [link]

– “It might have been possible to mount a show that acknowledged the occasionally compelling graphic elements of urban art without legitimizing a crime. Such an exhibit wouldn’t include glamorizing photos of freeway, subway or L.A. River vandalism — and would unequivocally condemn appropriating someone else’s property without permission. “Art in the Streets” does not come close to that standard.” [link]

– “I say that if it hangs in a museum, or is put up on a building with permission, it can be art. But if it’s put up on my garage, it’s vandalism.” [link]

To those who fear the purported rise of graffiti in downtown, I would like to know to what extent the murder rate has increased in proportion to those graffiti tags. And to those who think that graffiti “destroys urban vitality” or amounts to urban blight, I would ask why a blank wall is any better than a tagged wall?

If it is purely a matter of aesthetics, and nothing is better than something as these minimalists contend, then it would be consistent to also condemn public advertisements and ugly street signs. Perhaps cars also. Indeed, we should strip our public spaces of any mark of human life.

And let’s please make a distinction between graffiti on your “garage” and graffiti in public space: in the alleys behind Melrose, across the concrete banks of the neglected L.A. River, on a trash dumpsters in MOCA’s parking lot, over the monstrous jeans ads on the Sunset strip. There is a difference, and it is about time we start discussing these issues seriously.

But these critics, despite their lack of creativity, underscore an important problem with “Art in the Streets.” The exhibition simply does not directly address the illegality of graffiti. We see pictures of early Los Angeles cholo tags on the river, huge throw-ups on billboards, a collection of photographs from the New York subway heyday, and yet, not so much a cautious discussion of the idea that graffiti is unsanctioned and illegal.

It is as if Deitch and his team of curators tried to wipe the illegality clean out of graffiti.

Yet that illegality and subsequent criminalization of graffiti is nonetheless tacitly lurking in the exhibition. Infamous LA graffiti artist, Revok, who features work in “Art in the Streets,” was recently arrested for his vandalism and sentenced to 180 days in jail.

A billboard masterpiece from Revok.

There’s also not so much of a discussion concerning the fact that for the most part black and brown youth from economically depressed neighborhoods initiated graffiti. This may be the only visual art movement in the history of the world that was created, developed, and self-fashioned by teenagers. Let alone teenagers who had close to nothing. Teenagers who responded as they could to the disillusionment and failures of the post civil-rights era–who were directly ignored by new institutional policies of Reagan’s ‘benign neglect’ towards ghettos country-wide. Is this not an important facet of the internal narrative of graffiti?

That is good preparation for reducing graffiti to an aesthetic of stylized pseudonyms, geometrical patterns, wheat-pastes, and ideas that just happened to occur in the street–ready to be spliced from its natural environment to be placed on museums walls, or in an advertisement campaign for Nike.

For some time, at least, sanctioned graffiti art will retain the residue of its edge, like a badge of its once dangerous and rebellious past. But eventually, that past will decay, and the market will have appropriated yet another fearless movement into its ever expanding reach over every small facet of everyday human life. Here come the steamrollers.

Still from the music video for Britney Spears' "Till the World Ends"

Just a month ago, the new Britney Spears’ album Femme Fatale dropped to surprisingly rave reviews, even from reputable sources. While I can’t say I’ve listened to the whole record, I’ll confirm that at least one single stands up to Slate writer Jody Rosen’s high praise. I must also admit that “Till the World Ends” is currently on heavy rotation.

A thunderous four-to-the-floor Euro house beat underpins Spears’ lustful croons about, yes, dancing ’til the world ends–dramatic synth crescendos and all. Silence. Another crescendo, muted at first. Louder. Louder. Hair Swinging. Water floods out of the pipes. And the drop! Maybe the last drop of forever ever! This is apocalyptic pop music at its finest bubblegum sheen.

Who knew that elaborate fashion/dance spectacles would take place in the sewers underneath Los Angeles as downtown skyscrapers are struck by the fires of revelation? Or wayward asteroids? Doesn’t Britney look sort of dead in the face in the music video?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzU9OrZlKb8

Spears is certainly not the first to take up such a seductive subject as the dance party at the end of time. Prince may have jumped off the whole theme with a song that has reached the apex of pop legacy, “1999.” Since, Daft Punk movingly recharged the urgency of the apocalyptic rave with “One More Time,” and many underground acts have followed suit–maybe even films too. So I ask myself, and you as well, dear reader: What does waxing lyrical about the end of time bring to the dance floor?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnuijDieOvY

Allow me to speculate with a somewhat grandiose theory. Time works differently on the dance floor. There’s multiple levels to this. I’ll start with the body in motion. Rhythmic music intoxicates the body, setting it into the groove. The groove has no beginning or end. We tap into the groove; it has always been there. The groove disturbs our sense of mechanical time, thrusting our limbs into repetitive patterns which play on cyclical themes.

The way bodies move to rhythm overflows, stretching outwards, towards no determinate horizon. Psychologists have come to call this experience, where the body is completely absorbed in its activity, flow. You don’t have to dance physically on the floor in order for the groove to come into play. As Lee Scratch Perry says, the groove can motivate a mental dance. The club, or the dance floor, must establish the right conditions for bodies, or minds, in flow.

In recent decades the club has become a space of relief from everyday mechanical time, the sort of time that can be measured and put to the clock, divided into segments and distributed in wages. The time of the dance floor can’t be quantified; it breathes and unfolds in waves of energy. The mechanized clock organizes the goals of labor and pushes forward human activity towards completion. Dance instigates no completion. The play of dance falls forward towards no goal in sight besides its own internal movement, constantly fulfilled while opening towards further fulfillment.

So what does the lyrical gesture towards the end of days add to the temporality of dance? I’ll take some choice cuts from Prince’s “1999″ to illustrate the three essential, interrelated elements.

1) Urgency: “Yeah, everybody’s got a bomb/ We could all die any day/ But before I’ll let that happen/ I’ll dance my life away.”

2) Necessity: “War is all around us/ My mind says prepare to fight/ So if I gotta die/ I’m gonna listen 2 my body tonight.”

And the song ends with:

3) Eternity: “Yeah, 1999/ Don’t cha wanna go/ Don’t cha wanna go/ We could all die any day/ I don’t wanna die/ I’d rather dance.”

Although Prince admits he was dreaming when he wrote “1999,” he hardly takes an idealistic stance on the temporality of dance, what we might also call “party time.” “But life is just a party/ And parties weren’t meant to last,” he sings in the opening verse. So we could even add an understanding of finitude–that we dance in the face of the vulnerability of life and death–as the fourth essential element which binds necessity, eternity, and urgency into a whole.

Vulnerability not only increases the stakes of the party (because we would thereby acknowledge the great abyss or inevitable negation that haunts our waking life, our surrounding world, and the earth’s longevity) but also amounts to producing the paradox of eternity in time, an eternity incarnate in the flesh of the dance floor. Other artists have similarly represented these rapturous traits of the dance.

"Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing" -- William Blake

Strange enough, on the eve of 2001, in that apocalyptic world post-Prince’s “1999,” I found myself glued to the television watching Daft Punk’s “One More Time” on repeat. After I got lifted to new heights of intoxication on some Cali herb, the video of celebration at the end of time felt so important and resonant that I wanted aliens to come down and give us one last chance to party to bass pummeling synth-funk before they evaporated the entire earth.

What Daft Punk captures in this song, that Prince just might have glossed over lyrically, is how the temporality of partying not only stretches to infinity but also liberates: “One more time/ Music’s got me feelin so free/ We gonna celebrate/ Celebrate and dance so free.” On loop.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGBhQbmPwH8

I’m sad to say that I don’t think Britney replicates the sublime effects of Daft Punk’s and Prince’s party time songs. There’s far worse out there, though. I’ll even give you one. Jay Sean and Nicki Minaj get the scorched earth award for the worst apocalyptic dance song ever created with last year’s “2012.”

There may be more legitimately Dionysian a-pop-alyptic songs out there on different wavelengths or buried under vaults of Barbara Streisand records. So get up to the celebratory dance sonics of the apocalypse! And we’ve got to hope that some gifted musician will take up the challenge again.

John Maus at the Victory Grill

One might call John Maus‘s live performance at the Victory Grill “unbelievable.” And so we did. Maus wailed and shook on the stage, grappling with his microphone like he was trying to strangle it, occasionally screaming not into the microphone, but away from it, out over the heads of the crowd, into the void.

None of this would be so strange were it not for the fact that Maus stood alone on the stage, nary an instrument in sight. Even a guitar hanging from Maus’s neck would have made him more comprehensible, more mundane. We likened him to a drunken karaoke performer, seeing teary renditions of “Don’t Stop Believing” from our pasts reflected in the sincerity and abandon of his stage presence. But a karaoke performer fully gripped in the throws of rapturous intoxication. . . who has come, alas, to the desperate and final realization that he is truly alone in the world.

The maudlin aspects of Maus’s performance were made even more apparent by the Lynchian setting. The venue was dimly lit by red overhead lights; Maus performed on a low, bare stage before a set of bedraggled velvet curtains; teenagers ringed him on two tiers of torn diner seats; out front the restaurant — an old jazz/blues establishment that has maintained in the neighborhood since the sunset of World War II — served catfish sandwiches and strawberry cake.

Maus’s music is reminiscent of that of Gary Wilson. But where Wilson’s eccentric spirit manifested itself in the form of schizophrenic, voyeuristic songs, Maus’s lyrics center on the tried and true themes of love and solitude. When Wilson does sing about loneliness, it’s more of a despair-ridden solipsism than a pained enchantment with love loss. Maus’s music is an earnest cry of desperation; a distant groan of unrequited love; a spell of ceaseless wandering and homelessness; a scream into the ghostly neon-lit night.

Maus yelped in awe and chanted over programmed motorik rhythms and synthetic harmonies, an unsettling combination of sounds he once honed as a member of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti.

***

The Soft Moon and Shabazz Palaces at Klub Krucial

Whereas John Maus’s screams were uncontrolled and sometimes animal in nature, The Soft Moon‘s Luis Vasquez screamed methodically, then distorted the percussive quality of his voice into the cipher of an echo chamber.

It was our second time seeing The Soft Moon, and we are prepared now to say that Vasquez has his live show down to a science. The visuals, which were projected onto a huge empty wall behind the band, reflected the sparse geometric structures of the post-punk beats and the muted lightness-upon-darkness of the synthesized melodies. It was as if the video for “Circles” came alive on the set.

The venue in which we saw the Moon is usually a dingy hiphop dance club, but in the daytime, the dusty mirrors and grime and the torn-apart carpets made it look like a genuine 80s new wave joint. Some real tech-noir kind of steez. We’re still waiting for The Soft Moon to play “When It’s Over” live — a track maybe a bit too despondent for most in a live setting, but without a doubt the one song that launches the listener into the prime emotional desolation at the heart of The Soft Moon’s catalogue.

Unfortunately for Shabazz Palaces, the whole fitting-right-into-the-environment thing didn’t work out for them so smoothly. Technical difficulties cut Butterfly’s partner off from his mic and electronic drum kit; all we could hear from him was the minimal bongo rhythm over the crunchy low end bass charged off of the MPC. At times Butterfly shifted from the vital frustration and anger of the inner city Shabazz Palaces anthems to the spacey slam poetry anachronisms endemic to his Digable Planets days. This had us thinking: We’d really like to hear El-P in his prime remix Blowout Comb; on a second thought, that’s what Shabazz sounds like at its best.

Dominique Young Unique, taking it to the streets

Not that there weren’t some killer female MCs in town at the time. We stumbled quite accidentally upon a set by Dominique Young Unique, to our delight. How else can we say it: She rocked the crowd flawlessly. The two white guys backing her up on beats and instrumentals — a long-haired metalhead and a computer programmer from the UK — also rocked it, albeit in their own nerdy way. At one point the metalhead picked up his synth keyboard and got down like Dam-Funk keytar style.

Musically, Dominique reminds us of Thunderheist but with her hood pass intact. Girl raps rapid-fire style with a 15 year-old’s bravado over video game electro noise. This recipe could easily become cheesy but Dominique channels a bit more of the charisma and longevity of a Roxanne Shante than an Amanda Blank. (Although big ups to Amanda Blank when she sings over Eli Escobar’s nu-disco, but not so much when she raps.)

Dominique Young Unique — who is from Tampa, Florida — was recently taken under the wing of another Florida act of similar tendencies: Yo Majesty. You can definitely hear the Miami bass and Freestyle influences merged with Salt -n-Pepa “Push It” antics, which never gets tired as long as you play the game with correctness. Although the limited emotional range of this kind of electro can hold talent back, Dominique’s sharp swagger was made both more impressive and more emotionally rich by how much innocent fun she was visibly having on stage. Others agree. We also caught the tail end of an act at Beauty Bar with Yo Majesty’s Shunda K on the mic and Austin’s own DJ Orion on the turntables; girl still knows how to work the crowd.

***

Das Racist at the ND

And of course many hiphop acts at SXSW did not fall into the easy categories of a black/white divide. Take Das Racist, for example, repping hard for the Brown when we saw them perform at the ND and galavant about town the rest of the weekend (playing a total of something like 15 shows in 2 days).

The three gentlemen of Das Racist mostly yelled their songs (sometimes in a falsetto), punctuating them with funny effeminate dance displays and a shrill pterodactyl sound Mike was particularly fond of. Their set at the ND was something like a cross between a rap show and a stand-up act, featuring one liners like “yo that was SHOE-icide. Cause his feet were KILLIN it.”

This extra entertainment was much appreciated by our Hydra heads; unlike other acts that spent a half hour tinkering with mic volumes, Das Racist displayed an utter disregard for detailed sound engineering, although this came at the expense of their ability to communicate their music’s best attribute: their clever lyrics and wordplay.

Addendum: We would see Das Racist again, this time while meandering around an after-hours party they were headlining. Out of nowhere Heems and some scrapper began to brawl it out on the street outside of the club, Heems’s air freshener chain bouncing to-and-fro, his wifebeater pulled over his chest, revealing a spacious underbelly. Actually it wasn’t much of a scrapper; just looked like a normal kid who was standing in line to see Das Racist. He probably didn’t even know who (or what) hit him.

***

Jamie xx and SBTRKT at Barcelona

To reconnect with the first part of our dispatch, we’re still trying to work through some thoughts regarding the massive influx of UK electronic sounds to American dance floors. Mexicans with Guns impressed us with the sense that the programmed percussive swing of American digitalism quite directly mirrors England’s syncopated but slightly off kilter dance records. This latter scene was showcased at South by Southwest by UK garage producer SBTRKT and a sprawling DJ set by Jamie xx.

SBTRKT has an ear for the forward pulse of 2-step as well as the bubbling synthetic melodies and soulful croons of garage. These tunes sound amazing on a sound system crafted for the low end, and we were getting a heavy dose of it at Barcelona. If dubstep might have grown a bit tiresome within its own wobble wobble fold, we have it to thank  not only for importing the sonic trajectory of the UK into the US, but also for its help spawning all those fragmented mutations of uptempo dance music in England — from future garage to funky to dubbage and whatever else is on the rise.

The authenticity of the British club experience in Barcelona actually made it difficult for particular Hydra writers to focus on the music. Certain of us (Adri) were mostly trying to dodge the insane coked-out British girls that filled the club in their “frocks” whilst thrashing about arrythmically. But from what we did hear, Jamie xx spiraled from American sources of dance tunes to the UK takeovers, and back and forth through the dialectic. His selections spanned Chicago ghetto-tech, deep house, as well as grime/club tunes, genres of dance music that mesh seamlessly yet complement each other’s patterns of intensity. The ferociousness of the bass and warmness of both the synth keys and vocals fit easily into our SXSW thematic of swag/vulnerability.

***

James Blake at the Fader Fort

Shortly after Cass McComb‘s solid — but rather unremarkable — set at the Fader Fort, fellow crooner James Blake took the stage. A blonde fangirl with a large backpack informed us in an offended and authoritative tone that we should all be as excited as she was for Blake’s impending appearance. Once the man of the hour did appear, we were struck by the similarity of his appearance and sincere delivery to that of  pop icon Justin Bieber. Quipped Adri: I’m waiting for Bieber to pull a James Blake. Responded Mike: You mean James Blake to pull a Bieber.

Jokes aside, (and seriously though, Bieber really channels Michael Jackson on “Runaway Love“) Blake performed his tender, skeletal dub-step lamentations with polished, graceful aplomb, adding some cool musical refreshment to an otherwise sweltering afternoon. Blake’s tunes show that the structural framework of dance music — when dissected, retextured, and rearranged — can offer quite a bit of inspiration and emotional fodder for a singer-songwriter. And along with stateside groups like Gayngs, Blake proves that there is something to be sonically salvaged from the soft-rock side of the 1980s.

***

Los Rakas, Dave Nada, and Toy Selectah at Frank

Oaktown boys Los Rakas also repped the brown and the raka, adding a latin infusion to SXSW to counterbalance Fader’s shutout. To our surprise, we found them performing at local restaurant Frank, where we also saw fav DJs Dave Nada and Toy Selectah. Dave Nada’s expert drops kept us engaged and the floor moving, as did the mad stylings and intricate transitions of Toy Selectah on the clocks.

Most exciting was the way that Los Rakas and Toy Selectah chose to combine the energy of traditionally-inflected live vocals and call-and-response with the spinning of sophisticated beats.  After a week straight of all-day shows and all-night partying, our Hydra correspondents needed a concentrated dose of that freshness in order to stay awake.