I’m not sure how I feel about Montreal. Ever since I started learning French I’ve associated the language with hostility and romantic impulses for sneering antagonism. The language of love and revolution. Or perhaps just indulgent protests and overpriced espresso. In all fairness, my narrow and decidedly cliche perspective is both the fault of and refers only to Parisians.
At any rate, it was a bit of a shock to speak the language to the warm and helpful Quebecois. For instance, I stopped by the Museum of Fine Arts for an exhibit on the life and work of Miles Davis (“We Want Miles“), which included a couple of his original paintings (who knew?), and the female worker at the gift shop didn’t even erupt in laughter when I screwed up the word for stamp. I had just bought a postcard of Mati Klarwein’s strange and brilliant gatefold cover of Bitches Brew (shown above), Miles Davis’ first foray into the funky side of jazz. Timbre said the museum attendant, her face wrinkled into a professorial concentration, generous and stern, the word for a stamp as well as the creator of that art. She fingered my postcard. I looked at her slightly confused. Someone who is crazy in the head. Her face finally dewrinkled and she gave me directions to the nearest post office.
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South Korea resumed operations of psychological warfare against North Korea — effectively ending a six-year moratorium on propaganda — in response to the sinking of the Cheonan warship. The broadcast began yesterday evening at 6 p.m. on FM radio when a female anchor announced, what she called, the “voice of freedom”. What followed was a dance-pop song by girl group, Four Minute, titled “Huh”. The lighthearted melodies of freedom waded into North Korea, pulsing over a heavily synthesized bass line. Fairly assertive girlish voices — occasionally autotuned into a robotic growl — paraded their ability to do whatever they wanted while underscoring the dangers of overeating.
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A couple nights ago I dropped by my new favorite Los Angeles cinema, the historic and tragic Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax, now completely reimagined by the oh so excellent curatorial group Cinefamily. As part of a series on animation for grown-ups, Cinefamily hosted a special screening and presentation on the origins of Nick Jr.’s strangely brilliant pre-school kids program, Yo Gabba Gabba.
Gabba is the brainchild of a couple skate-punk musicians (Christian Jacobs of the Aquabats and Scott Schultz of Majestic) who as new fathers found themselves quite disappointed with the limited creativity of children’s programming on television. That disappointment spawned wonder and fortunately, they found a dude as charismatic and as Easy Reader cool as DJ Lance Rock (another musician, Lance Robertson) to host the show. Gabba has become something of a phenomenon, gripping audiences from all age brackets, not just its two-year-old target market, and constantly pushing the envelope of how creative and musically inspired a kids show for the pre-linguistic can be. Now moving into its third season, Gabba is just getting more and more bizarrely fascinating.
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A couple months ago I wrote a blog post about how music videos were getting a bit monstrous. At the time, I didn’t yet find it odd that I was even watching music videos even though that MTV had long stopped playing them, and well, who watches the television nowadays anyway? Looks like the Internet brought them back in full force. Did you realize Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” is pushing nearly 75 million views? New York magazine published an excellent article earlier this week tracing the history of the music video, its death, and now its revival thanks to high definition streaming on Youtube and Vimeo and the fact that we’ve all become obsessive media consumers on the web.
A few of the directors (including Spike Jonze, back again) are even turning the craft into an art again. It seems that the purpose of the music video is primarily to become viral, so we keep seeing more and more outrageous, sensuous and all around captivating videos. A good gimmick works as well; after all, OK Go is credited with putting this beast on the treadmill. If you haven’t been keeping up, I’ve got some treats after the jump — a prison love affair between Beyonce and Lady Gaga, a hybrid human-panda intoxicated takeover of LCD Soundsystem, and Beyonce again, whoa.
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But certainly for the present age, which refers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence,. . . illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. – Feurbach (via Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle)
I don’t know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower. — Banksy
Yes, Banksy has once again invoked the gawking hearts of the Internet–all sorts of media sources — and maybe even real people. The mischievous and still publicly anonymous vandal, known for his slyly playful and politically-minded graffiti (like painting on the West Bank barrier), learned an important lesson from his many years of painting on private property: art gathers as much meaning from its context as its content. It might not seem like much of a radical thought, but by taking environmental context seriously Banksy has been able to make art more of an event than a cultural artifact. Some of Banksy’s most memorable performance stunts find him placing things in unlikely places: his own work among the masters or inside a Paris Hilton album, a painted elephant in the middle of his debut gallery opening or a Guantanamo Bay prisoner doll near a Disneyland ride. Banksy’s new project, the supposed documentary on street art Exit Through the Gift Shop, plays all these tricks and more.
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I picked up a CD of Moment of Truth, the fifth full-length effort of NY duo Gang Starr, back in 1998. I was still a young hiphop fiend excited to sink my teeth into whatever beats and rhymes came my way. But even my immersion in Los Angeles during the apex of the G-Funk era and a swelling underground scene championing freestyle ciphers and heady rhymes hardly prepared me for Gang Starr. While it seemed as if both poles of Los Angeles hiphop were hinged on exaggeration, an aggressive hyperrealism on one side countered by boundless formal play on the other extreme, Gang Starr brought the mind’s eye to the street level. The name says it all; the people and the cosmos linked together.
In Moment’s self-titled song, Guru raps: Styles, smooth but rugged — you can’t push or shove it/ You dig it and you dug it cause like money you love it/ The king of monotone, with my own throne/ Righteously violent prone my words bring winds like cyclones. It was subliminal grime. Royal thinking and commercial desire merged together. Even the instrumental production propped up that balance. Guru’s partner and producer, DJ Premier, flipped horn samples from dusty jazz and funk crates (Donald Byrd to James Brown) over coarse boom bap percussion while Guru matched the tension holding those chest-rattling beats with both effortless delivery and strong minded lyricism. He was always in deep concentration, hiphop’s most memorable incarnation of the street philosopher.
Guru, known from birth as Keith Elam and in his later years as Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal, died Monday. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood, and was in a coma since a heart attack in mid-February. He was 47 years old.
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It’s somewhat surprising that we’ve cultivated a genre of art, most often in film, referred to in the most casual speak as ‘so horrible it’s great’. Birdemic: Shock and Terror – the debut work of amateur filmmaker and day-time San Jose software salesman James Nguyen — is the newest cult craze to flood the midnight screenings. The film is currently spreading all over the country, quickly becoming today’s newest exploitation epidemic. Enthusiastic and often intoxicated crowds hoot and holler at Nguyen’s ingenuous effort to create a “romantic thriller”; pauses in conversation last too long, the story shifts in fragmented directions, and of course, birds fall from the sky and bomb stuff.
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 Two intriguing books have recently been published with similar interests in the connected histories of both modern music and technology. Steve Goodman (a.k.a. dubstep progenitor Kode9) just published an ambitious academic work on MIT Press, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, illustrating sonic technology’s potential for either a politics of control or artistic creativity. And Dave Tomkins finished a book on the vocoder after ten years of accumulated research, How To Wreck a Nice Beach (Stop Smiling pub.), named after how the vocoder, a portmanteau of voice and coder, misreads the phrase, “how to recognize speech.” Tompkin’s thoroughly funkified book traces the history of the vocoder from its military origins as designed in response to Nazi wiretapping all the way to robotic electro jams and today’s Auto-tune synthesized, pop anthems championed by T-Pain.
It’s quite strange that so much sonic technology is so tightly tied to military inventions and purposes, and even more fascinating how much music has been able to appropriate the initial intentionality of that weaponry towards its own creative-minded purposes.
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 Herman Eberitzsch Jr. III in the early 70s The medium of recorded music has reached a pivotal age in its maturation. The origins of recording technology reach back well over a century (the earliest phonograph recordings date to the late 1800s), and the most longstanding traditions of American music– blues, folk, rock– now penetrate the ears and hearts of over three generations. And while some preservationists have dug into the forgotten eras of American music before (i.e. Harry Smith’s impressive folk anthologies), the archival practice has never surpassed a rarefied community of collectors and enthusiasts.It takes a centrifugal force of longevity and history for us to collectively begin the process of cyclical reflection on an artistic medium–where we can look at our history anew, allowing us to both rediscover lost artifacts and actualize latent possibilities. That time may have come.
This week archival imprint Family Groove Records released never before heard material from Herman Eberitzsch Jr. III, the first chapter of a four part series entitled the HE3 Project. An arranger, songwriter, and funky keyboardist, Eberitzsch recorded scores of songs during San Francisco’s psychedelic heyday throughout the 70s. He crafted experimental jazz-funk (“Rapture of the Deep”), uplifting psych-soul (“Make It Sweet”), and grooves grounded in knocking percussion and a powerhouse horn section (“Love is a Tortured Love Affair”). But, Eberitzsch never caught a break. Major labels skirted record deal after record deal, leaving Eberitzsch to one last resort: store the tapes in the basement–where they’ve been for the past four decades, waiting for their unlikely resuscitation.
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The Soft Moon “Breathe the Fire” (128 kbps)
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We at Hydra have been blowing up the speakers with The Soft Moon’s uncanny soundtracks for the post-apocalypse. The effort of Bay Area musician and visual artist, Luis Vasquez, The Soft Moon just broke a debut 7″ record, Breathe The Fire, on Captured Tracks. And, it’s quite stunning. Lucky for Hydra, Vasquez graced us with permission to put “Breathe the Fire” up for download, although I need to get a copy of that vinyl anyway, at least for that amazing cover art, not to mention the B-side. From the bio (and for full disclosure, I indeed wrote it):
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