Music – Page 5 – Wis[s]e Words

On new music

Published on May 21, 2020Leave a comment

What do we mean when we talk about listening to new music? I’m currently listening to the album the song below was taken off, ABC’s 1987 comeback attempt, Alphabet City. I do have the vinyl of that, but this is the first time I’ve listened to it in decades. Arguable this is new music to me, but is it?

Probably not, eh? But I have never listened to ABC’s sophomore album, Beauty Stab. When I play it today, does that mean I’m listening to new music, or is there more to it? The idea after all is that you stop listening to new music after a certain age (thirty, thirtyfive, in any case an age I passed a while ago). You no longer have the mental flexibility to appreciate new things, and are forever doomed to wallow in the nostalgia of the music of your youth. A horrible fate.

But what does count as listening to new music? Ont he one hand Beauty Stab is new music for me. On the other hand it’s more of the same music from a band I already know I like. Not very adventurous. But what if you discover an overlooked artist or group in the same genre of pop music? Is that new music? Or does that still fall under nostalgic wallowing? Surely discovering an entire new (sub)genre of music does count, right?

Alcest is a French band/project driven by metal prodigy Neige, which with its first EP created a new genre: blackgaze. A hideous mutant recombination of black metal and shoegaze and I’d be surprised if you can find two more unlikely musical genres to merge. Nevertheless it’s ultimately still heavy metal, a music genre I’m well familiar with. Alcest sounds a lot different from the Iron Maiden and Anthrax I grew up with, but ultimately it’s still metal. And to be honest, it is rare for me to start listening to any kind of music that is completely alien to me. Getting into Japanese pop and rock music by way of anime was the last major discovery for me, but even that is not that alien.

Ironically, the newest sort of music I may have listened to recently is actually the oldest piece of music we know how to play, a hymn to Nikkal, the goddes of orchards and fertility from Ugarit, an ancient port city in what is now Syria. Almost 3500 years old, it’s oldest discovered song with surviving musical notation. It’s older than anything we know, a product from an almost alien world, yet put a synth under it or use the right sort of guitar and it could just as well be a modern noise or gothic song.

Rammstein’s Deutschland looks very French to me

Published on April 12, 2019Leave a comment

I can’t help but look at the video for Deutschland and see Enki Bilal in it.

Enki Bilal and Pierre Christin/Jean-Claude Mézières’ Valerian series, or rather one particular album in that series, Sur les Terres Truquées. The latter because it’s a story set in a series of (faked) important historical moments that ultimately collide together into one big mess at the climax of the story. Not unlike the video with its mosaic of dark scenes from Germany’s shameful past, from Romans slaughtered in the woods of Germania to Rammstein themselves as Jewish prisoners being executed. In the end these too all blend together.

But I was mostly reminded of Enki Bilal. That mix of perverted science, mythology and religion, the fascination with fascism and totalitarianism, the sense of decay and degeneration, it’s all very Bilalesque. Ruby Commey too, as Germania could’ve walked out from one of his stories, beautiful and the focal point of each scene she appears in, but corrupted. There’s a layer of grime in most of Bilal’s settings that you see in the video too, the scene of the monks devouring offal frex. Whether or not the makers were actually inspired by him or not doesn’t really matter, but it sure looks like something Bilal could’ve made.

Friday Funk: Curtis Mayfield

Published on March 22, 2019Leave a comment

Back in 2004 I worked for a small startup company that made — hang on to your hats — software with which you could use your mobile phone to connect your laptop to the internet. This was back in the days when dinosaurs still roamed the land, the iPhone wasn’t even a glimmer in Steve Jobs’ eyes and there were like a billion different phone makers who each brought out a zillion different phones, all which needed to be tested to see if our software could recognise and use them correctly. Manually. To be honest the job paid lousy but it was a recession and the long hours were sort of made up for by things like free lunch (yes yes) and free drinks. But especially by the pooled music library that lived on the network to which everybody had uploaded their favourite music to work through the night with.

It so happened that one of the dudes working there was a huge funk and soul fan and thanks to that I got to sample a lot of groups and artists I’d barely heard off until then. One of which was Curtis Mayfield, who upon then, only knew from Move on Up as one of those songs you hear on golden oldies radio. Hearing him in context was a revelation. Being a metal head by nature I’d never done much exploring of the funk & soul genres, but what with Sandra being a Northern Soul veteran and getting my hands on that co-worker’s stack of classic funk ‘n soul that changed rapidly and Curtis Mayfield was on the forefront of it.

You can understand why looking at this 1972 Beat Club mini concert, can’t you? Socially conscious music you can dance to performed by a band at the height of its powers.

Current weeb musical obsession

Published on March 21, 2019Leave a comment

A vocaloid video that almost exclusively consists of Japanese onomatopoeia and stock phrases, with a seriously funky beat underneath it.

Otoboke Beaver & finding new music

Published on May 4, 2018Leave a comment

Otoboke Beaver is a punk band from Kyoto named after a love hotel in Osaka that was located near the high school of one of its members. They’re brilliant:

Metafilter recently had a post about the death of the music review’s power to end careers and people wondered how you find new music without looking at sides like Pitchfork et all. For me, finding this particular band started by looking up Shonen Knife on Spotify, then browsing through the related artists, finding another great punk band 54 Nude Honeys, browsing through their related artists list and ending up with Otoboke Beaver. Shonen Knife of course had a brief burst of popularity outside Japan in the early nineties, so I knew them from when Dutch radio used to play them, when it was still possible for cult bands like this to actually be on the radio. Spotify now fills the same function for me.

Reviews, especially those of the Pitchfork variety, have never been that important to me, though there were times when I’d follow the recommendations of a site like warr.org — run by two enthusiasts rather than professional reviewers– religiously. And sometimes it was the random musings of a blogger I followed that got me interested in a particular band — and ultimately in this case, an entire prog rock subgenre. You can only find new music if you’re open to experiment and break out from your regular listening, by either getting recommendations from people you trust, or by just following the trail leading out from a band or artist you already like. What with so much music available effectively for free, there’s no need for the safety net of a review anymore before you sample a new band.