Therein lies Daft Punk’s biggest mistake on RAM. When everybody has the ability to make magic, magic does not disappear. Instead, the people making good magic have the capability to separate themselves from the people making shitty magic by putting their superior skill on display. But rather than making an album of sample-based music that outshined productions by Skrillex or Justice, Daft Punk took another route.

Daft Punk have always been the auteurs of their music in the way many consider directors to be auteurs of films. But, just like calling the director the main creative force of a film obscures the role of the writer, the producers, and the numerous other people who make a movie possible, calling Daft Punk the author of Random Access Memories obscures the numerous collaborators and session musicians responsible for the bulk of the musical material. The tracklisting for RAM credits the featured vocalists, and “Giorgio By Moroder” contains its guest in the title, but looking at the liner notes reveals a far larger depth of collaboration. Chic’s Nile Rodgers appears (and co-writes) “Get Lucky,” “Give Life Back to Music,” and “Lose Yourself to Dance.” Chilly Gonzales plays the piano interlude on “Within,” and Paul Jackson Jr. plays guitar on nearly every track.[1] The only track where Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo take sole songwriting credit is “Motherboard,” one of the album’s least interesting tracks. If we’re going to proclaim Bangalter and de Homem-Christo as musical geniuses here, we should note the importance of their collaborators to the sound of this record. Their skills lie less as producers than as curators, which fits in well with the aesthetic of appropriation (whether from studio musicians or samples).

Much has also been written about how Daft Punk’s work with studio musicians is a move deeply embedded within a nostalgia for a different era of pop music. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, studio musicians were an integral part of any recorded music, as important as the studio itself to the sound of the record. But the labor of studio musicians declined in parallel with the rest of American material labor in the late 1970s—as the auto industry left Detroit, so did Motown. Nile Rodgers, with whom Daft Punk worked heavily on RAM, is a member of the last era of trained studio musicians. (As an aside, the quality of collaboration on RAM is intricately linked to musicians who are familiar with working as session musicians—contributions from Rodgers, Paul Williams, and Giorgio Moroder sound far more thorough and well-worked than contributions from Julian Casablancas and Panda Bear). Daft Punk’s choice to work with session musicians instead of samples reads as an ideological move: this is how music should be made (or, alternately, “Give Life Back to Music”). But rather than proving that live instrumentation and recording is a viable route to producing a record, Random Access Memories highlights how high the barrier of access for making a record in this manner has become. Same goes for the record’s advertising campaign, which placed billboards in large metropolitan areas and rented out airtime during SNL. They also ran a long promotional video campaign interviewing each of musicians with whom they collaborated. This kind of promotional expense is unimaginable for most musicians, but Daft Punk (and Columbia, their label) consider it just as important to invoke nostalgia via advertising (focusing on more classic forms of advertising media) as they do via music.

On RAM (and especially in its press blitz), Daft Punk ultimately mistake sampling for a lack of creativity, something that belies their original goals and productions. And if the complaint about sample-based music is that musicians are eschewing creativity in favor of calling on the creativity of others, is that not what Daft Punk have done here? The substitution Daft Punk make on Random Access Memories is not that of studio musicians for samples, but rather that of inaccessible source material for accessible source material. As David Abravanel notes, “Regardless of your intentions, you don’t know Nile Rodgers. You can’t get Electric Lady on the phone, nonetheless afford studio time there. You can’t afford ad space on SNL.” So while Daft Punk attempt to “Give Life Back to Music,” they also imagine that the only people capable of doing so are of a creative upper-class. The access on Random Access Memories is not random at all, but rather restricted.

To end this, I want to make note of something that’s become increasingly apparent in contemporary journalistic coverage of music: the homogeneity of stories that surround a release. Take examples from the past few week’s releases. Every piece written on Daft Punk focused on the narrative of their work with studio musicians. Every piece written on Modern Vampires of the City focused on Vampire Weekend shedding the Paul Simon-appropriating, Ivy League-grad image and releasing an album on their own artistic style and merit. Every piece written on Trouble Will Find Me focused on The National’s surprising confidence as a high-level rock band. These aren’t the reviews, but the artist profiles that come out to accompany the album. As online music press becomes mainstream journalism, I cannot stress how important it is to look and think beyond these narratives. The reason we started The Tape was to question the music in front of us, the way that the press presented it, and the means by which we listened to it. When you read five articles on one band that all retell the same narrative, it’s important to think about where that narrative is coming from and why. When the narratives put forth by the promotional material and the press coverage converge is that really criticism?

I see some parallel movements here, and I think it’s important that we keep track of these trends going forward. In both electronic music and in music journalism, the lowered barrier to access hasn’t resulted in democratization of media. In both cases, the democratic potential has been trumpeted to excess, and it obscures the real work being done: the ruling classes (in journalism’s case, Pitchfork; in music’s case, major label acts) are really the only voices and beneficiaries of the post-Napster music economy.

Tristan Rodman studies Modern Culture + Media and Computer Music at Brown University. He co-founded and co-edits The Tape. Follow him on Twitter @tristanrodman.

David Longstreth’s songs don’t explain him; they imitate him. The creative force and leader of The Dirty Projectors, Longstreth has founded a career on a stubbornly quirky approach. He formed the band in 2000 as a solo project while he was a freshman at Yale, but he dropped out soon, recording so much in his dorm room that he barely attended classes. It’s still very much his project, but he’s got a full band now— an astonishingly tight rhythm section and two more singers, Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle. In 2007, two years before Bitte Orca solidified the band’s sound and landed them in indie rock’s critical elite, they released Rise Above, an attempt to recreate Black Flag’s hardcore classic Damaged entirely from memory. Longstreth hadn’t listened to the album in 15 years. For anyone who’s heard Longstreth scratch a riff out of his left-handed Fender, or even sing in his warm wobble, this odd task seems easily intelligible. His music is a site of conflict: prickly guitar lines spar, personal lyrics wander into abstraction, and each song enters a sort of time machine, making pit stops in every decade to gather a few choice elements (a thin ‘60s snare drum, an ‘80s West African guitar chime, a Destiny’s Child drum thump). When he speaks, he offers few concrete answers, but explores his music from multiple angles in a way that mirrors the songs he’s describing. He is a notorious control freak, famous for 12 hour practices, and he handles every aspect of songwriting, mixing, and production. 

This conflict might be why the band is so pleasurable to listen to— Longstreth’s songs are collages with the stitches on display. He once told the New York Times that he keeps the Bible with him on tour for the stories and obsessively listens to Lil’ Wayne’s mixtapes, from which he draws inspiration. It’s not hard to believe. Critics heralded Swing Lo Magellan, the band’s latest album, as their most concise, but it still swims in and out of styles: stuttering electronic drums find Broadway melodies on the anguished “About to Die.” The golden age of ‘70s folk-rock breathes through the title track, while “Gun Has No Trigger” could score a James Bond movie if they ever decide to shoot one in Williamsburg. Concise, perhaps, for Longstreth, but the album is a study in multiplicity— how many ways can he write a song? I spoke with Longstreth over the phone in late March about his erratic production style, the relationship between the band in the studio and the band on the stage, and how the group has changed since Bitte Orca. I expected him to clarify some of his music’s enigma, but instead he seemed an extension of the counterpoints in play. 

Greg Nissan: I’m fascinated by the production on Swing [Lo Magellan]. There are elements that feel distinctly modern, very studio-manipulated, and others such as the drum tracking that feel like a sort of ‘60s style when stereo recording was still not fully developed. It seems like a collage of production styles. How do you draw from such different sources to create cohesion in your band’s sound?

David Longstreth: One of the models for the album, or maybe not a model but an album I really love, is Revolver by the Beatles. One thing I love about that record is that every song on it is so different, it’s almost like every song from the album is one track from a whole other album. Every one of those numbers opens into a sound world all its own. I wrote so many songs going into Swing Lo Magellan, and we recorded in kind of a relentless but low key way for a pretty long period of time. There was a real wide spectrum of sounds and feel, and so one of the craziest things about cutting all the songs down, figuring out which twelve would be the ones on the record, was seeing how that came together. It was weird, since every song seems so different from the production standpoint. I really wanted the album to capture something that felt like where we were in our actual performances as opposed to something with a lot of digital recording. You usually try to get some sort of objective capture that you can digitally manipulate later on. This album was kind of like, fuck that. Make decisions as soon as possible— what the sound of the drums would be like, how many mics are we gonna use, compress on the way in. That kind of stuff. A lot of the sounds are from the ‘70s and ‘60s because those are my favorite [producers], Glynn Johns, Jeff Emerick. You know.

Longstreth is aware of the relationship between sound and space. Even his digital elements seem to predict their life beyond the computer. The sounds will bounce off the walls in an actual room, charting the space. He builds a unique sonic architecture through his production, however, one contrary to many popular production trends in rock music. Many producers attempt to situate the sound in a cohesive setting, in which the sounds feel as if they’re coming from the same place, with a few elements that come and go. Longstreth’s peculiarities surface in the way he opposes spaces in his song, fighting cohesion. For example, Swing Lo Magellan’s“Just From Chevron”: the song begins with a twitchy guitar line (signature Longstreth) fully panned to the right and an echoing, repeated clap on the left. There’s little reverb on the guitar, so it feels as if it comes from a small room, and an exaggerated amount on the claps, which sets them in a cavernous environment. Immediately there is a sense that they can’t exist in the same place, that there is a wall between them. When the lacquered vocals enter on the left, the guitar migrates to the middle, and now we feel three spaces— two cathedral-like expanses of claps and vocals, separated by a guitar in the middle that feels plucked from a bedroom. I envision a stage split into three parts, a different scene in each. The middle is brightly lit, the others are dim.

GN: I find it interesting that you brought up the Beatles in relation to the production when you talk about how you wanted to capture the band as you are now live, because by Revolver the band had transformed very much into a studio band, playing few shows and exploring what can’t be done live. I’m curious how your experience playing live informs your songwriting or the production, and what has your experience been playing this album live?

DL: That’s a big one, because my normal answer that remains true is thatBitte Orca is the album I made where I wanted to capture what it felt like to be on stage, us playing. I wanted that record to feel like an emblem of the live band, whereas Swing Lo Magellan is a different beast. It’s more like I put those songs on [the record] because those are things I was thinking about, things my mind wandered to, and it was a definite challenge to figure out how to play some of those songs live. Like “See What She’s Seeing,” a lot of those effects we created, or I created, in the computer. Giving them to a player and making them something physical was part of the challenge— how the fuck are we gonna do that? That being said, playing the album live is amazing because it’s a more personal record. It’s more open-hearted, and so to play music that’s a little bit less guarded, it feels like a real communication between the band and the audience and between us on stage. It’s been cool.

“We don’t see eye to eye/ but I need you/ and you’re always on my mind” he croons on “Impregnable Question.” Even in what might be his most straightforward song to date— a burning, lo-fi slice of ‘70s AM radio— Longstreth stresses disagreement. It’s a conflict not only referenced, but enacted throughout the album. The album’s opening lyrics: “There was a single one, then there were ten. Ten made a hundred, a hundred million.” Longstreth’s voice wobbles into song with abstraction, a litany of numbers beyond image. In the chorus, however, he screeches above fuzzed-out guitars, “He was made to love her. She was made to love him.” The insight in his words is more in the system of voices he creates— the various registers— than in any one line. It’s in the way he forces abstraction and image to look back at each other. Just as his guitar parts progress through counter-rhythms, counter melodies, his lyrics move dialectically, opposing what came before to flesh out a world of voices from several mouths. Coffman and Dekle, whose airy, sugar-throated vocals serve as a foil to Longstreth’s, offer even more depth of register. Pitchfork’s laudatory review of the newest album called them the Greek chorus to his narrator. The Dirty Projectors always sounds like, well, the Dirty Projectors, and it’s because Longstreth knows how to plant a foot on his influences— Neil Young, Beyonce, Richard Wagner, John Coltrane, to name a few he’s referenced— and push off, beyond them.

GN: I remember an interview with Pitchfork, sometime after Bitte Orca,you described the album title as two words that just sounded nice together. Your lyrics always feel tied to the rhythms of your guitar lines and the music in general. How much of this sonic quality that dictates meaning is present in your lyrics now?

DL: I think with Bitte Orca that was definitely true about the sounds of the words, totally abstract for the most part. Some lyrics were about something, but the way I put words on Bitte was about sound. I would say on Swing Lo I did it pretty differently. I got really excited with the possibility of lyrics. I was so overwhelmed with the color of music, about an exploration I hadn’t really given much thought to.

At this point in the interview, as I tried to penetrate this vague affection for the color of music with another question, a crackling voice interrupted the line. “Sorry guys, I gotta jump in here. That’s it for the interview today. Thanks so much. Dave, I’m gonna call you back with the next interview in just a few minutes.” It was Longstreth’s PR guy, who’d put me in touch with him. It was only a ten-minute interview, and on hearing the last of him, I couldn’t help but imagine Longstreth sitting at a desk, propped on his elbows, taking phone calls from 20-year-olds for hours on end. He didn’t seem unengaged, only overloaded. He’s the type to find his most insightful moments after hashing it out with himself, positing things he can discard in order to refine his ideas.

The final track on SLM, the acoustic crawl “Irresponsible Tune,” features only Longstreth’s voice. But he has two voices, actually, and though they’re staggered they sing the same words, the same melodies. One arrives a half-second after the first, on the other side of the recording. Even in agreement, there are multiple Longstreths. The song ends with an earnest imperative: “Sing all day.” Three gentle strums follow, each wide enough for a breath. “Record and play.” Three more strums, breathing now. “Drums and bass.” Three strums, ringing out at the same lazy pace. “And a guitaaaaaar” Longstreth stretches out in an airy undulation, as if the word is infinite. The final stanza: “Will there be peace in the world? Or will violence always own the truth? There’s a bird singing at my window, and it’s singing an irresponsible tune.” He repeats twice more: “An irresponsible tune.” At the heart of his music— self-antagonizing, self-devouring— is this simple need to investigate two oppositions, to pit them against each other and watch the show. Longstreth sits in the middle of the poles, of his various influences and styles, of his many incarnations, and he’s always chirping something beautiful. 

Greg Nissan is a sophomore at Brown University. He bit the orca.

That’s far from saying that Tyler hasn’t grown between Goblin and Wolf. The latter’s production is significantly more forgiving, sophisticated and nuanced than its predecessor’s. The atmosphere on Wolf exudes a tailored adolescent energy that’s both earnest and gauzy, abstractly reminiscent yet grounded in a profoundly real and lived experience. It’s this skillful cultivation of ethos that perfectly stages Wolf’s existence at camp Flog Gnaw—the proverbial cesspool for unfocused adolescent confusion. Tyler introduces two new characters to the Odd Future universe for this final installment—breaking himself into Sam and Wolf, who often compete for a girl, Salem’s affection. It’s through the guise of Sam that the real Tyler for the first time articulates a pure, unfiltered feeling. On “Awkward” he as Sam confesses how he’s been that “scrawny little fucker” at age sixteen, and how “sprung” he is by what could be his first experience of genuine affection for Salem. But, for an album that anticipates Tyler’s future as much as it reflects, from that future, a past of unremarkable adolescence, songs like “Awkward” are depressingly fatalistic: crooned lines like “You’re my girlfriend…(whether you like it or not)” foreshadow a psychosomatic affliction that will turn him, later, into a Goblin. Moments like these are littered throughout Wolf: songs like the pretty yet unremarkable “Slater” (“My bitch is on my handlebar / I just wanna ride my bike”), and the burdened reconciliation of an imagined drug trafficking scheme on “48”  (“I’m in too deep / I can’t see the shore, I’m sorry”), anticipate Tyler’s eventual demise and isolation from the benefits of romance, capitalistic success, and real friendship, which in the moment come off as indulgent parodies of teen angst. These kinds of reveals are about as commonplace on an Odd Future release as a vitriolic spit of “fag” or “bitch”—they tread no new narrative or lyrical territory, but simply resituate familiar tropes within a new narrative context.

Wolf’s greatest flaw is this very same self-defined incapacity to break free from the narrative we were introduced to at the onset of Bastard. Within Tyler’s cognitive arc, we’re taken back to a stage in his life when he was most vulnerable—all doe-eyed and horny, perhaps even in love at Flog Gnaw—and consistently reminded of the eventual cost that an abuse of that vulnerability will have later on: an odd, horrific future. This kind of analeptic prolepsis—the impulse to look back on how you imagined things might be while looking forward—is the technical device that situates and facilitates the entire thematic and aesthetic style of the album. Track “PartyIsntOver/Campfire/Bimmer” probably best exemplifies this: “Party Isn’t Over” has Tyler rather boyishly imploring Salem to dance with him (“The party isn't over, we could still dance girl / But I don't have no rhythm / So fuck it, take a chance with a nigga / Like me, like me”). “Campire” shows Tyler ruminating on race and scorn and unreciprocated love—that metaphor about that “motherfucking” marshmallow “getting lynched and burned” is about as pathetically ham-fisted and trite as one can get—and resolves with a guest verse by Laetitia Sadier, the voice of Salem who remarks on the “gentle, but radical transformation” that Tyler undergoes before her.

All of this plants the seed for the beautiful, lyrically brilliant “Bimmer”—perhaps the best stand alone track on the album. With profound nuance Tyler reminisces on his sexual relations with Salem, who, like the BMW about which he so earnestly waxes, can take him wherever he needs to go—away from the constraints of adolescence, the pressures of camp, and, for a second, out of his own head. But as the lyrics, as well as the deeply haunting, beautiful, and sparse beat of the song suggests, Salem is as much a vacuous fantasy as she is the literal object of Tyler’s affection: “A lot of trunk space, the perfect two seater;” “…not a lot of miles on [her] meter;” “Your head lights are off, I’m tryna see ‘em.” The car is empty, the odometer unturned, and the headlights off. Each line is a description of a relationship that was or could be something meaningful and rare, but is presently devoid of life, warmth, and real value. And as is made clear on the outro of the song, Salem’s on her way to the lake, where she’ll be killed—as we’ve already been told back on Goblin’s “Analog” / “Fish”—by Wolf, the dark, alternative side of Tyler’s subconscious. Any hope we could’ve had for a suburban romance for Tyler is killed before it even consummates; much how the album cover illustrates, “PartyIsntOver/Campfire/Bimmer” is a harbinger of a demise that is already fated, already executed; Tyler is at all times as much the awkward Jerry-curled boy as he is the jaded, nihilistic young-adult that commits violence onto others in the name of his own self-destructive, seemingly baseless fantasies.  

While grounded in profoundly real, and beautiful sentiment, the narrative construction of Wolf does nothing to bolster the thematic elements of its predecessors, while simultaneously failing to provide new narrative, musical, or lyrical value of its own right. The album is then, in Typical-Tyler fashion, caught in exasperated limbo: on one hand condemned to revisit the unspoken melancholia that precedes and defines Tyler’s current self, and on another, an unrelenting ego-driven impulse to destroy that same person in a way that bequeaths no genuine catharsis for Tyler or his listeners. The album and trilogy’s poor construction is what makes genuinely brilliant moments on Wolf, like the surprising collaboration with Coco Owino and Erykah Badu “Treehome95”, feel largely inconsequential—able to fit seamlessly within the general aesthetic of the album without facilitating or advancing its narrative, artistic value, or import as a socio-cultural critique. And even so, Wolf is too long, the lyrics and production too repetitive and contrived, and the conclusions it draws too insipid, for it to be any more valuable than the average diary of a disgruntled teen outcast repurposed for sporadic musical pleasure. Despite its name, Wolf packs a surprisingly weak bite. 

Marcus Jeremy is a sophomore at Columbia majoring in African-American studies.

The music we listen to and share can play an important part in social healing. It is possible that our social culture could transgress its traditions of supremacy, exceptionality, and subjugation. It is possible that our social culture could more adamantly reinforce the tide toward an equitable distribution of resources and love. What we may need for this equitable distribution to happen entails some serious work, no doubt. But said work could be reinforced and sustained by a social culture that promotes an active, intentional and balanced coupling of our raw desires and our activism with radical habits of artistic consumption. These radical habits would encourage us to cultivate and fuel a peculiar empathy for one another’ s feelings, circumstances, imagination and experiences; a peculiar empathy that would engulf every iota of our minds, bodies, and souls.

Artistic consumption and artistic production implicate memories, desires, and elements particular to the artist, the social climate, and the consumers implicated. Artistic consumption and production orchestrate a communication of messages, ideals, and principles. These three parties therefore enter into a form of exchange that transcends modern understanding of time, space, and matter.  These various levels of exchanges are sites for what a friend by the name of K. Cruz called conscious collisions. These conscious collisions, I think, manifest an ebb and flow that generates the transmission of empathic and subconscious messages across souls. These conscious collisions are sites for transmissions and their potential should not be dismissed. The art and music we consume engulf and manipulate not only our feelings and our imagination but also, how we conceive and achieve particular desires, our personal agendas, and our politics. What would happen if we could sprinkle some specific songs into the foundation of The United States’ current soundtrack… songs with a peculiarly emphatic and particularly soul-filled resonance?  Please do not consider the piece as advocating for the eradication of certain musical or artistic forms from our aural archives. What I am proposing is an expansion, a broadening and maybe a prioritization of our auditory repertoire, the particulars of its contents. The soundtrack I am hoping more and more people groove to will encompass raw and righteous social empathy. My vision is that this social empathy will in turn inspire a life long commitment to social justice, racial, and gender equity as well as a reconfiguration of our relationship and commitment to equity, accessibility, difference, and history.

The process of evaluating art music, of deciding which artists to include in our daily shuffle is a site of activism. Combined with serious work in the community, I hope readers will take a moment to very delicately select and share with others, a set of sounds and artists who transmit a history and aural experience raw enough to breed social empathy. My vision is that this social empathy will in turn inspire a life long commitment to social justice, equity, the reconfiguration of our relationship to accessibility, identity, and healing.

I probably sound like

an unrealistic wack-o?

*shrug. (lol )

Thinking of you ~ Tracy Chapman

Feeling no pain ~ Sade

Immigrant ~ Sade

Go with it ~Tokimonsta ft MNDR

Somebody already broke my heart ~ Sade

Manteca~ Dizzie Gillespie

Voodoo child ~ Dizzie Gillespie

Primal chance ~ Jesse Boykins III ft. mara Hruby

Skin Deep ~ Buddy guy

Gigantic~ Eddie front

Du, a song by Val Jenty

Four page letter ~ Aaliyah

*Writing letters can unshackle the most fickle hearts when done in a raw and vulnerable manner.

Human syndrome~ Pisces rising

When we go to war ~ Tobias Froberg

I'm So Tired ~ Ta-Ku Feat. Mei Swan & Raymond

On The Run ~ selah sue

Storm coming ~ Gnarls Barkley, consider (surprise)

If ~Janet Jackson

Little lin man ~ mumford and sons

Empires ~ Lamya

Elle me dit ~ Ben L’oncle Soul

Indecision ~ Sampha

Earn my Affection ~ Amel Larieux

Sharon Onga identifies as a black immigrant, a woman, an outsider trying to muster up the courage and self love to identify as a lesbian and as an activist for young queer women. She believes these identities inherently make her queer.  In early september, her short essay called"Confessions of a part-time sexy dyke and wandering immigrant" was published on Gawker. She recognizes that she has a lot to learn. She is thankful for her mentors, friends and family. She is forever grateful for the time they spent reading, laughing and thinking out loud with her through this process. She is a senior majoring in Africana Studies at Vassar College and is currently looking for a job.

"YUHHGH!”

miraculously in 18 point font. And then the texts would continue. I tried dialing the number a few times, but my calls never went through. I was almost living with it when they started texting at 4am and I'd have to figure out, still half-dreaming, what--

"Hair long, money long

Me and broke niggas we don't get along,”

--had to do with my project deadlines and the way Space Mountain made me throw up Aunt Petra's egg salad. Evidently, nothing. 

Sleeping 3 hours a night and doing poorly at work, I figured I should probably ask around the office and see if anyone's kids had been texting from their parents' phones. Turns out only our receptionist, Sheryl, has a kid over 9, and he's foster and only listens to country. I kind of freaked at that point and searched Google to find reverse directory sites that backtrace numbers for you. $1.99 got me that the number was coming from College Park in Atlanta, Georgia. $4.99 more found out that the number was registered to T. Epps. 

I was pissed when I called the phone company and got put through the customer service blender in some sort of karmic exchange. Finally, a senior service manager three tiers up explained to me that they couldn't put a block on a number that had system admin privileges because system admins auto-bypass blocks. When I asked why a system admin would repeatedly text me obscene non sequiturs at four in the morning she said she didn’t know. She agreed to investigate the case further however, provided that I send them the conversation log. So I did, called it a day and waited to hear back.

Nothing from either party came for about a week until Valentine's Day. Marlene and I were out at that Thai fusion place and I got, 

"Roses are red

Violets are blue

Sugar is sweet

… 2 CHAINZ!”

which was…thoughtful. Clearly AT&T hadn't followed through. But, the signature sounded sort of familiar. I checked our TiVo back home on a hunch and found episodes we'd recorded of 2 Broke Girls. Sure enough, one of the episodes features a rapper called 2Chainz. Wikipedia informed me that 2Chainz's birth-name is Tauheed Epps and suddenly I'm searching my entire text history on Google. Except for the Valentine's Day one, every message brings up a link to a lyric site with the line in question in some part of a song.

At this point I didn't know who to tell. No one I knew had any idea who 2Chainz was and I still didn’t really believe it. I sort of felt like a detective at my desk, formulating hypotheses, trying to trace leads. Assuming this was actually 2Chainz, why was he texting my phone? Why did it seem like my texts weren't going through to him? And also, who the fuck is 2Chainz?

Wikipedia again.

"Born September 12, 1976 Tauheed Epps, better known by his stage name 2 Chainz (formerly Tity Boi), is an American hip hop recording artist from College Park, Georgia."

Okay, I knew that. But wait, this guy used to be called Tity Boi?

"Epps formed the hip hop duo Playaz Circle (the word "Playaz" being a bacronym for Preparing Legal Assets for Years from A to Z) in 1997 with his high school friend Earl Conyers (known as Dolla Boy) while Epps adopted "Tity Boi" as his stage name."

I’m not sure how professional it is opting for “Tity Boi” as your nom de plume while preparing legal assets, but what do I know?

"In early 2011, Epps decided to change his stage name to 2 Chainz as he perceived it to be more 'family friendly.'"

See?

I might have gotten a little obsessed at this point, and singing “I take ya girl and kidnap her, feed her to my mattress” repeatedly in the shower definitely made Marlene notice something was up. It wasn’t that big deal of a deal until she caught me cooking in my boxers and a fedora at two in the morning, literally surrounded by crates and crates of yams. That I’ve never even liked yams didn’t really help my case for this not being symptomatic of some sort of midlife crisis. We had a long talk with a therapist after that about “feeling trapped” and “being burdened by financial responsibility.” I think we came out a lot stronger for it. 

Afterwards, at the vegan waffle house across the street, I was feeling pretty good about things and enjoying my buckwheat pancakes. Marlene seemed happy about how the talk had gone and I felt like my head was clearing up. Still, there was this guy at the table next to us. He looked about twenty-two, with glasses, an undergraduate attempt at a beard and--what do you know?--a black shirt with those two emblematic, gold chains. I told Marlene and she made a face and made me swear that this would be the “absolute last thing having to do with this 2Chainz guy.” So I agreed and walked over to his table. 

“Oh,” he said, looking pretty surprised, “Yeah, you want to know about 2Chainz? Uh, sure man.” He started typing something into his iPhone.

“Here, you should really read this first,” he said and pressed the device into my hand. “Almost a year ago today, this was on Passion of the Weiss.”  

I read enough to get the gist. Basically, it was a a rant by this guy Mobb Deen, chastising rap fans for playing along with the annual trend of choosing which rapper was next to become famous. I handed his phone back.

“Yeah man,” the guy said in between bites of vegan chili, “That year, the rapper in question happened to be 2Chainz, a 35 year old former member of Playaz Circle, an Atlanta act signed to Ludacris' Disturbing Tha Peace records, if I’m not mistaken.”  He wiped his mouth.

“He'd just released this mixtape called Codeine Cowboys 2 and on it there was this song, "Spend It" that was super catchy and had this line about similac, as in the breast milk substitute. Uh, ‘take ya girl, give her back, 9 months later: SIMILAC’ or something?” He paused to think. 

He was quiet a while so I offered, “And he just got really popular after that?”.

The guy shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much.” He took a sip of water and stuck out his hand. “I’m Brandon by the way.” 

“Rick.”

“Fast forward a year and 2Chainz is the rapper of 2012. Well, not counting Kendrick Lamar.”  

“Who’s he?” I asked.

“He’s this LA rapper who released this really important album that everyone liked. You know the song Swimming Pools?” Brandon sung a melody that sounded vaguely familiar. I shook my head no.

“Oh, well that’s on it. Really smart stuff. Anyway, he got really big last year and he’s really good. 2Chainz though, man, he’s--he’s weird man,” he said laughing.  

“Why?” I asked him.

“He was on everything. Including stuff with Kendrick Lamar, but also stuff with Justin Bieber, and, like, Kreayshawn I think?” He scrounged up the last of his chili. 

“Dude seriously hustled. I mean, especially for a rapper who’s 35, you know?” Brandon sized up my age as he said this. “Not that that’s super old,” he said, a little uncomfortable. “But you know, rappers. Anyway, what exactly did you want to know about him?”

“I don’t know,” I stammered, a little confused at this point, “I’d just really like to know why I guess.” 

“Whoa man, that’s a big question,” Brandon said as he adjusted his glasses. “I mean for that you gotta look at trap rap and Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka.  You gotta look at screw music. Houston, Atlanta, Baton Rouge. You gotta talk Cash Money Records. Lil Wayne, Da Drought, The Carter. Lil B. Based freestyles...” He trailed off.

I got the feeling that Brandon wouldn’t be able to help me out after all, but he seemed like a nice guy, so I thanked him for his time and offered to buy him a drink. He said he didn’t drink but would happily have an avocado date smoothie in its place. My wallet wasn’t in my jacket, which meant I had left it in the car, so I told Brandon I’d be right back and walked over to Marlene. She looked peaceful, just reading a book and finishing her coffee. I kissed her forehead and told her not to worry, I’d be right back.

Outside, our sedan reflected the afternoon sun, and I smiled when I realized it was almost exactly the color of mayonnaise. 

Gabriel Gutierrez is a sophomore at McGill University.

Tristan Rodman: This seems to me to be a particularly interesting moment in the history of the music video. We've seen the medium go through a few phases. At their inception, music videos were used largely to document and verify that the things musicians were doing in the studio could be replicated. This went hand in hand with a shift from performance as the primary musical object to the recording as the primary musical object. At some point thereafter though, music videos turned extremely performative. They became a way to present an identity image and brand. And then through the mid-90s, we started to see music video directors like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, who began by directing commercials, then ventured through music videos on their way to feature films. Stylistically, they responded to the music by creating strange and abstract representations (I'm thinking here of Gondry's video for The Chemical Brothers "Star Guitar"and Jonze's video for Daft Punk's "Da Funk"). What do you see in the style of contemporary music that seems to lend itself to disembodied performance in music videos?

Tarek Shoukri: We're definitely living in a different cultural landscape where the music video has an interactive element to it. Now we're in an age of the delightfully weird music video, filled with WTF moments. As you've pointed out, when music videos became very performative they were all about eliciting a certain image or brand to associate with the performer. Back in the early 2000s, Britney Spears needed to lip-sync her videos for us to buy into her image. But now, we no longer have to suspend our disbelief and buy into Britney's lip-syncing. Now we are thrown into videos that so blatantly lip-synced, and thrive in this weirdness and disembodiment. Ray Wise sings as Victoria LeGrand in the Beach House's "Wishes" video, and Local Natives are replaced by sandwiches in "Heavy Feet." Nobody cares about the accuracy of the new lip-sync. It's not meant to be believable, so we do not need to suspend any belief. Just like in Eric Wareheim's bizarro world of discomfort humor, we are being asked whether or not we get the world being presented and we are challenged to accept it for all of its misplacement or back down.

TR: I think you're absolutely right to point to lip-syncing, because I don't think it's something that really bothers us anymore. Beyoncé came out of that whole inauguration pseudo-fiasco by belting out the national anthem at the Super Bowl press conference. If you can do it once, and well, that's good enough. So when the live isn't really live, and that's obvious to all of us there's no need to prove and defend that in the music video. It's also, I think, deeply tied to the rise of autotune. These music videos question how human vocal recordings are to begin with. I think this is a great point to turn to Phoenix's new "Entertainment" video.

This is not about you. You will not Travolta across the dance floor, the neon lights on the lapels of your white suit. No one will notice the new way you bump your hips back and forth. No crowd will circle around you as you shimmy from side to side. This is faceless, collective movement.

Popular dance culture has a new home, Electronic Dance Music (EDM), and its most salient trends—commercial success, streamlined structure, homogenized rhythms, and mammoth club gigs and festivals—are manifesting themselves in the way bodies are moving. In a GQ piece about Electric Daisy Carnival, a three-day Dionysian lingerie party of 300,000, Gideon Lewis-Kraus describes the communal aspect of the dance: “Mainly what a DJ seems to do is egg us on to a collective dance victory, which he celebrates by putting his arms up in a great V, usually just after he’s pumped his right fist for a bit.” It’s now a dance that you can enter and leave at ease, in which your own body’s motion is just a piece of the sweat-drenched, drugged-out mass. The dancing is characteristically done in conjunction—bouncing in unison as the bass drops, each rave-goer mashed into the audience’s pulp.

According to Forbes, EDM is an estimated four billion dollar industry. Its abduction by the major music industry was completed when Skrillex, the spectacled, waifish bass wiz, won three Grammys. It’s the only sector of music whose prospects are rising, as the rest of the industry languishes in the mp3 age. While the ubiquity of mp3s has hurt the traditional record giants (illegal downloads, a shift away from albums toward singles), these factors lend themselves well to a culture that relies on constant remixing, where new tracks are posted to sites like Soundcloud every day. In addition, the start up costs are relatively small: a laptop, mostly pirated music software, and some headphones. All that money comes largely from touring. The tours cost promoters less than the traditional rock set up, as they involve fewer personnel (Swedish House Mafia is the largest popular DJ group, with three members, and even that number is rare) and don’t require staggering tour busses to carry expensive gear and roadies. DJs can get from show to show more quickly. Show up, unpack your gear, plug in the laptop, go. This recent success is plastering itself onto the bodies of fans. EDM’s commercial success has led it to bigger and bigger venues, and the way people dance—synchronized head bops, arms pointed up, the moment of eerie stillness before the bass drops, the jumping organism—matches the space in which the dancing takes place. In his essay “The Pleasure of Popular Dance,” Robert Crease explores dance’s relationship to space: “By popular dancing I mean the kind in which people dance amongst themselves, spontaneously, without professional training, in ordinary spaces without sharp borders between participants and spectators… one gives oneself over to… a gestalt, an entire situation, a setting in which the people, lighting, environment, and ambiance foster an informal moving atmosphere.” Fans often cite festivals like Ultra Music Festival in Miami or Electric Zoo in New York as the apex of the new rave culture experience. These gargantuan festivals are so crowded that to dance individually is literally impossible—either run with the group, or don’t join the stampede.

Isn’t this the lost ’60s ideal, though? A gathering that obliterates the individual, that celebrates peace, love, and narcotics? Aren’t these next-to-nude neon-lovers and their bejeweled bodies carrying the torch of Woodstock? Nouveau Hippies? At first glance the EDM aesthetic seems to promote these utopian ideals. The crowd undulates together like an amoeba, hops up and down as one body. To lose oneself in the human sea at these mega-festivals, in the bodily comfort of being one of many, might sound appealing, but this is a music sub-industry that aggressively standardizes its sound and style, forging a frightening mass aesthetic in which everything is neon, everything is instagrammed, and every rhythm sounds the same. While some of the sounds produced by the giant DJs are innovative, the forms are quite conservative; every EDM pop hit follows a rigid structure, surrounding the build-up and the drop.

In a recent study of contemporary pop music, a group of scientists and academics, Joan Serra et al. analyzed a huge database of songs in terms of pitch, timbre, and loudness, to see whether pop songs sounded more alike today than they did in past generations. The findings showed an overwhelming homogenization of pop music. The analysis of pitch served to compare melodies, and melodies are closely tied to the rhythms of songs and the way we dance to them. Almost every top 40 song gets the EDM treatment—the four on the floor stomping bass drum, the bone-shaking synth bass, the ethereal synth wash before a chorus that makes you feel like you’re standing on a mountaintop, yodeling something in a lost but magnificent language. The new unifying production trends are leading to a loud, sterile march. This rhythmic compression, a departure from the diverse array of syncopated or intricate rhythms that dominated the past half-century of dance music in genres like funk or soul, coincides with the compression of dance. The dance becomes a coordinated, simple, and repetitive motion with everything lining up to the beat. EDM is no utopian music ideal; the flowered masses are left with the skeleton of dance’s old rhythms, as evidenced by the singular body of dancers that amasses at these festivals.

Serra’s work on loudness poses another question, especially in light of the debauchery of EDM festivals—is the music influencing the drugs (MDMA is the marquee drug of the moment) or are the drugs influencing the music? Many of the production trends of popular dance music are related to purely physical sensations. If you’ve ever stood in front of a subwoofer, you know that bass isn’t just about the melody, but the feeling of large sound waves vibrating through your body. As songs are produced at louder and louder volumes, this is a measure of relative, not absolute volume. No matter how loud you crank up a Joni Mitchell song, your brain will perceive a David Guetta club banger as inherently louder. Molly, the movement’s drug, heightens music’s physical impact. Are people taking so much Molly because the music is perfect for it, or is the music responding to the culture’s drug du jour and shirking certain creative elements in favor of speakers large and loud enough to shake your body into ecstasy? As we become more accustomed to the sensations of loudness, it seems less likely that the trend will be reversed.

As dance is compressed so is our definition of dance music. It becomes synonymous with the tank tops, vague lyrics about saving the world and, of course, the impending bass drop—a moment so seemingly addictive that it is eliminating other ways of bringing a song to new heights. The form of a dance hit is so conservative (build-up, drop) that it seems to undercut the sonic advancements these DJs are achieving. The rampant sub genre-ism of EDM makes this even clearer. As Lewis-Kraus got the opportunity to interview a rising DJ, Sander van Roorn, the DJ’s publicist instructed him to make no queries about genre. Lewis-Kraus finds a scary explanation for this: “House is ascendant; trance has been sliding out of fashion, and a rising DJ such as Sander isn’t keen on being identified with last year’s category, even if the sounds themselves remain debatably distinguishable.” This genre-squashing, this narrowing of what is popular dance music and what is yesterday’s fad, mirrors the standardization of rhythm, of space, of individual dance itself. Dance music that doesn’t have an ejaculatory bass drop, that doesn’t seem arena-ready, is getting pushed to the sidelines. Perhaps dance music needs room in the conglomerate sound of the world’s top DJs (DJ Magazine’s yearly ranked list of the world’s top DJs is taken entirely seriously and often cited, as if this is a pure measurement of talent and not style or fame) for other genres, many of them electronic and technically EDM, which are not receiving the attention or fratty fist pumps that the rest of the movement is. With EDM’s popular takeover, however, it seems as if it will claim the “dance music” title for itself for some time.

It’s easy to get distracted by the bright lights. The spectacle. But this mass movement—both of culture and body—features a rigidly controlled aesthetic of motion, even as it masquerades as a hedonistic celebration of the senses. It might be both. This story seems to be playing out like others we’ve seen. In the ’60s, too, lofty selling points like “love” and “fun” and “peace” were turned around on those who coined them. The importance of social networking to the EDM generation, where mixes are constantly recycled and remixed, suggests a specious democracy at the heart of this giant “scene.” But while the Internet has made it easier to put music into the world, social media sites also make it that much easier for advertisers and promoters to know exactly what people want and, in response, to exaggerate those trends until that’s all we see. Pop music and creativity are not always in opposition, but what we hear as a rally cry to dance sounds more like a military march to me: One-two-whoop-whoop.

Greg Nissan is a sophomore at Brown University. According to Forbes, he is an estimated $4 billion industry.

MAKE DO & MEND 06 - Belle & Sebastian

I listened to this on the way to a job interview.

B and effing S keep a consistent beat with their contribution. It stays a laid-back ‘70s breakbeat near all the way through. If soul night DJs were looking to add to their racket, this might be a good place to check. We meet again Jane Weaver (eerie chanteuse); we get the titular track “Paint A Lady” by Susan Christi, which sounds like America playing with George Harrison, recorded in 1970. Finders Keepers did good work resurrecting her drugstore visage, as there were only 5 of those records made as test plates.

I am happy to report that I can now recognize The Vampires Of Dartmoor without looking at the player. A goofy Hanna Barbara jawharp and a slightly unhinged breakbeat. There guitars slink and creepy-crawl, and I have decided that I like their antisocial freaknik aura.

S. McLoughlin / A. Cooper are actually some of my favorites, I was glad to see ‘em on here. FK are connected to a sect of hidden pagan folksters, the modern derivatives of The Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Comus; old weird Britannia. These kids record their folksongs to warbled tape and they sound like moldy gems. “Snowfall” is merely acoustic guitar, layered in counterpoint, a ringing pinning it all together. It’s sheer loveliness, the guitars are so intertwined; it’s like Bert Jansch or John Fahey without the angst. Felt-like in its spindly complexity, Sam McLoughlin and his affiliates are beguiling, a tucked-away secret.

There’s a Japanese version of Iron Man, “Kuen Kuen Lueng Lueng” by Sroeng Santi, also with a funky backbeat. You go kind of mad, listening to a concentrated dose of these records after a while. Your life becomes a Hindi holiday in the Scottish highlands; it’s like moving to the space disco. If you embrace and digest the musical polymorphism, if you accept the mutation, you’ll be just fine. It’s perplexing, listening to Asian musicians trying to play ska; there’s a lot going on there, a lot to think about.

Belle and Sebastian provide a dishing of solid gold funk and breaks, this one will make the hungry sample hounds satiated. (Hint: There’s probably more breaks in this records than all the rest). Which raises the question: for what purpose are you listening to these records? Is listening to music your job? Are you a wedding DJ? A drooling completist? Everybody comes their own way to Finders Keepers, has their own reason. The reason you listen to music, the way that you use it, impacts greatly how the music is perceived. What role does music fill in your life? What are you looking for?

If you’re looking for great samples, this one’s it.

It also kept me safe and calm on the way to my interview. It kept me safe in its backbeat, put a spring in my step. There’s a relaxing quality to B&S’s mix; stoned.

On to the next!

discogs

MAKE DO & MEND 07 - Sublime Frequencies

If there’s anybody who knows how to put together an exotic mixtape, it would be Sublime Frequencies. A record label out of Seattle, they’ve released albums of taxi radio from Mali, exploding dragonflies in Asia Minor. Unsurprisingly, I hardly know any of the acts (except The Vampires Of Dartmoor. I’d know them anywhere). There’s a definite globe hopping agenda going on here: India, France, Spain. The series has fallen into a groove at this point, and you’re actually pretty well familiar with Finders Keepers menagerie, 7 EPs in. Far out French fusion prog, Czech new wave soundtracks, Persian party music, and lots and lots of funky breaks. Nearly everything has the crackle of age, and a funky underpinning to it. FK are trying to appeal to that select sort of digger, progressive hip-hop heads and soulgaze samplesmiths. If you like 70s party music, you will love these records. If you like sounds from all over, then these are for you (particularly this one). If you have a limited amount of time for funky ephemera, and private press curiosities, you may only give this a passing glance. If you’re an extensive musical thrillseeker who’s already heard everything, then you might need all 10. I know these records are rekindling my musical curiosity, my thirst for knowledge, for experience.

Listening to these albums, swimming around in them for a month and a half, infecting my thinking patterns with skewed world music and tainted exotica, something has started to shift. The way I am listening to, and thinking about, music is shifting. It’s becoming fresh and new and interesting again.

Truth be told, I don’t think of music much, in terms of individual cuts. It’s more like an uninterrupted whole, and I always feel cheap and dishonest when I talk about the minutiae in a review, although the way I listen to music has inevitably changed, as a result of so much writing.

“Werewolves On Wheels (Main Theme)” by Don Gere is my favorite track on this record. A twangy country take on Velvet Underground pulse, it’s cheap and trancey, slinky and sexy. My kind of post-punk.

I really must be going, so suffice it to say: file under breakbeat.

discogs

MAKE DO & MEND 08 - Bob Stanley

A lesson in minimalism.

To put this whole thing together, I had to scour the internet, checking playlists, making sure I had everything. I could not buy the venue, yet still I wanted to write about the music, so I did whatever it took to hear the music.

Still to this day, I do not own a copy of 08. I’m listening to it as a mix on the internet. For the others, I created a Review folder, everything extracted, almost neatly numbered. If you could see the desktop of my computer, you would know what I mean about drowning in the data stream. I’m a digital hoarder; I have a curious mind. To invite a little is to invoke a lot; and being a music lover can drown you in spam and bland pop hits. Your ears can get flabby, that’s why we condition ourselves.

I wanted to review all 10 of these EPs as an exercise in listening and paying attention. Every day I struggle against numb ears and cynicism; there are days when I would have walked 10 miles to pick up ONE of these records, and I still feel that way about certain things. You might feel like you’ve heard it all before, but you haven’t. You haven’t experienced this moment before, bud. Listening to music forces you into the present, you are washed over with a flood of emotions and ideas, your mind is full of images and memories. It is transmission, it is a ghost, it is a possession. You have to lean in, you have to fight against the forces of entropy, the forces that would have you forever seeking instant thrills and sugar rush revelations. Some of the music that I listen to the most, I’ve discovered since the dawn of the internet age. I’m constantly flicking through a different strain or strata of music, but it doesn’t bother me. Sometimes I feel rootless and weightless, like the alienness will drive me berserk, so far from home. But then some heavenly harmony hits, and a new synapse is forged in my brain, and all is forgiven. Being a musical adventurer is a path for the brave.

I’ve been drowning in possibilities, lost in love. Too much damn music, not enough dang time. It was not until I met my mate, and I started to relax into my life, that I began to be able to listen to and write about music; to hear clearly. Not listening to fulfill some goal, to fill in some checklist, although I have to say there is a satisfaction in filling in the blanks. The lengthy avenues of discogs.com. But even without trying to categorize, I still appreciate much of this music. Even without knowing what it is. Some of it I don’t. I have a very limited need for Bollywood in my life, I’m just hardly ever that chipper, it always comes off as evil around me. But I’ve probably discovered ten new artists that I am legitimately excited to check out. Finders Keepers, and people whose taste I trust guide me through the fog, and there is a light on the horizon. There is a clear and stress free mind ahead. I mean, what the hell’s the point of getting stressed out about listening to psychedelic music?

discogs

MAKE DO & MEND 09 - Now-Again Records

We are reaching the end; I am nearing enlightenment. Who would’ve ever thought that, after listening to weeks upon weeks of turkish fuzz and scraping soundtrack excerpts, that I’d still be excited to put on another abstract breaks record. Yet here I am, here I type. At this point, you’ve heard nearly all of these bands before. There’s even the same Voice of the Seven Woods track, “Fire In The Head,” as appeared on 04. But don’t get jaded now, this is still some of the farthest reaches of left dial sounds you’ll find, even if you go looking for that kind of thing a lot.

Now-Again records is owned and operated by former head of Stones Throw, Egon. Egon doesn’t stop with Detroit and breakdancing samples, he travels the world finding the lowest grooves. His expertise here is much appreciated.

There’s a head-nodding, silver pulse that runs through this record like a sciatic nerve, raging and tearing yet lowdown, low to the streets. This music is down, it will keep you rolling. You get a chance to hear “Ince Ince” by Selda, the one that was copped by Oh No, the original is just as catchy; Selda is a sultry songbird, and their guitarist sears and burns. They could’ve been bigger than Big Brother & The Holding Company.

‘Petch Barupa’ by Kor Hua Jai Bee Kuen is one of the more exotic things you’ll hear, unless you listen to a lot of Chinese tango. The guitar drags along the floor like a dead waltz, a lazy salsa; this is seductive jazz, sung in a different language. There’s a truly astounding guitar solo, that would’ve done Beefheart proud. A cross between an oriental temple and a burlesque. The main mood of this edition seems to be exotic jazz and funk. Egon’s incredibly good at picking it out.

Not out of any fault, mainly lack of time, this is the record that I listened to the least, out of the bunch, but I plan on remedying that, and digging into Now-Again again.

discogs

MAKE DO & MEND 10 - Finders Keepers

We are nearing our completion. Finders Keepers present us with their absolute favorites of their own stash. Almost twice as long as any other, with hardly any repeats, it seems like they’re showing off: “Look, we know our shit better than anybody.”

They end like they began, the album beginning with an innocent incantation. Then S. Janacki brings us to an Indian wedding, complete with choreographed dancers, and a choir of demented children. This stuff is so chirping it’s hard not to imagine it mangled by some breakcore freak with an axe to grind. I do NOT want to hear asian children sped up to drum ‘n bass standards. Scary.

You get to meet the master of midnight here, John Paul Massiera, with the very strange Warner Brothers disco funk of “Duck Duck.” It sounds like Tortoise with duck calls and Moroder strings, if that makes any sense. The beat is infectious, pummeling, driving. This song is rife with samples, for the adventurous producer. Speaking of killer beats, Pierre Raph’s ‘Batterie Field,’ from the Requiem For A Vampire soundtrack sounds like a free-jazz marching band, playing in a crypt. It segues smoothly, or takes a sharp right, into Arp Life’s spaghetti-spy thriller, “Rosa Rosa”. Its got that Profondo Rosso blurred-line, production music funk, with thin cheap filling the accordion’s role. Stylized.

Suzanne Ciani’s (The Delia Derbyshire of the Atari Generation) shows up with “Liberator,” a driving hero’s anthem, that foreshadows wonky’s rigid basslines and mechanical drums by two decades. It’s triumphant, and surprisingly effective Techno, with Vocodered vocals promising to “save the human race.” It’s what it might have sounded like if Kraftwerk were to have done the soundtrack for Pole Position.

I’ve been swallowing down Finders Keepers mouldering fumes for 6 weeks. I’ve listened to almost every volume of this series 5 to 6 times; it’s becoming part of my genome. I’m mutating; gazing off with a far off smile as I ride the escalator at the mall, genuinely enjoying the soulless muzak. Gazing at my life through a mildewed, beat-digging lens that makes everything more enjoyable, more thrilling. The joy of discovery is alive again, my curiosity is afoot. I’m staying up all night, tape recording old vampire flicks off of cable. Finders Keepers is teaching me to pay attention, how to find and recognize the good shit! Their motto is ‘Making Global Sounds Local’ and they are fulfilling that role nicely, finding the weirdest shit this side of Irwin Chusid.

All in all, I’d say 02 and 05 have been my favorites, to listen to as a complete whole. The best results of my experiment were introductions to Jean-Claude Vannier, Lubos Viser’s Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders soundtrack (which I legitimately love, in all seriousness), and Zdenek Liska’s score for Mala Morska Vila. Of the crop of current musicians who make an appearance, S. McLoughlin, Jane Weaver, and Paper Dollhouse are all worthy of adulation and investigation.

If you were to buy one edition, to see what the FK dudes are mostly about, 10 might suit your needs. It’s twice as long, and covers the same range as most of the other contributors, and there’s a lot of rare dust here. 09 is your best bet if looking for whacked out exotica.

I plan on reviewing the individual albums these were mixed from, as time goes on. Finders Keepers, Andy Votel, Demdike Stare... these have become part of my life. I’m happily influenced; relaxed and funkier than when I started.

The Make Do & Mend series is a prime example of modern activism, people helping people spread the word. It’s the antidote to the crumbling machination of the Pop Industry. We diggers will never be without inspired sounds to listen to. The world gets strangers by the second, as we slip down the rabbit hole, away from the consensual reality of bright lights and autobiographical information. There is mystery here. There is wonder.

J. Simpson is a writer and musician, living in Portland, Or. He is the principle author of the Forestpunk blog (Forestpunk.wordpress.com), as well as the co-founder of the Bitstar arts and music collective (www.facebook.com/ratbits) with his partner Lily Valentine. He is dedicated to better living through better hearing.

Finders Keepers started back in 2001 with an eponymous compilation. Expert diggers Andy Votel, Dominic Thomas, and Doug Shipton started the label with the intent of unearthing “psychedelic / jazz / folk / funk / avant-garde and whacked-out movie musak,” for the faithful. Faux vampire soundtracks, Czech new wave, more funky Indian breaks than you can shake a divining rod at, these guys live and breathe dusty vinyl (probably to the detriment of their lungs and delicate psyches). They have become a reliable source of curious psychedelic artifacts, packed with dense liner notes, and often luxuriously packaged on vinyl. There’s is a model of care and craft, and when their inventory burned, the community stepped up to help them stay afloat.

Being an impoverished music enthusiast in this day and age, trying to accurately describe sounds and alert folks to good music is part of the way that I support the various scenes. Also, being an obsessive in this day and age means being drowned in sound and hearing novel acoustics, from waking until sleep. If you don’t learn to slow down and experience whatever you’re hearing, it becomes bland white noise—garbage in the data stream. Labels like Finders Keepers, and other expert archaeologists, give their lifeblood and sweat to find the most esoteric slabs of wax and funnel them back into the culture. I give my sweat and sleepless nights in response, acting as scribe, trying to jot it all down. It’s what I attempt to do with the 66.6 series: fanatical obsessive sonic archaeology.

I impudently volunteered to review all 10 EPs of the Make Do & Mend series, released back in 2011. Make Do & Mend consists a series of EPs, released bi-weekly for 5 months, with big names like Jarvis Cocker, Demdike Stare, Belle And Sebastian, Prefuse 73, and fellow archivists Sublime Frequencies putting together mixtapes of their favorite tracks from the Finders Keepers catalog. I quickly came to realize that the standard ‘This is what this sounds like’ music journalism was not going to cut it. It would take a novel to describe the bread crumb trail of obscure 7”s, weird soundtracks, and the movies they come from and the supermarket of genres contained on these 20 sides. This gives me an opportunity to try several of the emerging styles of music writing that are prevalent these days. It’s a joke—pretending to be an authority on even the slightest percentage of sounds that surround us now. The best we can hope for is an inquisitive mind, open ears, and an appreciative heart.

MAKE DO & MEND 01 - Jarvis Cocker

The first installment was brought to you by Jarvis Cocker, multi-cultural frontman of Pulp. He brings us a sampler of Japanese children’s music, Caribbean funk, proto-Techno, and Australian motorcycle gangs. 

“Listen you dandelions

don’t try to be daisies

don’t try to be tall like the trees

did some of you try to be pink?

be content

be yellow

its not failure if yr not a pink dandelion”

A quaint Mancunian accent intones over some mayfair flute and faint guitar plucks, courtesy of Carol Batton, a poet who disseminates her words on the streets of Manchester. ‘Beeing’ sets the mood for this first installment of MD&M, and this opening verse could be a cross-stitch sampler hanging in the Finders Keepers’ office. Quickly veering from childlike verse, and the lysergic orientalism of Yamasuki, a project of French pop composers Jean Kluger and Daniel Vangarde, which sounds like Damo Suzuki leading the Langley School Music Project, with a Judo master punctuating the verses like Kuni from UHF. This combination of childlike wonderment and soul-burning psych grooves is a decent synapses of Cocker’s contribution to the cause. Almost every track is a winner, many soliciting comments from my roommates, causing me to walk back and forth to cull exotic names from the playlist. My personal favorites are ‘Le Roi Des Mouches et la Confiture De Rose’ from Jean-Claude Vannier’s misplaced masterpiece, L’enfant assassin des mouches. Finders Keepers unearthed this gem in 2006, one of their most noteworthy achievements to date, rekindling Vannier’s career in the process. The alarm-clock musique concrete, Within You Without You strings, and middle-eastern percussion tickled my cochlea in all the right ways, and reminded me to listen to Histoire de Melody Nelson again.

Jarvis must’ve been on a roll: the futuristic space-disco of ‘Super Man, Super Cool’ is a banger! Slinky, slippery funk synth, motorik drum beat, acid rock guitar licks and gospel chorus sung in french and James Brown’s horn section playing the Munsters theme song; its Detroit techno made by a live band in 1978. Cache Cache, a Finders Keepers’ subsidiary, restored this to wax in 2010, and Jackie Chalard has been one of the choicest of this series thus far.

Billy Green brings us a roadtrip across Australia: ‘Death Trip’ from the ‘Stone’ Soundtrack, “The Gravediggers” bring us a new kind of motorbike gang, and then its on to Trinidad with Amral’s Trinidad Cavalier Steel Orchestra cover of War’s ‘The World Is A Ghetto’. Its a feast for breakbeat fanatics, a real slick downbeat and ambient Calypso. That’s the thing with these Finders Keepers’ comps, you have to be a geographer and an ethnomusicologist to even try and write about them, they’re so all over the place. Or, you’ll end up as both, along the way.

We have a lot of ground to cover, so I’ll hesitate from describing every track.

The one I’ll leave you with is ‘Silver Chord’ by Jane Weaver. She’s one of the originating sorceresses of the Bird offshoot of FK. I’ve been fond of The Fallen By Watchbird, and have even pulled this out live. It’s gorgeous. Her voices sears my soul, true pagan worship. This is harps and angels, freak folk done right, here joined by Wendy Flower. It’s this kind of track that makes it spellbinding to be a music journalist.

1 down, 9 to go.

discogs

MAKE DO & MEND 02 - Demdike Stare

It was because Demdike Stare that I delved into this project in the first place. I decided to become fascinated by their gaze, and use it as a salve against my musical ADD. Sometimes  you’ve just got to take a stand.

MD&M 02 was probably the highest profile of the bunch, most notably for 2 exclusive DS edits and a sneak peak at a forthcoming Jean Rollin soundtrack, Fascination (paired with Requiem For A Vampire). We are introduced once again to Billy Green, of the Stone roadtrip fame. Demdike’s ‘Double Drop Crash Edit’ takes us far off the highway and into the outback. Headswallowing didgeridoo and tribal bells, ghostly choirs of djinn: Demdike Stare get trancey as only they can.

For a long time I was only listening to the EP1 version of this, which was released as ep1 with the two remixes and a track from Slant Azymuth, so it was kind of a trip to hear the whole thing, with all the funky filler. They’re essentially a mixtape band, building their golems from pre-recorded slivers of the choicest wax; they will introduce you to a million new bands.

‘The Dragon’ by Vangelis sounds like Scottish techno with fiddle and lo-fi acid guitars, like Chrome dancing with the Dead’s parking lot. It’s 15 minutes of stomping, eye-crossing tribal getdown, advise caution while operating fast machinery. It’ll put you in the theta state in the morning, and having you talking to ghosts by mid-lunch. He apparently does a lot more than just airy synthscapes.

‘Demdike Stare's Les Vampires Emeutes Mash Up of Horrific Child’s ‘L'Etrange Mr Whinster’ is my favorite. I heard Boomkat call it “a full five minutes of hopunchbacked loops and petrified chorales from the back of the top shelf,” and I couldn’t really improve upon that (as usual). It’s whispery and sinister, Suspiria-like and pounding and terrifyingly detuned; the kind of a thing to stop a party cold. It’s like a witch party in a dream.

‘Contast’ by Fusioon should again make some instrumental beatheads very happy, or perhaps purveyors of abstract electronics. There’s lots of squiggly organs to bend, and some sweet chorus-y guitar. Very similar in kosmic mood to 01’s ‘Tocatta Y Fug’. They remind me of Keith Emerson’s prog-funk excursions; come to think of it, there’s a bit of a Goblin Giallo fog over this whole affair, as well. ‘Disco Title Music From Dahshat’ comes on like a dance party in a temple in Calcutta; funky bongo action and Hindu chanting, some overdriven exotica flutes and spy guitar, burned from the vinyl. Bappi Bahiri popularized the use of synthesized disco music in Indian films, and was accused of plagiarizing other composers without paying royalties. He seems to be an interesting character with a lot of music—and it seems like his career was full of crazy, otherworldly sounding funk breaks. I will have to investigate further.

‘Violent Library’ by Acanthus is an abstract drum ritual in the middle of the comp. It brings to mind the ritual processions of funeral folk druids like Sylvester Anfang II or Comus. Come worship...

Bruno Spoerri is practically becoming a household name, ever since FK released Gluckskugel to critical acclaim. Since then, a number of his original albums have been restored to print on a handful of sweet labels, appear on compilations, and are remixed by young practitioners of the electronic black arts.

Originally coming from a jazz saxophone background and stopping for a moment to practice psychology, DJ Dino Lötscher and Andy Votel convinced Spoerri to dig into his sound archives from 71-80, in hopes of unearting a pleasurable treasure trove of audio ingenuity and bouncing tones of self-discovery. It’s brilliant stuff and well-recorded. ‘Background Rhythm 4’ is a ghost in the machine, a virtual heaven, a Fellini nightmare. The vocals will just not come into focus, a rain-soaked blur of nauseating ascent; bloodcurdlingly futuristic, in an old-fashioned kind of way.

I got introduced to the fried grooves of Selda Bagcan a couple of years ago, thanks to Finders Keepers. (Actually, I think I heard her on Oh No’s track ‘Heavy’ first). I’ve always been a huge fan of middle-eastern scales, so Selda’s sitar leads and perfect breakbeats are a no-brainer, plus she wails like an Indonesian Janis Joplin. I think she was a persecuted political prisoner at some point. ‘Utan Utan’ will please your cocktail-sipping company.

‘Visitors’ is a visitation from Jean-Paul Massiera, it’s like a Dario Argento car chase in space with Phil Collins on the radio. It’s kind of queasy and greasy in its triumphant ‘80s electro. It seems like the gratuitous ‘song’ on the horror movie score, interrupting the surreal atmosphere of dread. This will sound good on a cassette deck as you head to the ice cream parlor.

‘Main Theme from Sitting Target’ takes us back to the cinematic roots of Finders Keepers’ soundtrack fetish. A ponderous Morricone funk workout; space western. Beatdiggers beware this, there’s wailing sax and gothic grindhouse organs. There’s even some industrial lo-fi clutter. Creepy slo-mo western breakbeats, absolutely glorious.

We conclude our listening journey with ‘Des Ecuries’ by Phillippe D’aram returning us to the decompression chamber of our own atmosphere, in some more weightless dystopian dream mass. If HAL were to have sang opera...

This concludes the second chapter of our installment.

discogs

MAKE DO & MEND 03 - David Holmes

3 records in, you start to recognize familiar names from FK’s stash: Acanthus, Jacky Chalard, Jean-Claude Vannier are joined by Lollywood prince M. Ashraf and his chanteuse A. Rishdi, and you meet The Vampires Of Dartmoore for the first time. Ashraf’s tracks are sourced from the highly popular ‘The Sound Of Wonder,’ (with the eponymous track kickstarting this party), and ‘Hello Mr. Hitchcock’ comes from ‘Dracula’s Music Cabinet,’ an artificial OST from the Vampires’ that is begging to be bled by the zealous b-music sample fiend. ‘The Sound Of Wonder’ is almost unbearably light-hearted and positive, with its bellydancing exotica. More fare for the tiki bar.

MD&M 03 is a more rockist fare than the electroacoustic derivations of the first 2. There’s a snotty European vibe, (see ‘L’Etrocute’ by Jesus, full of French pathos), mixed with Pakistani wonderment and Czech dream logic. David Holmes’ contribution to the cause seems much more cinematic than the sound-collages of the previous volumes; ‘The Song Of The Siren’ by Zdenek Liska is an angelic underwater chorus, from the Czech version of the Little Mermaid (Mala Morska Vila)((which is really dreamy and lovely and highly worth seeing)). Its all Disney acapella for 2 minutes, before unexpectedly segueing out with some imaginative sound design (what exactly is going on?). ‘Le Frisson De Vampires’ by Acanthus is another soundtrack cut, with some ghoulish croaking and ghastly chanting over surf guitar. This is the most epic of prog rock, presaging sludge metal by 2 decades - it could be Pink Floyd scoring a Hammer Horror flick.

There are 4 main feelings expressed on Make Do & Mend, compiled by renowned digger and DJ David Holmes.

1. Pakistani Wonderment/Lollywood chic - Two tracks here from M. Ashraf, one of the most famous music directors of the Pakistani film industry. ‘Dama Dam Mast Qalandar (The Song Of Wonder)’ is frighteningly upbeat, bellydancing exotica with hip-swaying vocals. The music reminds me of Ethiopian jazz, with its rolling organic lope, but instead playing with a synthesized sitar, and an accordion, oddly enough. ‘Live and let live/love and let love’; perfect for your next Bollywood cocktail night. (There’s a couple of tribal drum breaks in this one, for those that are looking.) ‘Too Ney Kaha’ features Nahid Akhtar on vocals, a bouncy breathy vixen who seems to be driving the men wild. The music is pure beach party funk, there’s more bongos than a Shackleton record, (plus some surf and wah guitar), mixed with some onomatopoeia ‘plosive action, some pure Indian rhythm speak in action! A strange track, could’ve come from the Ghost World soundtrack.

2. Freaky continental attitude - ‘Rockers En Liberte’ by Jacques Barsamian, ‘La Collecte Des Coeurs’ by Jackie Chalard, ‘L'enfant La Mouche Et Les Allumettes’ by Jean Claude Vannier. So many passionate, snotty French accents! ‘La Collecte...’ by Jackie Chalard is my favorite of the bunch, taut mysterious prog-funk, some searing acid leads lingering with muttered garbled voices in the distance. It’s a trip; it takes you for a voyage! ‘Rockers En Liberte’ is just plain strange; a glam band playing with a children’s choir, run through a stereo imager. So much whooshing! The Jean Claude Vannier track is another one from L’Enfant Assassin Du Mouches, truly one of the gems in Finders Keepers’ crown, and no better reason to keep these fine folks in business. There’s a surreal cut-up sound collage at the beginning, there’s a narrative at play: church bells, footsteps, traffic, maybe stomping out a cigarette. There’s a grinding, nightmarish racket, and the scene seems to jump cut to a garish Go-Go burlesque cantina. It really puts images in your head, but they’re very inconclusive and malformed. ‘L’electrocute’ is a sneering, whining synth seduction. The bass hops like a Playboy bunny, there’s even skeezy bump-n-grind brass. This track has more attitude than anything i’ve heard this year.

3. Soundtrack Outtakes - My favorite cuts from this record. ‘Hello Mr. Hitchcock’ by The Vampires Of Dartmoor is a creepy goofy surf samba, the music interrupted by a Slovenian sounding accent ringing up the master of terror and threatening his life. Don’t worry, there’s b-movie organ and xylophone, as well. I might be worried, if I were Alfred Hitchcock. ‘The Song Of The Siren’ by Zdenek Liska, from the soundtrack for a Czech version of The Little Mermaid (Mala Morska Vila)((which is really dreamy and lovely and highly worth seeing)). It sounds like a Disney host of Seraphim; if you have ever fancied the ghostly ambient vocals of Panda Bear’s Young Prayer, this will flip your wig. It ends with more abstract sound-design; it is these interludes (which ‘L'enfant La Mouche’ features as well) that make this record so fun and stony to listen to. Movies of the mind!

4. Other - ‘Witchhunt’ by Twinkranes and ‘I Like Blue’ by Yellowhammer. ‘Witchhunt’ is a modern offering, from a 2009 release on Twisted Nerve. Twinkranes have a classic synthpunk vibe—think Suicide, with Cosmic progressive tendencies. The vocals are smooth and robotic, rising above the tumult. This track rages and never relents; this band is a rare find, worth the price of entry alone. Their synths are sick! Burning analog geist, played in octave, with a machine drum beat. ‘I Like Blue’ by Yellow Hammer is some Syd Barrett lo-fi pop by way of Yellow Magic Orchestra. I think ‘Kyber Mail’ by Sohail Rana is the strangest track on here (saying something); it sounds like a train rolling through an 8-bit landscape, cruising through carousels, over hills and under dales. This seems like it may have been made for children, but it certainly seems to set the mind alight with visions. Goofy but imaginative. David Holmes has produced for Yellowhammer in the past; this track was selected from an upcoming compilation.

It seems like David Holmes has really picked the rarest and the best from his personal stash. Not a stinker in the bunch. Will get you re-interested in film music, I can almost guarantee.

I’ve got 7 more to go. I’m running out of time. {the clock strikes 12}

discogs

MAKE DO & MEND 04 - Gruff Rhys

Gruff Rhys, alongside maybe John Cale, is the most famous Welsh person I know of. He is the singer for the band Super Furry Animals, who’ve always had a flair for Welsh pride and psychedelic pop. There’s definitely some Welsh rare beat on here, but that is not all! Yamasuki are back with ‘Aisere I Love You’, a track that sounds like your junior prom, if your junior prom took place on an army base in Kyoto. Nahid Akhtar makes another guest appearance, playing the exotic princess on Nazir Ali’s ‘Society Girl’, which is the craziest mix of polka, go go, and freakbeat rave-up. It’s a theme song for an otherworldly Breakfast At Tiffany’s.

Album opener ‘Ghost Rider In The Sky’ by Susan Christi, a cowboy song originally written by Stan Jones in 1948, has found the most permanent residence in my playlists out of the bunch. It sounds like Nancy Sinatra with an Amen, a fingerpicked acoustic guitar blowing in the wind. It’s a story about a cowboy; a vision of “red-eyed, steel-hooved cattle thundering across the sky,” chased by damned cowboys. He would have to join their endless hunt, if he didn’t change his wicked ways. It’s a novelty country song, but it’s haunting and catchy; the arrangements and performances are outstanding, tasty hints of brass and funky drumming. ‘Ghost Rider In The Sky’ was originally released on Christi’s excellent opus from 1970, Paint A Lady.

My other favorite track out of the bunch, and the most contemporary, is the middle-eastern jam ‘Fire In My Head’ by Voice Of The Seven Woods. Tribal tabla percussion and microtonal guitar meets some funky drumming and burnt-out electronics. This is like the 7th hour of a trip, when you’re starting to get paranoid and speak to spirits. Ironically, it sounds more authentically middle eastern then a lot of the music found in this series that actually comes from the Middle East. They’re trying to appeal to Americans, and the Western record buying public, while us Anglos are trying to assuage our guilt, erase our past. Voice of the Seven Woods is the project of Rick Tomlinson, along with Chris Walmsley on drums and Pete Hedley on bass. They’re frequent collaborators with the B-music collective, along with Gruff Rhys and Andy Votel. Every album i’ve heard by them has been solid and different. Worthy of attention.

Many of the other tracks on this release come off as novelty or filler. Perhaps it’s the alien nature of the Welsh language, or the silliness of the children’s music; it’s the least cohesive out of the bunch, or the one I listened to the least. Selda does make an appearance, with ‘Yaylar’, always a good thing! The more Selda Bagcan in your life, the better!

discogs

MAKE DO & MEND 05 - Zola Jesus & Prefuse 73

This, along with the Demdike Stare joint, was the most anticipated and most listened to of the bunch. I’ve been a big fan of Zola Jesus for years (I saw her play at a Spanish mission in Austin, TX.) and I was curious what her gothic sensibilities would pluck from the back catalog. 05 also features an exclusive remix from Scott Heron (Prefuse 73) of Japanese children’s choir Yamasuki.

At this point, your practically friends with some of the artists on this disc. Between all 10 eps, you can pretty much hear the entirety of Lubos Fiser’s soundtrack for Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders (which you really should hear from start to finish); you’ll hear Jane Weaver, Jean-Claude Vannier, and Voice of the Seven Woods again as well. The heft of it seems cinematic in scope; adventurous instrumental music, evoking mysterious mov. The fact that most of this issue is instrumental makes it easier to listen to on repeat than many of the others. Its kind of easy listening exotica, flutes and tribal drums, demonic choirs. There’s less crunchy funk and persian breakbeat than a lot of the other discs, and I just love the ghostly choral romance of Lubos Fiser and Zdenek Liska, who composed the Mala Morska Vila soundtrack. The entirety of this disc is free from kitsch and clutter, and you are reminded how lovely and whimsical and strange some of this music is. ‘As She Entered’ by The Predicate Production is a chillingly beautiful sliver of modern classical with tape music filigree—it’s grand for this avant-garde edge to be filtering back into people’s holes.

And that sort of reveals the real advantage of a series like Make Do & Mend; how name and notoriety can sell other music, how musicians link up and help each other out. Zola Jesus and Prefuse 73 are pretty big names in certain circles. Probably quite a few people heard these records, and this is NOT music that would be heard otherwise. It’s freaky in all the right ways. To pick a few, I’d say “Europium Alluminate (with Demdike Stare)” by Jane Weaver, “The Sermon” by Lubos Fiser, and “The Song Of The Siren (main theme) by Zdenek Liska. Your apartment can be transformed into a tropical pagan temple, with a reel-to-reel spinning in the corner.

Of all the records to check out, to get a hint of what Finders Keepers are all about, this would be the one.

discogs

This concludes Part 1. Make sure to check out our forthcoming March issue to read J’s take on the last five EPs!

J. Simpson is a writer and musician, living in Portland, Or. He is the principle author of the Forestpunk blog, Forestpunk.wordpress.com, as well as the co-founder of the Bitstar arts and music collective, www.facebook.com/ratbits, with his partner Lily Valentine. He is dedicated to better living through better hearing.

“Physical is best. Touch it. Smell it right after opening the shrink-wrap. Take it off the shelf to show to your friends, so they can touch it too. Neither downloaded, streamed, nor any other form of music will ever replace physical (except for live!)” – Chuck, user comment on “Pitchfork Launches Advance,” from HypeBot

“Seriously – you’re going to love it. And if you don’t, it won’t have cost you anything.” masterofreality, user comment on “Spotify’s US launch,” from Ars Techinca.

What do you do when you want to listen to recorded music in 2013? You can opt for physical media: put on a CD, a cassette, a record. You can listen to an .mp3 file on software like iTunes. Or you can stream it from “the cloud.” A number of companies compete for your streaming music business, all with slightly different offerings and business models. Spotify and Rdio offer a seemingly infinite library, integrated with your Facebook account, and sync your collection across a bevy of devices. Pandora generates a stream of music based on any song or artist you give it. Turntable.fm puts you in a virtual room and lets you take turns choosing tracks with and for an audience of other users. The list goes on, but one constant unites all the cloud music services: they are free or have a free option. Sign in and log on.

Streaming music services emphasize the single listen and the individual track over repeated play and the full album. Don’t mistake this for sentimentality or for a lament that “streaming music killed the album.” Fetishization of music-as-object can occur in any format. There’s validity in privileging individual tracks, and for that type of music consumer, streaming is a godsend. There is, however, a considerable hole in the streaming music industry for album fanatics.

Enter Pitchfork Advance. On January 7th, online music publication Pitchfork threw its hat into the ring with a fairly unique offering. For the uninitiated, Richard Beck’s n+1 essay puts it best: “In the last decade, no organ of music criticism has wielded as much influence as Pitchfork. It is the only publication, online or print, that can have a decisive effect on a musician or band’s career.” Pitchfork has attained its reputation through careful curation. Curation is the cultural capital attached to Pitchfork, and the key to its success and self-continuation as the premier source for music news and criticism.

The site invests deeply in bands as brands, and their coverage inherently favors some artists over others. For example, Pitchfork has reviewed every album by Rihanna, but declined to comment on the biggest pop record of 2012, Taylor Swift’s Red. They’ve launched the careers of Vampire Weekend and Bon Iver while simultaneously writing Kings of Leon and the Killers out of the annals of festival-tent indie rock. Pitchfork curates meticulously at the level of form and content, both on its site and with its new streaming platform.

Advance streams full albums, in their entirety, and only during the week before the album goes on sale. But rather than a simple media player, Advance attempts to bring the full album experience, including artwork and liner notes, to the web. If streaming services view the single as critical to a social music experience, Pitchfork Advance posits that the album is critical to an individual listening experience. Pitchfork CEO Ryan Schreiber argues that “Pitchfork Advance allows you to have an experience with the music that’s immersive in the way that engaging with a vinyl LP would be.” Certainly, this is romanticism through new media: an empty basement with nothing but a turntable and a pair of headphones, losing yourself for hours in the music, the artwork, the lyrics.

The first album on Advance, Yo La Tengo’s Fade, was accompanied by a set of video loops and animations, content unique and exclusive to this new format. The trees on the Fade’s cover glisten and shift color. Scroll horizontally to see a list of who played on the record, and where it was recorded. Scroll further for a tracklisting. Since Fade, other artists have expanded upon what the platform can do. Guards’ In Guards We Trust contains lyrics and video artwork of cars and lips, complementing the themes of the album. The Advance interface also includes links to social sharing sites and places to purchase the physical album. Advance emphasizes the close relation between music and its material form, making it impossible to extricate the experience of listening to music from the experience of an album. After the week an album spends on Advance, the music disappears, but the artwork and animations remain.

We live in a new era of media reception, one that has fundamentally changed the way we engage with and consume the music we love. In Strange Sounds, Timothy Taylor notes, “Today’s technology makes possible a greater degree of eclecticism in consumption than ever before because of purchases (or downloads) from the web of single tracks of recorded music.” With .mp3 downloads and the ability to rip CDs, the focus of consumers has moved from the album to the single. Why buy an album when the one song you want to hear costs $.99 on iTunes? With this, the playlist has eclipsed the album collection as a source of personal meaning-making. Like listeners once did (and still do) with mixtapes, users invest themselves in playlists and hold them as sources of identity. The songs acquire personal connotations and flavors, and these can be shared to other users/consumers with similar desires. Spotify and other social music services invest heavily in this concept: if you put yourself and your identity into a playlist, an algorithm can determine recommendations for artists, songs, even other users with similar tastes. The playlist is the primary piece of collected data. But by emphasizing the individual song, streaming services highlight an age-old musical debate: what do you prefer, the single or the album? More precisely, which one do you use to create your identity?

For users of these services, this debate is intricately tied to debates on what, exactly, the ideal listening experience is. Commenting on a piece on Advance in tech-blog The Verge, user juliancamilo writes, “As long as theres [sic] a quick way to skip to the next song, it can’t recreate that experience.” Another user drolly suggests “picking up the needle,” but the point is taken: some music purists believe that the album is the paramount form for the art they love, and appreciate Pitchfork Advance for its effort to return people’s focus to the album. Another user, juanochoaiii, writes, “I think the key of enjoying music lies with giving it undivided attention. A streaming service, iTunes, internet radio app, etc., is always used in the background of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, The Verge, etc.” And so, fittingly, Pitchfork Advance sets itself in opposition to the streaming mainstream. If most digital music services are fragmented and distracted, Advance tells you that immersion makes you a superior music listener. Welcome to music snobbery 2.0.

Any popular music form has its detractors, from the top-ten-listing musical objectivists in High Fidelity’s Championship Vinyl to the LA Weekly critic who just this week rebelled against his counterculture by writing a feature called “The Dirty Projectors Are Not Good.” But the glance down the nose extends beyond musical taste. Decrying the new music delivery technology is as old as music delivery technology itself. Thomas Christensen writes about the outcry when four-hand piano reductions of orchestral scores allowed concert music to enter the home in the 19th century, quoting one man as saying, “It is horrifying and worthy of the strongest censure how masterpieces have been arranged—particularly for four hands—with such ineptitude, superficiality, and disrespect.” In Christensen’s article on four-hand transcriptions, those who stood in opposition to the format were those who were threatened by its democratic potential: music entering the home meant it could replace music in concert halls, destabilizing class structure. Similar outrage can be found anywhere economies of power are threatened. So how does streaming music threaten the economy of the album?

Streaming and singles work perfectly for music’s most ascendant (and lucrative) contemporary genre: EDM. An August 2012 Forbes article “places EDM’s rise on the genre’s coexistence with the Web [because] DJs were some of the first to truly give their music for free and adopt social media, making money off of gigs and appearances rather than album sales.” The money for EDM is in the single and the live mega-performance, and that money flows heavily. EDM’s fans view it as democracy-in-miniature, a sonic utopia, the music of a new youth.

This leaves indie rock, a historically album-based medium, with the short end of the stick. This summer, Nitsuh Abebe wrote a feature in New York Magazine on Grizzly Bear, a hugely popular act by indie rock standards, explaining that the band don’t make nearly as much as one would expect. The band members barely scrape the middle class. Meanwhile, the highest paid DJ in the world, Tiësto, made $22 million in 2012. Albums are expensive to record and clumsy to distribute, especially in the digital realm. Singles cost less to produce (especially if you’re making music on your laptop), and make distribution a breeze. As such, albums are quickly becoming a format that only record-label artists can afford, because the label provides the finances and infrastructure to make a record viable. In turn, many independent bands have relied upon crowdsourced funding via Kickstarter in order to make and distribute full records, using a recorded single as the promise of future returns.

By following the money trail and the current impulses of musicians, it’s possible to see why Advance represents a new way forward. Because Pitchfork curates so carefully, they ensure that they remain in the inner circle of commercially viable music. They cover the requisite amount of Top-40, EDM, and R&B while keeping their core indie rock audience. With Advance, Pitchfork is using its clout in an attempt to save the full-album listen. Advance is an ethical medium compared to other streaming services that offer a pittance in royalties to their artists. Writing for Mashable.com, Todd Olmstead claims, “Conventional wisdom suggests that in an age of rampant piracy, letting listeners sample music legitimately will curb illegal downloading, and in the case of rising acts, might even entice people to buy something that otherwise would have been off their radar.”

While trying out Pitchfork Advance, I didn’t find that I could give it my undivided attention. I did, however, find that I listened to multiple albums for their duration, albums I wouldn’t have listened to otherwise. But I didn’t make the leap to go purchase them. At least not yet. Perhaps I will once the albums are off Advance and the music is still in my ear. I do feel a responsibility to pay for the music to which I listened and guilt about potentially stealing the albums. That, if nothing else, is a small victory.

Tristan Rodman is a sophomore at Brown University and co-edits The Tape. If you're in the New York area, catch him speak about Turntable.fm at the 2013 Theorizing the Web Conference on March 2nd.