Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Dirty Water 2 (stray pitch)

 From 2011, past Paper Thin Walls' lifespan, so aimed elsewhere, but seems to fit  here:

Dirty Water 2: More Birth of Punk Attitude doesn't have the sometimes spectacular transitions of its recent forerunner (which I'd def want to briefly acknowledge)(orig. take here https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2012/01/dirty-water-sandwich-some-p-comments.html),  and isn't quite as abrasive, but compiler Kris Needs sets the same pace and perspective right off, veering from  Captain Beefheart's lean and loping "Zig Zag Wanderer" to the cooler rifle range poise of The Human Expression's "Love At Psychedelic Velocity." Zig-zagging from familiar to emerging landmarks continues as Death's "Freaking Out" shrugs over over the cliff, with its stop-start momentum spun around some more by Dizzy Gillespie's "Bebop", with the spiraling electric guitar of (I think) Charlie Christian (there's no "punk jazz" per se on here, but Diz and the live MC5 dig deep and deliver quickly, gratifying rock-head attention spans and appetites).     

Yeah, doo-doo-wopping Silhouttes, strutting off to the poorhouse, smirking "Strange as it seems, all my money turned brown") Suicide suggestively crooning about a "Creature Feature", the Velvet Underground's Live in Texas 69 version of "I'm Waiting For My Man", with its sly classic spoken intro and brown narcotic TX-appropriate new tattoo x boogiemorphic tendencies bleeding through the VU's better known distinguishing marks--yeah, just when all those guys rushing to a peak of cool, we get the one-two punch of Patti Smith's "Piss Factory" and Wayne-to-Jayne County's "Man Enough To Be A Woman" Concise epics, ,bluntly bum-rushing the enemies of promise, and challenging themselves too. And just in case, the Misunderstood's truly flower punk (acid in at least two senses)

 "Children of the Sun" seems a little too grand, the Unrelated Segments' "Story of my Life" immediately brings us back to itchy grievances, warty warning signs and the still-fresh zits of tombstone testimonials. Sometimes it seems like "right band, wrong track", but even then, context can fortify, as Blondie's (lyrically blurry but sonically tonic enough) late 70s "X-Offender" zigs back to the United States of America's "Hard-Coming Love", where chanteuse Dorothy Moskowitz and the USA's male geeks lure each other though  shuddering  psychotronic blossoms of (what turns out to be) foreplay, or at least something left gracefully for generations of imagination, in mid-air. Back to street level again, for the Godz' heartfelt, country-busking serenade, "C'mon little girl turn on" (that's the whole lyric, and all that's needed). These thrift store cowboys get washed through the Lower East Side by the alley waves of  Holy Modal Rounders' "Indian War Whoop." So it goes, jumping back to the late 70s for the rattling b-movie tumult ("I do this every night") of "Imagination" by the sic and aptly named Rudement. 

Contextual momentum or not, some of the daring juxtapositions just don't fit (Woody Guthrie, Big Star, the Flamin Groovies, --possibly more examples of right artist, wrong track). But squinting as sternly as possible (and okay, Faust and some others are growing on me) these two discs still seem to have at least 97:26 of keepers. Main hitch seems to be   I just recently got this, and it's an  April 13 release, so might not fit your projected plans. But thanks for your consideration (sorry this is so long, but it's an involving album) don


Friday, December 24, 2021

Alexis Gideon

 Alexis Gideon: “Just Run”

7.0

From Reunion Song (Sickroom)

Loitercore Out Now

(originally published 2007)

Unemployable, sitting in the park all day,  memory’s yellow clearing, now you found your cue. The joke’s on the ones behind the sealed windows up there, in Disabilities Review, the ones who gotta breathe their building (while they’re lucky). So let the Vick’s Vapor Rub on your chest rise and fall, carrying this wind chimes guitar, and silver notes from your aunt’s bell-lyra, the one she carried and struck with a mallet, up and down, up and down, silver precision, as she high-stepped in the red mud (marching band, class of ‘45, impressions brought to you by Casio). Something bracing in the Geritol, whether they make it any more or not: attention span glides up and down and around the staircase in your brain, following in the footsteps of overdubbed rush-the-mic-like-a-heartbeat rhymes on other tracks, not too far from Bone Thugs N Harmony meeting up with Sly And The Family Stone’s (“And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo wah”) “Everyday People” petticoat sass. Also not too far from some other tracks’ musical jokes that drag on a little bit, like this review, but are no worse than the lowlights of Sun City Girls or Residents. Yeah, your headphones can’t plug into this, can’t retain what you read if you read it, heard it—-but don’t have to, not while the music plays, out here where the air “still swims where the wind sways.” (In the empty blowy envelope, there’s a nice spiky surprise.)

yeah yeah but if you want one of the best ever (on here) https://papercomet.blogspot.com/2020/01/negativland-reviewinterview_19.html

Monday, October 5, 2020

Negativland Thigmotactic/Smith & Shields/Individuals pitches

2008 (I ended up covering Patti Smith/Kevin Shields’ The Coral Sea 

In the Voice, better version here :https://myvil.blogspot.com/2016/06/southern-crossing.html )



I could actually see putting Coral Sea with Negativland's Thigmotactic

(July 15). Smith and Shields see raise, and deliberately drop RIP

Artist-collector Mapplethorpe's visionary vessels of beauty into

the teeming dreaming tides of possibility, where he cracks into

freebird M, while Negativland are fascinated by ugly crazy dorky

commercial shit. 

In both cases, it's all about messing with mythologies, fallacies,

as weight and fuel.

This album  features Mark Hosler up front "singing", with the others

playing, and it confines most of the samples to Hosler's mosh of found

and new lyrics He doesn't let on which is which, what comes from his

own POV, though of course it's all his now, and none of it is; he's

free to mess around and pass on through other lives, kinda. But

there's no great air of self-congratulation, just of being at home in

what is not that far from a novelty-song country groove. Some of it is

terrible, some is awesome, but his attitude is more snotty than

snobby, more expressive of the basic, forever young pleasure of going

"nyahh nyahh, " yet not complacent, underneath easy shots. There's a

sense of restless reverie, somehow leading perfectly into bad, bad

vibrations of crappy old synths, teased into headrush waves, the

moonshine or cheap wine equal of Smith and Shields, buzzwise.

Takes

longer to get there, but it's effective. (Some lyrics, whatever their

pedigree, manage to oops upside the head, too)(as with Smith/Shields

the timing is crucial, though ain't it always.)Of course, this kind of

release has to filtered through scuzz, that's the only way these

deacon bohos can allow their listeners and themselves to enjoy the

material world, and the spirit world has to enter and exit via

jailhouse hooch, ideally. They get close enough, at least on best-tooned

tracks. Could also appeal to some fans of Residents, Primus, possibly

of Stampfel, Fugs,

The Individuals’ Fields/Aquamarine (July 22) is also about breaking on

through, as Fields first did when it jumped out at me from little

speakers on a Tuscaloosa sidestreet, soon after it was first released.

The title song followed me home ("Asleep in the fields/I'm drunk in

your bed, I walk by your houuuuse"), pushing through pedestrian

concerns and passing them along, song by song, situation by situation.

Not only does Gene Holder's remastering bring the dynamics of each

performance out more (and makes clearer how unmannered, undated so

much of this is), but, by placing the earlier, more freewheeling sonic adventures after climatic songs like "Leap Of Faith," we get the

illusion of progress, like they really did take that leap and keep

riding those records like flying carpets (there was another album,

recorded with a different line up, but it wasn't released). I don't

love every track, and I never did, but they all sound better,even the

best songs.(I used to think Janet's wail on the chorus of "Fields" was

a little much, but the remastering is revelatory, as usual)Amazingly

tight bass and drums, guitars do just enough, singers ditto; nobody

imitates the Talking Heads, etc ("Fields" does sound kind of like X,

but X at their best.). Songs of troubled youth, o yeah, but/and as

appropriate for spring and summer as it will be for fall and winter.

Might have more for end of July, but more likely Aug.





 

Sunday, January 19, 2020

Negativland review/interview

180 Gs  “A Nice Place To Live”
from 180 d’ Gs to the FUTURE! (Seeland)  
sweet chariots o’ fire                                         7.0
(published  Nov. or Dec. '07, paperthinwalls)
Since 1980 (at least), the recombinant entity
known as Negativland has been remixing everything,
beginning with (and past the ending of ) the received notion
of “a band”, with a monstrously ever-burgeoning sense
of anti-corporate, anti-Media-whore enterprise
that extends and spins its tentacles around and through
all the arts, for a start, so that of course “everything”
becomes self-reflexive and for instance, in 2005,
they (for it is always a they, shedding and attracting
particles) sent forth, all around this great nation,
“…a large  visual art show of over 80 piece’s (sic),
of their ‘fine art’ works, video, and home-made
electronic devices… “ And this rolling, roiling,
ravenous, fervently ironic multiplicity,
a baby leviathan driver, forever getting busy being born,
was inevitably and inexorably named,
according to the press sheet, “Negativlandland.”
The slick gravitational waves of such
kinetic me-mass, outward bound in the
gospel bosom of classic Western American
self-direction, must have finally turned negative space capability
indeed, beyond attitude, to bring forth an ahhh cappella
breath of fresh air, The 180 Gs.
The Gs perform the audio pieces of Negativland,
setting them to music. Not that the audio pieces of
Negativland are not music, in Cagean terms of
“organized sound,” and not that this sound does not
include patterned vibrations and connotations of
“daa-dummm,” and “plink-pliiink,” but The Gs
always make a nice set of tones, and tunes.
They (the Minnick brothers) sound young,
and bear the first names of Negativlanders past and present,
including that of Negativland’s late, lamented chaplain,
Pastor Dick Vaughn. Or perhaps it is Negativlanders
who bear their names, for they (the Minnick brothers)
sound “older,” in a forever young, 50s-60s,
rhythm ‘n’ blues, rock ‘n’ roll sense:
they take us on “a positive journey through a
Negativland,” leading all trouble into “media rubble,”
and put the f.u. back in fun, and the fun back in f.u.
This is not easy to do, and on 180 d’ Gs to the FUTURE!
(CD included with a DVD, Our Favorite Things,
which itself includes new videos for original Negativland
audio performances, and much, much more),
there are Gs renditions which are a bit diffuse. 
Yet much fun comes, and not only from blithe spirit,
but also from a poise that that suggests a degree of
seriousness, when appropriate.
Indeed, come to think of it, maybe they always do this:
“Car Bomb” sounds flippant at first, as most of The Gs
harmonize on a list of components which, considering
the title, are likely targets (the “chorus” is a lone G’s
clock-like mouth-clicks). But the voices are so rich and
agile, they also begin to seem like the kind of possible
targets, components, worth caring about, never mind your
car parts. (Okay, them too.) There’s no pathos to this, it’s just
—how it is. “I Am God” calmly juggles several approaches to
religion, including the corrosively righteous.
“The Greatest Taste Around” is from Dispepsi
(a concept album which designated a certain
soda as its devil driver), and may well have been
intended by Negativland to satirize their own tendency
to self-righteousness. But if performed by them
(one suspects), it would or could sound merely ironic,
too “white” a signal, pointing to itself.
(Not bad, necessarily, but probably kind of like Devo’s
bobble-headed cover of Lee Dorsey’s “Workin’ In A Coal Mine.”)
The 180 Gs never sound “white,” because of this sense of just
—how it is. Whatever they think about it, they’ve seen it all.
But they’re still watching.
(By the way, noting that The Gs share first names with
Negativlanders isn’t meant to suggest that they’re all the
same people: 180 Gs’ David Minnick’s urbane, twilight
rumble is very different from Negativlander David Wills’
rattling twang, which seems like it could be the basis for
Negativland’s tape-spliced, jump-cut drive, although they
started without him.)
 “A Nice Place To Live” comes from a familiar kind
of TV or radio feature. The 180 Gs sing an eerie, elegant
clarity into a dusty encounter at the Los Angeles County Fair,
an interview with a community “booster,” who’s proudly
presenting an exhibit, including a creature that wiggles
its paw, powered by the glorious resources of Contra Costa County
(they have everything up there). He clears his throat at one point
(in tune), and there are various other signs that The Gs are
singing a transcript, every noise from an old recording,
making notes and intervals of them, tiny gaps, blue bumps
in the road, all the way to and through Contra Costa County
(over it too: with vocal sounds like copters or saucers, always on track). 
Early American engine-uity, fidelity and entrophy, morphing through
art of the ancient geeks, and now are & bees’ too. A cappella, yeah.
They got it all covered, no samples held. (Although, speaking of
“50s-60s” associations, there was this saying,
“You are what you eat.”). Voices set the pace, re-define the time,
like Negativland always try to do, splice by splice (yeah, even in digits),
of every track, every piece made whole. Somebody’s going home.
Negativland’s Mark Hosler on “A Nice Place to Live”
Are you familiar with the original version?
No.
The original is one of our earliest, it’s from 1981, that we found in
a dumpster. And we just thought it was so bizarre, and
inexplicable and funny, that we made a piece out of it.
And The 180 Gs kind of turned it into something that’s more
like a Gregorian chant.
I actually think, knowing the original, it’s the
single funniest track on the whole 180 Gs CD.
How did you guys come up with the idea of
using a vocal group?
Basically, we got, in the mail, I don’t know how many years ago now,
a CD from The 180 Gs, of Negativland cover tracks.
We were just kinda dumbstruck by it when we heard it,
and they were doing “Christianity Is Stupid” and
“Theme From A Big 10-8 Place,” that’s the last track on
this CD with the DVD. And they were so wonderful,
and I can tell you now that the idea of someone doing a
Negativland tribute album, I would shoot them to stop them
from doing it. We don’t like that kind of weird, fawning fandom,
and those kinds of indie tribute albums are almost always pretty lame.
It became a trend, and I remember thinking,
“Man! I hope no one ever does a tribute album on us, that’d be horrible!”
So here come The 180 Gs, and their approach is so completely,
impossibly strange, and we said, 
“This is so great! Maybe we could get them to do a whole album
of our stuff!” And so we wrote them back, “We love it!”
And obviously they love Negativland, that’s why they did it.
So we told them,
“Look, why don’t you pick a song or two from every record
we’ve ever done, and you can interpret them in any way you want,
change them, the only rule is that you have to follow the
semantic content exactly. No deviations,
every single ‘Ah, um, er’ that’s in there; but other than that--!”
So they did it just to do it, and we said, “Wow.”
So did you kick the tracks back and forth?
 They would send us stuff, and I basically ended up
overseeing it, and when they did the song from Dispepsi,
they did it just like the record, and I said,
“There’s no reason to do that, change it as much as you can, do to us
what we do to everybody else. Mess it up, change it around, go creative,
and I’m going to be totally hardass on you,
‘til you get the little details right.”
They’d send me the words, what they thought it said, and sometimes
I’d have to say, “No, that’s not quite right.” A couple of times I felt
really bad, but some people will notice it, that know the original record,
and obviously, from what you say, you did notice
that they were being
very detailed, even though you don’t know the original.
And now the Dispepsi
piece sounds like a field recording, a work song!
How did they change “A Nice Place To Live”?
The original’s just two guys talking, over a beat,
and The 180 Gs replicate that, they make this sound like
a drum machine, with their mouths, and on top of that they turn it into
this rhythmical choral piece, that to my naïve ears sounds like a bit
like a Gregorian chant,
and it’s done kind of in the round,
where they’re chanting but they’re repeating phrases
off of each other.
180 degrees different from the original
—no, it’s completely different. 
The original is simple, way too simple, compared to
what Negativland
does now: we found this tape,
we just processed this beat
---it was done a long time ago, 1981.
Have you played this for anybody, where you’re living now?
No, I don’t sit anybody down, and say, ”Look at this.”
Well, I would suggest that you try it, because,
especially in the South…The 180 Gs, to me, have this whole
impudent, 50s-60s r&b thing, and even a lot of people who
are prejudiced
down here, get into that kind
of music
…and when the promoter mentions oil wells, I think about
black music as a resource, for all kinds of white people too.
Don (Joyce, another Negativlander) and I like doo-wop,
I like Sam Cooke too…It’s another level you’re picking up on,
and you’re one of the first people I’ve spoken to outside our
immediate group about this project, but one of the other l
evels, that we’re unclear about how it will be perceived,
is that Negativland, whatever you think of what we do,
we are all white guys, and we’re very much responding
to culture that is the dominant, mass media, white culture.
And then we have the 180 Gs doing this very bizarre take
on our work, and it does touch on different idioms in music
that are traditionally associated with blacks, with African-Americans.
And we like it, we thought that just makes it incredibly strange
and wonderful, but as far as what people will think when
they hear it, we don’t know. But that’s kind how it’s always been.
There’s enough of us in the group, that we feel like if we all
basically like what the project’s doing, other people will too.
You can’t worry too much about whether they will.
In the original track, does the promoter sound
stressed at all?
Let’s see, he does it pretty much like this, I know most it
by heart, I just love it. (He performs it.).
So kind of a genial, avuncular—carny barker?
Avuncular, that’s a good word for it.
The 180 Gs sound like they’re testifying
about all the oil it takes, for Wiggles to lift his little paw,
like all the oil in Contra Costa County. Which is where?
Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that’s a good interpretation,
and Contra Costa County is where Negativland is from.
On the other side of the Oakland-Berkeley hills,
in the San Francisco Bay area, and the record we did with
“A Nice Place To Live” was Points, and the record we did
after that, our third record, A Big 10-8 Place
(recently reissued, with a bonus DVD of their first video
project, No Other Possibility), that came with a map,
with all the information about Contra Costa County,
and there’s a long story about it on the record,
and we took the whole idea of Negativland
(previously the title of an early 70s Neu! instrumental),
and started to make it literally be about where we were
from, and very specifically, not just generically about the
suburbs. We’re from Concord.
And that was the first time we did a concept album,
and forever after that, from ’83 ‘til now,
every record we’ve done has been a concept album.
We never went back to anything that wasn’t.
   I like the focus, the way it’s not a collage,
cut-up text, and it’s about two real places:
Contra Costa, and its exhibit at the Los Angeles County Fair.
The promoter says Contra Costa’s for people who
wanna get away from the smog…
  I only wish I could have seen the display,
I can’t begin to imagine what it looked like.
We just found this tape. We certainly are seen as
doing work that has a real socio-political critique,
and we deal with bigger issues, but there’s always been
a strong thread in our work—we just find weird shit,
and just use it and present it in our work Negativland
didn’t start out to be political, it just came from a pure, naïve love
of the strange culture we live in, in America. You love it, you hate it,
it’s horrifying, it’s silly, it’s ridiculous That tape that we found,
what’s wonderful is, it’s real.
You couldn’t write something like that.
When is it from?
Who knows!
 Must be a while back, for Wiggles to be that big a deal.
Do you prefer to work with older materials like that?
It seems like we often do…We work in film, we work in sound,
we’ve worked in performance, we’ve had art shows in New York
and Seattle and Minneapolis, and we’re always inspired by
what we find. It’s not that we set out to find something,
but you just keep your eyes open, your ears open,
and you run into stuff, and it’ll give you ideas.—Don Allred



















Dirty Water 2 (stray pitch)

 From 2011, past Paper Thin Walls' lifespan, so aimed elsewhere, but seems to fit  here: Dirty Water 2: More Birth of Punk Attitude  doe...