How Does It Feel? · Monday January 14, 2008
“There’s something really exciting about hearing a great song that you’ve never heard before – whether it be old or new. And even if you’re not quite sure how to dance or what to do, there’s still that adrenalin rush of going “What is this?!?” I’m sad enough to admit that I live for that moment. But equally there’s something really uplifting about dancing and singing along to songs that you know inside out – from cheering the first few chords, to punching the air if you’re so inclined, to singing every word of the chorus, usually seeing your friends doing exactly the same thing. Hopefully we get the balance just right at HDIF. The new songs aren’t played in the spirit of “Hey, we’re so cool, we know this obscure music you’ve simply got no chance with”, more just as a way of saying “Have you heard this? It’s amazing!” And I’ll never be ashamed about playing the biggest songs in the history of music, if that’s what the moment requires. No song’s ever overplayed in my opinion. Just played at the wrong instance. A little bit of imagination can breathe fresh life into anything.”
Thanks, Ian.
2007 · Tuesday December 25, 2007
Hey! Another blog post!
So much good music came out this year. Here is a list of my favourite albums released in 2007. Of course, barely any of it came from England, but no matter: British music mostly sucks right now. It’s not really in any order, besides my favourite album of the year, which is listed first.
Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
Do Make Say Think – You, You’re A History in Rust
Dan Deacon – Spiderman of the Rings
Burlal – Untrue
Caribou – Andorra
Deerhoof – Friend Opportunity
Scout Niblett – This Fool Can Die Now
Adrian Orange – Adrian Orange & Her Band
Mt Eerie – Mt Eerie Parts 6 & 7
International Falls – Achievement
LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver
Dirty Projectors – Rise Above
YACHT – I Believe In You, Your Magic Is Real
The Watery Graves – Portland
Little Wings – Soft Pow’r
Doers – Gaiety
The Field – From Here We Go Sublime
Bonnie Prince Bilbo – Ask Forgiveness EP
Liars – Liars
Panda Bear – Person Pitch
Graves – Seldom Slumber
Saturday Looks Good To Me – Fill Up The Room
One album that’s been caned constantly all year:
Neil Young – After The Gold Rush
Bands that I haven’t listened to but really meant to:
Deerhunter
Phosphorescence
Bands who released new albums that I never even heard once:
Spoon
Wilco
Modest Mouse
Bruce Springsteen
Andrew Bird
Blond Redhead
Album I initially liked and now find REALLY annoying:
Battles – Mirrored
Guiltiest pleasure:
Justice – Cross
Best show (tie):
Dirty Projectors with The Blankket and Aaron Flint Jamison at the Gramaphone, London
Do Make Say Think at Cargo
THE RETURN · Friday November 30, 2007
Hey folks. All seven of you.
After a length nine 10 week break (the beginning of which curiously coincided with the completion of a 12,500 word dissertation), I think I’m ready to start hitting the Internets again.
I passed the MA – with distinction, no less! Somebody must have really liked my dissertation. Strange. The final title? From Panopticism to Pleasure: Surveillance, Search and Consumerism in Google’s Information Empire. It’s just BEGGING to be torn apart.
You can download it here (PDF, 234kb) if you enjoy self-flagellation. I jest, it’s not that bad.
Anyway, now that it’s rainy season in London and I’m going to be spending the winter cocooned/marooned in my cosy/tiny room, you can hope to see more stuff being posted here. Oh yeah, I’m still in London. Why? Amongst other things, one pound is currently worth over two dollars. Paying off American student loans in pounds is a worthwhile proposition, methinks.
Oh yeah, I’ve been Twittering shadloads over the past couple of months if you’re into that kind of thing. I’m building an archive of completely banal moments.
Wired: The Banal
Tired: The Spectacle (the phenomenon, not the amazing Norwegian hardcore band)
Adrian Orange & Her Band · Wednesday September 19, 2007
Adrian’s new album, Adrian Orange & Her Band, has been in deep iTunes rotation for the past few months. Along with Rise Above by the Dirty Projectors, Andorra by Caribou, and You, You’re A History In Rust by Do Make Say Think, it ranks among my favourite albums of 2007 thus far. Happily, it looks like many music writers on the Interwebs agree:
Tiny Mix Tapes
“Adrian Orange’s is a real voice, a voice that puts us in contact with our own everyday struggles, loves, and yearnings. Adrian Orange & Her Band is a small, but significant, step away from musical standardization and toward the preservation of personality, of individualism, in pop.”
Audiversity
“Even still, it is hard to completely pinpoint the sound because Orange and his band so easily transcend styles throughout the album…The album is all over the place, and thanks to the talented musicianship and imaginative arrangements, it shines brilliantly.”
Exclaim!
“Equipped with a new label, sound and 18-piece band, Orange purges himself of his folk-riddled past and embarks on a distinctly African sound, one very much in the vein of Fela Kuti. Recorded with Phil Elverum and Calvin Johnson, the album erects a wall of horns, tribal rhythms and chanting voices, with guitars and organs chugging back and forth in a hypnotic, rock-steady fashion.”
Another Exclaim review (why are there two, I wonder?)
“Inspiringly unfettered, Adrian Orange has composed a remarkable effort.”
A Tune A Day
Adrian Orange used to go by the moniker Thanksgiving a few years back and his debut under the new name is a fantastic journey…Strikingly real and welcoming.”
Some dude named Jeff
“But this band (whatever the fuck you want to call it) are NOT predictable. It’s cryptic and dangerous and we LIKE that. The jazzy horns, the never-ending drums, the wail of a broken (?) soul. You’re not going anywhere while listening to Adrian Orange and Her Band. You’ve come to a halt. A standstill. A crossroads with no clear “right” way. So, stop, look around and have a seat. It’d be a long ride if you kept moving. It’s an even longer one when you’re standing still.”
RetroLowFi
“The record is full of slow building, jazzy barn burners with lots going on at all times. Each musician seems to be in charge of their own section’s sonic destiny while still working towards a common goal of making beauty where chaos could erupt at any second. Adrian Orange & Her Band is a fascinating listen, and if Adrian keeps churning out succesful experiments of this magnitude.. well, his music could very well become the stuff of legend. We’re in your corner, Mr. Orange.”
Clicky Clicky Music Blog
“the band’s forthcoming K Records release is unlike any other that we’ve heard from the label. Orange and a loose collective concoct a perfect late summer sound that is far from unusual, but wholly engaging.”
Licensing Content · Tuesday September 11, 2007
I feel extremely uncomfortable with the following:
“When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”
– From Facebook’s Terms of Use.
Woah, Facebook retains the right to SUBLICENSE anything you upload to their site. That’s effed! Most online ‘social networking sites’ have similar policies in place (Virb, MySpace, Flickr, Last.FM’s seems a bit better/simpler). While you retain ownership over your content/work, it seems like you basically give the company a free license to use and reformat any of your content for their own purposes. Yuck.
FUNNY GUY. · Friday September 7, 2007
JACKASS OF THE DECADE. Although perhaps jackass is a little tame, given the number of people that have died or been killed because of his policies…
“Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit,” Bush said to Australian Prime Minister John Howard.
Oops. That would be APEC, the annual meeting of leaders from 21 Pacific Rim nations, not OPEC, the cartel of 12 major oil producers.
Bush quickly corrected himself. “APEC summit,” he said forcefully, joking that Howard had invited him to the OPEC summit next year (for the record, an impossibility, since neither Australia nor the U.S. are OPEC members).
The president’s next goof went uncorrected — by him anyway. Talking about Howard’s visit to Iraq last year to thank his country’s soldiers serving there, Bush called them “Austrian troops.”
12,500 Words · Thursday September 6, 2007
3:30am, GMT. Friday, September 7th, 2007. IT IS FINISHED.
London Living · Monday August 20, 2007
How to spend £30 ($60) on one evening out even though you tell yourself upon withdrawing the cash that it will last you through the weekend:
1) Realise that you have no money on your pay-as-you-go mobile phone. Top up by £10, as that is the minimum allowed amount.
2) Realise that you have no money on your Oyster card, which means that you won’t be able to ride a bus or tube without paying exorbitant cash fees. Top up by £5.
3) Go skateboarding at South Bank and spend £1 on a bottle of water and £1.50 on a cup of coffee.
4) Realise that you went skateboarding without eating dinner and are getting quite light-headed from lack of protein. Buy a hummus and salad pita from a kebab shop for £2.50.
5) At this point, you have £10 left. Go to the pub to meet friends, purchase 3 pints over 3 hours, and if you’re lucky (being in Hackney and not the West End), you’ll have a pound or so left at the end.
6) Your friends then convince you to attend a squat party/rave in Shoreditch, where you spend your last pound and some change on entry. You spend 5 minutes walking through the semi-squalid interior of the collapsing building, listening to shitty techno and avoiding wasted Shoreditch hipsters. It’s pretty depressing. Time to leave.
7) It’s 3:00 am and time to catch the night bus back to New Cross with dozens of drunk people! The driver of the N21 from London Bridge passes by without stopping (could it be the hoodie? the skateboard?), forcing you to wait another 20 minutes in the abnormally wintry-feeling August night.
Congratulations, you’ve just dropped $60 (or 50% of your current bank balance) on a night out in East London!
Choice Snippets from Ye Olde Dissertation · Tuesday August 14, 2007
“If you add in every small business in the world–and believe me, Google is thinking that way–you can sum up Google’s amibitions in the commercial world as this: the company would like to provide a platform that mediates supply and demand for pretty much the entire world economy. As Schmidt put it, ‘The sum of [Google’s addressable] market, if you include in the large companies and the small companies throughout the world, is the world’s gross domestic product.’ ‘We think of it as a marketplace,’ Schmidt added.”
from The Search by John Battelle (page 248)
“We should understand the society of control, in contrast, as that society (which develops at the far edge of modernity and opens toward the postmodern) in which mechanisms of command become ever more “democratic,” ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens. The behaviors of social integration and exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorized within the subjects themselves. Power is now exercised through machines that directly organize the brains (in communication systems, information networks, etc.) and bodies (in welfare systems, monitored activities, etc.) toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity.”
from Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (page 23)
“The idea of communicative capitalism helps explain how this democratisation in fact undermines democracy by transforming communication into its opposite…The convenience of the World Wide Web, for example, enables millions not simply to access information but to register their points of view, to agree or disagree, to vote, and to send messages. Facts and opinions, images and reactions circulate in a massive stream of content…a message is no longer primarily a message from a sender to a receiver. Uncopled from contexts of action and application – as on the web or in print and broadcast media – the message its simply part of a circulating data stream. Its particular context is irrelevant…In sum, communication functions symptomatically to produce its own negation”
from the essay The Networked Empire by Jodi Dean in Empire’s New Clothes
“In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of ‘incarceration’, objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle.”
from Discipline and Punish by Michael Foucault (page 308)
“Don’t Be Evil” – Google
CIRCLING THE WAGONS · Monday August 6, 2007
Literally one hour before starting my final dissertation (which is due in 4 weeks, yikeS!), I read this little gem in a Discorder interview with Ian Svenonius. He encapsulates my current feelings with regard to academia and academic writing in about 3 lines:
Do you read much in the way of contemporary cultural studies? You’re pretty well-versed in Marx. And you reference Dick Hebdige in your book.
No, not really. I just read about history. I don’t really read academia. It’s so self-referential and it’s so laden down with footnotes that it’s basically unreadable. And academics tend to write in a style where they’re circling the wagons. They’re writing for their own little community and they emboss what they write in a veneer of science. They’re purposefully impenetrable. I avoid it in my book. It’s not to be confused with academia in any way.
