8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

Milk Crate of Forgotten Playlists

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The best and truest discourse regarding Twitter’s predicament (and that of its users) expresses the sentiment of just letting it go. This is a hopeful stance, so don’t misconstrue it with surrender or giving up. Folks obsessed with fixing, preserving, or even finding an equal replacement for Twitter are embracing a defective template. Like arguing with Spotify to change its ways, a focus on what’s clearly an unsolvable problem distracts us from creating ‘first-principles’1Yes, I’m cheekily using a term popularized by that billionaire knucklehead. alternatives. Rip it up and start again.

Ryan Broderick in Garbage Day:

I’ve seen arguments on Twitter from liberal users this week saying things like, “Twitter is a public square and the front page of the internet, we must stay and fight the Musk fans and conservatives for it.” lol with all due respect, but why? The main benefit of the internet is that it’s infinite. There doesn’t need to be a public square! And there can also be many! […] Twitter, though smaller than other platforms, still monopolizes our culture more than any other. And very soon it will be owned by the richest man on Earth… But we don’t need to stay there. There’s nothing keeping us there. And I’d argue we can take it further. We now know that centralized feeds are just easy targets for despots and oligarchs (and whatever Mark Zuckerberg is) to capture and control. We need to throw it all out. Make websites and message boards and Discords and become ungovernable. Kill the central feed.

Robin Sloan:

There are so many ways people might relate to one another online, so many ways exchange and conviviality might be organized. Look at these screens, this wash of pixels, the liquid potential! What a colossal bummer that Twitter eked out a local maximum; that its network effect still (!) consumes the fuel for other possibilities, other explorations.

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Brian Eno with guitar

I appreciate Gary Hustwit’s approach to documentary film-making, and his feature-length profile on designer Dieter Rams is a total joy. So, under Hustwit’s steely direction, I’m more excited than hesitant about a documentary on Brian Eno. But will it be generative?

From the press release:

Befitting its subject, Eno will utilize proprietary generative software developed by Hustwit and digital artist Brendan Dawes to provide unique viewing experiences via multiple digital formats, cinema screenings and site-specific installations. “You can’t make a conventional, by-the-numbers bio doc about Brian Eno,” said Hustwit. “That would be antithetical and a missed opportunity. What I’m trying to do is to create a cinematic experience that’s as innovative as Brian’s approach to music and art.”

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Hidden in a Fire Island House, the Soundtrack of Love and Loss
In tragedy, music provided solace during the AIDS epidemic, and newly discovered cassette tapes captured two decades of parties and pain.
Hidden in a Fire Island House, the Soundtrack of Love and Loss
In tragedy, music provided solace during the AIDS epidemic, and newly discovered cassette tapes captured two decades of parties and pain.

This moving NY Times article explores how mixtapes can capture and contextualize historical moments. In this case, a stash of recordings discovered in a former ‘party house’ on Fire Island documents the escape and loss experienced by the island’s community throughout the tragic height of the AIDS crisis. There are many other histories told through hand-designed mixtapes — the genesis of hip-hop and the ebbs and flows of the original rave movement, for two examples. However, these histories are confined to the period from the mid-70s to the late ’90s. Future accounts told through music will take other forms, but it’s not like anyone will stumble across a milk crate packed with forgotten playlists.

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I can’t get enough of this cover version of Black Flag’s “Rise Above” from the French duo Ibeyi. It’s as perfect for 2022 as the original was for 1981. The predictably angry reactions peppering the song’s YouTube comments section miss the point entirely — the fed-up spirit of punk rock is for everyone, no matter the race, nationality, or musical genre. Nobody exclusively owns that.

Roedelius’s Gentle Journey

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Hans-Joachim Roedelius is a gentle giant trotting through the timeline of kosmiche music (perhaps a better genre term than the maligned ‘Krautrock’ designation). As a giant, his influence is enormous, but Roedelius’s quiet insistence on working diligently in history’s background accords to his gentle demeanor. 

Roedelius’s role in the 1968 formation of Berlin’s Zodiak Free Arts Lab spawned Tangerine Dream, Ashra Temple, and his own Kluster trio with Dieter Moebius and Conrad Schnitzler. Kluster transformed to Cluster a couple of years later once Conrad Schnitzler departed, and the now-duo adopted the more organic and tranquil sound that remains Roedelius’s template. Famously, Cluster recorded two classic albums with Brian Eno — the second of which includes one of my favorite Eno vocal performances on “The Belldog“. 

To many, this ’70s period is peak Roedelius, but he keeps riding the spaceways with a solo discography that’s long and a collaborative discography that’s even longer. And there’s a newer incarnation of Kluster/Cluster called Qluster featuring Roedelius and audio engineer Onnen Bock.

Now in his late-80s, Roedelius is going strong, still composing and producing melodic, experimental music. He continued to play shows and tour internationally right up until the COVID blockade. In March of 2017, I was lucky to see Roedelius perform at Orlando’s Timucua White House. I wrote briefly about that show here where I called the music “experimental and quiet, not at all jarring, and serenely [transmitting] the artist’s feelings in a tumultuous world.” Afterward, I met Roedelius, who was cordial and talkative. He even told my friend who regularly visits Germany to “look him up” on his next overseas journey.

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As always, I’m fascinated with the creative habits of different artists. I ran across a couple of older interviews with Roedelius on the music magazine archive site Mu:zines and found a few notes about his process. In this 1984 interview, Roedelius describes an improvisational cut-and-paste method that is emblematic of the kosmiche pioneers:

I usually do most of the recording at home. Whenever the mood takes me, I sit at my piano – a lovely old Bosendorfer grand, over 100 years old – and play, and I put everything I play on tape. Then I play back that tape and select the best parts from it, and work on them until I’m happy with the way they sound.’

The piano features heavily in Roedelius’s music, and, indeed, it’s the starting point for most of his compositions. Treatments, synthesized sounds, and collaborating musicians get added once the edited tape is ready. Here’s another 1984 interview where Roedelius describes the recording of his album Gift of the Moment: 

I have a grand piano at home and the basic album tracks were recorded there using a Revox A77 in stereo at 7½ips, I made sure I got ‘space’ on the tape, then I went into the studio in Rotterdam and transferred the stereo recording onto one track of the 4-track — the album was done on 4-track with dbx — and then I started adding to the music using the different instruments…

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I bring up Roedelius because there are two new opportunities to discover and appreciate his music. First is the latest episode of the excellent SOUNDWAVE podcast featuring a retrospective mix compiled by Roedelius himself. This nearly 90-minute selection is the perfect primer for anyone seeking a historical sampling of Roedelius’s output. It’s also fascinating to hear the songs that Roedelius includes, whether these are his favorites or just pieces he thought were the best fit for a podcast mix. (“The Belldog” makes an early appearance.) Hearing Roedelius’s decade-spanning output in a curated context emphasizes the timelessness of his music. 

Next, here’s a rare (maybe the only?) Roedelius livestream performance from a little over a week ago. I received a text from my sometimes-Germany-visiting friend alerting me that Roedelius had just started a “surprise” livestream. I tuned in, and there he is, deep in concentration, beaming haunting sounds from a pair of laptops, an iPad, a controller, and a pair of keyboards. This performance is a mix of its own, featuring a few Roedelius classics, and it drifts pleasantly into your surroundings. Listening live, I lost myself in these sonics, writing several paragraphs and achieving that hallowed ‘flow state.’ But, if you attempt the same, be warned that Roedelius’s vibe is interrupted a couple of times by his laptop’s notification pings. And then there’s the endearing moment just past the halfway mark where Roedelius walks off for a moment after announcing, “I have to go for a pee.” Serious music doesn’t have to be so serious after all.

The ARChive is a Necessity in the Digital World

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Richard Morgan in Rolling Stone:

The [Archive of Contemporary Music] is a massive private research library that has been in downtown Manhattan since 1985 … […] Far from the kind of crackpot hoarding that sometimes happens in cities, George’s archive has been supported by powerhouses in music and entertainment. It houses Keith Richards’ blues collection. Their current board is varied enough to include both Youssou N’Dour and Paul Simon (Lou Reed and David Bowie were both once members). It consulted for Tom Hanks on the making of That Thing You Do. It’s the go-to repository for album art for everything from Grammy exhibits to Taschen books.

In a quirky explainer on their site about how they are ready for an alien invasion, the archive notes: “The ARChive collects and preserves everything that’s issued, hoping to define ‘what happened’ in terms broader than those usually described by selectiveness or availability. Taste, quality, marketing, Halls of Fame, sales, stars and value are as alien to us as they are, well, to aliens.” […]

At a time when some in the city were scrubbing Keith Haring murals off subway platforms, [founder Bob] George was welcoming every genre, including then-unpopular punk and hip-hop (among the archive’s greatest collection is a trove of punk 45s). “We could make the good and goofy come alive,” he says, “because no museum or university library is going to do that. They only want things after they’ve gotten valuable. It’s a small view of value. We see things differently. We see the value in everything.”

I almost wrote that The ARChive is like a musical version of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Then I caught myself, realizing the absurdity of instinctively going to an internet-related analogy to describe something classic and rooted in our physical history. That may underlie the problem here — that we devalue the importance of a permanent IRL archive of our artistic triumphs now that the online world seems ubiquitous and deceivingly tangible.

And that problem? The ARChive is in danger of losing the space it has occupied since 1985 due to dramatic rent increases in its TriBeCa (NYC) home. This important collection of music (over three million recordings, whoa), and a building modified and renovated to house the vintage media safely can’t just pick up and find another home, especially in the city. So Bob George and friends of The ARChive are asking for help from music lovers worldwide, via a GoFundMe campaign.

From the GoFundMe page:

Our Independence is important to us. We operate without any City, State or Federal funds. We cherish the ability to work on projects of choice and free from restrictions or the dependence on governmental/taxpayer support. Our once affordable rent on White Street has skyrocketed to $21,000 a month, making it increasingly difficult for a pure research organization to survive in Lower Manhattan. Our home is in New York and we would love to stay here.

Independent historical archives like these are becoming ever important in our digital world, as emphasized by some recent mishaps and decisions of corporate content overseers. We exist in that tricky time-space when physical artifacts are still a part of our lives, but digital replicas are slowly taking over. On a personal scale, I think it’s fine to eschew material collections for digital ones if that’s your inclination. But that can fool us into forgetting that an archive like The ARChive is a cultural necessity, just like that seed vault in Norway is essential. If the digital replicas are lost — which could happen — then it’s institutions like The ARChive that help us relocate our scattered artistic history.

Donate to the Archive of Contemporary Music’s GoFundMe campaign, even if just a little bit. I did. And h/t to Eric Johnson (DJ Bunny Ears) for alerting me to The ARChive’s plight.

🔗→ Rebuilding the ARC: America’s Largest Music Collection Needs Your Help
🔗→ Rebuilding the ARC

The Olds Are Alright: Dance Music Becomes Generational

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Joe Muggs in Mixmag:

Which is more important, though – reinvention or continuity? After all, the purity of scenes that are created for and by youth, with all the energy and absolutism that goes with that, is something special. Whether it’s the teenagers excluded from UK garage who turned their youth clubs into moshpits as they invented grime, or kids in bedrooms across the world cooking up ever more mind-warping memes and post-vaporwave electronic sub-genres that only make sense with total immersion in cultural reference points from K-pop, Cartoon Network and dark web research chemicals, some things absolutely don’t need the input of old farts. There’s a stupendous thrill that comes from hearing kids from Shanghai or Sao Paulo, Jakarta or Johannesburg, smashing together extreme electronics with pop and local sounds with zero respect for the canons and hierarchies of the past.

But at the same time, The Black Madonna [who referenced “the young folks and more seasoned folks sharing space and ideas”] is right. In the space of house-techno-rave that she’s operating in, it’s incredible to have people like her and Honey Dijon, Optimo and Harvey and all the other battle-hardened vets right in the thick of things, bringing the weight of decades of experience to bear on the dancefloor and sharing that with the young guns they play next to. Each new generation that discovers the joys of Kerri Chandler or Photek or Chris & Cosey re-ignites the power of their music.

As one of the above mentioned ‘old farts,’ I love this sentiment, and I’ve also thought a lot about it. We are in a unique place where veteran (a kinder way of saying ‘older’) artists freely mingle and perform with younger, emerging talent. For example, in dance music, some of the biggest draws — and influences — are now 50+. In my DJ heyday — the late ‘90s — this wasn’t the case. Though, granted, the genre was fresher.

I used to think it was good for older artists to step aside and let the young take their seats at the table. But it turns out the different generations are just adding extra chairs. There’s a collaboration between the various ages of artists rather than competition or resentment — a transfer of ideas that encourages innovation while respecting history. And it’s not just the artists — the fans have embraced this generational variety, too. When the 79 years old Giorgio Moroder can release albums and tour with enthusiastic fanfare from the electronic music community, it’s evident that we’ve arrived in a special and respectful place.

🔗→ Never mind nostalgia – we’re living in a golden age of intergenerational partying

Disco’s Shadow

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Musical collisions can create the most exciting and innovative sounds. I’m fascinated by that gray space on the Venn diagram between two disparate genres, instruments, or creative objectives. Jon Hassell combined elements of ancient world music with electronics and spawned a blurred terrain he termed ‘fourth world music.’ And I’ve written previously about the fun things that happened when classic rockers ran head-first into the new wave.

But the often-reluctant introduction of disco to other styles is curious and complicated. Disco is a combination of genres in itself, and the results can be extraordinary – queue Brian Eno’s “I have heard the sound of the future” pronouncement upon encountering “I Feel Love.” But love it or hate it, we must accept that we are living in disco’s shadow, with every genre touched not just by its beat and groove, but also by disco’s radical production techniques and rearrangement of format (singles, remixes, extended versions, etc.).

There was a period of collision when disco was forced upon, rather than accepted, by mainstream artists of the non-disco persuasion. Alexis Petridis writes about this phenomenon for The Guardian:

Critical opprobrium, a collapse both of sales and artistic credibility, fans who paid good money to see you baying for your blood: you couldn’t wish for a more vivid illustration of the risks awaiting the late-70s rock artist who chose to go disco at disco’s height. It was a hell of a gamble. There was always the chance of some short-term commercial gain, but the odds were stacked against you: the back catalogues of umpteen 70s artists are flecked with ignored attempts to cash in on the success of Saturday Night Fever, remembered largely by fans as catastrophic career aberrations. Even if you did get a hit out of it, your success would almost invariably be accompanied by mockery or even anger.

It’s easy to identify the artists that embraced the opportunity for experimentation versus those unwittingly dragged by their feet into the studio session. There are plenty of aberrations, but then there’s also “Heart Of Glass,” “Another One Bites The Dust,” and “Miss You.” Talking Heads would’ve been a different band without the combination of disco and their artsy ethos, and I’d argue new wave and post-punk may not have taken off without the ’70s nightclub’s groovy influence. We wouldn’t have this surprising moment from Crass either:

It’s a bit old-fashioned to mock disco — I think the consensus, finally, is that it was a significant cultural movement, not just musically but socially as well. A lot of the resistance to disco had a sinister backbone that had nothing to do with the music, as evidenced by the infamous Disco Demolition’s quick transformation into a riotous hatefest.

I remember a moment watching Late Night With David Letterman as a kid in the early-80s. Paul Shaffer would regularly have a guest fill in with the band who would often be a studio musician of some renown, though unknown to the general public. There was a drummer with the group that night and, I can’t recall who it was (though I can guess), but Shaffer introduced him as “the man who ruined music.” When Letterman asked what that meant, Shaffer explained that this drummer “invented the disco beat.” The drummer then demonstrated by playing a simple four-on-the-floor rhythm with a slight shuffle as Letterman and the audience jeered. I remember being confused by this — ruined music? I know they were joking, or maybe half-joking, but in retrospect, it seems that Shaffer — the guy who co-wrote “It’s Raining Men” — really should’ve known better.

P.S. – I do realize the photo of Klaus Schulze at the top doesn’t have a lot to do with disco, but, man, it’s such a great image.

Holger Czukay’s Secret Code

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My friend Tom was years older than me, and he let me regularly visit his house to listen to records. I was a weirdo growing up isolated in Central Louisiana, and friends like Tom were invaluable. His record collection was immense and consistently opened my mind to amazing sounds. Tom introduced me to Krautrock, a music genre that was startling to a Louisiana teenager in the mid-’80s. I think Faust came first and I paid homage to the discovery many years later. But the wildest lightning strike occurred when Tom put the needle on CAN’s Monster Movie and a song called “You Doo Right”:

 

A lot is going on in that 20+ minute song, recorded the year I was born. The pounding drum line, a spiraling guitar, and Malcolm Mooney’s yowling vocal churn together like rotating machinery. The mesmerizing hook, though, is provided by Holger Czukay’s trampoline of a bass line. If repetition is a form of change then Czukay nails the concept. As Czukay once said, “The bass player’s like a king in chess. He doesn’t move much, but when he does, he changes everything.”

NPR Music:

It feels somehow inapt to simply identify Czukay as “CAN’s bassist.” Holger Czukay was the band’s co-founder, its center, its de facto leader, its producer and engineer, its tape editor, its bassist, its radio knob turner, and, effectively, its light and its shade. In its early-’70s prime, Can was dedicated to collective improvisation — as Czukay put it last year to Mojo, “We were not thinking. When you make music together, you have to reach a common accident.” At its best, the group sounded like a single organism. But one man, Czukay, collectively tuned them.

Holger Czukay was also a prolific solo artist and collaborator, working with the likes of Brian Eno, Jah Wobble, and David Sylvian. Pitchfork has published a solid sampling of Czukay’s efforts which is worth checking out.

Holger Czukay, 79, passed on this week, found dead in his home which doubled as the old Inner Space studio in Weilerswist, Germany. CAN drummer Jaki Liebezeit passed last January.

There’s little denying the influence of either, and theirs is an influence that’s obscured like a secret code. It runs covertly through so much music and so many genres. Some of us are indebted a lot, and others just a little, but we’re all indebted.

The Gated Reverb Conundrum

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Do I know someone over at Vox? Perhaps there’s some psychic mind-link? I ask because the music topics the site covers in its ongoing video series are coming from my unbeknownst internal wishlist.

I mean, here’s an eight-and-a-half minute video on gated reverb. Holy cats.

Okay, so we’ve got to talk a little bit about music production trends. These trends represent sounds, styles, and motifs that, at best, enhance a song and, at worst, shackle the recording with the baggage of its era. This is a prison where the Yamaha DX-7 electric piano serves jail time with the drum n’ bass time-stretch. The gated reverb drum part is in a curious place as past uses of this technique do often sound dated, but also curiously contemporary in some examples.

I think that Peter Gabriel’s use of the technique still holds up (listen to “I Have The Touch“). This may be due to the artist’s objective. I always believed Gabriel embraced the gated sound not for trendiness but because it evoked the big tribal drums that shaped his rhythmic fascinations. In this way, the huge drum parts create an uncanny overlay to his songs. This reminds me of Jon Hassell’s definition of fourth world music: “unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques.”

Notwithstanding a period’s technological limitations, if an artist makes production choices that are evocative and intentional, as opposed to ‘on trend,’ there’s a better chance for the music to have persistence. In the case of the gated drum, Gabriel and his cronies helped set the trend, but you get the picture.

On the other hand, you get the preponderance of heavily gated kits (kick drums included, yikes) that overtook some strains of ’80s electronic music and a couple of Cocteau Twins albums. Of course, much of this is enjoyable, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with being anchored to a particular era of music production. But the key is to be mindful. I’m not convinced Cocteau Twins would have gated the kick drum if they were making those records now, but I’m sure Phil Collins would still add the reverb to the drums of today’s “In The Air Tonight.”

Vox notes gated reverb is being rediscovered by modern producers and is trendy again. I can’t say I would have noticed at first as these productions are so processed overall. And I think there’s a distinct difference to those using the technique to fill out the aesthetic vision of the song and those looking to evoke ‘that ’80s sound.’ Both processes are intentional, but the passing years will tell if they are timeless (or, unstuck in time, as the case may be).

I ran across the blog Songs From So Deep which provides some closing thoughts on the subject:

This is the thing. Production fashions are an arms race. This is how it happened last time gated reverb was the thing. One artist does something, the next one repeats it but takes it further, everyone piles in until a point is reached where someone says, OK, enough, and sets their own trend.

When I was a teenager in the mid-1990s, listening to contemporary rock music and forming my own tastes and preferences, nothing could have sounded older, more tasteless or garish to me than a big, gated-reverb drum sound. It was the preserve of poodle-haired corporate metal bands. Later on when I’d grown up a bit, I had to train myself to put those objections aside, to listen past the obvious signifiers and give the music a fair hearing. But nevertheless, my tastes were formed in the era they were formed in, and despite this being the sound of the popular music of my childhood, it’s not my sound. Perhaps the folks making these records are too young to have these hang-ups.

Side Note: Susan Rogers is interviewed for the Vox video. That gives me an opportunity to highly recommend this interview with Rogers over at Tape Op. It’s one of the best production-related behind-the-scenes interviews I’ve ever read. A must for Prince fans, too.

Decoding a Pocket Symphony

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Posted by the Polyphonic YouTube channel, this video essay illustrates all the remarkable things that happen in the three minutes and thirty-nine seconds that comprise The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” It is remarkable when the details get laid out: the convention-defying sections of the song, the ingenious chord combinations, the metamorphosing moods and transitions, even how the deceptively simple lyrics reveal a deeper meaning. “Good Vibrations” is indeed a “pocket symphony.”

 

Wikipedia:

The making of “Good Vibrations” was unprecedented for any kind of recording, with a total production cost estimated between $50,000 and $75,000 (equivalent to $370,000 and $550,000 in 2016). Building upon the multi-layered approach he had formulated with Pet Sounds, Wilson recorded the song in different sections at four Hollywood studios from February to September 1966, resulting in a cut-up mosaic of several musical episodes marked by disjunctive key and modal shifts. It contained previously untried mixes of instruments, including jaw harp and Electro-Theremin, and it was the first pop hit to have a cello playing juddering rhythms.

Its title derived from Wilson’s fascination with cosmic vibrations, after his mother once told him as a child that dogs sometimes bark at people in response to their “bad vibrations”. He used the concept to suggest extrasensory perception, while Love’s lyrics were inspired by the Flower Power movement that was then burgeoning in Southern California.


The instrument that steals the show in “Good Vibrations” is more often than not mistakenly referred to as a theremin. Kudos to Polyphonic for initially calling the instrument on the recording by its actual name: the Electro-Theremin. He gets it wrong the second time around, though.

From an article about this instrument via NPR:

… in the 1950s, trombonist Paul Tanner and an amateur inventor named Bob Whitsell made an instrument that made sounds similar to Leon Theremin’s creation, but made it a lot simpler for non-experts to hit specific notes and control the volume.

Tanner’s instrument — like the theremin — was used in science fiction films and a very popular television show from the early 1960s called My Favorite Martian. Tanner featured it on his 1958 album, Music for Heavenly Bodies. The few people who bought The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds when it came out in May of 1966 would have heard Tanner’s instrument on the song “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.” But in the autumn of that year, every American teenager heard that weird sci-fi sound on every AM pop radio station, when Paul Tanner performed his Electro-Theremin with The Beach Boys on “Good Vibrations.”


One more observation: near the end of the video I found myself thinking, “Wow, Brian Wilson did look exactly like Paul Dano.” Then I realized that was Paul Dano. Sneaky.