Mente Errante

Sorry for the recent dearth of postings, I've just been a little uninspired to write lately. But I seem to have regained the urge, so here I am. I'm halfway through a massive musicological appreciation of the superlative* reissue of Sleep's Dopesmoker - you can hear what notes Al's playing! it doesn't sound like slurry anymore!! - still, for my money, the benchmark against which all Doom/Sludge/Thingy should be measured and by an accident of fate, was reissued in the same week as my birthday, a coincidence which slipped me by but was pointed out as very appropriate by a number of my good friends. I'm quite sure I have no idea what they mean... Fuck me it's good tho'.

One reason I haven't written much is music. After the smoking demise of my old (hi-fi) amp, it's replacement** proved to be so fucking amazing that every time I've sat down to write, I've been dragged back to the sofa by the music, so clear and beautiful is the sound, unable to concentrate on anything else, and then found myself completely unable to remember what the fuck it was I was going to write. Well, at least I've got a good soundtrack as Europe sails inexorably towards the economic event horizon lurking somewhere in the near future...

Eleh's Radiant Intervals is filling the room at the moment. One advantage of the place I live in now, is that it's fucking old, proper brick shithouse military architecture. I mean, the place was originally part of the Royal Artillery and is located in the parkland the army used to train people to lug and fire massive battefield artillery pieces, so unless you throw open every window, there's almost no leakiness at all, and that means I can listen to Eleh at the correct volume level. In other words, stupidly fucking loud. I love Eleh's music, ultra-minimal, like a sub bass obsessed cross between Elaine Radigue and Alvin Lucier, and the way it works as much on a physical level as a sonic one, absolutely filling the listening space with palpable density, seemingly giving the air that it's moving weight and substance, a thick, gooey sonic treacle permeating every corner of the room, making the whole place thrum as the high end oscillations tickle yr eardrums like starlight twinkling through the atmosphere. You can almost see and taste the waveforms. And (Dopesmoker has this effect too) when it ends, it feels like the pressure in the room has actually lowered, like the molecules of the air itself have been allowed to fly loose again, the sensation that a huge, unseen presence has left the building. It's akin to the delicious way the air feels after a massive thunderstorm, uncanny and wonderful and unusual.

The other thing I admire about Eleh is their? her? his? insistence on, and ability to maintain, absolute anonymity in this multiply-connected world of ours. Eleh have been around for 13 years, put out a fair amount of records, and still no one seems to have a clue who's behind it all. No websites, no interviews, no photos, no names, no nothing except the music itself. I like that.

Also, did you know that if you watch four Resident Evil films in one sitting, yr intelligence level slips lower and lower by the minute. I had to ring someone to find out how to work the fucking kettle after the third film...

Anyway, enough of this rambling foolishness, I've just got the first series of Archer on blu ray and I feel like laughing until my lungs fall out.

And one last thing, Dr C, tak for de lægemidler og solbriller, du kender mig for godt.

*Not a word I bandy about with great frequency, and certainly not towards Southern Lord, whose shit to good release ratio clocks in at around 10:1 (and growing) these days. They did this right though.

**It's a Rega Mira3, in case you were nerdy enough to be wondering. I won't have any other make of stereo gear in the house (speakers excluded - it's Tannoy all the way for that side of things).

Globos

The new Terry Riley album is fucking shit. It's an absolute, unmitigated ballbag of a record, and the only reason for releasing it that I can see is that Terry Riley's name on the cover might make a few bob for the label (Tzadik). It's being cynically touted as a triumphant return to his 60s/70s methods, all modal riffs and looong looping delays, shifting patterns of phrase and phase, and while it's methodology is superficially similar, the result is not. Ladies and gentlemen, this is most definitely not the mixture of In C and Persian Surgery Dervishes that the hype seems to promise, but what feels like a pitiful attempt to cash in on the popularity of 60s/70s minimalism by going back to a compositional style TR abandoned over 20 years ago and whacking out almost two fucking hours of parping toss utterly lacking in conception, conviction or purpose, and is possibly the most pointless fucking piece of music I've endured in many years. It's certainly the most boring.

It ultimately falls flat on it's face in two main areas; sonically and musically. Musically this adds nothing to his body of work, coming across as a cynical, slapdash rehashing of old tropes, especially in the light of where other artists have taken these ideas in the previous forty-odd years, twisting the Riley methodology into unexpected new shapes and making it as much if not more a part of popular music practice as the avant-garde milieu which spawned it. Riley's influence is everywhere these days, has been for a long time now, and that's what I find so puzzling about this record; is it just an exercise in nostalgia, the sound of an old stoner having some fun, or an attempt to reclaim, to reassert ownership or provenance of a process for making music?

I can't imagine it's the latter. Terry Riley just isn't that sort of über tight-assed academic composer, he's way too much of a hippy and he's always been way too inclusive in his worldview and musical outlook to suddenly get all uppity about getting ripped off forty-odd years down the line. So, if not a fit of artistic control-freakery then what about the other angles? Nostalgia? Fuck I hope not, 'cos there's no worse reason to make a record than to relive past glories as that's either the subconscious passive-agressive equivalent of the above or wanking in the mirror. So, discounting those unedifying propositions, we're left with the old stoner hypothesis, which is fine in and of itself, I mean, that's how I (and an awful lot of other musicians) practice at home, but it doesn't necessarily lead to music anyone else would need or want to hear...

And now we get to the even bigger problem with Aleph. It sounds like crap. Not lo-fi, just crap. Sterile and digital and cold in all the wrong ways*. And it sounds this way for two reasons: 1. the horrible fucking preset synth sounds which sound exactly like a shit cheapo 80s rack module but apparently derive from a synth which cost 5 grand when new** which Mr Riley has tuned to a particularly inappropriate form of just intonation*** using some of the most unconvincing simulations of real instruments I've ever experienced (and this isn't from a modern perspective, the technology was in place and easily cheap enough to achieve infinitely superior results years before this was recorded), which in tandem with the circumstances of recording results in a thin, shrill, genuinely unpleasant acoustic completely at odds with the deep, detailed sonic environment music of this type deserves.

And what were those circumstances? Turns out this record was recorded as an mp3. A format so completely inappropriate to music so heavily dependent on tuning and harmonic relationships because in compressing the file from it's raw form the data that's lost cannot but be essential to the correct presentation of the music, every sliver of 1s and 0s sliced away thinning the frequency soup still further until all y're left with is this unsatisfying, unwholesome gruel. You can master and remaster all you like, and believe me they've tried, but you can't replace what was never there in the first place, and I don't want to listen to a sketch or a storyboard, I want the whole fucking thing.

The real shame? If this had been recorded using better instruments, on a medium more suited to the music, it would probably have been fucking brilliant. But it wasn't, and it isn't.

*I should point out here that I'm not the analogue fetishist that many think I am, what I insist on is the appropriateness of the gear to the sound that is sought. The only question that should be asked of a mix is does it sound right?

**Korg Triton Studio 88. Very powerful, very shit.

***Can't be arsed to go into the maths at the mo'. I finished writing several thousand hard-fought words on non-standard analysis last week and would like a couple of mathematically minimal weeks to decompress.