Kentaro Miura dropped medieval gothic masterworks as panels in Berserk like it was nothing. maybe the closest manga has gotten to Doré’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno
seeing this thread full of corporate AI fuckheads pat each other on the back & try to denigrate this clearly sick performance & litigate what is & isn’t art is heartening because it shows that noise & performance art are still capable of frightening the squares
sorry but ACAB includes:
- Transformers (“protect” the earth, Optimus Prime is red white & blue)
- Scooby Doo gang (heavily carceral)
- Powerpuff Girls (operate with extreme impunity, no judicial review)
- Arthur (idk he just feels like a cop to me)
- Peppa Pig (literal pig)
Badalamenti really wrote a ~40 second cue so compelling that it could be used in every episode of the first 2 seasons of Twin Peaks in all their diverse plotlines & always set the mood, always convey the evil energy at the heart of the plot, & you’d never get tired of hearing it
one of my piano students (13 y:o) who usually is an extreme 1st-person-shooter / hyper-modern PS4 head told me today that he & all his friends have only been playing Animal Crossing & have a group chat dedicated to turnip prices
“yeah we’re killing it on the stalk market”
me age 12:
System of a Down “Prison Song” has sick riffs & I love the scream vocals. heavy as fuck dude
me now:
why yes, the US government does use revenue from minor drug sentences to fund secret wars, rig elections, & train brutal corporate sponsored dictators around the world
the true lost era of the music format wars is the golden age when you could google “[album name] rar [mediafire / rapidshare / filetram / zippyshare]” & the thing would just be there to download
The Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, Randy Rhoads, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Prince, Chuck Berry, Duane Allman, Albert King, Allan Holdsworth, Dimebag Darrell, BB King jam session occurring right now I have a feeling is pretty good.
me when the most abrasive harsh noise imaginable is on
vs.
me when pop-punk band featuring a guy singing whose voice could be described as “snotty” is on
without Dave Smith, no MIDI as we know it. no widely available polyphonic synthesis in the form that we know it. thank you for envisioning how electronic music could evolve & giving us the tools to make it sound like whatever we can imagine. rest in peace
for all the “bro wtf are Cocteau Twins saying” memes, it really is special & legitimately magical to me that Elizabeth Fraser fully committed (for a long while at least) to singing gibberish in the most beautiful fashion imaginable. truly a wild move. i don’t take it for granted
thinking about the set we saw Anna Azizzy play in a basement in Pittsburgh in 2015 with a mic-ed knife & a mic-ed plate full of lunchmeat & veggies. patiently chopping each item, room dead silent, u got to hear the different grain of sound each one made
Arthur Russell died 30 years ago today. a person & a body of work that defies all categorization. a freak genius & a humble polymath whose art we’re all still exploring & discovering together. thank you for everything
Maggot Brain is 50 years old today. thinking about all the psyches that have been shattered & rebuilt thanks to this album over five decades, my own included. we have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe, & they were delicious 🙏
one of my students asked me:
“would you rather:
- only be able to listen to Tool for the rest of your life
or
- never hear any music again”
I asked him if I choose only Tool would I be able to listen to natural music like bird calls & he said all the birds would sing Tool music
"something truly magical happens when these players get together. deeply out, & yet blessed with a firm control of negative space & dynamics. we look forward to what comes next from this bold new ensemble"
it’s not at all lost on me that Rashida Tlaib, while under fire with racist genocide-stoking bullshit from all angles of our government & society right now, is making the effort to present this act to fight for musicians
probably the only congressperson i respect
It takes more than 800,000 streams per month to make the equivalent of a $15/hour job, and the vast majority of music artists on platforms like Spotify never get to that number. I introduced the Living Wage for Musicians Act to fight for the fair pay that musicians deserve.
quintessential “dudes rock” duo right here. they saw you from across the bar & are perplexed by your vibe but want to invite you to record the sounds of an iceberg melting
laptop ambient musician:
“i don’t just go up there & press play when i perform, ok? a lot goes into this. i’m fine-tuning, making decisions, improvising”
Phill Niblock:
“yeah when i perform i just press play on a single file on my laptop & then play solitaire on my phone”
openers have a sacred right to blow the headline act of the show out of the water. witnessing this happen is one of the true pleasures of going to see live music
apparently the LCD S*undsystem guy is in Chicago today? i like to imagine that the environment around him gentrifies in real time. like he walks into a building & by the time he leaves it’s a yoga studio for dogs
@boynamedshark
not to be that guy lolll but... there’s a small loop of tape that’s blank but always spinning around in there that serves as a kind of blank canvas to catch the feed from the 1/8 jack, it’s basically like leaving the record activated on a tape deck & hearing what u play into it
Mdou Moctar the only band i can think of that unites Saharan / Tuareg music heads, noise freaks, more middle of the road indie rock people, & dads who just wanna rock out & idolize Eddie Van Halen. truly the people's band
this situation is grim & the fact that nearly all music spirals in the direction of streaming / exploitation in this system could not be more obvious & untenable for artists
also The Caretaker feels like a particularly thorny project to contextualize in all this given its M.O.
time has tempered my relationship with Brian Eno’s art from the state of extreme fanboy to like, appreciative fan. no specific reason, just like the nature of life. & yet without a doubt this MF was COOKING here 100%
traditional ways to make it in the music industry:
- generational wealth
- know the right people
- be very hot
some newer ones:
- be an AI
- start beef about politics of touring
- your project was invented by Spotify
- viral video where u plug yr synth into a bug or some shit
studio as instrument / effects processing before Lee Perry:
ooo maybe we can make it sound like the band is really big & in a tunnel!
after Lee Perry:
make drums out of water. smear sounds like paint. instruments don’t have to remind us of what we know down here on earth
Microdosing Has Taken the Tech Sector By Storm & Increased Productivity, But What If You Took More Drugs & Shit Started to Melt Into Fractal Pools of Beautiful Colors & Shapes Inside Your Eyes?: The Case For Taking A Normal Amount of Drugs
if you are the CEO of Amtrak please send me a demo of your tape-loop based diaristic sampledelic music that explores the way that railroads bisect the natural world with machinery
fellas, would you marry a girl who keeps at least ten bodies submerged in her spectral black goo dimension & feeds on them for the sustenance she needs to continue the hunt
so if I’m understanding the situation correctly, the music of The Caretaker is catching on with Zoomers who are treating it like some kind of “The Ring”-style creepypasta that will traumatize u when u listen & now it’s trending with its own “Challenge” video format ?
LOL amazing
Sakamoto’s run of 80s solo albums stands as one of the most monumental leaps forward for electronic music. the seeds of electro-pop, strain after strain of dance music, skewed sample collage, hip-hop production. music as deeply profound as it is goofy. legitimately “experimental”
2021:
OPN is the musical director of The Weeknd halftime show
2022:
James Ferraro revs a motorcycle onstage for 30 min at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics
2023:
Dean Blunt fills 400 solo cups with Cîroc at the concert inaugurating Elon Musk’s colony on Mars
NEWS: Mayor Lori Lightfoot concedes defeat in Chicago mayor race as voters Tuesday rejected her bid for a second term after four tumultuous years marked by a pandemic, spikes in crime citywide and widespread divisiveness.
is your teen texting about Three 6 Mafia?
OMG: original Memphis gods
STFU: Scarecrow taken from us
JFC: Juicy finally canonized
KMS: Koopsta's mystic stylez
GTFO: GangstaBoo totally flattens opposition
Ok, here's a genuine question for something that I have been struggling with: what does 'futuristic' music sound like today? Not retro-futuristic, not the 1960s or 80s conception of the sound of tomorrow. An actual projection or imagining from the present we are currently in.
maybe the cutest youtube comment interaction i’ve ever seen. imagine being Charles & seeing this dude’s name on there randomly & being like “oh fuck it’s Chad i have to say something”
“music industry” lmao
the scales are tipped everywhere in favor of the few on top. of course this type of framing is deployed in major news outlets to discredit the artists that make the music wanting more than .003 cents or w/e per stream. disrespectful. everything is broken
recent developments in AI technology have revealed the truth behind Goya's dark masterpiece: through extrapolation algorithms we now know that Saturn was devouring his son inside of an Arby's
i don’t give a fuck what u call the art i make, u can say “i was listening to Max’s disgusting little goblin songs the other day.” fine with me
but the minute u call your art “content” - like some interchangeable morsel you toss into the machine to keep it churning - fuuuck that
we regret to inform you that our thirty-fourth choice for the new host of Jeopardy, a Cajun alligator hunter named Dusty Beauregard who lives on a houseboat in the gulf of Mexico, once wrote in a Tumblr post that "the earth is flat & i have pissed over its edge into the abyss"
new OPN is great. sometimes u just need to go full prog fantasia, buffet of sick synth tones mode. it’s cool to hear him write at this degree of maxed out detail / fidelity / narrative complexity & turn the dial back towards ~producing electronic music~ over everything else
wondering how / if history will consider the insane levels of power emanating from Ohio for the last like 20 years in terms of noise / experimental music. it’s the American cradle of freaks. doesn’t get said enough
a disaffected goth catboy, your pervy uncle, & a man with diamond cheekbones who always looks like he’s in a high-end whiskey commercial dove into electronic music & changed the game forever. thank you for everything YMO 🙏
coworker music:
- Clara Rockmore
- The Caretaker
- Karen Dalton
- Alexander Scriabin
- William Basinski
- late period Scott Walker
- Burial
- DJ Spooky
- Bohren & Der Club of Gore
- Philip Jeck
- Lustmord
(i work inside a haunted painting in the ballroom of an abandoned hotel)
you can love something without knowing much about it. you don’t have to be a walking wikipedia about the things you love. it’s cool if you are but it’s not necessary. you can see or hear something & just be like “wow i love that”
20 years after appearing in the image for the Experimental Band Theoretically Good headline in The Onion, Soliday is still out here freaking out the squares. wild set last night
starting a noise rock band? things to consider
select your vocal class:
🔘 David Yow (guy shouting)
🔘 Mark E. Smith (guy talking)
🔘 Jamie Stewart (trauma, horny)
drums:
🔘 the path of the human
🔘 the path of the machine
guitars:
🔘 angular / lacerating (only one option)
it’s hard to articulate just how much i disagree with this whole viewpoint. “roll of the music industry dice” “basically a business card” - what artist worth their salt thinks about creating art this way? a critic encouraging outright careerism is just like... so dark
one major Chicago archetype is the nondescript normcore 30 y/o dude with a mustache who stands in a pack in the corner of the bar with other dudes that look exactly like him & they say nothing to anyone & later someone tells you “that guy was in Smith Westerns” or some shit
me analyzing past sales data & triangulating a price slightly under the current market trend for a Discogs LP listing that no one is ever going to fucking buy