OiNK Gets Boinked

In other news, torrent site OiNK is yet another fatality in the War on Information. The invite-only site, which had about 180,000 members was pretty kickass for getting you things before they existed, but the British techie who ran it and the Amsterdam servers that housed its info are now in the hands of the police. That's what you guys get for kicking Tender Button out of your little clubhouse.

Slowly we creep back to the dark ages when you actually had to wait for an album to be released in order to hear it. The horror, the horror.

Itha-Go-Go, Anyone? Matt+Kim

There are so many things I should be working on right this very minute but I wanted to babble about some shows for a little bit, since last week was a pretty good one for shows. Last Tuesday, a lady friend and I hiked up to Cornell's Risley Hall for the latest Fanclub offering. I was pretty psyched thinking the show was in Tammany, a little coffeespace with a proper stage and such where in Fanclub days of old we caught Portland IDMers Badger King and Bobby Birdman, but for reasons which passeth understanding, the show was in Risley's dining hall, which lady friend informs me is a reproduction of a dining hall at Oxford. Very Harry Potter, without the pointy hats. Muddy accoustics and no stage, but about seventysome kids packed up at the front.

Titus Andronicus started off the night with a pretty straight-up Clash homage. I believe the case has been made elsewhere, if you're going to steal, steal from the best. Mostly London Calling-era sound, letting my mind drift off to the copy of the Joe Strummer bio I'm waiting to borrow from Mr. Excitement. The fact I was more interested in thinking about reading about the Clash than paying attention to the band was more my fault than theirs.

The next band up was the unfortunately named Midnight Prayers (who we thought for a while was called Midnight Cruise. Not much better). A couple songs in I got to thinking how neat it is when new possibilities pop up on the menu of what kind of band you can be. These guys started off sounding a little like Deer Tick or O'Death: pseudo-old-timey ramshackle playing with high nasally vocals, a sound which is kind of popular with the kids these days. Not much new until they ripped into a garage cover of The McCoys' "Hang On, Sloopy" (the official rock song of the state of Ohio, apparently). Let it be known that I heart me some sixties pop, especially songs that seem irredeemably silly in retrospect, so these guys set the hook in my heart with this one, but the garage translation was a perfect way to combat some of the silliness in the original. From there on out, it was garage all the way, up to and sort of including a slightly draggy cover of the second half of "Shout!". Err...unless you can play wicked fast and have a pretty firm grasp on your loud/soft dynamics, this one's best to be avoided.

On the plus side, let's cast a vote right now for sixties garage pop and Phil Spector girl groups to be the next big thing. It makes sense! Interpol gets into Joy Division and Television and bam, a whole bunch of bands go Ian Curtis. Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands evoke the spirit of the Talking Heads and whoosh, bunch of Talking Heads bands. My Morning Jacket attempts to redeem southern rock and we get the Black Mountain family of bands. Time has come to move a little further back. The Black Lips have the garage sound knocked down but even cooler is the girl group sound, not of the Pipettes but of Grizzly Bear. Recommended three in a row: "Knife" by Griz, "Putty in Your Hands" by the Shirelles, "Veni Vidi Vici" by the Black Lips. Oh, and also, more bands need to include baritone sax.

(At some point I'll figure out/remember how to put songs up here, I really will.)

Matt+Kim finished out the show and they were just cuter than two little hamsters driving a toy car! Giggling in a skeleton teeshirt as he stood up on his chair to see the audience, Matt was like an amphetemine-fueled QVC host, telling the audience how EXCITED they were to get the OPPORTUNITY to play here, and how AMAZING it all was. I know I sound snarky, but in fact it was pretty goddam adorable. Oh, and also they played music. M+K sound like a more muscular Mates of State (who are equally adorable, substituting googly for giggly), with hints of the aforementioned Portland IDM sound. They let the audience surround them, to the chagrin of the sound guys and the kids were pretty boppy into it, lot of cheery pogoing, sweaty undergrads, crowd-surfing opening band.

Which brings me to the main point here. In addition for a call to garage rock, I think the time has come for Ithaca's answer to Chic-a-Go-Go. All we need is a room, a bouncy band, a bunch of the kids and a couple cameras. Oh, and a slot on public access. Come on, who's in?

Stupid Bloody Tuesday

Continuing with the new musics! Hooray for the return of our espresso machine!

Dirty Projectors- "Rise Above" With a couple more listens, this one could well replace Animal Collective as my favorite album of the week. Not as frantic, obviously, but just as complex and far more fleshed out than previous albums by the Projectors. They've grown into a rock band, and it kind of rocks. Sometimes a band just needs to get in touch with their muse, and it turns out for these guys that muse was Henry Rollins.

The Go! Team- I've already forgotten what this album is called. Their first one was loaded with hooks, every other song was a pop hit. This one feels slick, slippery. I hope I'll get back to listen through it again, but chances are strong I won't.

Black Lips- "Good Bad Not Evil"- One of those bands who's just good at what they're doing. The Black Lips won't change anybody's life like hearing the Sonics for the first time, and this album is not all that different from previous efforts, but it plugs along like a late model Honda Civic. Straight garage, solid driving music.

St. Vincent- "Marry Me". No. Wispy, meandering. I actually forgot I had it on.

Shout Out Louds- "Our Ill Wills" Holy Swedish! Shiny pop from Scandinavia, The SOLs are like candy. Lyrics that indicate English is only their second language and melodies that prove pop music is their native tongue. Listened through it twice today, grinning vapidly. I like me some vapid grinning.

Know what else I like? Posters by Laura Brothers!

I can't remember if I'm US or UK, but this should be a big ol' throwdown. Which I also like.

Treat Me Like You Did the Night Before

The writing of this post is going to stretch over the next few hours as I wade through today's shipment of tomorrow's music. The folks at Matador were nice enough to sneak me advances of the upcoming Devendra Banhart and Cave Singers albums, but there are more immediate concerns at hand as I whip out the ol' exacto knife and quietly slice into this week's new releases, starting with-

Animal Collective- "Strawberry Jam" They sound more like Panda Bear's band than ever, which is a good thing. Not as spacious as "Person Pitch" but with hints of that spaciness and the whooping and yelping one expects from an Animal Collective effort. This is the one I've been looking forward to and have studiously avoided listening to advance tracks. Feels like "Feels" a little in its overall consistency, none of the dizzying highs paired with almost staggering lulls of "Sung Tongs". I think they might have resurrected Vincent Price for the mildly "Thriller"esque voice over on "Winter Wonderland", paired up with Panda's looping high vocals. If all of this week's stuff is this good (one imagines it couldn't be), I'll be a happy little store-jockey.

Various Artists- "Wattstax" I've heard most of these recordings before, but it's nice they've been given the deluxe treatment. Sound quality is great, better than I've ever heard and the packaging is lovely, sharp, crisp, iconic. Plus it's four hours of music, which is an assload of Stax. Makes a nice counterpoint to their 50th anniversary collection, painting a deeper, less broad picture of the label in 1972. I especially appreciate the inclusion of Jesse Jackson's intro to the festival and bits of Richard Pryor's stand-up, which flesh out the festival as being about more than just music.

Kanye West- "Graduation" Conversely, the packaging for the new Kanye sucks. Unless you like semi-retarded looking anime bears. Which maybe you do. "You can be my black Kate Moss tonight"? Actually, that's some pretty clever stuff, but to quote Tom Petty, I don't hear a single. And man, that voice modulation crap that Cher invented bugs the hell out of me, which is not to knock Cher or any of her scientific advancements. Did you know she invented the fishnet stocking? Okay, we all know I don't have anything halfway intelligent to say about hiphop, so on to...

50 Cent- "Curtis" Wait, this is hiphop too. I think I'm rooting for 50 in the sales battle, just cause I don't imagine Kanye would quit the busines over such a minor thing. Maybe there will be a tie? 50's definitely got the allstars on his side, but the album feels disjointed and anyway, Steve Gollnick could probably get Timbaland to record a track with him at this point. That'd be hot, I'd buy that.

More to come later...

Body Kinesthetic Politic

Two fold purpose here. One is to pull out the paddles, rub them together and shock this blog back to life. The other is to do a post mortem on last weekend's dance party, a success in many ways thanks largely to my DJing counterparts, but also kind of a new development in what we've been doing this whole time.

To start then, a brief history. The dance parties pre-dated me as something called the Revolutionary Dance Party. The idea was a small, early party on a Friday or Saturday night, concentrated entirely on dancing and then spilling out into the town at large, with a group of people wound up physically and mentally, yes, but even more important (it seemed to me at least) grounded in their own bodies, aware of them as instruments of activity and joy. The individual body is the most basic unit of the state and when the body is viewed in this way, a locus of joy, the impact on the state will be positive. When the body is viewed as a locus of pain, of punishment or restriction (as is the case at the state level currently), the body and the state will always be in opposition, the state inflicting itself on the body rather than the body, or a collection of joyful bodies, restructuring the state into a network of interactions based in joy, pleasure, fulfillment.

This both is and is not as sexy as it sounds.

Revolutionary in goal, the RDP was famously fascist in execution. The rules were as follows:
1. Everyone must dance.
2. No one cannot dance.
3. Everyone must bring music to share*.
4. Everyone must bring a dance move to share.
5. Everyone must dance.

*In a strict RDP, the music had to be in a physical format, that is to say that iPods were frowned upon.

Because these events were small, intentional communities, the rules were easy enough to enforce: anyone who chose not to participate was asked to leave. The result was fluid and dynamic: it had no maker, no singular originator.

Contrast this with the auteur school of DJing: a singular virtuoso DJ (or series of DJs) exerting total control on a dance environment. This, of course, is the standard club model and can be downright amazing. Again, there is at least the auspice of an intentional community, since people who go to a dance club must do so at least on the pretense of dancing. But once in the environment, the myriad desires of the community members fall at odds to one another: people who came to dance are pestered by people who came to hook up, crowded by people who came to passively observe. At the same time, the DJ holds ultimate sway over the environment, and the crowd is at the whim of his personality. One DJ may favor feats of mixing, overlapping and blending over danceability or (as is more often the case) may fall back on prescripted sets that are entirely disconnected with the audience, relying on time-tested hits or (worse!) nostalgia and (worst!) imagined nostalgia to keep a crowd barely moving.

When we began doing dance parties in public, we faced an immediate problem. By nature of being public, the strict rules that held together RDPs could not be enforced (although we did have a little Dance Gestapo to gently encourage people to dance or else), but we had no inclination to have just another dance club setting. We wanted a Dance Party, dammit. With Dancing! So we tried the dialectic model. Benefits are obvious, I think: you winnow down your audience til you once again have a more or less intentional community. People would only come to, say, a Bowie vs. the Talking Heads dance party for one or a combination of three reasons:

1. They like Bowie.
2. They like the Heads.
3. They want to dance.

You have the added advantage of a certain level of partisanship, such that even people who aren't dancing at any given moment will more than likely be involved in the music through debate, a debate echoed by the back and forth of the music.

Also, you have the back and forth of the music: the DJs must be responsive to one another and, in an effort to make a case for their band of choice, must be responsive to the crowd's reactions. A crowd that dances hardest to rock-era Bowie is going to get more rock-era Bowie (and more rocking Heads songs), while a crowd that responds to the heavy polyrhythmic Heads tunes is going to get more of the same from the Heads, and an emotionally shattered Bowie DJ.

Part of the reason, I think, that we started with and have returned to the Cure vs. the Smiths is that there you've got two bands with whom people have a deep emotional, often personal memory, which, unlike an encyclopaedic knowledge of 80s pop stored in the cortex, is often written directly onto the body, deep down in neural passages formed in the vital and emotionally active teenage years. Note how this is diametrically opposed to nostalgia: it's not a pining for a time past, it's a visceral experience of an aspect of that time, of a different aspect of one's emotional being. Which is why the people really into it, many of them excellent dancers, tend to dance exactly the way they would at age 16 at the Smiths vs. Cure parties.

Finally, we expanded into what we had last week: the open source model. Let me stress that part: it's intended to be fully open source in that any one of the people DJing is fully replaceable, given that their replacement is equally impassioned about the music they intend to play. The open source way allows for maximum fluidity, maximum responsiveness to the crowd and, like the original RDP, a creation with no creator, an event that creates, fuels and sustains itself, that shapes its body out of its evolving self. The first time we tried it, I think we (and thus the event) was caught up in silly ideas of one-upping each other, with certain songs brought out for shock/kitsch value, but this time we had a real challenge. People began dancing at 9:30 and a mistake could kill momentum, cause the entire thing to collapse.

This is not entirely true after a point. Momentum can sustain itself through at least one dud. Isn't that right, Miami?

But this time, something really amazing happened. A community in place, intentionality built itself. Confirmed non-dancers danced, the "audience" in the spectator sense, found itself devoured, shaped into the body of the dancing crowd. Intentionality conquers apathy and the body kinesthetic rules over all!

Big successes: All of My Friends by LCD Soundsystem, for all eight minutes (credit to Luke), Balkan Beat Box, novel and unstoppable (credit to Jason) and the Passenger, bouncy, familiar and imbued with the creepy, beautiful energy of being swept along by a larger current (credit again to Jason).

Downpoints: the afterparty. Not because it was a bad afterparty, it was actually quite nice. But the afterparties are almost always a downpoint, even if they don't involve my ass gettting handcuffed. Because the only suitable follow-ups to a successful dance party of this type are as follows:

1. More dancing (why does this never happen, by the way?)
2. Making out*
3. Smashing the state into a million shiny pieces (why does this never happen either?)

*I sincerely hope many dancers are opting for this rather than the afterparties. Making out is (or at least should be) the final choosing of joy over the state.

Next month we go back to Vs. for a bit, give ourselves a little bit of structure, scratch the ol' dialectic itch. As far as this little blog goes, I have every intention of keeping it going this time out. I've got some album review/previews drafted, some thoughts on the comeback albums of indie bands and whether it's axiologically different from/better than yet another Who comeback and, umm...much much more!

How Easily We Are Flattered...

Someone actually asked at Trivia Night if I published playlists. Which made me blush, naturally. And as I'm typing this, someone else asked the same thing. Since some quirk of iTunes leads to only 5 out of 40 songs being available if I publish the list on the iTunes store thingie, I'm putting it up here and will try to do so every week if I'm feeling frisky.

Paint's Peeling- Rilo Kiley
Try- Michael Penn
Bring on the Dancing Horses- Echo & the Bunnymen
Retrieval of You- Minus 5
Eye of Fatima- Camper van Beethoven
A House is Not a Motel- Yo La Tengo
The Hardest Button to Button- White Stripes
Happy Jack- The Who
Who Taught You to Live Like That?- Sloan
Pablo Picasso- The Modern Lovers
Dashboard- Modest Mouse
Who Do You Love- Ted Leo/Pharmacists
Suffer for Fashion- Of Montreal
Hot Burrito #2- Flying Burrito Brothers
Close to Me- The Cure
Because You're Frightened- Magazine
Dance Steps- The Natural History
Folsom Prison Blues- Johnny Cash
Someone Great- LCD Soundsystem
Road- House of Love
6'1"- Liz Phair
Friend of Mine- The National
Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space- Spiritualized
Beanbag Chair- Yo La Tengo
Fiery Crash- Andrew Bird
Older Guys- Flying Burrito Brothers
Happily Ever After- The Rosebuds
Torn & Frayed- Rolling Stones
Fire Island, AK- Long Winters
The Well and the Lighthouse- The Arcade Fire
Sex and Dying in High Society- X
Mama Wolf- Devendra Banhart

Hope that helps. If there's a question about a particular song, post it in the comments and I'll try to elucidate. Which is like ElimiDate, only more helpful.