"black metal": soothing?

Listening to this album is kind of like wearing noise cancellation headphones. Which is, I guess, how I relate to a lot of black metal, especially in a cafe, or when a group of talkative undergrads is sitting at a neighboring table at the library.

Listening today
Torche, Meanderthal
Tortoise, TNT
The Wire on Air, 3 April 2008
V/A, Smithsonian Folkways Sampler
V/A, A Raga for Peter Walker
Ulaan Khol, I
Swirlies, They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days in the Glittering World
St. Vincent, Marry Me

good noise

I went to a show tonight not really knowing what to expect. It was Lampo’s first show since the spring, and the inaugural show in its new space on the near north side. The guy who introduced Marcus Schmickler quoted Phil Niblock as saying that Schmickler is (if I recall correctly) a “future kid,” and extended the metaphor half-jokingly to suggest we were about the hear “the sound of the future.” I had heard one album by Marcus Schmickler, Amazing Daze, which in my memory consists almost entirely of low drones, but according to reviews is at times fairly abrasive. The piece Schmickler played at this show was very different: roaring, howling, shrieking, gurgling, crackling, mostly with a metallic edge to it. Very “busy,” as the friend I heard it with put it; like me, he was bowled over by the complexity, density and inventiveness of the sound. The sound was produced entirely from Schmickler’s laptop. He sat at a desk during the performance, looking down at the computer. There were four speakers, surrounding the audience at its four corners.

I don’t know quite how to write about this music. It is best experienced live, I think, and perhaps part of the attraction is being able to experience it, to endure the cacophany. For one stretch I was contemplating getting a hearing exam at the university health center, wondering if I would have to go see a specialist and how much it would cost. My grandfather on my dad’s side experienced hearing loss when he got older, so I’m worried that at some point I’ll have to stop listening to loud music. His hair also went completely white in his early 30s, but that didn’t happen to my dad. I should mention that I have forgotten almost everything I learned in high school biology and the physical anthropology class I had to take at Cal. Of course there are ear plugs (they were being offered at the front table), but the sound is just not the same, as I experienced at a Rocket from the Crypt show at Bimbo’s 365 in 1999. At that show I had the plugs in for most the set, taking them out only in the last five minutes. Without the plugs the band was a revelation.

Anyway, I do not want my writing about the show to be overly hasty description-wise. There’s a risk of heavy-handedness in wanting to “explain” this music (or sound art, or whatever): to thematize it, to taxonomize it, to too securely spatialize (place-ify?) it. What I guess I’m saying is that there’s an interpretive risk of reifying an art form that aims to subvert, transgress, and/or overcome. (Exactly what the object – “object” in the sense of “a thing which is perceived, thought of, known, etc”, not “aim” – of this subversion etc would be I’m not so sure of.) On the other hand, I don’t necessarily want to posit a pre-critical or pre-rational domain of sensation in which the work operates, though such an idea has recently attained renewed critical respectability.

The sound was at times mimetic, to almost comic effect. (Indeed, a dude in front of me burst out laughing several times.) One of the dominant motifs was a tonal upswell that made me feel like I was close to an airplane taking off. After church sometimes my family parked next to the runways at SFO, just off the frontage road next to 101, mainly because my dad wanted to and he was almost always the one who drove, to watch and hear airplanes land and take off. Other sounds being mimicked: ambulance sirens, machines in a factory. The latter has, of course, been a dominant motif of experimental sound art since its earliest days. Some phases of washed out noise sounded like Niagara Falls (I went there in summer 2004), which is also extremely common in noise music. For a moment I thought of the noise torture at Guantanamo: I can’t decide if this reaction is banal, or if such an aim on the artist’s part might not be inconsistent with the diabolical character of the work.

The sound also created a sense of space, which is what this kind of sound art (if we can speak of "kinds" here) also tends to do. Schmickler creates sonic spaces incredibly well. “Sense of space” does not necessarily mean built space. In fact, it sounded more like the destruction of built space, in the manner theorized by Benjamin or in a certain sense Bataille, or Pynchon (see "Zone") or Sebald. Sometimes I felt embraced, with vibrations swelling up from the floor. There were occasional sensations of being in a natural space: underwater (maybe under the river Lethe, or the lake of fire (see also this, which has a handy glossary of literary terms)), and at the very end, in the simulacrum of rain forest full of mechanical birds and bugs.

The new space turned out to be ideal for this kind of performance. The acoustics seemed excellent, and the spareness of the décor, as is the custom in art galleries – off-white walls with green light projected on to them – provided a more or less neutral material support for sonic construction of space.

At one point in show I saw a scrap of something fall down from the ceiling. I looked up to see if there was anything above me. At the Alexei Pliousnine show at The Renaissance Society last October, the sound was so loud that it actually dislodged a huge piece of equipment from the ceiling. Luckily no one was killed. I was at that show, but left at the break, before the sky started falling.

It was snowing heavily tonight, making the trip from Hyde Park a little rough, but it was thoroughly worth it. I walked in the new snow with few people or cars around, not being able to discern the boundary between sidewalk and street, throwing a few snowballs at the trees lining the street.

p.s. Peter Margasak, the most open-eared music critic in Chicago that I know of, has a good take on the Schmickler show.

Noise/Mummies/Trees

Just found out about this great new band. I should mention that it is experimental black metal. Does this have to mean that I am a hipster? The OED says that “hip” is a variant of “hep,” even though the first citation for hip is 1904, while hep is 1908. Hep is defined as “well-informed, knowledgeable, ‘wise to’, up-to-date; smart, stylish.” Okay, nothing terribly wrong with that, I guess. The first citation for hep is symptomatic in a rather funny way, from the Saturday Evening Post of December 5, 1908: “What puzzles me is how you can find anybody left in the world who isn't hep.”

Insofar as it’s pejorative, which it is in my book, would I disqualify myself for hipsterism if I said I listened to death metal when I was a teenager, and thus have a history with it, and am thus not just associating myself with one of the latest trends? Black metal is never going to be all that popular anyway, even in what one can loosely call indie culture. Or is simply saying that I listened to metal as a teenager also identify me as hip? Of course, one’s art consumption practices do possess social significance, and of course in some cases grant one cultural capital. I can’t very well adopt the naïve view of “I just want to listen to good-sounding music”; it sounds too much like the tautological “I like what I like,” and it begs the question of what "good" is.

A gigantic garbage truck or some other kind of industrial vehicle was parked yesterday afternoon at the service entrance to the undergraduate dining hall just down and across the street from where I live. I was walking out the library when I heard it. Its mechanism was doing some form of work, generating a massive drone that could be heard for blocks. I thought, wow, that’s really nice, an unintentional piece of sound art in the middle of the day. It continued for a good twenty minutes. It reminded me of KTL, and Marcus Schmickler, who I hope to see at Lampo this Saturday.

This past Sunday in the mid-day I went for a walk down the street to the look at the empty quads. On a whim I went into the Oriental Institute to walk through the exhibits and return home. At the far end of the first hall, under the huge Assyrian statuary there were two rather fetching women dressed up in Egyptian garb giving a demonstration of how to mummify a corpse, or a fabric imitation of one, on a table in front of them. They invited the three people standing there to take out the felt “organs,” place each one in a little container with tops that associated them with particular deities. We cured the body with “salt," brushed it with “resin” and wrapped it up. Fun stuff. Then we went to look at the actual mummification implements in the collection.

The lights are turned off in every single one of the rooms in the undergrad dorm across the street. This is the dorm that resembles a prison inside and out. I went inside once to visit the room of my former Chaplain at Berkeley who was at Chicago for a conference. We had to go through five locked doors before we got to his room. I can see the dorm through the gnarly top branches of a tree, now bare for the winter. A haunting image, especially at twilight. It reminds me of the view out one of my windows at Canterbury in Winter 1999, a dead tree through which I looked at the backside of the Berkeley City Club’s neo-gothic building, with its lush green backyard where classically trained singers would warm up before concerts, and the aquamarine light (what else?) from the gorgeous swimming pool slightly visible through a few windows. The tree was cut down soon after I moved into that room.

I can also see the Brutalist-style library from my window, which is a little disquieting for some reason. Lots of my friends have moved to other parts of Chicago, but I've been living about as close to campus as is possible for a grad student.

Tragedy/Farce

The Wall Street Journal asks incisive questions relevant to the lives of many: “Hat-doffing on the 18th green is a common occurrence and appears to be growing in popularity -- but why?” (“Deconstructing Doffing,” WSJ, 11/4/07).

Anti-advert of the day: “Japanese pineapple-cheese crumbly candy”

Best thing I’ve seen this week: Shoes

Listening today:
Lair of the Minotaur, The Ultimate Destroyer
Jens Lekman, Night Falls Over Kortedala
Neurosis, Times of Grace
Skeletonwitch, Beyond the Permafrost
Roisin Murphy, Overpowered
Ratatat, Remixes Vol. 2
Sally Shapiro, Disco Romance
Fe-Mail, Voluptuous Vultures

good article on Hugo Chávez

Geoffrey Hawthorn, "Baseball's Loss"

If only Americans got this kind of analysis on its major media. In its absence, it's up to socialists and progressives to make the case for an analogous "revolution" in the US, respecting, of course, the traditions and peculiarities of US culture and politics. Chávez obviously recognizes the need for international solidarity, and has successfully advanced that agenda, even if it puts him into strategic relation with despotism. Hawthorn's article, however, concludes by echoing the dreadful doctrine of "socialism in one country," which he thinks Venenzuela will be constrained to accept: "Socialists elsewhere will no doubt continue to enthuse, but Venezuela will in the end be on its own." Let's see how long they can keep it going.

Reasons and Evidence

Excellent op-ed on Iraq’s “patrimony” from last March, referenced in a Tomdispatch article by Jack Miles today.

Conference: “In Defense of Sloth”

Jens Lekman: “but I will never kiss anyone…who doesn’t burn me like the sun.” Night Falls Over Kortedala is such a wonderful album.

Listening to Max Richter, The Blue Notebooks. It sounds derivative of something, but I can’t quite place it. Have the suspicion that it would be extremely impressive to people who listen mainly to pop music, but old hat to people who work in experimental/electronic/ambient music. I happen to love it, though I couldn’t imagine being an artist who put stuff like this out regularly. Need something else to lighten things up, which Richter actually has, e.g. production work with The Thermals and other rock groups.

Example of an independent Left: Socialism ou Barbarie. Its program would not really work in the US, however, given the intransigence of libertarian ideology in this country. That is to say, its critique of bureaucracy is too-easily folded into the knee-jerk US libertarian fixation on liquidating state agencies and leave the provision of health care, education, environmental control, etc., up to the free-for-all of the market. The same goes for Autonomia, perhaps, though there does exist such a thing as left libertarianism, i.e. anarchism, academic proponents of which include David Graeber and Simon Critchley.

Reason number 53 that it is difficult to take The Man without Qualities seriously:

"Ulrich [the main character] liked girls like this: ambitious, well-behaved, in their well-trained timidity like little fruit trees whose sweet ripe fruit is destined to fall one day into the mouth of some young knight of Cockaigne as soon as he deigns to open his lips. 'They have to be brave and tough,' he thought, 'like Stone Age women who shared their hunter's bed by night and carried his weapons and household gear on marches by day,' although he himself had never gone on such an expedition except in the distant prehistoric age of his awakening manhood" (189).

cultural transmission

"The Blue Angels were established following World War II by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, chief of naval operations. Their mission is to enhance Navy recruitment and to act as ambassadors of goodwill. They got their name when one of the original team members saw a mention in the New Yorker magazine of the Blue Angels nightclub in New York City." -- SF Gate, "Mayor blasts conservative critics, says S.F. supports military," 10/6/07.

What the ace pilot might not have known is that the Blue Angels night club was most likely named for the 1930 movie Der blaue Engel, in which an elderly secondary school teacher played by Emil Jannings (who would continue to be a major film star in Germany 1933-1945) lusts after cabaret singer Lola, played by Marlene Dietrich. Cultural inheritances can certainly be odd. Perhaps the pilot did know; I know at least one naval officer (my brother) who spends some of his time reading high-brow magazines. I wonder what the audience for The New Yorker was in the late 40s. And the corollary, how many New Yorker issues get mailed every week to US military installations around the world today?

Music today
Wolves again. Two Hunters is a masterpiece.
Hyphy Hitz again. Good house chore music.
Les Savy Fav, Let's Stay Friends
Trelldom, Til Minne
Chromeo, She's in Control
Spektr, Near Death Experience
St. Vincent, Marry Me
Love FM