Bring the Noise

2^nd Thoughts Dept.: OK, I shouldn’t ought to have been so harsh & reductive talking about MBV wannabes the other day. That wasn’t nice. I mean, I have a deep & abiding affection for that kind of dense, distortion-slash-reverb guitar Noise. It’s nice to find it wherever it can be found. e.g., I was listening to No Age this a.m. in the car. It was loud & it was luscious & it made me very happy.

Teen Creeps - No Age

Errand Boy - No Age

This kind of music is, for me on a good day, downright liturgical. It’s transcendent, it’s transcendental. Uh, it takes me outside of myself. To where my brain can finally shut the fuck up & there is only Sensory Experience. Like floating in the warm ocean at night & it’s nothing but the stars, the stars.

Heh. OK, so I’m exaggerating a little. I mean, I still managed to keep on driving & all during my own personal little rapture there. So. But anyway, there is a certain mode of music-making that (for me personally) is the alchemical real deal, the metamorphic whole greater than the sum of its parts. There are a lot of practitioners in this mode, particularly along the ostensible “rock” end of the musical spectrum. (Not to give short shrift to the more “serious” composers like Glenn Branca, La Monte Young --badass motherfuckers in their own right.) I tend to think they’re all chasing sort of the same thing, something that is elusive, not at all easy to define. Something transformative. It’s like there’s a point of stillness somewhere inside of the chaos, the noise.

I can’t ever seem to explain why this kind of thing makes me so damn happy, but it really really does.

Take It From Me -- Track #7 -- Sonic Youth

“Malibu Gas Station”
by Sonic Youth
from The Eternal
June 2009

I won’t try to explain here all the reasons why Sonic Youth still occupy such a warm & special place in my heart. But it’s not difficult to get me started on the topic over beers, just FYI! I saw SY at the Fox this year, but I missed the “secret” show at the Independent (tickets sold out online in two minutes flat).

Kim’s vocals (can’t always call them “singing”) are not typically my favorite ingredient of SY music. I like Thurston’s crisp & precise rhythm playing on this song (e.g., at ~2:00). It's not virtuosic or anything, but just a tasty little surprise, an indicator that this band is still reaching, still growing. The obligatory degeneration into noisy feedback is obviously their stock in trade, & handled particularly well on this track, I think.

Malibu Gas Station - Sonic You...

4 Songs per Hour

Not to disparage my friends & family --all fine people, open-minded & frequently indulgent of what I think is appropriate party music. But let’s face it: there’s a lot of Noisy shit on my iPod that’s just not easy to love. & all of it needs to be played loud or not at all. So, alone in the car is where much of my best listening occurs.

Just so you know, I do actually listen to normal music like, you know, a normal person. But I’ve got this one playlist full of the kind of music that, way back when, we used to fondly call Difficult Listening. Total length of this mix is like six hours, even though there are only about 25 songs on it. “Songs.” heh.

Anyway, I’m going to write about some of these crazy pieces here pretty soon. 1^st though, I’m still trying to figure out how to get the JW Player loaded up onto the site. [Clatter having no IT Dept, I have to try to figure this kind of shit out on my own.] The idea though, is to have a couple hundred words about, e.g., “The Diamond Sea” by Sonic Youth (& I mean the Alternate Ending version from the Destroyed Room album, which runs over 25 minutes), along with the song posted right there. So you can conveniently hear what I’m talking about without having to hunt it down. That will be cool, right?

So, yeah, my mix for driving alone in the car is entitled 4 Songs per Hour, & the average piece there actually is about 15 minutes long. The usual suspects are there, but also e.g., some of Robert Fripp’s more out there stuff, Miles Davis from when he got good & psychedelic, Neil Young getting all feedbacky on his soundtrack to the Dead Man movie, some great old African stuff like Fela Kuti, Youssou N’Dour & cetera –it’s pretty much the works. I like to set it to shuffle, then discover what I’m going to hear next.