Thursday Night Music

First of all, I attended the Animal Collective show at the Triple Rock. Ariel Pink doesn't even deserve a mention, because that was the most uninteresting set of music I've heard since last fall. Animal Collective was fun and very much worth seeing live. I thought they sounded different than on record, but maybe not. They had a lot of drumming which I didn't expect to be foregrounded, at least not to that extent, from Sung Tongs. I can't recall their third song from either album I've listened to, but it was the highlight of my week. It sounded kind of like a Brian Eno track that had been left to rot in the woods, and had somehow bled into an almost familiar yet not quite intelligible pop song. For however long that lasted, Animal Collective was my favorite band. I got a little tired toward the end of the show, so they got shuffled back into the larger category of "bands I like pretty well".

If you were expecting me to do a radio show on Sunday, well, I changed that and did one tonight at midnight instead.

[Note: exceptionally self-indulgent paragraph ahead.] I really enjoyed the Black Dice track Nick played just now on the radio (which upon further review I have). I'm trying to figure out what CDs I should order, because I want to order several at once to save on shipping costs, but it's so hard to make up my mind. I was going to get Early Pedro, but then Adam surprised me with a burned copy of both the Pedro LP and the Fear & Resilience EP, so I'm not so sure about that anymore. I'm thinking about getting a Greg Davis record, but which one? Keith Fullerton Whitman's got a new one coming out next month, but I'm thinking the record library might get it, so do I really want to order that? I kind of want the Run the Road compilation, but I'm not sure that I like grime as much as people who like grime are supposed to. I'd kind of like to get some more label samplers, like maybe one of the Pop Ambient collections from Kompakt, but I also don't enjoy sacrificing depth for breadth, so maybe I should get a single-artist album. Decisions!

I also realized, maybe even today, that the amount of time I spend reading about things cuts into the time I spend doing them (when I say realize, I don't mean like it's something new, it just became apparent for some reason). Like I spend hours per week reading Pitchfork, All Music Guide, etc., but not that much time actually paying attention to music while I listen to it. I have a few strategies for this, like checking my newsreader once every other day, or maybe putting all feeds that might require more than five minutes to read (Achewood would be okay, but The Morning News Headlines would not be) in another category that I only check when I have a lot of time, because otherwise I end up spending all my leisure time reading things on the internet. I like the internet, but think it might be taking over my life. Actually, it already has, but that's beside the point.

Irresponsible Investing

I remember being dumbfounded back when the tech bubble burst that people were complaining so severely about the money they'd lost on the stocks. Look at the Dow Jones, I said, it's gone down but not enough to wreck your lifestyle. I hadn't thought about the issue for a long while until I saw this opinion piece from tomorrow's Christian Science Monitor. It makes a lot of sense, at least from what I could gather about the choices people made during the last major stock downturn.

Also, regarding radio, Max & Summer will be taking my place this Thursday, since I will be returning from the Animal Collective show, so I will be broadcasting for two hours this Sunday, from 6 to 8 pm. I'm pretty sure I'll take the opportunity to play things I wouldn't normally play on Thursday night, but I don't know just what yet. I also want to remix the first half of the Arcade Fire's "Wake Up" with parts of some of my other favorite songs from that album, because I think the chorus could be used to more dramatic effect than it is, but even if I do get started on that, I don't know how long it might take.

Post-Punk

The Observer Music Monthly today listed their top ten post-punk albums of 1978-1984.

• The Slits: Cut
• PiL: Metal Box
• The Fall: Early Years 77-79
• Scritti Politti: Early
• Gang of Four: Entertainment!
• Talking Heads: Remain In Light
• Orange Juice: The Glasgow School
• Cabaret Voltaire: The Living Legends
• The Associates: Fourth Drawer Down
• Siouxsie and the Banshees: Once Upon A Time - The Singles

Style Changes

You'll notice that I'm changing the look of the site a little bit. Everything should be readable and actually the archives pages should all be updated which they haven't been in a while. I'm not finished, so you're not allowed to complain yet. If you have suggestions, though, I suppose you could post them.

M83

I'd only really heard one song by Ulrich Schnauss before he opened tonight, and I think "On My Own" is still my favorite. He had a pretty exciting final minute or two, but other than that I probably would have been just as happy listening at home. I thought about buying his record, but it came out two years ago, so I assume there will be a new one out soon, and also the one thing I really want at the moment is Early Pedro.

I apparently didn't know what to expect from M83, because I assumed it would just be Anthony Gonzalez standing at a synthesizer doing his thing, sort of like how it was with Ulrich Schnauss. Boy, was I ever wrong. If I were a namedropping hipster type, I would describe it like this: what if Jeff Lynne* joined Explosions in the Sky to play synthesizer (and supply weird vocal samples), told the rest of the band to shorten up their songs and get rid of some of the quiet parts, and then they went on an amazing tour to showcase their new sound.

M83 is touring as a four-piece band, which allows them to actually play most of the parts in the songs live. The bass was loud and throbbing and at times overpowering. Gonzalez sometimes played lead guitar and other times stood at the keyboard. He supplied vocals on a few tracks, but they also made use of a recording of a woman telling a story about being really scared in the car with her little girl, because Satan was coming to get them or something. I don't know if it's on the album or not, but it worked really well to sustain the mood between a couple of pieces. The drummer had, by the end, become predictably ferocious, but I don't think anyone was complaining. The main guitarist, well, he played the guitar with a strap over his shoulder most of the time, but he also used a little handheld fan (at least that's what I think it was) to hit the strings and get a sound most would only attempt with a pedal. I think at one point while he was playing the guitar with it flat on the table, which he did a few times, he had attached a screwdriver to the strings on the neck so it swung up and down for more homemade non-pedal effects.

They played for what seemed like close to an hour and a half, but the encore, which consisted of something really pretty and slow followed the band going into full-on assault mode for the last hurrah, probably would have been enough just by itself. Gonzalez kept apologizing in his thick French accent for their numerous technical problems, but the audience certainly couldn't notice any. If this was a poor show, I can't even begin to imagine what they sound like on a good night.

* = Think Electric Light Orchestra's "Fire on High".

Weekend Movies

You may have noticed the appearance of the "Netflix Queue" at right. I signed up with them for the third time, and I think my first disc(s) should get here on Saturday. Cinemania seemed an appropriate way to start things off.

I calculate that if I can watch twelve movies a month, it will take me until approximately April 2014 to get through everything I have on my enormous list. Of course, I would probably add a few titles to the list in those nine years, so we'd have to add another couple years, at least.

Charles and I discussed a potential matinee screening of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on Monday 2 May. It would be just after the first weekend, so there should be a lesser chance of an annoyingly crowded theater. Assuming we end up going, you're welcome to come along.

Thursday Night Music

Charles accompanied me on my journey through new music this evening, and I got a call from an appreciative listener, which was nice.

The following is from WordIQ.com:

Microhouse music takes minimal house to a new level, focusing on the essential dance-inducing elements of house music: the beat, the bass and the melody. Drawing from minimal techno and the glitch genre for its unique drums and chopped melody sound, it cuts house down to its bare bones.

Percussion in microhouse is reminiscent of tech house drums, replacing typical house kick drums and hi-hats with small bits of noise. Microhouse artists often experiment with different ways of sampling to achieve this. Vocals in microhouse are often very simplistic, nonsensical, and monotone in nature.

The term microhouse is usually credited to music journalist Philip Sherburne, writing for the magazine Wire in 2001. It is generally accepted that the genre began life in Germany in the late 1990s, urged along by record labels like Kompakt, Perlon, and Force Inc.

Knowledge is power!

Great Lake Swimmers

I really want to play something from this album on my radio show this week, but I can't because it wouldn't fit in at all. The Great Lake Swimmers (I'm listening to their self-titled debut) sound a lot like Sun Kil Moon, though because they record in a silo, I would compare them to solo demos of the slow tracks on At Dawn featuring only Jim James, but with less reverb on his voice. Actually, those demos probably exist and may not sound quite like this, but they would be very aesthetically similar.

I'd guess this may be my second favorite record of the year so far, because I'm still pretty blown away by Antony and The Johnsons' I Am a Bird Now.

MP3s from Insound:

Great Lakes Swimmers "I Will Never See the Sun"
Antony and The Johnsons "Hope There's Someone"

Carleton Chapel, East Entrance

Carleton Chapel, East Entrance
Originally uploaded by andy.slabaugh.

It looked nice outside when I left SUMO so I went out and took a bunch of pictures. I'd probably have uploaded more than just this one if I'd had some idea about how to photograph at night. Next time I will increase the exposure and increase ISO speed so they aren't all blurry. That would have enabled me to shoot the trees, which were probably the best thing to look at. There will probably also be nice pictures to take at dawn, but I don't really plan to be awake then.

The Slow Life

I was looking through Momus's LiveJournal, which got mentioned on Pitchfork the other day, and enjoyed/identified with this post on "emotional communism" as well as this one on the Slow Life campaign in Japan.

From their manifesto:

Humans live about 700,800 hours (assuming an average life expectancy of 80 years), of which we spend about 70,000 hours working (assuming we work for 40 years). The remaining 630,000 hours are spent on other activities, such as eating, studying, and leisure, including 230,000 hours sleeping. Until now, people often focused their lives on these 70,000 hours of labor, devoting their lives to their companies. However, with the "slow life" principles, we would now like to pay more attention to the 630,000 hours outside of work to achieve true happiness and peace of mind.

The practice of the "Slow Life" involves the following eight themes:

SLOW PACE: We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.
SLOW WEAR: We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).
SLOW FOOD: We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.
SLOW HOUSE: We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably, and ultimately, to conserve our environment.
SLOW INDUSTRY: We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.
SLOW EDUCATION: We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.
SLOW AGING: We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes. SLOW LIFE: Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy.

Those who aren't Japanese might need to tweak it a little bit to make it culturally appropriate, but you can certainly understand the concepts. I was talking to Connor today about various things and I think slow education is definitely something I'm feeling particularly supportive of as I near at least a break in, if not the end of, seventeen years of formal education.

Yankee Antics

I saw this happen as I was walking by the big-screen television in Sayles and thought it was kind of weird. Then I saw the entire Yankee bench in the outfield when I passed by the lounge on my floor. It struck me as odd but I didn't find out what actually happened until this afternoon.

Bandemonium

I'm fairly satisfied with my bandemonium. I think except for the fact that I didn't get to play "Death Is the Easy Way" or "Nashville to Kentucky" everything went as planned as far as transitions and commentary and whatnot.

Thursday Night Music

I've got my bandemonium all planned out, but then I forgot to advertise it on my own show. I also wasn't able to get my tracklist printed, which was kind of a disaster, but only a minor one since Cameron opened the record library about half an hour after I started.

Out Hud was neither bad nor as great as I'd hoped they would be. I'd say the best was toward the end, so I don't know if they kept getting better after I left or if they just stopped since they'd said it was going to be their last song. I think I like their first album a little bit more, if not a lot more, and they only played new stuff, which I found disappointing. The biggest problem was that for the most part they just weren't very interesting. To do minimalist electronic or dance music, which they tried to do, you've got to have really great sounds, and I didn't hear any sounds that I really liked, so it was easy to get bored. Their stage banter was kind of terrible, but that's not too important.

Hella played the math-rock, and I don't think I've been to a math-rock show before, so that was interesting. I certainly enjoyed parts of it, though I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how best to enjoy the songs. Sometimes they'd find a good riff and stay with it for a while, but you knew it wouldn't last long, so it was hard to get too attached to any part of the music, which seemed to make my attention wander a little.

Underwhelming or not, Sarah Moody deserves a lot of credit for booking a show this big. It's not too often we geta national tour coming to campus. I mentioned to Adam and Dana that this is probably the only time we'll see an act in the Hot Artist section at All Music Guide the same day they play the Cave.

Sitcom -> Reality -> Sitcom

This NY Times article suggests that The Bob Newhart Show, which by the way is not the same show as Newhart, could potentially be a model for how the networks might attract attention and ratings back to traditional types of TV comedy.

With television favoring louder voices, the kind of calm exhibited by comedians like Mr. Newhart and Johnny Carson might now be seem a quality worth emulating.

Professor Yeti Column, etc.

Last week I complained about television news coverage at Professor Yeti. I was going to link to it earlier, but the new issue wasn't up when I first checked, and then it kind of slipped my mind until now.

Since I'm going to at the Cave this Thursday evening, I'll be on the radio at midnight instead of 10:15.

Also, even if you hate golf, you still ought to see this clip of Tiger Woods' recent but destined-to-be-legendary chip-in at the 16th this past Sunday at the Masters.

Notes

I was looking around at Largehearted Boy because I'm not quite tired yet, and I saw this list of the best baseball books. The one I'm probably most interested in reading is The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. That might go well with Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema since both have pantheon-type lists for their respective fields.

Also I was just realizing that as much as I hate fanboy reactions to comic book and science fiction movies, I might have a hard time staying objective when seeing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I mean, I've read the book probably too often, gone through the rest of the "trilogy" at least once, I have the BBC miniseries on DVD, and I've heard the radio series multiple times. Normally I get frustrated when people start to like any one thing too much, because there is so much else that goes undiscovered while you watch, say, Evil Dead II for the thirty-eighth time. At least I'll try to not buy any tie-in merchandise.

Radio Again

I've started posting playlists again, to the certain delight of all.

Here is my program guide entry:

Title: Maundering by Moonlight
Time: 10:15 pm Thursday
Genre: Electronic/Experimental
Description: Slowcore, Krautrock, Microhouse, Ambient, Turntablism, Folktronica, Dance Punk, Post-Rock, "New Weird America"

I could have gone with "Trance/Ambient" for the genre, but that wouldn't have really been accurate, and only one of you would have laughed, so I didn't do that. And yes, I realize that my description is actually just more specific genres, but it seemed the most appropriate way to go this term.

Actually, I was just reading a great show title/description, which I would use if I were to have a show next term. It would be called "The Anechoic Chamber," and the description would be this thing where John Cage asks some Harvard researcher what were the low and high noises he heard in the anechoic chamber, which is a place where there aren't any sounds made by anything but you, and the Harvard researcher replies they were his blood circulating and his nervous system, respectively.

Senior Profiles

Charles just posted his interview with the Second Laird Miscellany, so I figured I would treat you all to the un-censored version of the best part of my profile in the Goodsell Gazette (the math department newsletter), which was printed in somewhat unrecognizable form several months ago:

Q: Why did you decide to major in Math?
A: Academically, I fumbled around in the dark for my first two years and when I finally found the lightswitch, I discovered that I was in a strange and disorienting room from which I all could decipher was the stenciled phrase "Math majors" on the frosted glass door that led out into the rest of the world.

I can probably understand why they felt the need to brighten it up a little. It seemed appropriate as I prepare for the math comps exam.

The Pitchfork Summer Festival

I'm thinking pretty strongly about attending the Intonation Music Festival in Chicago, curated by Pitchfork, because it's not going to cost very much, it's going to be roughly four hours away, which is a pleasant but not overlong drive, because I kind of wish I'd attended last year's Curiosa Festival (The Cure, Mogwai, Interpol, and The Rapture) in Chicago, and the first list of bands, which was posted today, looks promising:

• The Decemberists
• The Fiery Furnaces
• Will Oldham (special DJ set)
• Broken Social Scene
• The Go! Team
• Four Tet
• Magnolia Electric Co.
• The Wrens
• A.C. Newman
• The M's

I'll have to work out the logistics, which I think is pretty much just where I would sleep on Friday and Saturday night, but it's at least something to think about.

Packaging

Packaging
Originally uploaded by andy.slabaugh.

This picture features the memory card I got for my camera and the comparatively enormous box in which I received it. The packing peanuts to content ratio was stunning.

Saturday Movie

I'll be going to see The World at the Oak Street Cinema this Saturday at 6:45 pm. It is, of course, part of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. You're welcome to come along, if you'd like.

Springtime Radio

Adam has toiled all weekend and come up with the radio schedule. Give him a pat on the back if you see him. I've got a show at 10:15 on Thursday evenings. I will also have a My Morning Jacket bandemonium at 4:30 pm on Friday 15 April, for which I ordered two EPs today from CD Universe.

Charles, Jack, and I have a block of programming to ourselves, though if you wanted to be thematically coherent, you might have to replace Charles with Nick, since I'm not as sure what Charles will be playing.

This term will be all "left-field" stuff, probably close to what gets featured in The Wire. I might take 15 minutes to play more traditional things, like from 11:00 to 11:15, depending on how I feel about the concept. Hopefully it will all make sense in the end. I sorted out the stuff in iTunes that I feel will be appropriate for this term, and it came out at around 1/6 of my total. I'm not sure at the moment how much of that I have on CD, but I'll be re-sorting and burning a lot of discs this week.

Final Four

I'm excited about the championship game on Monday, although probably not as much as Kevin is. Illinois reminds me in a number of ways of my high school team, which took second in the state tournament this year. They have three outstanding guards (though one is more of a slasher/jumper), solid post play that is respectable and sometimes great, but not always consistent. They lack size, compared to larger teams, in both bulk and height, but tend to make up for it by spreading the floor and good anticipation. They may get beat rebounding, but they pass as well as or better than anyone and look to push the ball up the floor with a lot of turnovers on the defensive end. They have more than five shooters on the team who need to be guarded outside. Hopefully Illinois doesn't also end up losing the in the title game.

It's kind of weird that three of the four coaches in St. Louis this weekend have been at their present positions three years or less. It's also kind of weird to me both that the Arizona-Illinois game wasn't voted as the game of the tournament or that Arizona-Oklahoma St. wasn't even on the list when they showed a poll on TV today.

I'm still waiting for some clever sports site to hook up an RSS feed with game recaps for specific teams, and maybe a second for news and other related stuff to the same team. It seems like it would make a lot of sense to me, and probably would not be too hard; every time a story gets filed with certain attributes, update the RSS feed. It's possible that this exists, but I haven't found it yet.

Mountain Goats in Ames

Thursday night I visited Charles and pulled a dead fish out of a bottle with two long, narrow wooden sticks. I won no prizes.

Friday we went to Ames, Iowa to see the Mountain Goats. We saw some of the opening act, The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers, who also joined the Mountain Goats on stage for a couple songs. They seemed okay, but I don't have anything in particular to say about them.

The Maintenance Shop had some stained glass and a bar and was more wide than deep. It felt like a nice place to be. I don't know what the capacity was, but probably what you'd expect for a small campus venue.

We met this girl Laura who was from Minneapolis, because we were standing next to her. Charles managed to one-up her in a discussion about the Microphones, although to her credit, she did mention John Vanderslice, whom Charles has no experience with. She claimed, I think, that Colin Meloy of the Decemberists is the second greatest songwriter writing songs right now right behind Mr. Vanderslice. She was apparently at the Decemberists/Long Winters show last year at the 400 Bar, so we reminisced about how that was a really good time.

John Darnielle and bassist Peter Hughes played some number of songs which amounted to what seemed to me to be a kind of short set, but what do I know? I enjoyed the songs from the new album fairly well. There was older stuff. I would agree with Charles that probably the best was when they had a full band, but I liked the song about eating jam out of a jar a lot, too.

We saw but didn't buy this t-shirt, the phrase at the bottom of which means: "From the founding of the city (Rome)." Charles didn't like the show, but wasn't bitter about it. If he ever resumes blogging, he can tell you why.

Amazon Order

I ordered a memory card, batteries with a charger, and a CD today from Amazon. The memory card was one order, and the other two were another, which I thought was going to take forever to ship. Then Amazon sent the batteries/charger without the CD, and didn't charge extra for it, which was very nice. Knowing that they do that at least some of the time definitely makes me more inclined to order from them.

I'd heard about the Tempo Technik Teamwork compilation on some year-end list(s) and looked it up at All Music Guide and Textura, which is a site that I haven't known about for very long, but which focuses on stuff I'm interested in and probably a lot of what I want to play on my radio show this term.

Charles and I just got back from Ames where we saw/heard The Mountain Goats, about which I will say more later, but I did want to note that he mentioned the AMG search plugin for Firefox, which is really nice considering the long load time of their front page.