Acapulco Presents... Delightful Missives from the World of Music "Criticism"

[Damn]

Wow!  Just... wow.

http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/oneohtrix-point-never

FYI: Donald Lopatin's records are essentially nth-generation kraut/ambient/"sci-fi" synth excursions, laden with cryptic artwork and heavy titles that obliquely reference '80s sensibilities (instead of '70s sensibilities, which is what Lopatin is actually aping).  If the year-end lists in The Wire, Tiny Mix Tapes, Dusted, etc. are to be believed, the 2-CD compilation Rifts, which collects three of Lopatin's recent LPs, was by all accounts the single most important sound recording of 2009 (besides Anim'l Collective).  His conversational style is so precious!  For a while you could link from the article above to a priceless exchange between Lopatin and fellow intellectual heavyweight David Keenan ("the Scotch Greil Marcus") on Keenan's blog, but now it's "by invitation only"!

don't. know. where. to. start.

I didn't really become fascinated with the music until I read an email exchange between Lopatin and Wire critic David Keenan

pretty much says it all about the interview. horrible. to guys in a room jerking off cuz they know how - studied philosophy for a 3/4 year 'n stuff. oh yeah, and they don't (!IMOPRTANT!) reject "mass culture": pipettes, icp wiki and all. on the other hand they jam it "bassett-style" and while they're at it drop an obscure hommage to tremaine's attempt. pat pat lil boy. you probably wearin' nice shoes too... well done.

i have to read a sightings interview now to clean myself.

[Whet Bull]

In this month's Wire, our boy David Keenan turns in a four-page profile of Mattin -- a good four years after the magazine first ran a feature about M., written by the only person on the Wire staff to openly call bullshit on "Hypnogogic pop," the sober and cynical Keith Moline.

Ever the intrepid researcher and Rock Taxonomist, Keenan refers to Billy Bao and Drunkdriver as "hardcore punk bands."  Cool!  Ducktails gets a genre all to itself but I guess Drunkdriver and Billy Bao will just have to crowd into the same pit as Negative Approach and Chronic Sick.  

Also, it seems that Drunkdriver's Kristy (or "Christie," as Keenan spells it, and who am I to argue?) is a man.  The irony's especially sweet in light of the main photo in the article, which features Mattin in ghastly drag, no doubt a gesture in line with M's long-running critique of machismo and misogyny in the Noise scene.

Otherwise, the article's fine -- for once,  the Kilted Kinbote stays out of the way and injects almost none of his legendary Keenanalysis into the mix, save for a priceless bit of "journalism" in which he meekly invites Mattin to a rugby match.  An interesting piece in which the author mercifully relegates himself to the background.

BTW, according to the Volcanic Tongue catalogue, the (Highly Recommended) List of Profound Insecurities LP finds Drunkdriver "at their sludgiest, their greasiest" (compared to their usual "hardcore punk.")  Buy it!

Elsewhere in the issue there's a fine eulogy for Rowland Howard that includes a moment of genuine insight and eloquence from editor Chris Bohn: "The tawdry balladry [of Howard's final solo records]  cleaves to his belief ... that the greatest rock is birthed from equal parts intelligence and stupidity."  That's one of the best things I've read about rock & roll in recent memory.  The piece is brief but worth reading if you find yourself at a newsstand with a few minutes to kill.

There's also a good one-page article about the Dutch scrape artist Raymond Dijkstra -- the first interview I've seen with this guy, who otherwise has received no press in the English-speaking world outside of an annotated discography in the abysmal U.S. buttzine Bixobal.

* * *

More news from the bearded mind of Davey Keenan: Ohneotrix Point Never's Rift is officially a masterpiece!

World-beating collection that bundles three of the most significant Hypnagogic/synth/wasteland psych recordings of the post-Noise era across two CDs alongside a bunch of tracks from rare CD-R and cassette releases. Daniel Lopatin?s vision of a new synth music capable of devouring both underground and overground modes while reformulating them as passports to tomorrow presents one of the most radical re-thinks of the basic aesthetics of experimental music. Just as Noise lapsed into a generic caricature dominated by strict rules and style demarcations ? ala dance music ? Lopatin?s Oneohtrix Point Never project, alongside the work of The Skaters, Emeralds and a few other lone thinkers ? signalled a way out of the impasse. By factoring in timbres that were previously out of the reach of underground music and by reformulating memory and nostalgia as energies that were capable of unlocking suppressed personas, Lopatin birthed a music that was formally radical while maintain the ability to speak in the most profound, emotionally expressive terms. Rifts collects the entire trilogy of LPs he released on No Fun and Arbor, Betrayed In The Octagon, Zones Without People and Russian Mind, running from automatic computer music and the lonely sound of machines singing to themselves to perfectly formed melodic miniatures that conjure up the kind of imaginary landscapes that work as the perfect reification and reflection of the process of memory. Rifts is one of the most affecting collections of electronic compositions I?ve ever spent time inside and listened to with headphones it makes for a totally immersive trip, with Lopatin?s feel for the precise architecture of sound giving the music the feel of a dimensional hallucination. A modern masterpiece, highly recommended.

I love it!  "Noise lapsed into a generic caricature dominated by strict rules and style demarcations" sometime around 2006 -- an not, say, 1989, 1995, or 2004.  Quick -- somebody tell Ron Lesser!  Enter the swashbuckling Lopatin, who rescues Noise from its tragic impasse by "birthing" a music that sounds just like Tangerine Dream.

[Whet Bull]

Also, it seems that Drunkdriver's Kristy (or "Christie," as Keenan spells it, and who am I to argue?) is a man.  The irony's especially sweet in light of the main photo in the article, which features Mattin in ghastly drag, no doubt a gesture in line with M's long-running critique of machismo and misogyny in the Noise scene.

Mrs. Acapulco tells me I should clarify what I meant here.  She's usually right, so here goes: Keenan has clearly never heard of Drunkdriver before, or even bothered to Google them, and when Mattin mentions a conversation he had with Kristy, Drunkdriver's kickass guitar player, Keenan mistakenly (bizarrely, hilariously) assumes that the guitar player is male -- even though she clearly has a woman's name and a quick Google Image search for live photos of the band would have shown that the guitar player is NOT a man.  It's an embarrassing blunder in light of The Wire editorial staff's liberal pieties (in the past the magazine has slagged Prurient for Dominick's alleged phallocentrism and Sun City Girls for -- get this -- being insufficiently respectful of Middle Eastern cultures) and also in light of Mattin's oft-repeated criticism of the Noise underground's sausage party ethos.

[Whet Bull]

Another glowing review, this time from Pitchfork (8.0!):

Though it sometimes feels like drone music will be forever relegated to the fringes of the indie world, an impressive batch of bands and labels have sprung up recently to counter that idea. Alongside bigger acts such as Sunn O))) and Grouper (not true drone, but plenty drone-y), artists like Emeralds, Black to Comm, and Yellow Swans [?!]are each tugging the style into intriguing directions. Daniel Lopatin, who records as Oneohtrix Point Never and shares a label with Emeralds, could plausibly be lumped into this group but also exists outside of it. Where others bring to bear a wide range of instrumentation in creating these glistening, open-ended sounds, Lopatin does so using only electronics (synthesizers and arpeggiators, primarily) and as a result, his music is arguably more distinctive and often more difficult to pin down.

Because he's worked outside the label structure and released albums on limited-run cassette and CD-R until now, Lopatin's music also hasn't been easy to find. But Rifts, a 2xCD collection of his material since 2003 (including all three Oneohtrix Point Never full-lengths-- Betrayed in the Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind), seeks to correct that by compiling just about everything he's recorded as OPN to date. At two and a half hours long, it's a dizzying amount of music and virtually impossible to absorb in one sitting but for anyone with a passing interest in drone or ambient music, it's worth setting aside the time.

Part of the reason Rifts feels like a crucial listen is that Lopatin's approach is so thoroughly his own, to the point that trying to attach it to one genre doesn't really work. At turns icy and serene, at others frenetic and twisted, it feels like a modern sci-fi remake of minimalism and kosmiche-- there are long, repetitious builds with big openings between notes that suggest vast space and long drift. Intricate synth arrangements unfurl over long stretches in tracks like "Immanence" and "Ships Without Meaning" to create a sense of endless glide. In this capacity, Lopatin proves he can reconstruct drone on his own terms, but on Rifts' more forceful, tech-y songs he shows that's not the only trick up his sleeve.

The three LPs joined together in Rifts were supposedly intended as a trilogy, and while they do work as a unified whole, it seems wisest to approach the record as a compilation. The sheer size of it is daunting and you don't lose much by listening to its separate movements individually. Within these smaller pieces, Lopatin oscillates between the long-form mechanized whir described above and shorter tracks that push the album forward and draw back your attention after lengthy drifts. More Blade Runner than 2001: A Space Odyssey, "Computer Vision" and "Betrayed in the Octagon" use chopped-up, rapid-fire synths for propulsion and quick tonal shifts to add color. This is precisely the kind of music some would criticize as robotic and unfeeling, but for such heavily computerized sounds, Lopatin also shows a way with mood-- a song like "A Pact Between Strangers" is dark and threatening, like walking into a strange home with all the lights off.

But maybe what's most impressive about Rifts is that Lopatin creates a singular kind of noise-- there just aren't many albums out there that sound like this-- and rides it for nearly three hours without repeating himself very often. In this sense, the recent LP it reminds me of is D?m-Funk's Toeachizown, in that the vibe is inseparable from the artist, clearly the work of one person with a novel agenda and the chops to see it through to the finish. And like D?m-Funk's, it's the type of music that doesn't knock you over the head at first, but sort of seeps into your pores over time, uncovering new pleasures when you inevitably come back for more.

? Joe Colly, February 2, 2010

Blahblahblah emperor, clothes, somethingsomethingsometh ing, etc.

[chrizow]

yeah, i read that this morning and wondered if you would reference it.  terrible.  dude also doesn't seem to know that yellow swans disbanded two years ago.

[tina]

Also, it seems that Drunkdriver's Kristy (or "Christie," as Keenan spells it, and who am I to argue?) is a man.  The irony's especially sweet in light of the main photo in the article, which features Mattin in ghastly drag, no doubt a gesture in line with M's long-running critique of machismo and misogyny in the Noise scene.

Mrs. Acapulco tells me I should clarify what I meant here.  She's usually right, so here goes: Keenan has clearly never heard of Drunkdriver before, or even bothered to Google them, and when Mattin mentions a conversation he had with Kristy, Drunkdriver's kickass guitar player, Keenan mistakenly (bizarrely, hilariously) assumes that the guitar player is male -- even though she clearly has a woman's name and a quick Google Image search for live photos of the band would have shown that the guitar player is NOT a man.  It's an embarrassing blunder in light of The Wire editorial staff's liberal pieties (in the past the magazine has slagged Prurient for Dominick's alleged phallocentrism and Sun City Girls for -- get this -- being insufficiently respectful of Middle Eastern cultures) and also in light of Mattin's oft-repeated criticism of the Noise underground's sausage party ethos.

Ah, Kristy mentioned this article to me.  Is this online or will I have to read at the magazine store?

[boodlyboy]

infinitely more heavy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI3ImtC_QuM&feature=related

next touchstone for the mainstays of the Volcanic Tongue catalog:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRd9TQNxfXw

[HIV Playground]

Whet bull, did you read that letter that some dude wrote to The Wire in response to Edwin Pouncey's review of Bill Orcutt's record? Priceless.

[HIV Playground]

In Edwin Pounceys review of A New Way To Pay Old Debts (The Wire 309), Bill Orcutts playing is compared to Cecil Taylor, Derek Bailey and Glenn Gould with evidence that is either highly specious or totally non-existent.



One of the most salient features of the album is the low C played on the open detuned sixth string of Orcutts guitar. Its hard to miss. He returns to this note every few seconds on every single track. There arent any other notes in that register on the album. Orcutt sticks to the C minor pentatonic scale for the majority of his licks on strings one, two and three (as you pointed out and one can observe from the video posted on The Wires webpage, Orcutt has removed strings four and five from his guitar). At the end of a list of guitar influences, you name Derek Bailey claiming that his influence echoes loudest here. No further explanation of this influence is given in your review, but lets examine what Derek Bailey has done for the guitar and see if we can find any similarities to Orcutt.



Bailey took Anton Weberns technique of constructing a single line of melody out of individual notes from several instruments of disparate timbres and applied it to the guitar. Rather than having access to a trumpet, clarinet and violin, for example, his timbre options were limited to fretted notes, open notes and harmonics. Bailey would pick a set of tri-chords and improvise on these three different options. Yes, theres more to Derek Baileys oeuvre than this, but this is Baileys most obvious contribution to the history of guitar playing. Bill Orcutt doesnt do anything resembling this. There arent any tri-chords. Orcutt sticks to a pentatonic scale. Theres no even distribution of pitches among fretted notes, open notes and harmonics on A New Way To Pay Old Debts. The only similarity I can find between Derek Bailey and Bill Orcutt is that they both play the guitar and that they both improvise.



Pouncey goes into a bit more depth in his comparison to Cecil Taylor. He says that there is a distinct keyboard element to Orcutts style, and that the influence can be plainly heard midway through Lip Rich, where the reverberating guitar strings against the pickup are strained to the point where they sound like Taylors stabbed piano keys. First of all, the middle of Lip Rich sounds like the rest of Lip Rich. Theres nothing Cecil Taylor-like about this section that can be plainly heard. It also sounds like every other track on the album with the exception of the last. Second, Id like you to name one Cecil Taylor album where he returns to the same pedal-point over and over again every few seconds throughout every piece.



Pouncey supports the idea that Glenn Gould is an influence on this album by pointing out that they both sing along with their instruments. You mention Gould in the headline, but this is the only connection to him you posit, and it is a superficial connection, if not a meaningless one. Lots of instrumentalists, classical and jazz alike, have recorded albums where their singing along is audible. Why not compare Orcutt to a jazz musician who sings along with the music? At least then theyre both improvisors. The comparison might be slightly more meaningful if it was made to another guitarist, but then it would undermine the equally tenuous and unsupported contention that Orcutts playing sounds like a keyboard.



As for the Gould quotation, No piano need feel duty-bound to always sound like a piano: the truth is that A New Way To Pay Old Debts does sound like a guitar album. Anyone who knows anything about the instrument will know that when they hear the omnipresent open low C that Orcutt returns to again and again like a crutch and the use of the C minor pentatonic scale. It doesnt sound anything like a piano, an instrument that doesnt have open or fretted strings and doesnt allow for that particular technical sleight of hand.

[HIV Playground]

It also doesnt sound anything like Derek Bailey.



Did Orcutt tell you to mention Bailey, Taylor and Gould? If so, maybe Orcutt should have written the review. Youve already demonstrated a lack of interest in (or perhaps aptitude for?) serious critical rigour. No need to actually review the music when the artist is feeding you lines about it.



One of my gripes with academic music theory is that its proponents see no problem writing a paper, publishing a book, or teaching a class that contains lots and lots of evidence and no point. Nothing to prove. I dont need to hear someone rattle on about a harmonic analysis of Wagners Tristan And Isolde if that analysis isnt going to lead to anything about Wagners cultural or historical significance. With your review of A New Way To Pay Old Debts you have done the opposite. Youve made a series of assertions about a works significance without providing one bit of real evidence. For shame.



Christopher Riggs Michigan, USA

[Guy M.]

thanks for sharing this immaculate piece of bullshit
goes to show that this mag could be even worse than what it is if some readers became writers

guy could have sent this one line, though:

It also doesnt sound anything like Derek Bailey.

[migamiga]

i think that reader letter is spot on. for what it aspires to be, the wire uses a lot of flowery, non-specific language. rampant namedropping is a way of both showing how extensively well-read the (review) writer is and avoiding specific discussion of the music. pointing out that these comparisons are bullshit so verboselly, and from such a precious perspective, may not be your cup of tea, but what the writer of the letter said is true and helpful, whereas dropping (hip) names that may or may not be valid comparisons is just misleading, lazy and conceited.

[Damn]

ha! haven't read the review but i have no problem with the letter at all. he's really transparent in everything he states and is absolutely making clear why he disagrees with the review of the record. i don't think that there's anything bad about that. also the "wire even worse if readers wrote" thing is besides the point cause that letter doesn't come from a motivation to get hired. i guess he just wanted to contribute to a mag he seems to really care about. (who would think that such a piece would get published in the first place???)

also the suggestion to condense it to one sentence would obviously be as bad a name drop as the review like it's criticised.

[Guy M.]

ha! haven't read the review but i have no problem with the letter at all. he's really transparent in everything he states and is absolutely making clear why he disagrees with the review of the record. i don't think that there's anything bad about that. also the "wire even worse if readers wrote" thing is besides the point cause that letter doesn't come from a motivation to get hired. i guess he just wanted to contribute to a mag he seems to really care about. (who would think that such a piece would get published in the first place???)

also the suggestion to condense it to one sentence would obviously be as bad a name drop as the review like it's criticised.

I disagree with the tone of this letter, I disagree with the sentiments expressed, I disagree with  all the arguments (except this one line), I disagree about the review too citing glenn gould and whatnot, I disagree with all of this culture and their approach to music

and I disagree with side 2 of that record!

[Whet Bull]

Ah, Kristy mentioned this article to me.  Is this online or will I have to read at the magazine store?

Unfortunately none of The Wire's content is online (as far as I know.)  If you send me a SASE I will photocopie the article and mail it to you in 2-3 weeks (or you can just read it at Borders or sumfin', which is what I usually do).

Whet bull, did you read that letter that some dude wrote to The Wire in response to Edwin Pouncey's review of Bill Orcutt's record? Priceless.

Yeah, thanks for posting it!  I really liked that letter, and I agree with Damn that the letter writer is pretty lucid and no-bullshit.  Pouncey's generally a cool dude, I think (isn't he Savage Pencil?  I think so...).  His review is yet another case study in the highbrow/lowbrow inferiority complex from which most rock-based writers suffer (even the best ones).  Like, the way only way we can think of to discuss the merits of a solo instrumental record is to compare it to shit like Cecil Taylor or Derek Bailey, even when the soloist in question is essentially a self-taught musician with no formal technical chops.  Arthur Doyle is another dude whose playing, frankly, sucks in academic terms -- he's just a fucking weirdo who plays that way 'cos that's all he knows.  Dude probably couldn't play a decent standard in the bebop style if he wanted to.

I think Orcutt's record is great, one of the best solo guitar records I've heard in fact, but his process seems completely intuitive and has nothing to do with Bailey's or Taylor's -- both of those guys came out of jazz and arrived at their processes in a very methodical, studied way.  If it came down to it, either one of them could play circles around Orcutt, but neither would ever have arrived at Orcutt's technique.  Orcutt's ultimately an all-American, intuitive folk musician (a very good, very advanced one).  The Glenn Gould comparison is just ridiculous, clutching at straws.

I think The Wire is excited to see a cat like Orcutt making a "serious" record, under his own name (as opposed to a fucked-up noise record with a band called Harry Pussy) like a "serious" musician, so he gets the "serious musician" treatment and his work is equated with that of the giants of improv, rather than accepting it on its own terms and trying to make sense of it as its own thing.

infinitely more heavy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI3ImtC_QuM&feature=related

next touchstone for the mainstays of the Volcanic Tongue catalog:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRd9TQNxfXw

That HBO shit is fucked UP, brah!  If you should incorporate that shit into your soundworld, you might open up a few third and even fourth eyes (the fourth is the peen, I think).  I'm with you, Boodles -- the CTW's library music is leagues ahead of all that shitt.  Friday, Sophie's Pt. IV?  I could go for another sangwich.