mashdownbabylon

Nuclear Sound Affects

 
During the late 1970s, I can't remember how many times my siblings and I would hear a song on the radio--most often English-language pop and disco--and try to sing along. We'd mimic the lyrics, switching back and forth between English and Hebrew as we unsuccessfully attempted to master particularly difficult American-sounding turns of phrase. Boney M's 1978 mega-hit "Rasputin," and Earth, Wind and Fire's 1979 smash "Boogie Wonderland" were particular sources of amusement, as friends and family would struggle to properly enunciate "R" and "W," sounding, in the case of "Vonderland," like Israeli caricatures of Bela Lugosi.

To read the rest of my review of Soul Messages From Dimona, click here.

Found Sound

 

Two weeks ago, I stumbled upon several boxes of LPs sitting in front of a house across the street. Containing everything from Glenn Gould's rendition of Bach's Goldberg Variations, to first edition Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins records and post-WWII electronic and musique concrète recordings like these,  was one of the best and most thoughtfully curated record collections I'd ever seen.

Most of the albums turned out to be in perfect condition, as though they'd sat in their sleeves for the last forty years without ever having once been played. I wondered who could have amassed such a library, without leaving as much as a thumb print on any of these discs. Then, it began to drizzle. That's when I made up my mind to redeem these recordings, and carry them all home.

Freedom is Reverb

In what could be one of the most crucial dub reissues of the year, Greensleeves has just published the sequel to my favorite King Tubby production of all time, Dangerous Dub. Out of print since 1996, this 1981 LP is the kind of record that teaches you to appreciate an entire genre.

Much brighter sounding than other Tubby recordings (at times the treble sounds an awful lot like Scientist) amidst a sea of never-ending reggae re-releases, More Dangerous Dub most definitely stands out. The mix is so clear and expansive, I can hear even the tiniest of details on my MacBook's crappy internal speakers.

One of the principle points Charlie Bertsch and I put forth in our presentation on Burial at the Experience Music Project conference last month is that dub's political meaning inheres in the way it uses reverb to symbolically create space, to enlarge it, as though the effect is it's own metaphor for freedom.

Given how bleak things looked in Jamaica when this album was recorded, it's no surprise that it sounds  as optimistic as it does, especially by Tubby's standards. It is as though More Dangerous Dub is an exercise in irony, particularly given how dark dub first sounded during it's heyday under socialist rule in the mid-1970s.

Rootless Occidentalism

C'mon Fairuz, where was this album really recorded? The fine print on the upper right says Lebanon, but the LP's title indicates that it might also have been made in the US. The ambiguity of the record's ideal location, as somewhere in between America and the Middle East, suits this 1971 release extremely well. How contemporary, especially considering the fact that the record is nearly fourty years old.

Blast From the Past

It's finally out, and boy does it look good. Strolling through the Haight yesterday, Jennifer and I stumbled upon the brand new edition of the Punk Planet interview collection, We Owe You Nothing, at the appropriately DiY, volunteer-staffed Bound Together Books.

Featuring several new interviews conducted between 2001 and 2007, We Owe You contains six pieces I acquired for PP back in the day, including interviews with Steve Albini, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, Negativland, Team Dresch's Jody Bleyle, Outpunk's Matt Wobensmith and Black Flag.

Toronto's Eye Weekly reviewed the collection on the 9th, together with former Punk Planet Associate Publisher Anne Elizabeth Moore's excellent Unmarketable. Putting Anne's book in the mix not only was smart. It also explains why PP remains essential to understanding the zeitgeist.

On the Radio

Wednesday at noon, former Political Asylum singer and AK Press founder Ramsey Kanaan will be hosting an hour-long discussion about the political legacy of The Clash on Against the Grain, courtesy of Pacifica flagship station KPFA, 94.1 FM in the SF Bay Area, and everywhere else, online.

Ramsey's guests include yours truly and Craig O'Hara, the author of The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise, a new edition of which is scheduled to drop in the new year. If you're interested in the band, in punk, or in how music and politics collide, we pretty much cover it all.   

The Liberal Arts

   
Ron Nachmann is an Israeli-American journalist based in San Francisco. A close friend and colleague, we've worked together at a number of different periodicals, including Tikkun, where Ron served as music editor. Now a contributor to Zeek, his latest article, a review of Tom Segev's 1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, was published in the December issue. It's not only a marvelous piece of writing on an incredibly complex and politically loaded book. Ron's essay is an excellent introduction to the politics of writing about Israeli history.

The appropriately-titled Continuity has finally arrived. A CD/DVD by the Tokyo-based, Polish sound artist Zbigniew Karkowski (in collaboration with Japanese videographer Atsuko Nojiri), this unorthodox career retrospective is the last project we signed when I was Asphodel's label manager. Already receiving excellent reviews in Europe from publications such as Vital Weekly, given press like this, I have the sneaking suspicion that Continuity will cement Karkowski's reputation as one of the world's most forward-thinking electronic musicians.

Publication Party

The new issue of Other is officially out. Though I'm running a little late posting this terrific postcard, (the release party took place a couple of weeks ago), we finally had the time to scan a copy.

A contributor (and sometimes contributing editor) to this great, freethinking mag since it was first launched, there's a piece in the current issue by me, about my years editing the late Punk Planet.

For the first time since 2003, when I served up a really loud noise set for a bunch of tranny friends at a local hair salon, I brought my Macbook and MIDI controller to the Other party and played DJ.

Speaking of Punk Planet, Paul M. Davis posted his article on the distribution crisis that triggered PP's collapse to the magazine's website. Click here to read his analysis. It's from the very last edition.

The Mirror Stage

You know you're starting to feel old when, in the space of one month, three films about three dead musicians hit the theaters, and you can still remember when their very first records came out. Such was the case when, watching the previews before the new Anton Corbijn biopic about Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, I saw plugs for new feature films about The Clash's Joe Strummer and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain.

Two down, one to go, so far, Control is the winner. Casting Ian Curtis as the unstable, miserable genius that he was, the black and white feature debut by the famous Dutch photographer has a truly literary feel to it, eschewing Curtis' star quality for an up-close study of a talented young man totally falling apart. Julien Temple's homage to Strummer, The Future is Unwritten is Control's polar opposite.

A documentary portrait of an equally brilliant middle aged rock star burdened with enormous regrets, Future is best summed up in the highly critical words of my wife, who published her own terrific take on the film last night. Check it out. If you haven't read the Bionic Farmer blog yet, this is the perfect introduction.

Just Say Fez

Oh No's new American take on Middle Eastern hip-hop is not without similarly single-minded precedents. In terms of actual full-lengths, Mutamassik's 2005 LP, Definitive Works, is of equally subversive significance. For anyone familiar with post-war Egyptian pop, from the sampled string sections to the galloping percussion, the influence of Om Kholtum's band looms large on this Brooklyn DJ's debut album.

Listening to Definitive last weekend, like a lot of records of its kind, I was struck by the ways in which Mutamassik almost plays with Western clichés of oriental music. Particularly the popularity of specific types of orchestral arrangements, and belly dance signifiers popular during the early '60s, when cities like Los Angeles boasted of a number of Arab-themed club bands.

I don't mean to suggest that this album intentionally stakes out a critical position in relation to these long forgotten artists. However, if you're hip to the phenomenon (think guitar-driven mini-orchestras with fez-wearing, Arab-American and Armenian band leaders, not shriners), its hard not to place the new engagement with Mideast music in American hip-hop in relationship to them.

I own a number of out-of-print recordings by several of these groups, but they're hidden somewhere deep inside my office closet. This weekend, I'm going to do some serious excavation work, and slap them straight back onto my turntable. I imagine that I'll find them a bit more ideologically complex than I did before.

East Meets West

Not long after 9/11, my favorite local record store began stocking up on European reissues of Turkish psychedelia from the late sixties and early seventies. Perhaps the third wave of musical imports from the greater Middle East that I can remember being taken up by American hipsters (beginning with their adoption of Ofra Haza in the mid-nineteen eighties,) the timing was entirely appropriate. Amidst the wreckage of the World Trade Center, American music fans were instinctively finding themselves drawn to the sounds of the Islamic equivalent of New York, London, or even San Francisco.

Indeed, if one wants to take a sampling of what makes the music of the eastern Mediterranean so unbelievably great, you can't do any better than listen to what's been coming out of Istanbul over the course of the past fourty years. Thus, I was reminded, as I delighted in the strangely familiar sounds of an American album whose arrangements epitomized what's best about Middle Eastern pop. The second full-length to be issued by Madlib's younger brother, Oh No, Dr No's Oxperiment is the closest thing that one will get to an archetypal Lebanese or Israeli Arab hip-hop record like Clotaire K's Lebanese LP, or DAM's more recent album, Dedication.

Relying exclusively on regional source material, if there is a recording that reflects a Middle East-impacted American zeitgeist, this album is ground zero. Opening with the Turkish fuzz guitar of "Heavy", to the mournful Arabic vocal part of "Down Under" near the it's end,  Dr No is an excellent example of how organically Middle Eastern music and American hip-hop speak to each other. As cheesy as that sounds, it's the political metaphor implied by that conversation's fluency that's so crucial. Think back to the pretense of the album's title. It's like a book report about the positive things Americans may have learned from their Iraqi sojourn. Baghdad Calling, anyone?

Download Me

Between the fall of 1999 and the summer of 2001, I spent an untold number of hours capturing field recordings of anti-capitalist demonstrators from around the world. Posted to an assortment of websites ranging from Indymedia to the BBC, once I'd start playing a file, I'd record it in real time to a Phillips 765 CD-R dubbing deck.

The best example of these recordings is a montage I pieced together of a demonstration in front of the IMF HQ in Washington DC, in April 2000. Cut and sequenced manually, and then placed over a heavily edited hip-hop percussion track, the song, What's Your Badge Number?, ended up on the first Elders of Zion record, Dawn Refuses to Rise.

Today, at the request of a listener, a community radio DJ posted the piece to her blog. Click here to read the entry and download the track.

Men's Recovery Project

It's always a pleasure to encounter an image that perfectly corresponds to a piece of music or a band. Scoring a two dollar copy of one of my favorite punk records today - Bolides over Basra, by Men's Recovery Project - sent me looking for a picture of the CD. Oddly enough, this turned up.

Given the kind of irony that MRP specialized in, I'm sure that singer Sam McPheeters would appreciate what Google is mathematically tying his music to. Is there a connection between a SWAT team hunting house cats and a concept record about the Middle East? You most certainly bet.

Cultural Imperialism That Works

By now, you'd think that a beats and Bollywood synthesis would be the stuff of nineties cliche. Indeed, it most certainly is. Witness all of the lazily titled 'Buddha Beat'-style anthologies issued by exotica imprints on the one hand, and the 'sitar and bass' records once the province of boutique ethno labels like Outcaste on the other.

Finding a copy of this new Madlib disc for only four bucks, I decided to make the plunge. When this kind of work is done right, absolutely nothing beats it. Luckily, my intuition proved correct. Sampling both film dialogue and music, with Beat Konducta India, the legendary Oxnard DJ takes the idiom in an entirely new direction.

What makes this record work is how it inverts the experience of world music. Instead of making the listener imagine they're somewhere else, it helps you figure out where you already are. Like my block, where sometimes I can hear Bollywood soundtracks blasting out of an Indian restaurant, while cars idling in front pump out loud hip-hop as they wait for the light to change.

Nevermind Matisyahu

Give it up for the real thing.

A Canon (of Sorts)

Working feverishly on my next to final chapter, here's a brief list of the cultural product I'm presently fretting about:

Film

Walk on Water, directed by Eytan Fox (Israel, 2004/US, 2005)
Paradise Now, directed by Hany Abu-Assad (France/Israel/Palestine, 2005)
Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg (US, 2005)

Books

A Little Piece of Ground, by Elizabeth Laird (Macmillan, 2003/Haymarket, 2006)
Palestine, by Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics, 2001)

Music

Magnetic Storm, Smartut Kahol Lavan (CD-R, Boshet, Israel, 2005)
Discography, Dir Yassin ( LP, Alerta Antifascista, Germany, 2006)
Vote Hezbollah, Muslimgauze (Soleilmoon, 1993)

The Ice Age is Here

Speaking of the golden oldies, in today's Guardian, there's an absolutely terrific article on the continuing relevance of The Clash's 1979 LP, London Calling. Penned by Joe Queenan, this is the kind of exquisitely written, politically-charged music criticism glaringly absent from most US news periodicals.

Part of an ongoing series of articles commemorating the 30th anniversary of the first punk explosion, The Guardian's special focus on '77 contrasts sharply with the near-exclusive emphasis placed on remembering 1967's Summer of Love in the arts sections of numerous American dailies over the past few months.

None of this is to say that similarly high quality, big picture music writing can't be found here. I've worked with countless first class writers for whom this kind of journalism is second nature. The problem is a resistance to commissioning such pieces outside of indie music magazines and alternative weeklies.

From Here to Epitome

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

In July, we started to receive a complimentary 'subscription' to The San Francisco Examiner. By featuring musicians like Nick Cave and Yo La Tengo on its cover, this historically conservative (and now free) tabloid appears to be intent on capturing my specific demographic: post-punk professionals who came of age in the early 1990s. In other words, the Nirvana generation.

I find such explicit overtures annoying because American news periodicals always over-emphasize their music coverage when they don't know who their readership is. I can't tell you how many editorial meetings I've attended over the years where an editor has asked the staff to "up" the coverage of cool bands when they're worried that they're not reaching a younger audience.

Just look at the headlines above to see what I mean. Fifty-year old Nick Cave "Gets Rowdy", fourty something Yo La Tengo "Still Has It." Its the kind of self-conscious headline writing that speaks reams about what the editors are really worried about: the vitality and worth of their newspaper.

Metal Health

During my last year at Asphodel (2003-4), I spent most of my time helping the label's owners acquire new projects. From traveling to Europe to meet artists, to endlessly redrafting new recording and distribution contracts, I frequently forget how many CD and DVD deals we eventually landed.

By the end of 2007, with the exception of one DVD, nearly all of the projects we worked on signing during that period will have finally come out. Of special note are two album-length works by the Berlin-based, new music group, Zeitkratzer ("Timescratcher") due out in September.

Consisting of an orchestral cover of Lou Reed's legendary 1975 album Metal Machine Music (a 2xLP of guitar feedback), and an additional CD/DVD of Iannis Xenakis-inspired works (cheekily referencing a classic Kiss title,)  Xenakis [Alive], I feel particularly sentimental about the impending release of these recordings.

The product of bandleader Reinhold Friedl's playful imagination, I'll never forget the amazing dinner we had together in a restored Cologne rail depot in August 2003. I'm not sure whether it was the food (pasta) or the setting (subterranean). Needless to say, its nice to see the albums we discussed then finally seeing the light of day.

Thinking Ahead

When I first began working in publishing, it was the mid-1990s. The 'zine explosion was already well underway, and the first web periodicals (such as Bad Subjects) were just starting to build the first substantial online readerships. Conversely, in the world of books, traditionally academic, non-fiction publishers such as Verso were beginning to chalk up serious successes with crossover political titles, such as journalist Doug Henwood's legendary Wall Street.  For the intellectual left, it was a time of immense creativity and ferment.

Compared to the past, according to the headlines, all we currently have to offer is a culture of continuous crises and closures. Music consumption is at an all time low, magazines and newspapers (both in print and online) point to dwindling (and, to be quite frank, aging) readerships, and book publishers keep issuing reports of mounting losses. After my new book is done, one of the things I would definitely like to explore is writing a cultural history of this period. Say, 1989-2009.

Bass Materialism: Grievous Angel Presents Dubstep Sufferah Volume 3
 

Desktop Rockers Be Gone

Can you remember what its like to just hang out and listen to music? Not at your desk, in your car, or on your iPod, but on the couch, on a weekend afternoon, with a friend, or a lover.

Imagine playing records back to back, for several hours, as your ears drift in and out of changes in albums, interspersed by comments about what you're listening to, and long, deep yawns.

So we spent our Saturday, comfortably nestled in the living room of a sleepy vacation rental near the Pacific ocean, three hours north of San Francisco. No hippies, all reggae.

Terminal Preppies

The only known 'band' photo: Christal Methodists, SF Weekly cover pic, 1999. Found on an old hard drive yesterday evening.

Back to School Special

For the last three years, I've been the owner of a satellite radio. Early adopters, we both installed them in our cars because of the access it gave us to non-American news services and genre-based music channels.  (I was immediately sold on the idea of a 24/7 death metal station.) Given what poor reception the radio received in my twenty year-old Volvo, and how long my commute to work was (an hour and fifteen minutes either way) for the first few months, my new radio was an enormously refreshing change of pace.

Unfortunately, Sirius' allure ran out rather quickly. Each one of its channels - even when they weren't run by the host company, such as the BBC's World Service - sounded far too disciplined. Everything came across as being so thoroughly programmed that if an announcer so much as made a pronunciation error, you'd fear for their careers. (The word 'cautious' always came to mind.) The lack of ads was great, but the absence of spontaneity was even more noticeable.

Perhaps the worst aspect of our Sirius experience was the alternative music station, Left of Center. At times sounding like it was programmed by the editors of London music tabloid NME, the endless repetition of throwaway British bands like Starsailor seemed like a very curious choice given how ill-fitting such groups sound in domestic indie context. What about a band like Spoon? Totally beige, but less obvious. Equally awkward was the fratboy-friendly vibe of Sirius' reggae station.

Driving our new, satellite radio-free car home today (we couldn't afford the option), I turned on KUSF and heard an absolutely iconographic, mixed-genre set of electronica, post-punk and hip-hop. Sometimes the DJ spoke too softly. Sometimes he segued a little too quickly. Nevertheless, it sounded like manna had descended from radio heaven. Moving from the great new Zeph and Azeem record to the Slits' classic New Town, listening to our local college station was like running into a cherished old friend you'd mistakenly assumed dead or disappeared.

Persepolis Revisited

Writing about Fatah's allegations concerning Iran's involvement in Gaza this morning, I was reminded that today is something of an anniversary. It was five years ago (to the day) that I completed the pre-release work on one of my favorite musical projects of all time.

Serving as the label manager of Asphodel LTD, the electronic music imprint best known for its turntablist records (DJ Spooky, the Invisbl Skratch Piklz, etc,) I'd been given the responsibility for putting together a highly iconoclastic production: An unreleased mix of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis' Persepolis, together with an accompanying disc of remixes by noiseniks like Francisco Lopez and Merzbow.

Unlike any of the other records I worked on at Asphodel, this project was absolutely loaded with explicit political signifiers. Originally commissioned by the Shah of Iran to celebrate the 2500th anniversary of modern Iran's founding by Cyrus the Great, Xenakis' work was meant to be the defining cultural moment in the Shah's campaign to secularize the historically devout, Muslim country.

Debuted at the 1971 Shiraz festival amidst the ruins of the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis, being reissued a year after September 11th,  this melodramatic, 59 minute composition took on an entirely new meaning. In context, Persepolis' noisy, dystopian mood anticipated the Shah's defeat (and that of Xenakis' own Communist-tutored vision of secularism) at the hands of Shi'ite revolutionaries seven years later.

Writing the liner notes-cum-press release, and directing the design of the CD's packaging (together with my employer and memorably-named friend, Naut Humon,) I told the story of the work's commissioning and its contemporary political significance, juxtaposed against the colorized image of a decaying palace, photographed in Persepolis by British archaeologists in the early 1920s.

For a double CD, the record actually sold quite well. Even more interesting was the fact that Persepolis received an unexpected level of interest from mainstream periodicals in the US and Europe. Needless to say, given the political circumstances of the time, I found it all incredibly encouraging. If you can get your hands on it, the February 2003 issue of UK mag The Wire ran what I still think is the best review copy.

Goodbye to All That

Yesterday's announcement that Punk Planet was closing its doors did not come as a surprise. Still personally close to the magazine that I helped edit for over seven years (between 1997 and 2004 I served as the periodical's associate editor and books editor, in addition to writing a column), I was entirely clear about PP's situation. That does not mean, however, that the news was not upsetting. Yes, I was intellectually prepared for it. But emotionally, I was not. I've spent the better part of today dragging, going grocery shopping instead of writing. Coming home from Trader Joe's an hour ago, I even missed my exit, and had to drive several extra miles to rectify the error.

Over the course of the last 24 hours, press coverage of Punk Planet's closure has been intense. From an  SF Bay Guardian piece (GW Schulz waxing about the days when Annalee Newitz wrote for us) to the Village Voice (a critical overview of the magazine's history, by Tom Breihan) the entire alt.press world seems to have gone into mourning with us. It all very much reminds me of the fact that Punk Planet was really a writer's magazine - staffed by serious, young writers, and admired by left-of-center journalists in the rest of the U.S. press. As a young editor, that always meant an enormous amount to me. The journalistic focus on the magazine was a deep and lasting complement that helped us all get by under less than ideal economic circumstances.

But that's only half the story. Punk Planet was a cultural event as much as it was a magazine. Unlike other similar events associated with youth culture, it was a product of immense ingenuity and tireless, hard work too. Thus, when its talented writers started to get offers from other periodical and book publishers, and record labels saw Punk Planet as an important place to break artists, the reason was obvious: Because the work PP was commissioning was insightful, well-written and passionate. During an era in which every 'punk' career move was considered suspect, imagine what a wrench this threw in the so-called works. For once, or so we felt, our subculture was being recognized for non-musical achievements, like political writing, which there was no point in feeling conflicted about.

Punk Planet allowed us to live 'punk' lives without the fear - or the anxiety - of selling out. Sure, we might end up working for a New Times periodical, or sell in excess of 60,000 copies of a novel. But in the grand scheme of things, that's still chump change compared to the 'sinful' kinds of music-derived incomes that punks always complained about. What giving its staff such opportunities entailed was a right to be equally culturally influential without any of the ideological excess associated with the so-called culture of careerism. By itself, that is an absolutely immense achievement, particularly considering how we defined success. The proof is in the pudding: thirteen years of successive issues, a first class book imprint, and thousands of ex-contributors in every wing of publishing.

I could write more about PP, but I've done it before, and I think I've said enough. If you'd like to read an earlier piece about working at PP, which details a bit more about what I personally think about the magazine, check out Punk Planet Forever in Stylus. Written after the first IPA-induced storm clouds began to gather in late 2005, it does a much better job of saying what I've already said above, if not a bit more.

Ethnicity as Genre

Ben Gurion airport music shop, Tel Aviv.

Recording the Border

A fence between Israel and Egypt, along highway 12, in the Eilat mountains. Standing nearby, we noticed that the wind was so strong that the razors on the barbed wire made clear, high pitched, percussive sounds.

Carefully placing microphones inside, we captured six minutes directly to disc. Listening back to the results after dinner last night, Vance joked, "Who would have ever thought that barbed wire had musical properties."

Animal Liberation

Judy considers buying a copy of Final Scratch. In my studio, May '07.

Commercial Break

If you live in San Francisco, and you like smart, genre-defying music, this gig is just for you.

A brilliant pairing of two of Europe's most creative, dub-influenced producers, this promises to be one of the best local shows of the year.

For more information and tickets, click here. 

He Loved Us, Too

My vinyl copy of Johnny Cash's now out of print 1969 account of his visit to the West Bank's holy sites. Briefly reissued by Harmony records in the late nineties, right after Cash died in 2003, I investigated licensing it on behalf of my former label. From what I recall, the cost would have been far too prohibitive.

Needless to say, this thirty-eight year old half-spoken word, half-sung recording of Johnny & June getting off in places like the Garden of Gethsemane is at its peak of cultural relevance. Christian, Zionist, basking in the significance of Israel's June '67 victory, The Holy Land is in serious need of a critical revival.

Manna for Your Subwoofer

I finally picked up this outstanding collection of Coxsone Dodd-produced instrumentals on Sunday. Issued almost exactly a year ago to this day by Heartbeat, its an absolute must-have for dubheads and newbies alike.

I first intended to buy Downbeat when I was perusing the stacks at Jammyland in NYC last month. But, like all my trips there, I ended up feeling happily disoriented by the store's immense selection, and left empty-handed.   

Elders of Zion

Bring the goys.

With fellow noisemaker Vance Galloway, Suppenkuche, January '07.

Almost Free

Every weekend - or so we intend - Jennifer takes one day for herself. I assist by either working at cafes, seeing friends, or spending the day perusing the aisles of one of my favorite local record stores (or two). In either case, its a good weekend ritual for us. After an exhausting work week, we both need a break from our routines. Having a little personal downtime is always helpful.

Last weekend was no exception. On Sunday, a close friend who moved to Arizona several years ago was in town to see his family, who were out here visiting from New York. We met up for breakfast at the Pork Store Cafe on 16th street, and then made a beeline for Streetlight Records on 24th. Eager to take advantage of a sale, Joe indulged me while I worked the bargain bins.

I walked out with a number of gems: Nina Hagen's Nunsexmonkrock, the new 2.13.61  CD edition of Negative Trend's sole EP, a Homestead-era copy of Nick Cave's Kicking Against the Pricks, The Need's last two records (including the soundtrack for Nomy Lamm's rock opera, The Transfused), Le Tigre's Feminist Sweepstakes, and three other LPs, all for 16.95$

Thinking of myself as the champion discount music shopper, I said goodbye to Joe, and proceeded to walk home feeling absolutely triumphant. Delighted at the prospects of Jennifer's reaction to the purchases (for several years, she's expressed interest in owning nearly all of the records I'd bought), nothing prepared me for what I encountered three blocks from our house.

Standing near the corner of San Jose and 30th, a woman in her mid-thirties was hosting her own DIY music sale. In front of her stood two makeshift tables. One held gangsta and crunk CDs and DVDs, while the other sported piles of unsorted grime, electronica and indie rock discs. Tight on cash, I decided I'd still take a look to see if there were any absolute must-haves.

Low and behold, a number of records fit the bill: Lady Sovereign's Vertically Challenged EP, DJ Clever's Science Faction: Dubstep comp, Panjabi MC's Beware LP, and Rammstein's Reise Reise (featuring the hilarious 'Amerika') all caught my fancy. Looking over the 15 discs I ended up holding in my hands, the person selling the records sighed and said, "Take 'em, they're free. I'm having a hard enough time moving the hip hop as it is. Nobody likes music anymore."

What's Been Lost

From a letter to a friend, discussing the social consequences of recent changes in music distribution

Music consumption has become more of a monadological experience. With increasing frequency, it is both bought and listened to in isolation. This has both beneficial and negative aspects.  Beneficial, in the sense that without the pressure of community influences (aside from user-generated reviews of product,) online, listeners make freer choices in terms of artist and genre than they may have made in the past based on CD packaging, the limited selections offered by brick and mortar stores, reviews in music magazines, and the tastes of one's peers.

The negative aspect of being 'freed' to consume in this manner is that it completely isolates individual listening experiences so that one may not be able to identify or connect with the community out of which the work one consumes was made in, such as a record label, which in indie terms, was always the commercial front end for a particular scene or milieu of artists. (Dischord records is a great example of this, being a Washington DC-artist only label.)

Though recreating that experience can be done online through links, listening suggestions, blogs, music-based social networking services and listservs, getting socialized by the communities out of which music emerges requires a great deal more effort. Deliberate communities have to be created around shared taste preferences in order to help facilitate the social aspect of music consumption that was lost in the movement to online distribution. Thus, community is recreated, for lack of a better term, through programming.

Interestingly enough, the need for a less mediated version of this experience - that which existed prior to the emergence of online retailing - has, in my understanding, been replaced by a higher attendance rate for concerts for any number of artists, big and small. So, in a club or a concert hall, one finds collective attempts to get back to the social experience that consumers may have once had listening to music with friends, or hanging out at a record store.

Granted, fans have always fetishized concerts for exactly these kinds of reasons. But now, it appears, live events have become more important for these reasons than ever. In many respects, while concerts remain promotional events for artists that help sell their recorded music, the 'label' experience that was once such an important aspects of buying music in a retail environment (remember when there used to be Sub Pop and SST sections in indie shops?), is not recreated at a live event.

At a concert, labels, and what they represent communally, are pushed to the side in favor of the personality of the artist, and what it represents. Live, the artist is always the center of attention. However, even more importantly, since retail sales have dramatically slowed for everyone, concerts are the new brick and mortar stores. Artists act as their own label, selling their work directly to fans, in keeping with the online ethos that every content creator is their own vendor.

Perhaps the greatest thing that has been lost in all of this is the status of an artist as a representative of a larger community. Live, the artist is reduced to the status of their own isolated laborer, generating their own income in a entrepeneurial fashion, without any context other than their audience. Subsequently, the artist has become the mirror image of their listeners. Isolated, except in relation to those who immediately consume them.

New A/V: Otomo Yoshihide: Multiple Otomo CD/DVD (Asphodel)

Source Material

Not the best time writing-wise this past week. I've been finishing the bibliographical work that I've needed to complete for my book, and have spent a lot of time gathering together any remaining news articles I can find in order to bring myself totally up-to-date. I feel pretty good about what I've pulled together so far, though, as with other book projects I've worked on (this is my fifth), I've had to set severe limits to my source material so I don't find myself overwhelmed.

As a rule of thumb, once I've acquired everything I need to start writing, I focus on covering only the most representative instances of my subject matter and comment on them until there's hopefully nothing left to discuss. If I have material left over that I might find useful later, voila, its always there. I hold on to everything. I can't tell you how many times over the years that I've found myself grateful for my packrat habits. Sometimes I wish I'd become a librarian.

Despite this self-congratulatory pat on the back, there are two standout occasions in which I've failed to live up to my archivist's ethos. The first was during high school, when my then-classmate John Whitson gave me his only copy of a live soundboard tape of a Husker Du show in Walla Walla, Washington. Unmarked, I recorded over the cassette, thinking that it was a blank. Talk about stupid. Even then, in the spring of '86, I knew I'd committed a horrible mistake.

The second time was equally profound. In the fall of 2005, director Julien Temple contacted me, explaining that he was making a documentary about the life and times of his old friend, Joe Strummer. He wanted to know if I could give him a copy of a recording of an interview I'd done with Joe, which had been the cover story of the January/February 2000 edition of Punk Planet, (and had just been reprinted in Let Fury Have the Hour, an anthology of writings about the late Clash frontman edited by Antonino D'Ambrosio.) Temple explained that he wanted to use the recording in his film, and was hoping I would allow him to do so.

Several hours later, as I searched through boxes of cassettes in my basement looking for the interview, I found the tape. Unfortunately, along with a number of recordings of my old radio shows at my alma mater, Reed College, the cassette had been damaged by water, and was in an advanced state of deterioration. Even though Temple's crew kindly offered to try to restore it, the recording engineer that I am knew that the tape was beyond repair.

Clearly, I should have known better. It would have been great to have been able to give the Strummer interview its proper due. It was a terrific recording, and Joe was in absolutely marvelous form. As much as I like the written transcription of the interview, nothing comes close to how charming and witty he sounded on the phone. Even Strummer's coughs (was there a bong nearby?) were hilarious.

Nevermind the Clichés

The last time I devoted a serious amount of mental energy to Adrian Sherwood was a typically cold summer night in San Francisco in 2004. Prior to a gig at the Elbo Room in support of his first solo album, Never Trust a Hippy, together with a couple of close friends, I managed to get myself admitted to the venue's dressing room. There stood the surprisingly tall, fifty year old producer, sweat pouring down his bald head as he shook hands with his guests, discussing the production work he'd done on the then-forthcoming Asian Dub Foundation record, Tank.

It was one of those moments when I didn't feel like I had anything to say. Having met dozens of my favorite artists over the years, I'd thought that I'd gotten over feeling star-struck. As it so turned out, this specific evening turned out to be an exception to the rule. Having produced some of the most influential records of the past generation - by Dub Syndicate, Creation Rebel, the New Age Steppers, and countless others - for his own legendary On-U Sound label (whose creative A&R work served as the inspiration for the label I managed, Asphodel) - I felt like I was in the presence of the Creator.

Unfortunately, this experience  proved to be all-too brief. Not long afterwards, as I sat behind the stage watching Sherwood mix his set, I started to feel queasy. In fact, nauseous. DJ'ing decidedly psychedelic, fast-paced material (according to my friend Ron, consisting of unreleased African Head Charge material, if I remember correctly), after twenty minutes, I decided that I had to leave. Could it have been what I'd had to drink that night, I wondered as I stumbled down the club's crowded stairs, hoping to be relieved by the cool night air. What a lightweight. I'd only had three beers.

Thus, I approached listening to Sherwood's new album, Becoming a Cliche/Dub Cliche, with a little bit of trepidation. So far only released in the UK by Real World, import copies have been slowly trickling into the US since the record's release last November. Picking up a copy yesterday after having breakfast with the same two friends I'd gone to the Sherwood gig with, I took the disc home, and spent most of yesterday afternoon giving it a good listen.

Though I'm not prepared to do a serious critical take quite yet, I'm not exactly feeling speechless this time out either. Very much in the vein of his last solo record, Becoming a Cliche is a dense, drum and bass and ragga-influenced album every bit as rewarding as Sherwood's last record. Boasting the vocal talents of longtime collaborators Lee Scratch Perry, Mark Stewart and the late Bim Sherman, it almost sounds like an updated Pay It All Back-era On-U Sound anthology.

In a November review  in the Guardian, critic Dave Simpson inconclusively asked whether Sherwood was still creating work as groundbreaking as his past achievements - particularly given how many producers have assimilated his style over the years. I'd say yes. However, I'd qualify that judgement by saying that Sherwood is doing so by refining his work rather than introducing new musical idioms. Artistically, though far less dramatic, that's of equal significance.

Music to My Ears

It's taken nearly four years, but the second Elders of Zion record is officially out. Released by Sounds From the Roof - a terrific new LA label run by  Rooftop Promotion's  Garo Kuyumcovic -  this eight track EP compiles a number of songs we wrote for queer festival porno shot Damnaged, our final pieces recorded with Pansy Division/Plus Ones drummer Luis Illades, and a remix of the Tight Bros From Way Back When's "Show Me," which spent a good number of months housed on the front page of the Kill Rock Stars website before disappearing into the hipster ether.

Like the last Elders record, Dawn Refuses to Rise, Twilight War features a few interesting guests in the sample department. Mixing Ho Chi Minh with a group of Russian Jews recorded at a passover service during the 1950s (saying "next year in Jerusalem" in Yiddish) on album opener "Viet Cong Jerusalem," we have our fair share of fun again employing obscure vocal parts. However, what makes this record distinct from our last is that it is primarily instrumental. The politics, as it were, are carried forth by the tone the songs set rather than by traditional protest music polemics.

Released as an iTunes exclusive, we'll be following up Twilight with a brand new full-length album on SFTR in the fall.  Delightfully enough, it'll appear on vinyl as well as CD and downloadable formats. I'm quite excited about producing a vinyl version. By no means an analogue loyalist, (I've been composing music on computers for eleven years), I still prefer the sound of analogue over digital. The former label manager in me is also tickled by the fact that vinyl LPs and 7"s have been going through a sales resurgence over the last several years.

Despite all of this business nonsense, its just nice to have a new record out again.

Just Say No to Emo

Anarcho-punk nostalgia has finally kicked in. Perhaps the only kind of 80s retro that's remotely acceptable, this beautifully pieced together compilation CD released late last Fall (the 4th in a series issued by the UK's Overground label) is an absolute must-buy for anyone interested in the intersection between music and radical politics. Written by former Crass drummer Penny Rimbaud, the liner notes are worth the price of admission alone. Get it in the US from AK Press.

For those looking for an excellent monograph of the genesis of the UK anarcho-punk scene, the American edition of Ian Glasper's excellent The Day the Country Died is forthcoming from Reynolds and Hearn in March. Hallelujah.

The 1980s marked the most profound political rationalization of popular music ever. Given how absolutely dire the events of the past five years have been, (and how impovershed most musical responses remain), the rise of anarcho-punk historiography seems utterly appropriate.