Rantings, reviews and lists from a person who structures half his life around obsessing over music.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Burning Man Music For Dummies

With Burning Man hitting Nevada right now, sapping San Francisco of half of its population (not to mention matching the cities' yearly drug usage in a week), those of us left here might be wondering what the big deal is. Don't get me wrong, anyone who has lived in San Francisco even a month probably has already developed enough of a closet-hippie instinct to appreciate the utopian principles and free-love doctrine of this annual event (that originated in our very own Baker Beach by a colony of nudists, might I add), whether we can afford the vacation time and money to go or not.

But when surrounded by a multitude of more immediately obvious incredible lineups from festivals littered all throughout summer, the sad fact of the matter is that, with the exception of The Crystal Method performing this year, many of the best musicians on Burning Man's bill are overlooked and overshadowed by the enormous amount of countless similar, but much more generic, acts. After all, many of the sub-genres featured at the festival rank among some of the easiest styles of music to make (Dubstep and Trance, I'm looking at you). Everybody and their grandmothers are getting a hold of free audio programs and making intoxicated young people dance.

Thankfully, Burning Man doesn't make music the primary appeal of the event, instead choosing to find its niche in costumes, art installations, pyrotechnics, acrobats and general bat-shit insanity. However, for the people who value music a little more than all of that combined and need a little more convincing to get their asses out to the desert next year, consider just this small handful of artists on the 2010 lineup who, for one reason or another, manage to separate themselves from the large pool of unidentifiable electronic drivel.

Rabbit in The Moon
Confucious and Bunny mix and match styles in an enveloping coat of swirly atmosphere, similar to Pretty Lights or any other number of modern DJ's that are beginning to blur the lines between various Electronic genres in super accessible ways. Their tracks are heavy in the sort of ghostly, swelling voice samples that you would find on countless downbeat compilations, but with a more rhythmic break-beat borrowed from Trance, Trip Hop and House. More importantly, their live shows include the sort of deranged fashion show that could have only come out of a state as strange as Florida, featuring everything from full body light suits and crowd-surfing body bubbles to fire playing belly dancers and...well...good luck finding the words to describe whatever this is.

Mimosa
If the first wave of Dubstep could be compared to the first wave of hip hop (minimal, primitive, kinda goofy, and innocent...see artists like Skream and Benga), then artists like Glitch Mob and Mimosa represent the "gangster-step" phase of the genre. Like Dr. Dre before him, Mimosa duels West coast attitude and modern technology off in intensely deep grooves, fat synths and instantly lovable hooks. Some of his songs share more in common with Flying Lotus (appropriate since this style of bass-driven beats came from the same region of LA) than with Rusko, complete with clipped up samples and jagged, stuttering percussion, but Mimosa manages to make that style of bass-driven beats in your face enough to work on the dance floor.

Treavor Moontribe

To outdoor festival junkies, Treavor Moontribe belongs to an elite class of people. One of the major founders and resident performers of the Moontribe Full Moon Gatherings, an all-night DJ event that takes place once a month in various scenic locations of So Cal, he's also spent 14 years perfecting his spacious soundtracks for deserts and snakelike progressive house and techno movements. The best way to listen to Treavor is to get lost in the hypnotic repetition of it all. His tracks drift slowly and change gradually enough to ease listeners into a gentle trance, but the creeping buildups have knee-shaking pay-offs - one of the organizers of The Moontribe Full Moon Gatherings recalls how he once witnessed a girl lose control of her bowels while watching Treavor perform.

Neurodriver
The human mind is basically an extremely complex and glorified super computer. We process and store information, receive and send electrical signals to get stuff done, and run tasks through pre-programmed processes (learned through repetition, the same way all of the programs on our computer were created). A common criticism of "laptop" music is that it requires no real instrumental talent, but once you realize that our minds work just like macs anyway, there's not much of a difference between learning the ins and outs of a computer program, and developing guitar or piano skills. The line is especially blurred when, all around us, technology is increasingly becoming extensions of ourselves. All too often, the phrase, "I feel naked without my cell phone," flutters above crowds, as if these mobile devices were appendages of ours. We interact with each other more and more each day through the internet, filling out Facebook profiles and pimping out webpages and blogs as if they were integral parts of our identities.

Artists like Neurodriver create music that reminds us of how we have helped technology evolve and how technology has influenced the way we are evolving, which is often a huge underlying theme of many Burning Man events and tents. This is the sort of electro-thrash that should be played while reading cyberpunk novels and pondering how much longer before cyborgs take over; think Amon Tobin reading a ton of Ghost in The Shell and then going to the clubs. Dancing may appear to be a human trait, but Neurodriver's plunging lockstep grooves and glitchy breakdowns make the mechanical nature of your body's movements and responses difficult to ignore. The same can be said of most Electronic music.

The entire Burning Man 2010 stage guide can be downloaded in pdf format from Rock Star Librarian’s awesomely useful website.
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Saturday, July 17, 2010

Electric Six - "Danger! High Voltage"


Electric Six really wants everyone to know how dance music keeps starting fires. Fire in the disco, fire in the gates of hell, even fire in the taco bell (apparently)! As "Danger! High Voltage" compels you to give into that toe-tapping, booty-bumping fire with its funky guitars, steady hump-inducing bass and searing saxophone solo, you might start to realize that this single from seven years ago offered a pretty interesting meta-commentary on why dance music has always been one of the most prominent and common threads in popular music: at the heart of it all is sex. In the same way that songs with obvious lyrics about love sell like mad, so do songs with musical textures that force the body to replicate the movements, motions and groove of the dirtiest of private, two-person dances. Both love and lust are emotions that literally every single human being can relate to, and so, unsurprisingly, they're the most marketable.

If you find that hard to believe, look at the way dance trends gotten increasingly sexual in the past 30 to 40 years. Look at how the ass-shaking, rhythmic bass of disco (When the dance floor was just posing the question), the not-so-subtle innuendos of funk (Was there ever a moment where George Clinton wasn't standing on the verge of getting it on?) and the tenderly erotic grooves of soul (Isaac Hayes wants all the women to crowd around!) infiltrated pretty much everything in the aftermath of the 60's sexual revolution. Among other things, Prince made his name in the 80's telling his infamous story about Nikki while an (admittedly, more than likely unintended) obsession with masturbation seemed to bubble under the surface, with several chart-topping singles telling us to "beat it," "whip it," and "turn japanese".

Look at how instantly popular Nelly got when he decided to tap into the sub-conscious desire in all our minds and compel us to take off all our clothes when it starts to get too hot in the bars. Britney Spears began with her career a pretty enormous fan base by dressing as a scantily clad schoolgirl but insisting on a profile of innocence. She went on to tell us a year later, dressed in a skin-tight, hot red catsuit that she actually wasn't that innocent, tripling her audience. Finally she was barely wearing anything, saying that she was a slave for us, resulting in a tenfold audience increase and making even critics praise her club-friendly singles. Plus, there's freak-dancing, which is basically an excuse to dry-hump in public. One can go on and on, but the bottom line is that there's a fire at the heart of how easily the public falls for these and "it's our desire".

There's a danger here, of course. How far into depravity and overt hypersexuality will we go? The way the two main characters of the music video in question have been joined by a taxidermied Moose by the end seems to suggest the possibility of our cultural obsession with sex breaching and embracing fetishism in the near future. We've already fully integrated mysogyny into most popular hip hop and when someone like Soulja Boy tells us to "Superman that ho" he gets huge. And how else, in this context, has something as abrasive, rough and filthy as Dubstep gotten so insanely popular, in the dance shoes of fans from pretty much every genre of music? I'm curious to see if a graph could be made charting the correlation between increases in both viewership of increasingly hardcore porn and listenership of Cragga. The fact that we have come to describe the high quality of a song in that genre as "dirty" could be more than a little revealing. I can see Rusko's newest single in a year sampling and warping sounds from "Two Girls, One Cup". What would be more filthy than that?

Okay yes, the dubstep examination is probably a stretch. Hell, this whole article might be. It's hard to avoid thinking about a song this much when the music video of is this hard to turn away from. There must be a relationship between dance and fire and sex and music and it must be vital because Dick Valentine and his girlfriend are staring pretty intensely at us. Between that and its monstrous hooks, the song invites enough repeat listens to start to seriously ponder about it more than this type of music usually warrants. At the end of the day, the enjoyment of dance music comes down to something that doesn't need to explained or examined. That's why the frontman's psychopathic vocal delivery here is so appropriate. It's primal, spontaneous, uncontrolled and the enjoyment of this song should be just as primitive. The circular guitar riff is hypnotic and mesmerizing as it should be to the joints in your muscles on the dance floor. As much as some groups of humans can try to act civilized and intelligent and highbrow, the bottom line is we're still animals and maybe that's why animalistic songs like this sound so damn good to us. The instinct to dance is as ingrained in us as the instinct to breed or eat or survive. To deny that would be as unnatural as denying sex.

Song and video after the jump:
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Thursday, January 7, 2010

Surfer Blood - Astro Coast (2010)

3.5 ★/7.0 - 7.9
[Kanine]

A band like Surfer Blood has no place in Florida. In case you didn't know, the Sunshine State is without a doubt one of the strangest places in the country. Last year, an overweight man from Florida tried to argue in the court of law that he was too fat to kill his former son-in-law, while another man whose computer contained over 1,000 child porn images blamed his cat. Just this past week, some guy thought he could put up a ransom for stealing someone's potted plant. There are nymphomaniacs, truck fighters, fish-wielders and diaper dudes. Jew kickers and door-to-door breast doctors run rampant, Hooters lies to their employees and grandparents hire hit men.

Surfer Blood know where they live (One of the tracks on Astro Coast was titled "Twin Peaks" for a reason) and must feel pretty uncomfortable about it because all they seem to want to do is sound as normal as possible. They must cling to their copies of Vampire Weekend and The Blue Album every night shivering in fear of all the weirdos and bizarre events they're surrounded by.

Their debut album seems to function as a sort of desperate last attempt to get out of their environment, capitalizing on a unique mix of every popular indie pop trend ever made. Sonic Youth guitar tones do Strokes covers. Weezer power pop sections alternate between Krautrock influenced instrumentals. Surf music and The Shins, Bradford Cox and The Sea and Cake, etc. Astro Coast will have you playing the name game for hours.

But really, who cares when the songs are this well structured and fun to follow? Rolling waves of grunginess give way to guitar heroics and handclaps on "Floating Vibes". "Take it Easy" shifts back and forth between jittery and groovy, always reiterating its namesake. "Harmonix" begins cutesy but gets otherworldly with disorienting haziness in each chorus.

Surfer Blood offers a nice alternative to Vampire Weekend haters everywhere. Both bands are shameless about their stealing and aim to create something distinct and, above all, fun in their mixing and matching of indie-fluences, but Surfer Blood sounds far less conscious about it. They're more lo-fi, more garage, more laid-back and with those Rivers Cuomo vocals, far more geeky and humble. Identifiable, easy to listen to and enjoyable even after multiple listens, Astro Coast has the potential to become a huge hit.
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Beach House - Teen Dream (2010)

3.5 ★/7.0 - 7.9
[Sub Pop]

With Teen Dream, highly acclaimed lo-fi dream pop duo Beach House continues their gradual embrace of higher production values, but that was probably to be expected. The more significant and surprising shift for their third LP, however, is that of mood. Teen Dream is a noticeably lighter affair than its two predecessors. Whereas Devotion was an album made for haunted houses and unsettled spirits, Teen Dream mines the duo's sleepy keyboards and Victoria Legrand's ambiguous moans for soundtracking the spirit of...well...teens.

From the cymbal crashes and rumbling drums of "Zebra" to the kaleidoscopic shuffle of "10 Mile Stereo", Teen Dream is constantly reinforcing the imagery of wide open fields, walks in the park and the wild nature of animals as metaphors for youth and freewheeling lovers. 'Beasts' and 'hunters' lurk under the lazy guitar figures and shimmering psychedelia of album highlight, "Norway", but Legrand suggests that the push and pull of these violent mates contains something sacred and beautiful; something that opens the "billions of stars to your fate". Even if she still sounds like she's lonely and lost, the brighter textures emphasize the hope in her isolation this time around, rather than the heartbreak.

Nostalgic romance is the star of the show. "Better Times" sways through snapshots of American Graffiti with its vintage guitar riff and gentle rock. "Real Love" gets stuck swooning over just the opening of "Don't Stop Believin" for maximum emotional punch. Gorgeous album closer, "Take Care" employs baroque touches to recreate a long carousel ride with your first true love. There's always been a dusty element to Beach House's music that could make listeners think about old photo albums, but the fondness emanating on Teen Dream will probably make you actually break them out.

But however satisfying it may be to see Beach House realize their potential in some ways, it also sort of reveals just how unremarkable the core elements of their sound have always been. Devotion and even Beach House might have been transitional works, but their mystery and dark underbelly translated for much more replay value. When certain songs got boring, the atmosphere carried the album. On the other hand, Teen Dream is far more open about its intentions, which is to stun you with its beauty before...actually, that's it.

The buzz-n-fuzz of "Silver Soul" may initially catch your ear, but the trick quickly runs thin. On "Lover of Mine" the duo seems to suffer from the same problem, getting so lost in the tone and texture of their keyboards that they forget to craft a song that does anything other than drift beautifully. Ultimately that's the thing that keeps Teen Dream from being as flat-out stunning as Devotion; it's remarkably well-painted, but that doesn't change the fact that you're looking at wallpaper. After all the advances and evolution made in genres like Electronica, Hip Hop and Dubstep that other sub-sections of the indie pop world have already thoroughly integrated and embraced, you have to wonder where that leaves sleepy and fairly simple artists like Beach House. There's no denying that Teen Dream is one of the first good albums of the new year, but what's questionable is whether or not it's that important.
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"How many times must a man look up
before he can see the sky?"