silence kit #20

Spoon
Kill The Moonlight [Merge, 2002]

For quite a while I have associated Kill The Moonlight with the underrated Will Ferrell vehicle Stranger Than Fiction, which features quite a fair bit of music by Spoon. These past few weeks though, I’m slowly thumbing my way through the hinterlands of cartoonist Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown series and his Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid In The World graphic novel and the suburban pop songs from Kill The Moonlight seems to be motioning along with Ware’s marginalized characters from one flat-toned comic frame to the next. That’s the way we get by, indeed. What’s unmistakable too is how the songs serve the purpose of caricaturizing the minute details of my own desiccated existence: my allergy to revoltingly arduous work, the melancholic pancakes on the breakfast plate, mornings hopelessly gray, the big innovation on the minimum wage. Musically, Kill The Moonlight is where Spoon’s current modus operandi precipitated in the haunting echo-drenched basement outbursts of “Small Stakes” and “Paper Tiger”, Britt Daniel’s barbed beatboxing on “Stay Don’t Go”, the startling futuristic heft of “Vittorio E”, their songcraft further sharpened on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007). Don't let it get you down.

speakers scream the same

We get older every year; Japan and Sonic Youth has some history between them going some way back, it seems, Lee Ranaldo reminiscing midway through the gig that they first played in Tokyo 20 years ago. An unseasonably festive atmosphere of rapt anticipation greeted these underground music veterans, and we weren’t short-changed – it didn’t quite have the feel of 1988-the-year-daydream-nation-broke transcendence, but for 67 minutes of revisionism genius it might as well have been. Experimental sound forms may be their lifeblood, but the sonic hardware from the recent The Eternal is more custom-made for enormous noise and blown speakers, the waves of mainlining guitar radiance they conjure up on new numbers like “Calming The Snake” and “Anti-Orgasm” are the stuff of forthright non-subjective joy. (Most rock dudes sound like real idiots saying shit like “Sonic Youth want all of you to have sex tonight”, as Thurston Moore did before kicking into the big dumb rock of “Anti-Orgasm”, but because it’s Sonic Youth and they did a Sister-era “Stereo Sanctity” that fucking blew your mind just ten minutes earlier and seriously left you believing you heard some otherworldly melodic noise you never heard before in your life, you let it slip as another one of those iffy propositions.) As with most things Sonic Youth, their performance spoke the language of despicably city-cool rock and roll, as epitomized by the hazy shades of electric blue on “Antenna” which the band seem to able to fearlessly stretch and bend at will.

(Setlist)
Sacred Trickster
No Way
Calming The Snake
Stereo Sanctity
Hey Joni
Anti-Orgasm
Poison Arrow
Antenna
Leaky Lifeboat
What We Know
Massage The History
Death Valley 69

a staged race has no thunder

As enthralling as their performance was, the short afternoon set Grizzly Bear put up recently during Tokyo’s Summer Sonic festival certainly felt rather insufficient for their glistening chamber pop to properly sink in with their audience. Especially after hearing the ever-wondrous “Lullabye” realized on stage, with the spacey subterranean shadings of the song circulating uneasily in the carnival atmosphere, I surely hoped for the band to do a bit more than just two songs from their Yellow House (2006) album, as great as the new Veckatimest materials are. The opening flourish of “Southern Point” perfectly captures the band’s essence as studio alchemists using the live stage more as a makeshift workshop of sorts, a flurry of ringing guitars calibrated to divine proportions. Their trademark fusion of archaic sound arrangements and unjustifiably beautiful harmonies gathered momentum from “Cheerleader” onwards, with Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen splitting even their turns on lead vocals, I can’t help the feeling the performance was compromised by the fact that Grizzly Bear had to rush through their set and had not enough time to properly stretch out their songs. A major quibble on my part then: which kind of left me there to stand and listen to the band close their set with their canorous rendition of “While You Wait For The Others” with somewhat vacillated emotions (“keeping up with the motions, still occupies our time/ You can hope for some substance, as long as you like”), the band exuding a curious tone of forewarning that felt a little out of place, present but not present.

(Setlist)
Southern Point
Cheerleader
Lullabye
Knife
Fine For Now
Two Weeks
Ready, Able
I Live With You
While You Wait For The Others

silence kit #19

Wilco
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Nonesuch, 2002)

More news from nowhere: I'm typing this from an Internet cafe in the Tokyo playlands, hiding out in the big city blinking, tongue-tied lightning motioning behind the architectural skylines. So I was listening to this album on the relatively long but peaceful bus ride from the airport into the city, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot so perfectly captures the suburban scenes flashing by from the passenger's sight, the electric roughhousing of "I'm The Man Who Loves You" radiating loudly and brilliantly, Jeff Tweedy's ethereal wistfulness on "Kamera" and "Ashes From American Flags" worming its way into your tired daydreams. I've been listening to their new Wilco (The Album) too, but I have to be honest and say it haven't really done enough for me - "Country Disappeared" is lovely though. Back when it was first released, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot reminded me a lot of Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers (1975), one of my favorite albums of all-time; but clearly Tweedy's malaise isn't quite the enormity of Alex Chilton's heavy melancholy.

mixtape (august 2009)

Murder tapes, her bulletproof smile
M. Ward "I'm A Fool To Want You"
Ilyas Ahmed & Grouper "Exit Twilight"
Silk Flowers "In This Place"
Interpol "Say Hello To The Angels"
Little Girls "What We Did"
Galaxie 500 "Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste"
Leonard Cohen "Avalanche"
Billie Holiday "When You're Smiling"
Tom Waits "Dead And Lovely"
Warpaint "Billie Holiday"
Tom Verlaine & the Million Dollar Bashers "Cold Irons Bound"
Matt Sweeney & Bonnie Prince Billy "Only Someone Running"

Depression gangster issue: Just watched Michael Mann's Public Enemies, which could well be my favorite movie of the year; interesting use of Billie Holiday music too, and so influenced is this latest mixtape. A nod to all sorts of killings and robbing, jailbreak and other misdemeanors of "gangster type" criminals (as my colleague like to label them) then, in all their existential, gun-toting shapes and forms.

zidane: a 21st century portrait (2006)

Zidane, doin’ work. Experienced or remembered in “real time”. Perhaps this might be as good as any time to visit this stunning piece of experimental filmmaking, now it seems that Real Madrid is back in the fray of zealous overspending and “acting stupidly”. French midfielder Zinedine Yazid Zidane, Real #5 between 2001 and 2006, he who inked on the dotted line of the most expensive transfer at that time, is a most fascinating subject matter of course, and not just for his prodigious talents. This veritable genius is also an outlier of our contemporary world in so many terms, his languid elegance on the pitch able to singlehandedly elevate the game of football (or, soccer) to a wholly different level on occasions. Now Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait can be labeled in a number of ways, but it clearly doesn’t bother to be one of those promotional sports videos stoking the starmaker machinery. Filmmakers Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno used 17 synchronized cameras in their attempt to capture Zidane as some sort of serene existential character, the results of which are possibly unrecognizable to the sports star himself. The game itself (Real vs. Villarreal, y’all), set to a mesmerizing score by Mogwai, seemingly transforms into a theatre of Gauguinesque wonder, the action short-circuited with the luxury of the cameras’ almost uncomfortable sympathy for Zidane’s every unhurried motion, his stealthy twists and turns, his fluid movement into space. The calm breaks when Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait descends into a minor brawl, in which Zidane momentarily loses his cool, and the filmmakers (and Mogwai’s music) boldly milk this to maximum effect, as a feat of infinite frustration perhaps. Magic is sometimes very close to nothing at all.