This week’s announcement that the audiovisual archive of Alan Lomax is being digitized and will soon be available for streaming (only in part, but part of a vast whole) represents a heroic advance for cultural accessibility. On the same tip, less momentous but more danceable, someone uploaded an entire Shep Pettibone mastermix from 1983 onto Soundcloud.
Carl: I spent much of last weekend reading both Will Hermes’s Love Goes to Buildings on Fire and James Wolcott’s Lucking Out, two books about New York City culture in the 1970s, a permanent locus of fixation for me. I enjoyed them both, though I would have liked more authorial presence from Hermes and less from Wolcott (or perhaps just less of Pauline Kael’s presence). One of their pleasures, among all the insights and gossip, was to go digging for all the music mentioned – including this version of “Psycho Killer,” which features Arthur Russell on cello and conjures up a whole alternative-history scenario in which he joined the band and became their audio svengali instead of Brian Eno….
And here is a new video for one of Toronto’s best bands, fairly untouched by “buzz,” One Hundred Dollars:
Erin Macleod talked to me this week for a piece she did about Celine Dion conquering Jamaica, but she didn’t need to: She spotted everything on her own.
I want to post something to remember the artistMike Kelley by, but his work, so full of tender-tough and naked-pretend feeling, makes me too happy for an occasion as glum as his early taking leave of this world. I will just hush up now.
Margaux: Several of my close friends (starting with thank you Julia Rosenberg and ending with thank you Sheila Heti) recommended a recent New Yorker article to me about how brainstorming doesn’t work. I think my friends liked it so much because the article was arguing that close proximity to collaborators and freedom with criticm proves to be much more fruitful environment for creating good, new ideas than does a nurturing and positive-only environment. I think everyone (in my slightly-unnuturing-but-wonderfully-humorous, incredibly-critical-but-enormously-helpful group of friends) was happy that the environment we have made for ourselves, by default, was getting a gold star.
It was written by Jonah Lehrer who wrote Proust was a Neuroscientist – a great read. I loved the New Yorker article too and loved especially the description of building 20. Building 20 was created quickly and cheaply to satisfy some temporary spacing needs for a department at M.I.T. An architecture firm designed the building in one afternoon. It was meant to be torn down eventually. Instead of being torn down right away, it continued to provide space for random departments in need. It became clear that it was one of the most fruitful buildings of the 20th century (or something) for surprising innovation in many different fields – mostly because people thought nothing of tearing down walls or putting a hole through the ceiling (to accomodate a new and growing invention) or generally adjusting rooms to fit the individual needs of a person or a project or to accommodate a field a study that is ready for a major change.It was a fun article to read just as I was starting my first day as the artist in residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in a brand new wing designed very carefully by Frank Gehry. It was interesting to think about all the different ways to be rich as I was leaving (temporarily!) my neighborhood full of crappy and great make-shift studios and offices, and my critical, hilarious and helpful collaborators available for bumping into at every corner.
Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Friday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:
Margaux: I finally read the beautiful piece by Mark Greif on Radiohead from a 2005 N+1 issue. He writes about how the music builds a memorizing construction of a person coping with both tolerance and defiance (and occasionally forceful acceptance) for a world he can’t fight or escape. Since he believes himself to be alone in these feelings, defiance is his main option. Greif’s approach to pop is a little more anthropological than participatory, but I am always happy with an approach to pop. His text offers one of the most poetic and concise distinctions between defiance and revolution that I have come across.
by BeerMagnet
I read Greif’s text about a month ago and it has stayed in my mind while I’ve watched the coming together of so many people in the Occupy Wall Street movement. It has been hard so far in the baby part of this century not to feel lamely defiant and isolated: Uselessly playing tear-gas-cat-and-mouse with the police at G20 summits while those in power get a great amount of work done somewhere way beyond the high fences. Watching Ralph Nader (at that point with a good amount of momentum and support) both be denied to participate in the 2000 presidential televised debates and then later be escorted off the corporate premises. He was escorted away even though his ticket was just for a seat in a distant screening room. Seeing the cynicism that allows for so much that is immoral to also be so completely legal and seemingly accepted. To see the same old banking CEOs in positions of highest power in the Obama administration. Speaking of which, I just looked up the documentary “Inside Job“ (about the late-2000s financial crisis) on Rotten Tomatoes and saw that it received 97% approval rating from the top critics. This says a lot for a movie that consists of talking-heads, charts and graphs – and a movie that involves Matt Damon – but only uses his voice (as narrator). Even if you know everything about the financial crisis, it is really worth watching for the amazing interviews with some of the participants of the disaster.
by jgwiz2008
It is easy now to see old Thom Yorke wasn’t alone. We can see people coming together publicly against recent tragedies, including the execution of Troy Davis and the shooting of the 24-year-old Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen in Oakland. And all of the other injustices that are occurring not just to individuals but to a growing mass.
Back to N+1. I was surprised to see that the fairly good-intentioned, Ivy-League-masculine literary magazine had put out the “Occupy! Gazette” . Its contributors are a much more diverse lot from across North America. It’s really good to see, in the Occupy movement and in this Gazette, the coming together of such different groups of people. It was initiated by the activist and filmmaker Astra Taylor and the editor Mark Greif and edited Sarah Leonard of Dissent. It’s a generous and useful action to share publicly these early stages – as it has been with the website occupywallst and the more participatory Wiki Occupy Home.
Reading all these things is like looking at early blueprints – sketches of a project just started. It made me think of one of my favourite books – Stuart Kauffman’s “At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity”. It’s a science book and not at all about social movements. But Kauffman’s argument is about the natural self-organization of life. He talks about how the greatest amount of new life develops between the greatest amount of chaos and, on the other side, order. It is great to see that the Occupy movements haven’t moved to too much order just yet. It is great to have the upside-down world land in such a mess and see so many people patiently start to organize what is around them – to be more concerned with the blueprint than with declarations of war.
Instead of fighting outside the gates of power, we are now the ones who are holding the meetings. And not just a meeting, but maybe one of the longest conferences in history – thanks in part to the difference between occupying and protesting, being able to re-claim space and time in public. In Art Fag City, in an article by Paddy Johnson about artists occupying art spaces, Johnson nicely articulated this point: “This is what is new and transformative about the movement and, ultimately, what Occupy Museums is about: using the open process of self-education as a means of self empowerment. It is a fight against passivity”.
Occasional, it’s wise to try to keep your mind in the boundaries of what you understand to be realistic hopes, but it can also make you deformed. It sure does feel like a mind-blowing expansion of those boundaries to suddenly hear the words anarchism and socialism mentioned (occasionally) in less villainous terms in mainstream media.
All of this feels like watching a little flowers grow on the scorched hills of Sudbury. **Oh! Sorry Sudbury, I see your clear-cut-mining-sulfuric-acid-charred hills have been growing little flowers for quite some time now!
by Manfredhaukenfrers
Chris: Corporate executives judging value poorly, part one: the $130 cheque that bought all rights to Superman. (Though one could say DC was all too insightful in this case.)
Corporate executives judging value poorly, part two:
The birth of a legend: “the other day i was talking to a friend of mine about this pet store in orlando (where i went to college) that hired a guy to stand outside in a dog costume and wave at cars.
occasionally, that guy would just start crumpin’ up a storm when cars would be backed up at the red light near him; it was always my favorite part of my daily drive home from school — i’d literally hope against hope that Crumpin’ Dog would be out and in full-on freak mode…”
Our friend Sheila Heti compiled this oral history of the Mad Hatter, an anarchic birthday-party venue that marked a generation of Toronto kids with its degrading rituals, sullen teenage tormentors and aesthetic of nightmarish surrealism. There’s already dozens and dozens of reminiscing comments, which only reinforce the impression that it was like a sort-of-fun Salo. My parents weren’t too overbearing, but I grew in the ’90s here, not the ’80s, and by then the notion of leaving your spawn in some juvenile demimonde for hours was already unbelievable. Us millennials had to make do with the relatively mundane likes of Laser Quest and Playdium.
Last week, I interviewed Toronto local hero Sandro Perri about his incredible, unclassifiable new album Impossible Spaces. You can read my thoughts about the LP itself over there, but the Toronto Standard was only able to run half of our long Q&A (even websites have word counts), so here’s all the other smart, insightful things Sandro said.
CR: I’m curious about your musical background – what kind of formal training do you have, if any?
Sandro Perri: The first thing was, I bought a snare drum when I was about…maybe 11, and I just played on that for a few months. Then I got an acoustic guitar and messed around on my own for two or three months, and then got a private teacher, and studied with him on and off for three years. So I guess that was between 12 and 15, maybe 16. During that time it was rock and classical guitar that I was studying. And then I took a break from that and sort of studied on my own for two years or so, and that was the most intense period, six hours a day, that kind of thing. Then I got a teacher for about six months just before applying to jazz school, who got me primed to learn more advanced scales and theory and harmony. I got accepted into school, and I was there for about a year and a half—
Which jazz school?
Humber College. I did one full year and one half-year, even though on the first day I wanted to leave [laughs]. It was very conservative as far as I could tell.
So they didn’t know who Ornette Coleman was?
The teachers would have, I guess. But few of the students were into that kind of thing. I managed to find the 4 or 5 who were, and we developed friendships and played together. But I got something out of it, I learned quite a bit, and equally important is that I learned what I didn’t want out of school, what I didn’t want to be involved in, which was studying to be a session musician or a straight jazz musician. I knew that I wasn’t really gonna cut it. So I think that was the extent of my actual schooling – the rest, I would just read books at home and practice rhythm exercises. I practiced a lot from this polyrhythm book for a few years. And then just listening. Listening was the main schooling, actually.
I didn’t realize until doing the research for this interview that you had made out-and-out dance music before, as Dot Wiggin and Continuous Dick. Impossible Spaces seems to return to that somewhat, or at least emphasize grooves more than Tiny Mirrors did – there are definitely moments that remind me of Arthur Russell. That wasn’t a question so much as a statement, I guess [both laugh].
I could treat it like a question.
Sure.
Well, okay. Dot Wiggin was actually a collaboration with a friend of mine, Todd Fox, who’s since passed. I guess he didn’t get me into making dance music, but I think that I became – I don’t know what to say about that. It was very special, that’s for sure. It was definitely an intense six months of music-making. And I learned something about simplicity from him, about space. I was probably trying to be too brainy about it before that. Trying to validate it as “music”. I still suffer from that a little. I don’t think I’ve fully found that thing you need to make great dance music.
The physicality?
The physicality and the simplicity. Structurally strong. That’s a key thing that I still am learning about, and I think all the dance music that I’ve made has just managed to not achieve that but offer enough of an interesting take that people have at least been curious about it. Whereas somebody like Arthur Russell definitely knew how to do those things, and he was a very sophisticated musician, in a more traditional sense. There’s nothing lacking in any of his dance music at all. In part, the desire to make dance music came as a reaction to being in jazz school, and yet, another part of me was still holding on to those things, which essentially prevented me from jumping right in. Just those mental traps you set up for yourself.
The other part was, making electronic music was a way of getting out of using my hands, having some sort of dexterity issue to grapple with. I spent years practicing and I had reached a bit of a stalemate. Making ‘beats’, on the other hand, was creative in an entirely different way. My brain needed a different kind of stimulation. It was much more about rhythm and overall construction than about knowledge of harmony. So it was a good way to relieve myself of some pressures that I felt, learning an instrument, becoming good at it. And I realized very quickly that making music is not about playing an instrument, it’s about overall composition, pacing and space and learning how to access some sort of feeling or idea and translating it into sound. Dance music is – I come and go, I’m into making it for a while and then I have a reaction to that, which is too much button pushing and not enough physical engagement. Not enough singing, not enough playing. There’s always a swing back and forth. So maybe I’ve come the closest to combining the two in this record.
That’s interesting, because in the beginning jazz music was dance music.
Yeah, totally.
And then they sort of bifurcated. I don’t want to create an academic/hedonistic dichotomy, but I think jazz now is much more in the realm of Anthony Braxton and Peter Brotzmann. More cerebral – I mean, it’s also very physical in a way, but – and dance music went in the direction of Larry Levan or Carl Craig.
Well, I think there are different ways of experiencing the physicality in music. You could still feel it, as you say, even if it’s Anthony Braxton or Peter Brotzmann. The best stuff, to me, is often very physical, and in a way, kind of simple. When it’s structurally strong and it offers you something to hang on to. But then, a lot of music that sounds like it’s barely holding on, like it’s just hanging there, can give me shivers as well. That’s physical too. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that jazz stopped being dance music, I think a problem is that too often there is a perceived difference between brain and body, and then you get people going to supposed extremes on either end. There’s terrible dance music, just all about the body without take anything else into consideration.
Or really terrible IDM.
Yeah, exactly. On either end of the spectrum, it’s just too much of one thing. It’s too separated from the rest of our experiences. So ideally the line between this stuff is blurred.
You’ve produced all of your solo albums yourself – the new LP was recorded at 6 Nassau in Kensington Market, if I remember correctly – but you also do production work for other musicians. Do the two roles differ at all?
Probably the big difference is that I’ll spend forever on my own records, just trying things out, experimenting with things, throwing things away after I’ve done them, redoing them. I can’t really do that with other people, because it’s their own time, their own budgets, their own threshold of pain [laughs]. That process of making a record can be quite draining and difficult. So that’s the big thing, I have to be more focused and get a sense of what the person I’m working with is comfortable with and what they want out of the situation and how far they’re willing to go with something. That’s actually a very good thing to learn. I like process a lot, I like working with other people a lot. Helping to understand what somebody’s else thing is, what they’re trying to say or what their vision is. To encourage them in ways that I think are useful and to discourage them in other ways, from all the things that come up when you’re involved in any sort of creative adventure: all the self-doubt, all of the wondering what other people will think about this, wondering what are we going to call this, what genre is this? When you hit upon moments that are uniquely themselves, there’s a moment of excitement and then there’s this backlash that often happens, where an artist can get nervous and have certain anxieties.
And do you feel that you have a strong Albini-like production style?
When you say “Albini-like,” do you mean similar to how he does things, or—
Not his specific style, but more that he’s known for an idiosyncratic one.
I don’t know that I’m experienced enough to know if I do that with people. I might not be the best person to ask. I think if you asked the last five people I’ve worked with—
You’d have to ask Owen Pallett or something.
Well, Owen and I have barely worked together. I recorded Owen for two afternoons just playing violin, and I was very hands-off. But I probably, maybe, might impose myself a little more than the average person in that capacity? But I try to make that work first and foremost with what the person is trying to do.
Did you improvise any arrangements with the other players again?
Not in the same way as Tiny Mirrors. Tiny Mirrors was very much about getting in a room and just playing the tunes and letting things happen. I definitely made suggestions and edited a ton on that record, but this one was more worked-out, and most of the improvising came after the fact when I did the overdubs, with the synth stuff – that was all trial and error.
I was also wondering how the lineup of guest musicians coalesced this time. There are people who return from Tiny Mirrors – Ryan Driver, for example – but newcomers as well, like Mike Smith on bass or Jeremy Strachan’s great sax cameo.
Just from knowing those guys. I’ve known them for years, even before [Tiny Mirrors]. Maybe the juiciest answer to that would be that I wanted something different from the way the playing came together on the last record. I wanted to move away from that kind of beautiful laziness that a lot of the players on Tiny Mirrors brought. Some of the playing on that last record, there’s – not a lack of commitment but a quality to it that always prefers not to say things, to imply things. There’s a lot of space where the listener can come to their own conclusions about what’s happening.
It’s kind of understated or suggestive.
Yeah. And I think there’s still a lot of that on this record, but there’s a little more of a push, and that was definitely a conscious decision. That often requires playing with different people.
That breathy panting in “Love & Light” is apparently the singer Zaki Ibrahim. Did you sample it from an existing song?
No, what happened was, there was this CBC-commissioned thing in 2007, where this show “Fuse” would get different artists to collaborate together.
Oh, is that the thing that Owen [Pallett] and Cadence Weapon covered “Paris 1919” for?
Oh, yeah, that might’ve been it. I haven’t actually heard that one. But yeah, they would get artists who’d never played together before to collaborate on something and do a live concert. What happened there was, they got seven people together to do this round-robin broken-telephone game, where everybody would write 27 words about the New Year, and the words would get passed around the circle to the next person, who would then start writing a song. Either inspired by those words or using those words. Then everybody’s song would get passed to the next person in the circle, who would work on the song or jump off of the song, write a new song based on their song. There were three or four steps. So “Love & Light” was my finished song – the last step in the stage. And Zaki was the person whose song was passed on to me. Basically, I sampled some breath sounds from her song, and the percussion bit, and I used her words as a jumping-off point to write the words for “Love & Light.” So we didn’t actually work on it together, but I ended up using elements of her thing. It was important to credit her in that song because I ended up using her words and some of her sounds as a base.
It’s intriguing because she’s not like your usual collaborators.
No, no, not at all. But that’s kind of an illusion too. The style is different but ultimately it means very little. She’s a great improvisor from what I could tell.
The sounds could come from a modern R&B song or something.
Yeah, which I like.
You recently travelled to Bruce Peninsula with John K. Samson [of the Weakerthans] and Christine Fellows for the National Parks Project. What was that like, composing in the wilderness with them?
It was great. It was very interesting because it became apparent almost immediately that being out there removed the need to create. I don’t know if that’s technically irony, but the whole point of going there to create in the wilderness was erased, for me anyway, as soon as we got there. It made it very evident that a big part of the impetus to create is living in the city… or maybe being away from nature, creates this need for your own natural space. So being in an actual natural space is…
I’m not outdoorsy, per se, but something definitely changes in my nervous system when I go out into the woods. It does for anybody, I think. So that was amazing, and I felt no pressure to create at all, and I ended up writing a song the fastest I’ve ever written one, in like ten minutes, just because I really wanted to go swimming [laughs]. And it was really good to hang out with John and Christine, because I didn’t know them, and they were really nice people. We had a great time. I learned a lot about creativity there. I cracked open the reasons why I want to create things. I find I’m always reminded of basic needs when you go out and you’re surrounded by nature and you don’t have any buildings around, you don’t have any concrete around—
Not to get all R. Murray Schafer or anything, but the change in acoustics alone must have affected—
Oh yeah. There was this one really exciting moment where we were in the water, trying to record the sound of this—you know when you’re doing your dishes, and some water gets into a metal bowl, and you hit it and it goes doink? It’s an amazing sound. And so we were trying to do this in the water, we were trying to record this sound in this bowl. I happened to have my nylon-string guitar with me, and I was holding it in a certain way, and the wind grazed the strings and excited the strings and these upper harmonics just all of a sudden came out of the guitar. It was this crazy, whistling-wind-chime sound that I’d never ever heard in my life. I didn’t know that wind on guitar strings could do that.
We all just kind of went “Oh my God” and recorded the sound of this guitar. It was really delicate, because I couldn’t move. If I moved a millimetre the sound would have stopped. I had to stay there holding this guitar. I think that ended up on the vinyl version of the album that they released. But that was a great moment, because we weren’t really doing anything.
The idea of just discovering this unheard sound is so… Yeah, especially when you have nothing to do with it, because then it’s really a mystery.
Interpolation recurs throughout your music in general, Plays Polmo Polpo being the most obvious example. But the final track on Tiny Mirrors reinterprets the first one, and while “Changes” is hardly a cover of its famous namesake, you are winking at Bowie with those stuttered vocals, right? Yeah, probably. Possibly. I think that it’s hard to pretend as if other music doesn’t play a part in the music that you make, films or books or whatever. I like the idea of talking about what you’re talking about, maybe, acknowledging the fact that you could be referencing things. To me “meta” is not a dirty word. There is value in understanding the context of listening, and referencing other things that you’ve heard in the past is an important element in understanding what you’re hearing now and how you’re taking it in.
“Wolfman” uses this symbol of semi-human monstrosity as a way to explore awkwardness and hesitation. How did those things become associated in your mind? It doesn’t seem like a horrific or violent situation, just one of…misunderstanding. Yeah, I think you’re hitting on some of the things that are there, for sure. Anything that could be considered monstrous is really born out of very human experience. I mean, the whole idea, the whole myth of the wolfman is essentially a human who has not been able to fully embrace what it means to be a human being, in terms of vulnerabilities that one has to deal with.
I guess if you think about it in a scientific sense, the myth may have been fed by—I can’t remember its name, but you know that rare medical disorder where you’re covered in hair? I’ve seen that talked about as a hypothesis for what inspired werewolves. And that persists today—they’re not seen as monsters, but they definitely are gawked at and stigmatized. I guess the whole thing with the idea of monsters is that there’s the unknown, which is of course terrifying, and then there’s the fact that you recognize something of yourself in the monster. That’s terrifying as well. There are a few other things in that tune. There’s an attempt at some levity, and there’s also a nod to the whole wolf thing that happened a bunch of years ago, [when] everybody had “wolf” in their band name but nobody ever explicitly talked about what that meant, what conditions that arose from. There’s a quote from that Will Oldham song [“Wolf Among Wolves”]—that song actually has a lot of quotes from other music, it probably has the most of what you were talking about with “Changes.” It’s loaded with quotations and licks from other songs, almost entirely.
Maybe more like Frankenstein than the Wolfman. Yeah, exactly [laughs]. Another monster.
It reminds me of the Mountain Goats—John Darnielle’s band? Oh, I’ve never actually heard that band. I know that you and Carl [Wilson] are big fans.
A lot of his songs touch on monstrous subjects, but in a nuanced or counterintuitive way. With “Wolfman” I was specifically thinking of a song called “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature,” which is about arriving at the apartment of somebody you probably shouldn’t be sleeping with. Yeah, I don’t know them, but I should probably check it out. Lyrics are a hard thing for me. They’re very difficult to write, I find. I wish that was my forte, but—that was actually the first song where I made an attempt at a story format. That’s probably where some of the awkwardness comes from.
By the conclusion of Tiny Mirrors, with “Mirror Tree,” you left the floor to your collaborators—you don’t appear on it at all. There’s a sense of absence at the end of Impossible Spaces as well; you’re there, but Jordan Somers [a friend of Perri’s who died of complications from leukemia in 2008], who co-wrote the title track’s lyrics, is not. It’s very moving, if you know the backstory. Well, thanks. That was the first time I had ever collaborated on lyrics with another person. It was definitely the level of trust between us that allowed it, because he hadn’t done that either. It was all in one session, an hour or so, and mostly we were just laughing, actually. We were coming up with really stupid things, funny things, and then some of what remained managed to flesh out the song nicely. We were quite close for a while. It was unavoidable that there would be a lot of elements in this record about dealing with Jordan’s death. A lot of it is the stuff that is just impossible to grasp. When somebody’s gone, so much is beyond your reach.
Was he already ill when you wrote the lyrics?
No, the lyrics actually – I started writing the lyrics a long time ago, probably 2005. They just kind of sat there for a couple of years, I didn’t do anything. Like anybody who writes or makes music, there’s a whole load of stuff that’s constantly being worked on or just sitting there waiting to be used. This song was one of them: we got together in 2007 and I brought that one out. He offered up a few things that he had in his notebook, that he had already written, and then we sort of meshed them together. He wasn’t sick then, but he got sick very shortly after we did that.
“How Will I?” was written for him, right?
In a way, yes. And the end of that song, the whole second section, is connected in some way to the act of facing death, mortality, what have you. Doing anything creative is really a way to prolong that, to stave off the awareness of mortality.
There’s that feeling of solidarity in the chorus: “Hand in my hand, shoulder to shoulder / Today it looks like love is bolder.”
That quite literally came about from standing over his grave with my partner and realizing that you can lose somebody very close to you, but it’s really important, in that moment especially, to remember who you do have in your life as well, to contextualize loss.
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