Along with its fetching new face, Tiny Mix Tapes recently introduced a weekly debate feature in which writers drop a loaded question and readers respond with their two cents, the goal being to foster a public dialogue about music on the site itself. Editor Mr. P knows that Biomusicosophy’s Elliott Sharp and I always get all riled up whenever music and politics are mentioned in the same breath, so he asked us craft the magazine’s second debate question, which concerns last week’s exchange between The Guardian’s Ben Beaumont-Thomas and Chocolate Bobka’s McGregor on the politics of “blog rock,” or American lo-fi.
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Archive for the ‘Horizons’ Category
Horizons: What, if any, are the political values of “lo-fi” indie music?
Monday, February 15th, 2010Horizons: Living Out Here on the Beach, Excepter-Style
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
Excepter’s music has always kind of reminded me of New Weird America’s evil twin, absconding from the wilderness to turn tricks in broad daylight on some street corner near 34th street-Penn Station, clad in a leather jacket and fingerless gloves. Like Sunburned’s, their sound comes across as the diegetic byproduct of some Manson Family-style ritual, frightening for the very reason that we really have no idea where that ritual comes from, or what the band’s members are trying to achieve. Even in the pit of industrial North Brooklyn, surrounded by concrete on all sides, they take rocks and sticks and animal-shaped talismans and try to hack their way slowly back to the earth.
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Horizons: Psych-Related Minor Plot Twist In New Coen Brothers Film
Sunday, October 11th, 2009
Still from A Serious Man, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009.
An Open-Ended Question From An Open-Ended Film:
Imagine, for a moment, that you are Larry Gopnick, the “Serious Man” in the Coen Brothers’ new film by the same name. The time is the 1960’s, and you are a family man and tenure-track physics professor living in an affluent Jewish neighborhood in the suburbs of Minneapolis. You, the Serious Man, believe that you are doing everything right until pretty much everything in your life starts going egregiously wrong: your wife decides to leave you for a family friend, your brother runs into trouble with the law, your 13-year-old son starts stealing from you to buy weed, and a student offers you an exorbitant amount of money for a passing grade (while threatening to sue you) the same week you are up for tenure.
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Body Actualized Control at the Market Hotel: An Interview with the Ubiquitous “Us” Behind North Brooklyn’s first Cosmic Yoga Party
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
When I emailed Jan Rew Midelfort and Etienne Pierre Duguay asking for an interview about the weekly Yoga party they started this summer on the roof of the Market Hotel in Bushwick, I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to get away with just sending over a list of questions. Duguay–one of the venue’s resident promoters, as well as the drummer for Real Estate and Predator Vision–responded demanding that I arrive at 7:00 pm sharp the following Wednesday to participate in the Yoga class myself. Midelfort–also a musician, and one of the most talented psychedelic music DJ’s I know–added that I should bring my violin along, because it would be “awesome” if I could perform a continuous drone during the New Age music component of the event, which happens after the sun goes down. I did not have the chance to get in touch with Aurora Halal, the event’s third core organizer, but I’m pretty sure she would have responded with yet another suggestion encouraging me nix the habit of passive spectatorship that journalists tend to fall back on.
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Horizons: What, if any, are the Politics of Hypnagogic Pop?
Monday, September 28th, 2009
The first thing I did when David Keenan’s hotly debated “Hypnagogic Pop” article came out in The Wire last June was log on to the Terminal Boredom message board–not because I read it all the time, but because it was the site where that debate began, as far as I could glean from a preliminary Google search. And the first thing I saw when I logged onto Terminal Boredom was a question that would make a really big imprint on my subsequent readings of the piece, partly because it was written in all capital letters and tickering from right to left across the screen:
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The Rise and Decline of the Lightning Bolt Experience: A Video History
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009![PB140480[1]](http://www.visitation-rites.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/PB14048011.JPG "PB140480[1]")
Brian Chippendale at Redrum, Providence, November 2004. Photo by Simon Hegarty.
In a recent podcast, Stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt and ESPN columnist Bill Simmons went into detail about how superstardom can often be the death knell of a comedian’s ability to develop strong material. The problem is that once a comedian has already won over the audience, almost any joke that comes out of his or her mouth will be met with a rapturous response–regardless of its quality. If the audience approaches a performance expecting the funniest night of their lives, they’ll always do their best to ensure that this expectation is met; they are paying good money for it, after all.
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No Fun 2009: Infinite Sound and Image: No Fun Goes to New York’s New Museum
Saturday, May 30th, 2009
Still, Makino Takashi and Jim O’Rourke, The Seasons, 2009.
If a three-bar, bouncer-peppered, profit-centric venue like Music Hall of Williamsburg seems somewhat of stretch for a “show case” of what is ostensibly the most fiercely anti-commercial and anti-hegemonic music today, try a major metropolitan museum. Those of us who relied solely on the No Fun website for information on the lineup this year will be surprised to learn that the festival had not only one new home this year, but two — along with a brand new “Infinite Sound and Image” component, which is longhand for “film screening.” Recognizing that many of the artists on the bill this year are active outside the purely musical sphere — and, perhaps, that the noise experience in general is not only about what we hear, but, almost always also what we see and feel — Carlos Giffoni teamed with Rhizome’s ongoing “New Silent Series” for an afternoon of moving image work at the New Museum on the Bowery.
FUCK SEPARATION: A Conversation, by Alessandro Keegan/Mattin
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
Mattin is a musician and performance artist from the Basque Country. He has produced a slew of releases under the names of Deflag Haemorrahge/Haien Kontra, Sakada, Billy Bao, and No More Music. He has also collaborated with many artists, including Drunkdriver, Margarita Garcia, Tim Goldie, Taku Unami and Tony Conrad, to name a few. His work mixes laptop electronics with politics and, in the case of Billy Bao, some harsh, deconstructed rock and roll. In the live setting, Mattin is subversive, sometimes abrasive, and always finding ways to undermind audience expectations and break the boundaries inherent to performance.
The Reactable: “That was one of the goals: let’s allow everyone to have fun playing the instrument.”
Friday, May 1st, 2009
If you have ever heard or seen the Reactable in action, it was probably during Bjork’s 2007 tour. Largely influenced by the Moog synthesizers of the ’60s and ’70s, this new instrument is a translucent table with movable colored blocks that produces a range of rhythms, melodies, and sequences. If the Reactable has not received the mainstream recognition it warrants, this may be because it is not its tonal qualities that make it revolutionary for live performance, but its components. While its sound is unlikely to break the mold, the Reactable is a dramatic innovation in both interactive performance and music technology.
An Extremely Drastic Case of Déjà Vu: Karole Armitage and Rhys Chatham Revive Underground Dance Classic in NY
Monday, March 30th, 2009
People who view the New York No Wave scene as one of the last truly exciting chapters in the city’s cultural history can buy as many compilations and artist’s monographs as they like, but nothing beats an opportunity to time-travel. Earlier this month at The Kitchen, New Yorkers jumped at a chance to spend two hours back in the early ’80s — a time when drive-by shootings and burning cars were daily staples of downtown life, but also when a late-night walk down 19th street just might land you in the middle of a dialogue between a professional ballet dancer and an army of electric guitars. Think Punk!, an evening of music and physical performance by choreographer Karole Armitage, cast a younger generation of New York Noise-makers in a recreation of Drastic Classicism, an explosive collision of classical ballet and No Wave punk…
