Getting Away With It

It had been a while since my personal site had a facelift. I felt now was a good time.

Made by hand in html and css and a few dynamic bits hiding in subfolders managed using jekyll.

Some small tweaks and modifications. Likes are over on the right now, and the description was shortened. I cleaned up my custom css modifications as well, based on what I actually know about css now, as opposed to my wild flailing before now.

I said I was going to write up capsule reviews of all the albums I listened to this year. Here’s the first eight. I have a splitting headache now. Maybe I’ll have more in a few days.

Amanda Palmer — Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under

I had to unfollow Amanda Palmer on twitter, and I no longer carefully read her long rambling blog posts in which she updates the entire universe about her life in both terrifying specifics and elliptical vagueries. Which is itself a roundabout way of saying I’ve gotten over the wallop that Who Killed Amanda Palmer inflicted upon me when I first heard it and fell in love. This isn’t a proper album, and to read her missives it seems like another WKAP isn’t in the offering anytime soon, so we’ll have to make do with these cast-off scraps of performance.

Not that there aren’t interesting things here: “In My Mind” is a clever song about the ennui of that I must say I identify with a little too strongly, and “On An Unknown Beach” is just simple pretty piano lines with soulful lyrics mixed just quietly enough to only really resolve if you’re willing to listen carefully. But half the album is live cuts of songs performed to amuse or flatter the Antipodeans she met on her tour there. “Bad Wine and Lemon Cake” is the best of the lot, mostly because The Jane Austen Argument, whom she performs it with, are the Southern Hemisphere’s version of The Dresden Dolls.

Amon Tobin — ISAM

Amon Tobin has come a long way since Bricolage in ‘97, tightening up his sound and moving away from samples of older music to tracks built around his own recordings of environmental noises and instruments that have never existed outside of a computer synth. The result is songs that feel extraordinarily solid when you listen to them. They seem to take up residence in the room you’re in, occupying space with their jagged edges and smooth concavities. I picture a rapid-cut movie set in some modern racecar (or perhaps future starship) when “Surge” comes on, “Night Swim” appearing as a hole suspended in space, the shadow the entire being of the mass, slowly pulsating until it shatters and vanishes into nothing at all.

Battles — Gloss Drop

“Ice Cream” was the first track I heard off this album, piquing my interest after I had finally tired of Mirrored’s (and the earlier EPs the band put out) finely-crafted but very cold rhythms. Lyrics? Even if they were mostly incomprehensible, this was a departure for the group, which had, admittedly, lost Tyondai Braxton due to other commitments.

Whether or not that explains the changes, this is a markedly different album from Mirrored. On Mirrored, Battles was making an album of rhythmic noise. (The EPs were even more dramatically unstructured, and aurally vacant to boot.) On Gloss Drop, they’ve made actual songs. The aforementioned “Ice Cream” and “My Machines” are both standouts, and both feature guest singers, Matias Aguayo and Gary Numan respectively. But even the lyric-free tracks feel stronger, focused, and planned, “White Electric” even breaking into something resembling an actual rock-and-roll structure, near the end of the album.

Beirut — The Rip Tide

How many times will I make the statement that an artist on this list has changed since they released their first album? Here’s number two: Zach Condon (mastermind of the band Beirut) barely sounds anything like his initial releases on new album The Rip Tide. The wide-ranging, Eastern Europe-influenced earlier songs (and electronic experimentations) have given way to a much more traditional indie-rock focused presentation of tracks here. There’s still a worldly eclecticism, but the album is much more predictable than, say, Gulag Orkestar or The Flying Club Cup were.

Still, we’re reviewing the album that was released, not what we wanted to have released. The emphasis here is on the lyrics, which makes the lack of really stand-out tracks all the more disappointing. Check out “A Candle’s Fire”, “The Rip Tide”, and “Vagabond” if you’re curious to know if you’ll like the album, as they’re pretty representative of the whole.

I should mention here that my favorite Beirut song this year was actually released on the Red Hot + Rio 2 compilation, and is in Portuguese: “O Leãozinho” is a gorgeous track that takes all of the world-traveler baggage that Condon’s collected over the previous three albums and melds it with his stronger sense of songwriting. It doesn’t matter that I can’t understand a damn word of it.

Bibio — Mind Bokeh

Where to start with Bibio. This is an entirely schizophrenic album, whiplashing between clubby anthems (“Take Off Your Shirt”), R&B pastiche (“Light Sleep”), and space music (“Mind Bokeh”), all spaced out by dips into the Bibio standby, lo-fidelity sample-based tracks with distorted vocals. It’s a hard album to like, sadly, as much as I wanted to. But the tonal shifts are distracting, and while loopy lo-fi electronic music was somewhat novel in 2004, when Fi came out, it’s less endearing in 2011.

Bjork — Biophilia

Let’s agree to ignore that Bjork thought releasing this album as an iPhone app months before the actual songs became available for mere mortals to purchase was a good idea. These songs are so slight as to barely be there at all. Even at her most subdued, Bjork normally manages to get a good build going within a song and an album, but on Biophilia, she doesn’t even manage that most of the time, instead giving the listener songs that go nowhere, say nothing, and peter out after a few minutes of Bjork singing over minimal instrumental accompaniment. “Mutual Core” is an exception, instead buying Bjork’s voice underneath generic thudding noises for the last few minutes. Biophilia supposedly is a celebration of living things. It’s a shame that the album sounds so dead.

Death Cab For Cutie — Codes and Keys

Ben Gibbard sounds happy, for once, on Codes and Keys. This, in spite of perhaps because of the indictment of modern paranoia on the title track and “Portable Television”. We can probably blame this outbreak of joy from his (now-defunct) marriage to Zooey Deschanel in 2009, as there was little evidence in his earlier discography of any untempered happiness.

Other than a shift in the tone of some of the songs, this is classic Death Cab territory. Clever lyrics, poppy guitar hooks, sone sonic washes here and there to clean the palate. I enjoyed Narrow Stairs more, but this is solid music. If you like Death Cab, you’ve probably already got it; if you don’t, there’s not much here to change your mind.

DeVotchKa — 100 Lovers

I’m a bad Coloradan. This is the first album I’ve listened to by local favorites DeVotchKa, a band that crosses Russian folk influences with indie rock sensibilities (before there was such a thing as indie rock, no less). They sound a little like Arcade Fire, if Arcade Fire were from Eastern Europe and had half as many members. And didn’t worship the ground Bruce Springsteen walked on.

100 Lovers is, I am told, their most accessible album to date. (I received it after it cycled out of in-store play at work, so that’s something.) It’s interesting listening, but a little same-y after a while. If you like Arcade Fire or punk-influenced folk music, you’d probably like it. Me, I just play “The Man From San Sebastian” once in while when I feel like listening to something with an accordion in it.

Steph shook her head emphatically. “No, they’re just virtual, projected on the room by the goggles. They’re all designed by Michiko and then set up to become visible only when someone looks at them with the right tools.”

“That’s why it looked like it was moving, then. She animated it digitally.”

“Yep.”

“OK, that’s neat.” Zoe pulled the goggles back on, and the statues reappeared.

“It can also be done with a cell phone, but this is more immersive, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, yeah.” She craned her head around, examining the statue in front of her. The texture was a little funny, for sure, and now it was obvious why the lighting was so even and bright: this way, it would be easy to predict how the shadows would fall on and around the statues, so they looked somewhat natural.

They walked on, looking at each one in turn. Most of Michiko’s work was angular and spiked, as if the statues had been hewn out of a single block of material. Maybe one could say they were carved from a single block of data, Zoe thought.

She was more interested in the smoother designs that were on display, which reminder her of her own sculptures. They were generally shorter and squat, with little toadstool-like protuberances growing out of them.

“They’re like toads,” Steph said. “Warty in weird ways.”

They also moved slowly, the growths bloating up to a few inches high and then receding back into the base blob to reform elsewhere. It was like Michiko had sculpted a sphere of swampy water and let it bubble away.

Finally, they reached the back of the hall, where the small group had been clustered before. “This is the one she’s really proud of,” Steph said.

It was obvious why. The sculpture was two pieces, cubes stuck to the ceiling and the floor. Between the two pieces, a single large drop of sculpture-stuff — Zoe had been thinking of it as ‘data’, but that was probably in accurate — was dripping back and forth.

It would start at the top, as a bulge from the base of the upper cube, and then slowly fall in a perfect teardrop shape to the bottom one, taking about a minute to drop the seven foot gap. The bottom would deform like the surface of a pond, and then go still again.

A few moments later, the bottom would begin to bulge, and a sphere of sculpture-stuff would rise from it toward the top. This one did not deform to a teardrop but instead dripped its own little drops from all over back to the base cube, merging with the ceiling again in about a minute, and starting the cycle over again.

The pair watched it go for a few rounds.

I didn’t make my word count for the day, so no nanowrimo post from me this evening.

Henry liked to refer to himself as an urban nomad, which really meant that he couch-surfed between indulgent friends in four or five cities around the world most of the year, his entire belongings fitting into two suitcases and a dufflebag. For this season, he was sleeping in his friend Phillipe’s studio, on a small mattress laid  on top of two unused desks near the back of the space. In return, Henry was helping with the code for Phillipe’s new art project along with his own long-distance graphic design work on commission.

Dropping his change into the tip jar, Henry pulled a bottle from his pocket and downed a pill, noting the time (3:42). When he hit a slow spot in his freelance work, he weaseled his way into medical trials as a guinea pig for hire. Sometimes he had the ailments, sometimes he didn’t. Currently, he was three weeks into an eight-week trial for a drug to treat drowsiness, which didn’t appear to be having any effect on him at all.

“I knew this felt like a sugar pill,” he muttered, sitting down again at the computer and logging the time and date in his digital pill log.

His scathing email had already drawn a reply on the list. “So, this clever ass over here thinks he’s too good for a single day of action, huh? Well, what better ideas you got?”

Henry was surprised and, begrudgingly, a little impressed. Normally, leftist arguments were not this confrontational, instead circling around the problem like a dog looking for a place to lie down.

“I don’t pretend to have all the answers.” He chuckled as he wrote the line. “But what if we tried something slower, but larger? Build up to it? Let the police think it’s harmless until the movement has a critical mass behind it, people in the streets day after day, until everyone knows about it?”

A silly statement, on the face of it. One of the maxims of the left-wing these days was that the police were always watching. Everyone on the list probably believed there were at least two police officers reading the list, and the NSA had a copy of the server stored away in Fort Meade.

“Fuck the brush,” she muttered, squeezing a daub of paint onto her finger and smearing it against her thumb.

For the next few hours, she reworked the red mass on the canvas, pressing harder and harder against the cloth, smearing paint with the same heavy vertical strokes, only now with her body, not just the brush. She transitioned from using just her fingers to attacking the painting with her palm, her wrist, elbow, knee…

The light from the window faded. She flipped on the overhead lights with her toe and kept at it.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the small mirror hung on the wall. A sight to behold, she thought. Paint all over her body, smeared on her arms, her torso, across her thighs, hand-prints all over her skin where she’d wiped off her hands for the next shade of red.

She fished a camera out of her bag resting against her bed and set up her small tripod. “These are not for sale,” she reassured herself. “These are not art. I’m just documenting the process.”

She’d never taken photography of herself naked before. Other people, sure, as part of her art degree. The slip of paper certifying her as having four years of education in art was buried somewhere in her parent’s house. But she’d never taken a picture of herself nude. And definitely not covered in paint.

A couple of test shots looked sickly and weak. She pulled out an extra flash and tried again.

This time, the red popped right off her skin, glowing in the otherwise dim room. She was gloriously detached from herself as she clicked the remote over and over again, posing herself as if she were just another model. Her fingers flicked over her body, scratching here and there to bring out a stronger contrast between her pale skin and the paint.

“The art comes in here,” Steph said, pointing at the base station on the second animation on the screen. “We want to make the status of the wifi network into an art installation when the wifi is running.”

“Aleatoric, algorithmic artistic endeavors.” Phillipe said.

“Again, you’re going to have to explain that one to me.”

“Simply put: we want to base the display on who and what people on the wifi are doing. Packet-sniffing, lifting of browsed images into a display feed, probably some more esoteric generative practices as well.” Phillipe tapped the mouse, and the screen changed to a still of a wall of a cafe with a collage of images projected onto it. “Just one idea.”

“We want to evert the browsing experience into the real world.”

“Evert?” Zoe was beginning to feel like a broken toy, just parroting words she didn’t understand back at the two of them.

“To evert is the opposite of invert. It means to make something invisible, visible, sort of. To project from a small space to a larger one.” Steph made some futile motions with her hands, cupping them on the table, then splaying them out into the air in front of her. “It’s a popular idea when talking about the internet, but it’s kind of hard to explain.”

“I think I get it.”

Phillipe closed the laptop. “That’s the basic pitch right now.”

Zoe looked down at the remains of her salad and took a deep breath. “I’m not sold.”