Walkaway - Nights

[link] This has most of the SG elements in a mid tempo poppy package. The guitar is really stretched and provides an almost cloying sweetness that somehow complements the very sweet, poppy vocals. A celebration of color and sugar, like stretched taffy.

Shoegaze weather

Today it was cold and gray and rainy/misty.  I did my fitness walk about the Heritage Park in Mount Sinai. I brought some headphones and listened to DKFM on my iPhone while walking.  SG was really appropriate music for the stiff cold and wet wind in my face, the cars going by on 25A and Rt 83.  The low gray sky.  Just right.

Guilty of Everything - Nothing

[link] What it's all about. Quiet, beautiful harmonies in verse.  Sweetness.  Then everything lines up for the huge chorus breaking through (presaged by the guitar feeding back). The wall brings everything, but it's still a sweetness. There's more to sculpt. Masterful SG. Without which just an innocuous little pop song.

F A O N Faon

[link] Here is just such a faucet.  This one seems like night.  Foggy and cold. Wet air getting around you on an empty train platform. With time passing differently, both more quickly and more slowly, in snapshots. Steam rising from pipes.

The high guitar

in SG is both the distant calamity and the siren responding to the calamity. A faucet of red sky beaming this way through a lens of yellow, industrial air. In an exurb waste, under a bridge, in the dry season with the evidence of the last flood in plain view. A high speed train burning by, carrying hypermodern youth across the wastescape between cities. A few of them may venture out here on foot or bikes on a sunny day in an obscure season. It's the soundtrack to this event, played by those same kids.  Staring down but only seeing the stones and shadows of the stones under the white sky.

You are Not Alone - Bleeding Rainbow

[link] Heard the studio cut of this on DKFM.  It's very clean and tight and has a lot of sophisticated sounding production.  This live version is great.  Pretty hard to carry off some of the contrasts. But they do a great job.  The harmony is always tough live. I like the main rhythm groove of the verse. Straight ahead SG.

The Foreign Resort - Tide

[link] One to travel to. Sort of a glide. The guitar noise lends a bit of machine grind to the affair. The instrumental narrative puts us out onto a plain, in the past, with the camera receding. There is a big horizon.

Doused - DIIV

[link] Not mainline SG but found it on DKFM. Strongly reminiscent of 80s goth-tinged postpunk like New Model Army and stuff like that. Urgent and atmospheric.  Refreshing to hear a revival of this type of sound.

Pilgrimage - R.E.M.

[link] I discovered this earlier album after The Reckoning, which was more subtle and in a lot of ways evocative of R.E.M.'s regional background. Murmur is a masterpiece of atmosphere and anthem; this song has both. One can see where folk music was Cezanne to their Picasso, here in an analytical cubism sense: constructing song as a rich but abstracted interplay and adjacency of motifs. The lyrics of all the earlier R.E.M. were also very pleasingly vague and abstract and stipes murmuring style of that period was the perfect way to deliver them.

Revisiting Gangnam Style

[link] Been thinking about, from an aesthetic point of view, why this video is so good. Good, in the sense that sometimes something hits the popular culture and becomes huge, because it has a new, somehow infectious, meme or set of traits. Here, the song by itself (I'm not at all familiary with Psy's music) is not particularly remarkable, although there are some interesting aspects to the song, in particular when parts build and then break down and start over. The song seems to be integral to the dance style that is the video (I don't know if Psy has this in his other videos). For me, and maybe for most viewers around the world, the part of the song and video that is most intriguing is the setting, the Gangnam district of Seoul and the apparent commentary on the people and lifestyle there. Putting the chauvinism aside, the concentration on a very particular urban place, and what appears to be a glamorous one, is intriguing. I've seen people like that occasionally in some parts of Taipei; the different parts of Taipei are also fascinating to me, so I can see Seoul being like that as well. The thing that really carries the whole video off of course is Psy's attitude and presence.  It's simultaneously self-deprecating and rap-esque arrogant. Also, at some points, he seems to be pointing to the whole place as an exhibition. I guess I've probably thought about this more than most people.  But I really like to figure out why some music and videos work so well.

Really happy for a colleague of mine

who heard today that he is being awarded his first NIH grant. I still remember that day and feeling for me.  It shouldn't be so important in science, but that's the system we have. My friend is an amazing scientist and colleague and a tremendous friend.

Love Removal Machine - the Cult

[link] I've probably talked about this before.  The Cult kept remaking essentially the same song.  But it was a damn good one.

Ship to Shore - Chris de Burgh

[link] My friend Scott was into Chris de Burgh in high school.  For some reason this song popped into my head the other day.  Doesn't really hold up over the years.  A little to slick for rock, IMHO.

Someone, Somewhere, in Summertime - Simple Minds

[link] An anthem of mine.  For almost thirty years now.

Light, Raking - Polvo

[link] The early 90s were a great time for music in the Triangle of NC. Polvo was a staple of the scene there.  Never saw them live (that I recall) but they were all over WXYC and WXDU.

Underdrawing For Three Forms Of Unhappiness At The State Of Existence - My Dead Girlfriend

[link] This band has some long song names and their name is reminiscent of My Dad is Dead, an 80s alt band. This is a really rich song.  The rhythm section plods and the vocal line is on-beat and chantlike. But there is a lot of sweetness. The B parts have a lot of denouement to them (I know I'm not using that word exactly correctly here). A heavy hard rainbow belying the title of the song.

Road, River, and Rail - Cocteau Twins

[link] From the sublime "Heaven or Las Vegas" album.  In three. It keeps a very even feeling through the verse parts and then comes to sort of descending rally points in the chorus intervals. For me there is this expansive landscape. Transport, but the land and water flowing by are the story.

what is it about Shoegaze

I've been thinking about this a bit lately. What do I hear in SG that attracts me so much? I think it is a really advanced form of music. It fills the space in a very noisy way.  The noise has emergent properties.  The noisiness is like clay.  It can be molded in very sublime ways. There are deliberately beautiful threads in a lot of SG: namely the use of very airy, soprano female vocals. This is a contrast but also a sort of adjuvant or catalyst. There is something akin to abstract expressionism in the application of these sounds together.  That's all I have on this for now...

Dry Your Eyes - Ash Code

[link] Found this on DKFM. Combines a lot of early 80s influences, from synthpop to goth. The silhouette-y video is reminiscent of the Sisters of Mercy.

A Rose Made of Galaxies - Orange Yellow Red

[link] I haven't read anything about these guys. Like Pale Saints back in the day, they vary in who does the vocals. The instrumental sound really is presaged by Pale Saints as well. And that is a completely great thing.

We Ran - Orange Yellow Red

[link] I really like this sound.  Terrific vocal texture and harmonies. Pale Saints blended with Cocteau Twins. The chorus of this song and the sort of abrupt transition into it is really nice. The production is superb. Nice video too.

Sleeper - Malory

[link] Smooth and heavy at the same time. Juggernauty. Sort of slipstream on the top end and a bit plodding in the rhythm section. Also evokative of some 80s gothy stuff. So in other words, it works.

Just found this

A Christmas card from my favorite online radio station, DKFM.

Technophilia

I imagine this word has a pretty broad usage, but I'm thinking of it as a trope that is in Computer Love, as well as a song I've blogged about here previously: I Love You Miss Robot by the Buggles.  I've also found it quite a bit in anime.  For example, the Big O, which we on DVD and have seen parts of (my wife has seen the whole thing) which involves a main male character and an assistant, who is romantically implicated, who is an android. The trope robot-ifies a female character, I think to symbolize the inaccessibility experienced by romantic male protagonists, who are often introverted. The tension is a huge part of the atmospherics of these stories.

More on Computer Love

The song can be read on several levels.  The raw sound was novel in 1981 and was the harbinger of electronic music invading pop and becoming ubiquitous.  The melody, arrangement, and production is supreme atmosphere. It's wistful. It has a retro tint to it. It's future as future-as-past, as something that has worn. I've always read this music as the product of a European modernism that was already the better part of a century old. By the 80s, a lot of internationalist architecture, while still being built around the world, was also starting to crumble.  It was lived-in and becoming gritty. Many of the visual images that Kraftwerk used had this feel to them. So there's a new vibrancy to this music but also a projection of how a future that is still a little ahead of us will be looked back upon.

Computer Love - Kraftwerk

[link] This song gets at an aesthetic that Kraftwerk classically developed that I have also been reaching toward. The sort of experimental (but aesthetically serious) desire to mechanize. An admiration of machine perfection and efficiency. A willing assimilation of inevitable technological change. So open that accepting it includes the romantic.

When You Get There - Zebra

[link] Loved these guys in high school. They're actually a Long Island band (originally from New Orleans, I think) and still play around here.  Here is a live version of this song recorded in 2009.

Darkness - the Police

[link] A song to fit my mood tonight. A masterpiece, actually.

parenting and science

cannot be done simultaneously.  Successful scientists who have kids do not parent those kids.  Someone else does. Or at least they have a physically able partner. But male scientists typically are the minor partner in the work of parenting.  It takes my situation for a male scientist to realize really what parenting is.

today's legos

Legos were great when I was a kid.  There were relatively few kinds of pieces and few colors and the child's creativity made up all the rest.  Today there are way too many specialized and really tiny pieces. Unfun, in my opinion.

More about Star Wars Uncut

The real message I take from it is that by "doing" Star Wars in all those different interchangeable contexts, Star Wars becomes a transforming principle for the whole culture.  Star Wars is more than just a huge pop cultural phenomenon. The entirety of modern life can be seen through Star Wars, as Star Wars.

Star Wars Uncut

[link] Really creative idea.  Absolutely hilarious and deeply loving results, from the fan perspective.