Brutalist.

i have spoken before on here about my love for a certain kind of office or public building- and i realized  today that i was, all along, talking about Brutalist architecture.

its good to name things, so that one can have a shorthand.

Obviously the term "brutalist" implies a coldness, which is the one word that can sum up what many people dislike about buildings like these. There is a hyper-utilitarianism about them, a sense of facelessness. I understand that, but i don't feel the same way.

When I lived in the east with my sister, I fell in love with one particular building in the small downtown area of the city where we lived. I just had a fascination for that building. one time i went inside of it, and to the top in the elevator. it felt like an adventure to me.

it isn't necessarily the modernist aspect of the buildings that get me. i would definitely say i have a deep love of clean lines, and in that respect, i am a modernist. but i also have a bend in my mentality that gravitates towards things that are EERIE. things that for others, would be disturbing, blot out the light.

some of my first and best memories are of hearing ghost stories. my parents were great fans of telling stories about dead relatives calling their name, of the house down the road where a lady could be seen going to the well except she wasn't really there, the sound of a black panther screaming and how it sounded like a woman....and all the while you are with your family and you feel perfectly safe.

just as a sexual fetishist gets a kink in his brain about penny loafers because something sexual melded at just the right time with two seemingly disparate things, so did i become always comforted by being spooked. as i child i used to WISH i could see a ghost, have prophetic dreams, have a UFO land in front of me on the railroad tracks. i remember being completely shocked in second grade when a fellow student who had been sitting listening to my ghost stories approached a teacher to ask her about ghosts, and she said, "there is no such thing". i was just dumbfounded. i really believed that everyone believed.

with a head like that so many of the things i have loved over the years have had this flavor. its why broadcast and the focus group's ep "witch cults" is one of my all time favorite records. anything that takes me there, to that mysterious head of my childhood, where i was also an anglophile and imagined every rainy day I was in England- a place i know i wanted to go to from a very young age because of its claim to be the most haunted place on earth- those are the things i love the best. its why everything in the hauntological aesthetic seems like something taken out of my own private file. i think i have looked at things hauntologically in a very acute way my entire life.

and that's why i love these buildings. there is a sense of woebegoneness, a sense of post-prosperity. and the sense of some of them having been public, meant for public use and empty at night, that just sets off all kinds of switches in my mind. the idea that something can be so BUSY during the day, and so literally forsaken at night.... what is that? Like the fashion district in downtown Los Angeles, a place that, upon discovering it, literally had me panting with excitement. it was like a made some sort of scientific discovery. to find streets that were COMPLETELY DARK in the middle of a huge city- no streetlights, no traffic lights, just row after row of buildings with the shutters pulled down- it just always hits me like a romance.

someone should name that feeling.

the purity of mathematics

i never thought i would say it, but i have fallen in love with mathematics.

the elegant little formulas for determining the slope of a line and graphing linear equations really began to drive it home for me. for a week i had been frightened of attempting my graphs homework and i sat there with the graph paper and my ruler for a couple of evenings trying to hammer into my mind why the hell anyone would want to graph an equation to solve it, or what the use would be.

staring at it, and getting another take on if from a couple of other textbooks, i understood. and the beauty and wonder and sense of it all really made it on par with a great work of art. realizing its something like extrapolation- determining what is going to happen up the line- equated it in my mind with some kind of telepathy, with numbers.

of course it isn't so mysterious- or is it? i find it amazing that anyone discovered these things at all. beyond that, realizing that we can determine so much about what can happen and what has happened simply using mathematics (not disregarding the Great Unknowable which is of course, immeasurable, probably) is just one of those things that is hitting me like poetry. it IS poetry.

my greatest wish is that i could somehow light a spark in other artists, especially those who believed they could never learn math, on what makes it such a wonderful system that has made so much possible.  its much like when i find a new band, or hear a great song that i want to share- i want to sit everyone down and graph out an equation and plot those points and then draw the line through it all to show the great symmetry of the system. matrixes are next on the list to learn, and visually they are so stunning that i have no doubt they will romance me in much the same way that graphing has.

math textbooks have been a fetish of mine for quite a while- especially the old editions with their fantastic fonts and op-art illustrations that spark a moog soundtrack in your mind when you look at them. to actually be beginning to understand on a deep level the "why" and the "how" is just an added bonus i never thought i would get. its just so RESTFUL, when you know what you are doing, to sit down with a problem, especially the graphs or figuring a series circuit in parallel, and work them out. when you cross check and discover you have it right, i always want to do a little dance. and i have been, in that sense, dancing alot lately.

perhaps one day i can teach this, demonstrate the poetry of it. because most math teachers didn't start out as artists, they started out with a natural affinity for the complexities of it and were able to get it quite easily. when you have had to literally claw your way to the barest understanding, it feels much sweeter, and its so much more exciting.

April 2013, Broadcast on the cover of "Shindig"!

I cradle a hope in my heart that Broadcast will one day go down as Legends.

Its funny, because they gave me such hope in modern music that I actually seek out new bands now, something i had never done before (tho i have always been a deep digger of older obscurities). What's so funny about that is that the more new bands that i hear the better Broadcast becomes. I get a better understanding of the context and content of modern (and by modern i mean, 90's and up) music and i understand that my 20+ years of bitching about how modern music sucks was not terribly off the mark, actually. It just makes Broadcast a billion times more special.

They are satisfying on so many levels. If you want spooky pastoral, they can take you there. If you want to move your ass, they can take you there as well. If you want freakout movie music, psychedelic dream pop, or avant garde experiments, they got it all.

It is a bit frustrating for me that their biggest hit was "Come On Let's Go", which i have to count as probably my least favorite song of theirs. Not only does it not represent the guts they had, but it sounds like a compromise, something i am confident they never partook in.

but that's what makes them great. here is a band who could make a pop hit, then go off and do something like "Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age", an album i would rather be mauled to death slowly by a pack of rabid wolves than consider living without. Of course, there were quite a few years between "Come On" and "Witch Cults", and its almost like juxtaposing "I wanna hold your hand" with "Sargeant Pepper". It simply didn't give you any clue as to where this band was gonna go.
If i could force anyone to spend some time with one record, i would choose that one. There have been a few times with friends, late at night out in my outdoor psychedelic living room with the colored lights going and some good weed, and this record will be on and in one of the spooky moments someone will say, with a shiver, "Wow, this is really psychedelic". The way they say it always has a twinge of the fear in it, like how you feel when you are standing on the verge of a good hallucinogen. and the fact that Broadcast do this without relying on any of the trappings of the neo-psychedelisists like sitars or moany long-winded "The End" send-ups is quite amazing. For all their worship of The United States of America, french pop (Trish called Clothilde's sole LP her favorite album of all time and yes, it is bloody fantastic) and the sixties in general, no band in my mind has made those influences their own so deeply as they did while sidestepping the Antiques-Roadshow syndrome of so many sixties revisionists. Even in their early, Stereolab-worshipping days, they always came off as completely their own thing. The territory they traversed is completely their own.

i recently heard a radio show from 2011 available on the archive.org, called "Goodbye Girl", which was a tribute to Trish after her death and also a look at the whole West Midlands hauntology "scene", if you want to call it that. Apart from the songs by Plone, Pram, and the older stuff (Basil Kirchen, the aforementioned USA etc), all the new bands they played absolutely blew. Then they would play a song by Broadcast and you were just blown away by how more fully realized their sound was. And not once did they mention the Ghost Box label, which just goes to show you how little they knew. The Focus Group is by far the best band on that label, but Belbury Poly are pretty good, and Hong Kong in the Sixties have a number or two that are decent. But Focus Group's "Sketches and Spells" is just gobsmacking, an essential companion to "Witch Cults", which Julian House (EXCELLENT graphic designer and cofounder of Ghost Box and sole man behind Focus Group") collaborated with them on.

Of course, then she had to go off and fucking DIE, leaving a legacy unsung and so much work yet to be done. Yes, there was the soundtrack (fucking BRILLIANT) to "Berberian Sound Studio" and James Cargill (whom yes, i will admit to having a bit of a crush on, he IS a handsome lad) is putting together one last Broadcast LP from the tapes Trish left behind, which has to be a heartbreaker. Your woman and your band mate is dead and you get to stay behind curating. It takes alot of brawn to heft a load like that. I will buy twenty copies when it comes out, even if it is the worst record ever made.

In the meantime, go and have a read at this. And if you are reading this, go and buy pretty much every damn thing this band ever did, and start with "Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age' and don't say I never did you any kindnesses. That is all.

the charm of the earnest

i have a new addiction. musical websites belonging to extraordinarily ordinary people.

I work as an assistant for a pro-audio reseller, and while looking up info one day about Omnichords (you gotta love you some Omnichords) i found a charming, and yes, archaic website belonging to an older fellow who repairs and teaches classes on these weird little machines.

If you aren't familiar with an Omnichord, its sort of a user friendly electronic harpsichord with Casio underpinnings. You know what i mean- its got the built-in synth "waltz" beats, horrible yet wonderful electronic equivalents of things like flutes and trumpets- and its "FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY!"

Yes, really. 

The above is just one example of this family-friendly ethos that spawned quite a little library of horribly inappropriate (at least on my own snooty rarified esthetic grounds) songbooks aimed at middle America (and Canada too, probably). Its pretty bizarre considering this is the same instrument that can be heard in songs by people like (the beloved) Broadcast, Antenna, and Stereolab, to name a few... the same instrument that might just now, be accompanying a little old church choir in say, Florida. 

But I digress. 

The websites. 

Its an entirely new world for me. But I find people really the most fascinating thing of all. I have always been interested in true crime and the MOST fascinating thing for me has always been the victims, the little details of their lives, the things that perhaps led them to wind up on that street corner or at that bar on just That Night. In fact, if ordinary people wrote more books about their lives, that is probably all I would ever read. Nothing is too boring for me. I like hearing all the mundane details, where they grew up, their perspective on things like, say, UFOs, or physics, or Divine Judgement. Ordinary people are actually not at all ordinary. I discovered that after years of working at gas stations in the south- every one, but everyone, is interesting, but they just don't know it. 

So, when you have someone who thinks of themselves as ordinary, who writes songs that you and I know (in our infinite and questionable wisdom) will never make the top 40, and then they make a website, what you have is a weird little corner of the Internet Multiverse. Its like the worldwide web equivalent of song poems- those "for a fee" songs that are being collected now by more obviously weird people like myself. Listen to 20 or 30 of those in an evening and regular music will start to sound patently ridiculous and even uninspired. Songs like "Moon Men" or "Jimmy Carter Says Yes" or "Octopus Woman Let Me Go"....songs written by people who work 9-5 for 30 years and raise families and tap out tunes on their Omnichords or Casios and write weird little poems that rhyme in clumsy ways... but somehow the end result is a weird kind of genius, completely and utterly devoid of guile, irony, or conventional talent. 

So I have been spending a good chunk of my free time just wandering around, looking for the right websites to turn that crank. A dead giveaway is really bad, Windows-95-era graphics. You know, the Angelfire-free-website-era graphics. Comic Sans font, some adverts placed at the bottom for cheaper insurance, choppily-scrolling pages, and of course, heaps of grammatical errors. 

It must be said, if it is not obvious, that I am not looking for comedy here. I am not laughing heartily at the stupidity or lack of sophistication of Joe Six Pack. I actually find it alot more interesting than the self-absorbed, esoteric hepster ramblings of someone who is a bit more "tuned in". I WANT to hear the thoughts and see the creativity of people who have, honest to god, probably have never even heard of the Velvet Underground. I already KNOW what people like ME think, pretty much- i have inhabited that landscape my whole life. And I live in Los Angeles, at an artist's collective and underground venue. I get vast boatloads of Hep and Irony on my plate every day. Something in me cries out sometimes for the ordinary, the naive, the guileless, for those that don't know any better. I find it supremely restful. 

A wonderful example of this is ...THIS....

and this...

and this.

The great thing about websites like the above is that they sometimes venture into some off-key territory.  Check this out....see jesus in a rorshach.

Or a woman suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder.

There is also the weird subset of websites that are "faith-based". Some of these are even better examples of what I am talking about, drenched in earnest appeals and canned piano gospel, with the occasional political diatribe thrown in for good measure. 

Again, this is not a clever mock, more like a sociological study. Do such people ever peer over the fence at US, the artsy, techy, above-it-all-types who salivate over Suicide boxsets and Can rereleases and blog about it on our Macs? Are they disturbed, or interested, or consider us godless? Have we all gotten too sophisticated, a little too steeped in our genre-fication and false depths? 

Then again, some of it is pretty funny. And we probably are godless, compared to Peggy. 

Summer, Missing

photos from the california backcountry, near yosemite, 2012- lost with family in a golden valley. i miss them.

Berberian Sound Studio

I have never waited with such anticipation on a film in my entire life. The concept, the soundtrack (beloved Broadcast), the whole giallo/library overtone-all of it was like porn, appealing to me on an almost animal level. Naturally, with such a buildup, there is bound to be disappointment, but I am happy to say that it is not nearly of the nature I expected.

First off, you should know, THE ENDING SUCKS. There are a few things in history I would change, and this is one of them. Its almost unimaginable that such brilliance would end so unexpectedly, as if a reel were missing, but it did, and one is left with the rest of the film, which is no small consolation.

But up until that time, I have to say, I was utterly in thrall. Completely. I must use the word "porn" again as nothing else quite captures the salivating glory of seeing all those old sound machines, echoplexes, tape machines, VU meters, all the up-close-electronic ephemera interspersed with Broadcast's brilliant (HEAVILY brilliant) music. I mean, kill me, I die happy. My pulse would race when the frame would go black and all you could see was a red flash- "SILENZIO". Never in my life has a film been as delicious, as made-to-order for my own fascinations as this one. I was so enthralled that when the film ended it was like being upended out of a warm bed in the middle of the night with a flashlight in your face. Ergo, i was a bit pissed.

But no matter. It satisfied even MORE than i thought it would, all the actors were brilliant, Toby Jones is fantastic, every frame is fantastic, except the end, and if it were food, I would have three courses of it and sneak to the fridge in the middle of the night in secret. Probably the only other film i can think of that I felt the same way for was "Performance", with its spooky overtones and nervous breakdowns and  black legacy. It has definitely inflamed my desires, and i want nothing more out of life than to work with sound and vintage machines and see tape spool and spin on spindles in the middle of the night in a basement in a dodgy sound studio. that night world of vintage technology, the smell of solid state electronics, the hiss of the tape heads.

Radio Show-Night Fall's "The All Nighter"

A more recent radio show, i think from the late seventies.
"Night Fall" is a Canadian radio show that lasted for about a 100 episodes and is probably my second favorite series of all time. The shows tended to be a little weirder and stayed pretty clear of crime-drama territory, instead focusing on "Twilight-Zone"-esque scenarios. There are many favorites from this series but I find this one one of the most unsettling.

The plot concerns an actress who also works nights in a 24-hour laundry. She notices a very strange man enter one night, and then disappear- and then discovers human flesh in the washing machine. Its one of those "WTF" plots that "NightFall" seems so fond of, and its actually unsettling besides. Download it here.