After a conversation I've now forgotten, with a person I can no longer remember, I still managed to write down three amazing tips on books I need to follow up on for my work-in-progress on car audio and territorialization.
Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies
Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare
Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb
Showing posts with label music life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music life. Show all posts
Friday, March 15, 2013
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Big Announcement Time! About My New Book, Blown Horizonz
Hello friends! I'm really excited to make an exciting announcement. About WRITINGS.
If you read this here blog, you see random, scattered, off-the-cuff musings on a semi-random assortment of popular culture nuggets, political haps, hot links, etc. But you may also occasionally see links to my writing elsewhere, and maybe you've wondered at those times, HEY, WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT?
What's it all about is that I pretty frequently for the last ten years or so have been writing about music for outlets like Tinymixtapes, the Japan Times, The Wag, Popmatters, Audiogalaxy, etc. I've now finally taken the time to compile some of these pieces into my FIRST BOOK!
It is titled Blown Horizonz: Incidental Comments on Psychedelic Noise, Abstract Rap, and Other Music That Will End Your Mind, and it will be released on September 1st, 2012.
Actually I should have probably written "FIRST BOOK"! above, in scare quotes, because it may or may not be a real "book." It's an ebook, which I'm self-releasing, with the generous cooperation of my various editors and publishers. Is that a real book? Your call, bro.
The collection will contain essays about everything from free jazz to weird folk to U.K. garage to Kool Keith. It includes interviews, mostly with white rappers like Cage, Themselves, and MC Paul Barman. Some of these pieces are difficult or impossible to find, including essays on Japanese hip hop and the Night People scene that I published in the print-only magazine Signal to Noise, and pieces from a decade ago that only saw the light of day in small newsletters. There will also be at least one piece written fresh for this collection.
One of the Signal to Noise essays was shortlisted for the 2010 edition of Da Capo Press's Best Music Writing, so that might be worth checking out. My writing has also been praised by such luminaries as Michael Gira of Swans and Dylan Ettinger. But just in case that's not compelling enough, you can watch this space over the next month for samples, plugs, and the like.
Best of all, the book will be FREE for at least two weeks after its initial release! How will I make money, you ask? And my answer is, of course, volume, my friend. Volume.
I hope at least one or two of you are as excited about this as I am. (Thanks Mom!)
If you would be interested in receiving a digital copy of the book for review, please let me know in the comments section below. Thanks!
If you read this here blog, you see random, scattered, off-the-cuff musings on a semi-random assortment of popular culture nuggets, political haps, hot links, etc. But you may also occasionally see links to my writing elsewhere, and maybe you've wondered at those times, HEY, WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT?
What's it all about is that I pretty frequently for the last ten years or so have been writing about music for outlets like Tinymixtapes, the Japan Times, The Wag, Popmatters, Audiogalaxy, etc. I've now finally taken the time to compile some of these pieces into my FIRST BOOK!
Actually I should have probably written "FIRST BOOK"! above, in scare quotes, because it may or may not be a real "book." It's an ebook, which I'm self-releasing, with the generous cooperation of my various editors and publishers. Is that a real book? Your call, bro.
The collection will contain essays about everything from free jazz to weird folk to U.K. garage to Kool Keith. It includes interviews, mostly with white rappers like Cage, Themselves, and MC Paul Barman. Some of these pieces are difficult or impossible to find, including essays on Japanese hip hop and the Night People scene that I published in the print-only magazine Signal to Noise, and pieces from a decade ago that only saw the light of day in small newsletters. There will also be at least one piece written fresh for this collection.
One of the Signal to Noise essays was shortlisted for the 2010 edition of Da Capo Press's Best Music Writing, so that might be worth checking out. My writing has also been praised by such luminaries as Michael Gira of Swans and Dylan Ettinger. But just in case that's not compelling enough, you can watch this space over the next month for samples, plugs, and the like.
Best of all, the book will be FREE for at least two weeks after its initial release! How will I make money, you ask? And my answer is, of course, volume, my friend. Volume.
I hope at least one or two of you are as excited about this as I am. (Thanks Mom!)
If you would be interested in receiving a digital copy of the book for review, please let me know in the comments section below. Thanks!
Thursday, March 22, 2012
SXSW Post-Op: Sapphire Slows
I discovered a few great new bands and made a few great new friends at SXSW this year, and sometimes they were the SAME PEOPLE. For example in this case - Sapphire Slows puts on an awesome show and makes awesome music and also simply is awesome, for good measure. She played the Not Not Fun house party at Hounds of Love, and also the fantastic Impose magazine party at the Longbranch.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
The Dance of Fate: Success and Failure in Music Business and Music Life
I spent much of yesterday helping a friend move into a new place. This friend is also the owner and manager of a mid-sized independent record label in Tokyo - I met him initially through my research and have spent a lot of time with him since. There were about a dozen people there to help, but since he'd also hired a super-efficient group of professional movers, there wasn't quite enough to keep everyone busy. In the end, it was more than anything a group celebration of a new stage in the life of a man who was to various degrees friend, business associate, or boss to the rest of us.
The condo he was moving into with his fiance was pretty great by Tokyo standards, a three-story with space for a guest room, a room that will serve as the fiance's home office, a really nice kitchen, a ground-floor patio AND a second-floor balcony - and most important, room for the baby they'll be having in just a couple of months. I also got to see the apartment they'd occupied for the previous five years, a small, cramped space that I could hardly believe had held the two of them and their dog. The move was a moment of success, mostly paid for by the truly righteous work my friend does providing a place for artists outside of Japan's major-label system, putting on shows that attract thousands of people and festivals that attract tens of thousands.
I was reminded of a quite different celebration I went to a month or two ago. Another friend of mine, a DJ and producer, held a release event for his latest EP. It was in an obscure bar in Shibuya, not even really an event space, just barely big enough to hold the fifty to sixty people who showed up. The release was a CD in a hand-stamped/painted sleeve. It was a fun event, full of people who were friends with the star of the evening, and with each other, but who had basically no potential to make money from or through one another. I talked to my friend after the event, and learned that the EP had been released in a miniscule run of 300, and also that he hadn't DJed or done any shows in the six months preceding. He had, however, recently met a woman he was planing to marry, and said he was going to start looking for work more reliable than his current gig at an amusement park. He knew that if he took a full-time job, he wouldn't be able to keep going with music consistently. But he said that he had accomplished many things he wanted to (releasing an album or two, playing plenty of shows, working with other gifted musicians) and was ready to move on. He struck me as genuinely happy.
I'm at a stage in my life where I inevitably think about success and the long arc of human life quite a bit, and the comparison between these two is fascinating, if not entirely illuminating. They've arrived at similar stages of their lives in dramatically different shape. One had built a small empire and was able to live comfortably. He works incredibly hard, but is moving in a straight line that seems to lead only upward. The other is about to go through a transition that promises to be both exciting and wrenching, as he tries to launch a sustainable career in his early thirties.
What's the difference between these two? One reason it's an interesting comparison is that their musical interests are about equally accessible - not pop, but not noise, either - so we can eliminate that as a determiner of "success." In many months of getting to know these two guys, the difference seems to be simply how hard and consistently they've worked, and how goal-oriented they've been. From my friend the DJ/producer, I always got the sense that music occupied a vague space between hobby and ambition. He was around people with an equally hazy vision. On the other hand, the label head has had his priorities very much in order since he was in his late teens, when he skipped college to pursue music promotion. In addition to working about sixty hours a week, he very much treats music as a business.
But there seem to have been tradeoffs, corollaries to these two men's different natures. My friend the DJ is a profoundly warm person, generous and cheerful and relaxed. He is surrounded by friends who like him for himself, many of whom enjoy making music with him, but as a communal rather than commercial activity. The ties that bind them are personal and intimate. The label head, on the other hand, is surrounded almost entirely by people he works with. Now, this is a million miles from the sad workaholism it might sound like - the reason he got into the music business in the first place was because he loved working with artists, with musicians, photographers, writers. These are people with interesting personalities, and maybe we should all be so lucky as to enjoy the permeable boundaries between friendship and work that my friend does. I certainly know I enjoy this in my own life - the relationship we share is exactly one of these business/friendships. But I also know firsthand that there's a certain gnawing emptiness to it, a need to get outside of the circumference of the functional and be with other people purely for their own sake. I sometimes sense that this label head has sacrificed more than might be immediately obvious - that the cost of making his own path has been a hypervigilance that separates him, every so slightly, from the rhythms of normal human social life.
There's no line here between good or bad, the right or wrong way to do things. Both of these people have led incredibly rich lives, and done great services to the rest of their community and culture. Certainly the more important distinction to be made from those who have not felt empowered to pursue their grand dreams, or those who were never lucky enough to have them in the first place. Those are the people - arguably, the 'normal' people - who I truly can't understand. But even within the realm of the creative, there is a wide spectrum of approaches, ambitions, ideas, personalities . . . and we eventually find our way back to the most difficult question of all, that of will. My friend the label head indulged in some very rare self-mythologizing last night, telling the brief story of his (entirely legal) entrepreneurialism as a teenager. The money he made from this early dip into business let him buy the records that inspired him onto his current path. None of what followed would have happened without that early moment when some built-in impulse to buy low and sell high kicked in - but at the time it was with no goal in mind, something you could even call instinctual. In turn, he's had a profound impact on hundreds, maybe thousands of Japanese kids by putting interesting music in their hands.
I was reminded of a quite different celebration I went to a month or two ago. Another friend of mine, a DJ and producer, held a release event for his latest EP. It was in an obscure bar in Shibuya, not even really an event space, just barely big enough to hold the fifty to sixty people who showed up. The release was a CD in a hand-stamped/painted sleeve. It was a fun event, full of people who were friends with the star of the evening, and with each other, but who had basically no potential to make money from or through one another. I talked to my friend after the event, and learned that the EP had been released in a miniscule run of 300, and also that he hadn't DJed or done any shows in the six months preceding. He had, however, recently met a woman he was planing to marry, and said he was going to start looking for work more reliable than his current gig at an amusement park. He knew that if he took a full-time job, he wouldn't be able to keep going with music consistently. But he said that he had accomplished many things he wanted to (releasing an album or two, playing plenty of shows, working with other gifted musicians) and was ready to move on. He struck me as genuinely happy.
I'm at a stage in my life where I inevitably think about success and the long arc of human life quite a bit, and the comparison between these two is fascinating, if not entirely illuminating. They've arrived at similar stages of their lives in dramatically different shape. One had built a small empire and was able to live comfortably. He works incredibly hard, but is moving in a straight line that seems to lead only upward. The other is about to go through a transition that promises to be both exciting and wrenching, as he tries to launch a sustainable career in his early thirties.
What's the difference between these two? One reason it's an interesting comparison is that their musical interests are about equally accessible - not pop, but not noise, either - so we can eliminate that as a determiner of "success." In many months of getting to know these two guys, the difference seems to be simply how hard and consistently they've worked, and how goal-oriented they've been. From my friend the DJ/producer, I always got the sense that music occupied a vague space between hobby and ambition. He was around people with an equally hazy vision. On the other hand, the label head has had his priorities very much in order since he was in his late teens, when he skipped college to pursue music promotion. In addition to working about sixty hours a week, he very much treats music as a business.
But there seem to have been tradeoffs, corollaries to these two men's different natures. My friend the DJ is a profoundly warm person, generous and cheerful and relaxed. He is surrounded by friends who like him for himself, many of whom enjoy making music with him, but as a communal rather than commercial activity. The ties that bind them are personal and intimate. The label head, on the other hand, is surrounded almost entirely by people he works with. Now, this is a million miles from the sad workaholism it might sound like - the reason he got into the music business in the first place was because he loved working with artists, with musicians, photographers, writers. These are people with interesting personalities, and maybe we should all be so lucky as to enjoy the permeable boundaries between friendship and work that my friend does. I certainly know I enjoy this in my own life - the relationship we share is exactly one of these business/friendships. But I also know firsthand that there's a certain gnawing emptiness to it, a need to get outside of the circumference of the functional and be with other people purely for their own sake. I sometimes sense that this label head has sacrificed more than might be immediately obvious - that the cost of making his own path has been a hypervigilance that separates him, every so slightly, from the rhythms of normal human social life.
There's no line here between good or bad, the right or wrong way to do things. Both of these people have led incredibly rich lives, and done great services to the rest of their community and culture. Certainly the more important distinction to be made from those who have not felt empowered to pursue their grand dreams, or those who were never lucky enough to have them in the first place. Those are the people - arguably, the 'normal' people - who I truly can't understand. But even within the realm of the creative, there is a wide spectrum of approaches, ambitions, ideas, personalities . . . and we eventually find our way back to the most difficult question of all, that of will. My friend the label head indulged in some very rare self-mythologizing last night, telling the brief story of his (entirely legal) entrepreneurialism as a teenager. The money he made from this early dip into business let him buy the records that inspired him onto his current path. None of what followed would have happened without that early moment when some built-in impulse to buy low and sell high kicked in - but at the time it was with no goal in mind, something you could even call instinctual. In turn, he's had a profound impact on hundreds, maybe thousands of Japanese kids by putting interesting music in their hands.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
New Glaciers of Ice: "Low (inst)"
Low (inst) by Glaciers of Ice
What may superficially look like a fun side project or even a "hobby" insidiously links back to my professional life. Making music isn't just important in its own right, but is also a way to better understand the musicians that I write about. But as I get better at it myself, these rationalizations and diversions become less and less important.
What may superficially look like a fun side project or even a "hobby" insidiously links back to my professional life. Making music isn't just important in its own right, but is also a way to better understand the musicians that I write about. But as I get better at it myself, these rationalizations and diversions become less and less important.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Regarding Workers
I took the above photo a couple of days after the 3.11 earthquake, mainly to illustrate the amazing speed with which Tokyo returned to everyday normality. The guy in the middle is just one subtype of an eternal Tokyo presence - the sidewalk promoter. He's giving out flyers (and probably tissue packages) to promote a contact lens shop, but you'll also see people doing much the same work in service of Italian restaurants, Karaoke boxes, manga kissaten, Korean barbecues, and hostess clubs (including the vile subspecies who harass passing young women to try and lure them into the sex industry).
I've lately been thinking about how little I understand the human element of a job like this. It's just one of a variety of undeniably crappy jobs you see people doing every day in a city like Tokyo, from fast-food server to Donki clerk to construction-site traffic-director. The last time I worked a job of this sort was about a year ago, when I did short stints as a parking-lot attendant and line-cook as part of my confused attempts to deal with unexpected funding shortfalls in my last year of grad school. Both were part-time jobs, and the line cook job was actually a hell of a lot of fun, but I ended up quitting both jobs with no notice in moments of frustration and/or overwork.
I had that option, because I knew I was on my way to other things, but I was nonetheless able to hold onto some (facile, superficial) sense of solidarity with "workers," thanks to my cushioned, provisional version of poverty, and the genuinely merciless grind of grad school, in some ways undeniably more demanding and even exploitative than this sort of service job.
Now, though, I'm realizing how much that illusion of lived solidarity was insulating me from a real consideration of the challenges posed by living in a mercilessly stratified society. Job-wise, I'm now living a ridiculous fantasy, which if not quite financially secure does happen to include total freedom. I'm suddenly not sure how to feel about the legions of workers through whom I float, to whose daily struggle I find it more and more difficult to truly relate.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Photo Roundup: May 2011
A few highlights from the past few weeks:
Melt Banana today, 5/14
A really stunning juggler in Ueno park
A famous mural by Okamoto Taro in Shibuya Station. Apparently the central figure is the inspiration for the apocalyptic robots of the Evangelion cartoons.
Slovenia's most popular rapper, at a small bar in Koenji called One.
Noise and generative video at Soup, Koenji.
Melt Banana today, 5/14
A really stunning juggler in Ueno park
A famous mural by Okamoto Taro in Shibuya Station. Apparently the central figure is the inspiration for the apocalyptic robots of the Evangelion cartoons.
Slovenia's most popular rapper, at a small bar in Koenji called One.
Noise and generative video at Soup, Koenji.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Notes from the Field: Three Studios: Hip Hop Life
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