IT'S OUT! Blown Horizonz: Incidental Notes on Psychedelic Noise, Abstract Rap, and Other Music That Will End Your Mind

Note: I'm now blogging at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's more attractive, and it focuses more on cool stuff like music and fiction.  Check it out!

It's coming, it's coming, it's here.  Collecting over a decade worth of writing about mind-boggling sound, Blown Horizonz strips away the insignificant fuzz and takes you to the deep dark places where music can remake you, remake us, remake our whole society into something bigger, weirder, and more free.


I feel like out of all of the press I've received for this record, that your review is the first one to truly understand where I was coming from and what I was trying to accomplish.
-Dylan Ettinger

Enclosed please find a check representing the payment for your piece selected for Best Music Writing 2010. On behalf of Daphne Carr and all of us at Da Capo, I want to express our deep regret that necessity unfortunately required that your piece be cut from the collection.
-Jonathan Crowe, Editor, Da Capo Press.


Noise is the imperfection that shows us that the world doesn’t have to be the way anyone tells us. Because what is perfect is dead - If some bit of studio-processed pop manages to have a spark of actual artistic life, it is a fluke, a monstrosity, an inexplicable anomaly. The sunzabitches even managed eventually to get the vibrational frequency of ‘grunge’ into a studio processing unit and started making songs in which the distortion sounded careful and clean. It always happens, capitalism recouping some pretty and successful version of a chaotic failure that initially captured attention by being spectacularly WRONG and exciting everyone thereby.

I have witnessed on record and in life an ethical noise, an aesthetic refusal of what we are told to call ourselves, new tribes traveling nomadic routes that short-circuit convention. They were able to do what they wanted and face uncertainty and not panic, which to me seemed as magical and unlikely as Clint Eastwood gunslingers facing down imminent murder without blinking. As much as I’d looked for the darkness, I still carried with me and maybe always will a certain suburban-normal fear of instability, and I looked at the way they lived and I envied it but didn’t feel it was mine to have. I imagined into them some sort of purer unmediated relationship with experience and desire. I wanted that noise to enter the substance of my life, but I could not let go of what was clean and safe.

When something appears simple and clear we are easily deceived into thinking we understand it, and as soon as we are thus deceived we might as well be dead. Confidence and clarity are the end of change and possibility. Noise presents us with an impenetrable barrier and tells us only that we must confront that blank wall and make sense of it ourselves. What we find when we truly face the irrational is inevitably some version of ourselves and what we believe and what we want, truer than what we ever could have seen if we’d been staring at a crystalline Technicolor projection of another person’s dream.

Noise is the sound of not knowing the future, of not needing or wanting anything. Noise takes us to Interzone, to interrogate the black meat, to ask questions about just what is this world we live in, and how can we or should we change it. It forces us to think about change because it shows us that anything Anything ANYTHING is possible. When we confront the blank barrier of the unknowable, the absence of order and meaning, we can admit that we know nothing. 



Blown Horizonz is available FREE in a variety of formats from Smashwords for the next week (9/13-9/20). 

Gangster Computer God

International Transport Volume 5A - Clean it Up And Dub It

(The idea behind these mixes - of pointing out little-known American music for Japanese audiences, and vice versa - has been inconsistently executed.  But now we're doing it for real - this is part 1 of a matched set, and the second part should go up in no more than a few days.  This one's for my Japanese friends.）

International Transport 5 - Clean It Up and Dub It

ここに集まった欧米に作った曲には、最近も、ちょっと前の曲も入ているのに、ほとんどダッブの生気からインスピレーションもらった。Ｔｈｅ　Ｗｅｅｋｎｄは基本的にＲ＆Ｂ，ピーキングラライトスはＩｎｄｉｅ世界から来たん、ＨｏｌｙＯｔｈｅｒは多分テクノと言うんだけど、三つは似ているようにダッブ芸実使う。

俺は最近得にテキサスをはじめアメリカの南から２０００年代に出たヒップホップにはまっている。”Ｓｃｒｅｗ”と言うスタイルは日本にほとんど知られていないけど、最近サイケデリック世界にも音響している。特にＳａｌｅｍというバンドを影響された。スローはキーワード。いわゆる”Ｓｙｒｕｐ”麻薬がこういう雰囲気の作るのに強い影響あった。　”Ｓｔｉｌｌ　Ｔｉｐｐｉｎ’”は私が一番好きのＳｃｒｅｗ風な曲。

ダッブや、Ｓｃｒｅｗ、「ノイズ」もこのミックスの中心です。ＣｌａｍｓＣａｓｉｎｏと言う、日本にまだ知られていないトラックメイカーはノイズだらけ、けどフックも信じられない。同じ用に、ビッグジャッスの「Ｄｅｄｉｃａｔｉｏｎ　２　Ｐｅｏ」はある表面にきれいの逆けど、美しいになる。

Playlist Next

Review - Peaking Lights - 936

Peaking Lights - All The Sun That Shines from Not Not Fun on Vimeo.

This has already been reviewed back at Tinymixtapes, but I've been listening the hell out of it, so I thought I'd chime in.  This band has been with me for a while, since they were great friends with the Night People crew back in Iowa City, and would come through a couple times every year between 2007 or so and my departure.  When I first saw them, they were still a fairly sprawly, lo-fi psych act in some sort of Pink Floyd vein, but they quickly got more and more beat-oriented. 936 is the culmination of this - culmination in the sense that it's hard to imagine anyone doing the particular thing Peaking Lights do any better than it's done here.  If Pocohaunted eventually turned into a raging Afrobeat band fronted by teenage girls, Peaking Lights is the Upsetters of American Underground Psych - they lay deeeeeep in the cut, from the ruthlessly minimal Linn drum patterns to the lo fi recordings to the utterly deadpan lead vocals.  If you love analog warmth, tons of reverb and delay, and a steady, relaxed pulse, this is your record.

They have a decent sense with hooks, particularly on the track here, "All the Sun that Shines," but I can't say that's their real attraction.  This is, for better or for worse, a 'background record,' one that I put on while I'm reading, one with a deep atmosphere but not a lot of foreground.  Live, Peaking Lights is one of those bands made for closing your eyes and swaying gently from side to side, and right about now is the time when they have to decide if that's what they always want to be.  But in this moment, listening to this record, I wouldn't want it any other way.

The Hip-Hop Connection: Sumo, Drugs, and Those Darn Rappers.

Last Thursday I was talking to my friend Terada of Deep Throat X, and the subject of marijuana came up.  Despite the notorious severity of laws against marijuana possession in Japan (supposedly, a third of a gram can net you five years hard labor), it's nearly as much a part of hip hop culture here as it is in the States.  What Terada told me, though, is that this nefarious influence is spreading throughout Japanese culture - most notoriously, into the world of sumo.  Even non-Japanophiles might remember the round of 2009 busts that brought down a handful of Russian and Mongolian sumos - but what you might not have heard about if you, like me, weren't reading Japanese papers at the time, is that it was hip-hop that brought low these proud scions of Japan's national sport.

We must preserve the dignity of sumo . . . whatever the cost.

This article (Japanese, but I recommend the useful/hilarious/surreal Google translations provided by Chrome) recounts the claim of Shinichi Kirin, one of the low-ranking sumo arrested in 2009, that he got interested in ganja because he started listening to hip hop and, moreover, spending a lot of time in a hip hop store in Shibuya. The article has a passage worth quoting because it says so much about Japanese perceptions/knowledge of pot:

同容疑者は吸引方法についてこれまでの調べに「葉巻の中身をくりぬき、中身の葉を大麻と混ぜて葉巻に戻して吸っていた」と説明。県警幹部は「葉巻を大麻と同じように肺に吸い込むことは通常あり得ない」としており、県警は供述は不自然とみている。

Regarding the investigation thus far into the circumstances of the suspect's involvement, [the police] explained, "[The suspects stated] they emptied out the contents of a cigar, then mixed those contents with pot leaves and put them back into the cigar."  The police have said that because "it is impossible to inhale marijuana and cigars in the same way," they believe this affidavit to be false.

Yes, we all have a lot to learn from the Japanese police.

Minds in Bodies and Bodies in Mind

I've spent the last three or four years in a strange sort of denial.  I can't remember exactly when it started, because it was an experience I didn't have much frame of reference for, but every fall recently has brought a set of subtle but insidious symptoms, worst of which was a fatigue that cut my energy levels to about 70% - enough to slow me down severely, but not, it turned out, enough to stop me in my tracks long enough to seriously reflect on what was going on.  What I ended up doing was confusing my physical state for a mental condition - I thought, during these stretches, that I was 'coming down with' depression, after years of being pretty much an Energizer Bunny of positivity and accomplishment.  Last year in particular, the fall involved juggling two or three different jobs while trying to finish my dissertation and searching for a job, and fatigue and anxiety seemed only natural.

This fall was a different story, but also the same story.  As some of you know I'm currently a research fellow, which leaves me with a lot of time - but this fall I found it desperately difficult to make use of it, even after my initial settling-in period here in Tokyo had passed.  I was unfocused, and didn't set about getting interviews and other ethnographic work together with my usual single-mindedness.  I started, again, feeling bad about myself as a person, berating myself for running out of energy before my usual late-night fieldwork got underway.  At the same time, I was aware that at least part of the problem was that I was physically not at my best.  The one thing I had been able to be objective about the previous falls was a series of sinus infections and colds, and again, this time around, I took some cold pills and antihistamines, but they didn't really do the trick.  I basically soldiered on, and fell further and further out of touch with a sense of myself as capable of accomplishing anything with the huge gift of time I'd been given.

Then, two weeks ago, I learned the hard way that antihistamines and pseudoephedrine didn't mix well with even moderate drinking.

"It Gets Better" - Living and Dying by the Stories of Ourselves

On my short trip back to the USA, I attended a funeral. The woman was a friend of my younger brother.  I had never met her.  She had, as the conventional saying goes, struggled with depression, and committed suicide after her insurance company forced her to switch her medication to a generic version of the drug she was taking.  Her parents' version of the story was that the switch caused her to slip back into severe depression and take her own life. Tragic events like this are common enough that psychopharmacologists are constantly working to figure out what's going on, using control groups and scientific methods.  The fact is, drugs may be amazingly effective at helping people with some kinds of psychological problems, but they're not flawless.

I didn't know this woman.  I don't know what she was like, or the contours of her problems.  But there were two hanging threads at the funeral that pointed to the need to treat depression with more than chemicals.  Her sister gave the eulogy, and a recurring theme was her sister's perfectionism and singular drive to succeed (in a bitter irony, the deceased had received her doctorate in pharmacology by the age of 24).  Very few Americans would consider this pathological, but as part of a complex including depression, you can imagine how destructive it could be.

There was a second element I only found out about after the funeral.  During the ceremony, I noticed an attractive young woman near the front of the chapel, seemingly taking things very hard.  She sat on the opposite side of the church from the girl's parents.  It wasn't until I spoke with my brother later that I found out this was the deceased woman's girlfriend.

One of the greatest historical sins of psychoanalysis is the way that, for a time, it legitimized blaming parents and their errors in judgment or action for everything from autism to epilepsy.  But however flawed and one-sided those conclusions might have been, they acknowledged a fundamental truth that is lost in treating the brain as a self-directed machine: that we are constructed not by some unified internal force, but by the actions of those around us.  I don't know anything about this girl or her parents, but this is a religious family in North Texas - a kind of Meccah for educated middle-class bigotry.  Even if her parents were fully supportive and loving, the broader context couldn't have made for an easy life.