Story Archive October 21, 2003 (Page 1 of 1)

From the wonderful extremely informative music site/blog Kingblind I got this link to a legal mp3 download of Low's John Peel Session from November 2000. Nine spiritual tracks.

This (Oct. 16th entry) really made me curious: Nick Edwards of Gutterbreakz on the new Martin Rev (the Suicide keyboarder) solo album To Live. Excerpts:

...The sound is so punchy and compressed, like he's deliberately set the recording level too high or something - the music sounds like it's gonna break your hi-fi if you play it too loud. It's that sense of 'perceived' loudness and the rampantly aggressive mix which makes this album so startling on first listen. And Rev's voice - which, incidentally, seems to mimic Vega's early vocal style - is so overdriven it just punches a big fucking hole in the mix, like all the other sounds get beaten into the background. There's simply not enough room for them all in the frequency spectrum. I imagine that the method of getting the music onto tape was as crucial to Martin as the actual compositions. It's all about density, reaching that point of critical mass where it seems like everything going to implode on itself at any minute. The recording process as Weapon of Mass Destruction.

That's not to say that the choons are of secondary importance. Far from it. The opening title track tears through the speakers with all guns blazing. It sounds like the Young Gods covering the Stooges' 'Penetration'. ...

Things get really strange when you get to "Shimmer", which starts out like another rocker, before being consumed by an avalanche of digital processing; smeared, stretched and crushed by delay, flanger and god knows what else, until it becomes unintelligible. It sounds like improvisation, as though the Digital FX Processor is Rev's new Lead Instrument. The sound becomes more insane and chaotic as Rev travels into the furthest reaches of freeform extemporisation, twisting knobs and pushing buttons as deftly and intuitively as Pharoah Sanders attacking the tenor sax at the peak of his powers. ...

"Painted" throws layers of abstract sound-matter over a beat that's pure mid-80's NYC Electro. It's like Arthur Baker jamming with Autechre. ...

What an asshole a man is with his enormous red exposed dick, tense and palpable, ejaculating in the presence of God and you can see it spitting out and falling back and going slack! Then the female sex looks like a mouth mocking him. He does everything outside, in the light of day; but you've got to penetrate a woman, rummage in there, and everything happens in her bowels in the roots of her flesh.

Probably from his diary The Business of Living (Italian original: Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935–1950)

I stole this from Tim Parks' great review The Outsider's Art of several books by and on Cesare Pavese in the latest, 40th anniversary issue of the New York Review of Books which is fully online (via FraFuchs weblog). It seems that Pavese's suicide (when 42 years old) had a lot to do with his lack of success with women. On the other hand I find his perspective on sex rather intriguing. As it cannot be dismissed totally. In its lust hostile consequences it is pretty close to the Christian stance but the reasons are different. I don't think that it has anything to do with shame or sin in Pavese's case (he was a communist by the way). It is more envy of all the couples who have good sex. He tries to ridicule something he can't have which he wants to have so desperately. There is a ressentiment feeling going on here. And he tries to turn it around. He who is a complete failure in bed is morally superior as he sees through the banality and ridiculousness of sex. And he takes much more the piss out of the males than the females in his small description of the act of physical love. As they are his rivals and successful whereas he isn't. In a way he isn't an adult man as he doesn't sleep with women and therefore he is not risible.