Author Archives: Matthew

The Zombies: Odessey and Oracle (pt. 1)

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Dear Matt:

Yeah, I wasn’t expecting overwhelming enthusiasm towards Magma, frankly. But, be content that you have now experienced the proggiest of the prog, and that it’s all smooth sailing from here.

I’m thinking that you’ll need a palate cleanser after a two-hour concert of ‘the least accessible music you’ve ever heard.’ So, this week you’ll be listening to a jaunty little trifle from 1966: The Zombies’ Odessey [sic] and Oracle. (The guy who painted the album cover couldn’t spell, and by the time he turned in his work, it was too late to fix it. The album has been known by its misspelled name ever since. Oh, the 60s.)

The Zombies were a late vestige of the British Invasion. They had two fantastic songwriters in keyboardist Rod Argent (who went on to have a successful career with his solo project, Argent), and bassist Chris White (who went on to have almost no subsequent career, save for co-writing a few hits for Rod Argent’s successful solo project, Argent).

In their day, they were probably best known for their 1964 hit “She’s Not There.” Nowadays, they’re almost entirely remembered for this album, which is just wall-to-wall joy, even by psychedelic standards. I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered another album so straightforwardly focussed on coaxing endorphins out of the pituitary. Even the sad, disturbing songs like “A Rose for Emily” or “Butcher’s Tale” are cathartically sad and disturbing.

60s psychedelia was a complex and unruly beast. But, I find that most psychedelic albums fit into one of two broad categories that I refer to as Peppers and Pipers. (This is clever. Stay with me on this.)

See, in early 1967, the Beatles were at Abbey Road studios, recording their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which I think is tied with Hamlet for the title of Most Acclaimed Thing Ever. Sgt. Pepper is meticulous, crafted, layered, and ornate. The songs have a sort of British restraint to them, in spite of their lush orchestrations and the colourful album art.

Meanwhile, literally just down the hall from the Beatles, in the same studio, Pink Floyd was recording their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which foregrounds all of the chaotic, improvisatory, stream-of-consciousness tendencies in late 60s pop music.

These two albums are both undeniably psychedelic, but they represent two entirely different strands of psychedelia. Other Peppers include Forever Changes, Pet Sounds, and Days of Future Passed. Other Pipers include Electric Ladyland, Their Satanic Majesties Request, and The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators.

The Zombies recorded Odessey and Oracle a few months later, in that same studio. It’s much more of a Pepper than a Piper. And, I suspect that’s why it’s aged so well, in spite of being so thoroughly of its time. Really good songwriting never stops being awesome. Loose, garage band jamming kind of does.

Side note: I am absurdly certain that “Care of Cell 44” will at some point be featured on Orange is the New Black. Just wait.

I really hope you like this. I hope that, because I feel like you’re winning this blog in terms of assigning music that I’ll like. I’ve revisited Deltron 3030 and Wrong frequently since those initial assignments, and they’ve improved with multiple listens. One of these weeks, I’m hoping to find something that’ll work that well for you.

Maybe this is it? In any case, it’s about as far from Magma as you can get. I expect there’s virtue in that.

— Matthew

Magma: live in concert (pt. 1)

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Dear Matt:

How appropriate that immediately after my confused, vaguely angry response to Die Antwoord, you’re coming with me to see Magma in concert.

Let me explain Magma. Magma is a jazz-fusiony prog band from France, led by virtuoso drummer Christian Vander. They’ve made 11 albums, each of which further expounds the sprawling utopian sci-fi mythos that they’ve developed over the course of their half-century of existence. Magma doesn’t just do concept albums. They’re a concept band.

The actual story that the albums tell is pretty tough to discern, because the bulk of the music is sung in Vander’s constructed language of Kobaïan, which is sort of a blend of French, German and speaking in tongues. Vander even came up with a Kobaïan name for the genre of music Magma plays. It’s called “Zeuhl” (pronounced “tsoil”), and it is characterized by slow-burning repetitive patterns, chanting from the small choir of backup singers that always accompanies the band, and virtuosic free improvisations on the bass, drums and guitar.

Lyric translations are not available because many Kobaïan words don’t have literal meanings. However, we do know that the basic premise of Magma’s mythology is that after an ecological crisis on Earth, a segment of humankind takes to space and colonizes the far-off planet of Kobaïa. Then there is adventure and and there are wars and there is quite a lot of chant-based spirituality.

I’ve never quite been able to figure out whether Vander actually believes that this story will come to pass. Most of his interviews are in French, so I’ve had trouble getting a handle on him. But, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that he thinks himself a prophet.

Look, I obviously disagree with some of what you said about prog back in your Van Der Graaf Generator response. I don’t think that prog is silly by definition. But Magma is fucking ridiculous. Magma is everything that you thought Van Der Graaf Generator was, times an infinity. An entire infinity. They are maybe the silliest band ever, even more so because they are completely sincere, and most of their audience appears to enjoy them without the barest hint of irony, as well.

I find this a completely untenable way of approaching Magma. They’re the sort of band that leaves me reaching for Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” to explain why I enjoy them. But I do enjoy them, very sincerely. It’s just that a significant part of my enjoyment comes from my sincere appreciation for ridiculousness. I’m completely okay with the sort of music where the artist’s reach exceeds their grasp, many times over. I even find it preferable to most of the alternatives.

I’m a bit jealous of you for getting to experience Magma for the first time, live. Their shows are famously impressive and intense, to the point where their live albums almost make their studio output feel superfluous. The lineup has changed constantly since the 70s, but every cohort has been pretty much equally stellar. They’ve made some of their most acclaimed music in the last decade.

I have my doubts about whether this will be for you. But, you’ll at least be able to say that you’ve seen one of the strangest acts in popular music. This is like seeing Beefheart, or Henry Cow, or John Cage blending vegetables in front of an audience.

So, I’ll see you Thursday, for the greatest evening of virtuoso sci-fi jazz you’re ever likely to experience. I’ll expect your response sometime Friday.

I am ludicrously excited.

— Matthew

Die Antwoord: selected videography (pt. 2)

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Dear Matt:

Ehhhhhhhhhhhh.

Alright. So, here’s how I approached this. When I fired up your playlist, I decided to just let it run, and resist the urge to Google everything. I figured, let’s just allow this to be a pure encounter, informed only by a half-remembered read of your assignment four busy days ago. I’ll just hit the fullscreen button, let Die Antwoord flow through me unmediated, and scribble down a few notes as I go.

Those notes look like the hastily scrawled confessions of a hallucinating trainspotter. It is a testament to the alienating weirdness of Die Antwoord that I appear to have descended into a dissociative state about midway through your playlist.

Honestly, I am as baffled by this music now as I was last night when I listened to it, and I’m spinning my wheels here because I don’t know what to say. I feel like I’m missing a huge chunk of the context for this, and I’m pissed off at Die Antwoord because I’m certain this is by design.

I have one potentially interesting thought, and it is about the tiring question of whether or not any of this is real. One of the many questions I posed to my future self in my scribblings on this viewing was “are those real scorpions?” That is, of course, regarding the video for “Fok Julle Naaiers,” on which Ninja raps: “Next time you ask me is it real, I’m gonna punch you in the face.”

Trouble is, with the way that Die Antwoord present themselves, “Is it real?” is a worthwhile question that everybody’s obviously going to be asking, as regards both the scorpions and the band itself. This is a move that’s been pulled before. It’s a classic Glass Onion — you bait your audience with deliberately cryptic art, then you mock them for trying too hard.

There was a time when I would have had the patience for this. Maybe sometime I will again. Don’t get me wrong: there were plenty of moments when I could barely pull myself away from the screen to make notes. But, it’s late and I’m frustrated and right now I kind of feel the same way about this that I do about the Stockhausen I used to listen to in high school: cut the performance art bullshit and make some goddamn music.

I take no pleasure in disliking things. It makes me feel ignorant. This one will require a revisit.

— Matthew

Brooklyn Rider: A Walking Fire (pt. 1)

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Dear Matt:

Let’s pick up where we left off before last week’s concert excursion. You had me listen to some loud, crazy punk rock because the time had come for me to confront my fears and doubts. Now, likewise, that time has come for you.

This week, you’ll be listening to classical music. (Well, nominally “classical,” anyway. Someday I’ll bore you with a lengthy diatribe about why that label is stupid, but I’ll spare you for now.) And, just as you offered me a deeply unconventional way into punk, I’m going to be shooting you far off into the outer limits of classical — where the canon fears to tread. Well, kind of.

Your assignment is to listen to A Walking Fire, the 2013 release from the string quartet Brooklyn Rider.

You may be shocked, once you’ve listened to this album, by the notion that some classical music listeners would find it difficult. But you’ve got to understand the fundamental difference between the classical side of the music industry and the rest of it: most major classical releases contain no new music. Instead, they feature new interpretations of old (sometimes very old) music that has been recorded before (sometimes hundreds of times).

So, an album like this, where two of the three works presented are premiere recordings by living composers with unfamiliar names, is not entirely conventional. I, for one, wish that it was. Because, recordings like A Walking Fire are way easier to recommend to adventurous non-classical-fans such as yourself than, say, a recording of Mozart’s 40th symphony.

So, what exactly is on this?

The first piece, Culai, is by a Russian-American composer named Ljova, who isn’t enormously well known, in spite of having written for Yo-Yo Ma and the Kronos Quartet. The last piece, Three Miniatures for String Quartet, is by one of Brooklyn Rider’s violinists, Colin Jacobsen. Both of these were written specifically for Brooklyn Rider, and that’s kind of the point of them: they’re custom-made vehicles for the explosive sound of this quartet, which is unlike any other in the world.

The work that’s sandwiched in between them is different in that it’s 100 years old: Béla Bartók’s second string quartet. Ask any string player who the top three quartet composers ever were, and you’ll probably get some permutation of Haydn, Beethoven and Bartók. Mozart and Schubert might enter the conversation soon after. Of those five, Bartók is the most recent by nearly a century.

Part of why I’m giving you this album is because I’m interested in how you’ll react to the Bartók in relation to the newer music. This album demonstrates two different models of classical music: the “futureproof masterpieces” model in the Bartók, and the “music for now” model in the other pieces.

My feeling is always that music need not stand the test of time before it can be dubbed “good.” It’s remarkable how uncommon that opinion is in classical circles, but I suspect I don’t need to justify it to you.

Anyway, the point is: classical music has lots to offer aside from the earnest pursuit of everlasting beauty. It can also be just casually awesome. That’s the kind of classical music that I’m most attracted to these days, and there is plenty of it on A Walking Fire.

I think you’ll find something to like in this. If not, no worries. I’ve got plenty of other potential classical gateway drugs lined up.

— Matthew

Beardyman: live in concert (pt. 2)

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Dear Matt:

What do you mean I couldn’t get anybody else to go see Magma with me? I’ve got tons of friends who like Magma! Scads, even! I wish you could meet them, but they all live in Canada. Wait…

Beardyman was fun. Really, it was a great show and I had a good time. But, dear god I am a walking cadaver today. As you’ll no doubt be acutely aware yourself, the concert ended after 1 AM — on a Wednesday night. I am writing this in stolen moments during coffee/lunch breaks, animated only by a truly monstrous amount of caffeine. Be informed that my present exhaustion, and the fact that I am a young/old man who Just Cannot Handle This Kind of Thing, is probably colouring my recollections of the concert.

Okay.

Let me start by enthusing about the Beardytron 5000. This contraption is every musician’s dream. It’s what Frank Zappa thought he’d found when he discovered the Synclavier. “It’s my nightmare,” said Beardyman last night, “but it’s also set me free.”

That’s a familiar sentiment to anybody who has ever played an instrument. I remember the frustration from my years as a trumpet student: I knew how I wanted the music on the page in front of me to sound, but the tool at my disposal was a difficult, primitive piece of 19th-century technology — basically, a metal tube that you make fart noises into.

The metaphor I use to explain this sometimes is that playing an instrument is like paying rent. Your rent payment is the thing that allows you to continue living in your apartment. But, it can also be the obstacle that prevents you from continuing to live in your apartment. Likewise, instruments are the things that allow you to make music, but they’re simultaneously the thing that comes between your musical vision and the actual sound.

When Beardyman says that the Beardytron has set him free, he means rent-free. In the context of my metaphor. God, I’m tired.

But, let’s focus for a second on the first part of Beardyman’s explanation: “It’s my nightmare.” He said that because for all it’s awesomeness, the Beardytron is still a ludicrous, cobbled-together Rube Goldberg machine (with a name straight out of Calvin and Hobbes) that sometimes does not work.

Last night, there were at least two instances where the Beardytron was misbehaving sufficiently for its maker to comment on it. They may have been my favourite parts of the night, because those moments emphasized the extent to which Beardyman is a musical Doc Brown: undoubtedly a genius, but an incredibly silly one whose unlikely inventions sometimes blow up in his face.

That’s what makes Beardyman fun — not just that he’s a fantastic musician (good lord, can this man beatbox), but that he’s willing to go to ridiculous lengths to get all those beats out of his head and into the world.

All the same, there were moments where this concert got tiresome for me. As you know, my attitude towards dancing is somewhat along the lines of Taber, Alberta. So, I spent the concert standing with the (reassuringly large) contingent of people who’d rather just listen.

Occasionally, I found myself thinking that I was going about this all wrong. Dance music is sometimes of only limited interest to people standing still. But equally often, I would look down at that writhing horde, dancing to a beat constructed from Beardyman’s ramblings about Bryan Adams and Celine Dion killing the Queen, and think: “What are you even doing? What is this music even for?”

And then I stopped thinking, and I felt just fine.

—Matthew

NoMeansNo: Wrong (pt. 2)

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Dear Matt,

Here is a crude summary of my feelings about punk.

I spent a long time hating punk entirely on principle, having heard none. I hated it for its attitude — for the notion that striving for excellence was somehow beside the point. I hated it for thinking that three chords were enough. I hated it for killing prog, which is ridiculous because it didn’t.

At the same time, I’ve always had a certain amount of respect for any counterculture. There are echoes of the hippies and glam rockers in punk, and there was a political situation that needed to be shouted at. I didn’t like how punk treated the prog rock “dinosaurs” as establishment symbols with no regard for how transgressive and countercultural those bands were in their own way, but the foundation was solid.

Basically, I’ve always admired punk for being angry about Thatcher — but I’ve always been suspicious of it for being angry about Yes.

I realize that all of this extends from an untenable way of thinking. Because, the punk I’m talking about here is not a version of punk that exists in a meaningful way. It’s a sort of textbook-defined, Platonic ideal ur-punk. (Basically, it’s the Sex Pistols.) As always, the real thing is messier and more complex. “Angry about Thatcher” isn’t a useful epithet when you’re talking about, say, a band from Victoria.

You may be interested to know that this is in fact not the first punk album I’ve heard straight through — it’s the second. The first was London Calling, as orthodox a punk selection as is available. And even that experience confronted me with the vast difference between my imagined punk and real punk.

Here was music with a certain amount of discipline. Restraint, even. The lyrics were thoughtful. The arrangements had been fussed over. Even after four sides of it, I didn’t feel like my precious aesthetic values had been disputed.

So, no. I don’t have a legitimate ideological conflict with punk. A personality clash, maybe. Punk likes to read Marx and get angry. I like to read Shakespeare comedies and chuckle to myself. Punk is freewheeling and likes being in rooms full of shouty people. I am fairly buttoned-up and like being in libraries. Punk thinks that breaking rules is a good idea. I was raised to be suspicious of people like that.

I don’t know if Rob and John Wright are people like that or not. I suspect both of them could have earned a decent crust playing jazz — that most regimented of spontaneous art forms — and I have no doubt that they spent countless hours honing their craft. Rob’s bass playing reminds me of Chris Squire and John Wetton, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that Nomeansno are King Crimson fans.

They also have a song called ‘Big Dick.’

I loved every fucking second of this album.

—Matthew

Kate Bush: Hounds of Love (pt. 1)

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Dear Matt:

In honour of this blog having gotten weird already, allow me to introduce you to Kate Bush.

Bush is one of a long line of British artists who constantly gets called “eccentric,” but also periodically enjoys massive mainstream success. (See also, Lewis Carroll, Monty Python, Bush’s occasional duet partner Peter Gabriel.)

I’m at a loss to explain why Kate Bush is popular. But, I do feel like I can pin down part of what makes her connect with her most devoted fans: she possesses a seemingly supernatural amount of empathy.

Bush writes deeply personal songs, but they feel like other people’s personal songs. She’s written lyrics from the POV of Houdini’s wife, a man contemplating fatherhood, and a curiously articulate fetus, among others. These ultra-specific psychological portraits can be alienating, before you find your footing.

Maybe you’ll agree with me that pop music is generally contingent on the listener’s sympathy: you’re meant to identify personally with what’s being sung. That’s why there are so goddamn many love songs. But, Kate Bush’s best songs work differently. They can make you feel empathy for a person to whom you are entirely dissimilar — even if, like me, you don’t normally possess much of that.

I think this is probably why Hounds of Love is Bush’s most beloved album. It’s a mix of genuinely personal songs with some semblance of universality (“Running Up That Hill” became Bush’s second-biggest hit) and tracks that entreat you to work past their alienating strangeness and come to an understanding with their protagonist.

This latter approach comes to the fore on the album’s second side. Much like our perpetual favourite reference point, 2112, one side of Hounds of Love is just a bunch of unrelated songs, and the other side is a sprawling conceptual epic. That epic, subtitled “The Ninth Wave,” is as narratively ambiguous as Deltron 3030, but there’s a nominal throughline involving a woman who (nearly?) drowns following a shipwreck.

I adore this side’s first track, “And Dream of Sheep.” It’s based on the ingenious premise (Kate Bush songs often have “premises”) of relating the inner monologue of a personified lighthouse as it falls asleep and inadvertently causes a tragedy. Of all of Kate Bush’s massive, Wes Andersonian cast of eccentrics and quietly tragic figures, this lighthouse may be my favourite.

But, Bush’s all-time greatest feat of empathy lives on side one: “Cloudbusting” is told from the perspective of a child — the son of dissident scientist Wilhelm Reich. The narrator’s inner monologue seems as alienating to an adult listener as it probably should. And yet we feel for him. “I hid my yo-yo in the garden,” he sings to his imprisoned father, “I can’t hide you from the government.”

Sometimes, manipulating symbols doesn’t affect reality at all.

The album’s sound is of its time. It’s got some badly dated synths, and it’s full of that awful 80s drum sound. But, I don’t care. The songs are strong enough to push through that.

I could go on for thousands of words about all of the reasons why I adore this album. But, ultimately, it comes down to this: Hounds of Love is an album full of feelings. In stark opposition to Bush’s image as an alienating, eccentric figure, Hounds reaches out and makes the effort to connect.

I have no idea whether or not it’ll connect with you. I hope so. I hope it knocks that impassive facade of yours clean off. I want to see waterworks, Meuse.

But, either way, this is what all the fuss is about. Now you know.

— Matthew

Deltron 3030: Deltron 3030 (pt. 2)

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Dear Matt:

Thank you for starting me off with hip hop, rather than Black Flag or some other thing that’s going to alienate me. You are a kinder blogmate than I.

You were right in predicting that I would love this album. It has all of the properties that I love in music, nowadays. It is deeply idiosyncratic. It is full of ostentatious displays of craftsmanship. It contains a reference to Armorines. ARMORINES, dammit!

And, it’s a concept album. At the risk of starting a turf war: concept albums are my domain. I’ve always felt that you can trace them back to classical genres like opera and the program symphony, which were amalgamated into jazz by people like Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, and found their way into pop music through psychedelia and its twin offspring, prog and glam. This is territory I’m comfortable in.

But, I’m the first to admit that there’s something distinctly adolescent about most classic concept albums. Tommy. Ziggy Stardust. The Wall. Dear god, 2112. (Even I can only stomach about seven minutes of that album.)

And, I don’t think that Deltron 3030 entirely escapes from that legacy. Any science fiction epic about dismantling a totalitarian state with rap is at risk of lapsing into that same earnestness you detect in Godbluff, Fight Club and Japanese RPGs. And, for the first few tracks on the album, I thought that’s more or less what I was dealing with.

But that was before I realized that Deltron 3030 is a magical incantation.

*Ahem.*

Allow me to indulge in a little light conspiracy theorizing.

One of the central tenets of magic (and I do mean magic — not illusion) is that you can manipulate reality by manipulating symbols. (Allow my current hero to explain more fully.) So, the practice of drawing a picture, telling a story, or spitting a verse can have a profound impact on the material world.

On ‘Time Keeps On Slipping,’ Del gets straight to the heart of this by noting how he can “convert energy into matter instantly with a pen and a pad,” and puts a finer point on it with the bold claim “I remake my universe every time I use a verse.”

This clearly positions the whole of Deltron 3030 as a spell. Naturally, Del doesn’t frame it this way, because it wouldn’t fit the SF aesthetic he’s going for. Instead, in ‘Virus,’ he equates his verses with computer code — a language with a long history of being equated with magic. As game scholar Jeff Howard writes: “Simply put, programmers and magicians both master a grammar to make things happen.”

With the cyber-magic of his lyrical talents, Del’s character Deltron Zero wins rap battles, which are portrayed as causing actual physical damage to his opponents (remember: manipulate the symbol, manipulate reality) and structural damage to the status quo of his oppressive universe.

So, this album is no mere adolescent anti-authoritarian fantasy. It is the most profound kind of subversive creation: it is an act of magic in practice. Del’s sci-fi incantation may have failed in its aim to bring down the government, but as you note, the album’s popularity has grown substantially since its release. Give it time.

Wow. This blog got weird way faster than I expected.

— Matthew

Van der Graaf Generator: Godbluff (pt. 1)

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Dear Matt:

So, here we are. The first stop on our Matts-ical Mystery Tour of Mattvillainy. I’ve chosen your inaugural assignment as a sort of mission statement for my half of this project. As you know, when I’m not living in the 19th century, my tastes tend strongly towards the more ambitious and grandiloquent music from the years of about… oh, let’s say 1965–1979. So, you’re probably going to be getting a lot of art rock, ropey old psychedelia, and classic prog — with frequent dalliances into more unexpected territory.

With that in mind, this week you’ll be listening to Van der Graaf Generator’s Godbluff.

This is not an orthodox prog recommendation. I could have given you Yes; I could have given you Rush. These are bands who are seemingly more central to most prog fans’ musical experience than Van der Graaf Generator is. But, because of that, they are also the bands who most closely adhere to some of prog’s more ludicrous tropes – the extended solos; the circuitous, fantastical lyrics… After all, Yes and Rush are among the bands most responsible for those tropes.

So, it’s all too easy to hear popular opinion bubbling away beneath the surface when you listen to these bands. (Even for me, and I adore them both – along with Genesis, ELP, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, etc.) I’m hoping that by assigning you something a small ways off the beaten path, I might be giving you a chance to see past the tropes and hear the music on its own terms.

Van der Graaf Generator, especially in this period of their development, was the rawest and most energetic of the major classic prog bands. Their singer, Peter Hammill, shrieks and grunts as much as he sings. He’s accompanied by a jazz drummer, a guy who built his own organ (though that’s not the one he plays here), and a man who cannot play the saxophone but does anyway. Godbluff is loud, shouty, and lean (at only 37:29). But, it’s also bombastic, dramatic, and more than a little bit camp. So, it has the potential to alienate prog fans and prog non-fans alike. Needless to say, I love it unambiguously.

I almost hope you hate it. I almost hope that, because it could make for more interesting reading – but also because the thing that attracted me to this idea in the first place was the opportunity for my rapidly calcifying musical tastes to be expanded and called into question. And that doesn’t just mean hearing a bunch of new, unfamiliar music. That means having my deeply-held musical value system come crashing into your entirely different deeply-held musical value system.

So, be truthful. Be forthright. And, Matt, don’t disappoint me.

— Matthew