Sunday, February 27
Angel Blogs and Right Wing Idiots
Well, it is baseball season (or will be as of Thursday, when the first spring training games begin), and, as many of you might know if you've visited my site in the past, I'm a huge Angels fan. This isn't an Angels blog, in part because I can't be bothered to delve through the RPI indexes and all the other really stupid statistical breakdown mechanisms that most baseball bloggers obsess over. I don't really care about those things, and I think talking about them makes the game less fun. I'll talk forever about what actually happened during a game or what I expect to see in the next game or how the team is doing over the course of the season, but I draw the line at predicting future performance or evaluating past performance based on numbers. Frankly, baseball is more interesting than numbers (though perhaps that's the English teacher in me coming out).
But I do talk about the Angels from time to time on this site, which leads me to real topic today: Angel blogs and the right-wing idiots who run some of them. It seems like half of the Angel blogs out there are written by guys who spend half their time bitching about liberals, propping up their obsession with Reagan, or apologizing for Bush's latest idiocies and the other half delving into the minutiae of the Angels. I like the stuff they have to say about the Angels--they're pretty insightful most of the time, especially Richard at The Pearly Gates--but it's embarrassing having these people throw out all this right-wing garbage alongside their Angels analysis. It suggests that being an Angels fan also makes a person Republican. That's something I can't stand, as I'm nowhere near Republican or right wing (though I'm probably nuts), and I'm guessing there are plenty of Angels fans out there like me. So, Angel bloggers, could you please stick to the topic you are good at--baseball--and leave the political commentary for someone else (or for another blog)?
But I do talk about the Angels from time to time on this site, which leads me to real topic today: Angel blogs and the right-wing idiots who run some of them. It seems like half of the Angel blogs out there are written by guys who spend half their time bitching about liberals, propping up their obsession with Reagan, or apologizing for Bush's latest idiocies and the other half delving into the minutiae of the Angels. I like the stuff they have to say about the Angels--they're pretty insightful most of the time, especially Richard at The Pearly Gates--but it's embarrassing having these people throw out all this right-wing garbage alongside their Angels analysis. It suggests that being an Angels fan also makes a person Republican. That's something I can't stand, as I'm nowhere near Republican or right wing (though I'm probably nuts), and I'm guessing there are plenty of Angels fans out there like me. So, Angel bloggers, could you please stick to the topic you are good at--baseball--and leave the political commentary for someone else (or for another blog)?
Thursday, February 10
And so it goes.
My father died last week. Hence, I've not been posting to this site or writing reviews--I'm taking a bit of a break for a while. However, I have created a web page to honor him. Please visit it.
Thursday, February 3
Mark Fell, Ten Types of Elsewhere
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Buy This Release
Mark Fell's Ten Types of Elsewhere sounds like a barrage of rain drops hitting a steel drum—that, or a particularly silly fart joke. That was my first impression, at least. When I listened more carefully, I realized that the music was far subtler (and far more beautiful) than I ever imagined. On some tracks, I noticed a distinct connection between Japanese plucked string music (I'm thinking of the soundtrack to the wonderful film Kwaidan). On others, I heard some Christopher Willits-like guitar fragmentations. Still others centered on intriguing hip hop beats. It's amazing that a work that seems (on the surface) to consist entirely of tiny, echoing pluck sounds would create such a rich vocabulary of effects, but it does, and the results are simply fascinating.
The title refers to ten processes that Fell used to explore specific topographical issues related to his sound installations. I'm not exactly sure which of the work's 45 tracks connects to which of the ten processes, but I don't really think it matters, as the tracks all seem closely connected in both sound and tone. The sounds you hear do, initially, resemble plucking noises, but those plucks are modified in many different ways. There are a lot of echoes, for instance, and these either stretch the small metallic sounds out into drones or create sharp, stuttering rhythms. These drones and rhythms then merge and squish together to create a variety of different musical shapes—including (as I said) hip hop, Japanese minimalism, and 12k guitar fragmentation, but also Oval-like digital processing (especially on the later tracks), early Fennesz field recording experiments, Conet Project-like surreal coded signals, and even the occasional Steve Reich-like ambient rhythm experiment.
I'm throwing these names out to give you a sense of the variety of sounds Fell is able to create using his topographical processes, not to suggest that he is on a mission to copy other artists. The real strength to Fell's work, in fact, is that it resists categorization. This is due largely to the nature of his music. The range of sounds he chose to create for this work is incredibly narrow, but he is able to produce from these sounds an amazing array of shapes and styles. To me, the music reminds me of nothing more than the Tao Te Chi: a work whose central tenet is that all things emerge from and return to a single, complete whole. To me, Fell's chaotic sampling of musical styles demonstrates how a single sound can become all things, all sounds. Of course, I could be completely wrong on that (as I am about a lot of things). Perhaps Fell's use of such a narrow range of sounds stems from the musical equivalent to a Scottish dare (like eating haggis or tossing a caber)!
Fell's work was largely constructed for sound installations, and his topographical experiments are largely a response to dealing with the relationship between his music and the different landscapes where it resided for small periods of time. All the postmodern theorizing he provides to explain the concepts behind the music, however, pale in comparison to the emotional response I, as a listener, receive when listening to the music in my home—far away from those sound installations.
Buy This Release
Mark Fell's Ten Types of Elsewhere sounds like a barrage of rain drops hitting a steel drum—that, or a particularly silly fart joke. That was my first impression, at least. When I listened more carefully, I realized that the music was far subtler (and far more beautiful) than I ever imagined. On some tracks, I noticed a distinct connection between Japanese plucked string music (I'm thinking of the soundtrack to the wonderful film Kwaidan). On others, I heard some Christopher Willits-like guitar fragmentations. Still others centered on intriguing hip hop beats. It's amazing that a work that seems (on the surface) to consist entirely of tiny, echoing pluck sounds would create such a rich vocabulary of effects, but it does, and the results are simply fascinating.The title refers to ten processes that Fell used to explore specific topographical issues related to his sound installations. I'm not exactly sure which of the work's 45 tracks connects to which of the ten processes, but I don't really think it matters, as the tracks all seem closely connected in both sound and tone. The sounds you hear do, initially, resemble plucking noises, but those plucks are modified in many different ways. There are a lot of echoes, for instance, and these either stretch the small metallic sounds out into drones or create sharp, stuttering rhythms. These drones and rhythms then merge and squish together to create a variety of different musical shapes—including (as I said) hip hop, Japanese minimalism, and 12k guitar fragmentation, but also Oval-like digital processing (especially on the later tracks), early Fennesz field recording experiments, Conet Project-like surreal coded signals, and even the occasional Steve Reich-like ambient rhythm experiment.
I'm throwing these names out to give you a sense of the variety of sounds Fell is able to create using his topographical processes, not to suggest that he is on a mission to copy other artists. The real strength to Fell's work, in fact, is that it resists categorization. This is due largely to the nature of his music. The range of sounds he chose to create for this work is incredibly narrow, but he is able to produce from these sounds an amazing array of shapes and styles. To me, the music reminds me of nothing more than the Tao Te Chi: a work whose central tenet is that all things emerge from and return to a single, complete whole. To me, Fell's chaotic sampling of musical styles demonstrates how a single sound can become all things, all sounds. Of course, I could be completely wrong on that (as I am about a lot of things). Perhaps Fell's use of such a narrow range of sounds stems from the musical equivalent to a Scottish dare (like eating haggis or tossing a caber)!
Fell's work was largely constructed for sound installations, and his topographical experiments are largely a response to dealing with the relationship between his music and the different landscapes where it resided for small periods of time. All the postmodern theorizing he provides to explain the concepts behind the music, however, pale in comparison to the emotional response I, as a listener, receive when listening to the music in my home—far away from those sound installations.
