Vaguely political nothings

Hi! I hope you’re keeping well, all things considered. It feels like the last three months have been the most consequential in years, maybe you feel the same way? My lockdown started with a furious creative energy and ended thinking about Ben Lerner’s observation in 10:04 that “shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.” I miss gigs and those friends not close enough to hang out with outside of gigs, and I miss not being made fun of by books. Reading A Confederacy of Dunces atm and Ignatius’ newsletters to no one damn near split a jugular.

At any rate, the studio is levitating, with a new subwoofer that makes my mixes much worse but makes the couchbound reverie much more twelve-dimensional, and a new chair having clocked some 20,000 hours on Gregory the Officeworks squeaker. I’m nearly done mixing a record from the unbelievably still-unnamed trio I’m in, after a cascade of realisations that making music at the molecular level is where I thrive, deadlines and any pretence towards being patchwork on ~the social fabric~ be damned. Next semester I’ll be working nearly full-time teaching some new material, including an extensive hashing-out of musician-first alternatives to the streaming-oriented music economy (for more on that I recommend the fantastic Penny Fractions newsletter).

My main news is that I’m hanging up the cans after six years co-presenting Difficult Listening on RTRFM. You’ll hear my last show tomorrow, Sunday June 28 at 9pm. Please do tune in—it’ll be a live fire sale of all the wonky synth skronk you’ll hear under my auspices for some time indeed. Experimental music always felt like a prompt to ask why would you even do that? in the best of faith while developing answers and worldviews that accommodate these most unusual tunes. You can ask that of anything though, and lately all I’m interested in are songs. Late-twenties energy is at its best when absolving self-conscious-isms, two of mine being an un-critical condescension of popular culture because it is popular, and an intellectual Napoleon complex nonetheless beholden to the validation it provides; presenting the show was printing them into the drying cement. Better I think to ignore that mental ouroboros and find new amateurisms. The highlight of my time presenting Difficult Listening was this year when a new student said the show was the reason they enrolled in the course I teach. The lowlight was a guy calling in to say “me and the boys listen to your show while lighting fires in Lesmurdie.”

The focus now is on rectifying those ‘idk where to start!’ thoughts re: the towering discographic legacies of singer-songwriters who found fame and record deals around the summer of ’67. Specifically, Joni and Van. My Joni Journey started with Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, by far her most problematic album—she’s in blackface on the cover—but also her most bizarre and confrontational. You can practically hear Jaco Pastorius’ misogyny caterwauling all over Joni’s syrupy and gliding lyric. The 16-minute ”Paprika Plains” is gorgeous and notable for the enormous lyric sheet mostly in parentheses, voiced not by Joni but by an orchestral tone poem. My Van Voyage started with Veedon Fleece, a tighter weave of the threads frayed by current albeit predictable top spinner Astral Weeks. Van’s lyrics are meandering and unfinished, and they rule. Listening for lyrics first and production second, for the first time since I was like 16 when Boards of Canada rearranged my vertebrae, brings me a lot of perplexed joy lately. Also I'm finding comfort in their latter-day catalogues that coast on platitudes and vaguely political nothings while still sounding pretty stellar. Joni’s 1994 LP Turbulent Indigo is a great place to start. Also entertaining in a more humanising way is locating that mid-80s moment when either their experimental vein or their halcyon of commercial success are exhausted and they succumb to label pressure to modernise their sound, resulting in some hair-raising production choices like Joni’s Dire Straits-esque turn on Dog Eat Dog. Nothing but respect for artists north of forty writing songs that rip—as a friend recently said “middle age is wasted on the old.” Who knows, maybe I'll fuck around and get into Trout Mask Replica next pandemic.

My other big lockdown thing is working on my chess game. I’m not great at it, but if you’re on chess.com, add me (:(:(:(:(:

Catch u in the pit xx