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Category: Music

Published March 8, 2024

At the Tom Verlaine Book Sale

Alex Abramovich has a nice piece at London Review of Books on the late Tom Verlaine and the sale of his massive book collection:

Verlaine, who formed and fronted the band Television, died on 28 January 2023. Over the years he had acquired fifty thousand books – twenty tons or more – on any number of subjects: art, acoustics, astrological signs, UFOs. The sale of those books – a two-day affair in August, run out of adjacent garages in Brooklyn – was a serious draw. Arto Lindsay, the avant-pop musician, walked by. Tony Oursler made a short video and posted it on Instagram. Old friends, some of whom looked as if they hadn’t seen daylight in decades, found each other in the long line.

Dealing with that many books was quite an undertaking:

Verlaine had been a regular at the Strand, where he’d once worked in the shipping department – you’d see him on the sidewalk in front, where the dollar carts were. On tour, he used the space between soundcheck and showtime to visit local booksellers. In Brooklyn, he had packed his storage units so tightly that Patrick Derivaz, the friend charged with handling his estate, had to rent another unit just to have space to move boxes around. Jimmy Rip, a guitarist in Television’s most recent incarnation, had flown in from Argentina in January; seven months later he was still in New York, helping out. Dave Morse and Matty D’Angelo, of the Bushwick bookstore Better Read than Dead, had come aboard too.

‘Usually,’ Morse told me, ‘people call and say: “We have fifty thousand books.” You get there and it’s more like five hundred. In this case, we counted the boxes.

My books are not in storage units but having also helped some relatives downsize recently, this is a reminder that I need to take a long hard look at what I want to keep.

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Published October 6, 2016

Gimme Danger

A Jim Jarmusch documentary about Iggy Pop and The Stooges? YES.

Gimme Danger is scheduled for a limited release on October 28th.

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Published January 25, 2016

David Bowie’s Forgotten Non-Fiction Books

David Bowie Non-Fiction Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld for The Guardian.

(And, on a related note, if you are looking for Bowie links, Daniel Benneworth-Gray is compiling a list)

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Published January 8, 2015

Glenn Gould and the Gas Mask

In an interview with CBC Radio in 1958, pianist Glenn Gould recounted how he came to play Beethoven in a gas mask. Now CBC Music have turned that anecdote into a charming short film illustrated by designer Heather Collett, and animated by Philip Street and John Fraser:

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Published October 21, 2014

Iggy Pop’s BBC Music John Peel Lecture

Last week, Iggy Pop delivered this year’s BBC Music John Peel Lecture on the topic of ‘Free Music in a Capitalist Society’ at Radio Festival 2014 in Salford:

I worked half of my life for free. I didn’t really think about that one way or the other, until the masters of the record industry kept complaining that I wasn’t making them any money. To tell you the truth, when it comes to art, money is an unimportant detail. It just happens to be a huge one unimportant detail. But, a good LP is a being, it’s not a product. It has a life-force, a personality, and a history, just like you and me. It can be your friend. Try explaining that to a weasel.

As I learned when I hit 30 +, and realized I was penniless, and almost unable to get my music released, music had become an industrial art and it was the people who excelled at the industry who got to make the art. I had to sell most of my future rights to keep making records to keep going. And now, thanks to digital advances, we have a very large industry, which is laughably maybe almost entirely pirate so nobody can collect shit. Well, it was to be expected. Everybody made a lot of money reselling all of recorded musical history in CD form back in the 90s, but now the cat is out of the bag and the new electronic devices which estrange people from their morals also make it easier to steal music than to pay for it. So there’s gonna be a correction.

You can read the complete transcript here, or listen to it (for the next couple of weeks at least) on the BBC’s iPlayer. You can also download it as a podcast for posterity.

Iggy Pop’s BBC Music John Peel Lecture 2014 mp3

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Published February 8, 2014

Sounds from a Concrete Island

I’m sure there are some of you who’ve already heard of UK sound artist Janek Schaefer. He has, after all, been recording and creating sound installations for past 20 years, and he even won the British Composer of the Year award in Sonic Art a few years ago. But, personally, I hadn’t heard of Schaefer until I heard a track from his new album on Tom Ravenscroft’s BBC 6Music radio show this evening.

Lay-by Lullaby, released this week on the 12K music label, uses “location recordings made in the middle of the night above the M3 motorway, right at the end of the road where JG Ballard lived, a couple of miles from Schaefer’s studio on the far west edge of London.”

Now, admittedly, the M3 has a special place in my psyche — I drove up and down it rather a lot in my late teens, often late at night — but more significantly Ballard also wrote his “seminal works on car culture” — Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974) — as the motorway was being built past the front of his house.

Schaefer’s 73 minute album was created last year as an installation for his show ’Collecting Connections’ at the Agency gallery in London. Apparently the sounds were played on infinite loop through a car radio installed in a little leather travel case and amplified by a pair of reclining traffic cones.

In other Ballard news, director Ben Wheatley announced earlier this week that he would start shooting his adaptation of High-Rise in June with Tom Hiddleston in the lead role.
High-Rise
The teaser poster for the film was created by artist Jay Shaw. You can read more about Shaw’s work, including his poster for Wheatley’s current film, A Field in England, which opened in New York this week, in Adrian Curry’s column for MUBI this week.

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Published February 4, 2014

Pete Seeger & Llewyn Davis

Leo Braudy, author of Trying to Be Cool: Growing Up in the 1950s, on the late Pete Seeger and the Coen brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis, at the LA Review of Books:

Llewyn is the solitary fame seeker, doomed to be disappointed. Perhaps the Coens think he needs a brother to accompany him or be his manager, rather than his critical sister? Always he sings alone… and glares when the audience or even a friend tries to join in. For a story about the folk scene of the 1950s, there is little sense of the unconfined energies of the period, the sense of bonding and belonging that someone like Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, or a host of others could elicit in their audiences. Nor is there anything in Inside Llewyn Davis about the politics that the folk movement wore so explicitly on its sleeve.

Pete Seeger was nothing like Llewyn Davis. He was an emissary from the Popular Front of the 1930s, when leftwing politics was merged with American history and ideals through theater, art, and song. He had a long, rich life, long enough to see changes in American culture unimaginable in the 1950s, and he kept singing. And we, whenever we weren’t too cool to do so, sang along with him.

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Published December 24, 2013

David Byrne on Creativity and Constraints

David Byrne talks about music, technology and his recent book How Music Works (now out in paperback), at Salon:

I’m not saying that the artist doesn’t put their feelings into it, or any part of their biography, but that there’s a lot of constraints and considerations and templates that they work with – unconscious decisions or constraints put upon them that guide what they’re going to do… Our imaginations are constrained by all these other things — which is a good thing. There’s kind of a process of evolution that goes on where the creative part of you adapts to whatever circumstances are available to you. And if you decide you want to make pop songs, or whatever, there’s a format. You can push the boundaries pretty far, but it’s still a recognized thing. And if you’re going to do something at Lincoln Center, there’s a pretty prescribed set of things you are going to do. You can push that form, but kind of from inside the genre. So I guess I’m saying that a lot of creative decisions are kind of made for us, and the trick is then working creatively within those constraints.

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Published October 30, 2013

Luc Sante on Lou Reed (1942 – 2013)

I wasn’t going to say anything about the death of Lou Reed — what is there to say? Like so many people, I discovered his music in my teens and was just as thrilled and confused by The Velvet Underground as anyone else — but I did want to post a link to a short New Yorker essay by Low Life author Luc Sante that seems to capture something of the man’s complexity, and the dark, ambiguous appeal of the VU:

The least you could say about Reed is that he was complicated. He was lyrical and crass, empathetic and narcissistic, feminine and masculine, a gawky adolescent and an old soak, a regular guy and a willful deviant, an artisan and a vandal. As a teen-ager he was administered electroshock, intended to cure him of either homosexuality or generalized waywardness, depending on which interviews you read. He studied poetry with Delmore Schwartz and songcraft in the teen-pop-counterfeiting ateliers of Pickwick Records, then absorbed the avant-garde trance state from La Monte Young via John Cale and Angus MacLise—but since he was already tuning his guitar strings all to one note when he met them maybe he’d absorbed it on his own.

The Velvet Underground, fruit of all those disparate lessons, encompassed so many contradictions it initially weirded out nearly everybody. Reed employed the marble-voiced Nico—foisted on the band by Svengali pro tem Andy Warhol—as a Brechtian device to spike his tender ballads, while pushing a wall of noise and lyrics about dope and queer sex directly in your face. That first record (“The Velvet Underground & Nico”) travelled by word of mouth for years, going from zero to classic entirely behind the industry’s back. It was among other things an aggressive declaration of New York gutter realism in a time of rising California pie-eyed bliss. It may well have launched fifty thousand bands, and it may also have launched a hundred thousand chippy dope habits. And at length it spoke to a million teen-agers, one by one, in the existential darkness of their bedrooms.

The first VU song I ever heard was I’m Waiting for the Man. It was a staple on Annie Nightingale‘s Sunday evening request show on BBC Radio 1 in the late 1980s and it sounded, if not exactly dangerous, then certainly wayward, grubby and glamorous in a way that only New York rock ‘n’ roll can. It sparked an unhealthy interest in the band that’s never quite gone away. The VU track that captures all their brilliant contradictions is probably the epic Sister Ray. But I couldn’t find the full 17:27 version (15 minutes might be enough anyway), and I’m not sure I want to end on that note, so here is Some Kinda Love from the VU’s eponymous 1969 album instead:

 

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Published October 1, 2013

Steve Albini: Aspire to Great Things

(This has been doing the rounds, but it is kind of great…)

Letters of Note has published the letter Steve Albini sent to the band Nirvana, prior to recording their final album In Utero, laying out his methodology:

I like to leave room for accidents or chaos. Making a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place and every bass drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it. I prefer to work on records that aspire to greater things, like originality, personality and enthusiasm. If every element of the music and dynamics of a band is controlled by click tracks, computers, automated mixes, gates, samplers and sequencers, then the record may not be incompetent, but it certainly won’t be exceptional.

Read the whole thing.

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Published August 12, 2013

The Birdman


The Birdman is a wonderful — and an award-winning — documentary short by Jessie Auritt about Rainbow Music in New York’s East Village and it’s eccentric owner.  The store just has to be seen to be believed:

With CDs, VHSs and old cassette tapes stacked head high, Rainbow Music is a hoarder’s paradise. However, its quirky owner, known as ‘The Birdman’, knows exactly where everything is. Amidst the Starbucks and Subways popping up on every corner of the East Village, Rainbow Music maintains its mom and pop feel, and is a hidden gem to its patrons. Due to the weak economy, online music sales and pirating, and the changing neighborhood, this charismatic curmudgeon is struggling to sell what he has in his store. Despite these challenges, The Birdman carries on to his own tune.

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Published July 10, 2013

Uncovered QOTSA

I’m surely oh-so-late to the party on this, but Nouvelle Vague’s Olivier Libaux has recorded a new album of Queens Of The Stone Age covers performed by female singers.

The Wall Street Journal spoke to Libaux about the album:

“I remember I was already thinking about doing an album like mine back in 2006, when touring with Nouvelle Vague…I was sure some Queens of the Stone Age songs would become wonderful, played softly, sung by female vocalists.”

Rather than make the covers album into a Nouvelle Vague project with French singers, though, he was keen to try something different.

“I wanted the album to be performed by English-speaking artists,” Libaux said. “I know that Nouvelle Vague sometimes sounded funny because of some of our singers’ accents. But my ‘Uncovered QOTSA’ had to be 100-percent accent free. I believe it’s because I wanted the lyrics to be as close to the bone as they could be. I then listed all my favorite female singers of this world and sent tones of e-mails. I was very fortunate since many of these singers answered ‘yes’ without any hesitation.”

Its charm may well wear thin on repeated plays, but you can currently stream the whole album at Soundcloud and decide for yourself:

If nothing else, I’d love to know who did the jazzy Milton Glaser-esque art.

The album is out in the US on July 16.

(via Largehearted Boy)

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