Notes from the 52

Your friendly neighborough music blog

[notesfrom52]

Atomic, or: living in dread and promise

Mogwai’s new album, “Atomic”, is a revisited version af the soundtrack they realized a couple years ago for a BBC documentary about atomic age.

This powerful album is worth a listening.

[notesfrom52]

Nicki Minaj’s Performance For a Noted Dictator Was a Shameless Money Grab

Following objections from human rights activists and other people who understand how dictatorships work, Nicki Minaj went through with her headlining performance on Saturday for a concert hosted by a company controlled by Angola’s corrupt president, José Eduardo dos Santos.

[Minaj] now joins a shady list of celebrities who have performed for dictators around the world: Mariah Carey was called out in December 2013 for also playing in Angola, Beyoncè performed for Moammar Gheddafi in 2009, and Jennifer Lopez has a history of accepting million-dollar checks to perform for corrupt leaders. Our occasional projections to the contrary, there’s not much about being a celebrity that requires elevated political awareness. I have to believe that Mariah Carey and Nicky Minaj probably were not abreast on President José Eduardo dos Santos’ long history of human rights violations when they both agreed to perform. This isn’t to dismiss their actions or suggest that either woman isn’t smart, but most people aren’t well-informed, so why would pop stars be? But Nicky Minaj obviously has a team of people who should and probably did bring this to her attention. And even if they didn’t inform her of Dos Santos’ corruption, others certainly did.

[austinkleon]

“I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things that he knows of and senses in the universe. That’s what music is to me—it’s just another way of saying this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that’s been given to us, and here’s an example of how magnificent it is. That’s what I would like to do. I think that’s one of the greatest things you can do in life and we all try to do it in some way. The musician’s is through his music.” –John Coltrane, 1962

[seen-your-video]

Neon Indian “Slumlord Rising” (dir. Tim Nackashi & Alan Palomo)

Director Tim Nackashi & Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo take us inside a seedy LA nightclub that quickly descends into violence in this cinematic video which opens with a stunning 4-minute tracking shot. 

[notesfrom52]

Neon Indian always gets it right.

[notesfrom52]

Me and my mates, we do whatever we wanna do. And actually, I think there’s something quite punk about that. Not screaming into a mic or wearing leather straps every day, but doing whatever the fuck I wanna do. So to me, that's punk. That’s not a wet blanket.

FKA Twigs

[notesfrom52]

Let’s listen to this song together.

Still here? Last issue of Wire magazine made a cover story about Annette Peacock. It turns out she’s a not so well known pioneer of electronic music, which she’s been composing for nearly five decades now. “I’m the one” is her most famous song, and while it is not an easy listening, I find it to be really good and pretty catchy - and I’m sort of a late-comer, I know. In a recent interview on the virtual pages of The Quietus, she talks about the Moog synthesizer: This year marks the 50th birthday of the MOOG synthesizer. How did you come to hear about the instrument because you were a very early adopter of it. AP: We had a friend, Don Heckman, who was a journalist on the New York Times - in New York the music circles were quite small and everyone knew everyone else. One afternoon Paul said to him, 'Have you heard anything new or interesting?' And he played us the Walter Carlos album [Switched On Bach]. I got really excited because it was the first new instrument in 300 years and I was trying to encourage Paul and get some enthusiasm going. I said, 'We have to get this instrument.' But he was not that interested because he didn't have to be. I was the young artist so it was very exciting to me as I hadn't established myself yet. I didn't have an allegiance to anything that I needed to abandon to pick up the synthesizer. I was moving ahead a lot faster. Finally Paul agreed to check it out and agreed to go down and visit Moog. He said that if we were to visit him we would have to take a station wagon and bring it back the same day. And that was very clever. Presumably a prototype MOOG would have been worth a lot of money. How did you persuade him to give you one? AP: Well, on the drive down I psyched out what would be an argument that would persuade him. And I figured that he would want the MOOG to be used to make serious music and to be seen to be involved in serious music because at the time it wasn't, it was being used in jingles and in synthesizing Bach and things like that. It wasn't taken seriously as an instrument. So that's basically what I told Paul to pitch to him and it worked because he gave us a prototype and we drove it back that evening. It sat in our closet for about six months because we couldn't find any information on how to use the thing. We went round trying to visit people but no one would give us any information on how to use it, they were all being very secretive. So finally we just rolled up our sleeves and worked out what to do in order to confront it. Originally I thought I would be behind the curtains altering the sound of the MOOG as a composer, conductor like the Wizard Of Oz - because I'm not really an up at the front kind of personality - and Paul would be out front playing. But that didn't work so then I thought about using it in a non-traditional way, for augmenting non-traditional sound sources like the voice and other instruments. But that was difficult and I had to invent a way to do that. And this is one of the most notable innovations that you're associated with. How did you come to this? AP: Actually someone from a technical magazine in Britain, when I was living there, interviewed me and I described to him how I did it. He said that it couldn't be done - even though I'd made records of me doing it! That took me by surprise. [laughs] The interview is pretty interesting and can be found here.

[notesfrom52]

“It’sThe beat drops - and everybody start nodding their heads. It’s a common behavior, so it’s easy to disregard. But the reasons why humans respond to a thumping bass line so strongly aren’t necessarily obvious.”

[notesfrom52]

The Hollow of the Hand by PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy review – an elusive journal

PJ Harvey and photographer Seamus Murphy travelled together in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC

“PJ Harvey, recently awarded an MBE for her contribution to music, makes her debut as a poet in collaboration with photographer and film-maker Seamus Murphy, who created a dozen short films for her album Let England Shake. An enigmatic artist, Harvey now seeks to penetrate the mistery of others with Murphy’s help. Together they have travelled to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC.”

[notesfrom52]

Articles: What Your Music Format Says About You

Considering the current preponderance of formats—including vinyl, streams, CDs, and cassettes—how we listen to music can now seem just as ...

“All these feelings artists and listeners and fans associate with certain formats are snapshots of a particular moment. They’re all subject to change; nostalgia has a way of making modernity feel passé, even wrong. It’s hard to romanticize the past without condemning the present, which partially explains the Luddite tendencies of some music-fan subcultures. Sure, we can talk about the hands-on, ritualistic experience of playing vinyl records (guilty)—dropping the needle, staring at the big artwork, reading the liner notes—but is there much to fetishize about the cassette experience other than, “Hey, remember these? This is how we used to listen to music, but we don’t anymore, and I kind of miss that.”