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The world sucks. Republicans are trying their best to lie their way back into power again. Oil is killing entire ecosystems in the Gulf. Global warming is starting to really come into its own. Some sub-human idiots from New Jersey are celebrated by everyone. It’s one day before the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima. It’s August and I live in a place where we’re excited if the temperature is only 102°, where no one has a job, where the economy is stagnating, and where earthquake recovery continues without any help from the outside world. Oh, and apparently the Mayans are coming. Really, is there anything good out there? Can someone give us even a peek at hope–even for a second?
Enter Arcade Fire. During their Madison Square Garden concert tonight (broadcast live online), my life didn’t suck–and I’m guessing that’s true of all the other people who attended or watched from a distance. And it wasn’t just the concert, either–though that was quite an amazing, spellbinding, celebratory event (watch it yourself if you want proof–it’s well worth your time). It was the unreal realization that a band like this isn’t supposed to succeed in America–yet they have, and this concert is proof.
While I was watching, I told my wife (who wasn’t watching–since they’re not Depeche Mode or Weird Al), “They’re all kind of ugly looking–so you know they’re good.” She concurred. I was exaggerating, of course–they’re not ugly at all (some are quite fetching, in fact). But they’re not Katy Perry or Usher, either. And here they are with a #1 album, selling out MSG, and blasting a concert online that shuts down Twitter. This is a band of Americans and Canadians and Hatians, men and women, multi-instrumentalists all, singing and playing complex, convex music that has caught the attention of teenagers and older dudes like me in a way that very few artists are capable. In a musical world filled with banality and self-delusion, Arcade Fire are more than just a breath of fresh air–they’re a hurricane that demonstrates why everyone else sucks (see: Radiohead at the 2009 Grammys).
I should add that I’m not even a particularly devout fan of Arcade Fire. I really like Funeral, and I’m beginning to discover their other music (including their new album, The Suburbs, which I’m listening to now). It’s beautiful, fascinating music, but I haven’t studied it or LISTENED to it to any serious extent to really have a lot to say about it (though Funeral is right up there with In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and that’s the highest praise I can give an album). But I know quality when I hear it, and they’re quality–and their very existence as a popular band, a band celebrated and listened to by all shapes and sizes and ages, gives me hope that the world won’t suck forever.
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It’s past the midpoint of 2010 by about a month. A lot of great music has been released in the past 7 months: Joanna Newsom’s Have One on Me, Pan Sonic’s Gravitoni, Flying Lotus’s Cosmogramma, Frank Bretschneider’s EXP, Emeralds’ Does It Look Like I’m Here? Dolphins into the Future’s The Music of Belief, and Autechre’s Oversteps, to name just the stuff I’ve been listening to.
But one work stands above all these, has invaded my listening space like on other…and it came out in 2009. It’s Leyland Kirby’s Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was. I’ve reviewed it already, but I thought I’d reassert the magnitude of this work again. It’s easily the best album of the current decade, even if it was released in the tail end of the last. It’s a long, difficult album, but it overwhelms me at every turn.
Absolutely essential listening.
At the end of the day, when there are no friends, when there are no lovers, who are you going to call for? What do you have to change?
–R.E.M., “Good Advices”
R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction was given the deluxe edition treatment this week–a remastered original CD and an extra CD featuring demos the band did in Athens just before flying to London to record the work with Joe Boyd. As deluxe editions go, this one is excellent simply because the second disk is not only a great listen but previously unreleased (for the most part), therefore making the whole thing worth purchasing even if you already own the album. And, yes, I bought my copy. When the first notes of “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” started up, I was suddenly taken back in time to 1985, to a point in my own musical history that has few parallels.
I still remember the first time I heard about R.E.M. It was at a party in Iceland during the summer of 1984. I was one of 30 American exchange students who spent the summer on that island. I was also one of the youngest in the group (15; most were 17 or 18–and when you’re that age, two or three years age difference means everything). I was a very socially awkward kid. I desperately wanted to belong. I wanted to take risks and be the life of the party and hang out with the cool kids and be accepted–but every time I tried something, took a risk, tried hanging out with coolness, I ended up saying or doing something incredibly stupid and embarrassing myself. I couldn’t help it. I was awkward; I was confused; I was naive. And yes, I know that made me a regular teenager, but that’s a fact only appreciated (or understood) much later. At the time, I was an aspirant, and I wanted nothing more than to be cool.
So at this party, there were two guys (one Icelander, one American) who were both obviously older and cooler than me. They were studying an article about R.E.M. in a local Icelandic magazine. I stood nearby listening in, not really understanding a word but fully aware that these guys were better than me because they knew something I didn’t. As I listened to them talk, I grew slowly terrified of my ignorance. It wasn’t my lack of knowledge of R.E.M. that frightened me; it was the realization that this was only the beginning–there was a whole world of bands, books, ideas that I was entirely unaware of. How could I possibly catch up?
I should say that my musical knowledge, at that time, was incredibly limited. My favorite bands were Men at Work, Duran Duran, and The Police. Anything that went beyond the bounds of MTV was simply alien to my experience. And, yes, over the next year or so I did grow and expand my musical palate (Springsteen, Prince, stuff like that). For whatever reason, though, I never got around to R.E.M.
Then Fables came out during the summer of 1985, and I decided, finally, to find out who and what they were. My first response upon listening was… what the hell? Why is the lead singer mumbling? Why does everything sound so muddled? Was it called Fables of the Reconstruction or Reconstruction of the Fables (some still ask that question)? The music puzzled me, but I couldn’t stop listening. I listened over and over and over; slowly but surely the music started to make sense, a lot of sense. I’d never heard anything like this. It was odd, beautiful, clunky, and groovy all at once.
Listening today, I understand exactly why I had such a strong attachment to this record back then. It’s wonderful collection of wonderful, weird songs. I love the harmonies on “Maps and Legends,” the country funk of “Can’t Get There from Here,” the strange lyrics throughout, pastoral beauty of side two (especially “Good Advices”). It’s just a great album. And yes I am aware that people thought the album was derivative of their earlier works; that it pales in comparison to Murmur and even to Document or Out of Time or Automatic for the People. But I still think it’s better than those because it most captures the spirit of this band: eclectic, personal, intelligent, and harmonious.
But even more important than the album itself, Fables opened a door to a whole musical world. From R.E.M., I discovered other post-punk American bands like The Replacements, Hüsker Dü, The Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Bad Brains, and on and on. The fact that Joe Boyd produced Fables led me to discover Fairport Convention and Richard Thompson and the whole English folk rock scene of the 1960s (Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, Incredible String Band, etc). R.E.M.’s inspiration also came from the bands of the 1960s–not just the Stones and Beatles and Dylan but The Byrds, The Who, The Kinks, and a hundred other acts I could name. And, yes, I had heard of the Beatles and Stones and all these acts, but I had little depth of knowledge about that music. R.E.M. became the catalyst for me to delve further into their works. Even more, the fact that I began to devour all things music gave me a focus in life: to write like Greil Marcus and Dave Marsh and the other cool rock journalists. And while I never actually ended up doing that, by a strange, circuitous route that even I don’t quite understand, this impulse to study and to learn pushed me through college and into graduate school, pushed me to write about sound and music and technology in my dissertation, to study music production and music creation, to create albums, and to write articles and reviews for my own websites and for Stylus and other magazines–and to write this very article here on the Inkbottle. And it’s kept me listening, searching, seeking out interesting, exciting, and wonderful music wherever it might come from. I can trace all of that back to R.E.M.’s little album.
Fables, then, is my Year Zero, a touchstone out of which the bulk of my life can be mapped. That’s why it matters to me, and that’s why I celebrate this album’s big, fancy reissue.
So what is the album that has most shaped your life? I’d love to hear your answers in the comments below.
This is the wonderful writer Elizabeth Gilbert talking about the nature and danger of creativity. From Ted:
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I’m no musician; I’m more of a dabbler, really. But I create stuff and share it with others. One of the most common complaints I’ve received about my music is that it is too sparse–that there aren’t enough things going on. “It needs something….else,” a friend once told me. When pressed, he couldn’t identify exactly what was missing–just that there wasn’t enough sound there (or there there, perhaps). And he was probably right, but the problem with creating music is that each element added to a mix needs to blend with all the other elements. Add something, and suddenly everything else sounds different. More often than not, those added sounds just create a muddled mess.
It is so easy to create complex music today. There are endless tracks available in even the cheapest audio workstations; there are endless plug-ins that can be used to make every individual track different; and there are seemingly endless combinations within each plug-in to customize sounds even further. For many musicians (especially novices like myself), it seems almost like cheating if we don’t stretch the software to its breaking point, adding tweaks and overdubs and all sorts of variations to every single song, every single track, every single plug-in–whether they need it or not.
Most of the time, songs don’t need that level of complexity. A song is usually a pretty simple thing: a melody, a beat, a hook. But once those elements are figured out, the creative process kicks in, and it’s hard to stop tweaking, enhancing, expanding. Back when it cost real money to record music (studio time and all), there were good reasons to stop tweaking. Now? Money is no object; time is no object. But the end result often suffers.
Because I’m keenly aware of the pitfalls of overproduction, I find myself drawn to music that resists such complexity. I love artists that craft interesting music out of the most elemental sounds, artists who recognize that less is way more interesting (and more challenging) than more. I’m not talking about classical music or folk music that is designed for a quartet or a piano or acoustic guitar; that stuff is fine, but it’s designed for simplicity. There’s no challenge there. Rather, I’m talking about music that has been deliberately pared down to its basic elements. I’m talking about artists who create unique and memorable sounds and then have the guts to leave those sounds alone. I’m talking about artists like Young Marble Giants, whose entire output consists of simple beats, two-finger synth melodies, and simple guitar licks–crafted in utterly beautiful, brilliant ways. I’m talking about The White Stripes, who create epics out of a guitar, a drum set, and a voice. I’m talking about Tom Waits songs featuring an organ, a trash can, and his nearly-dead voice. I’m talking about Chris Watson’s wonderful recording of a cheetah’s growl. I’m talking about the minimalist orchestra music of Amiina. I’m talking about The Caretaker’s and William Basinski’s slowly-dying recordings of the past.
Most of all, however, I’m talking about Pan Sonic, the anchorite monks of electronic noise whose last album, Gravitoni, is released this month. If anyone embodies this aesthetic, it’s them.
My introduction to Pan Sonic came in 1999 with their third album, A. I was familiar with a lot of electronic music at that time–the typical stuff like Orbital, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, etc–but when the first hums and snaps of “Maa” (first track on A) came out of my speakers, something clicked. This is it, I thought at the time. This is what I’d been searching for (even if I hadn’t been aware of the search until that moment). I was amazed by the simplicity–low, resonating, overpowering tones; intense buzzing and wheezing noise; and especially the clean, crisp, snapping click beats. This is electronic music, music crafted from the very elements of electricity. I was enthralled. I went back and got their first two works, Vakio and Kulma. I picked up their live recordings. I picked up the solo work by Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen. As each new album came out, I would spend weeks dissecting every second. I’d post reviews on my web site. I’d spread the word to whomever would listen. Before their four-CD set Kesto came out, I scoured the web looking for information on the work and then forwarded that information on to Phinnweb, the guys who ran the only Pan Sonic web site on the web. In fact, I scoured the Phinnweb Pan Sonic discography page and bought everything I could that had anything to do with the band, including a DVD that featured Pan Sonic performing on an instrument created by legendary Finnish electronic composer Erkki Kurrenniemi. The DVD was PAL-encoded, so I went out and bought a DVD player that played PAL disks (great investment–that thing let me buy the complete Blake’s 7 series that is only available on PAL).
Pan Sonic uses custom made instruments (made by Jari Lehtinen, a friend and unofficial “third member” of the group). I don’t know much about these, but I’m guessing they follow the rules for most synthesizers and drum machines–they use oscillators, filters, and envelopes; they feature sine and square waves and different types of noise. These various elements, configured in different ways, produce beats, tones, noises, and chords–the bread and butter of electronic music. But in Pan Sonic’s hands, these instruments manage to create beats, tones, noises, and chords that are richer, sharper, more interesting, and more “pure” than anyone else’s. Take the snare sound in “Vaihtovirta” off Aaltopiiri, for example. On the surface, it’s just a snap, like a thousand other snap sounds you’ll hear if you listen to enough electronic music. But listen again–there’s a warmth to that snap (created, most likely, by a built-in reverb in the instrument). At full volume (Pan Sonic’s preference), the snap sounds like a microscopic bullet shot into a thin sheet of ice.
What makes this sound even more impressive is way in which Pan Sonic presents it–sparsely. Their music is incredibly simple: some beats, some tones, and some noise. There are usually only about four or five different sounds at work in a Pan Sonic song; some of the sounds are in the high frequencies, some in the mid, and some in the low. Rarely do sounds overwhelm one another; each one is given space to build and to inhabit its frequency range. As a result, that snare snap in “Vaihtovirta” is wonderful because we can focus on it so easily. I find interesting sounds far more exciting than interesting songs, so this focus on sound alone is infectious. That’s not to say that Pan Sonic’s music merely fills space, however; the songs and the song structures are equally compelling, often moving from silence to noise and back again within a simple three-or-four minute opus. This was made possible, in part, because Pan Sonic usually recorded their music live in studio–unlike almost every other electronic artist (or just artist, for that matter, since the advent of computer recording equipment). That live feel in their music allowed for spontaneity, to be sure, but it also brought a freshness to the feel of the music–the sense that only music created in a moment can provide (mistakes and all).
Above all, however, I am amazed by Pan Sonic’s consistency. Everything they have every created is memorable. Yes, their music shares some common elements across every one of their albums, and some might call that repetitive. However, I don’t. To me, they are craftsmen who use the same tools and the same elements to create as many different, unique, and ingenious works that they can. Their biggest album, the four-CD Kesto, was founded upon the triptych works of Francis Bacon, who routinely created three different paintings on the same subject as a way to explore the many faceted nature of those subjects. To me, Pan Sonic’s music (not only Kesto but all of their works) took up a similar exercise–to explore how many different ways they could use the same basic tools to create music. If you listen to all of their music, from 1995′s Vakio to 2010′s Gravitoni, you’ll hear an incredible range of sounds and musical styles, from minimalist techno to maximalist noise.
And now we have an answer to the question: how many years can Pan Sonic use the same elements to create new musical ideas? The answer is: 15. Yes, Gravitoni is (apparently) their last album as a group. The two have been solo artists for some time now, and they both plan to go their separate ways to pursue their individual interests. But before they went away entirely, they gave us an amazing album that functions like a concluding chapter in the Pan Sonic story. Like all good conclusions, this one summarizes everything that came before and offers a final parting thought by which to remember their legacy. So spread across this album’s eleven songs and 52 minutes, there are beautiful and ugly and terrifying beats; overpowering caverns of noise; deep, gurgling bass lines; waves of sonic steam; and sine waves and square waves and flashing waves and distressed waves and on and on. Some of the highlights include “Corona,” which must be the audio equivalent to a voyage into the sun; “Radio Qurghonteppa,” which features a killer bass line (grinding gears churning through dead bodies, I think); and “Kaksoisvinokas/Twinaskew,” an eerie song that includes actual vocal samples (very rare in the Pan Sonic world).
And then there’s the last track, “Pan Finale” (see above), which really does sound like a finale, encompassing every single one of these sounds in an almost montage-like way to end the album and their career, starting with propulsive beats, adding in techno noodles and waves of spooky tones, then pushing these tones further and further towards a wall of noise and distortion, grinding and churning around the beat, washing us in a bath of white death. This is followed by a pause, where the beats and noodles reemerge; followed again by a powerful buzzsaw noise of pain, which dies into a long, slow tone that moves from left to right and back again as it dies. And, in the very end, at the very last second, there’s a snap, a crunch, a burst of noise–and then silence.
In all, Gravitoni is an amazing end to an amazing career. I’ve been listening to it for over a week and find myself wanting to go back and re-listen everything that this band has created. To me, as a wanna-be musician, their music is both inspiring and intimidating. I hope someday to create beats that are half as good as theirs–and when I do, I hope I have the guts to then leave those beats alone to grow and build and to live within my songs. Mostly, however, I’m humbled by their ability to follow a musical path for such a long time and with such amazing success.
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