Good Friday

Photo: Christopher Makos

Watched another episode of the Warhol documentary last night. It covered the part of his life when a lot of his friends, and especially his lover, John, got the ‘gay cancer’ in the mid-1980s. The ‘gay cancer.’ For some reason, that sounds so much worse than AIDS. So sad. 

Andy was such a talented artist, and not just for what he created in terms of paintings and films. The whole idea of being a celebrity, and your personality—your personal brand— being the work of art itself is just brilliant. They point out that although some others had done it before—Oscar Wilde, Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein—but he was the one who really popularized it.

And now everyone is doing it; a pale imitation of it, at least. 

Everyone is seeking their 15 minutes of fame. It comes, then disappears before you even realized it had arrived.

And Warhol started going on these ridiculous sitcoms like The Love Boat, but only appearing as himself. It was like he was injecting himself into pop culture. Kind of elevating these stupid, disposable media products and lampooning them, almost exploding them. A real life person popping up next to Richie Cunningham. Interacting with the artifice. It’s very meta. 

Warhol’s relationship with Basquiat was so sad. They seemed to genuinely love and appreciate one another on multiple levels. An older, established, white artist, and a upcoming, brilliant young Black artist. But then the media got in the way, the critics said some horrible things, and Warhol couldn’t understand everything Basquiat was going through as a young Black man. I think it really hurt them both. Tragic. Especially when you think about what happens next and how they both end their lives.

The death of two icons. Two Sons. Two Saviors of the art world, of our culture.

Why I directly support artists

Directly supporting artists with as few middle entities as possible is very important to me. There are two reasons for this.

First, I grew up in an era where if you wanted to listen to music or discover new music outside of what was playing on the radio or MTV, you needed to go to a store to search for the physical record, tape, or CD. Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but I still get a lot of joy from the feeling of owning music, even if it is only a file on my hard drive. It brings with it a connection with the artist that doesn’t escape me.

Second, supporting artists directly is the most straightforward way to show appreciation for their art. In an era when audio-visual content—especially music—is viewed by most people as disposable or downright worthless, giving cold, hard cash to an artist feels like a revolutionary act.

You streaming?

Yes, I use streaming services. A necessary evil? I’m not sure they’re necessary, but they’re here and they aren’t going away.

From a listener’s standpoint, it’s the most convenient option. From the artist’s perspective, unless you’ve reached the Taylor Swift level of success, streaming makes sense for helping people discover your music.

That said, I understand what’s going on in the streaming game. It’s a nightmare for artists. Our music is being used for free in order for the Spotify and YouTube’s of the world to rake in advertising dollars. But this is the state we find ourselves in, and IMO it’s useless to stand in the way of progress.

Top 5 Bandcamp Purchases of Q4-2021

Today I’m sharing a few of my favorite purchases over the past few months. View my whole Collection on Bandcamp.

Rhucle - With

Rhucle is an amazingly prolific Japanese ambient artist. I discovered him last year through my new favorite newsletter, Flow State. When someone release 5+ albums a year (not singles -- albums of eight or more tracks each), you start to wonder about the quality of the material someone is putting out. You can’t put that much music out and still retain premium quality, right? Rhucle proved this thought wrong. Everything I’ve heard of his is really nice. It’s one of the most minimal forms of ambient music I’ve heard, but it’s also some of the most sublime. Rhucle is an expert at stripping music back until what’s left is only the essential elements, each of which are irreplaceable to the emotional impact. Of the albums he put out in 2021, this one is my favorite.

Romeo Poirier – Hotel Nota

Belgian artist Romeo Poirier’s music is tough to categorize. The lack of drums or obvious percussion suggests calling it ambient, but the brand of textures he utilizes and arrangement of loops makes it feel more like avant-garde techno. Not quite as aggressive as Barker, but approaching the same overall feeling.

Deepchord – Immersions

I’ve long appreciated Rod Modell’s work, in both his Deepchord and Echospace expressions. Immersions was released in 2018 on the excellent London-based label, Astral Industries, but I only recently picked it up. It’s composed of just two extended tracks, 17 and the 18 minutes long respectively. They feel like two takes from the same patch or arrangement of instruments. Modell’s work here is squarely between ambient and dub techno, being characterized almost entirely by an ocean of swirling synths and delicious undulating noise. No attack. Then from the briny deep arises a chugging 145bpm rhythm… It never fully emerges, the kick sometimes imperceptible, deep beneath the surface, but you feel it.

Truly sublime. Excellent stuff for long flights and late nights.

Pablo Bolivar – Framework of a Dream and Framework of a Dream Remixes

Spanish producer Pablo Bolivar released Framework of a Dream in June of 2021, and an album of remixes in December. Both are worth a spin. I realized last year there is a strong contingency of excellent deep techno producers from Spain and Italy. Bolivar is one of the rising stars of the genre, and a founding member of both the Avantroots and Seven Villas labels, both specializing in ambient and dub techno.

Martin Jarl – Everything You Do is Blue

Another solid release from Jarl. I found him from his previous release on Drift Deeper. This one, on Deep Electronics from the Netherlands, is equally fun, groovy, and chill – exactly the mix of ambient and techno I enjoy.

For Jeff Tweedy, Writing Songs IS Finding Meaning

Great podcast here: Malcolm Gladwell interviewing Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy about how he writes songs, supporting his recent book on the same topic. 

Like a lot of artists, what stitches Tweedy’s songs together is intuition — linking the seemingly random events of life; drawing together the themes to create a tapestry that somehow makes sense to him. This bit at the end really jumped out at me.  Jump to about 40:00.

As Tweedy mentions, often, we are too busy, stressed out, and worried to actually observe what is going on around us. We have a million things vying for our attention, and many times, they succeed in distracting us from our immediate reality. 

But when we do take the time and make the effort to actually see and experience reality, it’s often telling us a strange, fascinating, and beautiful story. 

That story is being told  all the time —  we just need to stop what we’re doing and pay attention.

I’ve always believed we as humans are meaning-seeking creatures. We need to make sense of the world we live in.  We need to let our brains do that — to find the meaning. Meaning makes sense to us — far more sense than randomness and ambiguity and chance. We’re designed to do that.

So don’t be such a nihilist, ok? 

MTV Generation of Heck

I just watched the 2015 Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck, which is probably the most satisfying biopic of the late star and of Nirvana, at least as far as I have seen. Highly recommended (at time of writing, it’s streaming on HBO Max). 

While I applaud Gus Van Sant’s effort to depicting a misunderstood and alienated musician who might or might not be Kurt Cobain in Last Days, I ultimately didn’t really connect with that film at all. Montage of Heck does a great job at showing the sadness of Cobain’s early life, his rise to stardom in a scenius of forward thinking musicians and bands, and the tragedy of his later life, addiction, and suicide.

Aside from reminding me how utterly earth shattering Nirvana was in the 1990s, both culturally and musically, I really appreciated that they had some cool animated sequences showing (what the filmmakers imagine) his lone songwriting process might have been. I’m not sure if it’s at all accurate, but seeing a young Kurt playing guitar on a couch by himself, screaming lyrics in a closet, and whispering weird noises into to a tape machine really set me thinking about the 10,000 hours  he put in finding his voice, writing songs, and defining a sound that would ultimate change rock music forever. Nirvana and the grunge movement was kind of the last big thing to happen to rock and roll before its ultimate self destruction. 

Speaking of self-destruction, the MTV appearances in this movie reminded me of how gargantuan that TV station was in the 1990s. I mean, MTV truly was a force of nature back then. MTV controlled youth culture to a degree that is really hard to understand for people that were born after 2000. I can’t even think of a modern analog. TMZ, BuzzFeed maybe? But those comparisons really don’t get at the power MTV held, though.

Then there was Tabitha Soren, Kurt Loder, Bill Belamy, Riki Rachtman… they were more than just news anchors or VJs—they were kind of celebrities in their own right and part of the scene. MTV also organized a lot of events that artists performed at, including the Unplugged series, the movie and music award shows, and more. MTV was a cultural behemoth that didn’t survive the Extinction Event that was the internet. 

Lastly, Montage of Heck is a great encapsulation of what celebrity looked like pre-internet vs post. By and large, artists and celebrities now are PR machines, with well oiled social media content engines pumping out on-brand messaging 24/7/365. They are on, all the time, and their look and style and sound is very calculated, at least it feels that way to me.

Nirvana, and bands in general in that pre-Internet era, had a much more punk ethos. There are some really great interview moments in the film where it’s clear the band is intoxicated and really doesn’t give a crap that the cameras are rolling. It’s refreshing to see that. I wish there was more of that today, to be honest.