Retromania

2012-02-13T11:04:00.000-08:00

2012-02-13T08:50:00.001-08:00

FEBRUARY TOUR (updated)

starting February 16th I’m on tour, with events in Norway (Bergen Kunsthall; Oslo’s By:Larm festival), England (Critical Beats in London; Off the Page festival in Whitstable) and Paris (launch of the French edition of Retromania)

NORWAY

February 16: BERGEN

Talk on retromania + recreativity

Time: 6-30 PM

Location: BERGEN KUNSTHALL, Bergens Kunstforening, Rasmus Meyers allé 5

more information

February 17: OSLO By: Larm Festival

Conversation about Retromania with Audun Vinger + Q/A

Time: 3 pm

Location: Ragnarock conference room, ground floor, HOTEL ROYAL CHRISTIANIA, Biskop Gunnerusgate 3 PB-768 Sentrum, Oslo

More information

FRANCE

February 20–22: PARIS

February 20: Soirée Rétromania, a/k/a RETROMANIA ! Réflexions sur la pop culture à l’heure digitale. A presentation to celebrate the launch of the French edition by Le Mot et le Reste. Discussion with Etienne Menu (journaliste musical), Jean-François Caro ( traducteur) and Guillaume Kosmicki (musicologue et dj).

Time: 6-30 PM

Location: POINT ÉPHÉMÈRE, 200 quai de Valmy 75010 Paris (telephone: 01 40 34 02 48)

Cost: entrée libre

More information

U.K.

February 23: LONDON

Critical Beats #3: Innovation and Tradition
I’ll be joining Tony Herrington, Lisa Blanning and Steve Goodman for the third in a series of panel discussions co-hosted by The Wire and the University of East London and looking at aspects of electronic dance music and club culture as they manifest in East London and beyond. Mark Fisher was scheduled to participate but had to withdraw owing to circumstances beyond his control, so Lisa B has stepped in to replace.

Time: 7.30 pm

Location: Circus 1 at STRATFORD CIRCUS, Theatre Square, Stratford, London E15

Cost: £5/£3

Information and tickets: 0844 357 2625 or
here

February 24 to February 26: WHITSTABLE

The second annual Off the Page Festival: a weekend of panel discussions, screenings, talks, and debates on sound, music, and music criticism co-hosted by The Wire and Sound And Music, with contributions from Linder Sterling, Dave Tompkins, Jonny Trunk, Rob Young, Chris Cutler, Vicki Bennett, Gavin Bryars, Evan Parker, Kiran Sande, and others.

Saturday February 25: I’ll be giving a talk about the work of David Toop.

Time: early afternoon (details TK)

Location: THE PLAYHOUSE THEATRE, 104 High Street, Whitstable, Kent.

Cost: £40 for a weekend three-day pass; £20 Saturday pass.

More information on tickets and the full schedule of events

2012-02-13T08:49:00.001-08:00

sometimes the right coinage is hiding there in plain view

technoise

inspired neologistics from Resident Advisor to describe all this ex-noise underground types making beat-driven form-minus-function techno-like records using strictly analogue gear

(c.f. chillrave as superior term for hipstahaus)

artistes covered include Container, Diamond Catalog, Frak, Unicorn Hard-On, Laser Poodle, Cuticle, No Fun Acid, Viktoria, Leslie Keffer, Prostitutes

with brief namechecks for Dariius, Mammal/Midlife Vacation, Lazy Magnet, Max Cloud, Innercity, Danse Asshole, Pete Swanson, Mat Brinkman/Meerk Puffy/Ton B/ZZ Pot, Extreme Animals, Magas, Pleasurehorse, Vatican Shadow/Christian Cosmos, Sinking Body, The Three Legged Race

2012-02-09T09:19:00.002-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #21

"The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again."

--Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" The National Interest, Summer 1989.

2012-02-09T09:19:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #20

"The return to history everywhere remarked today… is not a return exactly, seeming rather to mean incorporating the 'raw material' of history and leaving its function out, a kind of flattening and appropriation"

-- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991

2012-02-09T09:14:00.000-08:00

end of history, pt 294

from press release re. Electronic Anthology Project's "Of Dinosaur Jr.":

"Two years ago, Built To Spill bassist and solo artist Brett Nelson decided to put his considerable musical talents up to a bit of a challenge:

"I truly love bands like Talk Talk, Men Without Hats, and Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, but I also love bands like Dinosaur Jr., The Replacements, and The Pixies. So what if I merged my two loves together?"

The answer to that question, initially, was the first release by The Electronic Anthology Project, an EP that took seven songs from the Built To Spill catalog and reimagined them as '80s synth pop classics. Utilizing a variety of vintage 80’s synthesizers and drum machines, the project shimmered with an authentic sheen. And rather than rely on the cut-and-paste ease of modern recording software, he records all the melody lines into his computer using as many takes as needed to get it right. "If I can't play it straight all the way through without screwing up," he says, "then it's not used." And the whole experiment was delightfully topped off with newly recorded vocal tracks from BTS front man, Doug Martsch.

Although dismissed by some reviewers as a "goof," Nelson took to the task with great sincerity and the resulting songs bridged the two seemingly separate worlds with bubbly charm and grin-inducing levity.

At the time of the first EAP release, Nelson promised that he would be back with more. And true to his word comes the latest installment in this project: The Electronic Anthology Project of Dinosaur Jr.

To be released on Record Store Day (April 21st, 2012) in a limited edition of 500 purple vinyl copies (with digital, cd and standard vinyl to follow), the new edition of The Electronic Anthology Project takes nine songs from Dinosaur Jr. and brings out the new wave influences that were always hiding among the acid-dripping guitar solos and fervent rhythms.

The blast of "Little Fury Things" (from Dinosaur Jr.'s breakthrough 1987 LP You're Living All Over Me) is given a new life thanks to a throbbing Devo-like pulse. One of the band's most underrated songs from their Sire years, "Feel The Pain," sounds even more wistful when lost in the swell of glistening synth melodies and a knotty bed of programmed beats that would make The Human League proud.

True to form, Nelson called on Dinosaur Jr. leader J. Mascis to record all new vocal tracks for each song here. Wrenched free from the volume and intensity of his band, the heartfelt side of Mascis's lyrics and sober delivery are given the spotlight's full glare and, as a result, shine even brighter.

Lest you think even after two volumes of the Electronic Anthology Project that Nelson is done, he has a long wish list of bands he'd love to make future EAP projects with including the likes of The Pixies and Sebadoh. If the previous two editions of EAP are any indication, they are sure to be eccentric, tuneful, and in heavy rotation on your home stereo."

2012-02-09T07:55:00.000-08:00

more italian hauntology

Iacopo Gardelli says:

"I'd like to suggest you this italian band called Calibro 35. I think that they could be the perfect italian example of hauntology, much more than anyone else: these people from Milan are obssessed with production music from the '70s, especially with b-movies soundtracks mixing funk, jazz and new-wave. It's our golden era, when italian movies were famous all over the world, and when society went through great changes. Innovations, creations, "modernism", if you like.

"When you hear their music it's like watching those films, and they made you wonder about those incredible years in Italy. They re-create the exact atmosphere of that moment.

"Here's a video they made.

"The song is a cover of 'L'appuntamento' written by Bruno Lauzi and originally sung by Ornella Vanoni."

2012-02-07T10:46:00.000-08:00

FEBRUARY RETROMANIA TOUR OF EUROPE

starting February 16th I’m on tour, with events in Norway (Bergen Kunsthall; Oslo’s By:Larm festival), England (Critical Beats in London; Off the Page festival in Whitstable) and Paris (launch of the French edition of Retromania)

NORWAY

February 16: BERGEN

Talk at the Bergen Kunsthall on retromania + recreativity

Time: 6-30 PM

Location: Bergen Kunsthall, Bergens Kunstforening, Rasmus Meyers allé 5

more information

February 17: OSLO By: Larm Festival

Conversation about Retromania with Audun Vinger + Q/A

Time: 3 pm

Location: Ragnarock conference room, ground floor, Hotel Royal Christiania, Biskop Gunnerusgate 3 PB-768 Sentrum, Oslo

More information

FRANCE

February 20–22: PARIS

February 20: Soirée Rétromania, a/k/a RETROMANIA ! Réflexions sur la pop culture à l’heure digitale. A presentation to celebrate the launch of the French edition by Le Mot et le Reste. Discussion with Etienne Menu (journaliste musical), Jean-François Caro ( traducteur) and Guillaume Kosmicki (musicologue et dj).

Time: 6-30 PM

Location: POINT ÉPHÉMÈRE, 200 quai de Valmy 75010 Paris (telephone: 01 40 34 02 48)

Cost: entrée libre

More information

U.K.

February 23: LONDON

Critical Beats #3: Innovation and Tradition
I’ll be joining Tony Herrington and Steve Goodman for the third in a series of panel discussions co-hosted by The Wire and the University of East London and looking at aspects of electronic dance music and club culture as they manifest in East London and beyond. Mark Fisher was scheduled to participate but has had to withdraw owing to circumstances beyond his control.

Time: 7.30 pm

Location: Circus 1 at Stratford Circus, Theatre Square, Stratford, London E15

Cost: £5/£3

Information and tickets: 0844 357 2625 or
here

February 24 to February 26: WHITSTABLE

The second annual Off the Page Festival: a weekend of panel discussions, screenings, talks, and debates on sound, music, and music criticism co-hosted by The Wire and Sound And Music, with contributions from Linder Sterling, Dave Tompkins, Jonny Trunk, Rob Young, Chris Cutler, Vicki Bennett, Gavin Bryars, Evan Parker, Kiran Sande, and others.

Saturday February 25: I’ll be giving a talk about the work of David Toop.

Time: early afternoon (details TK)

Location: The Playhouse Theatre, 104 High Street, Whitstable, Kent.

Cost: £40 for a weekend three-day pass; £20 Saturday pass.

More information on tickets and the full schedule of events

2012-02-07T10:36:00.000-08:00

mnml sggs's PC on two good aspects of 2011, first of them being collaborations

this struck me as wonderfully nuanced assessment of where music is at: the bounty of harvesting a crop, or crops plural, that were sowed long ago

"Several of these collaborations produced exceptional, if unsurprising results. A lot of them were my favourite records to actually listen to. Again, this is unsurprising, given that we’re dealing with well-established projects and, well, middle-aged dudes and dudettes who’ve really nutted out their approaches to sound. This is why, fundamentally, I think of the best of these as culmination records, recordings that cash out a bunch of ideas that have been kicking around for the past decade or more. But/so: not that exciting, really. And also, you know, I really hope that each is kind of the ‘last one’ in its sequence or series. For the sake of transformation. Culmination, then conclusion, then... rip it up, and start again. To continue on these trajectories would be to court the trage-comedy of true repetition. Add in more time, and you’ll endup with farce, if Woody A is to be believed. But being careful, culminating collaborations between people who really, really know their shit, these records are also very satisfying, if you give them your full attention. Repeat: they are amazing to actually listen to."

the second good aspect of last year was mixtapes, and he provides some examples/links to favourites - a couple of which i'd heard and would also recommend highly -- Moon Wiring Club at FACT, Mark Van Hoen at Pontone. And I must have missed the Endless House Foundation one, i'll have to check that out and the others recommended.

Mixtapes = "a feast" as PC says, but then again since their provenance trawls so far and wide and so atemporally, you might say that they too are a banquet based in harvesting crops planted long ago

2012-02-07T09:56:00.001-08:00

modern-ish versus modernist

they're back!

this sounds like a record from 1991

"unique rap-rave group from South Africa" says Dave, rap-rave = hip-house right?

i love it, I love them, I'm glad they didn't just crawl away with their tails between their legs after the flop of the first album, i'm looking forward to hearing Ten$ion

but it sounds like a record from 1991

i find this.... eerie

i mean, even so, it sounds more modern than Adele, just as tracks by Pitbull and LMFAO and Flo Rida and the rest sound more modern than Adele

so if there's going to be throwbacks, i'd rather the charts were full of this stuff, stuff that throws back less far back than Adele-type music

but still

the fact that it still sounds quite modern, modern-ish, is perplexing in itself

2012-02-06T15:42:00.000-08:00

hipsterhouse in San Francisco - the monthly party Haçeteria

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2012/02/lost_in_the_night_haceteria_ke.php

not just Detroit Techno and Acid House - they play New Beat and Italo too

2012-02-06T13:05:00.001-08:00

somehow i missed this splendid piece in Frieze from September 2011 by Bruce Sterling -- on what things will be like in the year 2031

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/twenty-years-fore-aft/

2012-02-06T09:53:00.000-08:00

brush up your rusty French - an interview with me in Liberation by Marie Lechner with Sophian Fanen

deux amuse-bouches:

Vous utilisez le terme «hauntology» pour qualifier un style musical créé durant les années 2000 et qui semble se languir d’une période révolue…

Le terme est de Jacques Derrida, mais le jeu de mots fonctionne mieux en français : hantologie-ontologie. Derrida explorait les résonances philosophiques du concept de fantôme, qui n’est jamais ni présent ni absent, jamais totalement dans le présent ni cantonné au passé. L’usage que j’en fais n’est pas strictement derridien, c’est plutôt un mot utile et amusant pour décrire un tas de groupes qui travaillent avec cette mémoire culturelle.

....

et

...

Comment la musique va-t-elle évoluer dans les prochaines années ?

Je n’en ai aucune idée ! Je suis très curieux de voir comment Internet va continuer à agir sur la musique et comment seront les musiciens qui ont grandi en ayant accès sans limite à tout ce qui a été produit dans l’histoire, partout dans le monde. C’est un état d’esprit bizarre pour faire de la musique et j’espère qu’une musique bizarre en sortira

2012-02-04T17:32:00.000-08:00

recreativity, part 498

2012-02-04T15:17:00.000-08:00

digital discontents, part 198

Neil Young on his campaign for higher-fidelity digital sound and how he spoke with Steve Jobs about creating a format with 20 times the fidelity of files in the most current digital formats such as MP3

"The quality of the sound of music today--I don’t like it. It just makes me angry.

“Not the quality of the music. But we’re in the 21st century and we have the worst sound that we’ve ever had. It’s worse than a 78. Where are our geniuses? What happened?

"If you’re an artist and you created something and you knew the master was 100 percent great, but the consumer got 5 percent, would you be feeling good?I like to point that out to artists. That’s why people listen to music differently today.

"It’s all about the bottom and the beat driving everything, and that’s because in the resolution of the music, there’s nothing else you can really hear. The warmth and the depth at the high end is gone. It’s like Occupy Music — the 5 percent, that’s who we are now. We used to be the hundred percent!

"It's not that digital is bad or inferior, it's that the way it's being used isn't doing justice to the art . . . The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn't have to make that choice.

“Steve Jobs was a digital pioneer, but when he went home, he listened to vinyl.

"I talked to Steve about it. We were working on it. You've got to believe if he lived long enough he would eventually try to do what I'm trying to do.

“My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years. We live in the digital age, and unfortunately it’s degrading our music, not improving.

“The CD is over. But the album will never be dead.”

His proposed format would contain 100 percent of the data of music as recorded in the studio. Each song-file would be so big, it would take 30 minutes to download; a new portable playback device might hold just 30 albums. You would download overnight and...

"Sleep well. Wake up in the morning. Play some real music and listen to the joy of 100 percent of the sound of music"

A dream, I'm guessing: don't see people going into reverse in terms of the convenience of "want it NOW!!!" instant-access and ultrachoice (a whole, huge collection portable wherever you go).

[various sources from 2011 and 2012]

2012-02-04T15:15:00.000-08:00

digital discontents, pt 197

steve albini from an interview in Tape Op magazine's latest issue

Q: Obviously a tool is a tool and you can use it any way you want. It’s your choice to keep working on tape.

Yeah, I think there’s more to it than that. I don’t think you can unilaterally say anything like that. The digital systems — their history and evolution — is that they’re editing programs. All of their development has gone into making them more powerful and flexible in the manipulation of already recorded sound. The act of recording a sound, within the digital paradigm, is perceived as a solved problem. Once it gets in the box is where the magic happens. I feel that’s an inversion of the process. I think there’s more implied in digital recording than just the manner of storage. There’s a whole culture of manipulation that has developed. I don’t think it’s a neutral technology. I think it’s had a detrimental effect on music as a whole. I think it’s structurally dangerous to artists. They don’t have an option of not ceding their music to someone. It’s not value neutral. The reason that I’m in the chair as a professional is that someone is expected to trust me to make choices that won’t make them vulnerable. I feel that’s one of the problems with digital recording; there’s no disincentive to making someone vulnerable.

(via http://www.markrichardson.org/post/17040033071/q-obviously-a-tool-is-a-tool-and-you-can-use-it)

2012-02-03T19:08:00.000-08:00

1920s nostalgia

2012-02-02T22:30:00.001-08:00

BOOK NEWS

news about Retromania's foreign editions and the American first-time release of Energy Flash

Retromania

* the French translation is published by Le Mot et le Reste Éditions on February 9th as Rétromania: comment la culture pop recycle son passé pour s'inventer un futur. I will be in Paris for the launch 2/20 to 2/23, details about the presentation on 2/20 to follow soon.

* the Spanish edition is being published in April by Caja Negra Editora as Retromanía: la adicción de la cultura pop a su propio pasado.

* the German edition is published in October by Ventil Verlag.

* in other Retromania news, the US edition has gone into its fourth printing, while the UK large-format edition, now sold out, has been replaced by the smaller, cheaper B-format with a new cover

Energy Flash

Energy Flash is issued in its expanded/updated form in America in May via Soft Skull. Because the original Generation Ecstasy was an abridged version of the UK edition, this is the first time it's been available here in its full-length form; it also has the 40 thousand extra words, covering developments in the 2000s, that were added to the UK-only 2008 anniversary edition. More information here and new about events TK.

2012-02-02T14:39:00.000-08:00

Nitsuh Abebe on emo and generation gaps.

"...in 2006, a writer and music-industry gadabout named Sarah Lewitinn-- more recognizably branded as Ultragrrrl-- posted a blog entry faking a claim that shouldn't, in and of itself, have been all that provocative. My Chemical Romance, she suggested, was "this generation's Nirvana"-- the transformative favorite that meant something to millions. The provocative part, I suppose, was what came around that: a needling argument that the music press was run by out-of-touch 35-year-old guys who couldn't remotely hope to understand teenagers or a band like My Chemical Romance, and were hopelessly irrelevant as a result... As a rhetorical ploy, the argument felt a little too cheap and juvenile-- that great stubborn teenage move where one pretends adults are simply unable to understand the first thing about being human. In reality, a lot of older people's antipathy toward the kinds of bands she championed stemmed from thinking they understood the stuff all too well, having sifted through piles of angsty power chords and snotty pop-punk through the whole 1990s alt-rock gold-rush-- little of which seemed all that meaningful to anyone lately."

every time I go into a magazine store and look at the music mag section (which isn't as often as it used to be) i pick'n'flick through Alternative Press. I used to write a bit for AP, back in the late 90s when the review section was edited by Dave Segal (now at the Stranger) and it covered all the cool stuff of that time (so i'd do short reviews of drum'n'bass comps and digital hardcore CDs and so forth, and others would review post-rock, industrial, ambient, IDM, lo-fi etc). A mix somewhere between The Wire and what Pitchfork now covers. Even then there was a discernible gulf between the superhip review section and the more bread-and-butter feature-oriented main body of the magazine. But for most of the last decade AP has been a different beast altogether, it's all about the kind of emo/pop-punk/gothy-whatnot/non-extreme metal that Nitsuh's talking about. It barely intersects with the Pitchfork world (or even the Spin world). Basically the reason I flick thru AP is sheer fascination at the number of bands I've never even heard of but who appear to be, for some (who knows how many), stars.

From a Retromania-perspective, the interest of emo and post-2000 pop-punk and glammy/Gothy/lite-metally whatever is that it represents a sizeable musical cohort with whom the notion of Innovation seems to have little traction. This doesn't mean the music doesn't change: i daresay if you placed an emo record from 2012 next to one from 1998, there would be some differences, probably apparent even to a listener such as myself with minimal "competence" (in the semiologist sense of ability to "read" a sign-set). But these changes occur without much in the way of intent or purposive will on the part of the bands, I suspect, and probably owe far more to "scenius" type mechanisms, incremental and anonymous shifts driven by recording technology, economics, and then the basic level of competitio nbetween bands to sound slightly different (but not too different) in other to stand out in a crowded field. Innovation is not much of a priority, or even a criteria in this cultural field; things like energy, passion, integrity, lyrics, etc are.

Not forgetting looks and, er, style.

There's a lot of genres in music--more and more, maybe--that undergo change in that slow, anonymous, non-ideological way. So e.g. country in 2012 is nothing like country in 1960 or 1980. In terms of the substance of its sound, it actually sounds like the stodgiest aspects of radio rock (of the Bryan Adams/Tom Cochrane/Mellencamp/Petty/Hootie type) sung with a Southern accent. But these changes came about slowly as a result of demographics and radio and the gradual divorce of most of its audience from any kind of rural existence.

2012-02-01T15:14:00.000-08:00

interviewed this lady three times, amazingly,and in a single year too iirc

now she's a reference point

2012-01-31T13:58:00.001-08:00

form minus function

Kiran Sande on noise-ist turned "techno"-ist Pete Swanson as emblematic of a spate of "unique, outsider takes on techno" (and also house)

http://www.factmag.com/2012/01/27/pete-swanson-on-dysfunctional-techno-mental-health-and-chasing-the-next-thing/

"If “proper” techno music is about function, then the Swanson, KPLR and Container records are about dysfunction – and their refusal to be useful to DJs and consumers feels like a quietly political statement. “I don’t really like the idea of music being produced for a functional purpose,” Swanson says. “I would be shocked if someone actually played Man With A Potential at a club and people were into it.”

it is a curious trend (see also Ital's Hive Mind), these replicas of analogue-era techno... that are absent -- in some hard to precisely pinpoint way-- of whatever vital attribute made the music work in their original context...

(cf Prurient dude rediscovering EBM/Cold Wave/dancefloor for Bermuda Drain as well as Vatican Shadow alter-ego, and producing music that would, if it had been sent as demos to Nettwerk or Play It Again Sam back in the day,would have been rejected as substandard)

the trend seems to be recursive in two ways

i/ a flashback to Throbbing Gristle's sideline in defective disco with "United", "Hot On the Heels of Love", "Adrenalin"

ii/ a strategy symptomatic of hyper-stasis -- Swanson like so many artists in the Zones wants to keep moving restlessly ever "onwards" ("I’m always chasing the next thing” he tells Sande). but since pushing forward in some absolute sense (advance into the genuine unknown) gets harder and harder with each passing years (for all kinds of reasons including the hyper-productivity of the Zones) that requires a sideways-and-backwards movement, i.e. into another genre/field from your usual one, but naturally into that genre's past (after all, you wouldn't want to get mistaken for an attempt to participate in the genre as currently constituted, or judged on its terms). if your model is things like Underground Resistance-type brutalist tekno (a style that electronic dance music left behind long ago) and your execution is deliberately rough-hewn.... not so much "deconstructed" as depurposed.... then the dread scenario of DJs playing it and dancers dancing to it becomes remote

but this leaves the work in a curious place, deriving its shape and existence in relation to something whose criteria it pointedly disregards

2012-01-31T13:53:00.000-08:00

retrotech / ersatz-analogue

via http://www.psfk.com/2012/01/grammaphone-iphone-dock.html (via Daily Swarm):

"Retro Acoustic iPhone Docks Turn Your Device Into A Gramophone [Pics]
By Emma Hutchings on January 31, 2012

These impressive iPhone docks mix the old and the new to create a unique sound. Tunes from your device are sent from the speaker through a small hole in the base leading to the instrument, which acoustically amplifies the music.

These striking retro docks are made by Ryan Boase and available at his ReAcoustic Etsy shop. The bases are made from salvaged wood, and antique gramophone horns and old musical instruments like trumpets and trombones are reused as amplifiers. The docks, which range in price from around $60 to nearly $600, don’t need any batteries or power cords. Boase describes his project, saying:

ReAcoustic is a way for me to be surrounded by music again. It combines another hobby of mine, woodworking with the instruments I loved playing growing up. ReAcoustic was inspired by the “old school” phonographs and their distigushed, vintage sound. It started with brass instruments and has evolved into other areas of acoustic amplification."

more information and pictures of the things at

http://www.etsy.com/people/ReAcoustic

2012-01-30T20:39:00.000-08:00

spoofing nostalgia and revivalism in the mid-70s

2012-01-30T10:05:00.001-08:00

"why so glum, chums?"--intersecting with Retromania's concerns, an interesting piece by Ryan Diduck for The Quietus on "The New Bleak" aka "hypnagothica" and its relation to recent political/economic/environmental traumas

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
talking of dark things, Valerio Mattioli, who writes for LaRepubblica tells me that there is an Italian counterpart to hauntology that was recently covered as part of an article in Blow Up (sort of Italy's The Wire) on contemporary Italian occult psychedelia. The journalist Antonio Ciarletta, says Mattioli, enumerates its ingredients as: "local folklore, the popular spaghetti cinema of the 60s/70s (especially mondo movies, giallo, spaghetti westerns, cannibal movies etc), even Catholicism, and a typical 'Italian vibe' all around.... Many of the musicians openly mention composers such as Piero Umiliani, Ennio Morricone and basically the whole Italian soundtracks/library music school".

"To me," continues Mattioli, "what’s interesting in these bands, is that their kind of hauntology avoids the eerie and pastoral feeling of the English counterpart, as well as the pop-cheesy attitude of the American hypnagogic pop. On the contrary, their music is blatantly dark, esoteric and sometimes bloody, actually reflecting the 'sun & violence' culture which – despite the clichés – is a commonplace here. Of course, there’s the homage to a popular imagery which is deeply rooted here, and that somehow reflects the Italian identity better than your typical Venice postcard. But it’s also like saying that memories often can be nightmares, especially if you live in a country which is half Europe/half... well, Italy. Kind of Sergio Leone/Lucio Fulci induced nostalgia...

"When you go back with your memories to the contemporary Italian golden age – to say, the 60s of the Dolce Vita etc – you can’t escape the ghosts of that same era: terrorism, urban favelas, corruption and so on. Even the big masterpieces of the Italian literature, TV and cinema typically deal with such atmospheres - they're always bloody, violent, excessive. Somehow, the bands analyzed by Ciarletta are here to remind us that the Italian good old days (when future seemed possible) were a very depressed place, and that the present is filled with those ghosts.

"It also comes quite natural to understand this trend as a reflection of the current feelings among many Italians: we perceive our country as a declining glory with no future at all; and economic crisis, crime and political warfare create a sort of Late Empire atmosphere..."

Bands operating in this zone include Cannibal Movie, Donato Epiro, In Zaire, Orfanado, Spettro Family, Heroin In Tahiti [Mattioli's own band], and on the "more 'pagan-catholic folklore' tip", Mamuthones and Father Murphy . TheAwayTeam/Polysick are "a sort of modern Piero Umiliani" with projects lined up for 100% Silk, and Planet Mu. "Needless to say: all these artists form a sort of family, they’re all friends and do stuff together, they share projects and labels etc."

An example of what Mattioli dubs "Mondo-cannibals":

Mattioli calls this sub-category "spaghetti wastelands" (love it!)

This is an example of "Italian gothic":

"Exotic libraries":

~~~ THEAWAYTEAM - TWILIGHT: DRUMS IN THE FOREST ~~~ from AAVV on Vimeo.

DONATO EPIRO - La Vita Acquatica from Planeta on Vimeo.

"Bloody folklore":

and this is Father Murphy, who I saw in Pistoia last year

2012-01-27T12:53:00.000-08:00

Toure on nostalgia as a cultural cop-out, but also on why it is, if not exactly forgivable, then understandable as a symptom at the present moment in time

2012-01-25T10:08:00.000-08:00

terrific icily-controlled rant from mnml sggs on "comfort house" (and by implication all music-as-comfort-food scenarios), inspired by two mixes suffocated by politesse and the feeling of having "heard it all before’".

PC speaks my kind of language when he points out:

"it could have been mixed 12 years ago and not sounded any different. In fact, if it were mixed 12 years ago, it would be very likely to sound exactly like it does. I've been thinking about this for some time, and I've decided that it really matters. Making a mix from 2000 in 2012... it matters. Well, it may not matter to you. But it matters to me...

"For me there is something unbearably complacent at work in the decision to make this mix in 2012, and I find it affronting... It's a kind of complacency makes me want to set fire to my records... as if to prove some pyrrhic point about evanescence, memory, or forgetting. This weird over-reverence that makes you want to desecrate things you love and care about... is this how punks felt?" ...

"The worst thing about the previous decade has been our inability to bury it... The 10 year fucker is undead, monstrous, and keeps on rising, repetitively, to attack us - with a crate full of deep house records."

2012-01-25T09:55:00.000-08:00

matthew ingram pointed these out to me

like it like it

not really similar, but has a similar effect on me as Metronomy -- evocative but (mostly) unplaceable

the upside of atemporality

whole album stream:

2012-01-24T15:44:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #19

"Any kind of popular trend is infinitely more wholesome than listening to old records. It’s more important that people know that some kind of pleasure can be derived from things that are around them—-rather than to catalogue more stuff-—you can do that forever; and if people aren’t going to have a reason to change, they’re never going to change"

--Harry Smith, interviewed in Sing Out! April & July 1969

2012-01-24T11:58:00.001-08:00

2012-01-23T20:16:00.000-08:00

further to the "whither generation gap?"/what happens when your parents have got cool taste and turn you onto stuff? question:

"It all started when I was 16 and I pulled out In the Court of the Crimson King from my Dad’s record collection. As soon as I put the needle on that thing, my life changed forever”--Christian Richer on how his project The Haiduk and its yet-to-be-released album 1968 came about

further to the Sixties-via-Eighties deadest of dead ends assertion, No Pain On Pop comment on The Haiduk and 1968

"Of course, you might ask if the world of 2011 needs an album that’s so hopelessly nostalgia-dripping and almost excessively true to original 60s psych pop. But on the other hand, in a way 1968 could even be considered the overdue complement to hypnagogic pop’s inner agenda to musically manifest the blurry memories of the music of our childhood... growing up in the 80s and 90s did not only mean "Boys of Summer" but also our parents’ collection of late 60s/early 70s psychedelia.... playing 1968 actually feels like putting on one of those dusty records we’ve just found in a box in the attic."

further to the what-happened-to-cultural-patricide/the kill-your-idols impulse, Richer says 1968 is “a modern piece containing an old school aesthetic, rather than an album trying to sound like it was made during that time. It’s more of an homage or a big ‘thank you’ to all the brilliant, inspired and beautiful music that’s been made during the 60s”

but judge for yerself [for pity's sake don't hear through my ears, whatever you do ;) eh?]

THE HAIDUKS - Use Up My Time from Moduli TV on Vimeo.

actually sounds more like PiL's "Low Life" than anything Sixties

2012-01-23T14:57:00.000-08:00

Neil Young's anti-digitalsound gripe: "I'm finding that I have a little bit of trouble with the quality of the sound of music today," he said. "I don't like it. It just makes me angry. Not the quality of the music, but we're in the 21st century and we have the worst sound that we've ever had. It's worse than a 78 [rpm record]. Where are our geniuses? What happened?... [consumers of music only hear ]5 percent [of the data of an original recording in an MP3 file... the warmth and the depth at the high end is gone] It's like Occupy Music — the 5 percent, that's who we are now"

2012-01-20T15:05:00.000-08:00

this sixties-via-eighties thing must be the deadest of current dead ends surely

it weren't that much cop really in '86 let's be honest

2012-01-19T16:19:00.000-08:00

retrolectro, pt 176

another one for the synth-women canon

Suzanne Ciani's got a retrospective out on Finders Keepers soon, called Lixiviation

more info here http://b-music-collective.blogspot.com/2012/01/fkr053-suzanne-ciani-lixiviation.html

unfortunately all of the music on YouTube is her later New Age stuff which is a lot less synthetic-sounding and moistly melodious

but there's this

2012-01-19T15:11:00.000-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #18

"Fashion is never having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it"

--Quentin Crisp, 1982

2012-01-19T15:05:00.000-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #17

"Randomly and without principle but with gusto cannibalizes all the architectural styles of the past and combines them in overstimulating ensembles.... the 'historicism' of the new painting [enables] its secession from a genuine history or dialectic of stylistic evolution, 'frees' it to recover painting styles... as a sort of objet trouve... an omnipresent and indiscriminate appetite for all the styles and fashions of a dead past"

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991

2012-01-17T14:11:00.000-08:00

just sayin like

2012-01-17T12:00:00.000-08:00

2012-01-16T18:19:00.000-08:00

2012-01-16T17:39:00.001-08:00

2012-01-16T15:27:00.000-08:00

2012-01-14T21:29:00.000-08:00

old gold dreams 54-56-62-64

2012-01-14T18:11:00.000-08:00

sigh, the lost boyishness of young Jim Kerr

talking of glittering prizes and new gold dreams - worth 45 million, that Jim Kerr, so they say. Always a "canny investor", apparently.

2012-01-13T16:45:00.001-08:00

Practical Electronica: A Trailer from Public Information on Vimeo.

Electronics Without Tears album out on Monday

2012-01-13T10:21:00.000-08:00

sing if you're glad to be grey

the Dean celebrates 2011 as a year of Dad Rock:

"Even so, there's never been a year so chocked with comebacks and tributes, survivals and revivals -- with reaffirmations that blues-derived iterations of what it means to be human have plenty of life in them yet. Paul Simon's best recording since 1986, Eric Clapton's best recording since 1972, 67-year-old Garland Jeffreys justifying his next-big-thing 30s, Aaron Neville's cast-aside gospel set, and what I consider Merle Haggard's finest album-as-album. A scintillating minor-label Buddy Holly tribute making up for the bloviating major-label one, jazz bassist Rob Wasserman's addition to Nora Guthrie's reimaginings of her dad's lost lyrics, 70-year-old guitar icon Steve Cropper burnishing his and the Five Royales' rep simultaneously, 60-year-old guitar oddball Gurf Morlix doing the same for long-dead odderball Blaze Foley. A late-McGarrigles miscellany and the eternal Peter Stampfel."

which he prefers to the stuff on the Pitchfork list: "experimental electronics both dancey and arty as well as other outliers... most of them classifiable as what is sometimes called 'post-rock'."

made a similar point here

this point:
"For the second straight year -- and though I don't do trends, this might be one -- nothing felt momentous no matter how much venture capital Watch the Throne put into trying"

chimes with what Steve Hyden said here about it being the Year of No Important Albums (and many Good Records)"

which chimes with what i said here about how Importance gradually faded as a possiblity, an eventuality, a likelihood, during the Noughties... and may soon fade away as a criterion, a desire

which chimes with the Dean's oft-quoted quip about "I kind of miss the monoculture"

(although Hyden elsewhere challenges monoculture-nostalgia, says it was a myth)

myth or not, it made certain kinds of intensities and convergences of energy possible...

2012-01-12T21:17:00.001-08:00

Porcelaintoy 'Monsters' (Official Video) from Rater/Coder on Vimeo.

2012-01-12T17:13:00.001-08:00

2012-01-11T14:08:00.001-08:00

uh oh it's starting already

[courtesy Job de Wit]

see also reissue of Avalanches's Since I Left You due soon

2012-01-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

archive fever, pt 397

behold the madness of the Fugazi Live Series archive!

"In keeping with our plan, we uploaded an additional 25 concert downloads on January 1, 2012 and we'll continue doing this each month until we reach our goal of making every Fugazi concert recording in our collection available.... Between 1987 and 2003, Fugazi played over 1000 concerts in all 50 states and all over the world. Over 800 of these shows were recorded by the band's sound engineers. The goal of this project is to make each of these recordings available to download for a small fee...
The size and scope this archive dictates that it will remain a semi-permanent work-in-progress. We welcome visitors to contribute photos, recordings, corrections, and any additional info that may be missing from specific shows.... The standard suggested download price is $5 a show but we also offer a sliding scale option where you can set your own price, and an All Access site membership."

an article about this madness i tell you MADNESS!

(i cannot think of ANY band, not one, not even my absolutest favouritest band ever in the whole wide world and ALL OF TIME, that i would want to listen to a recording of their every last show. i can't think of many i'd want to listen to more than one live recording of any given phase of their career/evolution. but never been a fan of the live album so...)g

[via TDK FE60 at Cassette Eater]

2012-01-10T21:25:00.000-08:00

Adult. entertainment

She and her rhythm box

Drexciya's Midnight Runners

yup that's right -- she's Ariel's missus

2012-01-10T15:02:00.000-08:00

Recessionaries

Guardian piece on fashion's rediscovery of punk

"Equally, in a recession worse than the one which spawned punk, one buyer for an upmarket fashion shop told the Observer there was disapproval at promoting a revival of a time "when it was all charity shops and ripping your own T-shirt and safety pins". She added: "The big designers think it's 'street' to sell punky clothes to the super-rich. Actually it's pretty irresponsible in tough times for anyone to encourage the DIY approach to fashion that punks had in 1977. No one spent any money."

i can think of plenty of reasons why the umpteenth recycling of punk sartorialisms in the fashion world is literally depressing, but that it's ill-advised because it might depress the economy -- what a wacky notion!

DIY = anti-consumerism = bad for business!

2012-01-10T14:44:00.000-08:00

retrovision - damn, really should have had more on film in the book!

Steve Rose: "It's a new level of vintage: not just getting the period details right onscreen, but getting the whole mode of presentation correct, too … ideally so you can't tell the difference. Let's call it retrovision. Retrovision is more than just "doing" retro; it's being retro, it's seeing retro."

Michel "The Artist" Hazanavicius: "I watched and re-watched many silent films to try to assimilate the rules of the form"

Matthew "Garth Marenghi's Darkplace" Holness: "Having the right sensibility is the main thing; knowing what looks too much or too little on screen. Darkplace was shot on 16mm film and preserved the 4:3 TV aspect ratio of the period. Sound was mixed through limited channels on to tape, then unspooled, crunched, trashed, kicked around the studio, re-spooled and transferred back."

2012-01-10T12:26:00.001-08:00

******Retrofication-Technology Watch*******

from The Rundown email-newsletter, a report on Fuuvi's "The Bee"

Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, and now: you.

These iconic directors still swear by the grainy look of the ultra-portable 8mm camera, and now you can, too.

The Bee by Japanese brand Fuuvi is just that — a Honey-I-Shrunk-the-Camera-sized simulacrum of an old Super 8, but digital.

You won't need any Instagram-esque apps or post-processing software to get the grainy, jerky look of old-school 8mm, of which you can shoot up to 100 minutes of video on a microSD card. (Check out a video sample here.)

Seeing as the Bee's more or less designed for the rough-around-the-edges retro set, don't expect 1080i video, or anything close.

The lo-fi specs: You can capture stills and video at 640x480 pixels with the 1.3-megapixel sensor at 30fps. The shutter speed varies from 1/6 to 1/2500 sec, and a ƒ2.8 aperture lens.

But of course, that's plenty of power to shoot your own home movie or no-budget film — or, hell, both at the same time.

2012-01-10T10:46:00.001-08:00

at the Los Angeles Review of Books: the podcast of a really enjoyable conversation about retroculture I had with Andy Zax in the summer, with audio-clips expertly woven in by Oliver Wang

2012-01-09T21:45:00.000-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #16

"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. Nobody, to my knowledge, had ever written a serious book on the subject, so I had no exemplars to inhibit me. Nor did I have any reference books or research to hand. I simply wrote off the top of my head, whatever and however the spirit moved me. Accuracy didn't seem of prime importance (and the book, as a result, is rife with factual errors). What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed. Those were the things I'd treasured in the rock I'd loved"

--Nik Cohn, 2004 (introduction to reissue of Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom)

2012-01-09T14:31:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #15

“The historical logic of modernism itself is that the newly liberated circulation of the token-sign always carries as its potential reverse an utterly devalued and empty currency”

--Rosalind E. Krauss, “Picasso / Pastiche,” The Picasso Papers

2012-01-06T15:51:00.000-08:00

vinyl sales just keep on risin' and risin'

so is this the continuation of a ground-swell of anti-digital sentiment, a sort of defiant ghost-dance attempt to go back inside the Analogue System with its all its affects?

possibly - but here's a couple of things i learned recently from friends in the industry that lend themselves to a more cynical interpretation

a friend who releases music in the zones of alteration told me that, in all honesty, you would be better off hearing that kind of music -- including his own album of last year -- on CD. with stuff that is recording in home-studio circumstances, the sound in all its detail will come across better on a CD. evidently there is a real craft to mastering etc etc to vinyl, but this expertise is beyond the price range of labels who operate in a limited-run economy. so why not just put the records out on CD then? because of the fashionable fetish appeal of vinyl to this niche market, the old-timey authenticity of the tangible artifact. "The kids want vinyl and cassette, what can you do?" says the musician.

this chimes with my anecdotal sense that a lot of new vinyl releases coming out of these zones do sounds a bit shit... like they're been transferred from whatever medium they were recorded on in an uninformed rush, and quite possibly onto inferior quality vinyl...

same goes actually for much of the funky and dubstep vinyl that's come my way in recent years... i wonder if the pressing plants are cutting corners because there's so few of them (did i hear somewhere that a lot of dubstep records get made out of plants in Poland?) they are swamped with orders... it may also because it takes expertise to transfer something that was recorded digitally onto vinyl

related to that, the other thing i learned from a different friend
who does a lot of work in the reissue sector, etc.... it is pointless 99 times out of 100 to buy a reissue on vinyl, because it will have been mastered from digital sources. especially with smaller run, obscure reissues, nobody can be bothered to dig up up the original analogue master tapes and often nobody knows where they are located, they might be totally lost. So your expensive vinyl reissue is most likely taken from an earlier CD reissue with its all its deficiencies

2012-01-04T12:36:00.001-08:00

2012-01-02T17:04:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #14

"Somehow, the past has become more remote and less useful the more closely it is cited"

-- John Haber, "The Reusable Past", riffing off Rosalind E. Krauss's The Originality of the Avant Garde

2012-01-02T10:55:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #13

“The thing about music today is a lot of it is about reorganising the past: going back, plundering – which this technology allows you to do – it, reworking it… It’s a bit like those people who spend their evenings on Flickr naming photographs; there’s a sort of managerialism to the culture of our time, from people who want to preserve it to people who then want to rework it… and there is a sense that culture is like a terminus at a railway station now. Endlessly, railway trains from the past keep on coming in with stuff from the past, which is then reworked, and we’re stuck with that and we’re not moving forward. It could be a reflection, not of the technology, but of the fact that we’ve run out of ideas”

-- Adam Curtis, interview on 6 Music

2012-01-01T09:13:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #12

"Our mental model is that we look into the future; the past is behind us. I was told that the Chinese see things quite differently: they look at the past, and the future washes over them, which seems to me to be much more sensible. There's a kind of peacefulness in that attitude that I appreciate. You're standing in one place, or treading water in one place, and meanwhile the drift of things is coming past you from behind"

--Brian Eno, quoted in John Hutchinson's "From Music To Landscape: A Personal Reaction to Brian Eno's Video Installation", Place #13 exhibition brochure (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1986)

2011-12-31T10:29:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #11

"This is a parable for every individual among us. He must organize the chaos in himself by recalling in himself his own real needs…. He begins then to grasp that culture can still be something other than a decoration of life"

-- Friedrich Nietzche contra the ETSY-ification of underground music, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, 1873

2011-12-30T15:33:00.001-08:00

further to my "is rock finally dead then?" query here

jon caramanica states the obvious, but states it starkly and sharply, and it's a point well worth making:

mainstream rock (he means rock released on US major labels, regardless of whether it's from the US or not, played on mainstream radio) is

"a musical universe in crisis like no other, full of old bands spinning their wheels, praying for one more summer out under big-tour sheds, and their young reinforcements, not much more than a field of dullards who are the artistic equivalent of grocery store generic brands. 2011 may well be remembered as the most numbing year for mainstream rock music in history.The genre didn’t produce a single great album, and the best of the middling walked blindly in footprints laid out years, even decades, earlier. Plenty of juggernauts — U2 and Bruce Springsteen, among others — took the year off, but the genre’s failings are creative, not commercial. At this point rock is becoming a graveyard of aesthetic innovation and creativity, a lie perpetrated by major labels, radio conglomerates and touring concerns, all of whom need — or feel they need — the continued sustenance of this style of music. The fringes remain interesting, and regenerate constantly, but the center has been left to rot."

the only thing i disagree with is the word "regenerate" in the otherwise correct nod to the continued interesting-ness of the fringes... i don't think that word, with its biologistic connotations of renewal and growth and evolution ... of generation and generative-ness... i don't think it really applies to the way that the Zones of Alteration operate... Hyperstasis, being a fundamentally digital/inorganic rather than analogue/organic syndrome, works through replication, recycling and recirculation, techniques of recreativity such as pastiche, appropriation, citation -- in other words, forms of asexual reproduction. (Or perhaps that should be asocial production - art practice that is incapaable, through its mode of operation and dissemination, of letting "the social" leak into it)

Repro ( according to this dude )as opposed to retro in the strict sense of the term, maybe, but still something that very much falls under the sceptical and unforgiving gaze of Retromania.

(Hyperstasis is, after all, nothing if not a churlish concept, looking a gift horse in the mouth, looking past the immediate bounty to the long-term dearth).

2011-12-30T09:21:00.001-08:00

listomania meets archive fever

2011-12-30T09:16:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #10

"Eclectic is another word for shit"

--V/VM, date unknown

2011-12-29T21:11:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #9

"The really big news of the Eighties is the stampede to regurgitate mildly camouflaged musical styles of previous decades, in ever shrinking cycles of nostalgia. (It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice--there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork , and the other is nostalgia. When you compute the length of time between The Event and The Nostalgia for the Event, the span seems to be about a year less in each cycle. Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia."

--Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book, 1990

2011-12-29T09:53:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #8

"Constantly losing more of this feeling of surprise and dislike, becoming excessively astonished no longer, or finally allowing oneself to enjoy everything—people really call that the historical sense, historical education"

--Friedrich Nietzche contra "generalism", On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, 1873

2011-12-29T09:39:00.001-08:00

i had been thinking recently about the breakdown of the generation gap, of the patricidal impulse as a generator of the new within music / culture....

what to you do, if you're a young person growing into music and thinking about making it, if your parents are cool? if they have really good, hip, broadminded and edgy taste in music? it would be stupid to reject all that great old music, and hard not to be influenced by being exposed to it from an early age (example: Maria Minerva's dad, who is a very well-known Estonian music critic and also TV personality, played her things like Nico's The Marble Index at a tender age... and many of my younger blogworld friends, i find out their parents would play stuff like the Cure or Japan)

the only actual generational rebellion in that circumstance is to have no interest in music, or only minimal investment in it (something to listen to in the background, decor for life, not a grand project or zone for identity formation),,, to use something other activity or culture-zone as the place in which identity formation goes on

but talking of this problem of having cool parents who turn you onto great music... a dad or mum that still takes an interest in current music, who might want to go to gigs with you or take you to a festival in the summer, the family sharing a tent...

reading a Quietus piece about hot new band S.C.U.M. this line leaped out at me

"Between shows, the Quietus managed to net keyboard player and sound specialist Sam Kilcoyne, son of Add N to X's Barry 7"

Add N To X was long ago enough so that the children are now old enough to form bands?!?!?

(Or was Barry a late-bandstarter, early breeder?)

at any rate, wow

weirdly S.C.U.M. are signed to Add N To X's label Mute

young Kilcoyne says "When we were making Again Into Eyes I asked dad if he wanted to produce it, but he wanted me to do it by myself. He was there for a lot of it, and gave his advice when he thought something wasn't working, but essentially he wanted me to do this on my own. I think if you take away Tom's vocals and listen to the synths, we really do sound similar to my dad."

unfortunately it appears they also sound quite a bit like My Bloody Valentine and Suede and Echo & the Bunnymen... seemingly mediated by (and this horrified me a little) by The Horrors

just the thought that bands are coming through influenced by the Horrors (Kilcoyne: "I'd never listened to My Bloody Valentine until after the Horrors' second record Primary Colours came out")

dearie me

here's a song by them

here's another one

and another

that one's a bit better, dank and thuggish, bit like Bunnymen circa Porcupine meets Love and Rockets meets Dr & the Mix (Jesus & Mary Chain's heroes/models) with a bit of early Sisters of Mercy thrown in

the more buried the vocals, the better

2011-12-28T10:03:00.001-08:00

[fragment]

You can see a similar alternation of surge-phases of innovation with periods of consolidation and eclecticism in other genres, like jazz and classical music. In 20th Century composition, the astringent and emotionally traumatic innovations of atonality and twelve-tone developed by Schoenberg were followed by a phase known as neo-classicism, which involved adopting and adapting the harmonic clarity of Mozart and Bach from almost two centuries earlier. According to Schoenberg-fanboy Adorno, Stravinsky--the most famous exponent of neo-classicism-- was guilty of "regressive eclecticism…. parasitism on the old " (the words here are Perry Anderson's gloss on Adorno's famously stern stance). Like a classical music equivalent to the Jesus & Mary Chain, Stravinsky even went in for direct or slightly distorted quotations from illustrious ancestors like Schubert, Pergolesi, and Tchaikosvky. After the second world war, though, there was a renewed push towards full-tilt innovation, both in orchestral music with the dominance of serialism as a compositional method and in electronic music with the adoption of new technological possibilities like tape editing and synthesizers.

What is different about the alternating rhythms of surge and slow-down within music's high culture is that they are relatively immune from fashion logic. Well, there certainly trends within the higher arts and as the great theorist of fashion Edward Sapir argued "there is nothing to prevent a thought, a type of morality or an art form from being the psychological equivalent of a costuming of the ego." But classical music is less tied to market forces than pop, and so less vulnerable to the economic pressures that create cycles of novelty and obsolescence.

2011-12-28T09:42:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #7

"In the world of glut + bloat, the withheld work of art becomes the only meaningful object"

--Don DeLlillo, spiral notebook aphorism, Box 38, Folder 1, date unknown

2011-12-27T18:16:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #6

"New mutations and combinations emerge and are destroyed; seen from the outside, the movement possesses a nervous vitality… intense, almost feverish… It resembles, it seems to me, a snakeskin full of ants. The snake itself is long since dead, eaten out from within, deprived of its poison; but the skin moves, filled with busy life"

--Ingmar Bergman,anticipating "hyperstasis" and "the zones of alteration", 1965

2011-12-26T15:45:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #5

"As the present can't be transcended, or the future predicted, the past is the only place available to anticipate the 'not yet'. Retro doesn't repeat the past, it redeems it. And, in so doing, it provides a fleeting revelation of tomorrow's possibilities, of things to come…"

--Steven Brown (channeling Walter Benjamin) in Marketing: The Retro Revolution, 2001

2011-12-25T11:33:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #4

"The people who are hung up on the Beatles' and the Sixties' dream missed the whole point when the Beatles' and the Sixties' dream became the point. Carrying the Beatles' or the Sixties' dream around all your life is like carrying the Second World War and Glenn Miller around. That's not to say you can't enjoy Glenn Miller or the Beatles, but to live in that dream is the twilight zone. It's not living now. It's an illusion"

--John Lennon, Playboy interview January 1981

2011-12-23T11:54:00.001-08:00

review by john calvert for Quietus finds proto-retromaniacal /end-of-history themes in the work of Gorillaz

"their debut is overlooked as a precursor to indie's mad rush to 'super-hybridity' throughout the past decade... The Japanese element – manifested in the animation, the cutesy instrumentation, the melodic e-numbers, Hatori's girly j-pop vocals, the Toyko-neon textures, and even just a general redolence - lent the futuristic sheen of hyperreality that Japanese culture had signified since the 80s. And because this was art-pop and therefore packed with subtext, the aesthetic also yielded a batch of secondary associations: thoughts of Japanese trash culture, Roxy-style distance, pop songs about pop, and even the trauma of Hiroshima. There is a whole tranche of Japanese art dealing with the notion that the tragedy had stripped the country of its history, leaving only the chintzy detritus of pop culture.... Together, these implied ideas created an atmosphere artist/sociologist Gerhard Richter called 'afterness' - a kind of mass cultural despondency that Albarn hit on with the Good, The Bad And The Queen; an album dank with the melancholic sentiment that everything had been done before ('modern life is rubbish' as Blur had declared years before). This wearied state-of mind that The Good, The Bad And The Queen embodied chimed with Gorillaz' aesthetic, for there’s surely a sadness implicit in the recycling of Western arcana that imbues so much of Japanese pop culture. The same air of lamentation and loss emanating from Albarn's other supergroup cut through Gorillaz tracks like 'Feel Good Inc' and 'On Melancholy Hill'."

2011-12-23T11:03:00.000-08:00

michaelangelo matos in the guardian investigating the phenomenon of hipster house aka chillrave

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/dec/22/portland-miracles-club-indie-goes-dance

they do seem awfully sincere and respectful

perhaps overly so

the question remaining for me though is:

if you wanted to dance, what's wrong with the existing, ongoing dance culture (in which house has undergone a resurgence across the board)

why is it based around dance / house as it was 20 to 25 years ago?

and so again it seems to fit that retro / vintage chic mentality of getting the period sounds right, the period styling (the record covers, the fonts, the flyers, the allusions) just right

there is this parallel thing going on with ex-noise/drone types getting into early techno and EBM /Cold Wave/ ate 80s dance-floor oriented industrial -- people like Prurient and Pete Swanson

in that case i suspect it's wanting somewhere to "go", musically -- noise-abstraction being a diminishing returns zone and also absolutely blanketed, choked with output

2011-12-23T10:28:00.001-08:00

Nineties and Newness

Kulkarni continues his New Nineties series at Quietus with a paean to Pram, perpetrators (sez Neil) of the Best Album of that decade

in the interview part, Pram's Matt Eaton says this:

"The whole ethic of the band, though it was unwritten and rarely spoken, was to create new music, so if a piece had a similarity/reminded someone of another work it was generally rejected. The emphasis was on new... It was all about new sounds and new ways of writing a song.... Even now, making a new sound is still our first impulse, and that includes not repeating previous Pram recordings...To repeat ourselves or someone else would be boring and not really worth the effort.... My working life is ten times harder than it needs to be because I hate repeating what’s gone before.“

There's people - quite a lot of people, I've discovered this year - who'll tell you that's an old-fashioned attitude, an outmoded approach.

2011-12-23T10:03:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #3

"Quotation is no longer an operative value. Quotation only submits one's work to the authority of History and its "masters." A DJ doesn't "quote," per se. He or she wanders into History and uses previous works according to his or her own needs. This method might be similar to past ones, but the set of values that organizes it has changed: Nobody cares anymore about signatures as authority markers, we now live in a cultural space of increasingly fluid circulations of signs"

-- Nicolas Bourriaud, interviewed in ArtForum, April, 2001

2011-12-23T09:57:00.000-08:00

interesting quote from a Quietus interview with Skream, suggestive of how hyperstasis aka the archival overload of influences, affects the individual artist's ability to "move forward"

Q: So how do you go about finding a new sound then?

Skream: The thing is, I don’t know. Music is mongrel now. It’s rare to find straight techno or... Especially in this UK bass sort of thing, everything has merged. I love that though. But then, do you go back and do a straight one-influence track? Is that going back on yourself? My sets now consist of everything, everything influenced with everything. So how I’m going to find the new sound I’ll never know. Maybe it’s just finding a new sound for me, ‘cos trying to create a new sound at the minute is mental.

this tune is pants innit

2011-12-22T15:28:00.000-08:00

History Is Made At Night, the excellent blog about the past present and future of dancing and nightlife, has a post on a 1920s-style "wild party" staged in 1950s New York -- perhaps similar in spirit and sound to trad jazz revival raves happening at the same time in the U.K. but with a more self-conscious retro / time travel intent to it

http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.com/2011/12/art-f-parties.html

2011-12-22T09:58:00.001-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #2

"Antiquarian history itself degenerates in that moment when it no longer inspires and fills with enthusiasm the fresh life of the present. Then reverence withers away…. Then we get a glimpse of the wretched drama of a blind mania for collecting, a restless compiling together of everything that ever existed. The man envelops himself in a mouldy smell….. Often he sinks so deep that he is finally satisfied with that nourishment and takes pleasure in gobbling up for himself the dust of biographical rubbish"

--Friedrich Nietzche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, 1873

2011-12-21T12:10:00.000-08:00

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #1

"Why would you want to catalogue everything that exists? The idea of conservation, as the word suggests, has a conservative side to it. And there does come a point where that can step over to conservatism which is very anti the future, anti technology, anti this and anti that. This happens all because the past was supposed to be better. That comes out of desperately trying to preserve phenomenon, that in their nature, slip away, they have no permanence. In a way it’s a desperate quest. I’m not anti-conservation; I’m quite the opposite. I am just wary of some of the attitudes it can generate, which can be very oppressive, and very restrictive. If you are constantly thinking, this has to be documented, this mustn’t disappear, your not actually living in the present, you’re thinking about what you can keep from the past, to save in the future. You’re not actually where you really are"--David Toop (Leftlion interview, 2007)

2011-12-20T21:05:00.000-08:00

this isn't out officially until next year but, in that peculiar publishing-world jumping-the-gun way, can already be found in some UK book stores such as Waterstones: the B-format edition of Retromania, more economically-priced and portable than the original heavy-paper-stock quasi-hardback edition (now sold out). It comes with a new nifty bas-relief cover and is compact enough to actually fit into a Christmas stocking without unduly distending it

2011-12-19T16:01:00.001-08:00

this paradox-riddled utterance caught my eye when reading a post at the science fiction webzine i09 about the Most Futuristic Music of 2011

"Sometimes the future can be found in the past. When you watch Blade Runner, it still looks like the future, even though it was made in 1982. Similarly, Arizona thrash band Vektor model their sound (and their dystopian/space-opera lyrics) on Canadian sci-fi thrashers Voivod, who did their best work in the late '80s, and yet they still have an undeniable spacy, forward-looking feel to their work."

the quote seemed indicative of our problems in imagining, let alone alone creating, Future Music when "the future" has become a set of idées fixes that we can't seem to get past

i've not checked out the other examples of Futuristic Music in the i09 piece but i fear i'll find further evidence of "arrested futurism"

for now hear's some deja entendu from Vektor,verily Voivod clones right down to the V-word-with-six-letters

2011-12-19T12:17:00.000-08:00

RetroActivity

is the name of this pretty package RetroActivity containing the Best of Sweet Exorcist (legendary early UK techno outfit from Sheffield) on two discs

almost the All of Sweet Exorcist, actually... well, there was this later album Spirit Guide To Low Tech on Touch(when Kirk & Parrot had moved into post-Artificial Intelligence zones and accordingly sounds closer to R.H.K's work as Sandoz, also for Touch) but RetroActivity scoops up the bleep/clonk era material for Warp

here's a fave Sweet Exorcist tune, minimalism getting maximal - the title track of the C.C. EP and C.C.C.D.

2011-12-09T17:20:00.001-08:00

retroelectro

Public Information Materials-Mix by Public Information

2011-12-09T10:47:00.001-08:00

this summer we went to see two exhibitions in Los Angeles – one was in nearby Pasadena (Clayton Brothers: Inside Out) and the other was in downtown at the MOCA and called Art in the Streets, a mammoth retrospective of graffiti and street art going back to the very beginnings...

Clayton Brothers do life-scale shacks and diorama-type things, lots of stuff based on old illustrative styles, newspaper fonts, etc – readymades either literally or in inspiration, but the overall agglomeration of it tinged towards the surreal-creepy-macabre-twisted... a sort of dayglo American-Gothic

At Art in the Streets, a lot of the more recent work involved very large pieces, real-size reproduction of actual real-world stuff – like a bodega, with cans of vegetables etc – or a shabby taxi hire office in a shady part of town, those band or advertising or prostitute type stickers stuck over every surface – one artist (Neckface, we used to see his graff in our old neighbourhood in the East village) did a thing that was literally street art -- the recreation of a dark, dank alley in a scary, grotty part of NYC, complete with a sleeping bum.

Anyway this got me thinking... about readymades and collage, the tradition that starts with Duchamp... with Schwitters with the merzbau and the merzhaus... then proceeds through Lichenstein, Warhol, Richard Hamilton.... Lari Pitman, whose work draws on decorative and kitschy-retro graphics and fonts... Jeff Koons.... and then into the post-graffiti/hip hop era with people the Alleged Art crew (heavily present at this exhibition)... some of whom were into stuff like the tags left by hobos on the side of railcars, or they were into tattoos... the late Margaret Kilgannen of Alleged used a lot of commercial imagery... hand-painted shop front signage, imagery from advertisements in old magazines... in the Alleged crew doc Beautiful Losers she says something about how "all this stuff becomes interesting to me when it's no longer selling anything to me"-- in other words, once it's divorced from commerce in the immediate here-and-now, it becomes capable of being aestheticized, which is a great description of how vintage chic works

but what struck me about all this in connection with Art in the Streets and Clayton Brothers is that underpinning the whole century-long thing was one idea – a REALLY BIG idea - which is treating the objects of manufactured modernity as if they were nature, as beautiful as a tree or landscape... (c.f. James Ferraro's description of Far Side Virtual as "the still life of now" - the audio and video landscape of our digitized, augmented daily surroundings)

but also it’s a move of taking the non-art, the infra-art, and just moving it across a line... commerce because culture, the mass produced aura-less product becomes the one-off, aura-full handcrafted object ready for the art market

And as the Ferraro comparison suggests, it's the same move being made by the hauntologists and the hypnagogics (a lot of post-Ferraro music is Pop Art meets psychedelia), with some psychedelics thrown in), you take what is deemed beneath or outside Proper Serious Rock-as-Art, so that would be ancient cheese pop or mainstream AOR or library music (in the case of hauntology) or with Ferraro now it's ringtones and computer start-up jingles and so forth i.e. today's equiv to library/Muzak... and ythen ou say well actually if you tilt your head this way slightly , it’s sublime – or even (upping the ante) in some cases it’s just better and more weird than self-conscious Arty art-rock.

And then the art work for a lot of those hypnagogic cassettes is chopped-up magazine images (eyes, lips etc) like a more grotesque and cack-handed version of what the British Pop Artists did... like the popcult unconscious throwing up all over the page (and that's no diss, i love all that artwork)

the low > high context-shift

Nicholas Katranis calls this artistic move "looking at what is right in front of you"

for most people now means that what they can find on the internet, what’s trawl-able on YouTube etc etc

e.g. oneohtrix scavenging for alchemy-susceptible materials on YouTube, the stuff that’s beneath consideration...

what I'm a-wonderin' is whether the BIG IDEA that i mentioned, whether that is so very very BIG -so fundamental and capacious in scope and potential - that it can just carry on and on and on... or is it a 20th Century idea that has just lingered a bit into the next century and hangs on while we all try to think of somewhere new to go?

post-script: what do you know, Aaron Rose, the guy who co-curated Art in the Streets and was owner and director of Alleged Art (and also directed the Beautiful Losers doc) has co-written a book called Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century's Identity Crisis that looks to be a rather Retromaniac-al polemic ("why has the 21st century become an era of collage, in which creative works are made by combining elements from the former century?", "THE PAST MUST NO LONGER SERVE AS OUR MASTER") which sorta suggests that even as he was pulling together the exhibition he might have been having similar anxieties as i did looking at it

you can check it out here: http://collageculture.com/

here's what he says in an interview with Oyster:

"Everything in this world is built on references. I don’t think that’s really such a problem, that’s part of the creative process. Although where the amount of original input is below 5%, that’s when I feel like there’s maybe a problem... I think the contemporary art world is horrible [as an offender]! And in music. Music, I think, is really bad. Music videos, especially — horrible — are like, basically just taking things frame for frame."

2011-12-08T13:14:00.000-08:00

retro xmas

2011-12-07T14:34:00.000-08:00

i'm not the biggest fan of Northern Soul as music but through doing Retromania I got much more sympathetic towards it as a cultural project

if all Northern Soul was a sublime as these two songs, though, I'd be in my singlet and high-waisted pants doing backflips and twirls in a trice

one of the greatest songs about dancefloor-as-utopia ever

the mod manifesto

RIP Dobie Gray

2011-12-07T09:59:00.000-08:00

xeno-retro, pt 136

"But we’d like to position Paradise of Bachelors as more than a reissue label—introspective, rather than retrospective, and opposed to the fetishized nostalgia peddled by lesser labels... We’re interested in releasing music, historical or futuristic or otherwise, with contemporary relevance and resonance—the music’s rarity matters far less than strong curatorial and aesthetic coherence, compelling narratives, and our ability to articulate untold histories through engagement with the artists, through interviews, oral histories, photography, and friendships. For us, that means looking backwards, to heavy American Indian psych, to Vietnam vet laments, to Carolina soul and gospel, to coastal honky-conch country, to Communist disco (some of our intended future subjects), but also to the contemporary iterations in and out of the infinitely mutable, mercurial traditions of American vernacular music. It’s the dialogue between those modes, and through those years and artifacts, that we find interesting."

Communist Disco! Native American psychedelia!

that's from an excellent essay for Shuffle by Brendan Greaves, one of the people behind the label Paradise of Bachelors

like also the sign-off

"Don’t sweat those ghosts, because they aren’t going anywhere, and without them, there’s nothing new anyway. These are the days of the dead"

an echo there of Prince Rama's "ghost modernism" perhaps

2011-12-05T20:14:00.000-08:00

pierrot period

mesmerised by the repeats of My So-Called Life on Sundance

who knew the early-mid 90s had a period look

perhaps it's just that one show, that one set of production values

but the overlit, high contrast film makes faces and flesh look phosphorescent

in the night scenes, like those pierrot mime faces looming out of the dark

Brian and Angela especially look literally moony

2011-11-30T14:53:00.000-08:00

where dead media meets sono-archaeology

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/106713

via this NPR blog essay

(which also directs you to this Smithsonian Folkways time-capsule of office sounds you'd have heard in a 1964 workplace

2011-11-30T10:19:00.000-08:00

introducing a sister-concept to retromania -- xenomania

i.e. the new exoticism / loving the alien, a.k.a net-enabled music tourism

it's at MTVIgggy.com (part of MTV World)

there's stuff on the early-adopter beat-geek syndrome of chasing the latest global ghetto grooves (kudoro, coupe-decale, etc) but also a lot on retro-exotica: all the reissue labels and blogs that are digging in the crates globally, excavating the pasts of other countries

2011-11-29T16:52:00.002-08:00

retromania-related interviews and piece-appearances-by-me

interview at Blurt online

http://blurt-online.com/features/view/1020/

NZ Herald piece on retromania in fashion

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/viva-magazine/news/article.cfm?c_id=533&objectid=10769820&ref=rss

Q/A with Rock Town Hall

http://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/index.php/simon-says-simon-reynolds-answers-rock-town-hall-questions/

Wired.TV (Italia) with video interview in which I'm confronted by Oblique Strategies cards and then have to connect them to Retromania

http://tv.wired.it/guru/2011/11/28/simon-reynolds-oggi-alle-persone-piacciono-molto-cose-ma-non-amano-piu-nulla.html

plus only slightly about retro (glimpse the obsession dawning towards the end) - a resurrected interview for David Ensminger's blog i did around Rip It Up that he's now dug up for Pop Matters

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/151683-simon-reynolds-redux-a-conversation-from-the-past-about-post-punk/

2011-11-29T16:52:00.001-08:00

via Mateus Potumati: Retro is such a huge phenomenon in Brazil it gets a cover story in the Sunday supplement of a big mainstream newspaper in Sao Paulo: the Agora, which I'm told is roughly equivalent to the New York Post, and is mainly read by inhabitants of the outskirts of that vast city, i.e. the lower middle class to poor

here are some images (apologies for some of them being sideways) from the Revista da Hora (Sunday color mag supplement of Agora)

apparently the retroism isn't based around Brazilian's own popular culture of the Fifties and Sixties, but North American

Mateus explains that "retro has been in the mainstream here for a good while – especially if you consider it in the broader sense, ie TV reruns, fashion and stuff.
This sort of “full impersonation of an era” kinda thing also used to be somewhat of a fad in the 90’s and over the last decade (hipsterdom!). What is truly fascinating for me is for it to be on a cover of an openly blue-collar/working class tabloid that’s famous for its violence-related headlines."

He reckons the Fifties Americana mania is connected to the (color me flabbergasted)
"the psychobilly scene, which is really strong in Brazil, especially in the South.
Curitiba even holds a parallel psychobilly Carnaval that happens as an alternative to the original samba one (Brazilian rockers generally hate Carnaval btw). This scene has always been there for as long as I remember, and it’s all about nostalgia"

Not just Ukrabilly, but Brazillabilly!?!

2011-11-28T15:37:00.000-08:00

"Baudelaire imagined the fully contemporary artist of his own day—someone drifting through the city, bombarded with stimuli—as 'a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness'. Today, the internet being the new city, a teeming cosmopolis of myriad precincts and neighbourhoods, you would have to update the metaphor and argue for the fully contemporary artist as a search engine endowed with consciousness."
-- Jary W. Keithmann, The Glissades of DataScape Mastery (2003)

2011-11-15T20:43:00.000-08:00

as discussed in Retromania

"The Martinellis Bring Home A Desire System"

derived from this infomercial

what i wanna know is, is it Martinellis or Martinettis?!? Cos I put one of them in Retromania (forget which) and i hope it was the right one!

the thing Dan's put up at Soundcloud is "a stereo redux" of "a 4-channel sound installation commissioned by Anne Hilde Neset for the SONIC TANK exhibition". So much shorter than the full-length work discussed in Retromania, which was about 30 minutes long and was titled the same as the original infomercial as i recall

2011-11-15T08:28:00.000-08:00

(re)creativity part 1089

2011-11-14T17:46:00.000-08:00

polska retromania!

http://ivanmariavele.blogspot.com/2011/11/polska-retromania.html

2011-11-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

bit like with Drive, chagrined that this lady hit the scene too late to be incorporated into Retromania

exquisite-looking cobblers, isn't it, Drive?

very very pretty. and completely silly

bit like Super 8, except that Super 8 is exquisite-looking cobblers, minus the exquisiteness, plus horrid CGI-excess, plus grating "dead media" referencing

2011-11-08T10:15:00.000-08:00

rave culture meets archive fever

2011-11-04T11:21:00.001-07:00

"retrofy your hi-fi system"

"AirCassette is a cassette player application for iPhone and iPod Touch. Choose your favourite cassette from a variety of nostalgic cassette models. The playing song information is written on the cassette label and you can also share your cassette view with friends on Facebook or via email."

more info http://aircassette.com/

since when have iPhone or iPod Touch or i-Anything been construable as "a hi-fi system" ?!

(cheers to rob cotter for tip off)