Listomania, or, Gluttered (slight return)

(further to this)

Can you say "glutted/clotted"? - Spin list Animal Collective's most important influences, all 127 of them!

This reminded me of  Panda Bear's Person Pitch, where Noah Lennox actually lists his influences across one page of  the CD booklet - a cloud cluster of aesthetic coordinates, which are bizarrely wide-ranging, stretching from the already-audible like Beach Boys to less blatant ones like Fela Kuti....  But as well as "cool" and esoteric ones, there's supermainstream, unhip reference points like Duran Duran.

The obvious comparison would be with Nurse With Wound's famous List on their 1979 self-titled debut,which is also a kind of textual pictogram.  But that is a fantastically obscurantist array of experimental, freakadelic, and outsider musicians, clearly meant to be a challenge to the listener: chase these down, if you can.  A blend of evangelism and oneupmanship. Fans have been trying to track all the groups down for decades and there were even some blogs, in the early sharity days, dedicated entirely to making their way methodically through the NWW List.

Panda Bear's is much more 2000s in its spirit: open-hearted, not snobbish or exclusionary. It's a sharing with the fans and captures the mentality of the filesharing/Shuffle/Spotify/Youtube/etc generation.

Equally (back to the gluttered theme, and c.f. Grimes's "post-Internet" notion) it is quite hard to imagine the artistic sensibility that could comprehend and digest and synthesise such a disparate array of inputs. Whereas the NwW List has more coherence, a unifying slant (weird, extreme, surreal, "out" etc) that connects its choices and points to the commonality between pre-punk progressive and post-punk noise-industrial.

gluttered

FACT's John Calvert on Animal Collective's congested and digi-maxed-out  Centipede Hz, a microcosm of the macrocosm that is netspace (a nonspace of absolute proximity)

"It’s as if by having every tool and style of every era and nation available to them at the press of a button has stripped AC’s world of its mystery; as if there’s nothing more to discover."

"the cost of such a dazzling feast of stimuli has been a certain element of romance.... there’s just no room for the listener’s own imagination, rendering it a difficult album to connect with"

 "with the American indie vanguard migrating over to electronica, a shrinking force in songwriting has been the spaces between guitar music’s adjoining parts. Spaces, or rather negative space, in which mystery burgeoned, where atmosphere and by extension a sense of place formed"

"...  Centipede Hz‘s overarching theme of enmeshed radio signals, spiralling intertwined through space. The hitch is, you never get a sense of that infinite space here, outer or otherwise, because space itself is in short supply... Centipede Hz plays out like another post-indie meditation on information overload in the net-age; where the music, packed and hyper eclectic, is pursuant to the concept. It carries the same tenor of anxious joy struck by ‘post-everything’ icons Gang Gang Dance"

a/k/a glutted and clotted

a/k/a Mourning "Becomes-Eclectic"

it's the Sound of Now (for a certain demographic / class / and it's the reason i can only hack about 20 minutes of KCRW before i have to flip to classic rock radio, flee to the clarity and punch of riff based Old Wave or New Wave