My Year in Music

Each Friday this year, I added a “What I’m listening to” section to my Famous Friday Varia and Quick Hits. Here’s a little index of what I’ve listened to over the past year.

Music is a huge part of my life and with my subscription Spotify, I can indulge my wide ranging (let’s say) tastes without much penalty.  In fact, I’ve toyed with the idea of a Music Monday blog where I have a little space to talk about my music. So far, I’ve held off taking the plunge, but it’s almost a new year…

The following list is in the order that I listened to this music over the course of the year. (Of course, I could cheat and go back to listen to something even after the week is over!):

Sufjan Stevens, The Age of Adz.
No Age, Everything in Between.
The Exotica Project
Alexander “Skip” Spencer, Oar.
Radiohead, The King of Limbs. 
Cut Copy, Zonoscope.
Radiohead, Kid A.
Scritti Politti, Cupid and Psyche ’85.
The Cure, Pornography
The Cure, Boy’s Don’t Cry.
Kurt Vile, Smoke Ring for My Halo.
Thurston Moore, Psychic Heart.
The Strokes, Room on Fire.
The Strokes, Is This It.
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Belong.
Bass Drum of Death, GB City.
MellowHype, Blackenedwhite.
DJ Quik, The Book of David.
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, 100 Days, 100 Nights.
Thurston Moore, Demolished Thoughts.
Greenwood Rhythm Coalition, Sol Vibrations.
Bon Iver, Bon Iver.
Gang Gang Dance, Eye Contact.
EMA, Past Life of Martyred Saints.
The Ravonettes, Lust, Lust, Lust.
New Order, Low-Life.
New Order, Power, Corruption, and Lies.
Jay-Z and Kanye West, Watch the Throne.
Fleet Foxes, Helpless Blues.
Femi Kuti, Day to Day.
Tinariwen, Aman Iman.
Bunny Wailer, Blackheart Man.
Yuya Uchida and the Flowers, Challenger!
Culture, Two Sevens Clash.
Buju Banton, Inna Heights.
Peter Tosh, Equal Rights.
Bob Marley, African Herbman.
Amon Tobin, Out from Where Out.
Amon Tobin, Bricolage. 
Wilco, The Whole Love.
The Mekons, Fear and Whiskey.
The Mekons, Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Frightened Rabbit, The Winter of Mixed Drinks.
We Were Promised Jetpacks, These Four Walls.
Youth Lagoon, Year of Hibernation.
M83, Hurry up we’re Dreaming.
Frightened Rabbit, The Midnight Organ Fight.
Hunters and Collectors, Human Frailty.
Talk Talk, Laughing Stock.
Suuns, Zeroes QC.
Atlas Sounds, Parallax.
Los Campesinos!, Hello Sadness.
The Antlers, Burst Apart.
The Antlers, Hospice. 
Ty Segall, Goodbye Bread.
We Were Promised Jetpacks, In the Pit of the Stomach.
The Bats, Daddy’s Highway.
The Bats, The Guilty Office.
The Clean, Anthology.
War on Drugs, Slave Ambient.
The Roots, Undun.

Phonographs and Potsherds

A reference in Daniel Faltesek’s contribution to Dougherty and Nawrotzki’s Writing History in the Digital Age caught my interest. Faltesek discusses the rise of non-linear editing particularly in film, but he refers to an article by Thomas Edison from 1878 which celebrated the potential of the phonograph for both recording and playing back sounds.

In this article, Edison imagines the phonograph function:

“For the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family – as of great men – the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph. In the field of multiplication of original matrices, and the indefinite repetition of one and the same thing, the successful electrotyping of the original record is an essential.” (pp. 533-534).

This passage immediately reminded me of the end of St. Theodoros of Kythera’s life. According to his Vitae, Theodoros’ recorded on a pot sherd the following phrase: “I, Theodore, humble deacon, laid down in sickness on April 7th, and I died on the 12th of May, on the day of the Holy Epiphany.”

In a short article on this life, I argue that by knowing the time of his death and inscribing a potsherd to this effect, Os. Theodoros demonstrates his sanctity. The modest, inscribed sherd demonstrates that Theodoros knew his future and had attained access to timeless knowledge of God. The use of a potsherd to inscribe his revelation takes an archaeological twist by the embedding a revelation that warps time on an object that is both modest and likely to endure.

Edison’s phonograph, likewise, sought to disrupt the predictable flow of time by making the last words of individuals remain alive after death. The immediacy of the spoken word and enduring the materiality of phonograph gave it a particular power as medium for last words. Like St. Theodore’s potsherd, the phonograph record became a way to warp time.

Punk Rock, Materiality, and Time

Crossposted to Punk Archaeology

I spent part of the weekend doing three things: learning how to make pasta with my new pasta maker, listening to low-fi punk, and reading Kathleen Davis’s Periodization and Sovereignty (Penn 2008). I am not sure that I learned much applicable to this blog from making pasta (although it was delicious last night at dinner), but low-fi punk, a short Twitter exchange, and Davis’s book did bring together some ideas that I had been meaning for some time to post to our semi-dormant Punk Archaeology blog.

The low-fi sound that has become popular thanks in large part to bands like the White Stripes, the Black Keys, and other purveyors of so-called Punk Blues positions itself as an antidote to the austere, “over-produced” stylings of contemporary pop music.  (Recently, I’ve been hanging out with the album “GB City” by Bass Drum of Death, but I also listened to Soledad Brothers self titles solo album and their more polished 2006 offering The Hardest Rock. My original idea for a post was to compare the low-fi, thoroughly average sound of “GB City” to the produced sound of Arcade Fire’s “Suburbs”, but that seemed too easy). The sound harkens back to garage rock and rough live albums produced in make shift recording studies on 4 and 8 track recording machines.  Low-fi recordings replaced the spaceless character of the recording study with the gritty and flawed presence of the garage, the basement, or the warehouse. Echoing and distorted vocal tracks compete for space against raw guitars and abusive drums. The best low-fi captures something of a hastily-arranged live recording without actually being anywhere in particular. Low-fi comes from anyone’s basement, garage, or abandoned strip mall.  It embodies marginal (maybe even abandoned) spaces (it’s not surprising that Detroit has become a Mecca of low-fi sound) and pushes out music that speaks to haste, temporary accommodations, and immediacy without specificity.

With the advent of digital music, low-fi has projected the materiality of its sound by producing vinyl LPs or even cassette tapes.  The sonic texture of the 8-track recorder in the basement or garage comes packaged in neatly anachronistic forms that insists upon a material presence even more physical than the music itself.  A friend of mine (on Twitter ironically enough!) suggested a track from an Oblivian’s album recently. When I asked whether she could share the track with me, she told me that she only had it on vinyl! So the grounding of low-fi music in a time and place moves from the practice of recording and to its materiality as a recorded product. Digital music, which can exist simultaneously in an infinite number of places resists any effort to impose physicality (and with music moving to “the cloud” in the very near future the location of music recordings will become all the more ambiguous).

The link between the physical sound of the low-fi recording and its circulation in physical media positions low-fi (and punk) to resist (in an ironic way, to be sure) the ephemeral character of so much “cultural” production today. From blogs and ebooks to musings in the indistinct space of social media, the viral distribution of music and video, and claims of a reimagined-ascetic minimalism, the space or even material nature of cultural production is collapsing in on itself.  In the future (bee-boop-boop-boop-beep), the diagnostic rims of Late Roman fine ware vessels will be stray bits of sound, text, or video clinging to the deteriorating disks of disused servers or discarded along with iPods and Kindles in modern middens.  Unlike the vinyl LP or even the (comparatively) primitive cassette tape, there is little on the iPod or Kindle that links it physically to the music or text stored on the device. Moreover, the use of these devices  do not cause the music or text to deteriorate.

So, I sat around this weekend, grading papers, making pasta, reading Kathleen Davis’ book, and listening to the space of low-fi sound spooling off a hard drive and running through my stereo. I could listen to it as much as I wanted and wherever I wanted.