Twelve of 11

A list of my favorite tracks of 2011.  No specific order and no claims of completeness, just the tracks I loved over the last year for reasons various and mostly subjective.  

1. Ghostpoet – Survive It (Quest’s Guidance mix)
2. Clams Casino – Brainwash by London
3. Holy Other – Touch
4. Drake – Dreams Money Can buy
5. Dj Rum – Mountains, Parts 2 & 3
6. Floating Points – Myrtle Avenue
7. Falty DL – Mean Streets, Part 1
8. The Weeknd – Wicked Games.
9. Schlomo – Just Us
10. Rick Wilhite – Blame it on the Boogie (feat. Theo Parrish & Osunlade)
11. Julio Bashmore – Battle for Middle You
12. Jamie xx – Far Nearer

Ghostpoet – Survive It (Quest’s Guidance mix)

“I know, Times are hard, You're against the wall, and your head is down…”  The weary, yet determined, optimism of Ghostpoet’s lyrics perfectly captures the dire resilience that colored 2011.  And, Quest’s remix, haunted by both the dread weight of ’06 dubstep and the bittersweet swing of classic UKG amplifies that sense of struggle at the songs heart.

Clams Casino – Brainwash by London

Everything Clams Casino touched this year was gold.  However, this smoked-out sub-base work out was a personal favorite for soundtracking late night subway rides.  The shouty bit at 1:30 is a great reichian sing-along moment.

Holy Other – Touch

A long cold draft of liquid longing and desperation.  The comparison to Burial is unavoidable but here all that late night hum is devoid of skittering beats or nostalgia.  This is the best in a long list of excellent releases of dark electronics from Tri-Angle over the course of the year.

Drake – Dreams Money Can buy

The love/hate relationship with Drake continues.  Yeah, his constant whinging over the melancholy of cars, money, women and fame should be grating, insulting or by this point tired but somehow you find yourself relating to the emotions even if the specifics are absurd.  The touches of self-deprecation and the off-kilter, self-destructing beats certainly help.

Dj Rum – Mountains, Parts 2 & 3

Widescreen, moody, sub-laced atmospherics.  This track should be too noodley, overly melodramatic, disjointed.  Instead, it reclaims and repurposes the emphasis on bass and space that dubstep discarded on its way to mainstream dancefloors.

Floating Points – Myrtle Avenue

Brilliant in every way.   This track is in a constant state of subtle flux, slowly writhing and contorting, the beats growing and tightening until they peek intensity and then, when you expect a huge synth flourish or massive drop, Floating Points simply places you down in new aural surroundings, not entirely unfamiliar but fresh and airy.  Then the process begins again.  The fact that that gorgeous vocal flourish (Fatima?) doesn’t appear until over 7 minutes in, is testament alone to the masterful amount of restraint at work here.

Falty DL – Mean Streets, Part 1

A number of Falty DL tunes from the past year could have made the cut (Hip Love. Lucky Luciano, Here We Go Again remix…).  But this is perhaps the most unique and, pressed in a limited vinyl only run, the hardest to track down.  Lagos by way of Brooklyn and Croydon,  I do not understand how this wasn’t a huge anthem. 

The Weeknd – Wicked Games

No one had a bigger year than The Weeknd.  Doubling down on Drake’s emo-bling and taking the beats edgier and sparser, the result is an addictive brew of filthy late-night R&B from the edge of the abyss.   This track came with an amazing, supposedly unsolicited video (NSFW).

Schlomo – Just Us

I’m on a dawn plane, unslept and hungover, reality lurching and pitching around me like I am out at sea instead stuck on the LGA tarmac.  This song rises through a folder full of random odds and ends on my MP3 player, with no artist or track info, only the unhelpful cover art.  Its frayed, skittering beats and haunted underwater carnival synths are the perfect complement to my state of mind.   It takes more than a week before I track down the info.  

Rick Wilhite – Blame it on the Boogie (feat. Theo Parrish & Osunlade)

"slick rick was in the house, turning it out, the girls were all singing lad di da di, I guess we were having a party…" The official Den of Iniquities party jam.  More fun than a serious Detroit house track should be allowed to be.

Julio Bashmore – Battle for Middle You

The hands down dancefloor anthem of the year.  Classic house and garage (Doomsnight Revisted?) are encoded in its DNA, yet it sounds like nothing else out there.  The call to “stomp your feet and get down” is superfluous.  Like you have any choice.

Jamie xx – Far Nearer

Oh, the steel drums!!  I played this more times this year than all the other tracks on this list combined.  If you stepped in my house or anywhere I was allowed control of the selection you heard it.  In the winter it made you dream of beaches and sunshine.  In the Spring and Summer it compelled you to sip cocktails in the sun and dance under open skies.

Bonus: Azealia Banks - 212 

The most grin-inducing, joyously filthy thing I've heard in ages.  

Halloween Playlist

Contains 66% more heavy dub and surf guitar than standard Halloween playlists.

01)   Screaming Lord Sutch & The Savages – Jack the Ripper

02)   The Pandoras – Haunted Beach Party

03)   Lee Perry & Devon Irons – Vampire

04)   Los Johnny Jets – Dracula A Go Go

05)   Skatalites – Lon Chaney

06)   Hillbilly Hellcats – Dead Man’s Party

07)   Jeff Richmond & Tracy Morgan – Werewolf Bar Mitzvah

08)   Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet – Zombie Compromise

09)   King Horror – Dracula Prince of Darkness

10)   Kid Koala – Trick N’ Treats

11)   Minus 9 – In the Spirit of Vampiros Lesbos (DJ Cam remix)

12)   Geto Boys – My Mind is Playing Tricks on Me

A Rope Let Down From Heaven

“I close my eyes and again try to run back the events of the previous night.  Just as before, the images are crisp but where the names of people and places should be there is only confusion and noise.  I must be nomenclature impaired I think.  I laugh gently at the idea that I can remember a term like nomenclature but not my own name.  Then I cringe at the reality of my situation.  I do not remember my own name.”

My new story, A Rope Let Down From Heaven, is up at the mighty Rotten Leaves. It is my surreal twist on the classic pulp amnesia story. It is a bit steamy up front, more than a little disturbing on the back end and if, like me, your sense of humor runs dark and twisted there could be a few knowing snickers along the way.  The original idea rose a rather arresting lucid dream and I am really interested to see how readers react to it.

If you have not visited Rotten Leaves since its relaunch a few months back, I highly recommend a look around. A number of extremely talented writers are breaking ground over there.  In the current landscape, I cannot think of a better source for your fresh uncut fix of the dark stuff than RL.

   

Fiction Friday

Quick links for a few quality pieces of fiction I have read and enjoyed recently:

"When Cornelio first served the woman she’d had been a girl of sixteen, as striking as the woman who sat before him now. A Criollo twice her age had put his hand on her thigh and when she spat to the dirt he laughed and called her ‘Indio.’ She shattered his nose with the bottle of tequila she was enjoying. As the man moaned on the floor, liquor and blood mixing with the dust his movements stirred, the girl pulled the knife strapped under her dress and removed his right ear with a slight motion. The Criollo never showed his crooked face again and Cornelio always kept enough añejo on hand. "
Incarnation by Chris Deal

Chris Deal crafts a smouldering, embers hot, piece of borderlands noir for the excellent Rotten Leaves zine.



"All the stuff you block out each day catches up with you in hotel rooms. Specters made of mental malaise stalk the corridors of every airport hotel and inner city stop over. All those thoughts you drown out with iPods, Ikea catalogues and foreign holidays. All those neuroses stifled with gym memberships, new wardrobes and cosmetic surgery. All the creeping paranoia. All of these things find you in hotel rooms. Sat there alone at two in the morning, having drained the mini bar, is it any wonder people commit suicide in hotel rooms?"

Sketched 002 by Den Patrick

Den Patrick conjurers a lovely ruminative piece of location based flash.



"I asked whether we could go inside and close the door. “There are no rules,” he said. “But—” I began. “Except that it stay empty,” he interrupted. “Can I eat in there?” I asked, a few days later. “There’s nothing you can’t do in there,” my father said, mysteriously. “Our family eats together at the table,” said my mother. Charlotte asked if it was my father’s room. “It doesn’t belong to any of us,” he said. “It’s just a part of the house. In the same way that Arfy lives with us but doesn’t belong to us.” On moving upstate we’d gained a puppy, to prove we had a backyard. “Is it Arfy’s room?” asked Charlotte, perhaps misunderstanding. “Arfy, too, is free to use the empty room,” said my father. “If Arfy poops in there, who has to clean it up?” I asked. We all glanced at my mother."

The Empty Room by Jonthan Lethem

Some of the raw electricity of Lethem's early work may have dissipated over time but what has taken its place is a mastery of tone that lures the readers in and then gently twists their perceptions into peculiar angles.



Maybe I will do this one Friday a month, maybe I will think better of it and never do it again. Only the blog gods know for sure.

Summer Mix

A quick little 40min. mix of breezy, unapologetic, sub-laced House music. This one is custom built for the hazy twilight hours, sipping drinks w/ umbrellas, dancing under an open sky.

SMMR MIX (June 2011) by kelcey

1) Groove Theory - Tell Me (George Fitzgerald remix)
2) Photek - Rings Around Saturn (Breach remix)
3) The Martin Brothers - Steel Drums (Julio Bashmore remix)
4) Julio Bashmore - Battle for Middle You
(Maurice Donovan remix)
5) Boddika - Soul What
6) Ossie - Creepy Crawlies
7) Jamie xx - Far Nearer
8) Deadboy - Heartbreaker (Julio Bashmore remix)
9) Jacques Greene - Tell Me
10) ZZT - ZZafrika
11) Caribou - Sun (Midland re-edit)
12) Karizma - Good Morning (Kaytronik remix)

Summer Mix 2011 by Kelcey on Mixcloud

Ian Francis - New Desert of the Surreal

Not to diminish the timelessness of the early surrealist masters but I doubt that the unconscious landscape of the 21C dreamer bares likeness to Dali's endless deserts or the marble columned corridors of De Chirico. I would suggest, instead, that if you took a snapshot of the contemporary unconscious the setting would resemble the brightly hued, leisure among the ruins of Chloe Early or the dark, deconstructed down to geometric grid, urban landscapes of Ian Francis.

Much of the work in Francis' New York solo debut, Fireland, inhabits an uneasy twilight areas between the unconscious and the urban street. In High Angle Deer Park (above), an urban park is stripped and flattened into a grid pattern forming an abstracted game board where a mysterious competition/ritual underway bathed with sexual tension and submerged violence.

In the striking Three People Lose Track of Time in the Financial District of San Francisco (below) the urban street is reduced to a series of streaked and tarnished geometric forms. What we can assume is a busy city street is depopulated leaving only the three narrative figures. The title places the scene in a specific location while the actual image is devoid of identifiable locative cues. Instead the figures inhabit a peculiar limbo, simultaneously in public and removed to a place of safety where internal life is free to manifest.

Again only a teasing suggestion of narrative is discernible. The viewer is positioned as an uninformed voyeur spying on a private emotional moment. The emotions are familiar but the specifics of the situation are a mystery. The figures appear familiar enough yet their forms are fantastic. They are more changeable composites than studied likenesses. Facial detail conveys raw emotion, the intimate confusion of the female figures, the anguish of the male figure carry a certain weight, however the figures are unstable, their faces extending in multiple, legs fading into the background. They are vaporous inhabitants of dreamspace where all things, even people, are shrouded in occult meaning but that meaning is fluid, uncertain and beyond concise explanation.

There is a connection to be made here between these urban landscapes, stripped down and re-mapped for unconscious exploration and the growing prevalence of augmented reality. However, I can not at this moment string the ideas together. It does seem, however, that there is insight to gleaned from the juxtaposition of the fantastic landscapes of Dali and De Chirico and these more contemporary abstracted urban scenes. Is it that the urban landscape has become so abstract, so removed from the "natural" world, so wiped clean through excess stimuli, that they are now the blank canvas for out waking dreams? On the other hand could it be that we have become so removed from any sense of uninfluenced imagination that our unconscious mind can no longer build the pristine deserts of surrealist fantasy? Instead we are left to simply augment the everyday world, creating just enough space to dream but perhaps not enough space to dream large. 

Ian Francis: Fireland is up at Joshua Liner Gallery until April 2.

Our Pr0n Stars are not Your Porn Stars

In 1995 superstar porn queen Traci Lords released 1000 Fires an album of disposable dance anthems. The LP's Juno Reactor produced high-gloss thump made a certain amount of sense as the backing track for Lords. There was a connection to be made between the bright lights in dark places hedonism or 90s dance floors and the over-lit trashy glamor of pornography from the same era. At the time both industries were seeing an influx of cash and begrudgingly ceded credibility. The two scenes were beginning to enter the wider culture, becoming household topics of conversations even if those conversations were still had in hushed tones.

Jump ahead fifteen years and you would be hard pressed to find two industries more drastically effected by the rise of technology and the accelerating effect it has had on pop culture than porno and pop music. Pornography is now omni-present and as acceptable a part of the larger culture as perhaps it is ever going to be. Its many starlets are not only wealthy but also pop icons. This money and visibility, along with advances in video technology, have lead to lavish production budgets for pornographic films that involve over the top plots, exotic locals and lavish sets.

However, our hyper-saturated media environment also allows easier access to mainstream porn's darkling sibling. Cheaply made films cast with skinny, tattooed twenty year olds (boys & girls, unlike mainstream pornography and hollywood's, massive age disparity) shot in grainy DV offer up a cracked mirror image to the bleach blond, and absurdly augmented starlets of mainstream smut. Where mainstream porn is increasingly hard to discern from major Hollywood movies, so-called alt porn is full of slap dash edits, cheap visual effects and at its most extreme, an Artuadian relationship to its audience. The hallmarks of the art/film school drop out cannot help appear absurd wrapped around what is still, at its gyrating heart, hardcore smut. However, this pretentious self awareness is no more bizarre than the glossy high budget aping of Hollywood the blockbuster found in more mainstream fair. Like most cultural forms, porn's cross-over into the larger culture comes at the expense of innovation and content. However, just like other cultural forms, a relational other forms to fill the subcultural void left in its wake.

Pop music is currently generating its own darkling other to mirror its very own high gloss stagnation. Signs of this growing dark-pop trend are most obvious in the blacker side of Lady Gaga's Night Porter meets Weimar Cabaret shtick. However, for the more adventurous listener a the peculiar sound has begun to coalesce around a number of insufficient names including Drag and Witchhouse. These new dark sounds often see pop sensibilities, R& B vocals, catchy synth melodies, submerged below a veneer of drone and feedback and merged with melodramatic analog synths that would be at home at the Bat Cave circa '95. The music often disseminates through word of net downloads or on strictly limited vinyl or cassette releases. A patina of the static and hiss of basement studio production sunk beneath lyrics laced with a dark sincerity is the final touch on obsidian mirror image to Bieber and Beyonce's glossy pop sheen.

One of the more respected forces enabling these new sounds germination, is Brooklyn's own Pendu label (d/l Pendu's Horror Scores for the Dance Floor). Along with White Ring and Chelsea Wolfe, Pendu also releases music by aTelicine, a band whose founding members include porn starlet Sasha Grey (see what I did there?). aTelecine's music is probably the most challenging of any act on the label or within the man/label's musical orbit. The songs are born of old-school tape loops and analog synths. They have a relationship to both the avant-drone metal of Sunn O))) and early 90s Industrial. On the Industrial side, aTelecine have a clearer connection to the early experimental sound of Throbbing Gristle or Current 93 than the grind and stomp of Ministry. Lyrics (by Ms. Grey?) are lost in layers of distortion sinking into to thick atmospheric haze that is constantly being chided and shifted by off kilter percussion. Hints and flashes of lullaby melody than work against the drone to create the gentlest sense of impending chaos, a timidly prodding unease.

The experiments don't always work, songs occasionally never manage to fully form but simply stagger on as stillborn noise for its own sake. However, more often the layers of dark blistering sound blend into something rich and fully formed. These songs lure you in while still managing to transcend mainstream pop's reflexive capitulation to sooth and comfort, to entertain. This is in the end not the music of large heaving breast, neatly tussled hair and well timed moans. It's more the music of sweat and spit. It slaps you around and bit and makes you feel dirty and just a bit uncomfortable. Which for some of us is exactly what we are looking for.

from aTelecine's A Cassette Tape Culture LP:


for the lulz: