joanna newsom

Top 10

1. Joanna Newsom, Have One on Me
2. Spring training
3. Waiting for new Venture Bros., rewatching old Venture Bros.
4. Flavors.me
5. Ableton Live
6. Heater Core 365 Ableton Live Tips
7. Lost
8. The Bugle
9. Top Gear on iTunes (they have the original UK versions that are 20 min longer than the ones they show on BBC America)
10. Boards of Canada possibly, maybe, perhaps releasing something in 2010

Bottom 3

1. California’s economy
2. Earthquakes
3. Republicans

It’s here!  It’s Joanna Newsom’s brand new 3-CD, 2 hour opus, Have One on Me.  Her last album, Ys, was one of the finest works of the last decade, and I’ve been waiting and waiting for new music from her to come out ever since I first heard “Emily.”  And now my wait is over, and now the listening begins.  Hopefully, I’ll have something to say about the work in a few days.

Go buy this now!  Now now now now now now now now now now!

Top 10

1. Ableton Live
2. Pitchers & catchers!!!
3. Lost final season
4. Moon Wiring Club
5. iPad
6. Heater Core: 365 Live Tips
7. Hauntology
8. Kiva
9. New Joanna Newsom
10. Caprica

Bottom 3

1. The voters of Massachusetts
2. Republicans
3. The Grammys (irrelevant since…forever)

Top 25

1. Angels win 2002 World Series–At my father’s funeral in 2005, I talked about our shared love of sports, and the point I made to illustrate this love was him calling me after the Angels won the Series for the first time.  That’s how much this meant to me (and to him).
2. The Wire: When a postmortem is written about the American experiment, this show will be singled out as a perfect illustration of how the country fell.  The detailed way in which the show demonstrated corruption, complacency, and stagnation at all levels of bureaucracy and business, mixed with the systematic defeat of anyone and everyone trying to make things better, says more about the last decade than a million hours of campaign commercials and governmental panels ever could.  It’s the most essential work of art of this century, and it will be one of the lasting gifts of our generation to generations to come.
3. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops and The River–I helped to generate interest in William Basinski’s work when I worked at the now-defunct Stylus Magazine.  All of his work is wonderful, but these two works shine above all other music from the last decade (even though they both are really over 30 years old now).
4. Children of Men: The best film of the decade is also the most amazing science fiction films ever conceived.  Clive Owen’s acting, Alfonso Cuarón’s directing, and Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography are the three pillars in this film, which takes us on a journey through a world without children and all the chaos and confusion that this fact produces.  It’s a spellbinding, amazing work of art.
5. Barak Obama–2nd best night of the decade (behind the night the Angels won the series) was the night that Obama won the Presidency.  And while he’s been attacked left and right for the past year, he’s still standing and he’s moving slowly but surely toward change.  I still believe.
6. Apple’s iPod and iPhone–When I used to carry around a portable CD player and 50 CDs, I would dream of a device that could store my music in my pocket.  And then I got an iPod.  And then I got another iPod.  And then I got an iPhone.  And then I gave my first iPhone to my friend and got a new one and we both started using ours together.  And it was good.
7. Tivo–Oh hell yes.
8. Idiocracy–Funniest movie of the decade, and the most accurate.  We don’t have to wait 500 years for this world to come into existence; I see this kind of stupid every single day.
9. Sigur Rós’s Agaetis Byrjun, ( ), Takk…, and Hvarf – Heim–Band of the decade?  I think so.  Their music has defined much of the genre that is usually known as “post rock,” even as their emerging popularity has alienated the band from the critics, most of whom see the band as sell-outs because they are successful.  And yes their last album wasn’t as good as their previous work; but it’s still way better than 99.99% of all music ever, so I’ll give them some slack.  Oh, and Amiina is awesome too!
10. Joanna Newsom’s Ys–I put this CD in my car shortly after I bought it in 2007 and it’s still in there.  It’s one of the only examples of high-quality poetry brought to life through music.
11. The Venture Brothers–Poetry of an entirely different stripe, this series is the vanguard of Adult Swim, itself the vanguard of popular entertainment for quite some time.  It’s part Hardy Boys, part Superfriends, part Six Million Dollar Man, part dada, part I Saved Hitler’s Brain, and part…well, part everything else I can come up with.  Oh my flipping zombie Jesus is this show good.
12. Tod Dockstander’s Aerial–Decades in the making, this is a magnum-opus from an electronic music pioneer who never really had much of a chance to practice his art back in the 60s because he lacked the credentials to use the very rare and very expensive technologies found in some high-level universities and few other places.  This is an exceptional trilogy of albums that puts Dockstander front and center in the modern world of experimental music.
13. Netflix–It took me a while to get into this (their initial catalogue was rather minimal), but now it’s practically a religion, even for people like my mom who know next to nothing about computers.  She checks her email and her Netflix queue.  Oh, and they forced Americans to use the word “queue,” too.  That’s awesome.
14. The Caretaker: The Complete Digital Collection–Unbelievably important music from the guy who was originally known as V/VM.  The entire catalogue is worth owning; more than that, it’s affordable.  This guy pioneered the online distribution of music.  Most of his catalogue was originally available for free download.  But I felt that I owed it to him to buy the collection and support this wonderful artist’s work into another decade (which has begun in earnest with Leyland Kirby’s latest release).
15. World of Warcraft–This is #1 on my wife’s “Bottom 10″ list for the decade.  I play it too much–and have for several years.  I got hooked when I saw that I could create a druid alchemist.  How cool is that?  Not that alchemy or druidism in WoW have anything to do with actual druids or alchemy, but it’s still fun to imagine living within a mythological world.
16. Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi and The Campfire Headphase–Boards of Canada’s contribution to the music world in the last decade consists of two fascinating albums and some EPs.  These are exceptional works, and they extend the ideas from Music Has the Right to Children in interesting ways.  I still check BoC’s website every day to see if there’s news of their latest release.  I bet I’m not the only one.
17. Amazon Prime–I grew up in Riverside, about 60 miles from Los Angeles at a time when I had to go into LA to find any decent music or bookstores.  I dreamed of a day when I would live in a decent town where I could buy any of the weird stuff that I read about in magazines.  And then the Internet showed up and with it came Amazon, the first and still best stop for online shopping.  I now live in a town that is over 100 miles from the nearest pocket of civilization, and the only reason a place like this is even partially tolerable is Amazon Prime, which allows me to buy whatever I want and not pay for shipping (well, I pay $75 a year, but you have no idea how much stuff my wife and I get on Amazon).
18. Neal Stephenson’s Anathem–Read it recently and loved it.  I’ve loved all of his novels (though the Baroque Cycle is a tough haul).  I love the fact that the kernel of this novel’s story is taken from the Long Now project.
19. Tim Hecker’s Radio Amor, Harmony in Ultraviolet, and An Imaginary Country–I first got into Hecker because Amour was based around shortwave radio signals he recorded in Central America (shortwave being one of my fascinations).  But everything this artist has created in the past few years is truly beautiful and challenging (a difficult combination, indeed).  Highly recommended.
20. Stow, Scotland–My wife and I took our parents to the UK in 2006.  We spent a week at a small farmhouse in this town.  It was wonderful.
21. Ableton Live–This is the past, present, and future of electronic music composition.  This German company will dominate the next decade because of their wise decision to merge their software with Cycling ’74’s epochal Max/MSP.  Max for Live debuted in November 2009 and will be the basis for more music in the coming decade than the vocoder was in the Noughts.
22. Top Gear–I care very little about cars, but I love this show.  It proves that adult men can make fun of each other intelligently and with style.  Plus it’s one of the few things my wife and I enjoy watching together.
23. Lord of the Rings–The movies were fantastic, but what I love even more is the fact that these films spearheaded the interest in fantasy and mythology.  It’s partly because of this film that I’m able to teach a class on mythology at my college.
    
24. Patton Oswalt–I’ve been a fan since his 1996 HBO special (which I taped and watched over and over).  He’s more popular than ever now, and his comedy just keeps getting stronger.
25. Longplayer–A wonderful idea.  Here’s hoping it lasts!

Bottom 10

1. George W. Bush
2. Dick Cheney
3. Donald Rumsfeld (really, it’s a three-way tie for first)
4. Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck/Fox News
5. People who don’t understand the difference between “were” and “where”
6. Terrorists of all stripes (from the 9/11 attackers to the Wall Street thugs to Republican fearmongers)
7. Boston
8. Reality television
9. 99.99% of all entertainment
10. Summers in El Centro, CA

Rather than pick and choose between different albums, I’m focusing on artists here.  Sigur Ros released a lot of music in the past decade, and it’s all (or nearly all) worthy, so I just lump it all together here in the #2 spot.  The same goes for Basinski, The Caretaker, Boards of Canada, and so on.  Mind you, I don’t add everything by these artists–only the cream of their crop (so to speak).   My attitude is: why focus on one work when so many great artists created multiple works of incredibly high quality?

As a result, I think you’ll find that the top albums list comes out to about 29 individual works (and more, if you count The Caretaker’s work individually).  That doesn’t include the multiple-CD releases here like The River and Kesto.  What does this mean?  Despite the near-death of the music industry, there’s still a hell of a lot of great music out there.

1. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops I-IV and The River
2. Sigur Rós’s Agaetis Byrjun, ( ), Takk…, and Hvarf – Heim
3. Joanna Newsom’s Ys
4. Tod Dockstander’s Aerial #1, #2, and #3
5. The Caretaker: The Complete Digital Collection
6. Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi and The Campfire Headphase
7. Tim Hecker’s Radio Amor, Harmony in Ultraviolet, and An Imaginary Country
8. Pan Sonic’s Aaltopiiri and Kesto
9. The White Stripes’s De Stijl, White Blood Cells, Elephant, and Get Behind Me Satan
10. Radiohead’s Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, and In Rainbows

Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order)

• The Advisory Circle’s Other Channels
• Amiina’s Kurr
• Antony & The Johnsons’ I Am a Bird Now and The Crying Light
• Gevorg Dabaghyan’s Miniatures: Masterworks for Armenian Duduk
• Fennesz’s Endless Summer, Venice, and Black Sea
• Flying Lotus’s Los Angeles
• Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Without Sinking
• Jacob Kirkegaard’s 4 Rooms, Eldfjall, and Labyrinthitis
• Kode9 & The Spaceape’s Memories of the Future
• Leyland Kirby’s Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was
• Nick Cave & The Bad Seed’s Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus
• Random Inc.’s Jerusalem: Tales Outside the Framework of Orthodoxy
• Rechenzentrum’s Director’s Cut and Silence
• Stars of the Lid’s The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid and And Their Refinement of the Decline
• The Silk Road: A Musical Caravan
• Tom Waits’s Alice, Blood Money, and Real Gone

I bought Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea years ago and have enjoyed it for most of those years (took a few listens to get it, but I got it fairly quickly).  Still, I never really LISTENED to it until about two months ago.

By LISTEN, I mean actually sitting down, not doing anything else, just LISTENING to it listening, the kind of listening I reserve only for the absolutely greatest music I’ve ever heard in my entire life.  Now, I love music and have for a very long time, but albums I will drop everything to LISTEN to are rare.  There was Bob Dylan’s Biograph, a few Stones albums (definitely Exile, possibly Beggar’s Banquet), the first Tricky album, Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights, Arvo Part’s Tabula Rasa, most everything by Boards of Canada and Sigur Ros and William Basinski, The Conet Project, and Joanna Newsom’s Ys.  And now Aeroplane.

A LISTENING experience is an intense one.  It will dominate my life for a few days, as I play the album over and over again, studying each nuance, each lyric.  When I’m not listening to the album, I’m thinking about it or singing it (either aloud or in my head, depending upon whether I’m alone or not).  I’m still in the midst of the Aeroplane experience, and I thought I’d share my thoughts about the album while I’m consumed by it, perhaps as a way both to understand its hold over me and as a reminder for future me why I spend this particular week in 2008 falling over myself about an album from 1998.  To do that, I’ll need to back up a bit–and return to something I started writing last year, a summary of my personal musical history.

I first got into music seriously in 1983, and all the stuff I described in the earlier “In Search of Lost Sound” posts) took place in late 83 and the first part of 1984.  My musical education really accelerated later that year, however, when I spent two months in Iceland as an exchange student.  The music that Iceland listened to that summer actually turned out to be the music that would be popular in the US later that year and the next year–stuff like Depeche Mode, Wham!, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and so on.  But what made Iceland unique for me was that it gave me a chance to learn that the pop music that I had been listening to was only part of a larger and more interesting musical universe.  It was in Iceland that I learned about REM and other, more interesting bands that would dominate my musical experience later on.

Actually, I didn’t listen to a lot of REM or similar music while in Iceland (I was more into Wham and that other crap), but once I got back to the USA in the fall I started paying closer attention to music and started experimenting with new and interesting artists.  My first real find in this avenue of exploration was REM’s Fables of the Reconstruction, their third album.  Yes, I got the 3rd album first and then went back and got the first two.  Actually, I still think Fables is pretty great, even though it was dismissed at the time as a letdown.  From REM (actually, from reading articles about them), I learned about The Replacements, The Minutemen, Husker Du, and Richard Thompson (Joe Boyd, who produced a lot of Thompson’s work–starting with the Fairport Convention years–produced REM’s Fables).

The years 1984-86, then, were stellar ones for me (and for music–awesome stuff released during that time).  I spent a lot of time and money learning everything I could about what would be called “alternative” music.  But those were also the years that I discovered the great music of the 60s–both rock stuff like the Stones and Who and Stax/Volt soul music.  By 1988 or so, I was almost exclusively listening to the past.  What I remember of late 80s, early 90s music is Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and Public Enemy (not necessarily in that order).  Really, though, I was living in the past for much of that time, fairly confident in my belief that music had already peaked.  Heck, my favorite album of the early 90s was Bobby “Blue” Bland’s Two Steps from the Blues.  Oh, I was also a grad student then, so you know I was a bit of an asshole.

Fast-forward a few years to 1995.  At this point, my interests started moving ever so slowly from classic rock and soul to electronics and computers.  I started designing web pages at this time, and my musical taste slowly moved towards things like Nine Inch Nails and Industrial stuff (like Boyd Rice and Throbbing Gristle), then Tricky and Massive Attack, and then Boards of Canada and their ilk.  This all coincided with my first forays in writing about music (my 25 site, my article on NIN, and my now-defunct Tricky site–which was the first Tricky web site, btw).  It also coincided with my first forays in creating electronic music, as well–mostly crap, but creating music (however crappy) is a really liberating, deeply satisfying experience.  And who cares if anyone hears it or not, right?

From there I started going down stranger and stranger roads, looking for the most experimental and interesting sounding music I could find.  Pan Sonic and Pole were my first forays into this world; they would be followed by the 12k artists, Mille Plateaux and Ritornell works, then even further afield stuff like Central Asian music, Jamaican dub, Chris Watson, Tim Hecker, and the Conet Project.  My focus during all this time was on sound, not music.  I was bored with the cliches of most popular music, fed up with the commercialization of art.  I wanted to hear something new, and I searched the web far and wide for just such experiences.

Which leads me back to Neutral Milk Hotel.  Does it?  Well, yes, it does.  For the past year or so, I’ve gone full circle and returned to the music of the mid to late 90s–your Trickys and Boards of Canadas.  I see this period as my own personal nostalgia period, in the same way that the 80s music is my wife’s nostalgia.  Yes, most people get nostalgic for the music of their high school years.  For some reason, the music I am nostalgic about actually came out 12 years after I graduated from high school.

1998, in particular, is a special year, both for me personally and for the music I love.  That’s the year I got my PhD, the year I got married, and the year I got my first decent job.  It’s also the year of Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children, Air’s Moon Safari, Bola’s Soup, Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, Tricky’s Angels with Dirty Faces, and, of course, Neutral Milk Hotel’s Aeroplane. That’s a damn good year in music, by the way.  The late 90s was a critically under appreciated period.

Now, unlike all the other works I just listed, I didn’t hear NMH for the first time until probably 2001, and I didn’t LISTEN to the work until recently.  So it’s fresher for me than those other works that I LISTENED to so long ago. So what am I hearing while I LISTEN to this album over and over again today, 10 years later?

I hear a voice, first off.  Jeff Magnum’s voice is amazing.  If his voice were a color, it would be a pinkish-red, like a skinned elbow with a trickle of blood oozing out from a raw, wet wound.  His voice is all emotion, completely removed from irony and critical distance.  Everything he sings, no matter how weird (“tomatoes and radio wire”) or how real (“I loooooove you Jeeesus Chriiiist”), is sung with pure, unadulterated honesty.

I also hear a guitar, an acoustic guitar that is so fuzzily distorted that it sounds as though the strings will break at any moment.  Those two things–Jeff’s voice and his fuzzed guitar–are the core of the album’s sound.  They mesh together beautifully, as if the guitar itself were embedded in Jeff’s belly or something.

For a long time, that’s ALL I heard on this album–a voice and a guitar.  As I started LISTENING, I started to pick up on the intricate production here, like the wonderfully moribund horn sections on songs like “Fool” and “Holland, 1945″ or the really amazing electronic effects that float in and around songs like “Untitled.”  All those people who think this is a folk album just don’t get the awesome production at work throughout.   There’s some amazing drum work here, some wonderful electric guitar, some rather fascinating use of odd and obscure instruments (like the euphonium) that provide essential touches to make each song memorable in a uniquely different way.  Oddly, when I would just casually listen to the album, the rockin’ “Holland, 1945″ was my least favorite song, even though it’s most people’s favorite.  Only when I started listening to the lyrics did I realize how wonderful the song actually is.

And yes, the lyrics.  That’s what I did when LISTENING to this album, study the lyrics.  As a rule, I find lyrics overrated.  It’s not a coincidence that most of my favorite music is either sung in another language (Sigur Ros or those Central Asian artists) or contain no lyrics at all (Boards of Canada, Pan Sonic, Chris Watson).  I’m a sound guy first and foremost.  But Aeroplane is no ordinary album, and these are not ordinary lyrics.  There’s a deepness to the lyrics that is as close as popular music can come to resembling the power and impact of actual poetry.  The lyrics to most rock songs (even great ones) don’t hold up when read on a page.  Lyrics get their power not from how they read but from how they are sung.

Jeff Magnum sings his lyrics wonderfully–about as well as anyone since Bowie.  But the lyrics themselves are really, really fantastic.  It’s a quasi-concept album about Anne Frank (most familiar with NMH know this), and the references to Frank throughout are haunting, touching, and perplexing–but also far richer than the idea of a Frank-centered album would suggest.

Take this stanza from my favorite song on the record, “Oh Comely”:

Your father made fetuses
With flesh licking ladies
While you and your mother
Were asleep in the trailer park
Thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadiums
The music and medicine you needed for comforting
So make all your fat fleshy fingers to moving
And pluck all your silly strings
And bend all your notes for me
Soft silly music is meaningful magical
The movements were beautiful
All in your ovaries
All of them milking with green fleshy flowers
While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines
Smelling of semen all under the garden
Was all you were needing when you still believed in me

Read it again.  The imagery is truly impressive, from the alliteration of “fat fleshy fingers” and “flesh licking ladies” to the connection of music (plucking “silly strings”) with sexual imagery (“powerful pistons…smelling of semen”).  There’s a true sense of a character stuck in despair (a father out screwing the neighborhood while child and mother are stuck at home) and seeking a release both in music and in the budding awareness of his/her own sexuality.  There’s probably some incest in there, too.  I don’t exactly know what it has to do with Anne Frank, but I’m guessing I’m not supposed to be able to read it literally anyhow.  It’s mood, evocation, inspiration, not logical connection.  That’s what makes it such good poetry.

Still, reading it is not nearly as interesting or as powerful as hearing the lyrics blow out of your speakers, hearing Jeff Magnum cry out “flesh licking ladies” with a mixture of disgust and resignation or hearing him cry out “I love you Jesus Christ” without a hint of irony or self-consciousness.  In the end, that’s what makes this work so great: Magnum’s voice singing these wonderful lyrics to pitch-perfect accompaniment and inspired production.  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a perfect combination of poetic inspiration and musical interpretation.  It’s brilliant, essential music that hasn’t aged a second in ten years.  I’m guessing I’ll be able to say the same thing in 2018.

Originally published 9/25/08

• Sigur Ros, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (obviously)
• Silver Apples, Silver Apples/Contact (thanks for the tip, Joanna Newsom)
• VA, John Barleycorn Reborn (wyrd folk music–some of it is a bit too precious, but the vast majority is beautiful and haunting)
• Monica Richards, InfraWarrior (see above–and thanks for the tip, A Darker Shade of Pagan)
• Sandy Denny, A Boxful of Treasures
• Fairport Convention, Fairport Unconventional
• Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson & Sigur Ros, Angels of the Universe
• The Frames, Set List

Originally published 6/21/08