Throat Clearing/Input Update
What I've been reading, watching, and listening to
In between working on promoting the remix album, producing two different podcasts, and working on the new Lamniformes full length, I’ve really left this thing languish. My bad. I do have some longer music writing pieces in the works that I think will be cool and interesting to read but those are also a long way from being finished so I figured I should do another July Media Diet report as a way of keeping you abreast of what I’m ingesting and thinking about before the beefier pieces make their way into your inbox. So here’s what I’ve inputing, output to be made public later:
Reading:
I’m about half way through Wagernism by Alex Ross. As befitting its subject’s reputation for writing overstuffed music this book is both exhaustive and exhausting. Very little of the book is about Wagner himself, instead it traces the way his music was interpreted and used by other artists as well as social and political movements. The short hand on Wagner is that his music was a big hit with Hitler and that he himself was an antisemite, both true facts. The book still hasn’t gotten to the Nazi era by it’s median, instead establishing that Wagner’s music was pretty much every where you looked in the late 19th century. I’m not really much of a fan of Wagner’s music, and needless to say I don’t like the guy either, but I’m enjoying the book. It’s fascinating to see just how malleable the meaning of music is once it reaches a critical mass.
A late entry to this letter: I just read Ryo Miyauchi’s latest issue of This Side of Japan, which opens with a very thoughtful retrospective on the J-pop artist Kyary Pamyu Pamyu that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Watching:
In preparation for the second season of The Human Instrumentality Podcast I’ve been refreshing my memory of Satoshi Kon’s movies. I can say confidently that they are still good! If you’re not familiar, Kon directed four animated films and one 12 episode animated TV show. A small body of work, but a dense one. Kon’s stories frequently blur the line between reality and fantasy, waking life and dreams, fact and fiction, subjects made all the more disorienting by his lightning fast editing and the animated medium he worked in. I’ll have a lot more to say about this stuff soon once the podcast starts back up again.
I also recently watched Jacques Tati’s PlayTime! and haven’t stopped thinking about it. It’s billed as a comedy, and yeah sure it has some good visual gags, but I was struck by how little you’d need to update its world of glass boxes to bring the movie into the 21st century. Since returning to the office is back on the table these days, I couldn’t help but see in Tati’s airport/office/shopping mall the reflection of the tourist playground that I spent my week days traveling through for the last few years. Very eerie!
On the smaller screen (it’s all the same screen but humor me) I’ve been watching some nerds go deep on music theory on YouTube. First there’s Metal Music Theory, which is as advertised a channel that uses music theory to analyze heavy metal music. The channel’s host Calder Hannan doesn’t just pick tracks from big names but pulls from much more niche artists and styles that generally don’t get this kind of academic attention. He’s also quite funny in an understated and monotone way.
I’ve also been watching drummer Yogev Gabay, who has a running series of videos breaking down music with complicated rhythms. This kind of stuff is like comfort food for me, and has the practical benefit of helping me keep my counting skills sharp. The music is roughly half prog metal and half jazz fusion, basically my audio diet for all of college.
Although I’m not much a gamer anymore, I’ve recently become fascinated with the channel Action Button. Tim Rogers, the channel’s host, seems like a genuinely brilliant and deeply weird guy blessed/cursed with a flawless memory and an interesting life. Rogers has a fascinating voice both literally and as a writer. He sounds simultaneously like the teenager behind the movie theater concession stand and the voiceover in the trailers. As a writer he balances in depth analysis of the games he’s covering with extensive research and a healthy knowledge of a wide range of other subjects, literature, linguistics, life experience, etc. What keeps me coming back is how generous Rogers is as a creator. His reviews are gargantuan, self evidently the result of multiple sleepless nights in a row. You can tell that Rogers really cares about giving his all to make these videos as good as they can be, and I find that very inspiring.
(I’m also watching the NBA Finals, but what else is new?)
Listening:
Along the same lines of inspiring cases of going all out, I’ve been listening to the podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones, which covers country music history in the 20th century. Being a fan of country music is not a prerequisite in part because the show is so thorough in its research that there’s plenty to digest without knowing the music, and because these kinds of stories have all sorts of resonance with other genres of music history.
Other podcasts that I’m enjoying: Sound Only with Justin Charity and Micah Peters, who cover anime, video games, TV, and rap music with lots of witty banter. Death // Sentence which is split between lefty politics, weird heavy metal, and even weirder literature. ex.haust, whose episodes about nuclear energy and the power grid are a must listen for anyone else who finds the weather pretty distressing these days. Flavortone, for my modern art music theory as explained by media saturated millennials. Cookies Hoops, for idiosyncratic basketball takes and Gen X NYC hipster lifestyle reporting. Cabbages for laid back conversations with rappers about movies. There are more, mostly about basketball.
As for what music I’m listening to, well. I maintain a consistent practice of listening to three new albums a day, pulled from a list of (at the time of writing) 575 albums. Typically this means I pull one from the start of the list, one from the end of it, and then one at random. I’ve taken a few detours lately to dig into the music of Joni Mitchell, Deafheaven, and Between the Buried and Me for the purposes of podcasts and upcoming written pieces.
So, yes. In addition to the non-writing projects mentioned up top I do have some written stuff in the works. Right now there are three looming thoughts that I feel the urge to write at for hours at a time. Here they are in order of most developed to least developed:
Deafheaven’s Sunbather and Millennial Ennui
Why metal can’t move on from Meshuggah
Ways of Watching Basketball
The first is a personal reflection on how Deafheaven’s music has changed over the last decade, and how those changes mirror the process of moving from my 20s to my 30s. I’ve had bits and pieces of this essay floating around in my head for nearly a decade now, so getting it out into the world would probably do me some psychic good. The second is the result of watching too many videos on YouTube where people have broken down Meshuggah’s music to a atomic level and still feeling like no one has quite explained how and why this band has become legitimately as important to the fabric of heavy metal as Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, and Metallica, all bands that dwarf Meshuggah’s popularity by a factor of several 10s. The third is an attempt to apply John Berger-ish concepts of “looking at art” to the process of “watching NBA basketball” which, similar to item no.1, is really a way for me to trepan out intrusive thoughts I have about the political/social/aesthetic implications of basketball as well as put into words a beginners guide to what your eyes should be doing during a televised basketball game, something that is glaringly missing from the process of getting new people into the game itself.
If you have a personal preference of which of these three pieces I should complete first, please let me know. Otherwise, they’ll be written in roughly the order I’ve listed them.
More podcasts, words, and tunes heading your way soon. Stay cool.