Erstwhile readers, oh devoted group of fellow dilettantes and archeophiles. Public Organ, as you may notice, has not been updated of recent. This is not because Zach and Walker, the editors, are doing nothing. Changing circumstances (geographic and intellectual) have caused us to divert our attentions to other self-made publications.
Zach is moving to New York in February, and he has started his own scrapbook. He's looking to begin his PhD in history. His interests are in the fin-de-siecle Vienna. Appropriately enough, his online scrapbook is entitled "Ins Leere Gesprochen".
Walker, meanwhile, is moving to Jaipur, India, to work for the Jaipur Virasat Foundation. He will be updating his own scrapbook, A NEW NADIR, as well as updating his specially-made travelog, UNDER WESTERN EYES. Also, check out his Flickr feed for any photos he may take while abroad.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
Jazz & the new Cool
I saw Javon Jackson "& Friends" at the Outpost performance space tonight. Jackson (Tenor Sax) was accompanied by Benny Green (Piano) Carl Allen (Drums), Eddie Henderson (Trumpet) and Peter Washington (Bass).
When Jazz music took the anglosphere by storm, it was because of its coolness or inherent difference. I.E. Jazz aficionados fell in love with a genre of music premised on the idea that it would never grow old.
It did, and Javon Jackson has the difficult job of making music for these people. Does he succeed? I think so. "The real deal", as many people in the audience said after the show. Green was capable on the piano; exerting enough control on the tempo and demonstrating a consciousness of the melody that supported his solos. Jackson was great as well; it's amazing to see a virtuoso at work on any instrument, but the pleasure of listening to a great saxophonist is in his or her ability to toy with the melody, adding a kind of prescience to the song.
Jackson was all this, and it was a gift (as his introduction put it) to have him in "this part of the country" (as Jackson put it--I imagined him thinking: "Where the fuck am I again?" as he stared vacantly at the audience of elderly whites in front of him). Jackson, to his major credit, did not display the typical self-conscious insouciance so characteristic of Jazz artists who are all-too-aware of their audience and the sometimes-derivative nature of the music they have devoted their lives to. Jackson was at ease on stage, playing old Terence Blanchard tunes in order to satisfy his own urges, new ones. Which is what coolness is all about, no?
Friday, October 16, 2009
Panama! Review
Soundways' 2009 compilation Panama! is one of the best ethnographic music compilations of 2009. Spanning the decade (1965-1975) when, it seems, no corner of the world went untouched by musical revolution, the record reaffirms a time-honored standard. Records like Buda Musique's Ethiopiques and Yazoo!'s The Secret Museum of Mankind all present ethnohistorical music as it should be presented to the people who enjoy it today: suitably authentic, but more importantly entertaining.
Unlike other compilations which privilege authenticity over quality and cachet over musical honesty, Panama! grasps at evident truth: Popular music is more enjoyable than so-called 'exemplary' recordings of the same genre. Where the latter is often poorly recorded and untouched by production technology of any sort, the former is purposefully designed for enjoyment. It is authentic like Jimi Hendrix is authentic.
This is not to say that Panama! is absent any didactic value. Calypso, Funk, Mariachi, Island, Rock, and Jazz are all represented equally and mixed indiscriminately.
The first track of the compilation is a vocal recording. "El se llama, panama. Panama esta Bueno y...Ma. No no no, esta mas sin esse. Ma."
From the sumptuous Maltrato by Freddy y sus Afro Latinos, dragging up island and cubanismo music from the isles across the way, to Descarga Superior on the next cd, throwing armfulls of funk and rock music into the listeners' ear. Santana, Hendrix, the Beatles, Parliament are all present.
Panama is a mixing pot home to dictators and international power-plays. FBI Chicanery, island vibes and everything in between. Panama! is in this way a pastiche of compilations past: it understands the true genius of a compilation to be its curatorial influence, not its fealty to any kind of musical reality that may or may not have existed in a certain place at one time or another.
Unlike other compilations which privilege authenticity over quality and cachet over musical honesty, Panama! grasps at evident truth: Popular music is more enjoyable than so-called 'exemplary' recordings of the same genre. Where the latter is often poorly recorded and untouched by production technology of any sort, the former is purposefully designed for enjoyment. It is authentic like Jimi Hendrix is authentic.
This is not to say that Panama! is absent any didactic value. Calypso, Funk, Mariachi, Island, Rock, and Jazz are all represented equally and mixed indiscriminately.
The first track of the compilation is a vocal recording. "El se llama, panama. Panama esta Bueno y...Ma. No no no, esta mas sin esse. Ma."
From the sumptuous Maltrato by Freddy y sus Afro Latinos, dragging up island and cubanismo music from the isles across the way, to Descarga Superior on the next cd, throwing armfulls of funk and rock music into the listeners' ear. Santana, Hendrix, the Beatles, Parliament are all present.
Panama is a mixing pot home to dictators and international power-plays. FBI Chicanery, island vibes and everything in between. Panama! is in this way a pastiche of compilations past: it understands the true genius of a compilation to be its curatorial influence, not its fealty to any kind of musical reality that may or may not have existed in a certain place at one time or another.
chiptunes
Delete The Elite, a CD with a paper cover sold by the Norwegian chiptune artist Covox, is roughly 40 minutes of what can best be called nintendo fugues. I discovered Covox in late October 2007 at the Blip Festival in Manhattan. Not to be confused with an actual "Music Festival", Blip is best understood to be a kind of illegal gathering of nerds and socially dysfunctional ne'er-do-wells under the shaky auspices of music made entirely by or with the aid of logic chips from video game console systems.
Covox's setup consisted of four Nintendo Gameboys plugged into a standard Korg-style mixer. As with concept art, much of the work had been done before the show. Covox put four gameboy cassettes of his own design (and presumably, programming) into the Gameboys and simply began to play by pressing buttons on the Gameboys.
What is chiptune music, and what is its legacy? It is easy to gloss over music generated by video game chips as appeasement of our thinly-veiled nostalgia: after all, music on video games has only gotten better over time: as video game scores approach their film counterparts in quality and duration, the interest exhibited in them by DJ's and other aspiring chiptune artists diminishes correspondingly.
This view of the music, however, pays cheap service to what will ultimately prove to be a lasting and expansive footprint. The idea of manipulating (with modern technology, let us not forget) old sounds to create new music is nothing new: this is a paradigm invented by Hip-Hop music and earlier still in Jamaican Dubstep and dancehall.
To those who look back on the 80's with a pallid nostalgia which only comes from not actually experiencing the decade in question, chiptune music is a titillating foray into prelapsarian musical modes: "Look how silly we were, playing Mario, eating pizza bagels."
Discount this explanation, however, and things grow rather uncertain. Crystal Castles is unarguably the most famous example of "chiptune" music, and they don't even use video games to make their music: they simply sample it over and over again. To purists this is enough to disqualify the group, but purity was never the mission of the chiptune movement: endless derivation was its founding principle.
Listen to Air War on Crystal Castle's eponymous debut.
Behind distorted and chopped-up recitations of Allen Ginsburg's Howl, a deceptively simple chord progression made of sounds from (to my best estimate) a cheap handheld video game device such as a Gigapet or a Tomagachi. Repetition in poetry and music are pause for meditation, and as angering as Crystal Castles can become, it is a poignant reminder that crap culture is not there because we are stupid but because it is our best synthesis of the art, music, and film that provide a kind of heuristic backdrop to our own cultural-creative impulses. The Gameboy lives.
Covox's setup consisted of four Nintendo Gameboys plugged into a standard Korg-style mixer. As with concept art, much of the work had been done before the show. Covox put four gameboy cassettes of his own design (and presumably, programming) into the Gameboys and simply began to play by pressing buttons on the Gameboys.
What is chiptune music, and what is its legacy? It is easy to gloss over music generated by video game chips as appeasement of our thinly-veiled nostalgia: after all, music on video games has only gotten better over time: as video game scores approach their film counterparts in quality and duration, the interest exhibited in them by DJ's and other aspiring chiptune artists diminishes correspondingly.
This view of the music, however, pays cheap service to what will ultimately prove to be a lasting and expansive footprint. The idea of manipulating (with modern technology, let us not forget) old sounds to create new music is nothing new: this is a paradigm invented by Hip-Hop music and earlier still in Jamaican Dubstep and dancehall.
To those who look back on the 80's with a pallid nostalgia which only comes from not actually experiencing the decade in question, chiptune music is a titillating foray into prelapsarian musical modes: "Look how silly we were, playing Mario, eating pizza bagels."
Discount this explanation, however, and things grow rather uncertain. Crystal Castles is unarguably the most famous example of "chiptune" music, and they don't even use video games to make their music: they simply sample it over and over again. To purists this is enough to disqualify the group, but purity was never the mission of the chiptune movement: endless derivation was its founding principle.
Listen to Air War on Crystal Castle's eponymous debut.
Behind distorted and chopped-up recitations of Allen Ginsburg's Howl, a deceptively simple chord progression made of sounds from (to my best estimate) a cheap handheld video game device such as a Gigapet or a Tomagachi. Repetition in poetry and music are pause for meditation, and as angering as Crystal Castles can become, it is a poignant reminder that crap culture is not there because we are stupid but because it is our best synthesis of the art, music, and film that provide a kind of heuristic backdrop to our own cultural-creative impulses. The Gameboy lives.
Bamboo Art
Wallpaper Magazine has this to say about Naoki Honjo:
And what do the container ships, public squares, tourist industries and other various assemblages of our modern technocratic society actually mean? Nothing much, actually. The narrow band of focus created by Honji's tilt-shift lens gives us ample reminders as well that we'll never truly contemplate the life we lead until it's too late.
The still tasteful childhood icon that is Thomas the Tank Engine is gradually filtering back into our consciousness all over again (thanks to the onslaught of children) and what strikes us this time round is the artful and painstakingly crafted model scenery. And it’s for much the same reasons that we’ve fallen in love with Paul Smith's latest discovery, Naoki Honjo.We at Public Organ could not disagree more. Honjo's work is still better compared to the Japanese Godzilla series. Just like the film, Honji's photographs reverse the visual tendency of the late 20th century to zoom in and magnify. Honji's photographs give the viewer a rare opportunity to see his own life, as it were, sub specie aeternitatis. New Mexicans have a great chance to check it out at Tai Gallery, near SITE Santa Fe.
And what do the container ships, public squares, tourist industries and other various assemblages of our modern technocratic society actually mean? Nothing much, actually. The narrow band of focus created by Honji's tilt-shift lens gives us ample reminders as well that we'll never truly contemplate the life we lead until it's too late.
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