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.

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.

tron: legacy

Bamboo Art

Wallpaper Magazine has this to say about Naoki Honjo:

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.