Last Tuesday I played what is, I guess, the first Natural Light show. Or live action. It's the name I have been using for a whole bunch of stuff. Mainly this blog, art stuff, and some music I've made / played during the last 9 month or so. After last Tuesday, I have derived the following statistic:
Number of good first shows: zero.
I played two cover songs. The first was WHY?'s "The Fall of Mr. Fifths" done as a capella rap sort of thing. Second was a cover of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's "Killers".
Mr. Fifths went fine. Killers did not.
The biggest difference is probably my own outlook on what I wanted to achieve vs. what I did. Both songs were things I wanted to do, and with the first I did what I wanted to do. I don't really care whether or not anyone watching/listening liked what they were hearing. It's not about that. It is about feeling like I was accomplishing what I set out to do: performing my arrangements of music that means a tremendous amount to me.
I really do get that there might be a disconnect playing such a heavy song when the show started with a Rebecca Black parody. But it's what I wanted to do. Whoever laughed, as if "I know your mom was your age when she had your brother" was a punchline, you are not my intended audience. For this performance, or for anything I will ever create or do in my life. You are not what bothers me. That I played so poorly does.
A lot of it comes down to rehearsing in conditions that were a lot different from the performance itself. Not even now being in front of lights and crowd that probably doesn't care about your music specifically. Things like standing at a keyboard instead of sitting at a piano, basically turning into a totally different instrument under my fingers. Having a drum machine on my right instead of on the left. Things I should have foreseen, thought about, and planned for and didn't.
There were problems with my ability to play a keyboard, sequence, and sing at the same time. And there were technical problems, like something with the drums sounding pretty shitty running through the amp I had to use last minute. And problems with the event itself, where coordinator was insanely rude and asked me, act 18 of 21, to only play one song for the sake of time roughly 50 seconds before I went on.
I was kind of mortified and devastated immediately after, and thanks extensively to my girlfriend, and thanks a small, surprising bit to some guy who came up to me in the parking lot afterward, felt a little better the next day.
Still, I think the experience is something important to come to terms with and talk about while it's still vaguely permeating my thoughts. I won't really get a chance to talk about a first show ever again, anyway.
I don't know when I'll ever do this again (or have the chance to), but I'm not writing it off as completely as I was when I walked off the stage. I have been writing a lot of new stuff (terribly, terribly fragmented new stuff). A semi relevant one:
to never fall into that trap
of a disappointing live act
songs becoming old and played lived less
wearing out not unlike i did sometime after the 12th grade
the run-on of ritualistic mass transit
the reason for this, the reason to consider language in...finite
and it felt infinite
as for what i did to deserve this
went to college, got nervous
I still think about this all a lot.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Everything I am Listening To 4
Felt Drawings - Body
(stream/free download)
It's best to get this out of the way first: Body is an incredibly good album. Body is also an unrelentingly sad album. It details a great loss without hope anywhere on the horizon. Without a laptop in sight, sole-Felt Drawings member Dom Tiberio creates dark, industrial drones highlighted, but never brightened, with dancible synth-pop melodies. Instrumentally, the album is stuff you could dance to but never would. Over which Tiberio's frank lyricism informs the music, answering the question of why this music sounds this way. And why it has to.
It's not an unfamiliar dichotomy (see: the Smiths, the Cure, etc.), but is here taken further and is all the more intriguing for it. Body is pop music daring not to be, and uncaring where it lands. Music that is not literally hard to listen to, but music that can sober any mood. The refrain of "How is it Supposed to Be?" desperately demands "just tell me how to love / show me how it's done", before qualifying the question with the only two options left: "is it kiss and hug or is it punch and blood?" Felt Drawings is high stakes music. Everything or nothing.
There is a lot to love here on Body, but it is going to hurt. And if you are going in, understand you will have to play by some uncomfortable rules. If you put nothing in, nothing is going to come out.
As with life, as with love.
Yuck - s/t
Yuck's self-titled debut is the answer to the question of what it would have sounded like if the band that practiced twice a week in your neighbor's garage back in 1995 had been any good. It's pretty cleat these sounds of the 1990s are something artists find themselves longing for. A decade with tastes and innovations more scattered than united in any one way.
In 2009 Japandroids' Post-Nothing delightfully helped to fill a void that had existed since Pavement disbanded. Last year, Surfer Blood's outstanding debut Astrocoast captured a lot of the things Weezer did on the Blue Album. But it's this Yuck album, in 2011, that manages to decode whatever it was that made rock music in the 90s so loved. It's music that isn't only informed by, but speaks to a period of time ten years passed. This time, the music is not as a reaction to whatever it was happening in the late 1980s, but whatever is happening in the late 2000s (and what that is, I'm not sure anyone knows yet).
Beyond all that, Yuck has made an album of good songs. The album opens with back to back hard rockers and from there covers just about all the ground you'd expect. Things slow down on ""Shook Down", become beautiful on "Suicide Policeman", and eventually distort beyond recognition on Rubber, the album's slowburning conclusion.
Dirty Beaches - Badlands
As Dirty Beaches, sole member Alex Zhang Hungtai, channels the spirit of the 1950s pop utterly. He works inside the ghostly, vague memory of a decade that has gone more or less unacknowledged in the current collective pop music conscious. We nod to Elvis, sure, but contemporary pop music history starts with the Beatles. Many of these sounds are taken directly as Hungtai borrows from a variety of samples and standard melodies. The whole thing sounds like it was bootlegged onto tape by a motorcycle passenger, tuning their radio into some nonexistent copy album. And going seventy miles per hour.
Badlands is frustrating and difficult to understand contextually, but not particularly difficult to listen to and to like. It sounds nothing like anything else happening in music today, but borrows so heavily from its inspirations it creates a bit of a conundrum. Is listening to Hungtai lay down ghostly vocals over a 2 bar sample of Françoise Hardy's "Voilá" worth listening to? And if it is, is it worth attention, praise?
Probably. Because what sounds unimpressive on paper ultimately kind of works. Badlands sounds unlike anything else happening in music today, a phenomenon given weight by the fact that the 1950s have been so widely passed over for so long. With a carefully managed, but effortless—and when you play these songs side by side with the source material, the sensation of low effort is uncomfortably apparent—aesthetic, Badlands is an album worth of attention. If only to have an opinion on it, which is to have an opinion on what music created like this means.
As for praise, lack thereof, or condemnation, you'll have to call this one for yourself.
(stream/free download)
It's best to get this out of the way first: Body is an incredibly good album. Body is also an unrelentingly sad album. It details a great loss without hope anywhere on the horizon. Without a laptop in sight, sole-Felt Drawings member Dom Tiberio creates dark, industrial drones highlighted, but never brightened, with dancible synth-pop melodies. Instrumentally, the album is stuff you could dance to but never would. Over which Tiberio's frank lyricism informs the music, answering the question of why this music sounds this way. And why it has to.
It's not an unfamiliar dichotomy (see: the Smiths, the Cure, etc.), but is here taken further and is all the more intriguing for it. Body is pop music daring not to be, and uncaring where it lands. Music that is not literally hard to listen to, but music that can sober any mood. The refrain of "How is it Supposed to Be?" desperately demands "just tell me how to love / show me how it's done", before qualifying the question with the only two options left: "is it kiss and hug or is it punch and blood?" Felt Drawings is high stakes music. Everything or nothing.
There is a lot to love here on Body, but it is going to hurt. And if you are going in, understand you will have to play by some uncomfortable rules. If you put nothing in, nothing is going to come out.
As with life, as with love.
Yuck - s/t
Yuck's self-titled debut is the answer to the question of what it would have sounded like if the band that practiced twice a week in your neighbor's garage back in 1995 had been any good. It's pretty cleat these sounds of the 1990s are something artists find themselves longing for. A decade with tastes and innovations more scattered than united in any one way.
In 2009 Japandroids' Post-Nothing delightfully helped to fill a void that had existed since Pavement disbanded. Last year, Surfer Blood's outstanding debut Astrocoast captured a lot of the things Weezer did on the Blue Album. But it's this Yuck album, in 2011, that manages to decode whatever it was that made rock music in the 90s so loved. It's music that isn't only informed by, but speaks to a period of time ten years passed. This time, the music is not as a reaction to whatever it was happening in the late 1980s, but whatever is happening in the late 2000s (and what that is, I'm not sure anyone knows yet).
Beyond all that, Yuck has made an album of good songs. The album opens with back to back hard rockers and from there covers just about all the ground you'd expect. Things slow down on ""Shook Down", become beautiful on "Suicide Policeman", and eventually distort beyond recognition on Rubber, the album's slowburning conclusion.
Dirty Beaches - Badlands
As Dirty Beaches, sole member Alex Zhang Hungtai, channels the spirit of the 1950s pop utterly. He works inside the ghostly, vague memory of a decade that has gone more or less unacknowledged in the current collective pop music conscious. We nod to Elvis, sure, but contemporary pop music history starts with the Beatles. Many of these sounds are taken directly as Hungtai borrows from a variety of samples and standard melodies. The whole thing sounds like it was bootlegged onto tape by a motorcycle passenger, tuning their radio into some nonexistent copy album. And going seventy miles per hour.
Badlands is frustrating and difficult to understand contextually, but not particularly difficult to listen to and to like. It sounds nothing like anything else happening in music today, but borrows so heavily from its inspirations it creates a bit of a conundrum. Is listening to Hungtai lay down ghostly vocals over a 2 bar sample of Françoise Hardy's "Voilá" worth listening to? And if it is, is it worth attention, praise?
Probably. Because what sounds unimpressive on paper ultimately kind of works. Badlands sounds unlike anything else happening in music today, a phenomenon given weight by the fact that the 1950s have been so widely passed over for so long. With a carefully managed, but effortless—and when you play these songs side by side with the source material, the sensation of low effort is uncomfortably apparent—aesthetic, Badlands is an album worth of attention. If only to have an opinion on it, which is to have an opinion on what music created like this means.
As for praise, lack thereof, or condemnation, you'll have to call this one for yourself.
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