Grab bag reviews: Fairweather Currents

So I'm going to try something new: record reviews!  Starting with something I'm going to call grab bag reviews.  Once a week or so, I'm going to go look at the new records from Boston in Bandcamp, find one or more thing that I like, and do some kind of review.  I'm going to write out my ground rules here, since this is the internet and that seems to be the kind of thing people do:

• Positive reviews (why write about things that aren't good?)
• Focus on genres I care most about: home recording, singer-songwriter, hip hop, maybe some experimental or electronic stuff if I'm in the mood
• Local!  Extra points if there are songs are about Boston, because that will make me like them.
• Obscurity.  If it feels like no one else will review the record, that is a good reason to review it.

And so: Grab bag #1: Urban Forestry by Fairweather Currents

Five wordy, hushed, self-conscious, charming, home recorded songs.  The narrative that emerges is of one more college student new to Boston, trying to make sense of a new environment,  The cover is the Huntington Avenue Y.

Dylan Citron sings in a voice so gentle it can seem androgynous and strums on a dry, thin, acoustic guitar.  Crowd noise from parties, distorted drum machines, vocal samples, and slow, melodic piano lines all take their place in arrangements that are familiar but not stale or derivative.

The last song, "The Times Are Never-A-Changin'" drifts slowly over a piano arpeggio, punctuated by the crunching up and down of the piano's sustain pedal.  The lyrics suggest a young narrator grappling for his own relationship with the violence in the world around him, and the song ends with a brief sample of a gospel recording.  As the title suggests, it's a protest song that doesn't know quite what to say, and it's one of the highlights of a really nice EP.

radio radio

A song from how it left me blind may be playing this afternoon on the amazing Outlaw Roadshow radio show on WEMF!  You can hear it live from 4-6 PM today.

new record is new, sad record is sad

Hey!  The new record is here.  I wrote a long, self-indulgent post about it below, so now I will just announce it.  Go to the bandcamp page to stream, download for free, or even download for money.  Leave a comment (ok, that is a pain to do unless you have a bandcamp account).  Rock out to it or let it make you cry - it is entirely up to you.

Also, there is a new version of hoteluniverse.org, which you can check out.  It is like this blog, but prettier.  I hope.  Not sure what else to do with that page - maybe more experiments in the future.

New record! Coming soon!

I'm almost done with a new record.  The new record is called “How it left me blind”.  It is distinctly a break up record, which won’t be surprising to people who know me.  People love break up records, so I’m hoping it will be hugely popular.  That’s a joke.

The record is more folky than the last few things I have done.  It was recorded thusly: the acoustic guitar and vocal are all live takes, with no drum machine or click track to guide them, and then the rest of the stuff was overdubbed over those takes.  More than half of the songs have backwards guitar parts.  There is a lot of electric guitar, and a fair amount of synthesizer.  And harmony vocals.

One of the joys of recording like this is the inevitable imperfection.  Imperfection is probably the wrong word, since it implies something close to actual perfection.  The inevitable chaos.  The timing is perpetually off, especially compared to the perfect symmetry we now expect on recordings.  My timing on acoustic guitar is unsteady at best, and overdubbing on those tracks feels like throwing darts from a moving car while the driver pumps the gas.  Counter-melodies shift uncomfortably to find their place in the measure, like a rider taking the last seat on the subway.  The rhythms sound right to me, after living with them, but I worry that they will sound wrong to other people, at least at first.  The decisions are arbitrary, the arrangements almost taking shape by chance. 

The backwards guitar helps – it’s a little like drawing with your eyes closed, or writing in a mirror.  Like cutting your own hair.  It’s not chance, but it is a lack of control, a disconnect between action and results.

Maybe the record doesn't sound as chaotic as I think.  It is a folk record after all.  It's hard to say, from where I sit, which is so close that everything blurs together.

On Amiri Baraka: Change starts in the gut

Brief thoughts on the death of Amiri Baraka: 

I tend to see Amiri Baraka as, first and foremost, a poet. Like his verse, his prose carries a fire and intensity, a distinctive language. So, first a poet, then a writer, and only then a political figure.

This way of seeing Baraka is a personal preference, but it is in contrast, I think, to the obituaries I've read, which focus on his involvement in political controversy. This view – that he was a political person who chose to take action through writing – robs his work of its greatness and importance. He was a poet whose subject was often, maybe most often, righteous anger at political injustice. The depth and purity of that anger remains fresh in his writing. It is not the routine, professionalized complaining of activists (though that has its uses) but the burning fury of a soul that just missed being destroyed.

The cliché says that poets were once the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but that they no longer are; that poetry mattered once in a way it no longer does. But maybe what Shelley's quotation means now is that change starts in the gut, and that poetry, or something like it, is the way that a person comes to understand what another person feels at the most fundamental level. Baraka wrote from the gut, and he should live on as a poet, not die as a politician.

New video/song/name

I made this video for a new song called "alias" which I'm putting out under a new name ("pajams") I may or may not use for future instrumental electronic releases.

I made the video using Quartz Composer, which is really great and worth checking out if you have access to a Mac.