Bizarrely, both me and my son had pieces pending when the news came - and they've both just run.
One of the great things about Pitchfork is the space they've given to young writers to go wide and deep (old writers too!). Here's Kieran Press-Reynolds with a thinkpiece on shitpost-modernism: "the flood of 2020s music that straddles the line between serious and silly, shattering conventions and exploding taste boundaries".
One of my favorite things - as a reader and a contributor - Pitchfork does is the Sunday Review: writers going long and deep on records the magazine never covered before, usually because they came out long before the website existed. After a tough week, it feels bittersweet to be this Sunday’s Reviewer, with a paean to Cocteau Twins and Head Over Heels, one of my favorite albums of all time.
In the piece, I reference a rave review in NME that turned my head around after initially finding the album off-putting. By Barney Hoskyns, that review can be read here at Pantheon. And here (also here as scans) is a much later piece where Barney interviews Cocteau Twins about the length and breadth of their career.
On the subject of music journalists and music journalism, there's been a lot of interesting, if necessarilyanguished commentary about what happened at Pitchfork and the future for criticism. I particularly like these thoughts for NPR music from Ann Powers, especially the last of her three points:
"To me, the best thing about music writing is that compared to other elements of the culture economy, it’s relatively useless. Some forms of entertainment journalism feed the star-maker machinery more than others: celebrity profiles, for example, flesh out the personae that turn artists into fetish objects....What I love about music writing , though, is that it can sidestep that productive, competitive side of culture, the market-driven need to sell more tickets, more records, more streams. Instead, great music writing messes with productivity by creating a space to slow down and really immerse in someone else’s creative work. To really listen..... I feel nourished by the daring of my fellow scribes, by the way their words are indeed extraneous to the churn of art and emotion as product, carving out a zone where the pause matters, time spent thinking, laughing at a good line, feeling my brain crackle as it absorbs an insight.... In the end, what matters about music writing is exactly the same as what matters about music: It isn’t leading anywhere productive. Instead, it’s offering a break from the grind, a free zone for thought and a few glorious, rejuvenating moments of fun.... Music writing says: Slow down. Pay attention. It witnesses the unfolding of meaning within measured time, and calls back to it"
Absolutely - music and music writing are alike in being one of life's essential inessentials. You can get by without either of them - but why would you want to?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
postscript: former Pitchfork editor in chief Mark Richardson with some fond reminiscences about colleagues who abruptly no longer work there either anymore.
Here's my NPRtribute to the wondrous and wise music of Harold Budd.
Who lived in South Pasadena and who I ran into on the street briefly a few years ago when I was out walking with Geeta Dayal (who knows everybody). By all accounts, he was as lovely a person as his music.
(See bottom of post for choice quotes by Budd and about Budd)
I reviewed the Cocteaus collab The Moon and the Melodies in '86 - I'm not sure I had a very clear idea who Harold Budd was then. The LP was the spur for some very flowery imagery. Maybe I'll dig it out later if it's not too embarrassing....
Cheeky Harold put out the same piece twice under different names, in the same year. You can see why though, what a beauty.
Another Moon + Melodies lovely.
Cocteau Twins "Eyes Are Mosaic ft. Harold Budd", as if this was a modern rap'n'B record! YouTube is pretty darn lax as an archive - of course it should be credited to Harold Budd. Elizabeth Fraser. Robin Guthrie. Simon Raymonde.
Eternity...
His music lends itself to the infinitely extended remix
Facts I wish I had known so that I could have included in the piece
That he taught himself to play the piano in his late thirties, in order to be able the music he wished to compose.
Things Harold said
"Being immediately pretty is the most important component."
"I really like to find as much life as possible in the smallest amount of material. A very simple scale, a relationship of note against note, especially a sustained note; I milk everything for all it's worth."
"One of the things was I got profoundly upset and bored to death with the avant-garde music that was being practiced around the world—the Western world—at that time. It seemed self-congratulatory, and for a small cadre of snobs, and I refused to go on with it."
"I really minimalised myself out of a career"
I cannot play the piano. I can play what I play, I can play me, but I have a dyslexia when reading music. I’m not a professional musician. I hack away at it and the piano is convenient. By no means would a proper pianist consider me one.”
"I slipped back into discovering something that no-one else was doing, or was likely to do in the very near future. I divorced myself from modern music in a sense, and began to develop a language which I thought was honest to God me, and totally outside of competition with my fellow composers.”
"I admire painters very much and I secretly wish that I were doing that"
"“Brilliant blasts of colour that simply engulfed you” - on Mark Rothko, Ellesworth Kelly, and other painters he admired.
"It's curious about The Plateaux of Mirror. It came so quickly and so easily that it was kind of a phantom"
"This whole 'new age' business is very distasteful to me. I don't like being even considered in that “category and I have almost no respect for it at all... It's very lightweight and very bothersome to me. .. I don't think it has anything to do with the actual truth about the meaning of the music”
"That one frosted my balls so much. I was just enraged every time I’d walk into a Tower Records or Virgin Megastore or something like that. There I was in the new age category and I just thought ‘Jesus Christ, how can I escape from these mindless bastards?"
"When I did the White Arcades album, I went to the studio with a list of titles and that's all."
"I've never worked with musicians who know how to read music. So that's always swell for me,
"A mature artist ought to be able to make a good record from the contents of a cutlery drawer."
"The one collaboration that never occurred and never would occur would be David Sylvian, whose work I admire above all others. I just love everything he does. There is a really good reason, it’s because although one thing is good and another thing is good, putting them together doesn’t make it twice as good. In fact it could be a disaster, and I’ve never wanted that to happen."
Things people said about Harold
"A great abstract painter trapped in the body of a musician" - Brian Eno.
"I would set up a sound, he would improvise to it, and occasionally I would add something: but it was mainly him performing in a sound-world I had created” - Eno, on The Plateaux of Mirror.
“Harold Budd's intention was to make what he called "eternally pretty music", and his way of composing was to write a piece of music, then take out all the notes you didn't like! - Eno
"He was really down to earth, a ham 'n' eggs kind of guy" - Cocteau Twins, via David Toop.
Typical really - you declare your intention to revive the long-lapsed custom of inter-blog conviviality. Only to (almost) immediately lapse back again into unlinking entropy.
Here goes with another effort. Starting with an interesting piece on the pop hologram phenom by Owen Myers at The Guardian. Featuring a few quotes from me about the exploitation of dead stars. Here also is the full batch of thoughts I sent Owen a week or two ago.
Also quoted in the pop hologram piece is Professor Robin James, who's been on a little tear of posts recently at It's Her Factory. Here's an analysis of Panic! At The Disco's "High Hopes" (oh how I loathe that song) in terms of the financial logic of the derivative, and a related post about Panic! singer Brendon Urine's team-up with Taylor Swift for the even more putridly self-empowered "ME!" and its promo atrocity. (And to think I once hailed "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" as the "Party Fears Two" of emo). Robin also identifies a mini-trend for "Brexit Techno."
Carl the Impostume with a short sweet paean to the Cocteaus and Felt's Liz-powered "Primitive Painters". I never got on with Treasure myself - too frou frou and frilly -but loved the Cocteaus on either side of that. Like Carl, I feel that, with Felt, "Primitive Painters" is the One - a pearly peal of heroic inadequacy from the howling heart of those Years of Exile - although there are a few other high moments in the discography, amid much over-exquisite filigree. (How right somehow that the primary instrumentalist in the group should be called Maurice - not your run-of-the-mill British rock name). Seems to be something Lawrentian in the air, what with this appreciation (Quinn Moreland on Forever Breathes the Lonely Word) that appeared only days ago in Pitchfork....
"and in the Eighties, there were wide-brim hats, there were... lots of wide-brim hats, there were.... lots of large wide-brim hats - indie-wear, indie-wear - everywhere"
"When the Owls Cry in the Night" is the peculiar Belbury Poly-ish title - never actually unpacked or even referenced during the piece itself, as I recall - of an interesting column by Rob Horning that recounts listening strategies he's developed in order to make music compelling in the face of the curiosity-killing overload. Tasks he sets himself to reenchant, or renarrativize, the vast accumulated past (a past that nonetheless seems way more alluring than the vast sprawling present). Always enjoyed Horning's meditations at The New Inquiry on the effects of social media, the internet, smartphones, etc etc on life, culture, mentality, mood, etc etc. Now he and some of the same Inquiring minds seem to be doing similar sort of now-analysis at a new-ish location: Real Life.
The idea of rationing one's exposure to music, keeping a distance from it, as a passion-protection strategy actually comes up over 35 years ago in this ancient radio interview with Sounds's Dave McCullough - a lost legend of the punk / postpunk / postpostpunk music press. He appears to have disappeared - nobody from that era seems to know for sure where he went after London or what he went on to do after quitting the rock press, most likely in a state of savage disillusion. I have written on one of my less-frequented blogs about how beguiling I find this unexpected discovery, this seemingly sole document of McCullough in the audio flesh.
McCullough in the photo flesh, strolling through Leicester Sq with the Clash
Must have listened to the show about four times now, entranced by his spiky yet silver-tongued patter, by the brittle and impetuous movements of his mind, by the texture of a different age - 1983. Even grown fond of McCullough's odd and motley selection of favorite records from his collection, which include Hall & Oates, Dory Previn, and contemporaneous releases by the Pastels, Microdisney, Hurrah, Peter Hammill.
One thing McCullough said that struck me as true is that reviewers - at least those with keen instincts and sharp sensibility - can tell by the first playing of the first track whether an album is any good or not. Which reminds me that I still haven't listened to Vampire Weekend's Father of the Bride all the way through - and that's because the memory of the first few tracks as heard several weeks back left an indelibly unappetizing after-aroma. This review by Lucas Fagen at Hyperallergic has the ring of truth: earnest maturity and emotional "depth" has turned to stodge all that was spring-heeled sprightly sparkly in Vampire's blithe and ravishingly superficial soundspirit. But it could be that I "agree" in large part because that gives me permission to shirk the chore of listening to all four sides of it.
Talking of the postpunk era, here's an interview with David Wilkinson, the author of Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain. Which I confess - scared off by the academic publisher price - I have not actually read, but I've seen Wilkinson give a conference talk and he has a lot of interesting stuff to say about the era.
Another book of note published relatively recently is Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience by Paul C. Jasen, who some in this parish will remember as the man behind this . With subsections bearing titles like "Spectral Catalysis", "Numinous Strategies", "Baroque Affect Engineering" and "Three Physio-Logics", it's some heady stuff ranging far beyond obvious compatibles like roots reggae and jungle and dubstep. More information and favorable appraisals can be checked out here.
Oh yes and I'm looking forward to reading the new book by Richard King, The Lark Ascending: The Music of the British Landscape - which looks to be the holloway connecting the two Robs (Young's Electric Eden, Macfarlane's Landmarks).
