Monday, February 21st, 2011 // Paperhouse
On a fateful day in 2002, you played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. From that day on, Motörhead drilled its beer-spitting, sweaty motorcycle romps into your brain.
Motörhead is pure. Motörhead is consistent. Motörhead is the anthem of every ballistic missile that’s waiting to rip across the stratosphere and ravage cities whole.
Motörhead is the distillation of a sound unbounded. Unlike most bands that haven’t changed their sound in over 30 years, Motörhead’s sound still rings true. Fans flock day in and day out to go see the loud black-clad ensemble. In short, if you like Motörhead, you like everything that the group has recorded in its 35-year existence as a band. The over-the-top umlaut in its name would spell disaster for any other band, but Motörhead pulls it off and makes you think it invented the symbol. When these musicians play their straight-ahead, black leather-clad romps into your brain, the audience knows they’re preaching the faith of rock ’n’ roll.
When on the microphone, Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister squints at every word he squeezes out of his smoke-clawed vocal chords. I seriously wonder how Lemmy’s vocal chords, like Tom Waits’, have made it through the guttural mayhem that Lemmy has put them through.
Interestingly, he’s been the only constant member of Motörhead through the past 35 years. It is this rotating cast of members that has allowed Motörhead to inculcate its bona-fide grit-rock into the skulls of millions worldwide. Motörhead has become an ethos, and any performance by Motörhead is a channeling of that undefinable hell-raising ethos. Young or old, once you get Motörhead in your veins, it’s there to stay.
So, If you’re ready to listen to that mean, chain-smoking, Yuengling-guzzling, toe-tapping, fist-clenching sound once more, some songs I recommend would include “Mean Machine,” off Orgasmatron; “Blackheart,” off Rock ’N’ Roll; and “Whorehouse Blues,” off Inferno.
-Juan Fernandez
Monday, February 14th, 2011 // Paperhouse
You’re back at your cramped flat in New York City, bone-tired, a deadline looming heavy over your shoulders.
You swallow hard and pull back from your desk. Your FM radio pulls at your fingertips and has you turning the knob. Static. Tchaikovsky. Static. Right-wing banter. Hissing. Warm static. Then you hear it.
“Come on man, don’t just stand there….” A police radio flickers and a bass glides through and a beat begins to form. A police squadron patrols the airwaves and on comes the wave of keys. A chorus of stuttered vocals pulses alongside an uptempo rhythm. A guitar chokes on its own feedback and then a high end filter squelches all but the low end. You look out again and it’s there, the chase, the delivery, the redemption. Your city captured in sound: “1987” by Poka.
Artists like Poka and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros strike a chord in the hearts of many because they induce a nostalgia for imagined pasts. This nostalgia kickstarts an odd process of historical revision. We imagine the ’80s being far more neon and full of oversized sweaters than they were. With the Cold War in full swing, things were real, unpredictable, and dark, And yet, we think of neon oversize sweaters.
The fact that we often search for fictitious pasts and try to revise the emotional tenor of particular eras reveals that there’s a lot going on for us as observers and creators of culture. How do we reconcile the creation of collective imagined pasts and a desire for objective historicity? I’m not sure, but I think it’s because we want exciting stories, and the past doesn’t give them to us. The result? We make fiction into fact with our music.
If you want to delve into a sound that openly claims to replicate a feeling that may or may not have ever existed, visit Poka at http://www.myspace.com/pokaremixprojects.
-Juan Fernandez
Monday, February 7th, 2011 // Paperhouse
To explain minimal music to a public that cannot distinguish between techno and house is a bit like trying to force-feed chili peppers to a two-year-old. To be fair, the advent of contemporary hipsters and their slightly more refined taste in media has advanced the public’s understanding of electronic music to a point where anyone with an ugly Christmas sweater and big glasses could probably give you a crude, working definition of house music. Yet to our surprise, their hipster radars have stopped short of what we might call the richest, most compelling form of music.
We are surprised, because hipsters are very visual people, and understanding minimal is akin to understanding the principles of good visual communication: It requires a basic understanding of Gestalt psychology. And like the designers of the Modernist era, minimal does away with all but the most basic elements of a given piece of music to achieve its purpose with the utmost efficiency and restraint. Minimal is to music as Swiss typography is to design: clean and succinct, yet rich and humanistic. In minimal, nothing is accidental, and the best artists meticulously craft the most tedious intricacies in their soundscape, teasing out of a computer what seems possible only through a real instrument.
If you don’t believe us, listen to “Miss You” by Anders Trentemøller, a Danish producer whose 2006 album The Last Resort still dominates our top plays on iTunes. http://ResidentAdvisor.net, our version of Pitchfork, describes the album as “electronic Romanticism.” If you haven’t heard Trentemøller yet, tune into WRCT on 88.3 FM at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday during WRCT’s Massive Music Weekend to listen to a full half hour of nothing but Trentemøller.
“But what about Gold Panda?” you might ask. “Aren’t they clean and succinct and meticulously crafted?”
No. Go outside, smoke your cigarette, and think about what you just said.
-Alex Price and Mirko Azis
