Less Than Zero

I exaggerate, but it was pretty damned cold. What to do (music-wise) about it?

Embrace it, I say. It may seem like the cold embrace of death, but that's the chance you take.

Eno: On Land (1982)

Every time I say something about a Brian Eno album, I fear I'm not adequately conveying how alien his work can be. And as that goes, this album is a pretty good example. No pretty piano or voices like Music for Airports. No specially-treated piano sounds like The Pearl. No concessions to pop music (guitars, drums, melodies, etc.) like Another Green World. In short, no obvious heart. It's here. He just doesn't flaunt it. It is, as we say, what it is.

And what it is works perfectly for me at the moment. A recent medical setback has me yearning for the minimal input I can still handle, and this does the trick.

Slightly out of reach, but when I check, it's still there, asking nothing of me. It's a deal.

A-

"Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960"

One Is Not Enough:

But I can't play it all day. I need some other records that hit the mark as well. So I tried to find something new to match the mood: cool, almost sterile, coming from the vast surrounding darkness: 

• Dove Ellis: Blizzard (2025): I was hoping for something more stark. But this Irishman is one of those expressive ones. Weird. A bit like John Martyn but less bluesy. And having had two blizzards in the past two weeks, I thought it might be apt. But the title could refer to the repose you may experience if you're stuck inside your house for days at a time. Or more obviously, the storm itself. I assumed the former and was mistaken. So I'm in no real position to judge it at this time. All I know is that I can't listen to it right now.
• Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago (2008): Based on its reputation, I thought it would be cold and barren. Not so. Annoyingly, not so. Given its reputation, I had much higher hopes for it. But I just may not be in a position to judge. So I put it aside.

So rather than another swing and miss, I decided to check what I already have:

• Joanna Newsom?: Practically no "production" at all would seem perfect. Alas, she's a bit...wacky.
• Tallest Man on Earth?: Spare, but a bit too much enthusiasm. 
• Iron and Wine?: Too folky. Too slow.
• Aphex Twin?: Too Suicidal. 

I did eventually find a couple of suitable records:

Low: I Could Live In Hope: Glacial pace, minimal harmonies. Anything more would be too much.

Cindy Lee: Diamond Jubilee: I thought it might be too recent, but it did get me through the earlier phase of this medical issue, so why not now? And it works.

A Break?:

My health being what it is, in the event that I'm not up to all this I may take a little break. 

I'll keep you posted.

Music for the War on Christmas

It's been a less than merry time in the Jaybee household. We've received a few blows recently, including the death of our dog, the one-year anniversary of my mother-in-law's death, and the news of the death within our circle of friends/family.

And whatever anyone tells you, not everybody's ability to cope has been, shall we say, "heroic". That whole notion is bullshit anyway. You're lucky if the grief doesn't take you all down with it.

What to do when the mood of the season is laughably out of sync with your own? With cheerfulness being thrust upon you, you fight back, of course, defending your negativity from any encroachments of goodwill toward men.

And what better to arm yourself with than the most utterly depressing music I can think of? "River" by Joni Mitchell, you say? Please. Joni got over that pretty quickly. Ian Curtis didn't.

Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures (1979)

Joy Division's second - and last - album, Closer, was one of my first ever CDs. Lucky for me I got it with about a dozen other CDs, which gave me time to dip my toe into that black hole of sound.

This record - their first - is not quite that far gone but it's pretty grim, and its grimness is baked into the overall sound itself. 

Ian Curtis and Co. are an acquired taste unless you're a 1970s/post-punk depressive. I was tempted to say you had to be feeling pretty strong to listen to this without wanting to off yourself. But that's not true. If you were feeling strong you wouldn't listen to this at all. This is for wallowing in the depths.

As I get ever older I should be less patient with that approach. After all, here it's coming from a bunch of twenty-year-olds. I mean, what do they know? But lead singer Ian Curtis meant it, man, and proved it by committing suicide not long after their second record. 

The music itself is as intense but slower than your typical punk rock. It features more of the loud yet echoey guitar that would re-emerge when the Ian-less band morphed into New Order. It's the sound of someone on his way to rock bottom. Closer, with its more dirge-like songs, trading guitar for keyboards, is the sound of the bottom itself. 

Do you know how they say sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you change? What they don't mention is that there's no guarantee you will. 

I can't really say I enjoy this music, exactly, but it does move me. 

I guess Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works, Vol 2 is comparable, but since it's all instrumental its desolation is in what is absent and is thus less in your face.

But with its up-front vocals, JD counts as the most desolate music I've ever heard.

Merry Fucking Christmas

A-

A Matter of Life and Death

Given my hard-to-stay-dead crisis of not being able to love any new music, it seemed to make the most sense to stick with happy/poppy/fun records to snap me out of it. What I needed was a good time! It sure didn’t make any sense to get a record about death.

Plus I already had a few records by this artist and felt I may have maxed out on him anyway.

But then, my son Michael - an adult now, who makes his own choices - comes to the rescue and gets this record anyway. And although I tend to stick to those records I myself buy, in this case I’m happy to make an exception.




Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell

Sufjan sometimes does long, sprawling albums, filled with orchestrations, like Michigan and Illinois (one of my faves from the last decade), and experiments in electronica like The Age of Adz. He even wrote a symphony about the BQE. link

But occasionally he’ll just write a bunch of tunes, perform them in a simple setting, and end up with a simple, straightforward album. Before, it was the religiously themed Seven Swans. And now, it’s Carrie & Lowell, about the death of his mother.

Now before you get all weepy about it, or worse, feel like you’re being forced into having to like something because of the subject matter, Sufjan points out how their relationship was complicated by her substance abuse and mental health issues, necessitating her leaving him when he was three, to be brought up by others.

So it’s hardly a miss you so much ma weep-fest, There’s an admission of the pain and regret left in the wake of such a relationship and the death that ends it, preventing it from ever being fully repaired.

But he doesn't try to just get by on the gravity of the theme, slipping in some sub-par songs because we feel sorry for him. He puts together eleven excellent to brilliant songs. There’s no skimping here at all.


The first song - “Death With Dignity” - actually starts with an uplifting melody and guitar figure, and ends with some subtle pedal steel guitar and almost Beach Boy-like harmonies. It's a microcosm of the rest of the album - a deft mixture of pain and joy.

Next comes “I Should Have Known Better”, and again, the music is sweet and muted, while the lyrics probe how to better handle such a complicated relationship, and ending hopefully by looking to the future, embodied by his niece.

“All of Me Wants All of You”, about a less than equal relationship, opens up a bit more musically, which is nice, since it staves off the claustrophobia one might feel after a couple of very low key numbers.

“Eugene” is a sweet, short folk song - just guitar and vocal like you’d expect from Cat Stevens. And since Sufjan is a religious fellow, here’s where I note the swimming instructor, pouring water on his head and mispronouncing his name, like a very public and very imperfect baptism.  It’s just one of the many religious and mythical references here that will take me years to figure out.

“Fourth of July” may be the quietest song on the record, but it’s also the most intense. The lyrics are a dialog between him and his mother both before and after her death. It’s a quiet masterpiece:
Did you get enough love, my little dove,
Why do you cry?
I’m sorry I left,
But it was for the best
My little Versailles.

It’s followed by the most beautiful song I’ve heard all year. The lyrics to “The Only Thing” are full of despair and thoughts of suicide, but the melody is so sweet that one is left feeling full of hope. The guitar interlude followed by the final verse may be the most sublime musical moment I’ve felt for years.

And after the poppy - relatively speaking - title cut, it gets quieter again,and stays that way until the end, which might be forbidding for any but the true believers. It’s all right, though, By now I am one.

I like how Sufjan, while keeping things sparse, doesn't get lazy with the instrumentation. He finds the exact string instrument that's right for the song. And I'd tell you what those instruments were if I could get the damned liner notes to open.

And he doesn't stint on the melody. Oh, he gets a bit prissy with his vocals occasionally, but only if the tune or the theme calls for it.

Those melodies are very straightforward, so it’s easy to get lulled into thinking you know what you're getting on first listen. But like John Prine and Neil Young before him, he’s written music that is so strong it stays with you long after you thought it would lose its power.

And it was this very mistake that led to my disappointment at his recent show. If I had just stayed with the album a little longer, the concert would have been brilliant.  I’ve had similar missed opportunities, like Elvis Costello in 1981, who, in the prior year, had put out three albums containing a total of 55(!) songs, all of which he seemed to play that night, and none of which I’d heard as yet, and REM in 1985, when in retrospect it would have been a good idea to have picked up their debut EP Chronic Town, which brought the show to a rousing finish.

By the time I saw Sufjan, I’d clearly underestimated his album. There was another level of enjoyment I hadn’t gotten to by then that I’d only reach over the next few weeks, when we played it over and over and over again.

I thought Aphex Twin would be the right way back into happy music, now I think Sufjan Stevens is. Of course, if I heard Carrie & Lowell in January, I may have never left the house again. But to paraphrase “Game of Thrones”, to get to happy, head to sad.

Yup, Carrie & Lowell is one of those "demanding" albums. No fun - the one thing I was looking for - at all. And yet, it's the best thing I've heard all year.

I guess Mick was right. If you try sometimes, you get what you need.

A

“The Only Thing”

Easy-To-Not-Listen-To Music

Now that everything is just great, I brace myself for the unending tidal wave of musical brilliance that is to inevitably flow through my life, now that I know I still have a hankering for it.

But instead of a tidal wave, it’s more of a trickle. I need musical Flomax.

To put it another way, music continued to disappoint, but this time I don't think it was my fault.




Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works 85 - 92

This is the happier, peppier cousin to the record that I use for my depressions.  And as I said previously I thought it might serve as a halfway mark to music that was more fun than what I had been listening to during that long, cold winter.

But my (admittedly unreliable) first impression is meh.

My second impression, awful, and in it’s own way, even more depressing than his other record.

And, as is usually the case my third thru whatever-I’m-up-to-now listen, better.

This is one of the first records ever called “electronica”. And the issue, to me, will always be Does It Have Any Soul?  And by that I don’t necessarily mean does it have Aretha Franklin singing on it, but rather, does it have real (or very well faked) feeling to it?

This is a valid question for any kind of music, but especially important for electronica, where there’s less of a reliance on words, and where there’s always a danger that the technology will overwhelm the the human.

That seems a fair way of judging this record. Here’s my reaction to each track, without the track names, because they’re silly.  (ie. “Xtal”, “Tha”, etc. You get the idea. It’s like he’s a member of a Sci-Fi themed fraternity):

1. We start off promisingly enough. Very sleek electronica. But the key element is the woman's voice in the background that humanizes it. 
2. Again, voices in the background - this time spoken - humanize this one, but not as successfully  as before. I like my alienation as much as the next guy so I hang in there. It's somewhat sterile but the ghosts in the machine help.
3. A less cool, and thus more humane, melody and beat that will one day get used to great effect by Erasure. 
4. Here’s where I start to get a Pure Moods vibe link. (Do you have Pure Moods? Of course you do. It’s a phase we all go through. Dont let it get you down. It’s not so bad. But it does kind of announce that you’re middle aged.) For a while I thought I was hearing heavy breathing on this one, but that turned out to be my son Michael exercising. So, thumbs down here, although the bass is trying.
5. And now I just don't care. He's trying to be Eno, and failing. Thank God it’s short.
6. And now he's getting desperate - he speeds things up a bit, but all I’m hearing are a lot of synthesizer farts.
7. And here he tries to be haunting and almost gets away with it. But not quite.
8. Now, this is a pretty cool track, and I can definitely imagine it getting played in clubs, where, you know, humans go. (Not me, cool humans.)  But there’s that whole “we are the music makers” lyric. Well, screw you buddy. We're the ones paying the music makers.
9. And again, not bad. Techno, but not entirely soulless.
10. More, techno, and perfect for that club.
11. Now he goes to outer space, where no one can hear you snore.
12. And then back to Earth, where’s it’s not all that exciting, either.  After a minute or so it perks up a bit.
13. Kind of brooding, in a good way. Kind of peppy too. It’s got the right attitude.

Most of these cuts are pretty long, and to be fair, they usually need a minute or so to kick in. But I don’t know if I’ve got that kind of time.

I suppose that, in its infancy, these are the areas that electronica had to explore, but I find more heart in Eno/Moby/DJ Shadow and even Burial.

From what I understand, Richard D. James (secret identity of Aphex Twin!, Oh my god, I gave it away!) was in his teens when he started out, so in that light, this is quite an achievement.

I also noticed a disturbing resemblance to the type of music they'd play on Miami Vice (another extreme dislike of mine from the 80s), which makes sense given that this collection covers 1985 to 1992.

This is music for those desperate to feel cool. And it works better in a club than it does out here in real life. Or to paraphrase Mark Twain, it’s music that sounds better when you’re not listening to it.

But it’s growing on me. A little.  The big joke on Aphex Twin is that, instead of this being apt for nighttime at a club in the city, how much better this sounds on a Saturday morning when I’m trying to do chores.

As it so happens, I’ve just gotten out of bed. I’m in a tee shirt and haven’t shaved yet, so I can practically pass for Don Johnson. So let me put on that blazer, roll up the sleeves and do the dishes!

To the tune of Aphex Twin.

B

"Crystal"

How Jaybee Almost Got His Groove (Which He Never Really Had in the First Place) Back. Sort Of.

When we last left off, Jaybee was trying to get back what passed for his mojo/groove/rhythm.

He never really had it in the first place - it all of that went to the kids - but you can't blame a guy for trying.

Like I said previously, I had a couple of reasons to sour on music at the beginning of the year. And avoiding music turned out to be not nearly as difficult as it should have been. It made me wonder if I'd lost my taste for it.

So I began to plot my way out. I’d look at the various year end best of lists for inspiration, where I found Wussy, St. Vincent, The War on Drugs piqueing my interest. But I knew I wasn’t in the mood for them at the time.

And the weird electronica and environmental sounds I was listening to led me to consider Aphex Twin, whose Selected Ambient Works, 85-92 might server as a halfway point back to normal, (Volume 2, its evil twin, was such a good companion during a very dark period. Like how you need a fellow drug addict around when you’re trying to quit.) Volume 1 is supposedly poppier, so I thought it would put me in the right direction, and lead me out, towards the records above. But it wasn't time yet.

Well, I finally passed those tests I was studying for, and then wondered if the music urge would come back.

It took about a day.

And what did I decide to listen to?  Why, that other great companion during that very dark time:



Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot 

Back then, this, and Aphex Twin, were the only two records I could listen to for a three month stretch. And I didn’t even love the record. It was just the only one that fit the mood.

But it does open with a number that reminds me of someone breaking out of cocoon (and then falling on his face, but at the time, I would settle for anything). And now, it seemed like a good transition to real life.

"I Am Trying to Break Your Heat"

The drumming is like how I dance, and it ends like my speeches do - in complete incoherence. But it was exactly what I needed.

I even brought the record to work where all dreams normally go to die. And they didn’t.

Well, by now I’d come out of the cocoon, and I had to take the next steop. Would I stumble?




My Bloody Valentine: Loveless

This was more like a volcano erupting. A dam breaking.  An explosion caught on tape. But, you know, in a good way.

When I first got this record, I found it so anarchic I had trouble finding where the beat was most of the time. Forget about melody.

This song doesn’t have that problem. The “melody” is a drunk slide guitar playing the same figure over and over (and over) again. The beat is basically a t-rex stomping on your head. By 3:23 you have to choose between going mad or just going with the flow. (Of water, not lava. Damn you, mixed metaphors!)

"I Only Said"

But, like I said, it was what I needed. 

So, I ended up feeling my version of normal, which I can’t recommend, but it’s all I’ve got.

Let's see where that leads.

Decade: 2000

Winter Draught / Spring Awakening:

For some reason, I just wasn’t getting any new music for the first few months of 2000. This was probably due to and end of decade record buying binge that then caused me to swear off of them for a while. It wasn’t until the Memorial Day that I felt like picking anything up. Mmm, where to start? How about a couple of Village Voice Pazz and Jop winners for 1999?

Belatedly starting the musical decade off with a bang, The Magnetic Fields three disc set “69 Love Songs” completely monopolized my CD player for the entire month of June. And not just because there was a lot of it. It was so good I had no desire to hear anything else.
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Now playing: The Magnetic Fields - All My Little Words
via FoxyTunes

Poor Moby, who’s “Play” just wasn’t for that month. And yet, by the time I got around to it, I found it to be, if anything, even more remarkably consistent than 69. You’ve definitely heard some of this, even if only on commercials.

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Now playing: Moby - Porcelain
via FoxyTunes

Around the same time, my wife wanted to play her students an example of scat singing. So, what would be better than Ella Fitzgerald’s “75^th Birthday Celebration”? That lesson lasted one day but we’ve still got this wonderful two disc set. It’s not for every occasion, but it is just exotic enough to pull you out of an otherwise ordinary day.

Summer:

Later that summer, we caught Blue Man Group, and picked up their first record, “Audio”. If you haven’t seen BMG yet, you should check them out. They’re a lot of fun, and the record stands quite well on its own.

Then came my annual birthday run, which is kind of like an orgy, except that instead of women, there are CDs. (Hey, the first step is knowing you have a problem.) This time around, I got a little too ambitious.

I figured Hole’s “Live Through This” would be my ace in the hole, but it didn’t quite meet my expectations. It turned out to be a typical “record that everyone liked, and even you liked what you heard on the radio, but once you bought it you thought it was really not such a big deal”. It’s quite good, just not great. Courtney can scream really great, though.

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Now playing: Hole - Rock Star
via FoxyTunes

Then there was jazz, like Cecil Taylor’s “Unit Structures” which is the type of record I buy when I’m in the grip of one of my “I can listen to any kind of music no matter what” delusions. It is surely one of the wildest records I’ve ever gotten. It’s like being locked in a room with a band that happens to be high, and mad as hell. I put it on when I feel that my soul has been crushed and I need something that will scatter all the pieces, or on beautiful summer days when I’m just not with the program. Another “put it on to get rid of the company” record.

When trying to decide on which Charles Mingus record to start with, I choose “Mingus Ah Um” - the one with the pretty cover. At first, it was just a bit out of reach at the time – despite the so infectious I can’t believe I’m hearing it “Better Get Hit in Your Soul” - but over the years, it’s grown on me, and is now one of my favorite jazz records.
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Now playing: Charles Mingus - Better Get Hit in Your Soul
via FoxyTunes

Aphex Twin’s, ambient, well “Selected Ambient Works, Volume II” was the polar opposite of Cecil Taylor, and as such is the type of record that – when company is over – is likely to elicit remarks like “one of your speakers must be out”. It’s similar to one of my all time favorite records – Eno’s “Another Green World”, but way drier. For devotees of sensory deprivation, which is what I must have needed in 2005, because I played it a lot at the time.

Somewhat similar (but boy does that somewhat make a difference!) is Kraftwerk’s “Trans Europe Express”. Leave it to the Germans to come up with something robotic, yet catchy.

See if you can spot the song that became a hip hop cornerstone.
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Now playing: Kraftwerk - Trans Europe Express
via FoxyTunes

And how could I leave out world music? I traveled to Africa (well, that section of the record store, anyway) for Mzaki Mbili’s “Resistance is Defense”. There’s a great sounding guitar throughout the album, but that’s part of the problem. The whole album sounds like one catchy song. Good, but too repetitive.

Next time I have to remember to balance things out a bit more. But, hey, I figured that I had the law of averages working for me.

Thanksgiving:

Leave it to my Thanksgiving run to save the day. I had been flirting with the local used CD store for a while, but feared that I’d get burned. But this time I took the plunge and came up with one great, and one worthwhile, record.

First, there was Randy Newman’s brilliant, hilarious, dark, profane “Faust”. Musically, it was perfect for the holiday season. Thematically, it couldn’t have been more perverse. This is the only context where I can accept James Taylor as God. Randy’s the devil, of course. Bonnie Raitt does the great “Feels Like Home” and Linda Ronstadt doesn’t annoy me.
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Now playing: Bonnie Raitt - Feels Like Home
via FoxyTunes

I remember putting Robin Holcomb’s first record on repeat one late night at work. It played about six times before I left. It’s quiet, slow and jazzy, and maybe a little too much of all of these things. But good to listen to when miserable, which I am from time to time.

Christmas:

And finally, when I got a gift certification to my favorite record store I thought I died and went to heaven. It was time for a major plunge into something new (by which I mean old), and this time I chose Louis Armstrong. I found his “Complete Hot Fives and Sevens” and the more wide ranging “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man”. Both are 4 CD box sets. I went deep with the former, because the box was smaller! This music is now 80 years old, and I still can only wonder what it sounded like to people at the time. It must have been comparable to heavy metal in its shear size. I love to just take one of the CDs at random and plop it into the player. I’ll probably never get to the bottom of it all.

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Now playing: Louis Armstrong - Potato head blues
via FoxyTunes

The Tally:

The great records that I have an immediate love for - as opposed to an appreciation - were:

• 69 Love Songs
• Faust
• Play

None of these records was released in 2000. So far, My Decades is pretty good. Ours hasn’t started yet.

The All-Nighter

Whenever I get a few days in a row off from work, I tell myself that somewhere in the middle of it, I’ll pull an all-nighter. This is a hell of a thing to pull off at fifty. So why do it, you ask? I don’t know. To pretend that my body and mind still work independent of normal waking hours when I feel like it? I already know it’s not true, and it makes me pretty useless for the next several days. Whatever my motivation, I know I’ll need a soundtrack for it.

Going out drinking with buddies doesn’t count. It involves too much fun and comradery, giving the night it’s own momentum. And that’s what the jukebox is for, anyway.

I’m referring to the nights that are sugar or caffeine inspired, “dark night of the soul” or at least “I need to be alone” time. So what can you put on at those times that won’t be too up and cheerful, but also have enough musical interest to make your all-nighter unique? And which records risk a consistency of tone that might not be immediately inviting, but that will sustain you through literally dark times?

The answer has been different, depending on the medium. Back when we had vinyl and used record changers, you could stack up six sides on top of each other and just let them rip for a couple of hours. Of course, when we all became more responsible about our records (as opposed to our bodies) we used turntables, which only allowed you to play one record - and one side for that matter - at a time. Whatever it was you were doing, you had to stop every twenty minutes or so, and change the side.

But one advantage LPs had over CDs was that when you were dealing with a schizophrenic record – one whose first and second sides are drastically different - you could put on just the side that fit the mood. Some examples are:

• “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” by Bob Dylan, which comprises side 4 of “Blonde on Blonde”.
• “Dark Star” by the Grateful Dead, which is Side 1 of “Live/Dead.” There are probably a dozen other Dead sides that would do the trick, but this one’s my favorite.
• “On the Beach” (Side 2) by Neil Young
• “Before and After Science” (Side 2), Brian Eno
• “Low” (Side 2), David Bowie
• “Heroes” (Side 2), David Bowie

On the other hand, CDs with a consistency of tone throughout can get you ten times the depression for your effort if you’ve got a multi-disc player. Try records like:

• “There’s a Riot Going On” by Sly and the Family Stone
• “Third” by Big Star
• “Tonight’s the Night” by Neil Young
• “Second Edition” by Public Image, Ltd.
• “Communique” by Dire Straits
• “Closer” Joy Division

And if you haven’t slit your wrists by now, these next records can be quite nice for traveling through interstellar space:

• “Another Green World” by Brian Eno
• “Ambient Works, Vol. II” by Aphex Twin (also good for depressions)
• “The Koln Concert” by Keith Jarrett
• “In a Silent Way” by Miles Davis
• “Adventure” by Television

And if the caffeine hasn’t worn off yet, go to your Morning Music list. Otherwise, get some sleep, ya crazy nut!