Don’t forget to support your local bookstore! If they sell e-books, go ahead and download from their website! Here are a few of my favorite local bookstores where you can buy it:
A DIVISION OF SOULS is also STILL FREE! Want to get caught up first before jumping in? Head over to B&N, Kobo or Smashwords (or hey, even NoiseTrade) and download the first book, and your reading list is good to go!
Next week will be the first of many entries for the Walk in Silence blog series…and of course, I’ll be letting you know all about that over the next week and a half.
But that’s not the plunge I’m talking about.
When I was first planning out the WiS project, I always had the timeframe in the back of my mind: should I focus just on my own personal connection with college radio (1986-1989)? Should I talk about its history (197? – 199?)? Or should I just come up with an arbitrary time? Eventually I chose the third entry, that way I could focus mostly on my own personal history, but also include the time before I connected with the genre, thus 1984 – 1989.
The plunge I’m thinking of now is the college and post-college years. They weren’t exactly the happiest years of my life, for various reasons, but they were interesting musically. College rock, at least with American radio, gave way to grunge and Britpop as it became more popular, and changed genre names numerous times before deciding on the all-encompassing ‘alternative rock’. A schism grew: those who felt alternative rock was selling out and followed the most obscure bands possible, and those who really didn’t mind either way, as long as the prefabricated crap currently in the charts went away.
I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a sequel to Walk in Silence for quite some time. There’s no name to it yet, nor is there any concrete schedule or plan for it at this time (all my focus is currently on posting WiS and publishing the Bridgetown trilogy), but I do have a few ideas floating around…it’ll focus mostly on the years from late 1989 (when I left for college) to late 1995 (when I left Boston and moved back home). And it will most likely continue the WiS theme of both personal story and music history.
Some albums from that era still get heavy airplay on the radio: you’ll still hear tracks from Nevermind and Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Loveless and Definitely Maybe and Achtung Baby and Violator and so on. But there are so many more albums I’ve ignored for one reason or another, forgotten about or couldn’t make myself listen to for personal reasons. Songs that radio let pass into history, even forgetting to play them on Throwback Thursday. But as with Walk in Silence and the 80s, it’s been nigh on twenty-plus years for most of these. It’s well past time to revisit them again.
So starting today I’m going to start listening to some of these albums in my collection, give them a once-over they haven’t had in quite some time, and see where I can go with it.
Oof! Yeah, still working on the final revision/edit of The Persistence of Memories, and it’ll be another few weeks before I can give myself a breather. The soft release date at the moment is “sometime mid-April”, but I’ll let you all know more as soon as I have more concrete plans! At present I’m THISCLOSE (translation: about forty or so pages) to finishing the revision/edit, I’ve made a quick mock-up of the cover (which you can see at Welcome to Bridgetown). Once the edit’s done, then comes the formatting and the uploading. And then FINALLY I can get back to a normal schedule again. [That is, until I start the same process once more with The Balance of Light. Whee!]
In the meantime, I’ve been on a School of Seven Bells kick lately, partly due to their release of their last album, SVIIB (recorded just before Benjamin Curtis passed away). Jangly shoegazey goodness that kind of reminds me of Lush with a bit of Stereolab mixed in. Enjoy!
Some news on the Walk in Silence book project. I shared this on my LiveJournal a short time ago (edited for clarity):
I think I may set aside Walk in Silence, the book.
I’ll finish it of course, for my own reasons, but I don’t think I’ll be releasing it as a self-published book, at least not for the foreseeable future. It’s a tough decision, but it’s one I’ve been thinking of ever since the start of the year, maybe even before then.
There are a few reasons…one is that it started feeling less like a book worth publishing and more of a vanity project. On a more personal note, writing this memoir version really felt like I was really just trying to finally purge it from my system once and for all so I could move on. While on a personal and emotional level this can be a good thing, and I may even be proud of the end result, it’s not something I’d be happy with on a professional level. I wouldn’t be embarrassed about it…I just don’t think it would be something worth putting out there professionally. As I said, it’s become a vanity project — it’s a story I want to tell, but I’m doubting there’s a significant audience for it. Maybe I’ll put it out there as a serial on [this] blog at some point. It feels that would be the best home for it, when all is said and done.
Do I feel sad about this? Not entirely. A bit let down, of course. That nagging feeling that I’ve wasted a few thousand hours of writing time on something that may or may not see the light of day. But I’ve had a hell of a fun time reading all those music bios and reference books for research, and I’ve come to appreciate and understand music a hell of a lot more over the years. Totally worth it just for that alone. I may also feel a bit embarrassed, having bloviated the idea and everything else about it over the last three or four years online, much to your wavering patience and tolerance, but I think I’ll get over it.
But really…the main thing is that I think I’ve outgrown the project. My heart and mind have moved on, probably some time ago, and it was high time for me to accept that.
…
…so yeah. At this time, it’s no longer going to be an e-book/physical book project.
On a more professional level, I think it would have been problematic as a book, especially a self-published one. There’s only so far I can go with Fair Use in regards to copyrighted music, and I don’t think I’d have done the project justice (to my standards, anyway) if I had to hold back for legal reasons. Doing it as a blog series would give me more leeway and make it more interactive, as I’d be able to provide links, audio and/or video.
SO.
What’s in store for this project? Well! Glad you asked!
I’ve already gotten a good ways into it (it focuses mostly between 1984 to 1989, and I’m currently writing about late 1988), so instead of trunking it and erasing it from my mind, I will use my collected notes and writings for it and do a serial much along the lines of my Blogging the Beatles series from a few years ago. It may start out as a once-a-week entry, but if time permits and I get myself into the groove, I may post more than that.
Another plus for me morphing it into a blog series is that I get to return to my originally planned release date again! Yay! It’s still in the planning stages, but I’m thinking a soft start date of April 19 or thereabouts, to celebrate thirty years of me obsessing over this damn genre.
April vacation, 1986, when a dorky teenage kid from a small town discovered a college radio station for the first time, and how it completely changed his life.
This phrase has been stuck in my head quite a bit lately. Not so much in tandem with the recent passings of numerous famous (and infamous) people we’ve known in our lives, but more with how nothing is ever permanent. It’s a theme that runs rampant in the Mendaihu Universe. Things end, things begin. Things evolve. It’s never the end of the world; it’s just an unfortunate moment that we must process in some way. Yes, there are horrible things in history, horrible things that cost lives, and I’m not ignoring or belittling that. But in the evolution of humankind, it’s never remained that way forever. We learn from our mistakes as well as from our insights. We make things better for ourselves and for others. There are always naysayers, but there are others who believe. There are destroyers, but there are also makers.
And to be honest, that’s the most fascinating part of being alive for me.
You know, it dawned on me that I don’t think I’ve gone to a nightclub venue since…well, probably since before I moved down to New Jersey in 2005, come to think of it. I used to head to various shows in Boston all the time back when I was in Massachusetts, and didn’t think twice about driving that seventy miles, hanging out int some smoky basement dive with too-loud music, and having to leave a tad early so I could make the last Red Line train out to Alewife where I was parked.
Over the years since we’ve been here, our showgoing has pretty much remained with the San Francisco Symphony and the SF Opera. It just sort of happened naturally, as they were well-known ensembles we were looking forward to checking out when we moved out here a decade ago. And over those last ten years, I’ve really come to appreciate classical music a lot more than I ever have in my life.
I won’t lie, for years the extent of my classical knowledge was pretty much tied in with Warner Bros cartoons such as What’s Opera, Doc?, The Rabbit of Seville, Long Haired Hare and so on. There’s also the 80s Hollywood movie such as Platoon (Barber’s Adagio for Strings), Apocalypse Now (Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (R. Strauss’ ‘Morning’ from Also Sprach Zarathustra).
I wasn’t completely ignorant of classical music; it was just a genre that I didn’t follow as closely as I did others. This of course has changed over the years; I used to really like Copland back in my college years but find his work kind of thin nowadays…I now find Tchaikovsky one of my biggest favorite composers.
There are certain pieces that I find absolutely stunning and will try to get to a performance if the SF Symphony is playing them. Such as:
Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ completely blows me away every time I hear it, whether it’s the orchestral version or the original string quartet version. I love when music has a deliberate flow to it — each melodic phrase is given time to complete itself without hurry. It’s like breathing.
Maurice Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ is so much fun! It starts off so quietly and unassumingly, and yet by the end, every single instrument in the house is bleating, banging and barking so loudly that the entire audience whoops with cheers when it finishes. A silly Italian movie called Allegro non Troppo (a self-professed “low-budget” homage to Disney’s Fantasia) got me hooked on this piece in college with its unique take on planetary evolution.
Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony (‘Pathetique’) is probably my favorite piece of all right now. I was thinking of it the other day when I was watching David Bowie’s final video, “Lazarus”…one kind of got the feeling that David knew the end was coming, and had decided to go out on a final creative note — a denouement letting us know how much he’d enjoyed his time in this world. I feel the same whenever I hear the Pathetique because it was Tchaikovsky’s last piece in much the same manner…I think he’d finally come to terms with his life as well as his mortality. This is also why I love the way the ‘big finish’ in this piece is actually in the 3rd movement and not the final; the final 4th movement ends up being more of an exhalation, a release.
Mason Bates’ The B-Sides is a relatively new piece — written by a composer six years younger than myself, I should add — and I can totally see the future of classical music heading in this direction, with a mix of analog, digital, and found sounds (check the ‘instrument’ used about three and a half minutes in!). Bates is somewhat of a local hero here, as he’s both a nightclub DJ (as DJ Masonic) and a composer of a large number of wonderfully creative pieces that he often performs with the SFS. Bates also recently released an album with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project called Mothership, which I highly recommend. I have high hopes for this one!
I’ve been listening to Air over the past few days…the band just popped into my head unbidden, and I’ve been searching for a good, laid-back soundtrack for my extended editing sessions lately, so it was a perfect fit. Their debut Moon Safari was released on this day back in 1998 (which puts it right in the middle of my HMV years), but it’s so retro in its sound that you swear it came out in 1972 on some budget label and got played at K-Mart when you were a kid. It of course ended up on heavy rotation during my writing sessions down in the basement.
In 2000 they released the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, based on the Jeffrey Eugenides book. That too got heavy rotation for me, with its spooky, dark passages. [Trivia: I didn’t know this until many years later that the singer for “Playground Love” is none other than the singer for Phoenix, going under the name Gordon Tracks.] It kind of fit the mood I was in at the time as well, considering I’d just been shuffled out of the HMV job and wasn’t exactly sure where my next step was going to be.
They may have lost me a bit on album two (three?), 10,000 Hz Legend, but I think that’s because they’d chosen to update their sound a bit, bring the melodies forward a decade or two. It took me a few years to get used to this one, and it’s got some great tracks on it, including a cameo vocal from Beck on “The Vagabond”.
Now the next album, Talkie Walkie, is probably my favorite of theirs, even over Moon Safari. They hit their stride here, balancing their retro-synth sound perfectly with some lovely modern melodies. They also provided an absolutely gorgeous track called “Alone in Kyoto” for Sofia Coppola’s next film Lost in Translation:
I’m still trying to get used to the next couple of albums (2007’s Pocket Symphony and 2009’s Love 2), most likely because my mind was elsewhere at the time, adjusting to our lives here in SF. Eventually they’ll come to me. Their most recent album, Le Voyage Dans la Lune from 2012, is fascinating in that it’s a soundtrack for Georges Méliès’ 1902 film of the same name. And Nicolas Godin (the fair-haired one of the duo) just released a solo album of Bach-inspired songs called Contrepoint, which I’m hoping will eventually see release stateside sometime this year.
Yeah, as always, the first couple of weeks of the new year are always scant when it comes to new releases. I’ve been busy doing a lot of book editing, so instead I’ve been listening to random things here and there. Not much to report on, sadly.
However, I did notice that my birthday (next Friday) will contain releases by Chairlift, Savages, Shearwater, Steven Wilson, Suede, Tortoise and Tricky, so there may be a bit of mp3 purchasing and stream listening going on this coming week.
Hopefully I shall have more to report by then!
I should, however, share this absoutely darling three-piece that I found on NoiseTrade the other week called (appropriately) The Feels:
Until next time!
[Of course, I could comment on the passing of Lemmy and David Bowie. I sort of knew about Motorhead, and that they appeared on a quite hilarious episode of The Young Ones singing “Ace of Spades”, and I have all kinds of fond memories watching David Bowie’s videos back in the day. I was actually quite a passive fan, liking many of his singles but never quite getting around to buying the albums until 1997’s Earthling. (For a while I also had a lingering dislike of Hunky Dory due to my freshman year roommate in college listening to it on endless repeat, much to my severe annoyance.) Still, I definitely appreciate all that both men have given to the music field. They will be sadly missed.]
I’d been a fan of the 4AD label since probably 1986 when I first heard This Mortal Coil’s cover of Bill Ogan’s “I Want to Live” (from the Filigree and Shadow album) on WMUA one dark night. I’d fallen in love with the dark moods the label’s bands evoked; not the dark of violence or depression, but the dark as in the absence of light. To me, the sound of Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance always made the most sense to me at one in the morning, when the rest of the world was asleep. Yes, even the stark punk crunch of Pixies in 1988 evoked darkness for me; their music sounded like a band that had just gotten into the studio at 2am after playing a blistering show and channeling that chaotic energy into the wee hours.
So when I first heard Lush in late 1989 via their first EP, Scar, and soon after with their follow-up EP Mad Love (both timed perfectly with my entry into college), I was completely taken in by how bright their music was. The same amount of reverb was there, but it was all made of sparkling beads of light and autumn afternoon breezes. The rainy excitement of “Scarlet” and the tripping evolution of “De-Luxe” were my entryway into the brighter realm of Britpop, at a time when the American alternative sound was veering into the metallic sludge of northwestern grunge. When Lush released the stunning “Sweetness and Light” single in late 1990, I was completely hooked. Its freeing energy and gorgeous simplicity created, to me, a perfect pop song. To this day it’s extremely high on my list of absolute favorite songs.
Their first album proper, Spooky, came out just days after my 21st birthday, and I remember going to Tower with what little money I had at the time to buy it. I didn’t embrace it right away, but that was more due to some personal issues I was having at the time than the music. By that summer I had it on repeat on my Walkman, especially the single “Nothing Natural”. I loved Steve Rippon’s off-kilter, questioning bass line, and especially loved the back end of the song where it completely drops away, leaving the rest of the song soaring for a good few moments before crashing back down for its final measures before finally fading out.
I equally loved Split, even though it felt like a much darker affair (again, I think this was more due to my personal mindset at the time), but after years of listening to Lush, it’s become my favorite album of theirs. I feel it’s where they hit their peak musically, even despite the producing issues they had at the time. It contains my other favorite song of theirs, “Desire Lines”. It’s a slow, plodding song, but deliberately so (and an extremely courageous choice for a single), and it’s probably the first song where I finally grokked to the mathematics of song construction. One can sense its novel-like format, coming in unobtrusive and steady, ebbing and flowing with increasing energy until it finally builds to its middle eight, hitting a shimmering climactic peak before dropping back down to the denouement.
Their next album, Lovelife from early 1996, was a bit of a leftfield surprise for me, as I hadn’t expected a more economic and poppier sound from them, but it was yet another album that got quite a bit of play for me, thanks to it being released just months before I started my job at HMV (I would often play this one and the Gala in the back room while prepping stock for the floor). The track “Ladykillers” was on heavy rotation on WFNX at the time, so I’d hear it almost every day on the way to and from work. And the goofy definitely-not-a-love song “Ciao!” — a brilliant duet with Miki Berenyi and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, and probably the best British musical odd couple since Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl.
I would return to Lush’s catalogue over the years, especially during certain writing sessions for the trilogy where I needed some kind of music that was ambient and dreamlike but also upbeat (otherwise I’d have gone for my regular go-to of Global Communication’s 76:14). Their Ciao! Best of Lush album came out in early 2001 and I’m pretty sure it was in my writing soundtrack bin well until 2003 or so. And now they’ve just released a lovely box set called Chorus, of nearly everything they recorded (it’s currently quite hard to find, but you might want to check their official online store here, that’s where I got it).
I remember Lush being hard to pin down for a lot of alt.rock listeners in the 90s in the northeastern US…they were either too dreampoppy for grunge tastes, or they were too noisy for the fans of the classic chamberpop 4AD sound, but they seemed to fit right in with those other stunning (in sound and in volume) shoegaze bands like My Bloody Valentine, Swervedriver and Ride. It’s been years since they broke up in the late 90s, but thanks to reunions of bands like MBV and Ride, brilliant music documentaries like Beautiful Noise and Live Forever, as especially new noisepop bands like Warpaint, Tamaryn and Wolf Alice carrying the torch, Lush is now fondly remembered as one of the best bands of their time and highly influential.
Lush has recently reunited and are playing a few gigs in the UK soon; they may also be releasing an EP of new songs later this year.
As mentioned in my year-end overview, I was particularly enamored of the recent reissue of some early titles from The Comsat Angels. I hadn’t listened to them in ages (I used to have a few of their albums on vinyl oh so long ago) and was surprised at how well they’ve held up. Their first album, Waiting for a Miracle, was released in 1980, and it sounds fantastic. At this point they’re kind of a cross between 154-era Wire, a bit of Unknown Pleasures Joy Division, with a pinch of Chameleons and Abecedarians thrown in.
The above song, “Home Is the Range”, which wasn’t on the first album (it’s on the reissue) but a pre-album EP, has been stuck in my head for the past week and a half, and I can’t seem to get it to leave. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. It’s a hell of a great track.
Walk In Silence 