Author Archives: DanW

Mixtape

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I don’t know whether to feel ashamed or rightly validated as I’m reading “How Music Works.” I do feel an affinity with the broad spectrum of experiencing music laid out so coherently and authoritatively by David Byrne, and every few pages I thump myself on the head bearing witness I was just thinking the same things. Honestly I’ve come across many of the same ideas, but David has developed them so eloquently and has so squarely nailed it that I will probably have to include citations to his works as primary sources instead of claiming them as my own. Better yet I can at least feel like I’m aligned some good ideas and that someone out there enjoys the depth of music like me.
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Mood Organ

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“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” opens with the protagonist and his emotionally vacant wife discussing the appropriate settings they’ll dial on their “mood organ” for the day to get some wind in their sails. The paradox, in case you haven’t seen “Blade Runner” or “Star Trek TNG”, is that it’s hard to define what makes us human, especially if we can be chemically and algorithmically manipulated like a machine. I wouldn’t dispute Deckard or Data on that point. Not to spoil it for you, but the humanity or androidness is blurred and brought into question with each of them. I don’t know if there’s anyway to make a sad robot happy by playing cheerful music, but I’m susceptible to that sort of mood organ. I practically have my iPod playlists arranged by mood and I can dial into what I’m feeling, whether it’s to pull out of the doldrums or to stew in venom. That sounds bipolar – I have more than two playlists and a broad spectrum of to dial in.
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Pledge

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My takeaway from the Coachella and RSD has been to fixate on Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Meat Beat Manifesto. At the edge of my conscious thought there’s a loop of “Acid Again” and “Heads Will Roll” beyond my control. On top of that, another topic, is the big thumping In Silico by Pendulum I enjoyed while smashing cop cars and other public property in Need For Speed: Undercover. I don’t mean to drop names here, but it’s becoming clear that good music is not dead. For a while I thought all creativity had dried out, though it was there all along in some other business model. Forget physical retail stores at this point – when I visited Best Buy today it wasn’t easy to find the single surviving row of CDs after rezoning for vast tracts of iPhone accessories. Out in the wild, in the unwashed back woods of the music scene, there are a lot of innovative, talented and well-produced projects funded in the spirit of democratic venture capital. Continue reading →

Record Store Day

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Thankfully the second weekend of the Coachella is not being televised or I would feel compelled to tune in through to the next early Monday morning again. That set me free to get out for enjoy Earth Day, which was coincidentally ‘Pot’ Day and Record Store Day. I thought I’d just slip into the one last remaining, though anachronistic, physical record store in my county: Greywhale Entertainment. I took a walk the long way through the mall to build the anticipation, but when I got there instead of an ‘On Sale’ sign I saw ‘For Sale’ and the store was gone. I admit waiting for a single fabricated calendar date to exercise support for my local brick and mortar record store was lazy, but today it was a heavy to realize the concept of a local, physical record store was dead. Other than Walmart or Best Buy, which don’t count, if I wanted to hold in my hand and look at a record before I bought it, I’d just be left to reminisce about the past. Continue reading →

Coachella Road Trip

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This weekend I have been on a road trip to Indio, California. It hasn’t been too rough on my car, only had to eat a couple of truck stop hot dogs, I’ve been able to get pretty decent lodging and parking hasn’t been bad at all, even though this was for the super crowded Coachella Festival. I’ve been in the same space as probably a few hundred thousand other hippies, but then in reality I have been holed up in my TV room with the heater cranked up (cold, late winter freeze in Utah) and plugged into the YouTube broadcast at coachella.com. Every year in April I idealize about how I should actually pack a tent in my car and drive down to Palm Springs to get in on the big party but it’s hard to rationalize the time away from responsible life, but more honestly it’s a grueling gauntlet of discomforts. I did join in for one day in April 2002, and with the relatively short drive from San Diego, the day pass only costing about $70, the lucky find of an open motel room, and temperatures not pushing past 90 degrees that day, I was thoroughly wiped out after seeing Bjork, Siouxsie, and the Chemical Brothers late into the night. I was heat fatigued, dehydrated, and wedged up into some massive, sweaty Samoan’s ass the whole time. Continue reading →