Category Archives: Public Safety

LCD Timewarp

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I’m back in the boisterous Provo Coffee Pod, a little bewildered. Despite the draw of the Utah Pride Festival this weekend in SLC there are still numerous iPhone metro-bohemians left in Utah County on a Sunday afternoon. I guess the population skews back to the other side of the tracks over the Summer. Much of the ecclesiastically endorsed BYU demographic recedes back out of Zion and we’re left with more tattoos, piercings, and (god forbid) sun dresses. I’m only complaining because I’d rather be tucked away in a nice quiet corner of the public library, but that kind of establishment is considered to be ungodly and an abomination on the Sabbath. Since I’ve lived in Provo so long I had the impression that all libraries are closed on Sundays, to let the dusty, weary books, and their librarian curators, rest their spines. But then I came across a library with its doors unlocked, lights turned on, and literary select diverse – and open on a Sunday. So now I’ve got that pebble in my shoes. Continue reading →

If There’s No Music Up In Heaven

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…Then what’s it for? I have imagined what life will be like after death. My nightmare is that it will be infinite church meetings, with an infinite playlist of traditional church hymns listed out on the wall with the black and white plastic number placards. I was trying to spend some time outside the house today, a sunny Sunday morning, and I rolled out of bed and dragged myself to a coffee shop. Not being a morning person I was relying on a subdued sanctuary where I could humanely nurture my nerves to some level of public presentation, sipping down one delicious Red Eye. I soon noticed that one person was actually sitting next to another and speaking. Soon followed by another, then another, then another, and so on. (Ironically, it was an ex-mormon recovery group.) What we had was ultimately a boisterous congregation building to a fossil fuel drilling operation in the tender wildlife preserve of my morning. That’s when I assembled my personal sound system and ignited my copy of the Arcade Fire “Reflektor” record – and where I got the idea for the title of this post. Continue reading →

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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Mid-Life Moshing

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Now I know for sure how I want my car stereo to sound. Yes, I just took a big leap and got a decent deck installed a couple of weeks ago. But just one week ago I stood 10 feet away from KMFDM and their enormous speakers concussing my torso with The Ultra Heavy Beat. It was a Thursday night, another day of work the next morning, not feeling highly motivated to rock out, only there out of duty and guilt from missing their show a couple of years before, they’re getting old and probably just milking the retro tour scene. No. Sascha and Lucia have a stunning, super-human presence on stage. The two guitar dudes flanking the stage brought and brazenly brandished the Rock (not Dwayne The Rock). And the acoustic drums decimated any idea that they’d be weaker than juiced up electronic beats. I woke up out of a lull in life right there. I remembered how much of a kick I got out of all the KMFDM records, how much I loved standing right in front of erupting loudspeakers (with tissue crammed in my ears for protection), and I started to get little twitches for wanting to hop, and dare I say at my age, thrash around into other people. Continue reading →

Bad Hair Day

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I talked before about the role of the producer in being a back-seat driver, steering the band off to the back roads and sometimes over a washed out bridge. Now that I think about it, U2 were led off into neverland when Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois stepped in and produced Joshua Tree. Since I’ve listened to some Brian Eno records now I realize that Joshua Tree is just another Brian Eno record with some Irish guys along for the ride. I love that record, but I see it as a case of the producers steering from the back seat. On a side note, knee jerk reaction, I bought the reissue of The Jesus And Mary Chain record ‘Automatic’ (with all the obsessive extras). In the ‘creepy stalker’ edition liner notes I read about how around that time the JAMC almost intersected with Daniel Lanois as a producer. I quote JAMC quoting Lanois, “oh we won’t do it in a recording studio, we’ll rent a big church somewhere…” JAMC responded, “we were thinking of getting in drum machines…” and they say ‘that was the end of working with Daniel Lanois.’ Continue reading →