So, taking the most popularized and generally misunderstood application of this theory, an Eskimo does not have many many more different words for snow that we do because she is always around snow, but that the need to communicate different aspects of snow (such as wetness and density) as part of the process of staying alive has actually created a greater granularity of distinction between individual characteristics in her mind. It’s not that there are more words for snow (though there are), it’s that the utility for each is sufficiently silo-ed from one another to create a greater number of distinct categories in the lexicon than there otherwise would be. This is the opposite of, say, how Frogger views motor vehicles; there is no distinction between vans and cars and trucks from his perspective – they are all automobiles attempting to massacre him. THAT BLOWS OUR MINDS.

We’ve always wanted to see (and perhaps there is an enterprising ethnomusicologist out there who has already, unsung, performed such research) some empirical examination of the role of environment in creating some of the more prominent music scenes in the last 30 years (punk started 30 years ago folks. 30). For example, what role, if any, did the long Minnesota winters have in the creation of Minneapolis punk/hardcore’s (bands like The Replacements and Husker Du) distinctly un-LA or DC sound? Can we create a line of influence between the region’s largely Scandinavian heritage and aspects of their mother tongue to the somewhat poppier, mellower and relaxed content of those bands when compared to their coast-originating contemporaries? Why is the leading factory for the assembly line manufacture of the Country and Western Music Industrial Complex music located on the other side of the Mississippi?

And what is it about Houston’s near and far East Side that has led it to be such a dependable source of re-imagined Americana over the years? From Janis Joplin to ZZ Top to current burners like Buxton and News on the March? Does the ‘March’s Glory Be EP (the first recorded with the full band) sound as though it was recorded in a room with the shutters tightly sealed and only kerosene lamps to light because East Siders dwell in a world where Hurricanes are a psyche-influencing reality (so much so that, after the album was recorded but before it was submitted for pressing, the roof of their studio and practice place was peeled off by Ike’s careless hands)? Is it the chemical plants that mar the vistas of their bayous’ banks that causes their take on country music’s pastoral side to mix so much guile within the glee?

And yet, in spite of these shadows, Glory Be is ultimately a joyful record, one that smiles on the high road with compositions that are catchy without being particularly hooky and grounded in an experienced realism without being hokey. It’s sipping tea on a porch while planning a picnic, even though the clouds tell you otherwise. Though it may be the dead-horse of their many praises, the vocal melodies/harmonies here are a stunning throwback to a time of taken-for-granted vocal prowess long since discarded in favor of affectation to avoid a gap in ability. Album closer “Clappin’ Good Time,” with its kiss of horns and sing-along closing has been a delicious counterpoint to the drat that has been crashing into our lives lately. And isn’t that the role of good music, to be antidote or accompaniment of the particulars of an environment to counterbalance the wave of woe or catch the wave of wonder? Glory Be is good medicine indeed. Recommended.

Glory Be is available at finer record stores around town, including Sig’s Lagoon, or you can pick up a copy at their show tonight at Rudyard’s with Lonely Dear and Alkari.  To hear tracks from the album, visit their MySpace.

A recliner will be exceedingly comfortable, allow you to stay in it for extended periods of time and may be difficult to get out of. A desk chair will position you at the proper height and with appropriate posture to operate a computer keyboard and and complete other tasks while not swallowing you and tempting you to slumber. A rocking chair will do just that, and provide relaxing utility be your task calming a baby or enjoying a lemonade.

And this is what Marketing seeks to achieve; to repeat a form endlessly, in whatever context or channel the message can be transmitted, until the consumer instantly recognizes the Brand and the corporate-intended characteristics of it. We see the dynamic ribbon and know this is a Coke product, and that it will be refreshing and delicious, regardless of whatever this new Zero variant of it may be. It’s a methodical, slow and eternal process, like the geology that creates diamonds from grains of sand. It never ends as long as the product exists and there is someone or something to sell it to. Ad campaigns may come and go, but Marketing has no beginning, no end and no middle, only the endless repetition of the form. There’s something about this eternal Mobius Strip that appeals to us, personally, and we believe it is part of the composition of our character that has led us to enjoy this sort of repetition in other parts of life. This split from Indian Jewelry and Future Blondes is a good example.

More so than on previous outing we can recall, Indian Jewelry’s “Zing Zang” is based on repetition. Though there is some build and dynamics as windy guitars  blow through the ten minutes of funk bass and distorted spoken word, the overall effect is post-minimalist in style, with little approaching a recognizable intro, outro or climax. Though Free Gold especially positioned the band as songsmiths of dystopian urban tribalism, this would be their first composition that could be described as a rain dance for additional psychedelics. And yet while it works well as the counter-point on this split, and certainly would not have been out of place as an interlude on Free Gold, something about the looseness of this track, and how it wanders makes us suspect that this will be a fairly unique composition in Indian Jewelry’s catalog, and not necessarily the sign of what is to come.

Future Blondes has always been based on repetition with teasing variations to provide the narrative movement, and “Heartless” is no different. The is probably the most refined track among the impressive mountain of output they’ve assembled in the past year (we’re two EPs and a split full-length behind, to say nothing of the tracks being offered up for free online). The thumping gristle of bass does most of the heavy lifting with drums that are more rhythmic and less punishing that we’ve come to expect. We won’t go so far as to say that this is dance-y rather than drone-y, but if someone were to throw the right sine line on top of it, it the resulting mashup would be a dead ringer for first-wave Chicago acid house.

Like good marketing, this split derives its ultimate utility from repetition. It’s not something we would throw on for five minutes of fun on the drive to the video store. It’s good headphone music for reading, or writing or even just enjoying. Endlessly. On repeat. Stopping every ten minutes or so to flip the wax. Recommended.

The Indian Jewelry/Future Blondes split 12″ is availble at fine record stores around town, including Sound Exchange, and online from the Dull Knife website.

When the bubble ‘pops’ in the water, it sends a shockwave through the sea towards the ocean bottom, and part of the energy reflects back once it makes contact with it. But the remainder of the sonic wave penetrates the earth, and each time it encounters a new layer, it reflects back yet another part of the energy (the earth looks like a layer cake when you slice it open, with each layer being made up of its own particular set of characteristics and physical properties).

HELPFUL DIAGRAM

So that reflected sound, subsequently, is captured by the hydrophones on those tails behind the boat, and then that signal, along with precise time and location information, is fed into a computer on the ship that assembles it all together for the next stage of the process. And this happens every few seconds. And they do this around the clock for literally weeks in a row as the boat moves slowly along. Yet as freaking complicated as that whole process is (can you imagine turning a boat around that has some miles-long crap hanging off the end of it?), it’s nearly stepchild to the level of SCIENCE required for what comes next: Signal processing and imaging.

(Aside before we move on: each of these boats has atleast one person on them whose job it is to be on the lookout for marine mammals. That’s right, they sit around all day and get to look for dolphins and whales. We kinda want this job, especially now that we have this record to use as a soundtrack for it.)

So, now you’ve got a literal warehouse full of data (back when it used to be recorded on magnetic tape. Oh yeah, love that vintage analog exploration data), you’ve got to make some sense of that. A big part of this is dealing with all the signal variation and interference and other processes that occur in nature because what you want to get back to is the purest, most un-affected signal that you can. It ain’t easy. There’s signals that bounce into each other, false reflections, surface clutter, and just the general clusterduckery that, as you might imagine, occurs when you try to record sound being bounced off a rock thousands of feet below the earth thousands of feet under water.

So the science of processing, then, is to go through and remove all that baloney. To take the equivalent of hundreds of guitars playing a ten hour long solo and using all manner of plugins that will likely never be affordable for Pro-Tools to strip away the reverb, delay, distortion, flange, chorus, echo and other hubbabaloo from each track. One note at a time.

In a sense, it’s the opposite of recording a band like Golden Cities. We imagine them to be the sound that got away. That rather than reflect upward, they pushed ever further into more and more distant geologic eras, gathering reverb, echo and delay as they pushed further through the Mesozoic to the Paleozic right on through to the Precambrian (and good lord, could they please take out Brendan Frasier on the way down). Further and further back in time they push, eventually to before God moved over the void and the nothingness and the darkness and the deep that became Earth. To where there is only space, and time is ill defined. There they float in the ether, eventually lining up with some space dust here or there. And the slow grind of time passes and they return to the present, falling as Perseids Meteors into a studio to record their experiences in the form of a self titled record.

Not so much a stretch considering they recorded this album during that particular celestial event. Golden Cities sounds old, like time drawn out from a tightly twisted nest of wire. Though almost entirely instrumental, it’s nothing like crescendo core and contains no hint of the metal or mathy angularism we’ve come to expect from the lyricless lately. We haven’t heard much like it since 7% Solution’s All About Satellites and Spaceships, a ten year old release that we still count among our favorites and yet one that sits in relative tonal isolation in our record collection (if you can suggest other stuff that sounds like these, PLEASE do). This is the perfect record for contemplating the deeper mysteries of deep earth or deep space, or for contemplating nothing at all. Either way, Recommended.

But we wonder, is there an Uncanny Valley with other forms of representation? We think that there is, and that groups like Black Leather Jesus (link mildly Not Safe For Work) have found tremendous possibilities for expression in a place that, instinctively, makes the average listener more than a little uncomfortable.

The Uncanny Valley

Let’s take a step back and postulate on what exactly music is for a moment, and where it comes from (and you’ll have to excuse us, cause we’ve never taken a single music history class that reached any further back than Scott Joplin, so we’re pretty much making this up as we go along). Music is sculpted sound. We imagine that, initially, it derived from noises that our fore-bearers created out of some sort of practical application. Shouts to scare away predators or warn friends; cracking stick on stick to demonstrate dominance; whistling to pierce through the din of lower pitched background noises as a signal of some sort. Music, then, came to be as ritualized representations of those sounds and their associated experience, just like cave paintings and storytelling and things like that. So if you’ll take a look at the graph again, the far right represents actual sounds found in nature, while that on the left represents art forms far removed from music’s primitive beginnings. And while tastes in music vary from person to person, we think that the comfort level pans out about the same.

Take Drum and Bass, which we would place on the far left. Though clearly music, there’s almost nothing about it that betrays the primordial source material. It’s easy enough to imagine, for example, that the ubiquitous four/four beat might derive from the rhythmic chopping of a tree limp to cleave off a bulge and get the grub inside. But what the hell in nature would evoke the complicated and rapid beats of someone like Danny the Wild Child? (Exception: a swarm of crickets on acid.) It’s also a format that, while it has it’s adherents, doesn’t particularly have a wide appeal/level of mass comfort. But as we move through forms of music towards more broadly accepted sounds (and towards a closer association with ‘natural noises’), popularity/comfort grows. But then, somewhere between the relaxing chants of Panda Bear and the soothing nothingness of those Tropical Paradise mood CDs, we plunge INTO THE VALLEY.

Noise music is all about the valley, and not not just because we have to force ourselves to listen to it and ignore the many side effects. When we hear it, especially the work of Black Leather Jesus on this 7″, we experience sounds rather close to those at the source: the rushing of rivers; a field full of locust; the crash of thunder; the slow grind of the continents. What’s disturbing about it, what the sonic equivalent to Black Beard’s stilted hand movement is, is the filtering – the distortion, the clipping, the layering, the processing in total. Like many who work in this genre, the source material for these sounds is completely unknowable, and the final product as much a mirror to the listener as a definitive statement by the artists. But it takes considerable discipline to create art in a psychological space like this and so, regardless of whether you think Noise is Art or noise, you do have to give the originators a high five for that. And of course, there is something perverse about not merely creating this kind of expression, but seeking it out and relishing in a space occupied by zombies and corpses. Yet in an odd way, and through this perspective, these electronic and utterly artificial noises are closer to the everyday than any version of “Louie Louie” you’ve ever heard. Vinyl for thought.

Mr. Wilson returns to the table, to his notebook, and tosses it into the back of his car. He drives back to the studio and writes, just a few years early, “Good Vibrations.” It takes “God Only Knows” place on Pet Sounds, and the latter is lost forever to the ether of space/time or whatever that crap is on Lost that lets them make alternative reality stories like this so plausible.

For us, “God only Knows” isn’t just our favorite pop song of all time, it’s also a turning point. Though they were already touring with Warhol’s The Exploding Plastic Inevitable multi-media project, it would be another year before The Velvet Underground and Nico darkened pop music with its door. Revolver had yet to be recorded, Rubber Soul having just been rushed to market to beat Christmas. Though there are no doubt exceptionss that someone will call us out on, the mantra of popular music up until this point had been decidedly Pie in the Sky.

Sure, there were songs of loss and heartbreak, and even heartache – but nothing this devastating. Nothing this dark. We don’t consider this the Dairy of it’s time by any means (the emo record that launched a thousand ships), more a product of the culture, politics and magnitude of that moment; a ship channel into which other artists were similarly dipping their paddles.

Pop music wouldn’t quite be the same after this. The box had been opened, and suddenly tones and themes and ideas that had little or nothing to do with surfing, cars and great balls of fire would become not just pedestrian, but fundamental to the art form. The innocent swagger of “I Get Around” would give way to the oversexualized cynicism of “Sex in the Club.” Even when pop seems its most innocent, its sprightly naive best, it cannot go back and take the other fork in the road that “God Only Knows” picked for all of us. How else could the beaming youth and feel good twee-pomp of Belle and Sebastian, for example, be matched with lyrics so disturbing, so antithetical to the melodies and arrangement?

Every now and then, though, we come across a set of recordings that we think from that other time, that other place where “God Only Knows” was set aside for a romp in the salt waters. Songs that, try as they might, cannot fool us into thinking that we still inhabit a world were the work of NWA was not merely inspired, but necessary. Microscopic Metronomes is one of those records. From the opening moments, with the band singing together around the sounds of a crackling campfire, it does double-time in shimmer, sway and smiles. Jangling its way through track after track of indie guitar pop as carefree as a sunbeam, the arrangements are clever enough to keep you interested, but with the comfort of artful (not artsy), simple melodies you feel like should have been invented before. Metronomes does not challenge you. It does not call you to muster up your intellect to trace the roots between Chicago techno and postminimalism, or demand you put some effort into figuring out the place in your praeternature that is supposed to respond to what you are hearing. It does not bore you with songs of woe intended for an already overstocked cupboard. It just pleases.  It just entertains.  It wraps is arms around you and says “Hey.  Kiss me real quick before we go into the ocean.”

There is a danger here, we think, of confounding our reaction to this record with the idea that it somehow lacks depth, that it is not weighty enough to reach into the coal closer to the truth of our being. That it’s a lightweight, some sort of musical Old School, pure mindless entertainment.  This is incorrect. We are all multifaceted, and often not our better selves. Before we were black and bitter, used up and not particularly interested, there was a light within us. And we credit the Moccasins for approaching their art from that place, as so few do anymore. For regular readers of this site, it should come as no surprise that we enjoy this, as we have enjoyed their performances, earlier recording and company. We have to say, though, even we were a little taken aback at how this record took us back. Joyfully Recommended.

You can catch the Wild Moccasins at their CD release show tonight, January 23rd with Buxton and Teenage Kicks at Walter’s.  A copy of the CD is included with your admission, as is tons of other stuff.  Complete details here.  All Ages, doors at 8.