You know, the funny thing about sex dreams is that they're almost always frustrating. Sure, when you're young and utterly inexperienced it's like "hey, whoa there that was" and revel in the untimely amazingness of this blooming frontier. But then, sadly, you get old and jaded it becomes just an annoying middle-of-the-night thing you don't wanna bother with when it jars you awake.
THE POINT, though, IS THAT wait I dunno. I feel like I'm supposed to be writing some shit about music, right? I still do that, don't I? Even though no one reads it?
But anyway, sex dreams. When sleeping next to a strictly platonic friend, they're somewhat uninvited. On the other hand, here's what happened: I was hanging out in a bizarre, impossibly lit, labyrinthine mess of a building complex with a friend I see yearly, and blah blah blah we ended up in a dining hall far too schmaltzy to be ever contain the people I was imagining (crusties in suits aerating wine in crystal chalices) and one of them begins relaying to me a sexual encounter with a young musician I've had a crush on 4ever. Sweet guy that he is, he initiates a flashback sequence to illustrate said hook-up, and anoints me to star as the roll of him making tender love to [name withheld because common decency] with great gusto and subliminal detail. The moral of the story is hell yeah and high five, brain.
Which brings us to the music albums full of songs you hear:
Waxahatchee is the singer-songwriter name (and recently, full band title) of Katie Crutchfield, previously of The Ackleys, P.S. And The Eliot Tones and sIhshjaksjka. Okay, so I may have mentioned this before, but P.S. Eliot's first LP, Introverted Romance In Our Troubled Minds is one of my favorite albums ever. Like, probably number two on the list between The Broadways' Broken Star and Band's Album. Prior to Katie's debut with Waxahatchee, I'd already become familiar with the bedroom tapes she recorded under the Guided By Voices-referencing title King Everything, so I felt somewhat prepared for what was about to drop.
HOW DEVASTATINGLY WRONG I WAS.
But no I kinda was prepared. That said, both the split with (bleah) Chris "The Clavicle" Clavin and the LP American Weekend are quite a bit darker than any of her previous outings, with a crackling ambiance brought on by the cassette-found-in-an-attic recording quality.
“to anyone who had woke up and realized their identity is blurry, has had to clumsily get to know themselves, has hit a bottom, has felt self-deprecating and vagrant, and to anyone who has ridden out a shitstorm.”This summation - which she prefaced American Weekend with - seems to shed some Litebright pegs on why this album hits me like a truck. SEE, I've been in all these stupid places a lot, and perhaps so much so that nearly all of these songs move me to tears every time I hear them (which has proven inconvenient). The sparse, nostalgic production and wordy, beautifully articulate lyrics set to such a raw performance are incredible, and tracks like "Luminary Blake", "Bathtub", and "Grass Stain" may actually dethrone a good deal of my favorite P.S Eliot songs for their pure emotional resonance. SRS BIZ, HERE. God I'm tired.
Since this release, Katie's gone on to record with a full band under the same name (which I wrote about who cares fuck you), and while that album is similarly fantastic, the aesthete here kills me. I imagine it's the backdrop of her career that primarily enticed me to giving this a chance, but this is a total stand alone. Pick up a copy at Don Giovanni Records and stuff. Tell 'em some blog asshole sent 'ya!
Also, and irrelevantly:
I've actually been keeping an ear more on the avant-garde side of the pretentiousness spectrum lately, but here's my impression of me writing about that sort of stuff after a zillion year break spent word pooping about Blink 182 or whatever the fuck it is I write about now:
"This is liek 3 hours of plinkety plink piano shit. I dunno if it's all performed or written by Aki Takahashi 'cause there's all these names on the front but it's some good shit, brah [tokes on a marijuana cigarette of weed]. I think it's considered "modern composition" but there's defz an Indeterminacy bend or maybe it's Serialism? I dunno. I have a hard time identifying parameters on that sort of malarky with all it's "tone rows" and "equal pitch weight and frequency" and Schoenburger and fries stuff. REC'D HARD!"
Several days later, and far more sober:
There is remarkably little information online about this album, but from what I can tell, this is a triple LP from 1973 of Takahashi performing her own interpretations on the works of her Japanese contemporaries (Joji Yuasa, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Toru Takemitsu, etc) on the first two discs, and a number of well-known European composers on the third (Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, Stockhausen, etc). Admittedly I've only really dabbled in the classical and modern composer realms, since the "academic" side of the avant-garde has never held a great deal of interest for me. After listening to this, I doubt I'll be losing my shit to some John Cage anytime soon, but this kind of thing does generate a weird experience.
Piano Space is an extremely minimalistic, dark and abstract work performed entirely through uncomfortable clusters of notes, silence, and some vocal improv. There's always been something extremely disquieting and morbidly fascinating to me about utter abstraction - in music or otherwise - and this definitely nails the head on the hit. I doubt I'll be listening to this a great deal, but stuff like this, Don Cherry and John Applegate's Human Music, Chamberpot's s/t, and other formless free improv units are things I like to visit the same way as I do with French New Wave horror films and other brutally disturbing, humorless bunk like that: more as an experience than something to put on repeat.
Okay yeah, so I might actually be less trite talking about this stuff drunk.
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