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Eric Harvey: Mark Richardson’s ‘A Proposed New Year's Resolution for Music Critics’ (marathonpacks)
Eric Harvey: Mark Richardson’s ‘A Proposed New Year's Resolution for Music Critics’ (marathonpacks)
‘Modern societies don’t advance if they don’t create new things. So human beings start asking new questions when they encounter a cultural object or idea: what about this can I identify (i.e. what about it is “old”), and what aspects of it are new (i.e. novel enough to create demand for it)?’ ‘The questions arise: What specific aspects of the past are appropriate fodder for new hybridizations, or what methods of hybridization are privileged over others? Most importantly, why is this?’
·marathonpacks.tumblr.com·
Eric Harvey: Mark Richardson’s ‘A Proposed New Year's Resolution for Music Critics’ (marathonpacks)
Topspin Media: The Unbundling (and Re-Bundling) of Music
Topspin Media: The Unbundling (and Re-Bundling) of Music
How music became ‘un-bundled’ from CDs as consumers downloaded the one or two songs they actually wanted, and how direct-to-fan sales have re-bundled that music into not just CDs but digital releases, vinyl, and every manner of special package imaginable. “As artists get their arms around all their rights and build direct relationships with their fans we’re seeing artists’ output RE-BUNDLED into higher value packages and average revenue per transaction greater than those delivered by the Compact Disc.”
·topspinmedia.com·
Topspin Media: The Unbundling (and Re-Bundling) of Music
seedy
seedy
This Tumblr posts PDFs of poetry anthologies and books of cultural writing and other classic texts, bits of important historical music-related interviews, old, rare, or otherwise important or interesting records, etc. Would that I had the time to take in everything listed here.
·c-d.tumblr.com·
seedy
Esquire: How LCD Soundsystem Changed Music
Esquire: How LCD Soundsystem Changed Music
Good oral history. This quote is a good takeaway: "I think the thing I've really learned from James is a) patience, b) only work with people you love, and c) be very, very, very, very stubborn about everything. Because when you're capable and able to say no to stuff, when you're capable of writing your own story and being very adamant about the way that you're portrayed or the way that your records are made, people respond to it."
·esquire.com·
Esquire: How LCD Soundsystem Changed Music
The A.V. Club: An open letter to LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, from one critic to another
The A.V. Club: An open letter to LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, from one critic to another
“Like a lot of music critics, I feel a special kinship with you, because we are you. Or, rather, you are a better, smarter version of us. The relationship music critics have with you is similar to what film critics have with Quentin Tarantino, who, like you, started out as a know-it-all fan who, unlike most critics, took all the trivial, microscopic specificities he absorbed from every corner of his fan experience and found a way to create something new with it. But even if you guys are big-shot artists now, you’re also still critics at heart; you did it like Godard, critiquing art by making better art. Any time you’d take pains to find just the right detail to make a track really snap—a crisp snare, a squiggly synth, a warmly bouncing bassline—you were both nodding to the records you felt did it correctly, while also making an argument against the relatively chilly, slapdash way music is made in the point-and-click ProTools era. They say writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but your records actually were architecture, built from the spare parts of closely observed sounds you deconstructed and recontextualized from countless songs in your impeccably curated collection.”
·avclub.com·
The A.V. Club: An open letter to LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, from one critic to another
Pitchfork: Odd Future Mixtapes
Pitchfork: Odd Future Mixtapes
“A year ago, when nobody knew who they were, the demonic L.A. skate-rat rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All cranked out music at an alarming rate. And now that nobody will shut up about them, they’re still doing the same thing. Since 2008, Odd Future have released no fewer than 12 full-length albums, as well as assorted between-releases singles — all available free on their Tumblr. Some of those releases are brilliant, paradigm-shifting works of violent vision. Others are entirely forgettable. Almost all of them are worth your hard-drive real estate, and almost all of them will confound you in one way or another. Below, you'll find a guide to every single one of those albums, from their introductory 2008 ‘The Odd Future Tape’ to Frank Ocean’s ‘Nostalgia, Ultra.’, the experimental R&B tape that the crew released just a few weeks ago.”
·pitchfork.com·
Pitchfork: Odd Future Mixtapes
PopMatters: The Art of Falling Apart: ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’—Separated at Birth
PopMatters: The Art of Falling Apart: ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’—Separated at Birth
“Both albums are like brainwashing, insular symphonies to a painfully reactive public awareness. The music doesn’t drive outward but, instead, falls inward, bouncing along the various fractured feelings of its singer and his mates. While ‘The National Anthem’ may suggest that ‘everyone is so near/everyone has got the fear’, the reality is that Yorke feels like a misidentified Pied Piper, the ‘rats and kids follow me out of town’ tenets of the Kid A title track pleading his case to be set free. This could be the main reason why the reaction to its release was so incredibly strong. Newness and novelty can help, but there is more to it than a differing direction. Kid A sounds like the start of a surreal psychological dissertation. Amnesiac occasionally comes across as whining.”
·popmatters.com·
PopMatters: The Art of Falling Apart: ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’—Separated at Birth
The Guardian: The hip-hop heritage society
The Guardian: The hip-hop heritage society
On the difficulty of preserving and reissuing classical hip-hop records. "The job that falls to those seeking to preserve hip-hop's past remains complex. Those doing the work need to know as much about copyright and contract law as they do about old Pete Rock B-sides, while a grounding in clinical psychology might help in dealing with the artists. It's a combination of specialisms few individuals possess, and it raises the question: just whose responsibility is it to curate the history of a culture?"
·guardian.co.uk·
The Guardian: The hip-hop heritage society
HIPSTERRUNOFF: The Memefication of Your Band
HIPSTERRUNOFF: The Memefication of Your Band
Sifting through HRO's sorta-haughty satire is worth it for the occasion post like this, where whoever Carles is gets tired of mocking teenagers and writes something true and intriguing about the state of the music industry and popular music culture (at least for the indie set).
·hipsterrunoff.com·
HIPSTERRUNOFF: The Memefication of Your Band
Disquiet: Steve Roden Found-Music MP3
Disquiet: Steve Roden Found-Music MP3
"Los Angeles-based sound artist Steve Roden" finds "a small plastic record album that he found inside another album" at a flea market. Sounds great. "the ghosts are with us, and they’re singing."
·disquiet.com·
Disquiet: Steve Roden Found-Music MP3
SynthMania: Famous Sounds
SynthMania: Famous Sounds
"'Famous sounds' are sounds that have been created or used by somebody, liked and then copied by many others, and thus earned a 'classic' status."
·synthmania.com·
SynthMania: Famous Sounds
Serge Musician's Tape, 1983
Serge Musician's Tape, 1983
"In 1983 the Serge Modular company produced a demo cassette featuring many artists using the Serge Modular synthesizer." Experimental electronic.
·mnmlnoise.com·
Serge Musician's Tape, 1983
Kiddie Records
Kiddie Records
"In 2005, Basic Hip Digital Oddio will feature an entire year of albums from the golden age of kiddie records, lovingly transferred from the original 78s and encoded to 192kbps MP3 format. That's one a week for 52 weeks!"
·whistlingrecords.com·
Kiddie Records
Phish breaks up
Phish breaks up
"We realized that after almost twenty-one years together we were faced with the opportunity to graciously step away in unison, as a group, united in our friendship and our feelings of gratitude."
·phish.com·
Phish breaks up