#music

Playing around with the new Reaktor 6. I don't know why I ended up with a techno beat.

Some musical acts who get long in the tooth sustain themselves through constant reinvention, like David Bowie. Others, like Iron Maiden, keep their old hits from sounding tired by pushing themselves to make great new music. And plenty (Springsteen, the Stones) keep flying by on the strength of their live performance regardless of the weakness of their current output. Kraftwerk manage to grab the best parts of all of these by continually refreshing their classic music.

We traveled all the way to Detroit for only a long weekend, and it was basically just to see Kraftwerk. How many more tours do Ralf Hutter and the gang have in them? I don't want to be on the wrong end of that question, having never seen them. Pete told me their shows were boring. Kris told me whatever, the visuals are good and you know all the songs. This is pretty right-on. The visuals, this time in 3D, were a fantastic future-retro mix of graphics and video all completely synced with the tunes.

They started with zero buildup, launching into "Numbers" so fast that much of the theater hadn't gotten seated. They updated the beat that launched a million electro singles into a super powerful, booming dance assault. Apparently Kraftwerk's people enter a venue, evaluate it, and supplement the sound system wherever necessary. And it shows. The sound was powerful but pristine.

The process of updating the songs began with The Mix, but they now sound even better — the beats have The Mix's dancefloor focus but the sounds and synths feel more like ultra-high-fidelity versions of the originals.

Here's a not-great but not-distorted phone clip of "Radioactivity," possibly the most dramatic update.

Ironically, the largest response came for the beginning of the second set, "The Robots." It's ironic because the applause was for the old-school Kraftwerk "robot" mannequins, who took the stage instead of the members. The rest of the time, the group wore uniforms I can only describe as Tron-like, which lit up to correspond with each song's projections.

Overall, a great show and a great classic Detroit venue to see it. It makes an all-day trek with a near-3-year-old just about worth it.

When I was in high school, I had a friend who shrugged off the idea of Wire records after 154, because they "started doing techno or something." That's narrow and inaccurate, but that's how we thought. And anyway, though they used synths the music was more like a left-field pop — and the "p" word is even more damning than "techno."

The inspiration for my friend's comment, though, may have been a "single" that Wire put out during their second phase. The song is "Drill," from The Ideal Copy. It features no less than 9 different reworkings, remixes, and live performances of the song that often bear no resemblance to the original. It's a fun release that hangs alright on its own because the versions are all different. Here's one.

Some of the versions are very industrial in tone, with processed vocals, textures made of samples, heavy programmed beats, and an almost-danceable pulse.

If you knew me at the time I owned the cassette, you were probably subjected to The Drill repeatedly in my Dodge Spirit. I apologize, but only a little.

I stumbled on this a while back when I was big on reading mp3 blogs. In the few years since I regularly trawled those sites for the mysterious and bizarre gems they posted, many of the really sought-after pieces have been reissued.

For the “Rock In Opposition (R.I.O.)” bands of the 70s, King Crimson was just too simple and pop-oriented. R.I.O. were progressive rock bands from England and Europe who packed so much complexity into their music that the standard prog fans wouldn’t touch them. Their audience consisted of avant weirdos, industrial heads, and fans of more experimental stuff, and their membership was as varied as Henry Cow and This Heat.

Belgian chamber rock band Univers Zero were one of the most intense R.I.O. groups, and Heresie is the best and darkest of their work. It’s sonically dissonant and very, very oppressive sounding in both its density of notes and darkness of mood. Perfect lights-off, scare-yourself music.

On the way to work this morning, I heard Op Ivy's "Bad Town," and I realized two things:

1. It is objectively the worst song on Energy.
2. Tim Armstrong's obsession with both rap and violence, which came to a head with his and Travis Barker's awful group the Transplants, is nothing new.

Not going anywhere with that. Just thinking.

This weekend I was buying cables in Guitar Center and they had just the most terrible sounds going in the pro audio department, maybe even worse than the sounds that are always coming out of the guitar department.

It was a fairly generic female singer doing some kind of singer-songwriter, almost-pop ballad stuff, but over the most obnoxious Skrillex-style American dubstep.

I like James Blake but I just can’t imagine anything more incongruous than the blaring wub-wub with the mellow vocals, it’s like a DJ randomly mixing two records with no regard to content.

Does anyone have any idea what this is so I can avoid it in the future?

Life since the move is mostly an endless series of boxes, but I have managed to get myself embroiled in one of the weirdest artistic situations of my almost 20 years of playing music.

I'd seen the Make-A-Band posters around town but hadn't really given much thought to what it even was. Erika saw an ad in the Eugene Weekly and convinced me that I was sufficiently musical and lacking in dignity to do it. So what is it? Basically, a bunch of musicians audition for 6 producers, who pick them to form 6 bands. The bands then perform in a competition.

The producers are local studio owners, record engineers, and (in the case of the ones who picked me) people in the business of video game scoring. The auditions are 3 minutes. And the competition is downtown, outdoors, for the whole damn ass world to see.

Even with Sharks, I don't feel like I ever took traditional, above-ground routes to musical performance and networking. It was always the DIY, punk rock thing — which of course in Austin is the only way anybody manages because it's a "who you know" situation and I've rarely known anything or anybody. But regardless of how this thing turns out, I've met some like-minded people and many of the folks making the Eugene music scene tick.

So here's the band, Gravity Nocturne. We're doing a jazzy, updated take on trip-hop. We're also all like 21, except me.

Don't worry, I'll be back to playing for nobody soon.