The New Era of Pop Exclusitvity

Everyone hates an exclusive club, unless they’re asked to join or can somehow force themselves in. For a long time, the Internet has operated in direct opposition to such exclusivity-—it’s a free-for-all, where user generated content is king, and anyone with a half-realized idea can easily foist themselves onto the public for five seconds and then shrink back into anonymity. This way of working hasn’t been kind to the music industry, which once thrived on the removed other-ness of pop idols. Those kids in the '70s who spoke in awe-struck tones about David Bowie coming from another planet now seem impossibly naïve, their wide-eyed wonder replaced with an all-knowing savvy, because we’ve all been drawn so much closer to the people whose art has inspired us. We can even interact with many of them directly via MySpace, Twitter, Facebook or [insert name of preferred social networking tool here].

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Alex Chilton R.I.P.

The sudden death of Alex Chilton on Thursday (March 18) has sparked an outpouring of grief from the music community, with many friends, acquaintances and fans paying warm tribute to a man who has touched most of our lives at some point. Chilton was certainly a difficult man and a willful contrarian, but he didn’t need to speak to us through interviews or conversation—his deeply personal, sad, touching and sometimes funny songs did all the work for him.

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Rob Swift - The Architect: Review

In the hands of Queens native Rob Swift, the master turntablist who has collaborated with everyone from Blue Man Group to Mike Patton, hip-hop is a pliable tool, a genre to be warped and moulded and parlayed into a musical force shorn of recognisable boundaries. He first tumbled into Patton’s orbit as a member of the X- Ecutioners, who went into battle with the singer on General Patton vs. The X-Ecutioners in 2005, and has since toured with Peeping Tom. The Architect firms up that relationship by becoming Swift’s first solo release on Patton’s Ipecac label, which gives him a chance to pull deep from his bottomless pit of beats and move away from his jazz-y roots, instead forcing a symbiotic relationship between the worlds of hip-hop and classical music.

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Led Er Est - Dust on Common: Review

Listening to this album by Led Er Est, the synth-happy New York trio of Shawn NoEQ, Samuel Kklovenhoof and the disappointingly named Owen Stokes, it’s clear that ‘cold wave’ is something of a misnomer as a rote descriptor to attach to their music. Dust On Common is anything but cold. It’s full of the warm rush of analog keyboard, the very-human vocal stylings of Kklovenhoof, and a giddy love of song structure. If Pieter Schoolwerth’s Wierd label and club, which are releasing this record, have any burgeoning stars in their midsts, it’s in the shape of Led Er Est, who manage to filter their avant impulses (Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire) through a clear and demonstrable affinity for the destroyed-love pop of Soft Cell and the Human League.

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Loscil - Endless Falls: Review

Scott Morgan is one of those rare musicians who fully grasps the notion that it’s as much about what you don’t play as what you do. This is his fifth album as Loscil, which continues to plunder the same vein of chilly ambient electronica as his previous efforts. This is music designed to be played loud, preferably with ears hermetically sealed in high quality headphones, so listeners can really submerge themselves in all the subtle textures and nuances of Morgan’s recordings. Like much of Loscil’s output, it’s often difficult to detect a human hand at work on Endless Falls. This is the sound of isolated machine noise hollowed out and whittled down to its fragile essence, a set of songs left teetering on the brink of actually existing at all, a sort of ghostly paean to the beauty found on the cusp of complete silence.

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Fur - Witches: Review

The internet isn’t a great harvester of scenes. In the past, bands balked at being associated with other likeminded artists due to an intrinsic desire to stand alone, to make something special, that didn’t bear all the hallmarks and trappings of anyone else’s work. But secretly, they knew that riding a popular wave, whether it was grunge or Britpop or some other fly-by-night scene du jour, was just about the best thing that ever happened to them. Scenes help people turn a blind eye to the paucity of original thought in most music, to allow all the ne’er-do-wells a chance to hitch a ride on the bandwagon until it falls apart and they go back to work in banks or pet shops or real estate.

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Cluster- Qua: Review

It’s unlikely any contemporary band would be able to navigate the same Byzantine career turns that Krautrock legends Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius have mapped out over the years. This will be the sixth decade in which they’ve operated as Cluster, or Kluster, as they were originally known. They began with a record deal struck with a religious group who insisted some appropriate sermonizing was included on their recordings, to which Roedelius and Moebius respectfully agreed, then took in collaborations with Brian Eno, Holger Czukay and Michael Rother (in their Harmonia guise) along the way. The third part of the original Cluster triumvirate, Conny Plank, is sadly no longer with us, but the two core members have soldiered on to record Qua, their first album in over a decade, released in the year that the sprightly Roedelius will celebrate his 76th birthday.

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