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Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Evidence that technology is making it increasingly difficult to have a sane, sensible relationship to space and time is everywhere. Consider the concept of "local music." Before recording, broadcast, and digital networking technology were available, all music was local music, and really, it still is. Even bands who stay on the road 24/7 are from somewhere. The concept of local bands would seem to imply that some bands live in outer space, and as far as I know, few musicians - barring Perry Farrell, Andre 3000, the RZA, a few others - can actually make that claim.
So when we talk about local music, we're talking about exposure, not geography. The Shins live in Portland (the Shins still live in Portland, right?), but they're hardly what you'd call a local band. There's a subtle edge to calling someone a local band - it doesn't mean they live somewhere, it means that their relevance is confined to a localized area. That there's a bit of an insult built into the concept of "local band" speaks to how thoroughly commodified music has become, as if success means spreading your product across as vast a network of strangers as possible, not engaging with your community at a hands-on level and enriching the lives of people you can see and touch and know.
After writing for nothing but national publications for a few years, I began to feel very estranged from anything that felt like a hands-on, organic culture. This can be hard to find in Chapel Hill at any rate, where the musical infrastructure is so petrified that the local culture can feel like something that grinds on with or without you - you can dip in and out of the scene at will, and there's a feeling that the club owners and touring bands and PR agencies will keep it running either way. Touring bands get booking preference, while local bands get shoved into Wednesday night showcases. And at a certain point I realized I was spending all this time thinking about the Arcade Fire, who I'm not even very interested in, while terrific bands were playing to no one down the street. Part of this was simply economic - there's obviously little money in writing about bands who aren't making any (or selling magazines with their cultural capital) themselves. And part of it was more like hypnosis; I found myself in a feedback loop of promotional cycles.
To rectify this imbalance, I started writing for the local weekly, which doens't pay very well, but has terrific editors and allowed me to have an economic and professional impetus to engage with local music again. I'm still interested in trawling the mirror-world of national music, but I needed something more down-to-earth, tactile, and unmediated to keep me sane. And in truth, North Carolina is a pretty great place for local music - now that we've finally put enough temporal distance between us and the Chapel Hill indie rock boom of the nineties, which made local music feel overdetermined and dead-horse-flogging for quite awhile, it seems as if the area's musical identity has finally loosened up again, and is producing fantastic bands in many different genres.
Today I'm starting a multi-part post highlighting some of the best music my local area has to offer. It won't be exhaustive - there are just too many bands - but I'm going to hit as many as I can. Some of these bands have a national foothold, some are virtually unknown outside of NC, and some are virtually unknown in NC - I'm using "local" in the most literal sense. It's less of an NC pride thing than a reminder, to myself and maybe to you, that culture can still happen on a human scale, should we choose to notice it. I'm still not going out to local shows as often as I could - it's not like when I was younger and had time to hang out in bars several nights per week, you know? - but I'm going when I can, and always listening to make sure I don't miss what's right in front of me.
IF BY "GAY" YOU MEAN "TOTALLY FREAKING AWESOME," THEN YEAH, I GUESS IT'S PRETTY GAY
Des Ark
Battle of the Beards
Lovitt : 2007
[Buy It]
Come to think of it, one of the songs that hit me hardest last year was by a local band. Des Ark is from Durham, NC, fronted by singer/guitarist/songwriter/spitfire Aimee Argot. I risk repeating myself here - I already wrote about this song, two times. You might notice I've been flogging the Bright Eyes connection pretty hard. I should explain. When I was younger and full of hormones, I was way into Bright Eyes. Fevers & Mirrors and its predecessors just slayed me; Conor Oberst and I are about the same age and demographic and were weathering the same kinds of psychic storms at the same time. I loved how everything about his music spoke of urgency, from the raw arrangements to the overcooked lyrics to the thin pule that could suddenly swell into a terrible vibrato, the beauty that could give way to ugliness in the blink of an eye. Des Ark taps into that same kind of dark, naseous euphoria. Argot also has an awesome, towering vibrato, and a raw, percussive guitar style; the hard-bitten expletives and hair-raising strings just bittersweeten the deal.
ATTITUDE AND MIRRORS
The Nein
Luxury
Sonic Unyon : 2007
[Buy It]
I like dreamers, questers and searchers, which is why I like the band Liars so much. (I think I've said this before.) It's also why I was so stoked about Durham band The Nein's album Luxury. For some years the Nein have played heavy post-punk with necrotic patches of noise. They were a good band but there was always something tentative about them, like they were using big guitar riffs as a crutch to prop up their more academic experiments in rhythm and structure. One of the band members is someone I've corresponded with for some time, on topics from pop-criticism to John Cage, and so I know him as a searching intelligence; not a hit-seeker, but someone interested in exploring intellectual possibilities through sound. And Luxury felt like the record the Nein had always tip-toed around. For the first time, guitar riffs took a secondary position to sections of screwy dub and ambient sounds, as if the Nein had finally amassed the confidence necessary to take off the training wheels. The specter of the rock they once played haunts "Attitude and Mirrors" in the guise of the acoustic and electric guitar riffs floating through the industrial sound bed. An out of the wilderness, up to the mountain kind of record.
MEMO TO MYSELF
Dan Bryk
Lovers Leap
Scratchie : 2000
[Buy It]
Good ol' Dan Bryk. I've been trying to tell the world about this guy forever, here and here and here and elsewhere, but there've been tough breaks for Bryk. When his excellent album Lovers Leap came out in 2000, it got props from Christgau, among other valid entities. I got a promo copy of it and took it to Europe with me, where I listened to it in a rapturous daze for months. It was supposed to be released by Scratchie/Mercury, but Mercury dropped out, leaving the small indie label to do a small release on it's own. The album kind of disappeared. Bryk moved from Toronto to Chapel Hill shortly afterwards, and immigration troubles have kept him from releasing much music since then. These issues are starting to resolve, and hopefully, the long-delayed Lover's Leap reissue and the new album, Pop Psychology, with finally emerge and put an end to the absurdity of this guy still being a relative secret. He's a singer/songwriter in the classic Randy Newman sorta tradition: idiosyncratic, charismatic, classically inclined, a bit rough in the grain. He's a chubby guy who often sings about being chubby and liking chubby girls; a happily committed romantic nihilist. He's got a killer falsetto, a knack for indelible hooks, and a one-of-a-kind sensibility - a mixture of depressive cynicism, jaded wit, and maudlin earnestness. Bryk can put a line as meanly cutting as "You probably think that we touched souls/ All I did was touch you underneath your blouse" near one as touching as "I'd love to spend some time with you/ As soon as I don't need it for myself" and make it work, because there's no sense of artifice about the worldview in his lyrics - it's too odd and inconsistent to be anything but his. I love Dan Bryk because his music reminds me of the undying power of pop songcraft, even at times when my tastes are skewing abstract and obscure.
That's it for now, but next week, we'll look at three or four more NC acts of merit.Labels: brian, local music
posted by Brian
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