Radio this morning. Listen over the internet or whatever. I am talking about moral panics (if I can talk). I need to be there at 10am, but I am not sure when I am on, maybe 11:15am, maybe…
Massive adventures last night. Went from one side of the inner west of Sydney (the Sandringham for the Chris Gillespie EP launch) to the other side (Bar Broadway for Aleks + the Ramps). That is like further than train stations apart and I was walking. The exercise was good, plus it was awesome to find an open bottle shop along the way [at 11:00pm, wtf?] however my body is still in shock of having experienced two such completely different music scenes in the one night. I hope it recovers for being on the radio.
What did you think of Aleks and the Ramps? I saw them a couple of weeks ago at the Spanish Club and I was completely unprepared for the experience. I’d heard friends rave about how ‘fun’ they were to watch, and I wasn’t expecting the music to be as experimental and impenetrable as I found it. I couldn’t make out any lyrics and the song structures made no sense to me. Nor was I expecting the semi-possessed slam-dancing at the front.
Of course, I was in a terrible mood that night.
yeah, so know what you mean.
I am glad you had ‘fun’ in scare quotes. When I am alone and reading I sometimes like to pick at my toe nails, get it down to the quick. Playing with the quick is painful but strangely gratifying. Aleks and the Ramps is also painful but strangely gratifying. You don’t listen to the band at a gig so much as endure their performance.
Plus it was super weird coming from the other ep launch where Chris is a freak songsmith, and the lyrics and his singing are meant to make sense in a more conventional way. For example, listen to “M2 Cockatoo” on his myspace, awesomely crazy shit, or The Road to Tamworth which he wrote in tribute to a mate who died after being in a road accident driving back to his Tamworth-based girlfriend.
The ‘sense’ of Aleks + the Ramps emerges from their nonsense and intertextuality. “no se si es amor” is a case in point. It is a cool track, their most immediately successful song, only cause I can hear the original song, and hear what they are doing musically with all the different layers. It is another kind of iteration beyond sampling or the remix.
The rest of their songs are like musical accidents that through pure contingency happen to take on some conventions of popular music and which challenge one’s capacity for listening adequation. Not ‘is this music worthy to be listened to’, but ‘are you adequate to assemble sense from the complex layers of aural intrigue?’
Take “Dead but Dreaming” for example. The title could very well refer to the spectral living dead of the Spectacle-commodity that inhabits the phantasms of the seduced mainstream collective subconscious.
Lastly, purely as a stylistic genre thing, it seems as if this music/performance should be considered less a kind of post-rock or post-punk-camp-country or something and more post-video game soundtrack.
“Lastly, purely as a stylistic genre thing, it seems as if this music/performance should be considered less a kind of post-rock or post-punk-camp-country or something and more post-video game soundtrack.”
lol, either that or it’s crap. Hope yr radio thing did well. Let me know when I can come around and scam movies.
dude whenever! i’ll txt you