Too Many Internets

I have a confession to make: I’ve never been all that into Patrick Wolf. Among my friends, there are die-hard worshipers, those who hold him in general disdain, and plenty who just like it when he pops up on iTunes DJ.

(Total aside: why was that renamed? Party Mix was a perfectly informative title for that function. Is it all that enhanced by pretending iTunes now has agency in selecting the order? Isn’t that was Genius is for?)

For my part, I’ve always been something of a poseur. I liked a couple of his tracks well enough, but I couldn’t make it all the way through many, many tracks. But whenever he came up in conversation with other indiephiles, I was the fawning fanboy. After all, it was a story that I could certainly get behind: Wolf as some gay, self-taught street kid musical prodigy, who did whatever the hell he felt like in service to his art. I wanted to get behind that, I wanted to obsess over his albums. I certainly wore out a few tracks…To The Lighthouse and A Boy Like Me on Lycanthropy and then…well I didn’t really listen to anything else until The Magic Position, which was really the only song I listened to on that whole album.

I think a large part of it is, for all of my teenage angst in high school, I’ve never really been a fan of emo music. It was a wildly underrepresented genre in my mp3 collection and I wasn’t even clued in to Wolf until college. For all the interesting things that he does musically, his genius productions and – adventurous – fashions, I can’t really connect to his themes. “The Magic Position” was very different compared to the rest of his body of work, and I completely wore the track out. But after its fantastic eponymous opening, everything went back to brooding on that album, if I recall correctly (and please correct me if you disagree!).

All this to say: I haven’t listened to Patrick Wolf in a while and I didn’t listen all that closely at the time. But I want to show you a music video that I’m very excited about – it’s for a newer song called “Hard Times”:

It’s directed by Ace Norton who has worked with a number of other indie darlings, and to whom Wolf refers, “[he is] the Michel Gondry of my generation.” I’m definitely going to be keeping my eye out for him, if only because I’m in love with the visuals above.

Because, really, I’m not feeling clued in to the link between song message and video. What is it that ties together working hard through tough economic times and sometimes being a wildly fluorescing drum player (or paint thrower)? Then again, who cares? It looks damn cool.

And, for what it’s worth, I am hopelessly in love with Wolf’s friend and sometime concertmate Owen Pallet, also known as Final Fantasy.

steven Optico-aural Synergy black light, music, video

As I was saying the other day, I don’t do too well when it comes to understanding what’s going on in a song. The following Kelley Polar song is a great example of this.

See, Kelley Polar is a favorite musician of mine. He creates incredibly tight, brilliantly layered neo-disco tracks, which most of the time are decently deep philosophical musings, or use scientific concepts as themes. His debut album (the cover image of which was a photograph of the Pillars of Creation) takes a lot of its inspiration from staring out into space. It features songs entitled, “Cosmological Constancy,” “Matter into Energy,” and, “Black Hole;” the first opens with the line, “All the beauty of the velvet sky above.” As you might imagine, this album and I got along rather well, what with my being an astrophysicist with expansive musical tastes.

I enjoy his sophomore album (I Need You to Hold on While the Sky is Falling) even more. Before I even saw the track listing, I delighted myself by realizing that the second song was about Zeno’s paradox (the song is titled, “Zeno of Elea”). I wanted to share the entire album with many of my friends, but wanted to make sure I started with songs that were easily accessible and distinctly Kelley Polar.

One such track was, “Chrysanthemum,” which was also conveniently available on his myspace profile. The only problem was that it seemed to be about murdering lots of people… and I couldn’t really suss out any motivation or causes of death, just making a, “chrysanthemum of everybody’s head.” Then I caught the music video for the song and everything made sense:

[I've embedded the youtube version of the video out of ease/accessibility, but highly recommend watching it in higher resolution at the creator's, Marco Cibola, website.]

Now, I feel a little silly for not catching the painfully obvious; “two atoms kiss / what a funny valentine,” after all. Still, if I was forced to learn from this beautifully simple video, with its striking, clean linework and illustrations, obviously informed by the ’50s, well, I’m pretty happy with that. And, anyway, it’s another song to add to my collection of, “Songs I understand, now.”

If you enjoyed that, I strongly encourage you to seek out the rest of Polar’s work. I mean, he’s a virtuoso who was kicked out of Julliard for starting a riot at his thesis recital. It’s pretty rad.

steven Optico-aural Synergy music

I don’t plan on doing this very often, but I need to gush about a material thing for a moment. Namely, my totally kick-ass headphones that I was able to pick up after Mid-Winter Gift Exchange: my Koss PortaPro SomethingSomething Model. I apparently can’t be bothered to look up their exact specifications, except that I ended up doing just that after typing the comma. Get this, the “Model Number” is apparently just writing PORTAPRO. “We don’t need numbers for our inventory, just give everything an all-caps name!”

What was I saying?

Oh yes, I love these headphones. Let me tell you why.

I’ve never been all that capable of discerning the lyrical meanings of songs. I love music, but I often have absolutely no idea what’s being said, much less what’s trying to be said using those words I can’t make out. Over the years, I’ve learned to just treat listening to the voice as listening to an instrument: if the consequences of the structural form and diction are that they sound nice and complement the other melodies and rhythms, I’m a happy, happy camper. Sung syllables are pretty much just sort of another set of notes to me.

Never mind that I end up with vague notions that “On the Bus Mall” is about two brothers, hanging out in Buchnell, or something. There were even songs that I could generally sing along with, though it was really more of a singing mumble. A sanglemum, as it were, though a particular example currently escapes me.

I had settled into this arrangement, figuring it was something with my ears, combined with a general disdain for lyrics websites. Then I got my new headphones.

My weirdly retro-styled headphones:

Check out that chrome and baby blue!

which can sort of pinch my hair sometimes and remind me that I’ve been meaning to get a haircut for a month.

But it’s always been very much worth it, because this is a pair of $40 headphones that produce brilliant, dynamic, crisp sounds. The bass thumps into my ear canal, the higher frequencies bright, easily distinguishable. Voices seem to float above or project from the euphony being presented.

I am frustrated that the particular example is escaping me right now, but these headphones have allowed me to turn the page as an appreciator of delicious harmonies. I was listening to a favorite song, a song that had been a favorite for years, that I would sing loudly when no one else was home, but that I would still have to sanglemum through at times. Then I listened to it in thee headphones, and I finally understood what was being said. It was revelatory.

And I think it takes a special pair of headphones to give you a moment like that.

steven The Rare Endorsement music, stuff

I recently had the great pleasure to see The Books in concert. The experience allows me to make many recommendations:

- If you are a fan of the idea of sound collages married with skillful musicianship, please seek out music by The Books. They are two wonderful gentlemen with wonderful ears, fingers, and senses of humor.

- If you live in or find yourself spending time in Boston, you could do worse than swinging by the Institute of Contemporary Arts. As my friend Gloria and I opined, “It’s everything that is best about modern architecture, in a really neat space.” Or something like that. It’s even better if you are at the ICA because you are seeing a show in their fantastic auditorium.

- If you are heading to the ICA, I recommend getting directions from at least a semi-native, since google maps are not yet three dimensional. Trying to get down to the service road from the Summer St. viaduct is not recommended.

Now please enjoy the video that accompanies my very favorite Books song as they are playing, that for ‘Take Time’:

Incidentally, this is one of 12 videos that were collected for their Playall DVD, some of which (as well as others!) are used in the background during their shows.

steven Optico-aural Synergy music