DJ SPOOKY THAT SUBLIMINAL KID'S SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER

You probably remember this. It’s a warm summer evening. The sun has barely disappeared over the horizon but the heat is not taking a break yet: there’s still all the stored energy in every objects that needs to be radiated. You’re lying on a picnic table outside and it is busily heating your vertebraes. Somewehere close by in the parking lot, some kids in a car are listening to music: you know it’s hip hop because you can’t make out the rap, but the signature beats are leaving their imprint in your ears. About a hundred feet from where you’re lying, the local arena is opened: some sporting summer event is happening inside; you can hear the cheers that come and go, like the crowd is breathing in unison. There’s some cheerful organ music also, but you only get the echoes of it and it sounds somewhat dreary and ominous. Further still, an open space church is celebrating the evening mass: the sound system amplifies the litany that a transient priest has come to recite. You take it all in and it fits beautifully together, a perfect summer evening weaved into a tapestry of quantum sound strings.

If you don’t remember, maybe all you need is a sitting with Paul D. Miller AKA Dj Spooky That Subliminal Kid’s SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER. Should shake those atavic memories awake.

This album has a special place in the evolution of ambient music. It’s one of the few landmark albums everyone should know about. It sits besides The KLF’s Chill Out, but I’ll reserve that one for another day. There’s Brian Eno: a lot of him is required listening. And there’s Dj Spooky.

Warp back to 1996. Nobody saw that coming. Washington DC is far from the cultural capitals of the world, and whatever happens in the music scene gets drowned by whatever happens on the national level: it is the presidential city par excellence, after all. So who’s listening to some obscure intellectual dj, who reads William Burroughs and Thomas Ligotti?

And then this album comes out. I remember the shock when I heard it the first time: back then, I was a huge fan of CBC’s Brave New Waves. Brent Bambury knew all about music, and he knew all about the music I liked, so I listened to his show with the blind trust of the faithful. One thing Bambury did that I especially loved was that he would always play a complete electronic album around 3 am. He’d present the artist at length, would expound on the meaning of the liner notes, and then let the music do the talking for an hour. Radio the way it should be done. So that night, he presented Paul D. Miller, and there was a lot of liner notes to read from (did I mention this dj is one heavily intellectual dude?). And then the intro to SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER came on. I had never heard anything like that music: a strange mix of hip hop beats and snippets of more than a few genres, all heavily layered with studio effects, giving a sense of place to the whole, like you heard the reverb of an alien hall in some higher dimension. And the titles, suitably science-fictionesque for my pleasure, a dj after my heart (The Vengeance Of Galaxy 5, Hologrammic Dub, Anansi Abstrakt, all titles that would make great science fiction novels in their own right).

And the crowning moment of the album, the moment you know you will wait for anxiously every time you will listen to this album again: The Terran Invasion of Alpha Cantauri Year 2794. Another science fiction novel waiting to be written. But also a magnificent track: sounds vaguely reminiscent of a train station, heaving and humming slowly; suddenly, in the distance, Satie’s Gymnopédies costumed in the dubbest bass you can get an amp to sound. And then the beat starts. Bliss follows. Truly the high point of an otherwise plenty remarkable album.

I remember reading once about the american composer Charles Ives, that as a child he loved nothing more than to go on top of the church bell tower and listen to his father’s marching band, as other competing marching bands were going up and down nearby streets. The resulting cacophony was quite certainly formative to the musical ear of the composer. Listening to Paul D. Miller, we get the impression that he grew up in an appartment that was sandwiched between competing record stores, and that his very peculiar sound is the result. How lucky for us!

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MARILYN MANSON'S THE HIGH END OF LOW

I have to say I specifically enjoy watching the BBC series WALKING WITH DINOSAURS. It’s got action, it’s got drama, it’s got endearing characters (giant and mysterious scaly things that went extinct some 65 million years ago: what’s not to like?), in short, it’s truly fascinating. And the WALKING WITH... series has more volumes than just the dinos: prehistoric mammals, mysterious giants from before the cretaceous, it’s a monster party for the cryptozoologist that sleeps in all of us (or some of us at least...).

I’m not sure in which of these volumes, but there is a particularly poignant scene that I vividly remember. I think the character was some sort of huge carnivorous mammal. It was on some sea shore, hunting, lonely. The narrator, with the dramatic tones only BBC narrators can muster, explained that this intrepid hunter was the last of its kind, about to become extinct. The climate of the planet was on the move, shifting in a way that was not favorable to this and other species. The animal, busily trying to break some sort of huge sea turtle, would never mate, for whatever life span it had left. Unbeknownst to itself: the very last one.

When I think of Marilyn Manson, I am reminded of that tragic mammal. For he is, after all, the last of his kind: theatrical glam rockers are a thing of the past, nearly extinct despite all their stage tricks. Dita Von Teese was maybe a mate for his very unique species, but he divorced her, and there’s no one else I can see who would have the genes to save that animal.

And when I listen to his latest album, THE HIGH END OF LOW, I am reminded of the sad scream of that nearly extinct mammal, all those millions of years ago.

His previous delivery had charmed me for its expressive, if somewhat childish, trailer-park-vampire sound. There was something almost hillbilly in the way the guitars wailed. Darkly so, and more grotesque than any of Manson’s previous offerings. I enjoyed that, it was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise progressively tedious discography. (THE GOLDEN AGE OF GROTESQUE and HOLY WOOD didn’t lack for interesting moments, but there was nothing that we hadn’t heard him sing before, and with more conviction.) This new album, with the return of Twiggy Ramirez on the guitar and Chris Vrenna of Tweaker fame on keyboards, gives us little more than a return to his previous heavy-electro-metal beats, an approach that is tired at best and that he doesn’t much renew beyond a few numbers that almost sound like outtakes from EAT ME, DRINK ME, only with more of the studio elements that created his biggest successes.

Don’t get me wrong. This is still some good shit. It’s always fun to watch our favorite techno-ghoul play shock-the-christians. How can I not smirk when I hear Marilyn singing: «Everyone will come, everyone will come to my funeral - To make sure that I stay dead»? It’s always fun to see the glam-rocker in action. He’s still doomed, condemned as a musical figure straight from a twentieth century that gets further and further away by the minute.

It may not be the album I wished for. But it’s the latest of a near extinct species. So it’s got archeological value as well!

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ARE YOU PART OF THE EASTERN STANDARD TRIBE?

Last weekend was a long one here, and I took some time to catch up on some accumulated reading. One item that had been standing in my inbox for more than a year was an e-mail serialization of Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe. I got that through DailyLit, a website that keeps a growing library of material ready to be consulted one e-mail at a time.

Now, when I registered for the free service, I figured it would be neat, reading the story on lost time here and there without actually noticing that you’re progressing; eventually, you’re finished and that almost comes as a suprise. But a few personnal things fell through and I found myself with very little time for e-mails for a few months. So the serialization stayed, neatly tucked away in a secret corner of my Google account, waiting for me to remember it was there.

Good thing I finally did, because it really is an awesome story. As usual, the tech ideas are clever, the story is engaging and the voice is dynamic, all qualities I always enjoy in Doctorow’s stories. There’s also a thinly disguised plea for free culture, but then what else can we expect from the author of Little Brother? Maybe there was a little too much of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest sprinkled in for my taste, but I’m all right with being a little annoyed at the familiar surroundings - a sizable portion of the text is told from the view point of an inmate in a mental facility; still, the unique voice of the narration works well at avoiding the traps that this setting could bring.

The point being: I enjoyed the story, enough so that I my next action after I was done with the last e-mail, I decided to go back to DailyLit and see what else was available.

Turns out the service has vastly improved while I wasn’t looking. The selection of CC licensed works and public domain books is pretty great. You can now manage the frequency of the installments on a direct basis; using a simple link on the e-mail, you immediately receive the next episode; perfect for those moments where you find yourself with some unexpected free time.

So I decided to start Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town. Why stop a good thing, you know?

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