Thursday, March 29, 2007

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised


The Revolution will be on the Feedback Farm!

The Feedback Farmers have had it up to here with the situation, and last night they had an on-air protest to tell how they felt.

If you, too, are angry, fed up, exasperated, frustrated, or otherwise in a tizzy about what's going on, then chant while you click: DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! DOWNLOAD NOW! (28MB MP3)
i don't know if it has been mentioned before, so my apologies if it has, but I think
Warhol was pretty self-obsessed and this film just shows how much he wants others to think he's...evocative and intimidating. in my eyes, the film is more concerned with it's attack on the audience and the art in taking people's emotions and comfort levels to the extremes, and he did that, right? it is even more of an attack especially since cinema is usually seen by many people together, instead of alone by one. but yeah i won't lie, it was interesting to see human nature at it's rawest and most vulnerable state, especially when the angle coming horizontally from below made me feel like the viewer was on top of him.

Can Machines Make Love?

Artist: Pole
Album: Steingarten
Label: ~scape

Berlin producer Stefan Betke kicks the dub dancefloor up a notch with his latest full-length, emerging after a four-year hiatus since he released his self-titled album in 2003. This is his second long-player for his own ~scape label (R was released in 2001) and his welcome back after a year-long run on Mute records. Those of you bored by the dubstep and minimal dub scenes take note. Here, Betke departs further from the sparse crackles and dark thumps of his earlier work and the hip hop flirtation on his last album, now focusing more on sonic saturation and deep beat techniques. Distortion, hollow clicks, and static flashes are inter-woven among the booty-moving low end, transcending the typical minimal dub landscapes in a building wash of meticulous electronic tweaks, breaking through to something higher entirely. The mood is gentle and soothing, but still showcases enough awe-worthy bomb-drops to inspire entrancing dances. Down and dirty robot slow jams for love-making in the digital future, machine easy listening that still manages to warm even the coldest of cyborg hearts. The arrangements are pristine, brimming with bleeps and tinkles that float downstream on euphoric fuzz undercurrents and fluorescent pulses. Even Terminator’s showing off his new dance moves, and he’s looking to get laid.

-Cole-

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Bands Confuse Me

I originally wrote this post to be something that was to appear on the Nightlight News, but for some reason, a bolt of ganja dust changed my mind and spurred me on to share these thoughts on this forum. I figured I might get more of a response, which is what I am hoping for, because as the title of the post suggests, I am confused and could use some help. Nevertheless, as the text may suggest, the post was written under my guise as Nightlight booking dude, not as XYC dude. I am a dude, fur the record.
Hoorah!

Ambient Music is a term that was essentially coined by Brian Eno, which he defined in the liner notes of Music for Airports as "able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting". Well said Mr. Eno. And as the founder of ambient music, then I must defer to your intent when evaluating the claims of bands that play said "ambient" music. Cuz so many seem to want to attach that term to their genre/genre/genre/genre self-description.
When I look at their myspace page, I wonder, have they ever listened to Eno? Ever listened to Fripp and Eno? Cuz their drums and guitar pop rocks for radio play and shooting up the charts has no scrape of ambient to it at all. Or that scrape of ambient is so fleeting and cursory that it seems to ignore the explicit intent behind making ambient music. Rather than functioning as ignorable, interesting, and contemplative, their music is engaging, explicit in its message, and designed, perhaps deliberately, to take the listeners attention from what they were doing back into the music.
Take for instance some of these bands and their claims/entreaties:
Plea - "Ambient Indie Rock Help!!! - Mouth Movements play not one iota of ignorable music.
Claim - "We're a indie/ambient/rock band from Boston." - 28 Degrees Taurus tread a line between sweet and engaging, perhaps justifying a descriptor such as calm-inducing. But they stray often from the format with catchy vocals and lyrics, breaking any efforts on the part of the listener (me) to desist any engaged brain pattern and devolve into nothingness and meditation.
Claim - "creates sounds that could be called electronic, metal, prog, and ambient all at once." - Ok so it's slow and kinda boring, but Souvenir's Young America also builds to soloing and noodling crescendos so quickly that by the time I started developing some deep contemplation they burst into the bridge, shattering my time-peace. And then the next song is all hard and riffy.

My words may seem like needless nit-picking or "bitching" to some, but to me, these issues of band self-description hit home at a larger phenomenon of lack of genuine uunderstanding and artistic intent in music. I definitely prefer bands whose self-decriptions relate more feeling and instinct, and invoke less of a slashslashslash kind of tag. If a slash-genre-slash can be flippantly thrown around without real regard for or commitment to the style, in this case ambient music, then what does this say about the recording artist's bearing, persona, or band attitude?
The meat of the matter for me is in the decision to book the band or not, cuz after all, that's what I doos. SEE: For a club like Nightlight that has actively cultivated an enigmatic aura that eschews the norm in favor of experimentation and art, to support a band that misrepresents itself could cause an subterranean ghostly crisis of identity that sends ripples through our collective audience. Similarly, WXYC seeks to educate its listener on little known but highly respectable forms of music. If one's mission is to expose the community to forms of art that are unseen, unheard, and golden, then one ought to be working hard to preserve the meaning and substance of those mediums one supports. Like Ambient Music.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Feedback Farmers Harvest the Forbidden Fruit


Last night the Feedback Farmers took to the airwaves once again and took a bite out of the many tricky legal issues swirling around Apple, Inc. Underneath all the noise there was a moderately interesting discussion about Digital Rights Management, Free Culture, and the recent settlement of the long-running lawsuit with the Beatles' company Apple Corps Ltd.



The Farmers want to thank Erin Watson for stopping by and discussing the work of the local chapter of Free Culture, which she co-founded here at UNC.

Did you miss the show? You can legally download the programme here (30 MB MP3).