Backstage at Clap Your Hands Say Yeah last Tuesday.
Hunters and collectors all come out at night.
But why the rush to judgement on Landed? Two albums after the departure of CAN’s native shaman Damo Suzuki, CAN evolved into man machines, refining their entrancing psychedelia with stereo fixes. Can the criticism reduced to a question of novelty that favors the organic and romantic over the calculated advances the band made in this period?
Maybe Landed is a watershed moment for CAN for all the wrong reasons. Holger Czukay engineered the record on a 16 track, a first for the band, giving their multilayered ideas and compositions more separation and clarity. Few bands can boast as much musicological sophistication as CAN, but it’s not until Landed that their technology catches up with their abilities.
As CAN’s story unfolds in their performance DVD, the images of each member in gargantuan headphones are reassuring and disorienting: astronauts need their spacesuits to live, don’t they?
CAN — “Red Hot Indians”
Sympathy for the Middle Man
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.
- Hunter Thompson
It’s a question of extreme pricing and sale. If there is no indie retail to help build new bands, we are left with MySpace, the unfiltered Internet, and ad/TV/movie placement to introduce people to new bands. Retail would be left to the Best Buy/Starbucks axis. That’s not too appealing of a scenario to me.
- Patrick Monaghan, President, CTD, Ltd.
Is there no alternative? The parasite’s only fear is the death of its host. Mairead Case’s article at Pitchfork on Best Buy’s loss leader maneuvers illustrates how desperate the record industry has become in recent years. But as I mouthed off at Her Jazz, not only is there a bigger picture, there are many pictures.
Emperor, no clothes, you can sort out the rest.
A controversy? It seems almost a shame that AIDS Wolf would get such a cursory dismissal considering the rich, contentious discussion that brought Jessica Hopper and Drew Daniel into the mix. Maybe the significance of invoking AIDS as a half-baked noise concept wasn’t worth the attention; consider that teaching ABC’s hasn’t made America more literate (via NPR).
Would they be less offensive without a publicist (tree, forest, no one around)? To what extent does a band’s flippancy/absurdity/whathaveyou reflect the general malaise/ignorance/handwringing charitable spirit/willful hatred of affected populations?
To some extent, AIDS gets treated today as though it were an ’80’s artifact — a cultural problem and locus of shame and pity rather than a scientific and medical one. This demonstrates the overwhelming rhetorical success of the Reagan continuum — a focus on family, personal responsibility and the importance of the individual over everything else. In many respects Reagan’s entered his twenty-sixth year in office, but this just isn’t semiotics. It’s big pharma and insurance licking their chops, commodifying illness, bullying the FDA, and celebrating deregulation in a grotesque orgy of suffering. (Dante’s Divine Comedy has been on my mind a lot lately. So has Boccaccio, but that’s almost all the time.)
Where to begin? Surely not with these jokers. They’re Canadian! They have single-payer! That’s not very Dickensian noise, right?
(Keep in mind that Greil Marcus pointed out in Lipstick Traces that Richard Huelsenbeck once told an audience at Cabaret Voltaire that there wasn’t enough suffering, and German WWI vets, disfigured by the fighting and mustard gas, were in attendance. Kinda makes Johnny Rotten and Malcolm McLaren seem a little pre-school by comparison.)
AIDS Wolf — “Vampire King”
It’s complicated.
Things are hectic. This is cryptic. Contemplate Malevich’s Glittering Grinder and Kafka’s torture machine in “In the Penal Colony”. There’s a perverse serenity there, something Foucaultian, something Marxian and more than just a little Weberian. In short, it’s heavy and work-related.
Behold…the Arctopus — “PAINcave”
Parts & Labor — “Timeline”