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Wednesday, January 13, 2010 I Love The Shit Out Of This Man, Forever And Always  Jeffrey Beaumont Life Hero David Lynch is at it again, not with a new film but an exploration of the America he loves so dearly in his "Interview Project" video series. Learn about the Interview Project from David here or go here directly to watch the videos of characters discovered across his world. Love this man. Labels: BEAUMONT, heroes, la cine, LYNCH, videos posted by Nihilist Loves Hate, Hates Everything at 1/13/2010 01:22:00 AM 1 comments Tuesday, April 14, 2009 David, I Heart You and Whatever You Do... And Moby... Well, You Too So, thanks to Logan for alerting me about this: today Pitchfork debuted a video for the lead single for the new Moby album (yeah yeah) and sure enough, it is an animation short directed by Beaumont life-supplier David Lynch (!!!). !!!!!. ... and the music part is acceptable. ?? Yeah, I know--it's like 3x WTF. But truly, wow. This would seem less wow-like if a variety of other things were true, like say, it was back in 2002 when people (sorta) cared about Moby and David Lynch still seemed theoretically active beyond weather reporting. But again, I repeat: this video is pretty cool and the Moby music seems decent (though perhaps I'm thinking of it as a soundtrack to a David Lynch film rather than a Lynch clip for a Moby song). Watch for yourself here: See? Not so bad. Moby explains a bit more about the album and how the video came about on his blog. Again, this to me continues to read as more WTF. To wit: i started working on the album about a year ago, and the creative impetus behind the record was hearing a david lynch speech at bafta, in the uk. david was talking about creativity, and to paraphrase, about how creativity in and of itself, and without market pressures, is fine and good. ...in making this record i wanted to focus on making something that i loved, without really being concerned about how it might be received by the marketplace.Notes on the three bolded parts: 1) ???? 2) haaaa!! i guess that's one way to look at it... 3) Durm? "Wait for Me", another track from the record? Does that mean Lynch is also doing ANOTHER video for the record, or did you just tease us accidentally by mixing up the song titles? Still, this pairing of Moby and Lynch though is less crazy than it may seem to anyone familiar with the lad, as he first made waves back in 1992 with the Twin Peaks-sampling "Go". I just gave "Go" a first listen in maybe eight years and it sounds like pretty dated, standard early 90s rave-house (mp3 below), but in '92 it was significant: pleasant, catchy, and Twin Peaks was still creepy and on the American brain. I never really got into "Go", as it sounded too "early 90s house" even when I first heard it about fourteen years ago (...!!!...fuckkkkk...), but I will admit that I actually went through a fervent and significant period of where I was quite invested in Moby and the music he made throughout the second half of the 90s. Ok, here's where it gets long. dum dum dum....  It all began in 1995 when I was nearly entering high school and decided that I was ready to escape my upstate hick trappings and fall in love with "new music". Armed with Rolling Stone and Columbia House subscriptions, obsessive tendencies, and a burgeoning David Lynch craving, I set out to track down new "atmospheric" electronic music, to open up my world and set my mind on fire. (seriously). This is the period I would pinpoint as the first significant "mature" development in my musical taste, and this maturity was carried forward by the discovery of five records which more or less changed everything for me: Moby, Everything Is Wrong; Aphex Twin, I Care Because You Do; Tricky, Maxinquaye; the Trainspotting soundtrack; and Aphex Twin, Richard D. James Album (US version). These five records, purchased between June 1995 and February 1997, were the most profound and jaw-dropping selections of music I had ever heard in my entire young life and, upon hearing them, my life was never again the same. With the benefit of hindsight, Richard D. James was probably the most significant to me of the group, both in that it is the "best" of them all and the one that I think most aggressively challenged me to consider the amazing possibilities of music and how I might go about understanding them. I also appreciated and respected I Care Because You Do for being strange, new and crazy (and I still am obsessed with closer "Next Heap With"), though it was too abrasive for me to ever "fall in love" with it. Maxinquaye, on the other hand, was arguably the most important of these records to me at the time***--I'm sure I've referred to it as "my favorite album" at some point or another during my life--and was responsible for a) teaching me what "cool" could really mean, b) rekindling my interest in hiphop, and c) providing my first soundtrack for young adult friction. And then, Trainspotting had perhaps the widest-spread effect as it made me obsessed with an entire country, culture, and history of music, including--wait for it--giving me my first real connection with David Bowie ("Golden Years"--a great Bowie deep cut for a first connection--appears). Bowie! Iggy Pop! Brit-pop! Techno! Fucking mind-blowing, all of it. And topping it off is Pulp's "Mile End", still hovering high in my "Top Whatever Songs of All-time" list. But then there is Everything Is Wrong, the one I found first and which got it all started.  Of these five pieces of music, Everything Is Wrong is the disc that I'm least likely to pull out and listen to for fun today, in 2009 (though I am listening to it now as I type this post). Additionally, it takes me no more than half a second to declare that it is easily the most dated and least weighty of the five--even including Trainspotting, of which 25% is mid 90s techno nonsense. And, taking it a step further, unlike the other four records, parts of Everything Is Wrong sounded cheesy and dated from the very first time I heard them. But yet... for various reasons, I think that for me Everything is Wrong is probably the most personally substantial of them all. To reference yesterday's discussion of different people's reactions to Roger Daltrey and Listzomania, what comes in play here is the unquantifiable impact of emotional and historical context on a person's experience. For me, what made Everything Is Wrong so significant to me was that a) it was my first exposure to the rapidly maturing field of experimental electronic music, b) it predated my awareness of and subsequent intense life impact on by Brian Eno (whose styles Moby has aped, emulated and followed, and, on a futurist level, used as platform to move beyond), c) its music ran an impressively wide range of sounds, genres and dynamics, d) it has many great, catchy tunes, and e) it made me feel incredibly cool for discovering something on my own that literally no one I knew had ever heard of The impact of all five of these points cannot be overstated, especially on an impressionable and experience-hungry 13 year old boy. At this point in my existence I was literally lusting after new life knowledge, particularly life knowledge that might help transport me beyond what I felt were depressingly constrictive confines of my upstate NY life. The sudden discovery of something profound and different, coupled with the understanding that it was due to my own newly attained agency that it had come it into my life, imbued that discovery with magical power unique to anything in the world. So what, then, of Everything Is Wrong specifically? What worked about this record that made me just "get" it so much? For starters, it is HELLA dramatic. Lots of early-to-mid 90s dance music sounded dramatic, but in a way that I found to be primarily cheesy and unearned. Everything Is Wrong, however, had a kind of intensely satisfying emotive bombast that I'd only previously experienced through rock music--and suddenly hearing it filtered through the technicolor hi-fi of richly textured electronics was sort of mind-blowing. Additionally, not only did Moby hit emotional highs with me, but he also showed restraint while doing so: sure, numbers like "I'm Feeling So Real" and "Everytime You Touch Me" are over-the-top melodrama--high bpm disco for kids tuned to the fast speeds of punk and the e-love of house--but on Everything Is Wrong, Moby balances them out by slowing things down with beautiful, contemplative piano compositions like "Hymn", "God Moving Over The Face Of The Waters", and "When It's Cold I'd Like to Die". It was these tracks that impressed me--yes, the track titles tell you enough to know that they too are over-the-top, but they were truly unlike any other music I had heard at that point in my life. I was an eager but sad and lonely boy, trying to learn the ropes of a world that seemed cruel and confusing but also filled with promise, and these songs were elegant, futuristic lovenotes that shot straight into my heart. Curiously--or perhaps appropriately, I guess--my love affair with Moby only lasted a few years, as I began to lose interest in him at the precise moment that rest of the world was finally made aware of his existence with the release of Play in 1999. While the mainstream audience-at-large (now conditioned to consider "electronica" after a few years of Next Big Thingism") was captivated by his "whoa! sampling old black people" techniques, those songs on that album felt excruciately unnatural and inorganic to me. I had grown to love the man enough to stand by the man through the appreciatable-but-kind-of terrible Animal Rights$$$$, an album that abandoned dance music entirely for a record of strangely alternating "hardcore" and "ambient" tracks, and I spent money and energy tracking down his earlier work (Moby and Ambient, in particular). But by the time Play hit made waves, I had moved on. But to close and get back to what matters: I can't say that in 2009 Everything Is Wrong stands tall with those other five records--it absolutely does not. And I can't even say that were I twenty-six in 1995 that it would have stood as tall then either--I was thirteen and everything was still new. But: some of those songs still sound as beautiful to me now as they did so many years ago. They are without doubt "special" and I will cherish them forever, as music and has footnotes on the story of my life. Listen: Moby - "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters", from Everything Is Wrong Moby - "Hymn", from Everything Is Wrong Moby - "When It's Cold I'd Like to Die", from Everything Is Wrong Moby - "Go (Radio Edit)", from Go EP Moby - "That's When I Reach For My Revolver", from Animal Rights ------- The Days Ahead I have to say that writing about all of this makes me yearn for the days when I could read and read about a record and still have no idea what to expect before I put it on--and then after listening, have little to no past experience-informing data to swarm my thoughts and impressions to tell me what it sounded like, who it referenced and "what it meant". The days when I could hear a record and think of nothing but the record itself. I read the following passage in an article in the NYT today on Mike Nichols and his upcoming retrospective at the MOMA that is germane to this line of thought: Nichols also doesn't listen much anymore to his classical record collection.Someday, perhaps, I too I suppose I might reach this point, when I have so exhausted and overstimulated my ears so that nothing will sound richer than the tone poems of natural life. A part of me fears these days but the rest of me just accepts them for what they are, life being lived as it must. --------------- NOTES: ***--Weirdly enough, I did not get into Portishead's Dummy at this time or through this album. Despite coming out a few months before Maxinquaye, it was 1995 and I was in eighth grade and lived in upstate NY, so these kinds of connections were neither instant nor obvious. It wasn't until summer '97 when I finally heard Dummy, and my only memory of the experience was that I exclaimed to my friend Pete at the album's conclusion that, "Hey! This is a Tricky song!" as "Glory Box" came on (it shares the same Isaac Hayes "Ike's Rap II" sample as Maxinquaye's "Hell Is Round the Corner"). This anecdote is mostly amusing to me in that i'm absolutely sure that had I discovered and enjoyed either one of these records in 2009 or even 2001, the other would have come to me immediately rather than years later. $$$$--Beyond having a few of those syrupy dark ambient instrumentals that I love so much, Animal Rights is at the very least memorable for its cover of the Mission of Burma song "That's When I Reach for My Revolver", which I didn't know was a cover for years (I just thought it was the best song on the record) and which, upon learning the truth later, made me love Moby forever a bit more than I had previously. Labels: BEAUMONT, curiosities, la cine, LONG, LYNCH, memories, mp3, music, old flames, thoughts posted by Nihilist Loves Hate, Hates Everything at 4/14/2009 09:52:00 PM 2 comments 2
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GET BEHIND ME DEAD MAN
saw one tonight at IFC... REALLY good
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