RIFF MARKET

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: NICK SYLVESTER
Each One Teach One

For whatever reason, I'm convinced the seven Sylvesters have this weird thing with insomnia, these weird alternating bouts of unrest. They never happen at the same time, so it's just that cosmically speaking, or maybe just statistically speaking, one of us seven just can't get to bed. When I realized this, I consciously tried to shift the burden to the non-Barry part of the fam, since we all pretty much agree that guy, the dad, has to get at least some shut-eye. Professionally speaking, he is a food prostitute. He goes to construction sites, lifts up his doors, sells his meatball sandwiches to burly-type men who have like ten different kinds of hammers on their belts, then blows out of there before any HI rolls up on him. I've seen a lot of these burly-type men eat meatball sandwiches and can assure you, without a doubt, my dad desperately needs his sleep.

That's more or less how we deal with things though, my family. We have these little mental tricks to keep us going psychically--20% aphorismatic, 80% witchdoctor--though most of them boil down to common sense taken ad absurdum. There's the "if you're upset about something, you must have time on your hands, which means you must not be working hard enough" trick for offsetting depression, the "when God closes a door he opens a window" tough love mixed with undying optimism bit, the "nobody pick up the phone, things will figure themselves out" school of avoiding credit card debt collectors, etc. What's tough is we all know they're tricks, so there's some cognitive dissonance involved, which means we're way too ganglionic over way too imaginary stuff. Like god forbid I'm two minutes late for a dinner reservation, I might miss my window--I might have to settle for a different window, one of those dorm ones with the jumper locks.

But the one trick I want to talk about, the no-sleep trick, the trick is this: When you're trying really hard to fall asleep but you can't, most times you'll notice that your butt cheeks are really tightly clenched--like, seriously pursed up. If you've never noticed this, do notice; it will blow your mind. Anyway, said clench is keeping you from sleep. So the only thing you have to do, if you want to fall asleep, is tell your butt to relax. Sometimes I like to whisper, inexplicably, "Shut up, Butt," but obviously this gets uncomfortable for anybody who may be in bed with you. And dangerous. I mean, who knows, her butt might not be ready to shut up. You might be screwing everything up for that butt.

Imagine my surprise this January then, when after 20 straight years of commanding my butt to shut up nightly, it started being disobedient.

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My current room is about 7'x7', i.e. one Status Ain't Hood by one Status Ain't Hood, i.e. one square SAH. The floor is covered with unplush dust-prone industrial-wear carpet, very similar dust-wise and durability-wise to floormats into the city's classier bodegas. The room is painted in cheery, floral colors that have reminded more than a few visitors of their mothers' kitchen wallpaper prints. There is a window facing 7th Street, and the building is close enough to First Avenue that I get a good dose of that action, with next to zero strain. A twin bed mattress I drove from Montgomeryville, the same mattress that caused fellow I-95ers no little unease since the thing wanted off my cartop, like it was kidnapped or something--the mattress takes up half the room, and spent most of this year boxspringless, right on the floor. The other half of the room, with about a foot of space between the bed and itself, is my stereo: a Marantz 2230 receiver, a/k/a the bluelight special, a Sony 5-disc tray, a Bang & Olufson turntable, Bose 601s despite everybody's vehement protests.

Also of note: Atop one of those open-faced Ikea closets at my bed's foot is a sizable vegetable box filled with dirty laundry; on the side of the box are the letters "AMC," which one visitor said stood for "All My Clothes." I'd disagree with her but sometimes there's like a pants leg hanging out the box, and it pretty much stares at you if you get the angles right, and I try to laugh and turn away but I can't, just can't.

Anyway all this is important because, long story short, I spent a lot of time in this room this year. I listened to a lot of music with my back against the wall, facing The System, lots of really old records I'm supposed to just know but not necessarily supposed to enjoy real-time, Modern Lovers, Velvet Underground, Future Days, T-Rex, Sonic Youth, Enter The 36 Chambers, the Breeders, Magnetic Fields, Pale Saints, Wayne Shorter (for Freddie), etc. Usually I listened to those first four VU albums in a row, as a package deal, paying them about as much attention as they me, not really studying them, just letting them sink in. Then I'd go to the gym, where I listened pretty exclusively to new mixtapes and Swell Maps and Daft Punk, and realized, fine yeah you were right, Homework is their best. I played restaurant for one summer minute, and that exact minute is when I gave up all resistance to Lenny Kravitz, the Jamiroquai of classic rock. I swear to whoever, whenever "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" came on the speakers, I sold way more $22 Kobe burgers than anybody wearing black pants as tight as mine should have sold.

Nighttime was different. Location location location has a negative, which is that it's really really loud at all times of the day, with no shortage of people saying, literally, "location location location." There's a constant stream of traffic and uptown-going trucks, and they all have good reason to honk their horns at each other I'm sure, plus there are all the trash trucks. I guess it was 2001 or so, New York City filled up the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, leaving the city no option but to privatize trash removal. So every building in the city, more or less, hires trash trucks from as far as Virginia and PA and New Jersey obviously to come pick up its trash. There are all these tariffs that the city has to pay too, it's all pretty fascinating reading at 3am, when you're trying to figure out why every thirty seconds there's another fucking trash truck blowing by your window, kicking up dirt, unshutupping a previously shut-up buttsky.

Plus there's a lot going on inside my apartment anyway. Every night my one roommate cycles through the channels starting at around 11:30pm, catching every Seinfeld and Simpsons and (I think) Mama's Family rerun he can before he totters off to bed around 1, 1:30. My roomwalls are just drywall, not actual walls, so I hear it all--I was sick of Kramer before you were. Another roommate just started dating a guy in a rock band that she says sounds like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and about two weeks ago the band's impromptu after-afterparty was at our apartment, started around 4am, and involved several hours of "Under the Bridge" on repeat. I always thought bands who sound so much like other bands would be embarrassed to publicly jam out to whichever band they're so obviously aping, but I was wrong, and I have the bloodshot eyes to prove it. My other roommate doesn't stay at the place too often anymore, but when he did, he would fall asleep on the couch pretty early in the night, and there would be two bottles of Stella on the coffee table beside him, and now I understand why. Even right now as I write, there's this infuriating click, I don't know where it's coming from, possibly the metal pipe that's connected to the radiator, and I imagine whatever is clicking in the pipe will soon click there, and then the room will get so hot I'll have to open the window.

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There's this guy named Brando, an older legend-type grad who liked the weird stuff. To a college kid with Potter glasses and a pair of tickets to see the French Kicks "before they get huge, really fucking huge I'm telling you," i.e me, Brando was daunting, infuriating, infatuating--a handless man rolling his own cigarettes, then lighting them with one of those $500 lasers everybody's talking about now. At the time I met him, pre-asshole Jared Leto was in vogue post-Requiem, and I happened to be pretty fond of both the look and the performance in general, to say nothing of the soundtrack. Anyway Brando also sorta looked like Leto to me, only in good ways.

Also and this isn't a dis on anybody I knew and loved in school but there was something very post-grad to me about Brando that seemed attractive to me, living the life in this self-assigning curriculum sort of way, a reading list that moved facilely from Debord to (Ted) DeBiase, levels of media consumption hitherto unimaginable. He consumed video and art and music and words and synthesized them all, to the point that he could ask a question like "What is your favorite product?" and you took him seriously, and you told him your favorite product, and if your favorite product was something really straightforward like "nylon" he would say something like "nylon is a good product," and then start talking about nylon for twenty minutes.

From afar I thought this was what it was like to be too young, too smart, in Manhattan, this well-known place though with plenty of secrets in the cracks, where people just consumed and created and kept abreast during the day, backreading during the night. The fantasy was that everybody was in the process of understanding everything. They understood culture in broader strokes, assimilated all media, but self-policing and self-conscious worrying over dilettantism forced this neurotic TYTS crew past the feeling of being overwhelmed until they had handles on Everything. The fantasy was that six or seven years ago, a TYTSer would not only know and do about everything TYTS, but was expected to know and do everything. Otherwise what the point of being there?

Two Brando stories. The first involves Brando getting into Cambridge one night around 1, playing Oneida's Each One Teach One disc 01 track 01, which is this way-loud 20-minute one-measure rock vamp, at police action-inducing volumes, collapsing on this nasty fake-leather couch sticky with liquor, then falling asleep like it was nothing--maybe even because it was nothing. The guy was post-silence.

The second Brando story involves a holiday party in New York, and somebody saying something to the extent of "sauerkraut rocks!", Brando mishearing it as "krautrock!" and Brando regaling us with stories of krautrock one-offs and side projects. I downloaded most if not all the albums he mentioned and thought most if not all of them were pretty fucking awful. The music was there but just barely, and I was at the point in life where you like Faust IV, but only after track 1.

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I think it was for a spacerock mix I made a lady last December, but I needed some sort of transition track, something pretty cloudy that could handle the beat from Psychic Ills' "January Rain" underneath. I was home, where many CDs stay on shelves, so this worked out, plus when I go home I like to go up to my room anyway and go through all my belongings just to make sure for example my dad didn't sell any of my books on ebay or my youngest brother didn't turn my childhood bear into his boy-school afterhours cumbag. Sorry, I just really loved that bear.

Pre-FireWire, I burned a lot of mp3 discs with impossibly completist archival-type intent, like for whenever I needed a track off the Amps' Pacer or "Persistence of Memory" from the Fulton Pyser LP. I found a stack of these discs in my room and made my way through them and I stumbled on all that Brando music. I listened to it all for several hours, straight through, even that terrible Ash Ra Tempel Tim Leary collabo, looking for the transition. I ended up picking "Kekse" from Harmonia's Deluxe. It's this pretty chintzy piano/synth semi-blues at first, but the track outroduces itself into this bucolic, piano by the pond routine that worked perfectly.

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Harmonia were Michael Rother of Neu! and Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius of Cluster. They made two albums in the 70s, Musik Von Harmonia in 1973 and Deluxe in 1975. Apparently Eno collaborated with them a year later but I haven't heard that material. Some combination of synthetics and synthesizers birthed this barely-there yet extremely gritty ambient music, threaded with simple seven- or eight-note melodies that take an entire track just to articulate themselves once. They sound exactly like a band called Harmonia would sound like. When Musik doesn't chug along triumphantly like a train pulling into the last subway stop, it feels like a semi-safe hiding place, somewhere with about a ten-minute catch-yr-breath expiration date before it's discovered and you're discovered and now you're back on the run.

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The first time it happened I was pretty embarrassed, me falling asleep to music I like. Pride is one factor. I don't like to think I own any music that puts me to sleep, plus I tend to dislike the abusive 'music as emotional crutch' types, because it's only a step away from 'music as fashion accessory' types, which is only a step away from the h-word. Is my reasoning. I fell asleep at a Rhymefest show earlier this year and I still feel pretty awful about that, and I don't even like Rhymefest, to give you an idea.

Verse number two, and I guess this is related to verse number one, the worst thing that's happened to rock criticism, more than mp3 blogs or fewer inches or the Xgau/Voice divorce, is the increasing laxness w/r/t the word "boring." I don't know when it started but I remember meeting this city's 100-word hustlers one-by-one like 03 04 05, and was amazed at how excitedly they dismissed music they didn't like as, merely, "boring." They listened to something once, and if it didn't catch their ear the first time, they moved on to the next, at least until Ryan dropped BNM on a record they overlooked, then of course they listened to the album, as if only to poke holes in the enthusiasm, or to figure out a way to pitch Chuck so as to poke holes in the enthusiasm.

I understand the word as very PC, "boring," and appreciate it as a colloquialism, i.e. something you say to a publicist to get him off your back. But without naming names or pieces I see the word and the sentiment creeping into printed matter. I know I'm probably guilty of it myself. But "boring" is not criticism; it's an excuse not to engage a work. It's an excuse to write around the record, not about it. "Boring" says more about the writer and the record in most cases, "been there done that" the reason American Internet Writers will sooner pretend to like Lily Allen's shitsmoker of a fake reggae record or go on a one-man crusade to make metal indie's new rap than even begin to let the utterly straightforward Sonic Youth album reveal its many complexities. That takes time though, and most lancers don't have that or the heart or the balls, and if there's one person to pity this year, it's the critic who's trying so hard to Stay On Stop, Shock And Awe, Get That Paper, he's forgotten how to listen, and why he did in the first place.

The writing is abysmal.

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Musik Von Harmonia is a pretty boring record, is the thing. It just exists. The sounds are interesting, maybe. "Ohrwurm" has those woozy drones that remind me of the sounds from whatever PBS special there was about bears accidentally ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms, and in an urban setting the song's a dead ringer for traffic in slo-mo, skrung owt. But there's nothing structurally fascinating per se about "Ohrwurm", same with "Ahoi!", whose lullaby just phases in and out while other things just happen to cut across the mix. As usual, the songs with motorik are interesting insofar as I can say "motorik!" in my loud a-ha Watson get my pipe voice, but it's a safe observation to make, one signifying nada.

As I near the 5-minute mark here, only 30 minutes left, I should mention I've tried sleeping with headphones on. I tried with my semi-expensive in-ears, Shure e3cs. Have you ever tried that? Hearing nothing at all? Just the weird sounds your saliva glands make in your mouth? It's terrifying. I need baseline decibels--a steady click, a vacuum cleaner hum, something, anything, just not nothing, and not the Buddha Box. I'm pretty sure I saw an FM3 guy on a panel at Mutek 2005, and somebody asked him how you replace the battery in the Buddha Box, and I'm pretty sure the answer was that you don't, that the deterioration of the Buddha Box was part of the idea, a nod to its own materiality, to Art. Well OK. If anybody has the Buddha Box mp3s, send them here.

But at some point, whenever it happened, maybe March or April or so, Musik Von Harmonia became my baseline. The best explanation I have involves another pair of headphones, the Sennheiser PXC-250 noise-cancellers. I've milked these babies for all their metaphorical milk, metaphorically speaking, so apologies for yet another life lesson involving the physics of sound: If the trashtrucks and ambulances and NYU kids and the roommates and the general hum of this city, the sound the buildings make when you walk on Wall Street and the buildings just hum, if all that sound comprises one fat ugly sinewave, Musik contains its exact cosine (I think it's cosine), 90 degrees out of phase, canceling out the fat ugly frequencies and leaving a pleasurable and eventually unnoticeable white noise in its wake. Is what this aphorismatic witchdoctor says.

[This brings up the extremely fair question of, if this album is basically a noise-canceling headphone substitute, like a poorman's noise-canceling headphone, why not just go for the real deal? Especially if this is just about canceling out the right frequencies and not clogging up the Frequencies That Matter, e.g. fire alarms, regular alarms. Well I just don't know.]

As of December 16, 2006, when everything around headphoneless me is in nasal-drippingly copasetic order--when everything has reached its cliche of a zenith, or vice versa--it sounds like Musik. I turn off the light, put a few towels in front of the door crack to make sure no rats get inside, try to remember whether I'll get sleep apnea from sleeping on my stomach or sleeping on my back, then I'm out.

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Some things I forgot: Brando lived down First Ave five blocks away from me, until this Spring, when he moved to Arizona, or New Mexico, I forget. I'd see him on my way to Mr. Freshbread for overpriced bagels. Mr. Freshbread is now called Cafe Blu, but it's the same management. The office where I currently work has these two extremely small dogs that like to frolic under my desk and pee on my floor, and the owners have to come in and mop up the pee, and everybody in the office thought all this was hilarious until one of the dogs got stepped on. If you're absolutely dead-set on noise-canceling headphones, the PXCs aren't too bad, just make sure you wear them while exercising. When you get water in those guys, the headphones, they emit this hellacious shriek that's like their breaking point--as if this business of ingesting all your noise the last few years has really been wearing on them, and now they're going to let it out all at once.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006