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  1. M

    Adorno again

    Not by Adorno, but closely related: Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction can be found in Illuminations by Benjamin. This is a good one, especially if you are short on time. Much of Adorno's writing is extremely dense and somewhat long-winded. I second the...
  2. M

    rhythm and sound, burial mix, wackies cheap(ish)

    I'm really liking the Monolake mix - very nice! Thanks for the tip!
  3. M

    Desert Island Discs? Not quite...

    A tricky question - I have to remember back to various times in my life and what albums I was obsessing over way back when. When I was younger, teen and pre-teen, I obsessed much more over individual albums, now I'm much more all over the place. So here goes: The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Duran...
  4. M

    Top 20 albums of 2005..?

    My faves: 1. Slater-Kinney - The Woods 2. M.I.A. - Arular 3. Deerhoof - The Runners Four 4. Monade - A Few Steps More 5. Sam Prekop - Who's Your New Professor? Also enjoyed, though somewhat less than the top 5: Broadcast - Tender Buttons Vashti Bunyan - Lookaftering Animal Collective - Feels...
  5. M

    Jeff Mills

    I still haven't checked it out, but it sounds like it might be pretty similar to Liquid Room.
  6. M

    TOSSER ALERT! vincent gallo to curate all tomorrow's parties

    Anyone here see Brown Bunny? I was hoping it would be as good as Buffalo 66, but sadly it was just really dull and pointless and completely lacked any plot whatsoever. He could have made it about 10 minutes long but stretched it into a full-length movie full of nothing. It was humorless and...
  7. M

    Jeff Mills

    Liquid Room is awesome - one of my favorite mixes. The actual mixing is kind of sloppy and slap-dash, and the recording quality isn't too great, but the overall energy easily makes up for that. I saw him about 7 years ago at Twilo in New York. His set didn't have the same intensity as Liquid...
  8. M

    Jeff Mills

    I was listening to his Metropolis disc yesterday - I like it a lot! Haven't heard anything newer than that, but I'm planning to check out the mix he has on the Axis website.
  9. M

    Catharsis

    I can relate to this. A lot of music I tend to listen to until I completely absorb it, so that I'm familiar with it inside and out. Unless it is really superlative, I tend to lose interest in it and my obsession moves on to something else. Some things I will come back to every now and then...
  10. M

    Maximo Park

    A question for British posters: Do any of you know if any of the original post-punk bands had much chart success in the UK? I ask because in the US post-punk bands, and really all indie rock/pop bands, and any rave music other than ultra-pop artists like Moby or Fat Boy Slim, never makes any...
  11. M

    Formalism?

    I was asked above about which threads I was referring to wrt the devaluation of formalist critiques. At the time, I couldn't remember specifically and was too lazy to dig for it, but now Blissblogger has reminded me that it was a different thread in which he also mentioned McClary. My...
  12. M

    Formalism?

    I totally agree with this - there is a vocabulary out there waiting to be used. Are there actually music critics that are using it? For electronic musicians, it's common currency, but what about the non-specialists who just want to learn a bit about how the music operates. Is it safe to say...
  13. M

    Richie Hawtin DE9: Transitions

    I'm looking forward to checking it out, although I thought DE9: Closer To The Edit wasn't as good as the first one. It seemed like the computer editing made the overall mix less smooth than when he was mixing with turntables. It's like every minute or so, there is an abrupt transition to the...
  14. M

    Formalism?

    Yeah, they suck. Why would someone want to waste a lot of time analyzing their music. (apologies to all the Green Day fans on here) I know that is meant to be a tongue-in-cheek comment, but just to clarify: when I say that pop music has increased in complexity, I don't mean that non-complex or...
  15. M

    Formalism?

    Don't the formal aspects have an emotional/cultural impact? Beyond just the overt message or attitude of the music, isn't there a whole implicit musical vocabulary as well that deploys its own meaning. Cartoon music comes to mind - when you hear a pair of bongos, it means that the cartoon...
  16. M

    Formalism?

    Is this really true? I wouldn't compare pop to classical in terms of technical complexity, but it seems that pop has moved fairly far beyond three chords and a steady backbeat. The proliferation and cross-polination of styles seems to bear this out. This sounds like a very sample-oriented view...
  17. M

    Formalism?

    This seems to be an underlying theme in a lot of threads - Does Formalism have a place in pop music criticism? On the one hand, I understand that a purely formalist critique is too narrow - that historical and sociological factors have to be involved in a well rounded analysis. However, I feel...
  18. M

    Maximo Park

    Not particularly, it just seems unnecessarily combative without really saying much about the music itself. It gives me a mental image of someone going through a checklist of bands and placing them into middle/working class buckets and then scoring them as if they were competing fantasy football...
  19. M

    Maximo Park

    I agree that it is getting rather OT, but what the hey... I think those two claims are an oversimplification of what I really think, though that is probably my fault for not elaborating. Class is certainly a useful way to look at society, but there seems to be an implicit prole vs...
  20. M

    Maximo Park

    I'm not really sure what you mean by "Class is old," but certainly the fetishization of the working class (inasmuch as you believe that society can be neatly reduced to monolithic class blocks), is pretty darn tired. Using class as a yardstick to judge artistic achievement is lazy and...
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