Music journal, 5-6/2012

May-June

May 25. Beach House: Bloom. Beach House’s beautiful slow-motion music would make the perfect soundtrack for watching the earth slowly recede into the inky deepness of space. Bloom, album number 4 and by far the most sophisticated, is their best yet, leading me to conclude that even if somnambulist lead singer Victoria Legrand is responsible for much of the band’s mystique, it’s really the gauzy, haunting, but imminently melodious musical beauty that allows the album to coalesce into a singular, perfectly distilled vision.

June 2. Earth: Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II. In five meandering, slow-motion instrumentals, the guitar, bass, cello, and very light percussion search for—search for but are necessarily incapable of finding—the silence of empty space, though what the four players ultimately settle for, a kind of subdued but uneasy melodicism, is reminiscent of the Dirty Three, if the Dirty Three were to play a session on many, many barbiturates.

June 10. Battles: Dross Glop. Worth-hearing remixes of Battles’ second album, but strictly supplemental.

June 10. Off!: Off! Though sixteen start-stop-start hardcore punk songs in as many minutes (actual runtime: 15 minutes, 44 seconds) doesn’t add up to an “album” using even the loosest definition of the word, the short length is perhaps the band’s wisest artistic decision. [MARGINALIA, June 11: After attempting to listen to 2010’s First Four EPs and this new one in a single sitting, I can safely say that spending much more than 15 minutes with these increasingly indistinguishable rants takes away from the novelty of four middle-aged guys who simply refuse to mellow.]

June 11. Julia Holter: Ekstasis. Though challenging and essentially esoteric, this album, Holter’s second, is an arresting and intellectually invigorating artistic triumph. Ekstasis is a devastatingly great work, indeed a masterpiece, that more than lives up to the incredible standard set by Holter’s debut, Tragedy, with which it shares its arduous perfectionism, innovative construction of instrumental and vocal passages, and, of course, “Goddess Eyes” (now expanded and divided into two parts). Of the two albums, Ekstasis is more immediately accessible due to a newfound (but by no means “conventional”) emphasis on lyricism and melodicism, showcased especially in the overlapping vocal arrangements of the album opener “Marienbad” and “Für Felix.” Holter’s mastery of sonics is always at work, particularly in the instrumental coda of “Boy in the Moon” and the unconventional, jazz-influenced structure of the nine-minute finale, “This Is Ekstasis.” This is one of my favorite albums of the last 5 or 10 years, even though it’s way too cool to care about how much I love it: “I can see you but my eyes are not allowed to cry,” she sings through a vocoder on “Goddess Eyes.”

June 17. Japandroids: Celebration Rock. If it is not remembered for the music, this album will surely find a place in the annals of Perfectly-Named Albums, at least. The first and last sounds you hear on the album are firecrackers popping and hissing in the starlight, and in between these apt bookends are eight firecrackers of a different, musical kind: orgiastic bombast of drum and guitar, accompanied by streams of equally bombastic Springsteenian anti-poetry that celebrates everything worth celebrating about the dumb simplicity of youth.

June 18. Killer Mike: R.A.P. Music. Make it stop make it stop make it stop make it st [MARGINALIA, June 18: Aborted listen, switched to new solo album by EL-P.]

June 18. EL-P: Cancer for Cure. Unmellowed and never one with a particular knack for subtlety, EL-P’s third proper solo album is a relentless, invasive, and eviscerating 49-minute slab of angst and outrage. The lyrics, some of EL-P’s most painfully direct, evoke an American politician undergoing psychoanalysis. As always, his scorching approach leaves the listener nary a chance to catch her breath, making even this, one of his shortest works, wearying.

June 19. Spiritualized: Sweet Heart Sweet Light. “Hey Jane” is probably a career highlight—it’s at least a good abstract for everything Spiritualized do, for better and worse. It’s not just a re-write of “Sweet Jane” or “Hey Jude” but a third song, somewhere between and below them, where Jason Pierce, the loving thief, has etched out a living.

June 29. The Tallest Man on Earth: There’s No Leaving Now. In which the American-sounding Swede, now married and, apparently, quite content trades in his trademark intensity and intimacy for a more relaxed, collaborative sounding album. But this description is misleading, imprecise: the Erstwhile Tallest Man on Earth (now asked to shrink and stand among others!) overdubs much of the added instruments this time around, creating an album whose music, once so self-consciously insular, tries (but fails) to capture the open, majestic freedom evoked by the lyrics. So the result is, disjointedly, somewhere between what he’s moving toward and where he’s already been. No wonder the mountains treat him like a stranger.

Music journal, 3-4/2012

March-April

March 10. Andrew Bird. Break It Yourself. Overlong because repetitive and repetitive because overlong.

March 16. BBU: bell hooks. Das Racist magpies who make sort of clever, sort of political rhymes. I mostly listened because of the bell hooks namecheck.

March 16. Matthewdavid: Jewelry. A solid, 20-minute download-only release from the Outmind guy. Like the weird Stones flip that opens.

March 24. Lambchop: Mr. M. I’ve never listened to a Lambchop album before this one, despite that fact that they formed, apparently, in the Reagan years and released their first official album in the Clinton years, but I dig the songwriter’s mellow, Cat Stevens-ish voice and his subdued, ironic vision of life and death just as much as I dig the soft musical accompaniment and clever string accentuations throughout the album. “Gone Tomorrow” is a great song.

March 28. Del the Funky Homosapien: West Coast Avengers [WCA D-Funk Limited] Mixtape. Del’s rapping with what seems to me to be more verve than he’s shown in years over some not bad flipped P-Funk samples, which bodes well for the second Deltron album, if it does end up coming out this year (I’d laugh, but I think the joke is actually on us).

April 3. s/s/s: Beak and Claw. An interesting experiment but the three artists—the rapper Serengeti, the indie symphonist Sufjan Stevens, and anticon. producer Son Lux—don’t quite pull off the synthesis they’re going for.

April 3. Grimes: Visions. This music—the first I’ve ever heard from this slinky Canadian with a poorly chosen moniker and a kinda wimpy voice, even though Visions is, by all accounts, her third album—exists in the sleepy netherworld between electronica and Cocteau Twins-inspired dream pop. Even though much of it seems slight, the songs still wrap themselves around you like a scarf around an exposed neck on a cold day. [EXCURSUS, Aug. 6: Where the hell did that sentence come from?]

April 4. Dirty Three: Toward the Low Sun. Even when they aren’t obsessively searching for new ground, the Dirty Three are as good as or better than pretty much everyone else. So it goes without saying that this album, which is shorter and tighter than the band’s last two with a greater focus on interplay and movement, features several stunning compositions, of which my personal favorite is an unrepentantly beautiful ballad called “Ashen Snow.”

April 4. The Shins: Port of Morrow. Vanilla indie pop about vanilla sex domestic life.

April 5. Mirel Wagner: Mirel Wagner. So this 23-year-old singer/guitarist (born in Ethiopia, raised in Finland) is sort of like a (lyrically) morbid and (musically and vocally) moribund version of the Tallest Man on Earth, drawing freely and equally from American folk and blues music and her own (seriously twisted) imagination. I wouldn’t want to be alone with her on an elevator, but jeepers! this album is intense—even the sort of cute song about riding a bicycle with her mother watching ends on a dark note, perhaps the darkest note.

April 5. THEEsatisfaction: awE naturalE. “Queens of the Stoned Age.” It was THEEsatisfaction that brought that seriously spaced-out, funked-up, jazzy soul/rap to the Shabazz Palaces album last year; they continue in the same vein on their first major album (various mixtapes and possibly worthwhile experiments are available on the duo’s bandcamp page). Just as blissfully weird (and wired) as Monae but earthier and perhaps too concise for its own good.

April 6. Homeboy Sandman: Subject: Matter. The first that struck me about this EP, released on Stones Throw, is that Homeboy Sandman—whether he’s spinning silly or abstract verses rife with wordplay to make Aceyalone blush or unloading serious social commentary infused with way more nuance than, say, EL-P—has both technical proficiency and range on his side, exuding more passion and vigor than most rappers five or ten years younger than him can muster (turns out he’s in his early 30s); and, after taking the trouble to dig up his first albums, the second thing that struck me is that he’s only getting quicker, brighter, leaner.

April 9. Serengeti: Kenny Dennis EP. What would it be like for the uninitiated to listen to this? I made up my mind to love it upon hearing the hook of the first cut (“Rib tips / rib sandwiches / and chicken wiiiings!”), but I imagine there are those who will struggle through its sixteen glorious minutes, squinting as if hearing an inside joke from which they are excluded. [EXCURSUS, August 6: Those who identify with the latter category would be well advised to start with Serengeti’s masterful Dennehy and work their way simultaneously forward and backward from there.] Serengeti includes some new biographical tidbits and Kenny’s sympathetic take on the Steve Bartman fiasco.

April 9. Del the Funky Homosapien: West Coast Avengers [WCA Limited II Fela] Mixtape. Second mixtape of the year has Del doing to Fela Kuti horns what he did to the P-Funk samples earlier this year; the lyrical well is noticeably drier on this one.

April 21. Willis Earl Beal. Acousmatic Sorcery. A guy lucky to have anyone hyping him; he has a strong voice but is musically and lyrically inept.

Music journal, 1-2/2012

[This and following posts in this series were extracted from my diary; some have been revised or cleaned up to read better on the blog. I’ll only be posting reflections on 2012 albums.]

January/February

January 31. Leonard Cohen: Old Ideas. The titular “ideas”—vis., God, sex, love, death—are old in every sense of the word, inasmuch as these well-worn signifiers have long since stopped signifying much yet continue to be the primary concerns of this age. They are also the very themes that have followed Cohen (or that Cohen has attempted to follow) throughout his long career, though, all the same, there aren’t any New Insights into the Old Ideas—the lyrics seem familiar and don’t necessarily rank with Cohen’s best. Instead I focus on the album’s true drawing power, which is in the performance, both vocally (the septuagenarian’s cracked and creaking voice has never sounded so appealing and, dare I say, dapper) and musically (these tracks glisten and pop with much more imagination than Cohen’s last few studio efforts).

February 5. Gonjasufi: MU.ZZ.LE. Can’t believe the guy needed the Gaslamp Killer to ground him!

February 5. Cloud Nothings: Attack on Memory. So they listened to Fugazi growing up but ultimately sided with Radiohead’s suburban ennui, I guess.

February 17. Alcest: Les voyages de l’âme [Journeys of the Soul]. Alcest make metal that might actually be worth listening to because they don’t really make “metal” music exactly (which, in its “pure” form, is aesthetically repellant and, let’s be honest, politically reactionary). As many critics have noted, this is clearly closer to early 90s shoegazing: there are no guitar solos (thus emphasizing layering and interlocking harmonies), most of the vocals are sung and sunk low in the mix (thus making the occasional growl or howl sound Dionysian rather than totalitarian), and a haunting sadness hangs over the proceedings, which is deeper and more pointed than black metal’s well-noted obsession with decay and decomposition. And yet…

February 17. Burial: Kindred EP. While last year’s Street Halo offered such subtle variations on a theme that the variations only registered to the most acute listener, Kindred actually does recognizably break with the musical techniques of previous Burial releases, even though you wouldn’t mistake these three extended tracks, extended toward but never reaching the point of collapse, for anyone else working in electronica today. And for that I’m thankful, for that I listen repeatedly.

February 19. Of Montreal: Paralytic Stalks. I don’t want to insult the weighty abstractness that (pop songsmith/self-styled intellectual) Barnes is shooting for here, but this album borders on listenability!

February 21. The Caretaker: Patience (After Sebald) and Extra Patience (After Sebald). Given that a film’s soundtrack was the original inspiration for Kirby’s entire Caretaker project, it’s a surprise that it took this long for someone to commission him to do a soundtrack (and how perfect is it that it’s for a project on W. G. Sebald, perhaps the greatest European writer on memory and oblivion?). But it’s anything but surprising that the result should be such a breathtaking and haunting meditation on creation and memory, conveyed through treated samples of Schubert’s Wintereisse cycle that tragically fall apart somewhere along the journey between the stereo speakers and the ears. [EXCURSUS, Aug. 6: The bonus EP, Extra Patience (which was made available for free on the guy’s bandcamp), a selection of outtakes so subtle that they barely register, is the perfect atmospheric companion piece.]

The Void / Transposition

released 01 August 2012
Harrison: electric guitar, montage (February, May-June 2012)
The Void: voice (track 1)

Why I Became Vegan (Part 4/4)

IV. Suffering Bodies

I have characterized my own choice to become vegan as a response to the Other, but more than that it is a response to the body—my body and the Other’s body—undelimited by any conceptualization of “the human” or “the animal.” So, to follow my above discussion of the political aspect of this choice, I will conclude with a discussion of the importance of the body and the irreducibly physical dimension to veganism/vegetarianism.

With regard to our ethical responsibility toward animals, Jeremy Bentham famously wrote, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” If we could unburden Bentham’s statement from his consequentialist/utilitarian perspective (a rehabilitative reading ably performed by Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am), what we would have left is an evocation of the shared vulnerability of all life and life-systems, a shared vulnerability that places humans, animals, and ecosystems on the same ground ethically, regardless of ontological constructions or epistemological categories: for everything that exists has the inherent ability to be destroyed.

In Philosophy and Animal Life, this realization is central to Cora Diamond’s essay: “The awareness we each have of being a living body, being ‘alive to the world’, carries with it exposure to the bodily sense of vulnerability to death, sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share with them” (74). In other words, using reason and rationality to arrive at our (ethical) choices is merely a deflection from the raw experience of lived reality, by which I mean the reality of our bodies, of our embodied experience as living beings. I don’t “inhabit” this body. I—what I call “I”—am this body. Furthermore, this body that I am can suffer and is infinitely destructible; when you destroy this body, you will always find something more to destroy. And can I live knowing this and continue to eat animals, whose suffering and destruction for the sake of human interests exposes me not only to the animals’ vulnerability but forces me to remember my own? No. I simply cannot forget, and I cannot deny the face that these Other animals present to me, this face whose suffering transforms my being.

So veganism and vegetarianism are not reducible to ethical reasoning alone but are sites in which my obligations toward the Other are transformed by our encounter, in which my own interests—my own selfishness, my construction of myself as an autonomous and impermeable being—are interrupted. And I realize that I can no longer eat meat or any food containing animal byproducts.

Perhaps it is just this sort of transformative realization to which Derrida attests in The Animal That Therefore I Am, when he writes, “The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins here” (29). The second sentence of this commonly quoted passage is purposefully vague. Does Derrida say that it is in this specific circumstance that thinking, for him, begins (again)? Or is the statement prescriptive—thinking should, perhaps, begin (again) here?  Or, we could ask, Where is the “here” that thinking begins? In his mind? Or the cat’s? And does thinking really “begin” here? Or does it, in fact, endure a particular paroxysm?

When I look into an animal’s eyes, when I see myself being looked at by another animal, I am reminded of how fragile everything is, including the boundary that I set between myself and this animal, this real, living animal. To draw this boundary, to be complicit with it, to maintain it for whatever reason, is violent and enacts violence, not only to animals but to humans as well. We know this. For any concept of what it means to be “human” will necessarily exclude from its ranks countless humans—as the disasters of the twentieth century and our own time firmly attest—just as any concept of “the animal” is used to enable further destruction.

Yet no matter what cognitive or linguistic abilities may be used to set us apart, our shared fragility will disturb any epistemo-ontological boundary.

The animal and I can be destroyed. Thinking begins here.

May 30-June 3, 2012

Why I Became Vegan (Part 3/4)

III. Denegation and Negotiation

There is another reason why veganism is better characterized as an embodied sensibility rather than a conclusion to the ethical project, and it is that vegans and vegetarians cannot avoid doing violence (or being complicit with preexisting patterns of violence) to animals, as well as to life and its ecosystems more generally. As Jacques Derrida helpfully reminds us in an interview, “Vegetarians, too, partake of animals, even of men. They practice a different mode of denegation.” This statement speaks volumes to the pretensions of “ethical veganism/vegetarianism,” and it can be elaborated in several ways. For consideration of time and space, I will draw out two (interrelated) implications of the statement, one concrete and the other abstract.

The concrete implication. The current mode of production and our economic system are based on exploitation of labor—human and animal labor—as well as the subjugation of nature and life to the cravings of the market. On this fact it is pointless to disagree. And this super-structural violence necessarily reproduces itself in the production of all food, not just in the more obvious case of the meat produced in factory farms. Though it is not comfortable to consider, the land and labor required for the cultivation of domesticated crops at the center of vegan and vegetarian diets is an ecological disturbance, one that causes the deaths of countless forms of life—not only of the crops themselves, but of insects, other invertebrates, and smaller mammals. Furthermore, farms rely on the physical labor (and therefore on the suffering and exploitation) of many human and animal workers. Thus, vegetarians and vegans, too, partake of animals and of humans. It is sheer ideology to think that a simple change in diet can change this fact, can make one guiltless before an Other’s face.

The abstract implication. At the same time that he acknowledges these more concrete patterns of institutionalized violence against humans, animals, and ecosystems, Derrida references a dimension of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical thought. For Derrida, following Levinas, our confrontation or interaction with the Other always entails some measure of violence, antagonism, power. This is not to suggest that it is acceptable for things remain the way they are or that we attempt to revert to some imagined pastoral past—indeed, as Derrida and Levinas would insist, we must change, for we can minimize this violence. But, in the final analysis, it will not do to think that we can rid ourselves completely of this violence simply by evoking an alternative economic paradigm. Even if we were to replace the current economic system with a more just one, even if our current mode of production were to be replaced, our encounters with our Other animals would retain the ineradicable trace of this violence.

If Derrida is right—and I believe that, in this case, he is essentially correct—it simply will not do for honest vegans and vegetarians to deny the existence of a violence with which they are always already complicit, a violence that their continued existence, in fact, calls for, necessitates. Therefore, veganism or vegetarianism would be more rightly understood as an embodied sensibility. If we wish to emphasize the ethical dimension of our choice, it will require a new ethical vocabulary, one that does not evoke some telos or notion of moral truth but instead positions veganism and vegetarianism as an embodied response to what we have decided is an impermissible violence enacted against human and nonhuman animals alike as well as to the various ecosystems to which they belong and in which they participate.

And here, again, Spinoza’s work on ethics, especially when read alongside that of Derrida and Levinas, is particularly useful. Veganism is not the termination of a predictable program or calculation that we mindlessly perform but is rather an intellectually enriching movement practiced concurrently with other radical pursuits. It is, at bottom, a way of relating to the world, a way of relating that attempts to minimize the damage I cause, even as I allow myself to be transformed by this encounter with an Other animal.

Why I Became Vegan (Part 2/4)

II. The Question(s) of Ethics

When people ask, or, more often, demand, to know why I became vegan, an immediate (but ultimately inadequate) response would be “for ethical reasons.” I can generally make myself understood to other people when I evoke ethics, but because it is not the whole truth, it is not the response I like to give.

It is not the whole truth because it dangerously grants vegans and vegetarians a kind of “purity” or moral superiority over other people. In fact, this is a common theme amongst many vegans and vegetarians, and it is difficult to think of anything more agitating to me personally than when “fellow” vegans think that they know what is “right” or “good” and that, therefore, everyone who doesn’t follow their practice is “wrong” or “evil.” In this formulation, veganism/vegetarianism ceases to be an ethical practice and becomes an ideology. This is a form of veganism that deserves to be criticized. By saying this, I do not mean that the ethical question should be dismissed, or that it is dismissible. But it is imperative that vegans and vegetarians stop producing such dogmatic claims to absolute moral truth.

For this reason, I want to begin to unwork some of the more problematic assumptions embedded in ideological veganism/vegetarianism. I would argue instead that ethical justifications for veganism are often either misunderstood or, quite frankly, insipid—that they can, and indeed do, work against the political relevance of being vegan. Saying this may put me at odds with many vegans, and it may seem patently absurd to meat-eaters. This is understandable. However, I hope I offer a gift that “ethical vegans” may come to appreciate, and, furthermore, something of a response to the perennial question of the meat-eating reader—a response that will serve to generate critical thought rather than end it.

First, we must ask, What is “ethics”? In the previous section, I noted that becoming vegan greatly increased my happiness. For this reason, the decision could be considered “ethical,” if when we say “ethics” we use Spinoza’s well-known definition of ethics as an induction into what constitutes “happy life,” that is to say an intellectually flourishing life.

For Spinoza, to ask, What is an ethical life? is the same as asking, What is a happy life? or, What does it mean for me to be happy? Thus, Spinoza wrestled the practice of ethics from the starchy domains of morality and philosophy and returned it to its proper place, praxis. Ethics is not dependent on the expectations placed upon the subject by the various political or religious institutions or organizations to which she belongs, or to which she is said to belong, or to which she is told she must belong, or to which she is made to belong (though, realistically speaking, this is not to say that the two are unrelated for most people). Ethics pertains, simply enough, to happiness. Of course, this is not actually a definition qua definition (that is, in the final, conclusive sense of the word “definition”). Spinoza’s definition simply adds a new density to the way we think ethics and, more importantly, the way we do ethics, by focusing on the question of happiness, which we are now invited to consider along with the question of ethics.

But here we are also confronted by the unique limitations of ethics as they are currently theorized in modernity, especially in the analytic tradition of the English-speaking West. Any given ethical problem, when broached in a university classroom or by armchair ethicists, is practically required to present itself to us fundamentally as a calculable, controllable choice between two (or more) actions. This is a way of practicing ethics that I reject, because, to put it frankly, this brand of ethics rejects me—it rejects my specificity as a spatiotemporally singular being whose daily circumstances and interactions cannot be reduced to a formula; it rejects me and you and, indeed, everyone as historical agents who live in a dis-ordered world but are nevertheless called upon to make decisions (sometimes invisible decisions) every day.

Jacques Derrida’s notion of undecidability is crucial, then, as it relates, especially in his later writings, to the ethical question. An ethical life cannot be reduced to a single, one-time choice between clear opposites, but is in the form of a continuous choice, or, better yet, a continuous affirmation or negation in the context of constantly shifting pressures and determinants. It is therefore wrong to say that veganism is the termination or conclusion of dietary ethics; it rather denotes a position or, to put it less concretely (and therefore more truthfully), an embodied sensibility or ethical sensitivity to the problematic of human-animal relation. Because happiness, like ethics, cannot be a quantifiable operation, the ethical imperative is not to make the correct decision based on pre-existing categories of “the good”; rather, the ethical imperative is produced by the choices and circumstances that present themselves to us.