Roadrunner Twice

(It's Tunesday, by the way, so you too should go write something short about a record.)

Okay, I've listened to Nanobots a few times and I--

(MID-SENTENCE DISSOLVE TO FLASHBACK:

• Calibration pattern: The Else is totally their second-best album of all time, behind only the sublime John Henry and trailed by Flood. (It also push-started my "Enemy Producer" theory, but that's a post for another day.)
• But even though I won't call it "favorite," their early stuff is some big-time lightning in a jar, never equalled.
• I never quite warmed up to Join Us; it seemed incomplete and... I dunno, like it was a research album forced into regular-album shape. "Judy is Your Vietnam" is legit wonderful, the minute-and-a-half song that reminds us what you're supposed to do when you only have a minute and a half worth of song. (Have I mentioned here that I want a 45-second remix of "Call Me Maybe?" Anyway.) "You Probably Get That a Lot" is also wonderful; "Can't Keep Johnny Down" is way catchy in that The Spine period way, where it gets real old quick but burns wicked hot while it still has fuel. "The Lady and the Tiger" is still intriguing, even though it doesn't quite gel. Those are the only four tracks I got feelings about; the rest just really didn't do it for me. Their odds-and-ends album from the same year was a better listen, I think.

END FLASHBACK.)

Anyway, I'm into Nanobots, and I think it's managing to call back to their old stuff without imitating it. The return of the twelve-second songs is kind of an obvious Apollo 18 reference, okay, that one's easy. And the return of decapitation/grievous head injury as a major theme. But more generally, it seems like they've gotten comfortable again with letting the weird song ideas be what they want to be instead of trying to make them all into actual songs. Just following it all down the hole. There are still ultra-poppy nuggets in here ("Circular Karate Chop," "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat") that may or may not wear out soon, but then again there always have been. The other tracks combine their old itchy weirdness with a new lazy effortless confidence that was definitely not there on Join Us. Throwing out cool harmonies and arrangements without making it any kind of big Thing, letting the shape of the thing be the Thing instead.

Call me back in a year, but I think it's a keeper.

In honor of that last post about huffing paint thinner and then gassing the house with unidentifiable ion-absorbing organic compounds, here's a little song for us to all enjoy!

A pair of identical waveforms at the same phase will, when added together, result in a waveform equal to one of the identical pair amplified by three decibels. As such, if we assume a complex waveform to be the sum of two identical waveforms at the same phase, we can reconstruct one (both) of the original waveforms by simply attenuating the resultant waveform by 3 dB.

The simplicity of this calculation reduces the problem of constructing the sound of one hand clapping to a surprisingly tractable state: if we assume the sound of two hands clapping to be the sum of the sounds of two individual hands clapping (initiated simultaneously), we can solve the kōan by simply attenuating the sound of two hands clapping by 3 dB.

Although some reviewers may question the validity of our base assumption, objections are easily dispensed with: no theoretical framework supporting the non-simultaneous report of individual hands involved in a clap has yet been proposed, and Beau Brosworth's exhaustive high-five experiments (Brosworth, 1987) conclusively demonstrated that, after correcting for strike accuracy and force, homogeneous pairs of dextral and sinistral hands produce identical clap waveforms within a 0.0034% margin of error.

Over the last several months I’ve been nursing an obsession with this song called Ballad of How You Can All Shut Up. Take a minute to listen, please, preferably with headphones. Back yet? Okay, now don’t hit me, lemme explain. ( No, there is too much; let me sum up. )

This sort of willful over-interpretation of what amounts to Miller having some fun in the studio and tossing off a shout-out to all the folks who had actually listened to all of Game Theory’s records is obvious and transparent bullshit, but I find it tremendously entertaining and cool, and I am pretty sure this is how all those “Paul Is Dead” guys felt.

Booker T and the MGs — Chinese Checkers

Why? No reason, really. Hi, everyone.

opoponax, you always get better answers for these than me. ( snip snip )

I'm testing out one of those new Mac builds of Chromium (via), and it is actually kind of awesome! Feels sleek.

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Lately I haven't been posting as often as I otherwise might have, because it turns out that I'm actually kind of reliant on having a native-app LJ client. And they all suck right now.

Xjournal used to be awesome, but it doesn't work with Dreamwidth and is stagnant these days anyway. iJournal always kinda sucked, and now it hasn't been touched for three years. MarsEdit technically works, but its DW and LJ support is... lacking. asLJ is too new to trust, Deepest Sender kind of defeats the purpose of using a client in the first place, and nothing supports the DW crossposter. So I have to post via a web form, which shouldn't slow me down as much as it does, but it does, so.

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I AM MOVING HOUSE. Gonna go live with Schwern in inner Northeast! It'll be rad. I have not even started packing yet. Expect me to become increasingly bugfuck insane until the 6th or so.

The place I'm moving into is a 2nd-floor apartment in a brick building that kind of reminds me of my digs in Minneapolis. Not anything close to identical, but familiar enough to immediately feel like home.

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That is a rather large spider in the bathroom, isn't it? I have granted her Not My Problem status, on the condition that she gets off the counter within the next half hour.

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Writing continues to be difficult. DON' WANNA TALK 'BOUT IT.

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It's one of those nights where The Replacements are once again everything I could ever want from pop music.

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So yeah, this is my new job. I likes it lots. Folks is cool. Things:

• The yarn world is far larger and stranger than I imagined.
• Indigo is awesome. No, seriously, it's the weirdest shit. Reacts on oxygen contact! Changes color as you watch!
• We get free coffee. My caffeine tolerance has shot through the roof.
• The shop runs on this app called POS·IM, which apparently has a 20-year lineage and is One Hairy-Ass Beast. It's got a majorly schizoid personality. On the one hand, it's been polished for 20 years to suit the needs of small-to-midsize retail outfits, and in general, the developers have thought of everything you will need to do with the thing. On the other hand, the interface seems to be held together with baling wire and fun-tak, the search capabilities are about the least sophisticated I've ever seen, and none of the features seem able to decide whether they're made for database-savvy power users or the technically-disinclined. The manual is written in at least two, probably more like three different voices, which switch off without discernible pattern and use distinctly different sets of vocabulary. It perversely re-invents every available wheel. It makes it frustratingly fidgety and tedious to make any large-scale changes to the inventory, and frighteningly easy to wreck vast havoc.
  • I am absolutely confident in my ability to bend it to my will. JUST YOU WAIT.
• No, I don't know how to knit yet. Gimme another week or two.

Leaving aside questions of absolute merit, it sometimes comes to pass that an album receives a perfect final track. Such that a better or more appropriate ending cannot be imagined, we're talking:

• The Loud Family: Interbabe Concern: "Where They Walk Over Sainte Therese"
• Jethro Tull: Too Old to Rock and Roll, Too Young to Die: "The Chequered Flag (Dead or Alive)"
• The Notwist: Neon Golden: "Consequence"
• The Mountain Goats: The Sunset Tree: "Pale Green Things"

Join in, name a few.

After a long-ish dry spell, I've been getting a bunch of new music lately, and a fair chunk of it has been making demands of me. Biggest offenders: The Devil, You + Me by The Notwist, and Interbabe Concern by The Loud Family.

I got The Devil, You + Me about three weeks ago, and I think I like it. As I said a while ago, The Notwist's Neon Golden was very nearly a perfect album, and the idea of a new disc from them worried me to an extent I'm embarrassed to cop to. And I guess I was sort of right, because this album is not Neon Golden II; it's a different thing with different goals, and it doesn't speak to me with anything approaching NG's immediacy.

But still... it's good. Maybe really good.

I think what I'm saying here is that I wouldn't have had to work so hard to "get" the album if NG hadn't already become part of the foundation of my brain. But nevertheless, I am slowly getting it. And it does replicate one of my favorite things about Neon Golden: the way it doesn't give up all its treasures on first listen. For the first month I owned NG, I listened to it every day and heard something new each time, and I can already start to see the pattern resolving here.

I think the album it most reminds me of is Broken Social Scene—it's a somewhat inscrutable sequel to an immediately mindblowing predecessor, and I'm seeing myself being slow to warm to it in the same sort of way. Hopefully this presages a similar amount of love a few months down the line; we'll see. In the meantime... I like it.

I think it's an album about a space station. Just saying.

Interbabe Concern, on the other hand, is just one weird-ass record. It came out between Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things and Days For Days, and while both of those albums are full of extremely tight pop songs (and strange interstitial bits, and grotesquely distorted samples from Miller's previous band), Interbabe goes entirely elsewhere. At first listen, it seems to slide in and out of musical competence with no readily apparent structure; the pop hooks are there, but they're buried under several inches of rubble. And it's not just the weird samples and random backwards parts between songs; in an individual track, the guitar, vocal, and rhythm parts all go wonky independent of each other, and the time signatures are perverse and impossible to dance or rock out to.

It's all deliberate, of course, the exception being that Scott Miller's voice is simply an idiosyncratic instrument to start with. But I'm still trying to figure out what cumulative effect the artifice is meant to have. One thing I'm noticing is that there's an unusual satisfaction in knowing exactly when the chorus is going to hit, which definitely takes repeated listenings, and likewise in being ready when one thing becomes another, unrelated thing. Also, the increased out-of-phase sloppiness of the parts seems to increase the drama of some of the tracks: for example, I'm not convinced that "I'm Not Really a Spring" would be nearly as gripping in a more exact performance, as having the vocals sliding around free of the guitar and drums is what makes it feel so out of control and breathless.

But like I said, weird album.

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Also, speaking of Scott Miller, I managed to find a torrent with pretty much all of Game Theory's catalogue! This is super exciting, as the original CDs (or cassettes, or whatever) are basically unobtainable, and cost in the range of $70 when they actually show up on eBay. I consider this pretty much the ideal use-case for wholesale piracy, so I snagged it and have been acquainting myself with an album at a time. It is, indeed, worth hunting down. Or at least a lot of it is.

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And in other news, I seem to be learning to like metal. This is new!