Listening • Smile Down Upon Us

Listening to Bjork’s entire back catalog early this year, I met five hours of pop music, experimental sounds, lots of magic. After years of shallow appreciation, immersion provided the best, most proper introduction. This summer I’ve been giving Smile Down Upon Us a lot of my time. Concentrating on it, (usually absently) taking it with me, fitting it in. Play it in the background and it’ll pass over, leave raindrops on the window, an undeniable calm. But once it has you it’s too rich to be ignored.

Evoking warmth, a quilt of rustling leaves and dewy feathers that shelter you, the music is created via email between English duo Phelan Sheppard and Japanese singer moomLooo. But it’s not loose, no bytes overlap or are lost. Fire encourages moomLooo’s voice, inviting the twang of autumn/winter folk guitar—it sounds better as summer calls it quits. As we retreat inside, I choose Smile Down Upon Us. —Mike Smith, Oct. 6, 2008

» Listen to "My Body's Continents" at Nothing but Green Lights

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Listening • Rusted, Golden, Aged

TV on the Radio’s first two efforts were rough and sharp: There was a lot of spirit but a lot of weight in those works. Though, to call them “efforts” is unnecessary as they were always cruising, doing something very special between shoegaze and rock music with the lightest touch. Polished harmonies that skate around dusty velodromes take off with ease and lift you up with a power clear in their artwork—energy and waves in the first, a dirty and eerie nest on the front of the second—ambiguity and a band rising from art rock toward something much more ambitious, and less safe.

Now, with Dear Science, it’s hard to stay on the ground and not be moved. Don’t let the dull artwork deceive, this is a band that have got bigger ideas. From a confidence to be playful and mature with noise and buzz, to the softly souled, avant a cappella whispers—great big ideas on a totally different plain. It’s uplifting, full of soul soul soul hopeful for a lost golden age.

For the third work, the cover art may have been pushed aside but artwork is important. More than the cover of a book, it’s the blurb, the tagline for the trilogy and it just ain’t that thrilling. I think this photo is better: rich and indulgent, fearful but rusted, dusk and dawn.



 —Mike Smith, Sep. 24, 2008

» Listen to "Halfway Home" at Sound of Air

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Watching • A School Daze Refresher

Lessons start again this month across schools in the Western world, whilst Lehman Brother’s and AIG got schooled in the pitfalls of unregulated capitalism. Election year guarantees we will learn a lot about the people wanting to to run the country for a few years. Who knew that people hunted wolves from helicopters a few months ago? And we should consider ourselves blessed that the internet informed us that Obama is not muslin (sic.). We learn, we forget, and as This American Life taught us recently, with all this new-found knowledge, or lack of, we have become Modern Jackasses: knowing just a bit too little, sharing it, pretending it’s really big.

The gimmickry of combining Star Wars and Pythagoreanism would never work in the school, but the internet has no limits on the possible lessons you can learn and there are millions begging for these sorts of diversions. Even if it is Darth Vader standing in front of a webcam declaring, “The hypotenuse is the long side of the triangle … I prefer to think of it as the Dark Side.”

Our Dark Lord strives for something cute and offbeat; it’s noteworthy due to the juxtaposition but if I were to test you now, would you remember it? It’s perhaps best then, when dishing out advice, to make light of a complicated situation, not to trick us into learning something we forget long ago. Coudal provides a few useful tips of surviving the economic depression in the series, “Now that the banks have collapsed and the world has falling into chaos.” Trash bag fashion for a time when you can’t afford to throw anything away.

The TED talks continue to make me feel optimistic that the smart people have my back. It’s not all new-tech revelling from an altogether distant astral plane; some are those deep memorable lessons, stories of humanity and individuals. “How to Read Africa” is delivered by “the gangster rapper at the Bar-Mitzvah”, Chris Abani. He discusses narrative and creating sense of self through the agents of imagination, or more simply, you can’t tell the story of a whole continent.

That is the sort of nuance you’ll struggle to find on the internet, but we are all aware of its flaws—why it may not be so smart to try to learn about any subject, let alone Africa, from Professor Wikipedia … “In 1908 he was award the Nobel Prize for … moustache.”



Since it’s the end of a long week, let’s remember a time when you did little else but wonder, when Sesame Street taught the sort of simple and colourful messages that all the above would do well to take notes from. Let’s all sit quietly and enjoy the classic, “How Crayons Are Made.” You’ll wish all textbooks came with such warming, strangely hip, and charming music.
 —Mike Smith, Sep. 26, 2008

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Watching • Do the Swiss Dream of Post-Apocalyptic Rap Battles?

You shouldn’t be disappointed that the one in 50 million chance of apocalypse didn’t happen this week; you should be pretty damn happy that nothing exciting happened to reward those watching the live web-feed at CERN, the particle accelerator in Switzerland.

Friends and I are sure that it’s not when they turn the thing on, but when it really starts stretching its legs that the world will play the ultimate lottery. It doesn’t help that benevolent Greek hackers are breaking into the system. We definitely don’t want computer geeks the Greek Security Team trying to over-clock a Black-Hole-Machine.

Exactly what is happening in Switzerland and what the Greeks have against particle physics is unclear. There is one surefire way to help all nations understand what is happening: the universal language of Rap.



Other things need explanation too—like rap battles. Here is one, translated for your enjoyment, including these very watered-down and no-fun lines: “The alleged facts you have uncovered in regards to me are unfounded and without merit. My birthplace is not only vastly inferior to yours, but my neighbors are much more resilient.”



Yet another election year demographic, No Values Voters, will be providing a lot of support for the apocalypse this year. The Onion suggests Citizens for a Bleaker America will be trying to swing the election toward hell sometime in November. And what else is bleaker than the end of the world? Post-apocalypse apocalypse, we can only assume. There’s nothing but mere chance stopping a meteor-hit world being swallowed into a black-hole—we’d probably consider ourselves lucky.



If anything is going to blow a hole through the earth, it’s CERN. When it does, here’s what will happen when you dive into the rabbit hole.

When the apocalypse does come—if you don’t go all Alice in Wonderland on us—what will you be doing? And why aren’t you doing it now? The following sort of recklessness seems like the sort of risk end-worlders will be enjoying. Fun until the sea starts to boil.



 —Mike Smith, Sep. 16, 2008

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Listening • Ambient Religious Jam

The words “folk,” “pastoral,” and “Tropicalia” ensure I read the whole piece and listen to whatever music is being pushed my way—“Tropicalia” references the hazy, Brazilian psychedelica to which Deerhunter side-project Atlas Sound are often compared. “Jam session,” in reference to “ambient-punks” Deerhunter, similarly draws me in as someone who knows little of the legends of jam, except that jam is good and great, as Ohmpark agrees: “All weekend long at the beach house, we had a daily, serious Microcastle jam session. It was sort of like a religious experience.”

Not just any of your mother’s jam, a serious jam session. One that emphasizes how worthy of study and contemplation Deerhunter are on Microcastle—especially when you are at the beach house with friends who aren’t going to attack you for reading too much into a six- minute jam.

Some critics like to talk about how “texturally cohesive” Deerhunter’s latest work is. That’s fine, but I like to enjoy my jam without thinking about that. I like talking with friends about why we like Deerhunter’s jam “Nothing Ever Happened” so much, not whether the jam has the right viscosity. —Mike Smith, Sep. 19, 2008

» Listen to "Nothing Ever Happened" at Ohmpark

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Watching • Getting Literacy Dun, the Rendition of Bamboozled Pandas With Chinese Accents

Ed Rondthaler, 103, a typographist since the age of five, tells us why spelling is D-U-M, championing simplified spelling in a very smart video from House Industries. He reminds thousands of webcam-empowered YouTube ranters that when you’ve got something to say you should be subtle, familiar (not creepy), delivering something high-quality, and rich. His tips don’t stop at improving literacy, if you want to live longer “good genes, and regular cold showers” will help, he told CNN.

Mr. Rondthaler thinks that smarter spelling will deal a significant blow to illiteracy. But there may be a few hurdles ahead as English takes on a Chinese accent; experts say only 15 percent of those with English skills will be native speakers in 2020. Now is a good time to remember the first advert to offend one billion people, the stereotypically Chinese Super Bowl panda.


The CEO of the company making that mistake reminds us, “The pandas are Chinese…they don’t speak German.” Well if these Pandas are fluent in Chinese, and what with panda diplomacy being all the rage, we might finally find out what its like to be locked up in China as a Chinese subject. The following very sad panda is not enjoying his diplomatic leave at a Berlin zoo post-rendition.

It really outweighs a dozen cute animal videos, doesn’t it? That bamboozled panda should talk to Berlin’s famous polar bear, Knut. He seems to always enjoy himself—especially when fishing carp out of his moat.

An American digital graffiti artist, James Powderly, did give us some suggestion of the harshness of being detained in China as the following interview indicates. He was arrested after he helped Tibet activists conduct a laser-stencil-based protest and was subsequently tortured last month in Beijing.

Six days of torture in China, or a being sent on loan to central Europe and experiencing a few years of camera flashes from behind the glass at Berlin zoo? You decide. —Mike Smith, Sep. 8, 2008

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Listening • And We All Drone On

The music of James Blackshaw, 12-string guitar virtuoso, elegantly drones and is perfect for drifting—in and out of the room, in and out of concentration, between the city, silent trains, and the ocean. “Infinite Circle” is really about these sorts of grand and complete movements. Derek Walmsey of The Wire magazine calls it like so: “His fingerpicking mantras are as melodic as a music box, gliding through dizzying tempos like clockwork…Blackshaw often sounds more like a court harpist than a backwoods strummer.”

“Infinite Circle,” is one-fifth of Blackshaw’s latest album, Litany of Echoes, and the mesmerizing 12-string guitar is perfect. We should expect no more—that’s what 10 out of 10s are for. Float onwards, away-wards. —Mike Smith, Sep. 11, 2008

» Listen to "Infinite Circle" at Indie Muse

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Listening • Field-Tested Dub

It took a visit to New York and the combination of disorientation and fatigue to allow me to really enjoy the recently unmasked British musician Burial. I think you really have to listen to his music in the right place, in the right frame of mind, to enjoy it properly. My first view of New York, from the air, was obscured by an evolutionary biologist who described the scene below as “soupy”—I was unimpressed.

A better view, early this summer, was later that afternoon in a friend’s echoey apartment in which we agreed that the rooftop party might have to be cancelled due to the weather. The atmosphere was made much more memorable with the introduction of Burial to the scene; he soundtracked blank stares out of huge windows as a lightning storm was passing over the Brooklyn Bridge, and dismissal of the storm’s severity was punctuated by a lightning strike too close for comfort. Friends washed up off of the streets into the tense, humid warmth that complements Burial music so well.

Burial is perhaps the best-known representative of dubstep, a genre that swiftly evolved in the last decade. Above being a descendant of dub-reggae and two-step, “Archangel” is gray, stormy, and silhouetted, painted with long strokes of treble and bass. Burial respects the sparseness of every city at night and presents a ghostly and almost Gothic space—somehow this is glorious. Burial, and dubstep, continues to win fans and he deserves to be favorite for the U.K.’s Mercury Music Prize for his latest work, Untrue. —Mike Smith, Aug. 19, 2008

» Listen to “Archangel” at Can You See the Sunset From the Southside?

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Listening • Joyous Descent!

The only words I can make out are “all day holiday” and “parachute”—Shugo Tokumaru sings the rest in Japanese at great speed. Tokumaru’s “Parachute” offers neither serene floating nor salvation; it is a fast-thinking, multi-instrumental, standing-to-attention kind of song. Bells, guitar, glockenspiel are all played quickly and causes slight panic—but it’s the voice that stops that chute from opening: How does it sound so carefree? Falling to such twee-pop music, knowing that you can pull the cord and be saved at any moment, is an adrenaline rush. Most parachute jumps in one day? 640. Just don’t listen to this song every time. Listen to it once. Now. —Mike Smith, Aug. 15, 2008

» Listen to “Parachute” at Exitfare

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