Links 09-13-2010

PunkNews.org - Dismemberment Plan to reunite

"The Washington Post is reporting that seminal late 90s/early 00s post-punk outfit Dismemberment Plan will reunite early next year for five shows in support of the vinyl reissue of their 1999 full-length Emergency & I."

> And here I thought Travis Morrison had quit music forever. Not that I'm complaining. While I won't be able to see the shows, it will be nice to have Emergency & I on vinyl.

PunkNews.org - Cave In to release 'Anomalies Vol. 1'

"Cave In have announced plans to release a new odds and ends collection entitled Anomalies Vol. 1. It's due out December 14, 2010 via Hydra Head Records."

> This plus the recent announcement of a new full-length in the works are definitely a good sign

Kotaku - Psychonauts Meets Inception (And It Works)

"Double Fine Productions' Psychonauts, the classic psychic adventure, when cut to ape Christopher Nolan's Inception scene-by-scene works shockingly well. Either consider this fan-made mash-up a dose of clever nostalgia or a reminder that, yes, you really should play some Psychonauts."

> Which just serves to remind me that I need to play Psychonauts again sometime. 

Sub-Zero Fun

“10pm show on a Thursday? I guess I need to go because I bought a ticket. It’s not like I don’t dig Autolux, but the new album wasn’t anything remarkably transcendent and besides, how is shoegaze space rock going to play live? I don’t want to go to a show that’s going to put me to sleep. I’m tired enough already and they’re not going to hit the stage until at least 11:30, but I bought a ticket and I haven’t been to a show in a while. It’s Thursday, at least I’ll find a place to park for free. I just won’t get there for doors. In fact I’ll get there a little after 10. It’s not going to fill up until after the second opener anyway so if I show up a little late I’ll still have a good place in the crowd.”

This was my thought process going into the Autolux show at Emo’s outdoor stage this past Thursday. Not really enthusiastic, but not quite reluctant. By the end of the night the band and the crowd would have changed my tune in a way that’s only possible with great live music.

I began following Autolux 10 years ago when they dropped their first direct purchase self-titled EP. I had just finished college at the time and was still living in Boston. As a fan of Failure (the most influential band you’ve never heard of) I had been following both Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards careers since the band broke up in the late 90’s. Ken Andrews had just released his first solo effort as “On” while Greg had previously been involved with the band “Lusk”. I had heard about Autolux through the Failure network grapevine as it turned out this was Greg’s new thing. “Autolux” was a great EP reminiscent of the spacier aspects of Failure, with distinctive shoegazey element. It was a low key assault; unassuming, unaffected, self-aware, but not pretentious, and incredibly tight. The opener “Turnstile Blues” grabs you immediately with its distinctive drum line and the rest of the EP doesn’t let go until the feedback fade out of “Future Perfect”.

4 years later it was 2004 and in the interim I had moved away from and then back to Boston as Autolux’s first full-length (and commercial release) “Future Perfect” came out. It featured a couple tracks from the self-titled EP and a host of new songs including spacier songs like “Great Days for the Passenger Element” and “Plantlife”. I recall being very much into this album at the time, listening to it on the bus that winter while on the way to and from work. If ever my interest in seeing this band live had been piqued, now was the time, but Autolux rarely seemed to tour ... at least not outside of their native California. In fact it seemed that Autolux was as anti-commercial as a band could get; art rock to the extreme. In either case the album came and went in my rotation, occasionally coming out for replays of my more favored tracks, but like everything else it eventually faded into the background of my music collection and I eventually gave up on ever seeing Autolux perform live. In fact I pretty much gave up on ever hearing anything new from Autolux again; such seemed their indifference to putting out any new product.

For 6 years as I moved from Boston to Virginia to Austin, nary a peep was heard from Autolux with the exception of a couple tracks produced for James Lavelle’s UNKLE project on the industrial-themed “War Stories” album of 2007 and 2010’s more trip-hoppy “Where Did the Night Fall”. Then in the beginning of August of this year, Autolux’s second full length “Transit Transit” dropped almost out of nowhere.

Seemingly defying all logic, Autolux presented an almost unbroken thread between this release and their previous effort 6 years prior. The sound was less spacey, but retained the same identity as both the first full-length and EP. Perhaps the only thing that changed is the music scene itself. In many ways, today’s scene is much more interested in a release like Transit Transit than they would have been even a few years ago. Autolux had always had a niche, only now upon returning to the public with new material they found the field broader and perhaps more accepting. Whether that had anything to do with the small-venue headlining tour I can’t say, but if the crowd at Emo’s on Thursday night was any indication, it was a good move.

Back to Thursday night: I arrived at Emo’s outdoor stage around quarter after 10. The first opening act was just about finishing as a purchased an Autolux t-shirt (my wardrobe of T’s being primarily band and game related) and found myself a good place to stand for the rest of the show. The second opening act “Gold Panda” was decent, but a little too hipster for my tastes: hip-hop infused techno noise by a white guy with a beard on a Mac. Hate the scene … not the scenester. Eventually Autolux went on shortly after 11:40 and started off with “The Science of Imaginary Solutions”, an unassuming track from their new album, then launched into what was (I didn’t realize until I heard it live) one of the more rocking tunes on the new album. The real kicker for this second song and several others throughout the night was that they didn’t just play it out, they jammed on it, something I was not expecting from this band. It was a great energy builder for what I feared would have ended up being a night of swaying rather than rocking and everything just built from there.

The rest of the show followed in similar fashion, with a decent mix of old and new material, all amplified and enhanced by a performance that was as unaffected and unassuming as the band’s image, but just as enthralling. Even better than the band themselves was the crowd. I know why I’m at the show; I’m a former Failure fan who will always religiously follow the works of Ken Andrews and Greg Edwards. The enthusiasm (and relative age) of the crowd spoke to something much bigger however. These were people who were Autolux fans before (or if) they ever heard of Failure or these were people who checked out a random show on suggestion and found something they totally dug. In either case, the band picked up on that energy and ran with it, coming back for a 3 song encore that was both unexpected and appreciated.

All told, it was a great evening despite the late hour, and as always it was amazing to get out and hear something live. I don’t care what it is, but music always sounds better live and while I tend to forget that when I’m on my way out the door, I remember immediately when the first sounds start coming out of the stage amps. My thanks go out to Autolux and the excellent fans at Emo’s Thursday night for a seriously rocking show. I hope it’s not another 6 years before I get to hear new tracks or see them live again.

Show Calendar

This is my calendar of shows I'm going to over the next 2 months:



Gonna be busy in a good way.

Can Apple Maintain the iPod's Relevance?

CNN - Can Apple Maintain the iPod's Relevance?

I certainly hope so. I realize I'm not the core demographic, but the iPod allows me to carry my entire music collection with me at all times and easily play it almost anywhere. As someone who's music collection nearly fills an 80gb iPod it would be a real pain to have to downgrade to something smaller like my iPhone. Once again, I know I'm in the minority, but the whole reason to own a device that large for me is so I can listen to anything on a whim. What's the point of owning a vast music collection in the digital age if you can't immediately access it in it's entirety when every you want? As it is, I'm getting the point where I need to upgrade to a bigger iPod (if such a thing exists) or start picking and choosing what I carry with me. The problem with that is of course if I'm driving down the road some night and get the urge to listen to Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You" (because who hasn't?) and were I to fill my iPod based on what I'm likely to listen to, this might not be on there simply because I've probably only listened to it three times in the last 10 years.

Culling down to a smaller device just isn't worth it for me and the idea of an Apple run cloud vault of my own music terrifies me. On the the one hand, I'm still sore from the days of Apple's strict adherence to DRM and an Apple run cloud sounds like another way to regulate how I can and can't use the music I own. The other problem is connectivity. I want to access my music on the road, wherever that may be and at the best quality possible. If the future means downloading my music from a cloud server I'm picturing poor streaming quality, drop outs, and (for those who use AT&T) giant gaps in coverage.

I'm a dinosaur, I know. I just hope that myself and people like me are a large enough niche for someone to continue to cater to. Not everyone is satisfied with carrying around only 100 or so tracks at a time. Some of us want more variety and choice than that.

Year of the Black Rainbow - Addendum

Ok, to be honest, the album isn't a total loss. There are some good tracks on it, but they're few and far between in my opinion. "The Broken" is excellent as the album's anthem track and "Here We Are Juggernaut" has grown on me. There was at least one, maybe two others that seemed like they might catch on with me as well, but all the slow songs (Far, Pearl of the Stars) were dull and almost grating and the album's one epic song "The Black Rainbow" was hardly epic at all, relying on a repetitious riff to carry it's nearly 8 minutes. And as mentioned in my previous post, I'm just overall turned off by the dull sound of the mix. The low end gets lost in the mud and the mid-high end is almost entirely mixed to feature the vocals, so everything ends up sounding flat to me as I can't hear the layering and depth I expect from a Coheed & Cambria album.

There's also a chance that I'm being a little harsh on the album because of the sequencing. To me it ends up sounding like an industrial wanna-be, similar to late 90's early 2000's acts like Kidney Theives and similar goth rock outfits. I spent most of college listening to nothing but industrial music, bands like: KMFDM, Front Line Assembly, and Skinny Puppy. I have a specific industrial sound that I like and a specific sound that really grates on me. The industrial tinge of Year of the Black Rainbow is the kind of sound that grates on me. Also, I'm very much over industrial music at this point in time. It was a phase in my life between mostly pop music and mostly punk and while I can still go back and listen to some of it, I don't do so very often and I certainly don't get into any new industrial. As far as I'm concerned (like real emo music) there hasn't been any good industrial made since around 2000 or so.

Year of the Black Rainbow is an album of experimentation, it's a band trying new things to spark inspiration and that's good, but I almost wish that Claudio had done a solo album (another Prize Fighter album maybe) after No World for Tomorrow instead of jumping into another Coheed album. Side projects are great for trying new things and giving you new ideas to bring to your main project. Experimental releases for an existing band are always tough to swallow, especially if the experimentation is not to your liking.

In the end I've still got 4 amazing albums from this band though and they will always be good live. We'll see what they come up with in the future though, hopefully less sequencing and more depth.

Year of the Black Rainbow - The Second Listen

I can't pretend anymore. The new Coheed & Cambria album just isn't good. It's not a sell out album by any means, but it's something else I always feared, which is that adherence to the concept of the Amory Wars would lead to stagnation.

Personally I never cared about a "prequel" album and I always felt that it could never live up to the epic nature of the rest of the saga. Year of the Black Rainbow does just that, it doesn't live up. It suffers because it feels like a band making an album because they have to and trying to do whatever they can to make it interesting for themselves, resulting in all the effects, sequencing, and post-processing that serves only to dull the experience for me. Add to this the fact that the mix is entirely flat and without any sense of space (compared to their previous album No World for Tomorrow that was nothing but layering and space) and I can't see myself going back to this one very often. I'm hoping it plays better live and that future Coheed albums unshackled from the concept of the Amory Wars will sound less forced and more organic, but there is always the chance that The Amory Wars will forever be their masterpiece and everything after it a mere shadow of it's brilliance. It certainly wouldn't be uncommon in the realm of progressive music, concept bands, or even rock in general.

Now I  kind of regret having not only bought the deluxe CD/DVD/Book edition of the album, but for having bought it on vinyl as well. I usually reserve vinyl purchases for albums I know I'm going to want to listen to and dissect audibly and I unfortunately don't see that happening here. They can't all be winners I guess and as a failure, Year of the Black Rainbow is still better than most.

Year of the Black Rainbow

First things first: there probably isn't going to be a PAX East post. I know I said there would, but the simple fact is that I tried to write it all at once and that turned out to be a bad idea. What I thought was one story about PAX East was probably more like 6 stories that I should have written over time and either posted together or as I finished them. Part of my reason for having this blog is to try to become a better writer - at least at non-fiction - and learning not to bite off more than I can chew is part of that.

I do however have a post about the new Coheed & Cambria album "Year of the Black Rainbow". Being the huge Coheed fan that I am, I've had the album pre-ordered online for over a month now and like "No World for Tomorrow" before it, the album arrived at my house a few days in advance of it's release.

Before I begin, there are a couple things you need to understand about myself in regards to Coheed & Cambria:

First off: yes, I was totally listening to this band before they were "cool". As a late comer to nearly every indie or punk band or brand of music I never have stories about being into small bands before they blew up. Coheed is the one exception. The first time I ever heard Coheed & Cambria was in 2001 on the University of New Haven radio station in southern Connecticut. The song was the Delirium Trigger EP version of "Everything Evil" and my reaction was "what the fuck is that chick singing about?" It was catchy though and I ended up hearing it again, which prompted some internet investigation where I found out that Claudio was not a chick and many other things about the band as well, including the concept behind it and their planned multi-album storyline. Their first album "The Second Stage Turbine Blade" had just been released and I stole some tracks online using Napster or Lime Wire or Kazaa or whatever was the program we were all using (and we ALL were) at the time. Soon after that I tracked down the album and bought it. I've been a huge fan ever since, having bought every variation of every album and having seen the band live a dozen times, including the 4 shows in New York in October of 2008 that would end up being recorded for the epic "Neverender" live CD/DVD compilation.

Second: I'm always afraid the band is going to let me down, usually by selling out and releasing an album of radio-friendly pop-punk or nu-metal or whatever the damn kids today are listening to. I have no basis for this fear other than the fact that after recording their second album "In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3" they signed with a major label. Other than this, they have never done anything to make me think they'll ever "sell out". This is a band that does what it wants and is constantly trying new things. Every Coheed album sounds like the same band, but has it's own identity and this keeps them fresh and interested in what they're playing and that's a damn sight better than most other major label acts.

Third: Coheed's last album "No World for Tomorrow" simply blew me away. I can't put my finger on it, but there's something about the sound on that album that grabs me. It's clean, powerful, and captivating. It's the epic conclusion not only to a 4 album story saga, but 4 albums worth of musical growth. It's easily the most obviously narrative of the 4 (now 5) albums of the Amory Wars series and every song has it's own unique identity. Whenever I've been away from that album for a while and I put it on I get blown away all over again. It is unlikely that they will ever make a record I like more than No World for Tomorrow, but I always hope that they do.

All that being the case, when I get a new Coheed album (especially after No World...) I'm critical of it. Even back when I first heard In Keeping Secrets, I wasn't sure what I thought of it. I thought "Blood Red Summer" was a total cop out song at first and now I love it. "From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness" was the same way and although it's my least favorite of their albums I still love it, especially the Willing Well suite of songs. So given all the above it's not surprising to find out that I'm not sure what I think about "Year of the Black Rainbow" right now. Once again, Coheed & Cambria are a band trying new things and while I'm sure I'll get used to it and I know it's the right thing to do, there is a part of me that is bummed that this album wasn't instantly a bigger and better version of No World. I'll get over that though.

Initially, Year of the Black Rainbow feels similar to From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness in that the songs sound fairly homogeneous. Even now after listening to the From Fear for years, "Crossing the Frame", "Once Upon Your Dead Body", and "The Lying Lies and Dirty Secrets of Miss Erica Court" all kind of blend together for me and only the fact that I've become attached to "Apollo I", "Wake Up", "The Suffering", and "Mother May I", allows me to find any auditory definition in that block of the album. Also with Year of the Black Rainbow as in From Fear, I have issues with the production. With From Fear my issue was the over-tracking of Cladio's vocals. It's something I know he does on his own with his demos and that he did with his solo project The Prize Fighter Inferno, but I'm not a fan of double tracked vocals to begin with and this was beyond double in some cases. The man's got a great voice and I'd rather hear it naturally. With Year of the Black Rainbow, my problem with the production is the heavy use of effects, sequencing, and post-processing. None of these things are bad on their own and they can be good choices musically, but I feel that here they are muddying up the tracks and making it more difficult to find that auditory bite in each song. I know it's there, but on my initial listen I wasn't hearing it so much.

All that being said, these are definitely good songs, but their identity is something new that I've yet to become familiar with. Such is the case with most great and challenging art though. In time I'm sure I'll grow to love it as much as I do the others, but I do think it will be lumped with From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness in my hierarchy. It's great to hear new Coheed though and to see that the band is still trying new things and playing their asses off. I'm looking forward to seeing them live for the 13th time later this month and seeing what they do next now that the story of the Amory Wars is complete.

The Best of 2009 (part 1)

I'm starting a "Plenty for All" tradition here tonight, listing my favorites from the past year. These lists are of course culled from things that I read, saw, or listened to and were released in the year 2009. Let's begin.

Best Album of 2009
In any given year I'm likely to be listening to more old stuff that I haven't heard before than newly released albums, but out of the 174 albums I purchased this year, there are bound to be more than a few that were also released this year.

5. Cave In - Planets of Old

An EP, but worthy of mention nonetheless. Cave In is as schizophrenic a band as there has ever been and in their career they've played metal, space rock, pop, psychedelia, and have ultimately arrived at this weird fusion that paradoxically still rocks. "Planets of Old" is very much a continuation of the sound Cave In brought us with 2005's "Perfect Pitch Black", a mix of all the above stylistic influences and a brilliant EP, even if it was only available on vinyl.

4. And So I Watch You From Afar - s/t

I heard these guys on the cover CD to an issue of "Rock Sound" last spring and the track that was offered was more or less a mathy post rock song. When I finally obtained the album as a whole I realized that they were much more. Sounding something like a more metal version of From Monument to Masses except without the electronics, And So I Watch You From Afar may have created a new genre if Stadium Post Rock is a term people will accept. The album is prententious as anything with plenty of reverb and a couple instances of faux live cheering in the midst of songs, but I'll be damned if it doesn't rock, while still being an at times mathy post rock album.

3. From Monument to Masses - On Little Known Frequencies

I didn't even know that this album had been released until I chanced upon it used at CD Cellar in Falls Church Virginia not more than a month after it had hit the shelves. Quite simply this is From Monument to Masses doing what they do best, epic post rock with a mix of live instruments, electronics, and samples.

2. Green Day - 21st Century Breakdown

I had purposefully ignored Green Day until this year when my Dad insisted I borrow "American Idiot" and "21st Century Breakdown" from him. Yes, it's still mainstream rock that gets confused for punk, but it's a concept album and you can't deny that it's catchy.

1. The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love

I had written off The Decemberists after their first major label album "The Crane Wife" failed to impress me. I wrote them off as sell offs and then they released "Hazards of Love" this year and I kept hearing how good it was. Ultimately it was the lure of the concept album that got me to check it out and I was ultimately glad I did.They manage to execute perfectly on all fronts and have created something that while perhaps not a cash cow, will certainly be remembered as a landmark record in the future.

Best Film of 2009
This was an awful year for film, absolutely awful. I was saying the same thing about 2008 as well until the final 4 months of the year produced some amazing films. 2009 had no such saving grace and most of what I've seen this year has been disappointing. One need only look at the lackluster choices for the year end awards to see how bad it is. And it wasn't that there weren't any independent films or daring projects, it's just that most of them weren't that good.

5. Star Trek

I was skeptical as any Trek fan would be, but J.J. Abrahms ended up making one hell of a film that while toying with the origins of the franchise, still managed to preserve the sanctity of all that had come before. One question remains though. What's with all the lens flares?

 4. Zombieland

This movie was an instant classic that could have been an instant flop. After seeing so many trailers for the film I had pretty much written it off. I figured that they were just showing me the most interesting stuff in the trailers and that there wasn't anything else worth watching. Man was I wrong. The Bill Murray scene alone is worth the price of admission. Ultimately, in the genre of Zombie-Comedy, "Zombieland" is second only to "Shaun of the Dead"

 3. Avatar

I would call James Cameron's films a guilty pleasure if the man wasn't so damn good at making films. Yes, he's an action film maker, but unlike Michael Bay, Paul WS Anderson, and their ilk, Cameron understands pacing, emotion, and just how to tell a good story. The effects serve the narrative, with Cameron, not the other way around, even in such an effects laden film as "Avatar". I was not disappointed when I left the theater. Avatar is James Cameron doing what he does best and I hope he doesn't make us wait another 10 years before he does it again.

 2. Goodbye Solo

This is a tough film to describe. It is essentially about a cab driver (Solo) who has a fare that asks him to take him to this park where there's a cliff so he can end his life in a couple weeks. Solo and the man make a deal and the rest of the film sees solo trying to persuade the man not to kill himself, while they both get involved in each other's lives. Yeah ... I'm not doing it justice, because it's really good. Even more astounding is the fact that the cast are non-actors, a bold decision by the director that actually pays of in some marvellously genuine performances.

 1. [500] Days of Summer

If you haven't seen this movie, see it. Maybe I'm biased with this one, because not only have I been in the situation presented in the story before ... I'm ALWAYS in this situation. "[500] Days of Summer" is not a romantic comedy, it's a romantic tragedy where Joseph Gordon-Levitt's main character tragically falls in love with Zooey Deschannel's manic pixie dream girl character and the end result is heartbreak. This movie is about what relationships are really like for nice guys who fall in love with girls who are ultimately, more involved, and more interesting than they are. One would like to think that the main character's efforts towards the end of the film to become more involved and interesting will ultimately pay off, but the movie doesn't bring us quite that far and I can't speak from experience on how that works out yet.

 That's all I've got for now though. I'll be back tomorrow with books, games, and whatever else I can think of to write about.

Begining The End

I've started seriously compiling songs for my year end mix. I'm planning on going forward with my original idea of making a mix tape concept album, basically telling a 2 disc story with other people's songs. Since the songs will be culled from my favorites from this year it's going to be semi autobiographical. This may end up being the most personal thing I've produced since college. Right now I'm thinking of breaking the mix down into 4 acts or "seasons". In a year that for me included: insomnia, anxiety, existential crises, and a new job/new city I've got a lot to draw on. Anyway, I'll have updates as it shapes up. I'll also likely be making a more traditional decade ending mix that I'm looking forward too as well.

Sufjan Stevens and the Boycotting of Oneself

The November 09 issue of Paste magazine has an interesting article about Sufjan Stevens. For those who may not know, Sufjan Stevens seemed to come virtually out of nowhere in 2005 with an album called "Illinoise", the second in Stevens' "USA Project" wherein he planned to make an album about each of the 50 states, Michigan having been the first in this series. Illinoise was a huge success by indie standards, selling well over 300,000 albums and the praise it garnered was well earned. I think it's safe to say that Illinoise doesn't quite sound like anything else out there, a peculiar mix of folk, choral, symphonic, and pop arrangements. It was a self aware concept album on a subject that shouldn't have been interesting but was and for the last 4 years we've been wondering when the next state's album would be done.

As it turns out the success of Illinoise may have been more than Sufjan Stevens has hoped for. In what he describes as an existential creative crisis, Stevens' recoiled from the idea of the "USA Project" and music altogether, until presented with the chance to create an original score and performance for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival recently. The resultant album "BQE" about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was recently released, features no vocals, and is very much a film score. Stevens still finds himself with something of a conundrum in so far as the future of his music goes however. Questioning the validity of the album as a format itself (considering that we're moving into a digital age and the +30/-70 minute format is very much based on the constraints of past analog formats) Steven's appears to be reevaluating not just the music, but the concepts behind it as well.

All of this it would seem, brought on by the shock of sudden (if not limited) mainstream success. And while personally, I would have loved to have heard more albums in the same vein as Greetings From Michigan and Illinoise, I suppose I can't fault Sufjan Stevens for the direction he's chosen. Some musicians, when faced with the fleeting promise of mainstream success and adoration, choose to run with the crowd and play to the masses or at the very least become so aware of their new status that their resulting product seems watered down by comparison. It's something that those of us who are more likely to have sought out such music long before it ever became popular call "selling out." Stevens' seems to have done the exact opposite though and is practically boycotting himself or least the version of himself that was lauded by the mainstream. Truth be told, while I appreciate a more Radiohead or Modest Mouse-esque approach to anti-sell-out stardom, where the artist manages to be aware of their impact and acceptance in the mainstream, but continues to innovate and play to please themselves first, I given Stevens credit for innovating in retreat.

While there may never be another state album in the vein of Illinoise or another state album period, Stevens is very obviously interested in exploring the future not just of his own music, but of the whole concept of the art as we progress through this digital age. I'm not expecting miracles, but as enamored as I am of the concept album and analog media in general, it will be interesting to see if artists like Sufjan Stevens can find a way to innovate the realm of digital music, in ways that aren't just a mimicry of what we already have available on analog.

Book Review: New Brunswick, New Jersey, Goodbye

Punk and hardcore were alive and well in America in the mid 90's but perhaps nowhere so much as New Jersey, a scene that would give rise to punk and hardcore mainstays such as Lifetime, Kid Dynamite, The Bouncing Souls, Thursday, and numerous others. "New Brunswick, New Jersey Goodbye" is a memoir of sorts by writer, teacher, musician Ronen Kauffman during his years living in and around New Brunswick and being part of the DIY punk and hardcore scene of the time. What starts out as a high school obsession with punk music, leads Kauffman to create his own zine "Aneurysm" and become more involved in the burgeoning punk and hardcore scene of the area, ultimately culminating in his moving to New Brunswick to attend Rutgers Univesity as a Political Sciene/Journalism major. Ronen tells stories that will be all too familiar to anyone who didn't have the cookie cutter MTV version of the college experience. For people who were more DIY, artistic, indie, or just plain anti, there are likely a number of touchstones here that will bring back memories from college or before. From flophouse appartments, basement shows, drunken skinheads, and the naivete of believing that punk music can change the world, Kauffman paints a picture that while specific to the punk scene in New Jersey at the time, is emblematic in a more universal way of the punk, harcore, DIY experience at anytime and in any place. As a fan of punk music, especially the NJ scene of that time, I found myself grinning uncontrollably when Kauffman spoke of the first time he met Dan Yemen (Lifetime, Kid Dynamite) and how the guitarrist enthusiastically purchased a zine from him.

This isn't just a book about punks bands though and Kauffman doesn't spend 200 pages just tossing out names for the sake of credibility, in fact most of the bands he mentions were so scene specific as to likely be unknown most anywhere else. It's a book about the the thoughts, feelings, comraderie, and community that comes with organizing, playing, and going to punk shows. In the end though the real focus of the book is as a coming of age story, wherein a DIY youth with socialist tendencies ultimately has to come to terms with life in the real world, but finds a way to still hold true to his ideals in the end. For me personally this struck a chord. I know all too well what it's like to hit that wall of the "real world" after college and how hard it can be to stay true to one's ideals while still making your way in the world.

While I thoroughly enjoyed it, I don't think this is a book for everyone. But if you were ever part of a scene that existed just (or waaaaay) outside the mainstream when you were young, I'm betting you can find something to latch onto here. For me personally Kauffman's stories conjured up memories not only from my own life, but of stories from my friends as well and that's well worth the price of admission.

New Brunswisk, New Jersey Goodbye: Bands, Dirty Basements, and the Search for Self by Ronen Kauffman is published by Hopeless Records and available at finer bookstores everywhere.

I'll Make You a Tape

The mix tape may be one of the only true artifacts of my generation. If you were a teenager at any point between the mid 70's to the mid 90's it's highly likely that you have made or received a mix tape. The concept is simple and yet totally reliant on the invention and propagation of the compact cassette as a cheap and accessible medium for the recording of audio at home. In it's simplest form the mix tape involves the recording of music from various sources onto a blank cassette. For those of us who actually made them the process tended to be much more involved than that though. The mix tape was a form of expression, a means by which to create personal compilations of one's favorite music, but perhaps most famously the mix tape was a way for music geeks everywhere to communicate with members of the opposite sex. To quote High Fidelity "you're using someone else's poetry to express how you feel." And that's what it was all about for us in the days when the mix tape reigned supreme. When it came to dating, the mix tape practically replaced flowers as the go-to symbol of affection during the early stages of a relationship. It was a sort of ice breaker as well, or maybe more of a wedge. If you met someone and had remotely similar music tastes the next step was always to make them a tape. Construct a good tape and chances were you'd be hearing from that person again.

Sometimes you just wanted to make a mix for yourself though. This is something I did all the time. As someone who was a teenager during the "modern rock" explosion of the 90's I spent a great deal of time listening to the radio and unlike now, I didn't purchase everything I heard and liked; I had a tape deck attached to my stereo, all I had to do was hit the record button and those songs were mine. I still have a couple dozen tapes of songs recorded off the radio between 1992 and 1997 lying around somewhere. But as an analog medium, playing a cassette meant endless rewinding and fast-forwarding if you wanted to listen to a particular song and when you're recording off the radio you're going to get a pretty random progression of music, so I made mixes to sort it all out. It started out as simple year end mixes of my favorite songs recorded over the last year that I would sometimes copy for friends and evolved into mixes for various moods or situations; my "Mellow Music" and "Car Songs" series of compilations come to mind. The thing about making a mix was that you had to really think about it beforehand, because once you put something down on tape that was more or less it. Sure you could have re-recorded over something, but as soon as you did that the quality started to degrade and you wanted your music to sound good ... or at least as good as a dub on a cassette of cheap magnetic tape could sound. There were other concerns too because make no mistake, what you were making was an album and every mix tape is essentially a concept album:

Mellow Music 1 - Side 1 (circa 1995)

1. Fade Into You - Mazzy Star ... you have to start your mix out strong
2. Nothingman - Pearl Jam ... and you can't let it go right away
3. Anna Begins - Counting Crows ... but you don't want to overdo it so you start to pull back
4. Wonderwall - Oasis
5. Promises Broken - Soul Asylum
6. Isobel - Bjork
7. Free as a Bird - The Beatles ... and you start to think about coming in for a landing
8. I Want Everything - Cracker ... so you up the stakes a little, create a thematic runway
9. Warehouse - Dave Matthews Band ... punch the throttle
10. Ride - Pretty and Twisted ... and come in fast

Mellow Music 1 isn't greatest tape in the world and very much a snapshot of my musical tastes from a very narrow window in time, but it illustrates the point and for me at least it was the tape that taught me how to make tapes. It came together mostly by accident, but ended up sounding really good. and though my efforts on other tapes to recapture that ideal, I learned the secrets of making a good mix. "There are a lot of rules." My mixes have evolved over the years and migrated to CD and digital playlists to the point where my staple year end mixes have become double-album epics. Even the mixes I make for girls these days follow what is very obviously a three act musical narrative progression.

The other beauty of the mix tape is that unlike vinyl, where you can sort of see where the next song begins and ends by looking at the grooves, tapes were a mystery, at least while playing. If you wanted to skip a song you had to fast-forward through it which meant stopping short or going to far, at which point you rewind. If you were listening to a tape it was likely you were listening from start to finish in the order recorded, anything else would have been a major pain. With the advent of the CD the order of songs on an album and eventually a mix would become a mere suggestion. You wanted people to listen to your tape in the order you arranged though, that was the whole point and if it was a good mix your audience would agree.

While the tapes eventually went away, CD's and digital media didn't kill the mix tape, it just had to evolve. I still refer to playlists and CD compilations as mix tapes when I share them. For me the process is still the same even if the technology has changed. The days of the true mix tape are long gone though and while I still make mixes for girls on CD, the tangilble, crafted essence of the thing is diminished in comparrison to the tapes I made when I was younger. It's become a point of nostalgia that unlike vinyl records, is not likely to ever return to the marketplace or the collective culture of the music listening public. And good riddance, the compact cassette was an awful format prone to noise and degration and posessing all the fidelity of a tin-can telephone. But the mix tapes made it worthwhile and made us all producers in our bedrooms and although the artifact has been buried, the idea lives on.