Before I Forget
A couple of things I didn’t write about as they came up, just so I don’t forget them.
Saw Autechre, SND and DJ Rob Hall at the Mezzanine in San Francisco, almost a month ago. It was a great show, one of the best live electronic shows I’ve seen. SND played a nice long set, and were a lot different than I thought they’d be live. On record, they always strike me as clinical, distant, and sort of minimal, with lots of textures on the edge of perception. Live, amplified over a huge PA was a whooooole different story. The comparison I thought of at the time was like this: Imagine looking through a microscope at a minute but highly textured surface, like a flake of rock or something. There are cracks and fissures and nicks that are invisible to the naked eye, but the closer you look, the more detail you can see in them. This is SND on record. Now, imagine being shrunk down small enough to hike these tiny microscopic cracks as if they were canyons. This is SND live.
Autechre was amazing too, with an hour-and-a-half non-stop, all hardware set vaguely based on some of the grooves and ideas from Untilted. I hate to make this comparison, but it was almost rave-like, in a way. Of course, minus all the ridiculous outfits, pacifiers, lightsticks, and drugs (well, ok, minus some of the drugs, most likely), and all the other bullshit essential to a rave. Not that I’ve ever been to one, but that’s the impression I get.
Abrupt topic shift: The Woods, by Sleater-Kinney.
Picked this album up while in Seattle, and I’ll admit I was pretty excited about hearing it. I’d heard so much about how raw the album was, and how it was the best of their career, and a new direction, and blah blah blah. So I made it a point of hunting it down, and picked up the limited edition version w/DVD.
And it sounds terrible.
Seriously. This is one of the worst recordings I’ve heard in a while. It takes the trend of loud, overmastered, brick-wall-limited rock albums to ridiculous extremes, especially the opening track. Everything is pushed so hot that there’s no dynamic variation to much of the material, and even the “quieter” parts max out the available headroom on the CD. I know they were going for “extreme”, and “loud” and “rocking”, but you can have that without sacrificing dynamics. You can make things sound rough, and edgy and yes, loud, without making it a mass of square wave distortion. Which is a real shame, since some of the songs are great. Not the best I’ve heard from them, but there’s definitely some quality material here. But as it is, I don’t think I’m going to be listening to this album again.
What really disappoints me is that Dave Fridmann, their producer, should know better. He’s made some brilliant sounding records (Come on Die Young, the Soft Bulletin, etc.). He flirted with this direction on the last Low album, the Great Destroyer, and it was almost palatable there. I think the difference was mainly that the Low album was a huge change for a band mostly known for their quiet, sparse, haunting sound that barely rose above a whisper. The wall of sound on the Great Destroyer works fine as an artistic statement, and although it was a bit loud for my tastes, it wasn’t uncomfortably so, especially since the band’s playing preserves some of the dynamic variation.
I heard that at TapeOpCon, someone told Dave Fridmann that it sounded like the Woods was mastered through a Rat distortion pedal. Sounds pretty accurate to me.
