Archives : all posts by Sean

James Irwin - "Everything Passed Me By". Flying to Los Angeles tomorrow and what better send-off than this jet-plume of a song by Montreal's James Irwin. Synths prowl softly round the rhythm section's groove; nimble guitars and baby blues; a saxophone like a shot & vanishing rocket.

Seems we're never going to get a record by The Moment, Montreal's best new band of 2013. They were James Irwin and Nick Scribner, Adam Waito and Julia Lewandowski and Jeffrey Malecki. "Everything Passed Me By" was one of theirs - a treasure I was waiting for. In concert, this tune was a blanket and a rainforest. It was a scene, a jam, a whole complete friendship. It was five songs convening in a summer field.

Now James has finished "Everything Passed Me By" on his own. I think it's songier than it was: melody & harmony, a musical arrangement gathered in a room. But still those gorgeous chords, that beautiful diffuseness. A fizz of feelings, vivid and fading and faint, in a story of Californian evenings, summer heat, lying down on a lawn. There's a long sunset. There's distance. There's surf. Ariel Pink is here, with John Maus. Belle & Sebastian are squinting at a concrete ocean-wall. If there are leaves, the leaves' green has lost its saturation. The day is Polaroid, with flat feet and swollen heart. I thought I was Harry Nilsson, here / I thought I'd be walking on the beach and the vision would wash up in a bottle at my feet / Everything passed me by. It's a song that dances with inevitability, around inevitability, splits inevitability into trilling call and answer, division, no mistakes.

Some paradises are very specific, too specific to ever find.

[more from James / there's a remix coming]

Don Jazzy, Tiwa Savage, Dr SID, D'Prince and The Mavins - "Dorobucci". In Africa at least, they have a worthy "song of the summer". "Dorobucci", from Nigeria's Mavin Records, is one of the year's biggest hits. It's a lissom, looping laze. It's a chant of good times, wealth and friendship, sunshine and water and flowing breeze. You can turn it up loud and dance, with all your gang; you can turn it down a little and breathe in/breathe out, among dappled lights. Nighttime and daytime, Dorobucci. Daytime and nighttime, Dorobucci. Simple as a good mood, found.

[official video coming soon / lots of great unofficial ones]

---

If you're on the west coast, I do hope you'll join me for readings & music in Los Angeles on Wednesday 23/7, SF on Monday 28/7, and Portland on Tuesday, 29/7.

(illustration by Adam Waito)

Tonal Blows - "Your Scratchy Face".
Tonal Blows - "By the Sea".
Tonal Blows - "Train Memory".
Tonal Blows - "A Choice Between".

Ringworm Psoriasis, Secret Garden Gallop Way, and From A Pride To Whom Lay with Mangy Mutts are three volumes of avant-garde ringtones recorded by Blobby Rice aka Blane Rose' aka Break Ribbons aka Bones & Rubber aka Body Roial aka my beloved Brendan Reed. Brendan is an artist and musician and programmer and filmmaker, a veteran of Letlowns and Clues and long-ago Arcade Fire. He's himself and none-other, a forge of sparking arcing art. And so when he decided to record and release dozens of ringtones your eyebrows would be right to rise, like floodwaters.

These are ringtones that chime and flail and explode. Some of them dwindle, others burst. Some are catchy hooks, other are the lint that catches on hooks. They are short and they are long. They are diverse. They break open our idea of what a ringtone is and I bet if you put one on your phone, and your phone then rings, you will breathe and smile and actually feel right in this technological world; like finally you are using technology to make your life truer, rather than more of a lie.

Four of my favourite TONAL BLOWS ringtones are available here.

• "Your Scratchy Face" is that phone-call where you are stressed out but also happy about the stress, settled by it; like your life has been given a gift of meaning by all the tiny fractured bits and pieces of roiling business;
• "By The Sea" is that phone-call on Saturday afternoon when things are finally going to get going!!! and you hear the phone in the other room and you're excited, you're excited!, but still it takes a while to get around yr furniture and through the doorway and to that damn phone and along the way you have the chance to imagine the whole story for the rest of your day, and how long it's going to be, and how thorough;
• "Train Memory" is that phone-call where your friend is going to insist on pretending to be a train; and
• "A Choice Between" is the ringing, jumbly sound of mingled friendships; you can't even remember how or when you met this treasured pal.

You can download all three of these volumes of ringtones for free or for cheap or for $1,000 a pop: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3.

---

Brendan made a riddle of a website for me, Our Shadows Slanting By The Lamps, to help promote my novel. Owen Pallett contributed music. The other sites were I Gazed At A Long Shelf of Batteries, by Jez Burrows (with music by my pal M.G.), and Whispering Machine, by Socialtech, with original music by Bear In Heaven.

The Hydrothermal Vents - "Neptune's Grave".
The Hydrothermal Vents - "Shark!".

A scuba diver has impermeable earbuds in his ears. He dives down through columns of bubbles, quills of current, weaving and sinuous in a search for manta-rays. And he's listening to music, sure he is. The Hydrothermal Vents have given us an album that's like Jacques Cousteau in a band with the Pixies, Devo jamming with Flotsam & Jetsam. Electric pop with spines and fins - rock'n'roll that's a little weird, its queerness hissing in like oxygen. While "Neptune's Grave" is tangled acceleration, the slap and coo of appetite, "Shark!" is fizzier stuff - under the pop and sighs there's something like a motorik, and it almost reminds me of Stereolab.

Yes, there's a silliness to the Vents' undersea project. But it's a serious silliness, po-faced whimsy; the Talking Heads taught us something can be funny without being a joke. Secrets of the Deep! doesn't rely on any punchlines. It uses its conceit as an engine, a chugging dinghy, as it trawls for pop. If "Neptune's Grave" doesn't hook you, "Shark!" will. Both shed silver fishscale whenever I take them up.

[The Hydrothermal Vents at Bandcamp / they launch the album at Casa del Popolo on Friday Saturday]

---

Sincere apologies for my recent absence on the blog. I was book-touring around the US and didn't have time to catch my breath (and type). Honestly I felt the guilt & regret swinging round my neck like a damn medallion. You are all friends and I hate when I neglect our correspondence.

That said, the tour resumes next week. If you live in Los Angeles, San Francisco or Portland, I would love to meet you in person. Please come to a reading, where I'll talk about Us Conductors, and read from it, and we can shake actual hands. (If you prefer it à la Québecoise, we can kiss on each cheek.)

• Los Angeles, CA - July 23 - Largo at the Coronet • Mollie has organized this incredible, almost dumbfounding show: "Moving Through Space Toward You" is a celebration of the theremin, and my novel, featuring Califone, thereminist Eban Schletter, electro-thereminist Probyn Gregory (who tours with the Beach Boys, playing that part on "Good Vibrations"), and This American Life mainstay Starlee Kine. Plus surprise guests? We're going to turn the theatre into paradise. Please come: buy tickets here.
• San Francisco, CA - July 28 - Booksmith • A reading at this amazing bookshop with help from local thereminist Meredith Yayanos. Free!
• Portland, OR - July 29 - Glyph Café & Arts Space • A "Happy Hour with the Theremin" from 5:30 to 7:30, with Us Conductors and local theremin-player Steve Hassett. Free!

I'll also be appearing at LA's Literary Death Match on July 22, competing against DJ Javerbaum, Sara Benincasa and Attica Locke.

(photo by Andreas Franke)

Owen Pallett - "The Riverbed".

Lately I have been caught up with Big Questions. Questions of why and what, a reverberating how. It's not an existential crisis, not a gin-soaked depression; I'm too happy for that. But, sometimes, some of us, even the happy ones, maybe especially the happy ones, need to ask these big qs. We are finally at a kind of rest and so it seems like the time, finally, to look life square in the heart and ask. Dry-eyed, deliberate, gazing from riverbed to thunderhead. With courage, no desperation.

Owen Pallett's In Conflict is his fourth solo album, the second under his own name. It is a tremendous work - universal and particular, pop music and out music. It fills me with a mixture of certainty and uncertainty. It feels like staring at yourself in someone else's mirror. Sometimes, listening, I am reminded of Stravinsky; other times, of Bernie Taupin. (Owen would maybe hate the Taupin comparison, but Bernie too is a master of revelation and affect.) It is an isolating album - a record that settles around you like its own biome, with rhythms and weather. It does not mix well with others - with stray scraps of radio, other people's conversations. I am writing this with Owen in my headphones and the World Cup echoing around me and it is as if two worlds are competing for my allegiance. One of them is valiant, the other capricious.

Let me talk about "The Riverbed". This song is a thrill. It is martial, thunderous, awesome. It is tidy and banal. It is the union of those sides: the banality of thunder, the thunderousness of ennui. Maybe they once called this genre "chamber pop", but here there is floodwater in the concert hall, electricity in the air. A clatter of snare and cymbal, that masterpiece of bass-drum - it is like making a monumental ascent, fording a river. The arc of Owen's vocals, the smooth swells of strings - this is all glide, unstruggling. Again, both sides - effort and effortlessness. This is the most confusing thing, sometimes, about art, and heart, and self-destruction: that they are hard and also easy, or easy and so, so hard.

Owen sings of hand on paper, finding new work. A few breaths later, The gift of your depression bears you down, down, down. So easy, each of these discoveries: sometimes the Muse is sitting beside you, offering creative inspiration; other times, the universe kisses you on the mouth and provides arbitrary sorrow. There are lines about alcohol and childlessness, loneliness and companionship. Just one glance at almost each image; the song is never subsumed by its subjects. And this is what led to my earlier reflections, on dry-eyed meditation: as much as "The Riverbed" tells a story about collapse and comeback, gin binge and struggle, it doesn't feel like it is performed from that space. Written, maybe (maybe), but not performed. Here, Owen seems sober and steady. He seems measured. He has looked into the well and now he can teach us about it. He can keep asking the same questions, the ones he intuited in crisis. Try to admit that you might have it wrong. He has learned something - something small, like a black garnet; something about velocity and persistence. Or even if Owen hasn't truly learned the lesson yet, he's untangling it, singing, trying to choose the proper words. Perhaps we can learn it. I'm going to try. This is the thing about life's empty hurtling: we're all falling together.

(Or are we?)

[video (which is great) / buy / touring all over, this summer]

(GIF by Uno Moralez)

This week my first novel, Us Conductors, is officially published in the United States. (It came out in Canada in April.) I hope you'll read it, you out there, old friends and kindred spirits and trespassers who strayed onto this blog looking for a calm pistachio background. Us Conductors is published by Tin House Books, and you can order it via its website, or buy it in shops, or on iBooks or in kindletown, or you can come into my front garden now that summer has come and I will bring you mint tea and ice-cream and try to persuade you to buy it.

Us Conductors is a sort of love story about Lev Sergeyvich Termen, inventor of the theremin, and Clara Rockmore, its greatest player. It's a novel about invention, memory, debt, airships, orchestras, Soviet spies, American ballerinas, Siberian taiga, electric singing, killer kung-fu, blue speakeasies, and responsibility. It's about lying faith and untrue true love.

You can read the recent Kirkus review here.

I started writing this book in 2009. Its working title was IN WHICH I WIN THE LOVE OF CLARA ROCKMORE, MY ONE TRUE LOVE, FINEST THEREMIN PLAYER THE WORLD WILL EVER KNOW. Part two begins with an epigraph, a Russian saying: "Twelve months of winter / The rest is summer." There are chapters about the 1929 Crash and the the day Lenin played the theremin. The chapter titles are taken from songs by artists like Kate Bush, Jesus & Mary Chain, and Mark Hollis. There are a few gramophones, but they don't say anything.

Besides' Clara Rockmore's theremin performance of Saint-Saëns' "The Swan", the track that most influenced Us Conductors is a piece of music by Tim Hecker:

Tim Hecker - "In the Fog II".

A song like smoke; like blur, like mist. Which seems like one shapeless thing but which is in fact variegated, comprised of interconnecting parts. All this furl of organ, rise of static. All this grey colour. If you are listening closely, you can not help but search through the sound - it's like a kind of thirst.

I recently wrote about this song, and others, for Largeheartedboy's "Book Notes" series (there's an accompanying Spotify playlist). As I said there:

Is this a melody we hear, or are we imagining it? Is this meaning or its opposite? Is Hecker sending a signal, making a message? He won't say.

All our lonely lives are this: can we feel the ones beside us, or have we made a mistake?

At the end of Us Conductors, Lev Sergeyvich Termen sits alone in Moscow, haunted, listening to magnetic tape. He is searching.

Please buy my book. Buy it for your father, for father's day; or for your mother, belatedly, for mother's day. And, if you're in the US, please come see me on my upcoming book tour. Initially, I'll be visiting Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Durham, Asheville and Atlanta. These are the initial dates, with West Coast appearances to be confirmed in a couple of weeks. At each of these stops I'll be reading from the book, signing first editions, and usually I'll have a local thereminist as guest star. They'll be special, and casual, and I'd love to meet you.

---

Elsewhere things:

• I wrote more than 2,000 words for HTML Giant about a YouTube video with the cutest little girl in the world.


• I was interviewed by Nardwuar, and also talked to the Hazlitt podcast about the book, warbled on a theremin.


• Litreactor proposed that in the movie adaptation of Us Conductors, Termen be played by Jude Law. (I disagree.)


• Said the Gramophone's better half, Dan Beirne, can still be seen zoiding up!!! at Spaceriders.tv.

Mark Berube - "Carnival". Mark Berube's Russian Dolls is the best thing he's ever done - ambitious, uncompromising, the work of a singer-songwriter who's drawing from Serge Gainsbourg, Beck and Sufjan Stevens, not the modest coffee-house set. But "Carnival" is higher-charged than Histoire de Melodie Nelson, less fussy than Illinois, sincerer than Mutations. There's a little of Stereolab and Pinback. There are fireworks and ferris wheels. The song's landscape emerges like a vision at the other end of a tunnel - piece by piece, closer and closer, shadows washed away by bonfires, what is distant becoming near. [buy]

(photo source)

Isle of Pine - "What Did You Release". A song like an exhalation - out, and lifting, and already gone. I imagine Isle of Pine at a Manhattan bar, a noisy Manhattan bar, cavernous, with moderately expensive lager and a row of Glenfiddich bottles; and people at the back are playing a giant version of Jenga, with big wooden pieces; and Isle of Pine don't need to play Jenga, don't need to play it for even one second. They can already imagine game after game, all the towers built and then collapsing. // A man turns to the woman beside him and says, What colour would you say this is? And she says, Either gold, or brown. [buy]

(photo source)