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Archive for the ‘Kraftwerk’ Category

Ian Duerden–Tales from the Clockwork Empire: The Tale of the Clockwork Menagerie Book 1 (2012)

Posted in Constellation Records, Feu Therese, Graphic Novel, History, Ian Duerden, Kraftwerk, Serge Gainsbourg, Steampunk, Tangerine Dream, Technology, The Beach Boys, Word usage on May 1, 2014| Leave a Comment »

clockworkSOUNDTRACK: FEU THÉRÈSE-Ça Va Cogner [CST049] (2007).

feu2Bands change sounds from one album to another all the time, but few as radically as this one. From weirdo psychedelic band to French new wave pop band, from 6 minute instrumentals to 2 and 3 minute songs with vocals.

At times the album feels like Kraftwerk meets Serge Gainsbourg (which I know is an unfair reduction, but when your singer mostly talk/sings in a deep French voice, the comparison is apt.  And yet the album is fairly poppy and catchy as well.

“A Nos Amours” opens the disc with three minutes of synth happiness. It even has a section where the music drops out and the bass resumes its place.  Recall in their debut that at 4 minutes of each song something radically different happened.  Now the songs just end. “Visage Sous Nylon” features the more Kraftwerk sound—but it’s an almost organic Kraftwerk (which I know makes no sense but there it is). “Les Deserts des Azurs” has a kind of Tangerine Dream feel with washes of analog synths.

“Le Bruit du Pollen La Nuit” has a weird kind of synthy 70 s rock feel but the music almost drops out entirely (but not quite) while the vocals (in French) are spoken. It feels like it’s mocking and serious at the same time.  It’s also got a discoey chorus singing “You’re just a just a just a pretty boy!”

“Nada” has a synthy almost disco feel.  “Ça Va Cogner” is just over 5 minutes long and consists of various delicate swells of synths.  I kept waiting to hear The Beach Boys “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” burst forth from the waves, until about half way in when it turns into a simple delicate melody and a children’s chorus. “Les Enfants” is a simple ditty with hummed lyrics.  It’s poppy and catchy as anything

“Ferrari en Feu Pt. 2” is a fast synth songs with slap bass. (Part 1 was on the debut and sounded nothing like this).  “La Nuit Est un Femme” is a slow synth track with a female backing vocals over a sung male lead. The end of the song adds some loud textures to this otherwise sweet song bringing in some really interesting tensions.  The disc ends with “Laisse Briller Tes Yeux Dans le Soleil,” a synthy instrumental that ends with cheesy charm.

This album is really wonderful–surprisingly catchy and dancey and yet exotic enough to not sound like anything else that (most) people are familiar with.  All of the Constellation albums are streaming on their site, but this one is especially worth checking out.

[READ: April 15, 2014] Tales from the Clockwork Empire Book 1

I was very intrigued by this book because of the steampunk nature and because I have a strange fascination with clockwork ideas–a technology that is precise and interesting yet which never really took off beyond clocks and small toys because other technologies were more powerful

I thought that the cover was kind of interesting with this gigantic metal head holding ball.  But on closer look the man in the ball was very poorly computer rendered and that should have been a tip off.  For all of the people in the book have this same unfinished-rendered look.  It looks a lot like storyboards of unfinished versions of Pixar films.  I mean, really cheesy and really unfinished and really unsettling. This is especially noticeable on the rendering of Napoleon Bonaparte in the “end credits” of the book.

I hate to harp on the graphics, but this is a graphic novel after all.  All of the non human elements looks fine, many look even better than fine, bordering on photo realistic.  But the humans all seem ugh, creepy and stiff and just dropped on top of these scenes.  It is terribly distracting and may even make the dialogue feel stiffer than it actually is.  Because the dialogue felt very stiff and mechanical as well.

It is the kind of story that seems historically accurate in the details and works very hard to let you know that it is accurate.  Indeed, in the end of the book Duerden goes to great lengths to show the accuracies in the writing.  But there’s so little flow in the dialogue that it seems like a lecture.  Basically the entire book feels like, not a first draft, but like the draft before the final draft.  Like the book is going to go back to have a final polish to make the dialogue breezier and make the pictures look better.

This is all a shame since I haven;t eve talked about the story yet. (more…)

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Five Dials 19: The Parenting Issue (28 April 2011)

Posted in Advice, Alain de Botton, Alexandra Styron, Arthur Bradford, Books about writers, Cars, Christoph Niemann, Consumerism, Craig Taylor, Culture Shock, Darin Strauss, Diedre Dolan, Essays, Excerpt, Fears, Five Dials, Fretful Mother, Funny (ha ha), Heidi Julavits, Hugh Gallagher, Humiliation, Jim Windolf, John Kenney, Katha Pollitt, Kevin Baker, Kraftwerk, Manuals, Marriage (Happy), Marriage Trouble, Neil Young, Peter Melhman, Piers Paul Read, Religion, Rush, Sarah Miller, Short Story, The Simpsons, Tucker Nichols, William Berlind, William Styron on August 27, 2011| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: NEIL YOUNG-Trans (1982).

By most standards this Neil Young album is a disaster.  It’s so bad that despite updating his entire catalog and releasing all kinds of bootleg concerts, he has never issued this disc on CD in the States.  So, just what’s so awful about this disc?

Well, mostly it’s awful as a Neil Young disc.  Meaning, if you like Neil Young (either flavor: country/folk or hard rock/grunge) this disc is a big fat HUH??  Neil Young has gone all synthy?  And not just synth but computerized synthy–sometimes his voice is utterly like a computer.  It’s a travesty, it’s a shame, it’s an incredible surprise.  Unless you listen to it without thinking of it as a Neil Young record.

But after all that introduction, the biggest surprise is the first song.  You’ve been prepped for this weird album full of computer nonsense and you get the fairly standard (if a little dull) rockabilly type music of “A Little Thing Called Love.”  It’s a pretty standard Neil Young song for the time.  Hmm, maybe the album isn’t that weird.

Well, then comes “Computer Age” and the keyboards kick in.  Interestingly, to me anyhow, this is the year that Rush released Signals.  Signals was the album where Rush fans said Woah, what’s with the keyboards guys.  Similarly, “Computer Age” makes you say, geez, was there a sale on keyboards in Canada?  The keyboards are kind of thin and wheedly, but the real surprise comes in the processed vocals (Rush never went that far).  The vocals are basically the 1980s equivalent of auto-tune (no idea how they did this back then).  Because the song is all about the computer age it kind of makes sense that he would use this weird robotic voice.  Sometimes it’s the only voice, although he also uses the computer voice as a high-pitched harmony over his normal singing voice.

“We R in Control” sounds like it might be a heavy rocker (anemic production notwithstanding) until we get more computer vocals.  Again, conceptually it works (its all about the dominance of CCTV), but it is pretty weird as a Neil Young song.

And then comes yet another shock, “Transformer Man.”  Yes, THAT “Transformer Man,” except not.  This original version of the song is sung entirely in a processed super high pitched computer voice that is almost hard to understand).  The only “normal’ part of the song is the occasional chorus and the “do do do dos.”  It sounds like a weird cover.  Sarah, who loves Neil Young, practically ran out of the room when she heard this version.

“Computer Cowboy (aka Syscrusher)” continues in that same vein.  Musically it’s a bit more experimental (and the computer vocals are in a much lower register).  Although I think it’s probably the least interesting of these songs.

Just to confuse the listener further, “Hold On to Your Love” is a conventional poppy song–no computer anything (aside from occasional keyboard notes).  Then comes the 8 minute “Sample and Hold” the most computerized song of the bunch and one of the weirder, cooler songs on the disc.  It really feels like a complete song–all vocodered out with multiple layers of vocals, not thin and lacking substance like some of the tracks.  It opens with personal stats (hair: blonde, eyes: blue) and proceeds through a litany of repeated “new design, new design” motifs.

This is followed by a remake of “Mr Soul” previously only on Decade.  This is a new vocodered-harmonies version of the song.

The biggest failure of the disc to me is “Like an Inca” it’s nine minutes of virtually the same guitar riff.  The chorus is pretty wonderful, but it’s a very minor part of the song itself.  It is fairly traditional Neil song, I just wish it were much shorter.

So, this travesty of a disc is actually pretty interesting and, for me, pretty enjoyable.  Most of these synthy songs sound kind of weak but I think that has more to do with the production of the time. I’d love to hear newly recorded versions of these songs (with or without the vocoder) to see what he could do with a great production team behind him.

Trans is not a Neil Young disc in any conventional sense, but as an experiment, as a document of early 80s synth music, it not only holds up, it actually pushes a lot of envelopes.   I’m not saying he was trying to out Kraftwerk Kraftwerk or anything like that, but for a folk/rock singer to take chances like this was pretty admirable.  Shame everybody hated it.

[READ: July 5, 2011] Five Dials 19

Five Dials 19 is the Parenting Issue.  But rather than offering parenting advice, the writers simply talk about what it’s like to be a parent, or to have a parent.  It was one of the most enjoyable Five Dials issues I have read so far.

CRAIG TAYLOR & DIEDRE DOLAN-On Foreign Bureuas and Parenting Issues
I enjoyed Taylor’s introduction, in which he explains that he is not very useful for a parenting issue   That most of the duties will be taken on by Diedre Dolan in NYC.  They are currently in her house working while her daughter plays in the next room.  His ending comment was hilarious:

Also, as is traditional at most newsweeklies, someone just put a plastic tiara on my head and then ran away laughing at me.

I resist Parenting magazines, from Parents to Parenting to Fretful Mother, they all offer some sound advice but only after they offer heaps and heaps of guilt and impossible standards.  So I was delighted to see that Five Dials would take an approach to parenting that I fully approve of.  Dolan writes:

Nobody knows what works. Most people just make some choices and defend them for the next 18 to 50 years – claiming nurture (good manners) or nature (crippling shyness) when it suits them best.

And indeed, the magazine made me feel a lot better about my skills (or lack) as a parent. (more…)

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Barack Obama–The Audacity of Hope (2006)

Posted in Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Constellation Records, Consumerism, Corporate skewering, Digression, Feu Therese, History, Kraftwerk, Le Fly Pan Am, Memoirs, Political Humor, Politicians, Shalibi Effect, Smarty Pants, The Walrus on October 22, 2008| 2 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: FEU THÉRÈSE-Ca Va Cogner [CST049] (2007).

I struggled ever so much over what disc to attach to this book review, thinking that any disc would be seen to have some correlation to Obama.  So, why not just go all out: a Canadian indie band that sings in French!

This is Feu Thérèse’s second disc.  It comes from Constellation records, home of noisy, lengthy, downbeat records.  In fact, Feu Thérèse is chock full of some of the big names in the Montreal underground: Alexandre St-Onge plays with noisy bands like Shalibi Effect and Jonathan Parant comes from noisy bands like Le Fly Pan Am.  So, how did all of these factors possibly unite to make this disc?

Ca Va Cogner sounds like a analog synth party from 1980!  The whole ensemble would be completely and utterly cheesy if the secret ingredient (which I cannot identify) did not make the whole thing work so well.  The whole disc seems to be washed over with these groovy synths. I want to make comparisons to Kraftwerk, but that seems a little too cold.  All of these songs are warm and soft, there’s even a children’s chorus on one of them.  Other songs are instrumental, or have minimal singing.  And “Le Bruit Du Pollen La Nuit” has a wonderfully smutty sounding spoken word track that recalls, of course, Serge Gainsbourg at his naughtiest (although I have no idea what this song is actually about).

I think what saves the disc from just being an 80’s French Europop band is the guitar and bass interplay.  Those two guys take a lot of the sounds that they’ve mastered in their respective bands, and play them beneath all of the synths.  It undercuts the intentional cheesiness of the keyboards with some awesome textures, and really brings everything to a remarkable whole.  This probably won’t be anybody’s favorite disc, but it is very enjoyable, and worth tracking down, especially if you’re a Francophile.

[READ: October 15, 2008] The Audacity of Hope

Since I’ve been for Obama since the beginning, I figured I ought to read his book.  It seemed especially apt now, since the McCain campaign is saying that we don’t “know anything about” Obama. Well, if you read this book, or, I suspect his OTHER autobiography, you could learn quite a bit about him.  Unlike some other people who don’t grant interviews, hmmm.  Okay, I had thought I would be able to review this book without referencing the current campiagn or the upcoming election, but it is simply impossible.  Please deal with my Partisan Review. (more…)

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