Oink’s Pink Palace, my favorite site on the entire internet was shut down this week. October 23, 2007 - a sad day indeed.
I don’t think I could give a better epitaph than DJ Rupture did on his blog. A musician aware enough to actually be encouraged when he found his music available on the revolutionary sharing site.
“Oink had everything by certain artists. Literally, everything. I searched for ‘DJ Rupture’ and found every release I’d ever done, from an obscure 7? on a Swedish label to 320kpbs rips of my first 12?, self-released back in 1999. It was shocking. And reassuring. The big labels want music to equal money, but as much as anything else, music is memory, as priceless and worthless as memory…”
Getting invited to Oink was one of the most exciting and vindicating experiences of my internet life. The black market community of music distribution through file sharing has always been intensely interesting to me; it was at the heart of my initial romance with the internet. In the beginning, there were simply websites with mp3s for download and lists of ftp sites that were traded around on IRC. Then came Napster, which brought the masses into the game, and then came Soulseek, which shared Napster’s user-friendliness and simplicity of use, but managed to stay underground for reasons i don’t really understand to this day.
But Oink was a revelation. It was truly a music lover’s paradise. It was a community based on love of music, sharing, cuteness (avatars were required to be cute in an endearing attempt to foster kind communication), quality, and organization. It remains the benchmark for what a music service can and should be. I guess stuff like that is always destined to come up against the harsh reality of “too good to be true.” Oink, you will be missed.
Saturday, Oct 13th, 2007 Categories: music, robots
Last week I was browsing around Amazon.com and stumbled upon what may be the greatest treasure trove of customer reviews on the entire site. Autechre album reviews. Autechre (there are a variety of ways to pronounce it, and the duo, Sean Booth and Rob Brown, have said the name can be pronounced any way one sees fit) is an experimental electronic music act whose compositions tend to defy description. There’s is the sound of machines lumbering towards expression. It is music that has been called unique, difficult, complex, repetitive, alien, abstract, robotic, inhuman, minimalist, dark, strange, mathematical, architectural, atmospheric, frightening, structured noise, austere, intellectual, emotional, cold, beautiful, harsh, etc. Lots of words trying to express some kind of analog to an experience that is completely lacking in words.
As one reviewer so well summed up, just go with beauty, stop trying to describe it and just experience it for yourself. Which is probably the best course of action with Autechre, but that doesn’t mean many have put forth some incredible attempts at the art of describing Autechre. Some particularly inspired samples:
“Here, we’re no longer looking at landscapes/listening to soundscapes. Instead, Ae bring us inside the mind of the machine. It is a claustrophobic, disorienting, but totally fascinating experience. The machines we inhabit are definitely mortal, perhaps mortally wounded. They spit out strange pattering rhythms, and quirky, touching melodies. They suffer from Tourettes and Obsessive-Compulsive disorder. They undergo life-cycles from birth to death before our eyes/ears.
When I listen to a great soul singer like Marvin Gaye or Sam Cooke, I feel a surge of emotion that comes from a sense that they are singing about my life and my experiences, more eloquently than I ever could. I feel like I share a special human bond with them. Ae have managed a more daunting task; they’ve brought me as close as is humanly possible to feeling a special bond with machines. Amazing.” link
“Through digitally construed mediums, we’ve been allowed to taste something that our parents and their parents never imaged, actually allowing us to ride on the shaped experimental surf of some unnamed audio sea for the very first time. Its uttering amazing in that respect alone, with foreign worlds never before experienced finding themselves sonically cultivated in man’s existence.” link
“Autechre sounds like the the noises of the inner cortex of a robot, while Aphex Twin sounds like a kid playing in a robot factory.” link
“Someone once compared the music on Tri Repetae as the sound of machines chattering away to each other in the dark. If so, then this record is the sound of those machines trying to drag themselves out of a dark tarpit under the glare of acetylene lights on some forgotten evil robot construction site. link
“It depicts an alien, mechanical, vaguely threatening but overall unclear form that seems to be wriggling into existence spontaneously (i.e., constructing itself rather than being birthed). link
“It’s weird. It’s repetitive. It’s difficult. And yet, there’s something there. Something fascinating. Something alive. I have to learn it’s secrets. I have to listen again. Marge! Prepare my headphones! Open the listening room doors! Hold all my calls! I’m going back!!” link
“picture crystalline structures of great complexity slowly growing, but incorporating organic fragments in a way that seems random and orchestrated at once. Now translate that to sound.” link
“damn brahmin… this is inaa fine style. jagged beats spin and contort, go out of focus, come back together. sounds like milford grave ripping apart acid house and early hip hop and putting it all back together as cubist dub drug cult funk.” link
After being inspired by the multitude of astounding reviews, I attempted my own review of the Untilted album. However, I found myself drifting towards trying to describe Autechre in general, instead of the album in question. It got me thinking about the music though, and ever since, I haven’t been able to stop listening. Maybe once I can decide on a favorite album I’ll be able to craft a proper review. My aborted attempt, after the break.
i think, for me, the wonder of the heavens derives from the idea that everything we’ve ever thought of, or ever will think of, is already out there, hurtling through that ever-expanding darkness.
