The sights, sounds and words of the week in noise.
NEWS
If you’re over 33 and can’t stand all the racket the kids call music these days, turns out you might be statistically average. Writing at Skynet & Ebert, Ajay Kalia — who works at Spotify to create users’ Taste Profiles — analyzed the demographic data and listening habits and concluded that users’ tastes, on average, “mature” by their mid-30s — which is to say new music is no longer a part of their listening diet. Of course, Kalia’s conclusion concerns popular music (whatever that means), and what many of the discussions around his findings have ignored is that older Spotify users (whatever that means) discover less familiar genres that they weren’t exposed to as teens, and users also re-visit music that’s fallen out of popular favour since their teenage years.
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Explosions in the Sky’s discography is now available on Bandcamp.
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READ
Morning Glory: Fugazi’s Repeater Revisited | The Quietus
“Rock music tends to reward the inspired accident: fans have become trained to respond to sounds that may be calibrated to micron-thin tolerances but which give the aural appearance of the intuitive and the inspired. That isn’t what seems to be happening here. Nor is this the product of a jazz sensibility, where technical excellence and deep understanding of chords, tone and rhythm combine to permit improvisation, in tune and on time, to provide the hypnotic focus. On these sessions Fugazi sound like they found a new path, somewhere between the two — where you can hear the deliberation behind every note yet never for a second feel that this makes the music anything less than tremendously exciting.”
Creative Darwinism: Pretty Flowers Grow in Shit | Spook Magazine
“Being isolated spatially and culturally – us from the city, Perth from Australia and Australia from the world – arms one with an Atlas-strong sense of identity. Both actively and passively, originality seems to flourish in Perth’s artistic community. Without the wider community’s acceptance, creative pursuits lack the potential for commodification. There’s no point in preening yourself for success because it’s just not real. It’s a fairytale, so you may as well just do it in whatever way you like, good or bad, in your room or on the top of the Telstra building, which – as anyone with any common sense will attest – was built for that one potential badass to drop in on a skateboard and parachute off.”
The Fight For All Ages Shows | Pitchfork
“Live music is, by nature, impermanent and ephemeral, but the places that show are staged can be either transitory or stable. All that’s needed is a power supply, a space for artists to play, and a place for the audience—meaning live music can happen most anywhere. I’ve seen bands play in a cemetery, in a botanical garden, a library, an industrial hallway, on a bridge, and in a skate bowl. I’ve been to huge festivals, clubs, and seen sets in churches, community centers, and many basements, kitchens, and living rooms. Despite all these options or spaces for opportunity, it’s harder than ever to get a show space off the ground, and keep it running. It’s no wonder so many spaces throughout the U.S. are illegal and temporary at best.”
LISTEN
The Leap Year — Knesting / Dental Work
In an alternate universe, The Leap Year are one of the biggest bands to ever come out of Perth. I fucking love this band, and I wish everyone else did too, and I can’t pinpoint what makes them so compelling yet so under-appreciated. Their new 7-inch — the follow-up to their tremendous 2013 album, The Narrowing — is bombastic and subtle and brittle and powerful and morose and uplifting all at once. Without being obtuse or even that groundbreaking, The Leap Year defy genres — call it slowcore, indie rock, shoegaze or gloom — all I’m settled on is that they just write really fucking good songs.
Chelsea Wolfe — Iron Moon
There’s a menace lurking beneath every note in this first taste from Chelsea Wolfe’s forthcoming Abyss, which is out August 7. But the song’s not without its moments of beauty; she matches the storm-brewing moments of intense discomfort with purgative, uplifting vocal melodies. This is Wolfe at her heaviest and most invigorating.
WATCH
Under the Influence: New York Hardcore
Rancid’s Tim Armstrong narrates this VICE documentary on the punk scene that flourished amongst New York’s 1970s and 80s squalor in the Village, documenting the abuse, addiction and poverty surrounding the rise of Agnostic Front, Title Fight and more.
Death From Above 1979 — Virgins
The amish go wild in this second video from the Toronto duo’s The Physical World.
