THE SELF TITLED INTERVIEW: LAETITIA SADIER

http://www.self-titledmag.com/home/2010/11/24/the-self-titled-interview-laetitia-sadier-of-stereolab-monade/

I guess I just love Laetitia Sadier for her music.

JNCT

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Throwback! 3 - The Emperor Strikes Back... I know, that's episode 2. Qu'est-ce qu'il se passe quand on lance de l'ail contre un mur?

My dad doesn't have a vinyl collection. His CD shelf is basically a mix of classical music him and my mother got when I was born (Mozart makes kids smarter, anyone?) and a collection of what's been in the top 40 of whatever country he was in pretty much since CDs became available commercially.

After numerous siftings through this nevertheless exhaustive collection, the only two albums I've taken to the relative safety of my room are Eric Clapton's Unplugged and Soundgarden's Superunknown. The first he got because it has a song that mentions my sister's name a number of times (I'll let you guess what that is), the latter he described as "a mistake I only got because it was number 1 somehow. I've never listened to it entirely". For a long time, he described my music with the expression that my great-uncle uses to talk about old-style rock'n'roll: de la musique de peaux-rouge. Which happens to be mildly offensive, so I'm not translating that.

So no vivid vinyl memories for me. No passing on of buried treasure, no shared tastes. Sure, I had a vague backstreet boys moment around 9, as well as other momentary radio crushes, but they always felt tasteless - going with the easy option, what was readily available.

So what changed that? Well, I didn't write this lenghty useless introduction for nothing. If you're still reading this, it means you have some nerve, and must be really interested. I'll skip the Linkin' Park and Good Charlotte episodes and the Blink 182 covers (although I have to say Travis Barker is still a sick drummer), and finally get to my point:

DIGIMON

That's right. I would probably be a very different person if it wasn't for that fairly catastrophic child's pokemon ripoff cartoon. More specifically, the movie that spawned from its success, and very precisely, the sequence with Smashmouth's song All Star. To this day, I still haven't thought too much as too what the song is exactly about, nor do the lyrics make any sense in my head (I was still learning English back then). It's been about 10 years since I first listened to this song, and I finally got around to actually reading the lyrics. 

Verdict: song's pretty bad. But it made me get Smashmouth's 2001 self titled album: 

Beneath the horrible cover was the first CD I had really asked for. As mentioned before, and like for Flavio, I was learning English at that time, which made me able to consider the lyrics more as sounds then anything with a message (let's be honest, the words to most of these songs are fairly horrendous).

However this record shaped my tastes: I liked the coolness of the first track, the relative "violence" of the second track (qualified by my dad as sounding like a drum carnage), the violin synths of the 3rd track pretty much made me want to vomit... 

So why would I ever talk about an album that is important to me only it was a random starting point? 

First of all, this was Flavio's idea, and I just went with it. Read his own blog too, it's awesome.

Second, it's obvious that this record has little musical interest. Sister Psychic still sounds like an ok song to me, and memories of Shrek and Digimon are woken up by listening to All Star. The Monkees' I'm a Believer is also covered on this record, and that reminds me of The Spy Who Shagged Me, which is probably the movie that turned me on dumb absurd comedies. The harmonica solo in that one song is kinda cool, that gnarly synth in Force Field makes me understand why I like Tobacco today, Shoes'n'hats is a bro version of AC/DC (which remains one of my favorite bands). You could even say that Smashmouth's only feat is that they take a number of influences/characteristic sounds (ranging from hip hop to metal and going by 60's pop and lounge) and making it sound like a cohesive blend pop record. 

In short, it was a pretty awesome introduction to modern music for a 9 year old kid. Your young cousing/familly member is coming over for Christmas and you don't know what to get him? This blog just provided the longest most inconvenient and specific gift advice of all times. Enjoy.

Quand on lance une gousse d'ail contre le mur, elle rebondit. C'est le retour du jet d'ail.

This one's for you, Arthur.

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Throwback! 2 - Basement 5, 1965-1980

Although my dad's vinyl collection is by all standards pretty impressive, very few actual records made an early impression on me. Now that I think about it, however, it's perfectly understandable: we didn't always have a record player in the house (the details of what stereo equipment followed us where are somewhat blurry before the early 2000s), and even when we did, CDs were always the dominant format. Vinyls were played only occasionally — when, I imagine, a nostalgic mood much like the one driving this post took hold of my dad —, and remained an archaic, overdelicate and thus implicitly forbidden medium for me until… Well, until I left home and discovered that people my age owned them and even played them regularly.

So while I'll never forget the wonder I felt handling CDs, opening up empty cases to unfold cryptic liners, and quickly matching particular artwork with artists or songs I especially liked, I have only three vivid vinyl memories. One was pondering the sleeve to Ziggy Stardust; one was wondering why on earth someone would call the Sex Pistols music. Less cliché, perhaps, was a deep, somewhat inexplicable fascination with Basement 5's 1965-1980.

(Basement who? Ah yes, my apologies. The Wikipedia note for the band confirms the little I know about it: Basement 5 formed in London in the late 70s, released only one album and an EP (both of which I believe are out of print today), and played an, I quote, "avant-garde" mixture of punk and reggae. That's not really doing justice to the Basement 5 sound, though, so I'll add a further hint for the connoisseur: they were produced by Martin Hannett. Oh, come on: the man responsible for Joy Division's spectral, abrasively cold, cathedral-punk sonic identity?)

I don't remember exactly when the following scene takes place; I probably wasn't more than six or seven. Imagine a cozy, standard living room in a well-to-do family, in, say, late-afternoon lighting. I was busy with what occupied most of my days, back then, which was reading (funny how things have changed, cough cough), on our dark-green-and-red sofa. I watched my dad walk to the bottom row of records on our wall-long shelf, pick one with a whitish sleeve and something that looked like a BMW logo on it (my grandpa owned a BMW, which is how I know… oh whatever), and drop a needle on the mysteriously oversized black disc.

I listened in terror as a strident siren filled the room, followed by an intimidating bass, laced around a sharp, martial and commanding drum rhythm. But that voice. That voice was truly paralyzing: deep and rough, grating even, toneless and aggressive, buried under layers of tinny echo, it sounded more like a German shepherd barking into a megaphone than anything human. Since I didn't know English, it wasn't until my dad starting yelling random words and phrases ("There's a riot going on!" "Immigration, you know what it's like!") that I gathered there were words being enunciated. As for my father himself, I'd never seen him like that: maybe this is the veil of memory distorting the facts of history, but he was dancing. Or at the very least, bobbing around, nodding his head, tapping his hands on his jeans. At that point I had set my book down and stood up; I proceeded to join in, ecstatic and utterly terrified. We danced, he blurted out more slogans I couldn't understand, which I probably repeated in my own version of Shakespeare's language (much like this Bulgarian Idol contestant), and — Awwwwww! — we bonded.

Shortly afterwards, though, my mom stormed into the living room to turn the volume down, my dad picked up a magazine, and I tried to go on with my book. Years passed, during which Basement 5 made too few appearances — all of them instantly recognizable, and a source of complicity between my father and me —, and it wasn't until this summer that I set out to find a CD or digital copy of 1965-1980. (No, I don't own a record player.)

It wasn't easy, and took a lot of looking around. But I now have confirmation: that album is pure, unrivaled genius. Just when you think you've heard about all that a punk-dub fusion can produce, you get hit in the face with a massive piece of cracked concrete, with mean riffs and lead-heavy grooves ("No Ball Games", "Last White Christmas" - CLASSICS! Seriously.), with visceral, depression-era working-class politics, charged with anticolonial rage and urban exasperation, all of it clad in a steel-armor sound both icy and incendiary — like tear gas in a blizzard.

(Thanks to Thom Henley for the hilarious video.)

"THOUGHTS ON... " - EP. PRIMERO: HALLOWEEN

The best thing I like about Halloween is that I have an excuse to listen to the Misfits' Monster Mash without shame (apparently they started sucking when Danzig left? Nice of the music press to inform me of that after years of listening to Famous Monsters... meh. You know what, AV club? Go cook yourself an egg).

The second best thing is getting a mix from Flavio. It kicks ass. GET IT HERE!

Other than that, I'm the grouchy old man that doesn't give you candy when you ring at his door. I've half-assed my costumes for the past two years (I wasn't even doing halloween any year before that), and I don't like getting scared.

What really makes me excited is dumb ridiculous senseless laidback things and beers. Which is why, next Halloween, I'll be staying home, trying to lure my trickortreater friends into watching Plan 9 with me and drink weird allegedly pumpkin flavored beer.

Ok I'm done. If you've made it through this rant, here's a r e w a r d. kind of.