Slighcarp and Grimshaw

Daylight Savings Time came early this year, and it had next to no bearing on my life, seeing as how I use a Mac and these kinds of things are taken care of for me. But this weekend was the first volley over the bow of winter, and there was sun when I came home from work today, which I haven’t been privy to since sometime in October. This circumstance presents two thoughts nearly simultaneously: 1) dear god, it’s been another 4 months at my job and 2) the idea of rhythm is appealing to me again.

You caught me in the midst of wintering, where my brain gets all wonky (as everyone’s does – damn lack of seratonin fucking up the brain chemicals) and I feel very drifty coupled with feeling chaotic and tweeked-out. Enter free jazz (or whatever happens to strike my fancy during the winter that doesn’t include foot-tappy beats: in the past it’s been ambient/drone-y things or noisenoisenoise) and it makes my head seem less foreign, since I can fill it with sounds approximating the frequency of my own busy head.

The winter doesn’t do much for my accessibility, either personally or musically (reference my offer to Sarah of my iPod at some point when hers was on the blink and her refusal, saying, “No thank you. Because I’ll be listening to the shuffle and one of your weird-ass bands will come on and totally freak me out.” She was kidding, sort of). However, the sun comes along and there are elbows and shoulders to be seen out on the street, and I want something to sing along with, or at least bob my head unconsciously to. So I bought the Lindstrom album It’s A Feedelity Affair, that got a lot of good press last year, a month or so ago, even though I’ve never been one for any kind of dance music. I’m much more inclined toward the jitters in a good Hrvatski song or IDM-y goodness, but I’ll be damned if I’m not terribly pleased about it. There’s some subtlety there, which was a surprise, and which totally shattered the fulcrum of my opposition to it. Totally beat-y, and with some wonderfully rich stuff going on underneath the beat (and totally shocking – headphones improve it!). It’s really good, and has become one of the default cds of the last month or so when we are at home, futzing around.

I heard somewhere a long time ago that ours (well, mine, I’m 28) is a generation of rhythm, whereas our parents were a generation of melody. We want something that will shake our collective ass, as opposed to something that will lead us from the beginning to the end of a song. A melody needs to end, but the rhythm can just go on (see KRAUTROCK, HOUSE, Etc.). Of course there are exceptions, but I’m overgeneralizing for the sake of the leitmotif.

Currently I’m listening to Dosh’s The Lost Take that came out last year, and which I found used on Saturday as I ventured into the city while Sarah flew to Berkeley to visit her west coast people. It is not perfect, by any means, but it’s ramshackle and a tribute to what one man can do with a drumkit, a couple keyboards and a sampler. I’ve been listening to Where We’re At Now, a comp that came with my Actions for Free Jazz t-shirt from Smalltown Supersound, a record label in Norway, which is doing for beat-based stuff what Rune Grammofon is doing for the post-rock set, which is to say, giving it an excellent foothold and distributing good music from Scandinavia. Hooray for buying music involving an exchange rate!

And I got the new Andrew Bird, Armchair Apocrypha, which I haven’t listened to all the way through (on which, by happenstance, Martin Dosh of the aforementioned Dosh plays percussive surfaces), but is sounding dirtier (in a really good way) than his previous efforts. I’m digging it, but I suspect that it will, like all his other records, take me a few listens to fully embrace, because let’s face it, that’s the way it goes, despite the fact I’ve got a big ol’ man-crush on that Andrew Bird, what with his Montgomery Clift good looks (thanks Rennie Sparks) and his whistling like a damn champion. Good stuff, I think.

Give it a few months to warm up, and I’ll want something else that will just shimmer across the surface of my head without too much of anything while I wish for death in the heart of summer. But for now, let’s dance. And failing that, let’s all bob our heads in unison to whatever we’re listening to right now.

Yeah, I’m ready to wear tshirts without another layer again. Winter manages to always last just a little too long.